Love & War_An Alex & Eliza Story Page 20

  “It gets so chilly in here,” he said, patting the bottle beneath his breast pocket. “This helps.”

  Eliza did not find the room too chilly, but she had just been outside, where the breeze was stiff and the ice hadn’t melted on the streets for the past three days.

  “You will forgive me if I seem rude, Mr. Earl, but you are not what I expected of a, of a—”

  “A man in prison?” Earl said in a self-mocking tone. “I have done my best to pretend that I am in the salon of some elegant hostess in Philadelphia or Paris—or Albany,” he added with a wink, “and, God willing, I will one day again, soon enough. Please,” he said, beckoning toward a chair on Eliza’s side of the bars. “Be seated. I feel as though I am conducting an interview.”

  Eliza unbuttoned her coat but, seeing no place to hang it, kept it on and sat in the chair, an elegant piece of carved oak covered in dark tufted damask that would have been at home in one of the salons Mr. Earl had just described. A heavy brocade curtain hung behind it, cleverly draped so as to reveal the gold fringe at its borders yet still hide the rough stone of the wall.

  After taking another pull from his bottle, the artist sat down on the edge of his cot, his back ramrod straight. A stick of charcoal appeared in his hand, which only now did Eliza realize was stained with soot, as if he had been practicing his craft all day. His hand began to fly across the pad propped on the easel, which was turned in such a way that she was able to see his hand move yet could not see the results of its actions.

  Several moments passed in silence. Eliza was afraid to speak lest she disrupt his concentration.

  “You will forgive me for diving in immediately,” Earl said at length. “Normally I would make some excuse about the light going quickly on winter afternoons, but of course we are all candles here. And thank heavens, too. The cells with windows may be filled with light, but they are unconscionably cold. All you can do is watch yourself freeze to death. No, here we are merely racing against Mr. O’Reilly’s return.”

  “Of course,” Eliza said. She felt somewhat out of sorts, even though this is what she had come here for.

  “May I suggest that for your next couple of visits you wear something more comfortable? Though that gown is beautiful, and you are a vision in it, I will not be ready for oils for at least a few days. I must first learn how your face paints.”

  “My face paints?” Eliza laughed nervously. “Unless I were to take the brush between my teeth, I do not think it will paint at all.”

  Earl smiled at her quick wit.

  “There are some faces, you see, that seem to lose their plasticity when they are drawn and become all rigid lines and a single dimension. Others lose precisely this definition and become nothing more than flesh-colored blobs, as lifeless as death mask. The painter has to discover the contours—the concavities, the convexities!—with good old-fashioned chiaroscuro, and fill them with the most quotidian shading before advancing to the tint of blush. The goal is to find the balance between the permanent, arresting shape that can fill a frame for centuries, and the breath of life that will ensure that no one forgets the subject was once a living, breathing beauty.”

  Eliza had been drawn and painted before, but mostly by Angelica and Peggy. But this was a different experience entirely. Earl’s eyes roamed her body with a directness that would have been improper in any other situation (and in fact felt a little improper in this one). She had a sudden sense of her face as a thing apart from her, an intricate mask mounted before her cranium. But at the same time, she felt that mask growing hot with a blush.

  “Do I—do I need to remain still, or is it permissible for me to speak?”

  “From what Mr. Hamilton has told me, it would be a crime to silence you. He has told me that your beauty is only matched by your brain. Given that my sole conversational partner for the past eight months has been Mr. O’Reilly, I long for tones more dulcet.”

  “He’s been learning his colors, though.” Eliza smiled. “Coral and champagne pink and his favorite, periwinkle.”

  “It takes a true innocent to make a word like periwinkle sound scurrilous!” he said.

  Eliza sat quietly, thinking that she had determined to do useful work instead of being merely decorative, and yet here she was sitting for a portrait. But she was helping somewhat, wasn’t she? Giving this man a job of some sort? And doing what her husband bid her?

