All for One Page 25

  Alex wasn’t sure where the flood of words had come from. Indeed, he wasn’t even sure if he believed them. She had deceived him, after all. And for what? She couldn’t have expected him to pay for her to stay at an inn so she wouldn’t have to go back to her husband—it was hardly part of an attorney’s modus operandi—and she must have known that if she wasn’t legally married to Mr. Reynolds, then she had no need of a lawyer to help her with the divorce. Which raised the question: What exactly did she want from him?

  He realized he was still fanning himself like a dowager trapped in a stuffy drawing room. He quickly set his hat down on the windowsill. Maria stared at it as though it were a bird that had flown in, and she was wondering whether to feed it or shoo it away.

  “When you came in you were smiling,” she said at last. “You are not smiling anymore. I am sorry to have put you in such a dispirited mood.”

  “Oh, it is not you,” Alex said too quickly. He could not stand to see the frown on Maria’s face and hear the self-reproach in her voice. What had she done wrong, save for being the victim of men of low principles? “It was just that when I came in I was thinking about something else. A legal triumph, if you will. I won’t bore you with the details.”

  “Please,” Maria said, half a smile creeping onto her face. “Bore me. I have sat in this room for a month now with no interlocutors save the barmaids, who started out friendly enough, but seem to have come to distrust me as time has gone on. I don’t know if they have learned something about my past, or if it is just the usual fear that attaches to a single young woman, who is always, eventually, perceived as a threat by all the other women around her. It is not our sex’s most admirable feature, though I suppose men are as capable of jealousy as women are.”

  “Indeed,” Alex agreed. “We most certainly are.” He had no idea what he meant by his statement, yet he suddenly felt jealous of Maria as well.

  There was a silence, and then Maria prompted: “You were going to tell me about your legal triumph.”

  “Oh yes!” Alex smacked himself on the face. “How silly of me!” He regained his composure. “Confidentiality compels me to keep the name of the relevant party to myself, but I think I can fill you in on the gist of the narrative. Suffice to say that there is a certain venerable organization in our city whose financial hands, as it were, have been tied behind its back by a discriminatory charter that hearkens back to colonial times.”

  Maria smiled blankly. “I’m sure I have no idea what you’re talking about. Indeed, the only word I’m relatively sure I understood in that sentence was city.”

  Alex laughed. “Yes, I suppose it does sound rather cryptic. Well then. Let us say the organization was a church, and its charter—its license to do business, if you will—was structured in a way designed to prevent it from making money, rather than helping it to do so.”

  “But why does a church even need to make money?”

  “Well, to serve its parishioners, of course. To build houses of worship and rectories, for a start, but also schools and hospitals and, and orphanages.” His voice fell on the last word.

  Maria looked at him searchingly. At length she said, “Is it true that you are an orphan like me?”

  Alex was stunned by her question. He knew that his past as a man who had come from less-than-privileged beginnings was fairly common knowledge in the states, but he did not think that the particulars of his childhood were widely known outside of his immediate circle of family and friends.

  “In a way,” he said finally. “My mother was called home when I was a boy of eleven. My father is living still, but he betook himself from the family when I was only an infant.”

  “Betook himself hither?” There was no suspicion in Maria’s voice, as if she merely assumed that he had set off for some distant port to earn his fortune like so many other men.

  Alex shrugged. “The last I heard he was on the island of Antigua, though that was some fifteen years ago.”

  “His business kept him away?” Maria’s voice was still guileless, though a note of curiosity had crept in.

  Alex shook his head. “I’m sorry to say that he abandoned my mother before I had turned two.”

  Maria gasped. “Oh, that is so awful! Why on earth would he do such a thing?”

  Alex felt his head growing hot again and resisted the urge to reach for his hat or loosen his cravat.

  “There were . . . irregularities . . . in my mother’s . . . status.”

  Maria stared at him blankly for a moment. Then she surprised Alex. She threw back her head and started laughing.

  “Oh, men!” she said. “Irregularities! Status! You think that by putting the real name to things that you will cause them to take shape, seemingly forgetting that they already exist.”

  Alex was unnerved by Maria’s sudden turn to mirth. “Mrs. Reynolds, please. This is my mother we are speaking of.”

  “Actually, it was your father we were speaking of. A man callous enough to abandon his wife and child because of, how did you put it, irregularities? In her status?” Maria said with another mocking, bitter laugh.

  “There were two of us, actually,” Alex said after a pause. “My older brother, James, and myself.”

  “So he is twice the scoundrel is what you’re saying? Well, come on. Think of me less as a delicate female than as Moll Flanders come to life, full of wisdom about things of which you yourself pretend to be innocent. So tell me, what were the sins of which your mother was adjudged guilty by your father?”

  Alex sighed, and then, almost against his will, he heard himself say: “She was still married to another man when she took up with my father.”

  It shocked him to hear the words come out of his mouth. He had never said them quite so plainly in his life, not even to Eliza, who had taken the better part of a decade to piece together the barest outline of the story.

  “And this first gentleman. Did she leave him, or was he just another abandoner?”

