Archive of Our Own

July 12, 1854

Eliza exhales softly as she sinks into her chair and clasps the small pouch hanging over her heart. Fifty years. Today, it has been fifty years since her husband drew his last breath, and her life was turned upside down.

She closes her eyes tightly. Yesterday, the memories of the aftermath of that terrible duel took her breath away. She’s too old for the emotions to grasp her as vividly as they used to, now, she goes through life as if several layers of stiff cloth swaddled her aching body. She didn’t cry.

Instead, she made a decision.

She opens her eyes again and stares at the blank sheet of paper on the desk in front of her. Everything is ready. The inkwell is carefully set to the side, the quill laid out beside it. It’s Alexander’s quill, carefully cleaned by their daughter at Eliza’s request.

She’s running out of time. She can feel her strength failing, and she knows that she won’t live through another winter. She’s already lived through too many of them. Her mind is still as sharp as ever, and her memories are all there, but she gets lost in the past more and more. The present fails to draw her in, these days, when the only thing she wants to do is remember the times forgotten by everyone else. The times when she was happy and in love.

The first cold, miserable and wonderful winter at Morristown, where she met Alexander. The horrors of caring for wounded and dying soldiers offset by Alexander’s eyes and his soft smile. Their wedding, the next winter, where Alexander only brought a single friend and charmed her entire family effortlessly. Philip’s birth, the winter after that, marking the end of the war and Alexander’s return to health after spending several months bedridden.

There were many happy winters. Eliza doesn’t let herself dwell on the tragic ones. She takes the quill almost reverently and examines it for a moment, bracing herself for what she’s about to do. Does she really have the strength for it? Does she have the courage to go back and do it all over again?

Can she put herself back into the narrative?

*

Eliza has always known the power of words. Her words are more powerful than most.

When she was seven, with her careful little hand, she wrote, I won’t have another little sister. It was a fit of jealousy, something inconsequential, just her practicing her spelling by venting her frustrations. Mama’s belly had been swelling, and Eliza wanted a brother, one who lived past his first few months, not another sister – she already had two, it was enough. She’d woken up the next day with a fever, and Mama’s belly was flat again.

No one had remembered that she was ever pregnant. Eliza had been delirious with fever or weak in bed for four months, her parents fearing for her life, and it took her weeks to understand that she’d been thrown back in time, when the winter didn’t come when it should have. She never found the sheet where she’d written the sentence again – because she never had.

After the first few incidents, she learned to be careful what she wrote. She used statements like I have been told, I like to think, when she was not fully certain of what she was saying. She littered her letters with bad spelling to be on the safe side. To her husband and Angelica, the only two people she ever told, she left blanks in her letters for them to fill, where she feared to write. They understood.

She experimented, too. She learned that she could only influence events in a way that could reasonably have happened, and when she wrote down magical fantasies, they stayed words on paper. The toll it took on her body reduced as she grew, and by the time she came of age, she didn’t feel any real ill effect anymore.

She learned that she could take someone else back with her, if she wrote the right words. Once, after she and Angelica had gotten caught trying to sneak out of the house and had been grounded, she wrote their punishment away and found that Angelica still remembered it. She had to tell her sister everything, but it was worth it.

When her efforts to help her father in the war landed him in front of a court martial instead, she swore to herself never to use her gift again. It was too much power. It was too dangerous. When she told him, not long after their wedding, Alexander agreed. From then on, the only things she ever wrote were his words, and carefully worded letters to her loved ones.

She held fast to that promise, all the way until Philip’s death.

But the one time she really needed it, the one time it was more important than anything else, her gift failed her. That was when she truly understood the nature of it. It was unnatural, ungodly in ways that horrify her. The story fights back, she found out.

It doesn’t want to be changed.

Every time she tried to save her Philip, it ended the same way. She went back many times, trying to find a loophole, and every time she had to watch her oldest son die, and her oldest daughter lose her mind. She brought Alexander back with her, she brought her sister Angelica back, she brought her dear Angie back, but nothing worked. Some times were worse than others. Some times had Philip agonize for days, or fight against a fever for weeks before he died. Sometimes it was a duel, and sometimes it was a war, or an illness, or an accident. It never changed the outcome.

That week in November felt like months. To her, it lasted years.

Eliza tried again and again to save Philip until she couldn’t stand to watch her son die anymore. She fought against the story and she lost. Something broke inside her, inside Alexander who had been swept back with her, inside their dear Angie whose mind wasn’t strong enough to handle the loss of her beloved brother, inside their family. Things were never the same.

Eliza didn’t try to save Alexander, when he took a bullet between his ribs. He made her promise.

But she lived another fifty years, and she saw many things. She saw her husband’s memory, her husband’s very essence, being overwritten, and she is the only one who still remembers, the only one immune to this pervasive power overtaking them all.