  A few minutes later, in one quick motion Earl sat back from his easel and turned it toward her. The light from the four candles shone directly on the page, yet it still took a moment for Eliza to make sense of the wavering black lines that floated on the yellow parchment. It seemed impossible that anyone could have captured a likeness so quickly, and in so few strokes. Then she gasped.

  For there she was. Her posture—the line of her back, the set of her shoulders, the demure press of her knees beneath her skirts, the drape of her silken gown and woolen overcoat. It was remarkable. With just a few hash marks and wavering strokes he had managed to capture the pattern in the lace covering her décolletage. And with seemingly imperceptible shadings, he had brought out the moiré luster in the dress itself. Yet even more incredible was the way in which he captured the flesh beneath the garments. Just looking at it deepened her blush.

  The three eldest Schuyler sisters (well, not so much Peggy) were a fair hand at capturing what they called “outlines,” which is to say the silhouettes of draped skirts, but when you looked at them you never got the sense that these garments were actually being worn by a human being. They could have been filled with air or straw. But Earl’s drawing somehow captured the tenseness of Eliza’s stilled legs and the constriction in her chest from trying not to breathe, or not to expand her rib cage when she did so.

  She was so taken by the masterful way her body had been depicted that she almost didn’t notice her face. Then she caught herself staring into her own eyes. Saw the curiosity there, and the amusement, and even the intelligence. It was as if she had caught a glimpse of herself in a mirror before she had time to compose an expression. She flushed to think of herself that way, but she hadn’t drawn the picture after all.

  She was suddenly conscious of eyes on her, and looked up to see Earl staring at her with a gesture that was both proud and questioning, as if he knew he had done a good job but was curious what sort of effect it had had on Eliza. It was almost as if he were wondering what sort of hold it might give him over her.

  But Eliza was so taken with the sketch that all she said was, “Oh, Mr. Earl! It is remarkable.”

  “Bah!” Earl said, grabbing the bottom edge of the page and flipping it over roughly, exposing a fresh sheet. “It is all wrong. Your face looks as though you had just looked up from a psalter when it should be as if you had just read an account of a shipwreck or a great battle or the moment when Romeo holds a sleeping Juliet in his arms and mistakes her for dead. We start again! But first—”

  He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out the flask Alex had sent. After a long drink, he sighed contentedly.

  I’ll have to bring a bigger flask next time, Eliza couldn’t help thinking.

  “It gets so chilly in here,” he said, then wiped a few beads of sweat from his brow and started drawing again.

  19

  Out and About

  Hanover Square

  New York, New York

  February 1784

  After more than a month in virtual isolation, the Hamiltons were suddenly discovered by society. Eliza attributed their newfound popularity to Peggy—“she’s in town for one night and already knows more people than we do”—though the truth is, Peggy was simply a conduit, and it was Helena Rutherfurd who provided the real entrée.

  The week after the impromptu dinner party at the Hamiltons’ Wall Street home, the Rutherfurds reciprocated with an invitation to “a small supper” at their town house on Hanover Square. The stone-fronted mansion was twice as wide as the Hamiltons’, much deeper, and a story taller, with an interior as opulent as th
ose grand proportions would suggest. The floors in the entry were stone instead of wood, while the parlors were laid with yellowy pine planks at least a foot wide, and bordered by intricate marquetry work in oak, walnut, and limewood. The ceiling coffers were more elaborately patterned than the mandalas of Hindustan. The wainscoting was a rich ebony as dark as tar, yet so naturally lustrous that Helena and John had made the daring choice simply to varnish it rather than paint it in one of the muted pastels that was all the rage—Wythe blue or tawny port or dusty rose.

  The paneling’s Spartan restraint, however, was more than made up for by the elaborately flocked wallpaper that covered each parlor in yards and yards of the deepest crimson and richest emerald, the most buttery of yellows or the surprising luster of burnished silver. Each chamber was its own jewel box, and Helena and John led the Hamiltons through them, one by one, with a pride that somehow managed to not be obnoxious.

  Eliza whispered to Alex at one point, “If their taste had been one whit less perfect, this would all be too much.” But the Rutherfurds had done a superb job and they knew it, and so instead of feeling as if their hosts were bragging, Alex and Eliza simply marveled at the beauty to which they were being treated.

