They gave Violetta a head start—no one wants to be upstaged by their maid, after all—then headed for the stairs. Peggy led the way. At the door to the parlor, she paused in front of Eliza, blocking her from view.
“My lady; gentlemen,” she said in a showman’s voice, “I present, Mrs. Alexander Hamilton in her own home!”
Peggy stepped aside with a flourish, and Eliza had no choice but to walk into the room like a princess into court. Stephen and two other men stood up, while someone who must be Helena sat in the room’s most comfortable chair, a large, broad wingback in a dark blue upholstery that swallowed her up a little. Even though she was sitting, it was obvious she wasn’t much over five feet tall—a fact that was confirmed when she rose to her feet with a large, kind smile on her face.
“Oh, my dear Mrs. Hamilton! Peggy said you were lovely, but she didn’t do you justice!” She walked across the room and clasped Eliza’s hand in both of hers, beaming up at her. Eliza was immediately charmed. Though Helena was a few years younger than she, she possessed incredible—enviable—poise, somehow managing to put Eliza at ease in her own house.
“It is lovely to meet you, Mrs. Rutherfurd. I must thank you for extending such generous hospitality to my sister and brother-in-law, as well as for gracing my dinner table on such short notice.”
“I think we do everything on short notice these days. New York is still so raw after its recent travails.”
“No doubt, order will be restored soon enough.”
“Indeed. But I suspect we will create some new traditions as well.” Helena stepped back then. “Please, allow me to introduce my husband, Mr. John Rutherfurd, and my uncle, Mr. Gouverneur Morris.”
Eliza shook John’s hand first, then Gouverneur’s. John was a genial-seeming fellow whose pronounced chin dimple rescued his face from plainness. Gouverneur, by contrast, as Peggy had mentioned, was quite young, maybe just a few years older than she, and with sharp eyes and a Gallic nose. His thick dark hair was swept back from his face and tied in a short ponytail, which only added to his rakish appearance. Eliza couldn’t help but find him charming, and his presence only made Alex’s absence at the dinner table clearer, which filled her with an empty ache.
“Goo-ver-neer,” she said, sounding the name out slowly. “Is it French?”
Gouverneur smiled disarmingly. “It is, through my mother’s line. It used to be pronounced ‘Goo-vuh-noor,’ but we Americans have added our own spin to it.”
“Fascinating. And of course the Morris name is known far and wide. My husband and I were engaged in Morristown, New Jersey, which I believe was named after your . . . grandfather, yes?” she asked.
“Lewis Morris, yes. Not to be confused with Helena’s father, also named Lewis, my older brother.”
“Pardon me for saying, but you seem more like Mrs. Rutherfurd’s brother than uncle,” she said with a smile.
He returned it with a genial one of his own, and it was quite clear that their dinner guest was taken with their spirited hostess. “My father’s first wife passed away, and he married my mother and began a second family only some time later. Helena’s father, my half brother, is twenty-six years my senior.”
“Ah, I see. I should also thank you on behalf of the Continental troops. My husband tells me that your reforms greatly ameliorated the conditions our boys served in during the war.”
Gouverneur smiled modestly. “We all did our part. I have been told that your war drives clothed more men than all the tailors and dry goods purveyors in New York and New Jersey combined, so allow me to thank you as well,” he said with a bow.
“And, Stephen,” Eliza said, turning to her brother-in-law, “let me thank you for bringing Peggy down to the city. A familiar face is much welcome in this fascinating but still strange town.”
At nineteen, Stephen was starting to come into his own. His body had thickened out of reedy adolescence and the whiskers on his chin and cheeks, though hardly constituting a beard, gave his lean face a bit more maturity. “I? Bring Peggy anywhere?” He scoffed. “I assure you that I merely follow along in the wake of your incredible sister, and endeavor to make the journey as comfortable as possible.”