  “My mother left. The man was—”

  “Violent? A womanizer? A drunkard? All three?” The bluntness with which Maria said these words brought a blush to Alex’s cheeks, but he found them strangely liberating as well. It was so refreshing to hear things called what they were, rather than skulk behind circumspection and propriety. Yet he couldn’t bring himself to speak quite so freely.

  “My mother did not talk of him often, but I gather that he was not innocent of any of the malfeasances you describe.”

  “‘Any of the malfeasances you describe.’ I say, Mr. Hamilton, that is a very fine way of putting it. Only I should wonder that your tongue isn’t in knots from having to categorize such simple behavior thus.”

  “There is no call for using vulgar words to describe vulgar actions, Mrs. Reynolds.”

  “The truth is never vulgar, Mr. Hamilton, no matter how unpleasant it may be. What is vulgar is concealing it behind flowery rhetoric, as if that could minimize the very real horrors that were inflicted and endured. Do you think a bucket brigade can put out a conflagration if they are forbidden from saying the word fire, or a surgeon can treat a disease if he cannot bear to look at the infected parts of the body, or a general can make effective use of a cannon if he doesn’t know how it rips an enemy combatant’s head from his shoulders? Vice, like any other obstacle in life, can only be conquered by understanding it, and it can only be understood by describing it honestly, accurately, and fully. So enough of these irregularities and malfeasances. What happened to your mother, Mr. Hamilton?”

  Alex shrank before the force of Maria’s words. How dare she! It was as if she were asking him to rip off a scab at the dinner table. It was unseemly. And yet, and yet . . . and yet the truth was no scab. The wound was still fresh and would only begin to heal, as she said, if it were examined openly.

  Still, it took all his effort to answer her question.

  “Her first husban
d beat her,” he spat out bitterly, “and she fled from him to the arms of my father, who abandoned her when he found out that the previous marriage had not been dissolved according to the letter of the law. And so, her reputation ruined, she was forced to drift from man to man on whatever terms they would have her, until at last she contracted fever and died. And when the notice of her death was published, her first husband appeared and confiscated what few possessions she had left to me and my brother, leaving us on the street to live as die as chance would have it!”

  A long silence hung in the room after this outburst. At length, Maria said gently, “There now. Don’t you feel better?”

  He did. She listened well, and he felt free to unburden himself in a way because she knew the rough edges of the world in the same way he did. They were alike, the two of them. They were survivors.

  * * *

  • • •

  THEY TALKED FOR the rest of the day. The deluge, once the dam had been breached, could not be held back. Alex told her the full story of his early years in St. Croix and Nevis. All the things he had never told Eliza, for fear that she would reject him for being too common. The meals taken with servants and stable boys, the expulsion from the Anglican school for being the bastard son of an adulteress, the pain of being ripped apart from James at the age of twelve, never to live with him as brother and brother again. Dressing in clothes that were little better than rags. Reading the same books four, five, six times because there were no others to be had. The constant need to prove he was ten times smarter, harder working, and more determined than every other boy. And even though he knew the circumstances of his birth had nothing to do with him, still, he could never shake the shame of it.

  It was not quite accurate to say that they talked, however. It was Alex who talked. Maria listened, her face attuned to his, her eyes filled not just with sympathy but with understanding in a manner he had never received from his wife.

  Maybe it was because Eliza, for all her independence and empathy, was still a woman of her class, a little too inclined to think of the poor as projects rather than real people, as evidenced by her meddling in the love lives of Emma Trask and Drayton Pennington, or maybe it was because he had never shared this part of his past with her, or maybe it was just because Maria was there, in front of him, and Eliza was hours and hours away. And though they had parted warmly, there had been a distance between them that hadn’t been there before. They tried to ignore it, but the sting of their argument still felt fresh.

  His monologue was fueled by frequent visits from Sally or one of the other barmaids; those ice-cold ales went down one after the other a little too smoothly. As the afternoon wore on, he sent for some mutton and vegetables, and later he added a slice of pie. The sun was long gone by the time he felt spent. He must have talked for ten hours or more.

  “I apologize,” he said finally. “I really don’t know what came over me.”

  Maria shrugged as if she, too, hadn’t noticed the passage of time.

  “I hope I am not keeping you from anything.”

  “No, no,” Alex said quickly. “The day’s labors were completed early, and my wife and servants are away, so the house is empty.”

  “Empty houses are funny things,” Maria said. “When a house is crowded, all one longs for is solitude. And yet when everyone has gone all you want is for them to come back. But I have learned from my month here that if you sit with it long enough the emptiness can come to seem quite full.”

  “I am afraid I am not much cut out for solitude,” Alex said. “I am much too needy.”

  “Well then. I am glad I was able to be here when you needed someone.”

  “You are truly a remarkable woman, Mrs. Reynolds. I must apologize again for ever thinking less.”

  “All I did was listen.”

  “A vastly underrated skill. Some people—people like me—listen for information. But others listen for what’s being said behind the words. It is a much rarer trait. You do it exceptionally well.”

  “How do you know? I mostly sat here in silence.”

