22
Temptation and Tragedy
Ruston’s Ale House and Inn
New York, New York
September 1785
He had gone there to comfort another. Not to seek comfort for himself.
He had gone there to celebrate his greatest accomplishment since Yorktown. Instead he had been handed his greatest defeat.
He defeated himself.
IT WAS A bitter pill to swallow, especially as the day started in triumph. Three weeks after Eliza’s departure, Alex had arranged a private meeting with a magistrate and Reverend Provoost to review the church’s charter as a preamble to an official hearing at a later date. He walked into Judge Tankert’s chambers in City Hall brimming with confidence. After a brief greeting, he spread his papers out and began his speech.
“In 1697,” Alex began, “the Church of England, under the auspices of King William and the Lords of the Treasury, Trinity Church was established as the principal parish of the colony of New York. Its charter granted it some fifty acres of land at the lower end of Manhattan, to which were added some two hundred more under Queen Anne in 1705. Subsequent deeds by the Church of England, with the full knowledge and cooperation of the crown, increased the church’s holdings to nearly four hundred acres over the course of the next seventy years.
“But while the church’s properties grew vastly over that period, its original 1697 charter remained intact and unchanged. This charter, as both of you know well, declared that the parish could not ‘use, lease, grant, demise, alien, bargain, sell, and dispose of’ property ‘exceeding the yearly value of five thousand pounds.’ In effect, Trinity was chartered as a medieval fiefdom. Should its earnings exceed five thousand pounds, they would be siphoned off by the parent church back in England.”
Alex saw Reverend Provoost flash Judge Tankert a look at the word fiefdom—strong language to describe the ecclesiastical body to which, up until a few years ago, both men had served faithfully. But to both his and the reverend’s relief—and delight—Judge Tankert was nodding his head in agreement.
Alex continued in a bolder voice:
“Yet all the while this stipulation was in effect, the parent church was busy loading Trinity down with properties it knew the church could neither develop nor utilize for the betterment of its own parishioners. Trinity was constantly forced to entreat for dispensations so that it could attempt to fulfill its mission for the spiritual, physical, and mental health of its congregation. In this sense, the church treated its colonial offshoot no differently than the crown treated the colonial government or the colonists themselves. Trinity’s every action was hobbled by the mother church, lest the colonists grow too independent. This, gentlemen, is a policy forged in oppression, pure and simple, and it has no place in a liberated and free United States.”
Alex paused for a breath. Up till now, he had merely been summarizing the facts of the case, and adding a political gloss that he knew would go over well with the rector and the judge, both of whom had been staunch patriots during the war. But the time had come to dazzle them with his legal mind.
“Now, I know what you’re thinking,” he continued in almost an offhand manner. “You’re thinking that even if this is true, it is of no consequence: Trinity and the government of New York State agreed to renew the church’s charter under the original terms after independence. And this, too, is true. Yet the renewed arrangement was entered into on the presumption that Trinity’s original charter had been maintained according to English law for the duration of its existence. And there, my friends, we find that that is simply not the case. You see from these documents”—Alex handed each of the men a sheaf of papers that Nippers and Turkey had copied out—“that the value of the land that the crown bestowed upon Trinity exceeds twenty thousand pounds in value. You heard me correctly, gentlemen. Twenty thousand pounds. And that is the undeveloped land, mind you, completely separate from any farming or manufacturing or domicile that may exist upon it. And so, I ask you, how can a document that stipulates that Trinity be limited to assets not exceeding five thousand pounds be considered valid when the issuer of that document itself violated the terms of the agreement? I’ll save you the trouble of answering: It can’t. The Trinity charter has been rendered null and void by the Church of England itself, and as such, cannot be extended to another governmental overseer, British, American, or otherwise. I submit to you, gentlemen, that Trinity is a free church, unbound by any laws save those that govern the citizens of the state of New York and the United States of America.”
Reverend Provoost and Judge Tankert stared at him in amazement for nearly a full minute. Eventually the judge bestirred himself, asked a few questions, made a cursory examination of the documents in his hands. As a representative of the state of New York, he was no doubt aware that Governor Clinton would be less than pleased by this development, but Alex’s reasoning was ironclad and he knew it. The Church of England had been hoist by its own petard. Trinity was free.