Nineteen or not, Stephen had always enjoyed talking like a forty-year-old. Perhaps it was the pressure of knowing he would be Patroon when he came of age. It was cute now, but Eliza wondered what it would be like when he was actually forty.
“I am told that we owe our aperitif to you,” Eliza said now.
“Allow me,” Stephen said, reaching for a decanter filled with golden liquid on the sideboard. Before he could grab it, however, a small figure darted out of the shadows and grabbed it first. Simon was back in his blue velvet footman’s coat, with a matching pair of breeches having materialized to complement it.
“A cordial, Miss Eliza?” he said in a voice that was less formal than loud.
“You should refer to your mistress as Mrs. Hamilton,” Violetta said from the dining room, where she was fussing with the table settings.
“A cordial, Mrs. Hamilton?” Simon boomed, already pouring some of Stephen’s honey wine into a glass.
Eliza accepted the glass and sent him on his way, hoping no one would notice the youth or inexperience of their so-called footman.
The next two hours passed in pleasant conversation, although Eliza was hardly aware of it. As 7:00 p.m. gave way to 8:00, and 8:00 to 9:00, she kept glancing at the clock on the mantel, wondering when Alex was going to come home, wondering if he’d received Simon’s note, wondering if he was caught at one of the wealthy estates north of the city with no safe method to make his way home in the darkness, or if perhaps he’d tried to make his way home and gotten lost, or fallen into a ditch and injured himself, or perhaps even been waylaid by the bandits who had returned to Manhattan Island with the settlers.
She tried to shake such morbid thoughts and reminded herself that Alex had not been home before 10:00 p.m. since he’d taken the Childress case, and most nights he came in well after she’d fallen asleep—and she usually stayed up sewing or reading past midnight. He might be late, but there was no call to start indulging in fantasies of his death.
But what if he’d never received the note? He could be sitting in his office right now, poring over old law books in search of legal precedents to use for the Childress defense, while his first real opportunity to mix in New York society passed him by. Should she send Simon out again?
While these thoughts were spinning around her head, the men were comparing the relative merits and drawbacks of farming in lower and upper New York and New Jersey, crop yields, the quality of milk the cows gave, how big were the eggs laid by hens, whether it was better to charge one’s tenant farmers high rents and allow them to cheat you on the yields or go leniently on them and earn their friendship and loyalty but make less money. Eliza had never paid much attention when General Schuyler talked husbandry of the land and found it even harder to focus now, but Helena and Peggy’s conversation was equally strange to her.
They were sharing the trials and tribulations of managing a large household—servants, siblings, in-laws, the number of parties to throw each month, how often to replace one’s china, upholstery, wallpaper. These things seemed like pipe dreams to Eliza and, moreover, not a place she was eager to get to. Her life might be a bit drab when compared to Helena’s or Peggy’s, but right now all she wanted was to see Alex while the sun was shining. To share a cup of coffee with him in the morning and a meal with him in the evening, to have a conversation with him more substantial than “Will you be home for dinner tonight?” and “How was your day?” If this was adult life, it was for the birds.
If Alex was going to be so engrossed in his work that he had little time for anything else, then she should be just as busy, Eliza decided. Perhaps there was a charity or a cause she could lend her services to, like her earlier work with orphaned children—anything to be useful
instead of just decorative. She would look into it soon, determined that she would spend no more days feeling sorry for herself.
Meanwhile, Violetta kept tromping between the parlor and the kitchen with an increasingly dour scowl on her face. She looked first to Eliza for direction, but as the party stretched into its second hour and the group made no move toward the table, she turned her attention to Peggy. Peggy waved her away, but by nine thirty, she, too, was looking at Eliza with a worried expression, and at one point, under the guise of pouring herself a bit more honey wine (as their “footman” had fallen asleep in a chair in the dining room), she leaned over to whisper:
“I fear that the honey wine will go to the men’s heads if we do not get some food into their stomachs soon.”
Eliza nodded and rang the bell. After two hours of shaking the pictures off the wall, Violetta appeared as if on felt slippers.
