“Colonel Burr,” he said, stepping to reach for my hand and bringing it to his lips in greeting. With a mouth set in a mischievous smirk and those shrewd eyes, the colonel was extremely handsome. “Aaron Burr. I served with your husband.”
I could remember no specific anecdote or story about Burr—my husband’s most colorful stories were always about Lafayette and Laurens—but I was too anxious to learn what he knew of Alexander to think of anything else. “I meant . . . you’ve heard news of him?”
No sooner had I asked than did my heart leap to my throat, for I became suddenly quite fearful that this man in his elegant clothes had come to tell me not that my husband was a hero but that he’d died as one.
Burr’s features slid into an enigmatic expression that couldn’t quite be called a smile. “No doubt your father will receive the dispatch, but a wife on the verge of motherhood ought to know straightaway. So I’m very honored to tell you there are whispers of a great victory at Yorktown.”
“An American victory?” I asked, hands on my protruding belly, my breath quickening.
“An American victory.” He nodded to reassure me. “Madam, if the reports are true, your husband personally led a bayonet charge across a shelled field, dodging fire and springing onto an enemy parapet to take the redoubt.”
The blood drained from my face, leaving me clammy and cold with horror at the danger my husband—the father of my unborn child—had exposed himself to. Even in leading a charge, shouldn’t Hamilton have been atop a horse, commanding his troops, rather than at the front, daring his enemy and braving a bullet? A flash of this image passed before my eyes, and for the first time in my life I fell quite literally into a swoon.
Colonel Burr was forced to steady me, a hand at the elbow and one at the small of my back, before easing me into a chair. “We’ve won,” Burr was saying, but I could scarcely hear over the strange buzzing in my ears. “We’ll have Cornwallis’s surrender soon. Or perhaps it’s already been accomplished.”
Dragging in ragged breaths of air, I pleaded, “And Hamilton?”
He gave a slow blink. “Of course. I didn’t intend to leave you in suspense; your husband secured the victory without a scrape.”
Both hands flew to my cheeks with a mixture of exhilarated pride and relief. “Thank you!” I wanted to run through the house shouting the good news like a crier. But I was still in a haze of half-disbelief, dizzied and trying to remember my manners. “Oh, thank you. Bless you for taking the trouble to come here to tell me!”
“Your father has agreed to help me get established in town, so it was my pleasure to deliver this news, Mrs. Hamilton,” Burr replied with silky gentility. “And the rule of my life is to make business a pleasure, and pleasure my business.”
Do you know, in that moment, how much he reminded me of Hamilton? Slender, with a military bearing, a sly smile, and a clever wit. I liked Burr very much. Right from that first meeting. I laughed and said, “Still—I am not quite myself, sir.”
Glancing at my swollen belly, he smiled. “There is little wonder why, given your happy condition and your family’s recent travails. It would have been a great loss to our country had your father fallen into British hands.”
Though I did blame all that for my momentary swoon, I also blamed the shock of joy at realizing the British were defeated and the relief of knowing my husband would come home to me after all.
But it was also, surely, that for a brief moment, Burr had made me fear that Alexander had died. And, looking back, I wonder now if the dark swirl of my nearly losing consciousness was more than a fear of death but perhaps even a premonition of it. Because though Burr was the herald of great joy that day, he would one day be the cause of my greatest misery.
* * *
HUZZAH! HUZZAH! HUZZAH!
That’s how our guardsmen stirred the household to hail my conquering hero.
In his haste to return to me and our unborn child that autumn, Alexander had ridden so hard from Yorktown to Albany that he’d exhausted four horses, and himself. I ran out the door to meet him and found him stumbling toward the house, his face slathered in sweat and grime, his clothes smelling of horse and the road. I didn’t care—not one bit.
Under a canopy of yellow, orange, and red leaves, I grasped my husband and kissed him on the mouth like the most brazen harlot who ever lived.
Shocked at my conduct, Hamilton startled but didn’t pull away. Instead, he threaded his hand into the hair at my nape, his teeth grazing my lower lip in gentle threat of sweet reprisal.
Behind us at the door, Mama gave a shocked gasp and Prince a disapproving harrumph. But I didn’t care about that either. Let the whole world disapprove, for in that moment, the only thing that mattered was seeing my husband alive and whole. And because I had no words to express it, only the language of a passionate kiss would do.
But once spent of those kisses, and having marveled at the changes nearly six months apart had wrought on my body, Alexander was tired in a way I’d never seen him tired before. As if he’d been feverishly staving off exhaustion with his talents and superlative industry for all the years of the war, and only now, in victory, did his body succumb to its toll.
Once he was bathed and fed and put to bed, he stayed there. Not for a day, or even two. In truth, he scarcely rose from bed for two months. I began to worry he suffered from some contagion, for Cornwallis, exposing a deranged lack of character in his desperation, had infected liberated slaves from southern plantations with smallpox, forcing them to approach enemy