Throughout her life, she’s seen traces. Gifts like hers are not common, but she has a feel for them. There are legends, of people who rewrote whole sections of history. People who changed the narrative.

Eliza isn’t alone. There are others. One of them was her husband’s enemy.

She gathered all of her letters to Alexander and Angelica, after Angelica’s death, and she burned them, getting rid of the only evidence of her gift. She never tried to counter Jefferson’s efforts to tarnish her husband’s memory, fearing that her gift would fail again and make things worse, even as she saw her friends, and even her own children, start to believe the lies. Alexander Hamilton has become a monster in America’s history, the Treasury Secretary who tried to sabotage his country at every turn, a cheating, lying husband and a terrible father. The only ones who remember him for who he was, now, are Eliza and poor Angie, who still believes that her beloved father is alive.

Eliza has one more try. One more chance to make it right.

Her hand around the quill is old and wrinkled. It shakes as she dips it in the inkwell. She’s thought about what to write for a long time, wondering what she can ask that God might grant. She can’t rewrite history entirely, but maybe she can change one thing.

She wasn’t enough. Alexander was alone in a hurricane, and she wasn’t enough to anchor him, to protect him from those who tried to change him, to overwrite him.

Maybe she can’t save him, but she can give him help. She can give him back his anchor.

After the battle of Yorktown, she writes, John Laurens renounces his plans to go back to South Carolina to remain at Hamilton’s side.

There’s resistance. The quill in her hand shakes until her handwriting is barely legible, and it’s the hardest thing she’s ever written. She lets herself sag. Her work is done.

Underneath, she writes, I can’t wait to see you again.

This one is easy. It’s not a statement. It’s a truth, only for herself.

She closes her eyes.

*

July 12, 1781

When she wakes up, it takes her a moment to recognize her surroundings. The bed she’s lying on is lumpy and rough, but there is no ache in her joints as she turns around to look at the room. She’s in the shaggy little cabin on the bank of the Hudson, across from Headquarters, where she and Alexander lived for months after he resigned from his position as aide-de-camp.

Eliza half expected to wake up sick and feverish like when she was a child, but she feels fine. She’s never gone back this far before. She doesn’t know the rules – she will learn. God knows that there’s time for that, now. Seventy-three years. It barely seems possible.

Her body is young again. Young and pregnant. The change is jarring, the lack of pain almost odd. She puts a hand on her still-flat stomach, the slight nausea and the memories the only clues to her pregnancy so far. But she knows the feeling well, having gone through it nine times.

Philip. She will get to see Philip again. She didn’t let herself think too much about the personal aspect of her act as she planned it, too scared that it wouldn’t work, but it did. She will have her son again. She will have her husband again.

She starts when she feels a warm body bump her arm. The body jumps as well, and Eliza turns to find Alexander’s young, beautiful face, his hair almost comically rumpled. “Betsey?”

“Alexander,” Eliza murmurs, letting the word roll on her tongue.

It’s been fifty years since she last saw him, and he’s right here, touching her, looking at her with wide eyes—

“You’re—what—how?” Alexander stammers as he looks around them. His eyes widen as he takes in the room. “I… I died. You brought us back?”

Eliza gapes. “You remember?”

“The duel… Burr… What happened?”

Struck by a sudden terror, Eliza throws back the blankets and pulls at his nightshirt, checking his chest. But there is no sign of a bullet wound, only smooth skin there. She breathes again. “You died,” she whispers.

“You promised not to write,” Alexander says kindly, his face marred with pain and guilt.

“I didn’t write,” Eliza sighs. “I survived. I outlived the debts you left us, I outlived my sister, I outlived every one of your enemies. I kept my secret to the end.” She closes her eyes as they burn. The emotions are so much more vivid in this young body, so much clearer. She breathes out and looks at her husband’s confused face. “Alexander, they overwrote you. They destroyed your legacy and turned you into a monster. In the end, I couldn’t let it lie.”

“You brought us back to save my legacy?”

“I brought us back to save you. Our children had to grow up without a father, and yet forever stayed in your shadow, outcasts wherever they went.” She takes a breath, trying to steady herself. “Fifty years, Alexander. Fifty years learning how to live without you, and I was the only one who remembered.”

“I can’t imagine,” Alexander murmurs. “My dear Betsey. I am so sorry.”

Eliza takes a breath. “We have another chance. I don’t know why you remember too, but we can make it right.”

“The story works in strange ways. I remembered when… with Philip, too.” His grief is closer, fresher than Eliza’s. By now thinking of her oldest son brings back only a small pang and good memories. Alexander’s eyes are still clouded with shadows. “Why now? You’ve never gone this far back before. Why… Why now?”