“Yes, Mrs. Hamilton?”
“Violetta, I wonder if we might bring up the first course, and—” Eliza’s voice trailed off as she caught sight of the shiny silver pieces in the china cabinet in the other room. She suddenly realized that most of them would have to come down to serve the meal. At the Pastures, when they took the display plate down for a party, they always replaced it with other pieces, so the shelves wouldn’t be empty. As empty as Alex’s seat at the head of the table.
She was conscious of Violetta’s eyes on her, and Peggy’s, and the four other people’s in the room.
“Mrs. Hamilton?” Violetta prompted again.
“Yes,” Eliza said, speaking not to the maid but to the rest of the room. “I wonder if we might be a bit unconventional and serve the first course Roman style. In here.” Alex was fond of spouting forth on ancient history, with Germanicus’s campaigns a dinnertime favorite—that is, when he did make it home in time for dinner.
“In . . . here?” Violetta said hesitantly.
“Yes!” Eliza said, forcing the brightness into her voice. “I know it’s unusual, but these are unusual times, no? They call for new traditions. We need not be hidebound and stuffy. It’s just—” Her eyes turned again to the dining room.
“I think it sounds fun!” Peggy cut in. She grabbed Eliza’s hand, and Eliza knew her sister understood how important it was that their first dinner not officially begin until Alex was there to take his seat.
Peggy turned to her husband. “You will forgive me, darling, if I say that after all those four-hour meals at Rensselaerswyck I am hungry—all puns intended—for something a little less formal.”
Stephen, the youngest person in the room, was also, in many ways, the most conservative. In two years he would reach his majority and assume the Patroonship and control of his vast estates, and he studied tradition with the same diligence that Alex studied the law. He frowned now, as if pondering a difficult problem in mathematics or astronomy.
“Am I correct in understanding that you are proposing we eat . . . here?” He indicated the parlor as though it were a barn or the crow’s nest of a whaling ship.
His wife raised an eyebrow, daring her husband to object.
He did not. “How . . . how utterly fantastic!”
“Wonderful!” Peggy said, giving Stephen so a warm smile that he blushed.
“Are you certain?” asked Eliza.
“What? No? It will be exciting. Almost like camping!” he enthused.
“Camping?” a voice called from the hallway.
Eliza stood and whirled toward the door, where a moment later Alex appeared, still wrapped in his overcoat.
She had forgotten how handsome he was, and seeing him at the threshold, looking tired but happy to see her, all her frustration and worry disappeared at the sight of his crooked smile.
“Alex!” she exclaimed, rushing to him in joy and not embarrassed to show it to their guests, who looked on with amusement.
Her husband took her in his arms and kissed her on the lips in full view of their guests. “I’m so sorry I’m late,” he whispered. “Work was tiresome.”
“You’re right on time,” she said softly, and pulled him in for another kiss.
17
Don’t Forget to Take Out the Trash
The Hamilton Town House
New York, New York
January 1784
With the host’s arrival, at last the party moved to the table and food began to appear from the basement kitchen in droves. Stephen’s provisions were generous, and Rowena’s culinary skills were even more remarkable than Alex and Eliza had heretofore realized. Each successive cut of beef and pork was succulently tender and juicy, some smoked, others cured, others fresh, with just the right amount of salt and pepper and dried herbs to set off their unique, savory flavors. A medley of winter vegetables complemented the meat—tubers like potatoes and rutabagas and parsnips, along with some of the more durable squashes from the fall, butternut and sugar pumpkin and acorn and dumpling, all accompanied by pungent herbs whose names Rowena (when she was summoned to the table by Helena, whose own cook was “hopeless” from October to May) refused to divulge, lest a competing cook track down her sources.
