1
Her Brother’s Keeper
New York Harbor
New York, New York
June 1785
To passersby, they must have looked like any other young couple enjoying the bright sun and cool breezes of a June day in New York City. Broadway was crowded with similarly affectionate pairs, arm in arm, or holding hands, or even giving in to the urge to steal a kiss, regardless of who was watching. City Hall Park was in full bloom, and the only odor that could push through the heavenly fragrance of lilac was the salt of New York Harbor, less than a quarter mile away. But unbeknownst to their fellow flâneurs, Alexander and Eliza Hamilton were engaged in that most high-stakes of marital negotiations: their social calendar.
“No, no,” Eliza admonished Alex as gently she could. “We dine with the Van Cortlandts on the morrow. They are in town for just four days. We are seeing the Van Wycks on Thursday.”
From the corner of her eye, Eliza saw Alex’s brow furrow beneath his hat, a narrow-brimmed midnight-blue tricorne that brought out the red in his hair and the twinkle in his pale blue eyes. “But I thought we were dining with John and Sarah on Thursday.”
“No, the Jays are Friday,” Eliza said as soothingly as possible, regarding him from beneath the brim of her own bonnet, which was a handsome chocolate brown trimmed with pink ribbon that accentuated the apples in her cheeks. She patted her husband’s arm as though he were a little boy. For a man who had supervised the schedule of the commander in chief of the Continental army for five years, he had a notoriously hard time remembering whom he was going to have dinner with three days out.
“Friday?” Alex repeated, as though she’d just told him Congress had voted to return the United States to British rule. “Then when are we seeing the Morrises?”
“Do you mean Gouverneur, or Helena Morris that is now Rutherford?” Eliza responded. “We’re having Gouverneur and his latest belle du jour, Miss Du Pont, to tea a week Saturday,” she continued without waiting for her husband to answer, “and taking luncheon with John and Helena at their city residence after services on the Sabbath. Or, no,” she corrected herself. “We are joining James Beekman at Mount Pleasant after church. The Rutherfords have had to push back their arrival until Monday, but we have tentative plans to join them for supper.”
“‘Tentative plans’?” Alex laughed. “How on earth can such a schedule accommodate a tentative plan? My good wife, you manage our social calendar with more precision than General Washington arranged his parlays! If you were foreign minister to King George or King Louis, there would never be another war in Europe again!”
“As I recall,” Eliza said, chuckling, “it was you who arranged General Washington’s social calendar, which makes it that much more surprising that you cannot keep track of your own.” She held up a string purse whose pink ribbon matched her bonnet. “If it makes you feel better, I have everything written down in a little diary I keep with me at all times.”
“When I was General Washington’s aide, I didn’t have a social calendar,” Alex said, laughing. “All my time was spent racing after him. It is your own fault, my darling,” he continued, squeezing Eliza’s silk-clad arm with a kid-gloved hand. “You are as impressive a hostess as you are a guest. Everyone wants you in their salon, and if they’re not soliciting your presence at their table, then they’re begging for a spot at ours.”
Eliza blushed prettily at the compliment and allowed a few steps to pass before she answered. Catching a glimpse of herself in a shop window, however, she couldn’t help but think that Alex might be right. He in Prussian-blue wool, she in dark rose silk with pink and chocolate accents—they were the picture of urbane, young New York society, and she noticed more than one set of eyes glancing at them both approvingly and enviously.
“Oh, pshaw!” she said at length. “I am naught but the wife of a war hero, who just happens to be the most capable attorney in New York City. If people court my presence, it is only so they can be closer to you.” At that, she squeezed his arm to let him know that none could come closer than her.
“Did you just ‘pshaw’ me, Mrs. Hamilton?”
“I believe I did, Mr. Hamilton.”
“That’s Colonel Hamilton to you.”
Eliza pretended to be shocked. “Of all the cheek—”
Alex soothed her with a kiss. “The only cheek that I’m interested in is the one my lips are pressed against,” he murmured.
“Just be sure you don’t neglect the other one,” Eliza said, touching the opposite side of her face. “It will get jealous.”
Alex dutifully leaned across his wife to give her a second kiss, then threw in one on the lips for good measure, and they continued on their way down Broadway. Eliza went on informing him of their social schedule, as Alex shook his head in disbelief at the number of bowls of creamed spinach he would be expected to consume in the next three weeks.
