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As Philip is laid to rest, he is not the only ghost haunting the cemetery. This is the bizarre thought that passes through Eliza’s mind as she watches her husband kneeling at the foot of their son’s grave. It almost makes her giggle, the incredulity bubbling up like something akin to mirth, but the heavy weight of grief keeps any semblance of laughter anchored inside her.
She feels faint and light-headed, but she won’t allow herself any weakness. If she should falter for a second then she might break her gaze, and – with the pain is so fresh she can feel it dripping like an open wound – to take her eyes away from Philip would be a betrayal. She can’t leave him now. Not yet – so she keeps looking.
Hamilton’s eyes are closed.
She cannot help the hot feeling of anger that rises in her stomach, settling near where her unborn child is curled. Of all people, he should be the one to witness this. If she must watch, then so must he. Her grip tightens on Angelica, whose head is pressed against the silk of her bodice. The child’s body is trembling. Eliza wraps an arm around her slight shoulders because the cold is the only thing she can protect Angelica from today.
Beside her, Alexander Jr, James, and John stand together; all of them ashen-faced and solemn. The youngest two children have been left with the nurse-maid, and she wonders if John, only nine years old, should have stayed behind too. However, he had insisted and she couldn’t have said no to him. In his eyes, she saw that he understood death in a way that the youngest did not. He mourns not for a brother gone away, but for one who will never come back. That is the difference, but as she watches the tears budding on his lashes, she cannot help but feel guilty for exposing him to this scene. Eliza presses a soft palm to her belly, offering comfort to her youngest. She imagines he must be feeling her grief too; stolen from her blood by the umbilical cord, like oxygen and water.
With the assistance of a friend, Hamilton finally rises and returns to their little family group. His limbs are weak with exhaustion and his knees are muddy. Again, the hatred flares up, irrational – and yet she will be the one working hard to remove the stains tonight, while he hides himself away in his office.
God, he’s a coward.
She falls into him, sobbing into his neck, and he stumbles slightly but stays upright. Angelica wraps around them both, keening loudly. It’s a sound Eliza’s never heard before. It’s heart-breaking and she cries harder in response, digging her fingers into Hamilton’s neck. She knows it must hurt him but she doesn’t care. He deserves to hurt, he deserves to hurt, he deserves to hurt, oh-
She cannot take it.
She cannot, she cannot, she must.
She has closed her eyes. She can no longer see him.
“Philip’s gone,” she whispers, barely daring to say it aloud, “He’s gone, he’s gone, oh, Alexander, he’s gone.” The words are heavy. The words are hateful. She chokes them out and they roll from her mouth like tear-drops. They’re ugly.
Hamilton nods, and when he speaks, it’s muffled by her hair, “I know, my love.”
“I cannot do this,” Eliza confesses, because everything feels too much, too sharp, too close. It feels like a white-flag of a day. It feels like surrender.
“I know, I know,” he repeats, “Betsy, I know.”
Angelica breaks away from them, and they both look up in shock. She stares back, her eyes are tear-bright and she stares. She stares like she knows who is to blame. She stares like she sees them, and then she screams.
Her face is empty except for the scream, and it goes on and on and on. Her brothers wrestle with her, and she sinks to the ground in their embrace. Eliza is trying to speak to her but the words do not register. Her hands skim uselessly over her daughter’s shoulders as she tries to calm her but Angelica is inconsolable. Eliza cries. Her motherhood has decayed. She cannot protect her children.
Angelica finally quietens of her own accord, mindless of all who surround her. She slumps to the ground, weeping. Her tears permeate the grass, drifting down through the soil as if it’s the only way to reach her brother. Maybe it is. Eliza cannot say for sure.
Hamilton now has Angelica on his lap, and he’s rocking her gently like he did when she was a child. He’s resting his chin on his head and humming the piano tunes that they used to play together. Angelica hums along discordantly, but at least she’s no longer screaming. Eliza raises a hand to stifle the sobs, her fingers pressing into her lips until it aches, and she hopes that there will be bruises. Hamilton is watching her over Angelica’s head. She matches his gaze even though it hurts, and she feels a devastation passing between them.
“Children,” she says softly, although the word feels incomplete, “Let’s go home.”
***
“Father, may I speak with you?”
Hamilton falters at the hesitancy with which his now-eldest son speaks, but he still steps back, allowing the rest of the family to continue homewards without them. “Of course, Alexander. What is it?”
There’s a moment of pained consideration as Alexander Jr gathers his words, his jaw clenching and unclenching, and his eyes fixed firmly on the ground. Hamilton looks on with concern, but doesn’t rush him. His boy’s face is blotted from crying, and his head is bowed under the weight of everything that’s happened. He collects himself.
“Father.” His voice has dropped several degrees in temperature but his eyes are now burning, “I know that… I know-”. His fists open and close impotently and he glares, fighting against a wave of despair.
Hamilton’s heart breaks, again. “Alex, what-”
“How could you kneel by his grave, and- and tell him you loved him?” he pants with the effort of speaking, “How could you lie like that?”
Hamilton’s mouth gapes and he pushes words to the forefront of his mind, but none of them seem right. The boy is angry. He is hurting.
“You told him not to fire. He told him to go into that duel!” Alexander continues, voice rising and breaking like the tides, like he’s being swept away and no one has thrown him a rope. The tears come thick. “You told him to engage in a delope, and it killed him. You killed him.”
“No, I didn’t-”
“You did!” Alexander shouts, and the sky seems to be bearing down upon them, pregnant with rain and darkness. He feels frantic and he feels sad and he feels everything at once without any dilution. “How could you?”