Honey wine had given way to Mrs. Childress’s hearty ales, and the conversation flowed as freely as the spirits, by turns frivolous (which New York aldermen were attempting to pass off their wigs as their own powdered hair) to serious (the revolution being over, tea—delicate, pungent, refined tea—was at last returning to North America, and breakfast was no longer dominated by “Caribbean gunpowder,” as Gouverneur referred to coffee, which “starts the day with all the subtlety of a jolt from one of Mr. Franklin’s electric wires”).
With a start, Eliza realized that even though Alex was home at last, she wasn’t going to get to talk to him any more intimately. He took his place at one end of the table, and she, naturally sat at the other. There were a thousand little things she wanted to ask him about his day and his cases, but she had to content herself with being one more member of the conversational fray. And in such a brilliant, opinionated group, that was a chore in itself. A fun one, to be sure, but Eliza was filled with newfound respect for her mother and the deft way she had handled hundreds of such occasions.
Inevitably the talk turned to politics. Alex had visited City Hall during the day’s errands, and the place was buzzing with rumors that State Chancellor Robert Livingston was working up a scheme to create a so-called land bank to facilitate investment in New York and boost the local economy. Chancellor Livingston was among the most respected figures in the state. Not only was he descended the Lords of Livingston Manor, but he had served on the “Committee of Five” that helped draft the Declaration of Independence, and now served as chief judicial officer of the state as well as the national government’s Secretary of Foreign Affairs. In other words, it would not be easy to dismiss any proposition that came with his signature attached. Although a more direct problem to opposing the plan—or implementing it, for that matter—was the fact that no one was quite sure what a land bank was.
“A land bank?” Eliza said cautiously. “I confess I am not sure I understand the concept.”
“That makes two of us!” Alex said.
“Am I to understand,” Stephen said now, “that if I were to walk into my saddler and order a new seat for my charger—”
“Oh, to have such problems,” Helena whispered to Peggy with a silly smile on her face.
“—or a side pommel for Peggy’s palfrey—”
“Pommel,” Peggy repeated. “Peggy. Palfrey.”
“Touché,” Helena whispered.
“—instead of paying him with shillings or Continentals, I would instead reach into my pocket and hand him, what, an acre of bottomland?” Stephen chuckled. “It seems rather—how shall I put this?—inconvenient.”
Alex laughed with his brother-in-law. “Not the soil itself, of course, but a note that transfers ownership of the soil. At least as I u
nderstand it, that is the general idea. Though may I add that it sounds like a rather expensive saddle.”
“Stephen likes a posh ride,” Peggy said, popping the p. “Some of his saddles are made of leather softer than my silks. He doesn’t mind a bit of detailing either—embossed patterns and silver tips and the like. I swear, he looks positively like Don Quixote sometimes.”
Stephen blushed. “I believe Don Quixote was rather shabbily dressed. Didn’t he use a chamber pot for a helmet?”
“But that’s preposterous!” John said to Alex, except he didn’t mean the helmet. “Before you know it the land will be broken up like so many stamps torn from a postal sheet. One’s property would be scattered about like cards in the wind—like acorns fallen from an oak tree, or, or maple samaras!”
“Maple samaras,” Gouverneur repeated. “My goodness, what a literary crew you have supping at your table, Mrs. Hamilton.”
“They’re the seeds, you know,” Eliza explained, “that spin as they fall from the tree so they float farther away. Rather like Leonardo da Vinci’s aerial screw.” She felt proud of herself for pulling that one from the mists of long-ago schoolroom lessons.
“Da Vinci!” Gouverneur exclaimed. “Aerial screws! What a clever bunch you—”
“But-but-but,” John cut in, knocking on the table, “where is the land for this plan to come from? The last I checked, New York was rather spoken for. Mostly by your family,” he couldn’t help adding with a wink at Stephen.
“No doubt much of it will be seized from loyalists,” Alex answered with a frown. “But it is not clear to me that even if we cast every last supporter of the king into raw nature that we would have nearly enough capital for such a project. Land would likely be, ah, received from the great estates in New York,” he said pointedly, looking around at his guests, each of whom was connected to one or another of those great estates.