Such was the price of being the most popular couple in town.
Since the smashing going-away party Eliza had thrown for Angelica and John Church last winter, where everyone who was anyone in New York and New Jersey society had been present, the Hamiltons’ hall table had been littered with calling cards. To accommodate all the requests, Eliza began hosting Thursday night dinners and Friday night salons, which quickly became the most coveted invitation in town. She was adept at mixing lawyers with painters, businessmen with artists, so the conversation was always knowledgeable and varied, and everyone left feeling like they’d learned a little bit more about how the world functioned, from the workaday business of brewing one’s own ale to the exalted labor of forming a new country from the ground up.
For if Eliza provided the culture, Alex provided the politics. His brilliant and compassionate legal defense of Caroline Childress, the widow of a British soldier who’d fought against Continental troops in the War for Independence, not only had made him the most sought-after lawyer in town—the man who could win the unwinnable case—but also led to repeated calls for him to enter politics at the highest level. Several people approached him to run against New York’s corpulent, corrupt governor, George Clinton, while others suggested something at the national level—senator, or perhaps foreign minister, should Congress decide to create an executive office. He might even be prime minister or president or whatever title they would bestow on the new leader of the country.
The Hamiltons’ combined success had made them the It Couple in New York City. With Eliza’s family relations to the Van Rensselaers, Livingstons, Schuylers, and the rest of the New World gentry, and Alex’s military and legal connections to General Washington and other heroes of the revolution, there wasn’t a soul in New York who didn’t want to meet them, whether to bask in their glory or ride on their coattails. But right now the Hamiltons were on their way to meet someone who meant more to them then all the tow-headed Dutchmen and high-collared Anglicans you could stuff in a parlor.
AS THEY TURNED a corner, the vista opened before them, revealing the clear southern sky over New York Harbor, whose sparkling waters were dotted with masts and brightly colored flags waving in the soft breeze.
“Papa’s letter said that Johnny was nervous about the journey down,” Eliza said, sounding a bit anxious herself. “It’s been such a stormy spring, and apparently he gets seasick, even on a riverboat. Although,” she continued, “I must say, my stomach feels rather restless this morning. I think Rowena’s eggs were a bit underdone at breakfast.”
“I found them delicious as always. I think you are just missing your Jenny or Martha, or whatever you called her.”
“We just called her Cook,” Eliza said.
“No doubt. To a child, she must have seemed the source of all food, and no eggs, regardless of how well they are scrambled, can possibly taste as good as the ones your Cook made you for the first eighteen years of your life.”
Eliza knew Alex had a point, but still, Rowena’s omelet had seemed a little runny to her. Rather than linger on breakfast, she tried to focus on her excitement at being reunited with her brother, who was to start at Columbia in a few weeks. Everyone in her family was proud of the university’s new name, no longer saddled with the British monarch’s title as King’s College. Since he was the eldest son, great things were expected of Johnny, and as her parents’ representatives here in New York, Eliza understood it was her job to see that he was kept in line. Johnny was also the first child after the sisterly triumvirate of Angelica, Eliza, and Peggy—the first to survive, at any rate—some nine years her junior. Though she was grown now, and he nearly so, she still couldn’t help but think of him as the baby she and Angelica and Peggy had fussed over for the first three years of his life, until Philip Jr. came along. They had coddled their brother and made a pet of him, and she knew that he wouldn’t stand for runny eggs.
“You will admit that Rowena has been very distracted since Simon went away,” she said now. “I do wonder if it was the right decision.”
Rowena’s son, Simon, had been in training as their footman, but from the start the energetic eleven-year-old showed no aptitude for it. He was an outdoorsy child, preferring bare feet to shod and loose cotton or linen to fitted wool. When, on an errand to the Beekman estate, Mount Pleasant, five miles north of the city, he had gamely assisted the chauffeur in delivering a mare whose foal was breach, Jonas Beekman was so impressed with his performance—both mare and foal pulled through swimmingly—that he offered Simon a job as a groom at a grown man’s wages. Rowena had reluctantly agreed to let him go, but took it hard. Simon would have to go live at Mount Pleasant, and, since the death of her husband in the war, she would be all alone.