“If we’re going to change the story,” Eliza says, holding his gaze, “we’re going to need all the help we can get. So I got us some help.”

Alexander frowns for a minute, and Eliza can see the moment it dawns on him. He gazes at her in wonder. “John,” he murmurs. “You want to save John?”

“I never got a chance to meet him,” Eliza says with a small smile. “But I know what he meant to you, and what he could have meant to the world. You always had this… deep wound inside you. If we’re going to undo Jefferson’s lies, I need you strong, Alexander. Stronger than him.”

Alexander opens his mouth but no sound comes out. After a while, he chokes out, “Jefferson? It was him?”

“We knew someone was spreading the lies,” Eliza reminds him. “I figured it out after you died. He rarely wrote things himself, and his gift is different from mine. He needs outside influence. Publication. The more widely his words are spread, the more powerful they become. Once he was president, he was unstoppable.”

“Then we can’t let him become president,” Alexander says, seeming to draw strength from that statement. “But… Your gift. Going back this far, there has to be some kind of cost, right? You always said that the story fights back. What—”

“I don’t know yet,” Eliza answers. “I suspect it will come.”

Alexander looks down at her stomach and gently puts a hand on it. “Philip,” he says. “What if—” The words choke out in his throat.

Eliza puts her own hand on his. “It’s a risk I had to take,” she says. If she gets sick, she might lose the life growing in her. Lose her son before he’s even born. “He’s strong, though, and so am I. I think it will be alright.”

She miscarried several times, and lost a child soon before the due date, but her heart tells her that it won’t happen this time. There will be a price, but not that.

She can only pray that whatever the price is, they’re strong enough to bear it together.

Alexander nods resolutely, though the doubt doesn’t leave his face. “We have a lot of work to do, then.”

“If my memory serves and I’m right about the date,” Eliza smiles, “I suspect Tench is going to come in any minute to tell you that the General has a command for you. We should at least get dressed, or he’ll be very embarrassed.”

Alexander laughs. Eliza lets this sound she’s missed for so long warm the frozen part of her heart once more.

*

November 3, 1781

“Marquis!” Eliza cries out when she finally spots a familiar face.

The Marquis de Lafayette’s eyes widen in shock as he sees her, and he immediately dismounts his white horse, handing the reins to one of his aides. “Mrs. Hamilton. You have come all this way? I am very happy to see you, but—” He glances at the now very noticeable bump of her belly under her dress and cloak.

“I received a letter from Colonel Laurens that my husband was injured,” Eliza says. “I had to come.”

“I understand,” Lafayette bends down to kiss her hand. “It will be a while before he can come home, but we didn’t expect you to make the journey, given your condition.”

Eliza is too worried to be annoyed at her friend for his misplaced solicitude. She’s also trying hard not to superpose the image of the young and triumphant general before her with the world-weary, limping old man she last saw in 1826. She can’t save him from the painful times awaiting him, and knowing of them beforehand makes it worse, somehow.

“Where is he?” she asks, focusing on the matter at hand.

The letter she received from Laurens, almost two weeks ago, gave few details of Alexander’s injuries, beside reassuring her that unless infection belatedly set in, they weren’t life-threatening. But the fear griping Eliza’s heart goes beyond her obvious worry for her husband. This wasn’t supposed to happen. This didn’t happen last time.

Alexander Hamilton wasn’t supposed to be wounded in the Battle of Yorktown. He was supposed to come home a hero and collapse from exhaustion there, safely in Eliza’s arms.

What Eliza did changed that, and she doesn’t know yet what else it might have changed.

“He is resting in this house,” Lafayette points behind him at a large house up the main street of the small village of Yorktown. The town has clearly suffered in the siege, and several buildings are burned down. “The General secured a room just for him and has his personal physician, Dr. Craik, attend him every day.”

Eliza nods, wishing that her uncle, Dr. Cochran, was here. At least she could trust him to tell her the hard truths, and she would gladly put her husband’s life in his capable hands. She doesn’t know this Dr. Craik at all. “I want to see him,” she says.

“Of course.” Lafayette offers her his arm, and she takes it, letting him walk her up to the house. “Did you send word that you were coming? The journey must have been difficult.”

“Not anywhere near as difficult as the last few months must have been for you,” Eliza answers, making conversation for the sake of distraction. The knot in her throat makes it hard to focus as they approach the house. “I hear that you’re even more of a hero now.”

“I am satisfied that it all ended here,” Lafayette says. “But your husband took a big share of the glory for himself.” He smiles to show that his words are meant in jest.

“He fought a lot to get a command,” Eliza sighs. “I would have been satisfied with having him safely home.”

