Straightening my spine and taking a deep bracing breath, I unfolded the pages. I’d committed the painful words to memory but was determined to give them a just reading.
Next fall completes my doom. I give up my liberty to Miss Schuyler. She is a good-hearted girl who I am sure will never play the termagant; though not a genius she has good sense enough to be agreeable, and though not a beauty, she has fine black eyes—is rather handsome and has every other requisite of the exterior to make a lover happy.
That was as far as my heart had been able to see through my tears when I first read this letter. But now I noticed the next line.
And believe me, I am a lover in earnest.
I noticed the date on this letter and the ones before it, too. How curious that Hamilton should’ve waited four months to tell his friend that he was to marry. As if jilting a sweetheart. One didn’t, after all, praise a new lover to the one being replaced. One deprecated, made light of the new infatuation. And Laurens begged my husband not to withdraw from him the consolation of his letters. Perhaps he understood it was an ending.
How to balance this against all the letters Hamilton sent me? Since I didn’t have a scale, I read them again. All of them. Even the one I tore to bits, ten years before, in rage and anger and grief. I’d ripped apart the sonnet he wrote me in Morristown. Hamilton’s first declaration of love. I’d torn it up but—tellingly, I suppose—I’d kept the pieces.
Now, with a needle and thread, I sewed the fragile words back together. And with each stitch, I felt closer and closer to binding the wound.
My eyes swam with tears as I read the reassembled lines.
Before no mortal ever knew
A love like mine so tender, true
Did you mean it, Alexander? I asked myself as I pierced the final scrap of paper with the needle’s tip. Did you truly love?
Dear God, the indignity of being interrogated after death. Whatever else might come of this trial, I decided that I would never leave my own letters behind to be cross-examined and vivisected. Like the corpses in the bloody Doctors’ Riot so many years ago. Like Alexander’s motives, investigated by several inquests and the whole country. And by me . . .
Which brought me to the third charge. The one I scarcely allowed myself to acknowledge.
Was the duel with Burr a fight for the nation? A vainglorious exercise in futility? Or something worse? One, last, suicidal chariot ride across the sky?
I’d read the witness accounts. I knew both men. I’d even seen Burr recently—two years ago when, by happenstance, he slunk onto a ferry just as I was getting off, and the anxious crowd parted so we were face-to-face, leaving me to stare into those eyes in search of the truth. But seeing only the pathetic emptiness of his soul, I’d left Burr with a withering glare and without answers.
For there was nothing Burr could say to right one single wrong between us.
So maybe I could never know what Alexander intended that day at Weehawken. Because the people we love are not entirely knowable. Even to themselves. But we love them anyway.
The only other choice is to live without love, alone.
What then, is the verdict? the spiders seemed to ask, as if they were weaving a web of memories around me.
Studying the patchwork sonnet now repaired in my lap and my wedding ring beside it, I didn’t know what the verdict was. A judge and jury must deliberate, after all, so I adjourned the court. And the place I deliberated was in my garden, where I gathered the last blooms of purple hyacinths.
But a verdict was finally forced upon me by a calling card.
And by James Monroe.
Chapter Forty-Four
MONROE IS STANDING in my parlor at the Grange, and everything, my whole life it seems, comes full circle.
I should have expected it. Monroe is, after all, not so much a visitor as a closing argument . . .
“I find that the lapse of time brings its softening influences,” Monroe is saying, in that deceptively sweet southern accent. “Now we are both nearing the grave, when past differences can be forgiven and forgotten . . .”
Forgiven and forgotten, he says. And my eyes drift to the dappled light of the entryway, where a bust of my husband has sat for more than twenty years. I’ve put Hamilton on trial. And now, here in the flesh, stands one of my husband’s many enemies and accusers.
“I remember a time, Mrs. Hamilton, when we counted one another as friends,” Monroe continues, wistfully, as if he is remembering. And, of course, I am remembering, too. Remembering with a bittersweet pang how we met, the friendship we shared in war, in peace, over games of backgammon and sight-seeing in Philadelphia with our young families while building a new world.
But I remember also that James Monroe was a man who gave me his word of honor and broke it. A man who hurt me and exposed me to humiliation. He isn’t the only person I’ve cared about who betrayed me. There have been so many others. But he’s the only one I can face now. And so I do. Using my silence as a weapon, forcing him to continue speaking until he finds the words that might reach me. Because as I once said to Monroe, life, like backgammon,