“The right decision for Rowena?” Alex now asked pointedly. “Or for you?”
“Oh, don’t tease me when my stomach is upset,” Eliza said, but she had to admit that, like her mother, she firmly believed that happy servants made for a happy house, or, at any rate, that a house in which the staff was miserable would share in their pain. Fires would go out, dust would accumulate, the eggs would separate on the plate. And as the thought of them returned, her insides churned anew.
“Well, the nephew should be here next week,” Alex said. “What’s his name again?”
“Drayton,” Eliza said. Drayton Pennington was the eldest child of one of Rowena’s sisters. He was said to be a hale lad of seventeen, though Rowena had not seen him in nearly a decade: The Penningtons had moved to the Ohio Territory to avoid the war. They transformed a considerable bit of land into a farmstead, but it was still essentially wilderness, and Nigella, Rowena’s sister, had written that Drayton seemed somehow “cut of an urban cloth.” He knew his letters and read every book he could get his hands on, was even better at math, and, owing to a dearth of sisters, was remarkably spry with needle and thread.
“Drayton and Johnny, both arriving within a week. Our household will be incredibly full.”
“Not too full,” Eliza said, patting her all too flat stomach.
“There, there, my dear,” Alex said, squeezing his wife’s arm tenderly. “It will come.”
After Alex’s momentous victory in court last year—and the settlement fee—the Hamiltons had at last felt ready to start a family of their own. But eight months of “carefully coordinated activity,” as Eliza had referred to it in a recent letter to her mother, produced nothing in the way of nascent Hamiltons. In an earlier letter, Mrs. Schuyler asked why Eliza had not joined her two sisters in giving her a grandchild to spoil, and, in a rare moment of candor, pointed out that the activity in question was not without its own charms: “You and Alex should persevere, and take pleasure in the perseverance,” she concluded. Eliza had thought the page in her hands would spontaneously combust when she read those words, but it was just her cheeks burning. And yet, her mother’s disappointment did not compare to Eliza’s greater one. Her wish for a child was much too painful at this point.
“Having Johnny here will be almost like having a child I suppose. Though he is nearly grown, Mama says that he is as headstrong as Cornelia, who is not even five,” she told her husband.
Alex stifled a groan. “I hope he is ready for school. Columbia is fast becoming one of the best universities in the country—I heard enrollment will reach nearly twenty students this year, and they have brought on a fifth professor! It will be big change for a boy used to studying with his brothers and a tutor in the schoolroom.”
“How hard can it be? They let you in,” Eliza teased. “Although as I recall, you didn’t stay around to graduate.”
“Hmmm,” Alex mused. “I seem to recall a little revolution getting in the way.”
“Excuses, excuses.”
Alex chuckled. “At any rate, I’m less concerned about Johnny’s ability to handle the classwork than the distractions of the city. New York is a far cry from Albany. There are theaters and parties and museums and visitors from a score of countries all vying for a young man’s attention.”
“And girls,” Eliza said. “Don’t forget the girls.”
“And girls,” Alex agreed. “But I trust the formidable Mrs. Schuyler will have imbued her eldest son with a firm sense of decorum and probity.”
“Well, let’s see,” Eliza said. “Of her three eldest daughters, the first eloped with a man rumored to have fled debtor’s prison—and possibly a wife—in England, the third was engaged for nearly a decade before she finally got her intended to commit to a wedding, and the second, ahem”—Eliza goosed her husband’s arm—“ran away from her fiancé at the altar to marry a boy from the Indies with no name.”
“I take exception to that statement,” Alex pretended to protest. “The name Hamilton is one of great distinction. My grandfather is an earl or duke or laird or something in the old country.”
“Well then, yours is the worst Scottish accent I have ever heard in my life,” Eliza said with a giggle. “It’s not even a good Caribbean accent, for that matter. And the very fact that you don’t even know your grandfather’s title calls into question your claims of aristocratic lineage. Correct me if I’m wrong, but you never even met your father, let alone your grandfather.”
Eliza suddenly caught herself, worried that she’d gone too far, as she knew her husband was sensitive about his background. But Alex only laughed, if a bit cynically.