  “Because you sat in silence. Like a priest in his confessional, you knew that if you gave any appearance of prurience or even curiosity, I would have stopped talking. And you knew, too, that I was only saying these things aloud to make them real, not to engage in the usual back and forth of genuine conversation. I did not want to investigate my past, only to air it out like a musty rug, so that the odors would dissipate in the breeze.”

  Maria greeted this with still more silence, and Alex laughed.

  “I fear I am just talking now to delay my departure. Truly, an empty house does not hasten one home.”

  “Of course,” Maria said. “But don’t let me keep you.”

  “It is I who am keeping myself,” Alex said, standing up. “However, now I must be off. Somehow it is only Tuesday, and the bulk of the work week lies ahead.”

  Maria stood, too, to walk him to the door.

  “Good evening, Mr. Hamilton. I shall always treasure this day as one of the pleasantest in my memory.”

  “As shall I,” Alex said. And then, surprising himself, he leaned in for a hug.

  Maria was surprised as well. But instead of turning her cheek to one side, she turned her face up to him.

  Alex would remember thinking that he should have pulled away. Rather than heed this warning, he felt his arms go to her waist. Then her arms were on his shoulders. They pulled each other close.

  “Maria, I can’t do this,” Alex whispered hoarsely. “I love my wife.”

  He did love her.

  He loved her so much.

  But Eliza was away, and Maria was here, in his arms, and the easiest way to get rid of temptation, it turned out, was to give in to it.

  23

  The Hardest Part of Getting Sick Is Getting Better

  Van Cortlandt Manor

  The Bronx, New York

  September 1785

  Eliza spent three weeks being ill and another two recovering her strength. The doctor told her that he would have released her from bedrest sooner had she not been pregnant. However, it was of prime importance that she be fully fit before attempting the fifteen-mile journey back to Wall Street. Fall had come on early and damp, with chilly showers drizzling almost every day, and sodden, rutted roads making the journey substantially longer than it normally would be. Mrs. Van Cortlandt said she could not in good conscience allow Eliza to leave before she was “full hale and hearty.” If worse came to worst, she said, Eliza would stay until after her time, and she and baby could return to the city in the spring.

  “Tis better that ye return alive than that ye return anon,” she said in her old-fashioned manner. “Ye must think of the future and not just your longing for the comforts of home and husband.”

  Still, Eliza longed very much for both.

  * * *

  • • •

  LAST WEEK, WHEN Eliza’s fever had taken its dire turn, the Van Cortlandts, after consulting with Emma, had made the decision to keep the severity of Eliza’s condition from Alex. It was the doctor’s judgment during the first week that each night she survived was a miracle. It was unlikely that a messenger could even deliver news of his wife’s illness to Alex before she succumbed to it, let alone make it from the Bronx to the southern tip of Manhattan.

  “Let the man bask in ignorance,” Mrs. Van Cortlandt had said to Emma. “The awful truth will be upon him soon enough. And if there be no sad news, then we have saved him the anguish of unnecessary grief.”

  But Eliza was strong, and though she did not even seem to realize she was ill, she still fought her fever valiantly. After a week the doctor pronounced Eliza out of danger, and now the decision was made to keep Alex in the dark for the sake of not needlessly worrying him (though Emma suspected that the Van Cortlandts also wished to keep the secret of their conspiracy a little lon
ger, because Alex would undoubtedly be furious when he learned that his wife had nearly died and no one had told him). With the Van Cortlandts’ permission, Emma penned Alex another letter saying only that Eliza’s fever had been more severe than initially diagnosed, but that she had pulled through and was now on the mend, though still too weak to write. This was not exactly true—while her fever had indeed broken, Eliza remained in a delirium for two weeks more—but Emma was much too respectful of the Van Cortlandt name to contravene their wishes. She concluded by telling him that his presence would likely only distract Eliza, who would feel the need to attend to him rather than the other way around, and that he should not abandon his work to serve as nursemaid to his wife. Emma was in attendance, and Drayton, as well as the vast household of the manor, which counted more servants than Van Cortlandts within its walls.

  In truth, Emma thought that Alex would ignore her admonition, and she expected him to show up any day. But when a full week had passed with neither word nor sign of him, she began to fear that her letter had not been delivered, and she wrote another. The description of Eliza’s condition was the same, as well as the entreaty that he not burden himself with the journey north, but she did add a pointed comment about his silence, inquiring if he had received the previous letter (the Van Cortlandts had paid dearly for a farmhand to deliver it to his doorstep) and, if so, if everything were all right with him.

  And though they hadn’t heard from Alex, they were certainly hearing about him. News of his Trinity triumph had spread all over the island, putting the Hamilton name once again on the lips of every Manhattanite, urban and rural. The Van Cortlandts, who were as thrifty and enterprising a Dutch family as ever sailed out of the Port of Amsterdam, took the pragmatic view that Alex was simply overwhelmed by the responsibilities of negotiating a new church charter as well as handling what must undoubtedly be dozens of requests by new clients, who would surely be banging down the doors of the most brilliant lawyer in New York.