After Judge Tankert dismissed them, Alex had a quick meeting with Reverend Provoost. A formal hearing would still have to be held, and a new charter would need to be worked out with the state government in Albany. Alex knew that Governor Clinton had hoped to use the church’s charter against Trinity in order to coerce it into surrendering a large portion of its lands to the state, from which it could reap tens of thousands in business deals and taxes. Clinton wouldn’t be keen to give up the potential revenue from seizing the church’s land without something in return. Alex had a big job ahead of him. But in the meantime, the church was free to develop its properties as it saw fit, which gave it enormous financial leeway and freedom. And part of that freedom was the ability to pay Alex a fee that would ensure his and his family’s prosperity for years to come. If the job wasn’t so pressing, Alex would rent a horse and set off after Eliza to deliver the remarkable news. A letter would have to do.
Reverend Provoost clasped Alex’s hand firmly, then surprised him by pulling him in for an embrace.
“The church appreciates your ingenuity and your hard work, Mr. Hamilton. We look forward to a long and prosperous relationship.”
“As do I, Reverend. Perhaps we might start with the matter of my wife’s orphanage?” He was imagining the delight on Eliza’s face when she read his letter informing her not just of their newfound riches, but the success of her scheme to help the abandoned children of New York. He could think of no better way to apologize for his outburst.
The reverend laughed. “If this scheme of yours plays out as you and Judge Tankert seem to think it will, I’ll see to it that Trinity not only donates the Vesey Street warehouse to Mrs. Hamilton, but refurbishes it to her specifications as well. It is not an overstatement to say that you have saved us, Mr. Hamilton. Trinity Church is forever in your debt.”
ALEX LEFT THE rector’s office walking on air. Wait until that odious Mr. Burr heard about this latest victory! He would be drowning in envy!
It was barely noon, yet Alex couldn’t bring himself to go back to his office. Instead he headed home, but once he got there the emptiness of the place was more than he could take. Again he thought of taking off after Eliza. He was lost without her. But it simply wasn’t possible. There were motions to be filed on the morrow, in this and in other cases. He was going to have to stay on his toes to make sure Governor Clinton’s men didn’t try to cut their own deal with the church that might deprive Alex of thousands of pounds.
But he simply had to tell someone his news. He was desperately lonely, and his wife had been gone for much too long. And so, ten minutes after he’d walked through his front door, he was heading back out into the late summer sunshine.
Ruston’s was doing a bustling lunchtime business. Sally was working the ale room with two other barmaids. Alex asked her to send up a cider and one of those chilled ales—better make it two—then made his way upstairs. Later he would remember that he had been on his way to see Caroline Childress when he caught a glimpse of Maria’s open door from the stairwell. When he told the story to Eliza, he would say that he went to her because he feared something was wrong, but the simpler truth was, that for whatever reason, it was Maria he wanted to celebrate with, not Caroline. It broke his heart how broken she looked the other night. Perhaps it was because he needed someone to apologize to, and Eliza was far away. Perhaps it was because Maria reminded him of his mother. Or perhaps it was just because he wanted to put a smile on her face.
He hurried down the hall. To his relief, he found Maria sitting in the window, staring out at the cloudy sky, which threatened rain.
“Mr. Hamilton!” she said brightly. “I saw you approaching on Water Street. I had hoped you were coming to see me.”
“I, ah, of course I was,” Alex said, a curious statement that he realized was both not true and true at the same time. “May I come in?”
“Of course,” Maria said, indicating the room’s other chair.
Alex stepped inside, then hesitated by the door. He wasn’t even sure why he was hesitating, until he realized he wasn’t sure if he should close it or not.
You’re being silly! he told himself. She is not some maiden with her mother listening in from another room, and you are not her love-struck beau! She is a guest in a private inn! Close the door and stop acting like a fool!
He pushed the door shut, resisting the urge to look up and down the hall. He had no idea why he felt like a fugitive, but he did.
He took a seat in the wooden rocking chair. He felt suddenly warm, and took off his hat and fanned his face with it.
“To tell you the truth,” Maria said after a moment, “I wasn’t sure, after our conversation the other day, if you would be back or not. I half expected Mrs. Childress to evict me the next day.”
Alex’s flush increased, and he fanned himself more ardently.
“Oh, Mrs. Reynolds, you must know that I would never do that! There is no doubt I was taken aback by the knowledge of your . . . of your deception, but after a night’s reflection it seemed clear to me that any falsehood you told was for the sake of self-protection, and not to harm or misuse me. Indeed, as I look back on it now, I believe I overreacted. It seems unfair of me to have expected you to trust me, when so many people—so many men—have treated you so poorly before. And so, from the bottom of my heart, I entreat you to accept my apology. My behavior was not chivalrous and simply unworthy of you.”
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 husband 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.