“And a good thing, too, lest I ended up following in that incorrigible man’s footsteps.” Shortly after Alex was born, his father had abandoned his mother and never reappeared in his young sons’ lives, even after Rachel, Alex’s mother, succumbed to yellow fever when he was eleven.
“Well,” Eliza said soothingly. “You seem to have done pretty well on your own.”
“On my own? No, my darling. Whatever I have and whatever I’ve accomplished, I owe half of it to you. Without your constancy and steadiness, I would be nowhere.”
“Goodness,” Eliza said, though she blushed with pride. “I’m not sure if you’re describing a wife or a saddle pony upon which one might teach a child of five to canter. Oof!” she added as Alex pulled her into a bear hug and covered her face in butterfly kisses. “The corset’s bad enough after Rowena’s eggs. Don’t squeeze so hard!”
THE TWO CONTINUED their banter for the next hour as they made their roundabout way to the docks on the Hudson River. It was a glorious day at the beginning of summer, the sky as blue as Delft tiles and the mercury hovering in the mid-seventies. Horses’ hooves and wagon wheels clattered over the rutted roads with the insistent jangle of commerce—it hadn’t rained in nearly a week and the dirt was baked hard as bricks. The streets and sidewalks were alive with tradesmen and women hawking their wares, and servants and messengers hurrying about their masters’ business. Wheat and corn from the fields of upper New York State, tin and pewter from Pennsylvania, cotton from the southern states, fragrant spices and sugar from the Caribbean and farther afield: With a population of thirty thousand, New York had surged past Boston and Philadelphia to become the young nation’s largest city, and virtually anything you desired could be had there, and at any price, from the cheapest bits of dented, tarnished flatware to the most exquisite silks and china (these safely ensconced behind store windows, but still easily visible from the broad wooden sidewalks of lower Manhattan).
The sun had just passed its zenith when they emerged on the river just above New York Harbor. The Hudson was more than a mile wide here, an impressive, flat, gray highway upon which ran hundreds of boats, from the tiniest oared dinghies to ships of the line measuring nearly two hundred feet. The mail ship from Albany was a single-masted, heavy-bellied vessel that sat low in the water, and it took a few minutes before the Hamiltons were able to make it out amid the larger merchantmen at dock.
When they spied it, Eliza hurried forward. After dawdling and window-shopping through the city, she was suddenly impatient to see her brother. It had been a year since she’d seen anyone in the family, and two since she’d seen Johnny. Loosing her arm from Alex’s elbow and taking his hand instead, she pulled him through the crowd, equally divided between stevedores and porters and other dockworkers, and people like her and Alex, there to greet an arriving loved one or see someone off.
“I can’t believe he’s really here!” she said excitedly. “I cannot wait to show him the sights! Bayard’s Mount and Collect Pond and Federal Hall and Fraunces Tavern. Oh, I do hope he loves the city as much as I do and doesn’t miss the country too much!”
“He need only hop on a horse and ride a half mile north of Chambers Street and he’ll have all the country he wants. But I suspect he will take to the big city like a fish to water. Johnny has always been a worldly boy,” Alex replied.
“You speak as if you know my brother better than I do!” Eliza said. “He is a delicate child! The noise and bustle may be too much for him!”
“A delicate child! As I recall, he took a shot at the British raiding party that came to kidnap your father in the last year of the war. I say New York should look out for him, and not the other way around.”
“Well, I say we should look out for him right now. The pier is so crowded today, I don’t know how we’ll ever find him.”
Alex took a moment to glance around. “I think I have an idea where he might be,” he said then, and, taking Eliza’s elbow, steered her off to the right.
Eliza peered ahead, but all she saw besides the dockworkers was a group of women crowded in on one another as closely as their bustled skirts and parasols would allow. The way they were huddled together, Eliza assumed they must be inspecting some exotic goods just off a merchantman from the Indies or Europe. Maybe there’ll be oranges! she thought. Since Jane Beekman had introduced her to the unusual fruit last year, she couldn’t get enough of them. Alex recalled them fondly from his youth in the Caribbean, although he said he preferred something he called a “banana.” The way he described it made her think he was pulling her leg, but apparently they were quite delicious.