  The silk-lined chambers were the perfect setting for the dazzling pieces of furniture the couple had accumulated, with many examples by the three great English masters: Sheraton, Hepplewhite, and Chippendale, as well as a virtual museum of American practitioners: Gilbert Ash, James Gillingham, and dozens of others from Boston to Charleston and everywhere in between. The Rutherfurds talked about the individual pieces of furniture as though they were paintings, a Jonathan Gostelowe here, a Samuel McIntire there, and of course they also had a stunning collection of paintings, including the American portraitists Charles Willson Peale, John Singleton Copley, Gilbert Stuart, and even, Alex pointed out to Eliza, a Ralph Earl, all of which were hung in a stunning salon they called the galleria.

  The silver. The china. Even the servants, in bespoke livery (“John has a passion for buttercup yellow,” Helen confided to Alex). It was all too perfect. The mansion was everything he wanted in a home, and more.

  Because it wasn’t just the mansion he coveted, but the people who filled it. Despite Helena’s remark about “a small supper,” the Rutherfurds seemed to have invited a representative from all the major families of New York and the surrounding environs, starting with the Morrises (Gouverneur was there, along with two of his and Helena’s cousins), and William Bayard and his fiancée, Elizabeth Cornell, and Lindley Murray, a lawyer like Alex, but also an aspiring writer. His mother, Mary, was revered throughout the Continental army for having invited General William Howe “to tea” at Inclenberg, the Murrays’ estate north of the city, and entertaining General Howe so well and so long that George Washington and his soldiers were able to escape the advancing British army. (“Mama won’t admit it,” Murray joked, “but I’m pretty sure she spiked General Howe’s tea with opium.”) There were also Pierre Van Cortlandt, Jr., and his brother Philip, the former yet another aspiring lawyer, while the latter was the heir apparent to the vast Van Cortlandt Manor north and east of Morrisania, which was rivaled in New York State only by the Livingston and Van Rensselaer holdings.

  Aaron and Theodosia Burr, the Hamiltons’ one-time neighbors in Albany, and now their neighbors on Wall Street, were there, as were James and Jane Beekman, who turned out to be siblings rather than spouses. The Beekmans had grown up in a house called Mount Pleasant five miles up the coast of the East River, just across from the southern tip of Blackwell’s Island. Mount Pleasant was known for its beautiful greenhouse—said to be the first in the New World—in which the Murrays grew the exotic delicacy known as the orange. Alex had loved them as a child in the Caribbean, but Eliza had never tasted one. Jane promised to bring her some the next time she called. Mount Pleasant was also famous (or infamous) for its role during the occupation: General Howe had commandeered the mansion as his headquarters (presumably after he recovered from Mrs. Murray’s opium tea); it was there that the dashing Major John André, who had made such a profound impression on Eliza at the Pastures on the very same evening she met Alex, had stayed before sneaking off to meet the traitor Benedict Arnold, a liaison that eventually cost him his life.

  There were Schermerhorns, Lawrences, Rhinelanders, and Wattses, and Abraham de Peyster, whose namesake ancestor had donated the land on which City Hall was built (not to mention the Hamiltons’ own house), and of course a few inescapable Van Rensselaers and Livingstons, who were all related to each other in one way or another, and indeed to everyone else seated at the twenty-five-foot-long dining table the Rutherfurds had set up in the galleria. There was even Pieter Stuyvesant, great-great-great-grandson of the last Dutch governor of the colony of New Netherland, who was at least eighty years old. Like his namesake, he spelled his name with an i, spoke English with a Dutch accent, and in a truly eerie coincidence, sported a polished walnut peg leg that rattled the china in the cabinets as he clomped through the Rutherfurds’ exquisite parlors. Though unfailingly polite, he still seemed to regard everyone as a step beneath his station. (“If the blood in this room were any bluer,” Eliza whispered to Alex at another point in the dizzying tour, “we could have used it to dye the uniforms of the Continental soldiers!”)