“I didn’t want him to duel! I didn’t!” Hamilton begs, his voice tilting in an appeal to his son, “If I had known… Oh, God – I would have stopped him! I would have kept him at home. I would have taken his place. You know I would have done. You know.”
Alexander lunges forward, but not to strike. He falls into his father’s arm and buries his face in his jacket. The air catches in his lungs like he’s trying to drown, like death is all he knows now, and he swallows down tears and salt-water. The coldness is a shock, and it clenches around the empty feeling in his chest. His throat feels hollow, he feels, he feels-
“I love him.” Hamilton sobs, holding this son to him like he couldn’t with his first-born. “I am so sorry, I am so sorry. I love him,” he whimpers, and his whole body strains with the desire to collapse.
“Forgive me – oh, I can’t do this. I can’t bury him. I love him.” Hamilton doesn’t want to confess this in front of his child, doesn’t want the twisting thoughts and the need for absolution to weigh upon him as they weigh upon Hamilton’s soul, but it’s too late, and they’re crying together; stopped in the middle of the road, unable to let each other go, alone and alone and alone.
***
The house is not silent. Eliza had expected it to be so. She’d thought that the fire would have been smothered, and the rain would have turned to mist and the birds in the garden would have muted their songs. She had expected the hush of a mourning land; or perhaps the silence, boldly following them home from the grave.
But it has not. Like all the other things they had said goodbye to in that cemetery, the silence has remained buried, immovable and irretrievable, densely packed under the earth.
Angelica had been put to bed to rest. She had been incoherent with grief by the time they had returned, and the pain had made the soft angles of her face stiffen into hard edges, the way the tectonic plates throw up fault-lines.
Everything feels fragile, and the family sit together in the living room because being apart feels like breaking. Little Elizabeth, who’d turned two only four days before Philip’s passing, is tracing with wonder the tear-stains on her mother’s cheeks, while a pudgy hand grips onto her hair too tightly. She thinks her mother’s hurt herself because she’s never seen her cry before, and so Elizabeth clambers off Eliza’s lap straight onto Hamilton and reaches to whisper in her father’s ear.
“Please, can you make,” she takes a breathy pause before the end of her sentence, “Mama stop crying?” Her hands are on Hamilton’s cheek, scratching against his stubble, and she keeps her face close to his so she can see his eyes. “She hasn’t stopped.”
Hamilton tries to smile and he covers one of her tiny hands with his own. “I can’t, Lizzie, she’s very sad.”
“Sad?” the little girl echoes, her brow scrunching in confusion as she turns to cast an appraising eye over her mother’s profile. She hadn’t anticipated that the hurt would be emotional, not physical. The concept does not yet exist in her mind.
“Because,” Hamilton chokes up and he presses his mouth against his daughter’s hair for a second to fight back his own tears, “Because your brother, Philip, has gone away, and-”
Beside them, Eliza gasps. Immediately, James rushes forward and wraps his arms around her, on the wrong side of the parent and child embrace. It feels wrong. It all feels wrong.
“Mama is sad because Philp is lost,” Hamilton tries to distract Elizabeth from her mother’s grief.
The little girl looks at him questioningly, “Where did he go?”
Hamilton cannot say it, so James leans over from where he’s cradling Eliza and whispers, “He’s gone to Heaven, Lizzie. It’s far away so we can’t visit him, but he’s happy there.”
Elizabeth seeks confirmation from her father, and he nods, albeit shakily, “Yes, that’s right, honey. Philip is very happy. You remember Jack, our little dog?”
She doesn’t really because she’s too young, but she says she does anyway.
“Well, Philip’s gone where Jack went. They’re both there together, playing fetch and running around. Getting into trouble.”
“I wanna go,” she says mournfully, and Hamilton laughs without meaning to.
“No, my dear. You can’t go yet. Otherwise, who would stay and take care of Mama?”
She evaluates this question seriously and, with a quick command to wait there, scrambles down from his lap and trots out of the room. Alexander Jr follows her out, obviously concerned, but also relieved for an excuse to leave the room for a moment of respite.
Communal grief is exhausting.
John Church and William are sitting together on the floor, tracing patterns into the worn carpet. They had thought that their brother was immortal, like their parents. They had thought he would live forever.
The house seems to echo with sadness. Eliza is now dabbing her tears away with a handkerchief, and she folds it neatly when she’s done. Her fingers are trembling but her lines are perfect. She sets it on the arm of the chair in case she needs it again. At some point during the course of the day, Alexander Jr had removed the tear-sodden handkerchief from her pocket and replaced it with a fresh linen one. She had felt her heart ache with love and gratitude, and she had gripped the cloth tightly between her fingers until her knuckles turned white.
After a moment, Elizabeth comes scurrying into the room again with Alexander shadowing her. There’s a strange expression on his face, and he scoops Elizabeth up in his arms to deposit her on her mother’s lap – carefully, to avoid her swollen belly.
“Mama!” she giggles, “Look!” Her hand unfolds to reveal several daisies, crushed slightly in her grip but still whole. “I got you them so you could be happy.”
With that, she pushes them against her mother’s chest, urging Eliza to take them. Eliza looks startled for a second but then closes her hand around them and drops a kiss on Elizabeth’s forehead.
“They’re beautiful, thank you, Lizzie.” Her tears spill over anew and she cradles the child close to her, eyes falling closed, trembling with the terror of it all.
Hamilton draws in a shuddery breath, “That’s very kind of you, darling.” He reaches over to hold the hand still grasping the daisies. “I think,” he says slowly, swallowing back the sadness, “I think Mama likes them very much.”