As it happened she was half right. The women, who ranged in age from sixteen to thirty and change, were indeed inspecting a new arrival fresh off the boat. But the merchandise they were haggling over turned out to be—
“John Bradstreet Schuyler!” she cried. Eliza’s upset stomach fluttered again as the covey of women whirled around in unison, revealing the slim figure of Eliza’s eldest brother, seated on an upended steamer trunk. His cheeks were so red that at first glance Eliza thought they were covered with lip rouge from multiple kisses, but it was just a blush. He sprang to his feet with a sheepish smile even as one of the girls said in an accusatory voice: “John? Why is this woman speaking to you?”
Eliza didn’t like the way the girl said “this woman.” It made her feel as though she were forty years old.
“Johnny,” she said in her most commanding older-sister voice, “why is this girl speaking to you?”
Johnny stepped in, his arms out wide for a hug, but Eliza’s look held him back.
Several of the women, sensing a familial authority in Eliza’s demeanor, lowered their hackles slightly, though they were still clustered around Johnny as if he were a skittish kid goat and might bolt if they let down their guard. But the boldest one of the pack did not back down and turned to Eliza with her fists on her waist and her chin jutting.
Eliza summoned all the dignity her mother had instilled in her. “He’s seventeen,” she said serenely. “Maybe you should hunt for something a little closer to your own age.”
The woman’s jaw dropped open.
“And as for the rest of you, you are free to call on John in the proper time and place—which is not a busy dock on a weekday afternoon.”
“And what is the ‘proper time and place’?” said one of the girls, a rather pretty little thing, Eliza had to admit, though her hair looked a tad dirty beneath its powder, and her dress, which had never been fine, and might even be considered gaudy, was in need of patching.
“I’ll leave that up to John,” Eliza said. “If you don’t mind now, we need to get my brother home.”
The girl was ready to ask for her address, but the look on Eliza’s face stopped her.
“Come along, ladies,” the girl said. “I’m sure the son of General Philip Schuyler won’t be that hard to track down. Bye, John,” she said, all but throwing him a kiss, and then she and her companions tittered away.
“Check your pockets,” Eliza told her brother when they were out of earshot. “Make sure you still have your coin purse.”
“Oh, Eliza, please!” Johnny said. “I know they weren’t exactly our set, but they were perfectly respectable. Don’t be such a snob.”
Alex chuckled. “Your sister is the farthest thing from a snob, as you well know. She married a poor man, as she reminded me not twenty minutes ago, and I’m sure would back you if you chose to give your heart to a penniless girl. Nevertheless, those delectable beauties, who just, ah, paid their respects to you, were not doing so merely because they found you a strapping specimen of young manhood.”
Johnny looked a bit hurt, and Eliza softened toward her younger brother, of whom she had always been very fond. She was struck by the fact that little Johnny had had quite the growth spurt since the last time the Hamiltons saw him, and stood nearly six feet tall, lean and lanky. His wrists and ankles protruded slightly from his sleeves and pants, which only added to the perception that he was a boy who was not yet a man.
“What do you mean about those ladies?” John said at last, self-consciously pulling at his cuffs to cover the exposed bones of his wrists.
“Let’s just say that their time is not exactly free,” Eliza said.
John’s brow furrowed. “I don’t understand.”
“Your sister means that if you wanted to continue your, ah, intercourse with them, a certain quid pro quo would have been expected.”
“Quid pro quo? You mean . . . payment?” John seemed even more confused. “But payment for what?”
Alex turned to Eliza helplessly, but she only covered her smile with her gloved hand.
Then John’s eyes went wide. He whirled toward the crowd of women, who were now descending on their next target in a flurry of silks and laces and titters. Their gloved fingers danced nimbly over the shoulders and arms of their new mark, as they had done on John’s just a moment before.
“No! You mean they’re—”
“Now, Johnny,” Eliza cut him off. “There is no need to name names. Their situation is unfortunate, but we do not have to add indignity by saying it aloud.”
“Wow!” John said, even as Alex flagged down a porter and directed him to have John’s luggage sent to the Hamiltons’ Wall Street home. “My first hour in the city and I’ve already been solicited! How exciting!”
“Welcome to New York,” Eliza said, finally giving her brother that hug. “And I was serious before. Check your pockets and make sure they didn’t steal your purse.”