  But of all the guests at the dinner, Alex’s favorites were John and Sarah Jay—although to Alex she would always be Sarah Livingston, eldest daughter of William Livingston, the governor of New Jersey and the man who had sponsored Alex’s passage from Nevis to the northern colonies. Alex had had a crush on her and her sister Kitty as a boy; but as the years passed and Eliza supplanted all others in his heart, he thought of the Livingston sisters as his own kin, the sisters he never had. He was thrilled that Sarah had made such an advantageous marriage. The Jays were perhaps not quite at the level of society as the Van Rensselaers and Schuylers—John’s family were Huguenot merchants, having fled Catholic oppression in France a century ago—but in the New World, one didn’t have to have a title before one’s name to be welcomed into high society.

  Gold and silver earned in trade was every bit as shiny as inherited wealth, and spoke to a family’s cleverness and industry besides, and not just the blind cosmic luck of being born into the aristocracy. John was a decade older than Alex, and also a lawyer—“one more and we could start a boxing club,” he joked, which prompted Sarah to say, “Lawyers? Boxing?” and break out into laugher. John had studied with the renowned Benjamin Kissam, as had Lindley Murray, and, like Alex and Gouverneur Morris, was a graduate of King’s College. Alex was pleased to learn from John that their alma mater, which had been closed during the British occupation, was slated to reopen in the spring, and under the non-royalist name of Columbia College.

  But what really drew him to John was the older man’s belief in the urgent need for a strong central government to unite the thirteen states, built around a code of laws—“a Constitution, if you will”—that would ensure that whether a citizen was in the Carolinas or New Hampshire or Virginia or Maine, the citizen would enjoy the same privileges and share the same responsibility as any American.

  “Local pride is fine,” John Jay said at one point. “Each state, each county even, has its specialty. But if we are New Yorkers first, or New Jerseyites—”

  “Jerseyans,” John Rutherfurd interjected.

  “—if we are New Yorkers or New Jersayans first, we are Americans last and always. Virginia has its tobacco, Carolina its cotton, Maryland its crab, Massachusetts its miserable winters”—laughter all around at this observation—“but all of them have the American spirit, which is the spirit of freedom of industry and quiet but unshakeable piety. We judge a man not by his name or lineage, but by the accomplishments of his own hand and mind.”

  “And what, pray,” Helena said, “do you judge a woman on? The cut of her dress, or of the figure beneath it?”

  John reddened, as did several of the other men, while the women at the table all shared a kn
owing glance.

  “Certainly, you would not say that beauty is a detriment for a woman to possess?” John said when he could speak again.

  “I would say that it is a distraction,” Helena replied, “and just as arbitrary a measure of her quality as a man’s surname.”

  More laughter from the women and red faces from the men. Then, Alex was surprised to hear Eliza say, “I do not think any woman at this table would disagree with you, but I do think yours is a statement only a beautiful woman would dare make out loud.”

  It was the line of the evening, and it made the rounds of society parties in that mysterious way news travels, always arriving at whatever drawing room or dining table the Hamiltons found themselves at. For Alex, it was something of a relief not to have yet another gray-wigged, gray-shouldered matron or half-drunk dry goods merchant sporting a military-cut suit that had never seen combat say, “Are you the Alexander Hamilton who served with General Washington?” and then press him for story after story about the American savior. Now it was, “Oh, are you the Eliza Hamilton who stole the stage from Helena Morris at her own party? I’ve heard so much about you.”

  Eliza, confident but fundamentally shy, now found herself at the center of social groupings rather than on the fringes, and though she managed to hold on to her modesty, she also embraced her new role as a “woman of society,” as she termed it, smirking a little as she said it, as though the term were somehow improper.

  “People used to say that I married you for your name and money,” Alex jokingly grumbled one night as they made their way wearily home after yet another late-night party. “Now they say that I married you for your beauty and charm. I can only wonder what on earth they think I bring to the union.”

  Eliza couldn’t resist teasing him. “You are very good at holding doors and umbrellas, and in a pinch you can lace a corset, too. A girl could do worse.”

  Alex made her pay for that quip all night long.

  20