“Men go out to seek glory, and women worry,” Lafayette says softly. “My wife, whom I have very much neglected these past few years, would agree with you. But now we are free, and the war is all but over. I will go home to my family. Hamilton will recover and come home a hero.”

There’s something hesitant in his tone as he says the last sentence, though. Eliza latches onto that. “How is he really?”

Lafayette stops just as they reach the door. “I worry for his spirit,” he says. “He is taking this hard. He is… different. I hope that your presence will ease his mind.”

Eliza steels herself and opens the door. Instead of the activity and stench of a field hospital that she half-expected, she finds herself faced with a hastily put-together replica of the aides’ room at Morristown. This is the new Headquarters, not a hospital. She seeks a familiar face, expecting at least Tench, but she doesn’t know any of the men sitting at the large table more than in passing. A few of them look up and stare at her curiously, but her presence isn’t enough to pull them out of their work, probably because Lafayette immediately urges her forward.

“Through here,” Lafayette indicates a door to the side, which leads to a corridor. He stays a few steps behind Eliza to exchange a word with one of the aides.

“Where is Laurens?” she hears him ask.

“With Hamilton,” the man grumbles in a low voice. “The General let him take his work there again.”

Eliza betrays a little of her impatience when Lafayette rejoins her, looking around the corridor. “Where is he?”

Lafayette opens a door on their right and lets her in without a word, face suddenly closed.

The scene Eliza walks into manages to ease the knot of worry in her throat and tie a completely new one in one fell swoop. Alexander is in a real bed, propped up on a feather pillow, looking mostly alert despite the pallor of his skin. He stops mid-sentence as they come in, and his eyes widen as they fall on Eliza.

Most of his body is hidden under a blanket, but Eliza’s gaze immediately falls on his arms, carefully propped up at his sides on folded blankets. His hands are both swathed in thick bandages and stiff leather splints, fully covered until only the tip of his fingers remains visible – on the left hand, at least, because his right hand is a mess of bloody bandages and, where his pinky and ring fingers should be, the space is empty.

Despite herself, Eliza lets out a small gasp and presses her hand to her mouth. Alexander’s face twists into a grimace, which he somehow manages to school into a half-sincere smile. “Betsey,” he breathes. “You’re here.”

Eliza rushes to his side, falling to her knees without decorum to cup his face, careful not to touch his hands. “Oh, Alexander,” she murmurs.

His gaze is slightly hazy and his pupils are blown, an indication that he’s been given laudanum. He tries to sit up more to kiss her, but he immediately falls back against the pillow, groaning in pain. “Don’t move,” Eliza says, leaning forward to meet him where he is.

Someone clears their throat, and Eliza belatedly remembers Lafayette’s presence, and the other man sitting in a chair close to the foot of the bed, whose form she barely registered in her focus on Alexander. She leans against the bed frame to push herself back to her feet, suddenly feeling the weight of the child growing inside her.

She feels light-headed, her tunnel vision clearing now that she’s reunited with her husband. From up close, he looks exhausted and pained. His facial hair has grown almost into a full beard and his brow is glistening with sweat in spite of the chilly early November weather, the fire crackling in the fireplace not quite enough to warm the room. His skin is not hot, though, so it’s pain rather than a fever making sweat so much.

Eliza forces herself to take her eyes off him and turns to the men in the room. Lafayette is still standing by the door, and the other, a thin and tall man with his hair tied back in a queue with a simple blue ribbon, has risen from the chair.

“Mrs Hamilton,” he says, his voice kind. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, in spite of the… circumstances.” He glances at Alexander. “I’m John Laurens. I wrote to you.”

“Of course,” Eliza nods. “Alexander has told me much about you.” Including a lot that Alexander only revealed to her years after Laurens’ death, in the wake of his affair. When, drowning in guilt, he decided to be honest about everything, he told her more than she ever asked for.

It was harder for him to speak of the other love of his life, whom he’d buried deep inside him, than to admit to his adultery. It took Eliza a long time to understand, and longer to make her peace with it. Right now though, seeing for herself the sincere tenderness and worry in Laurens’s gaze whenever he looks at Alexander, she feels nothing but gratefulness.

“I wish I had been able to come to your wedding,” Laurens says. “It shouldn’t have taken this for us to meet.”

Eliza smiles around the new knot in her throat. “Alexander once told me that if it took a war to meet me—”

“It will have been worth it,” Alexander finishes. “I still think so. This war lead me to meet all three of you, and I will treasure that forever.”

Another woman might bristle at hearing the beautiful compliment her husband once paid her repurposed to included his comrades, but not Eliza. Not after everything they’ve been through – she knows exactly what Alexander means.

Of course, Laurens knows nothing of what it really took for Eliza to meet him. Alexander gives Eliza a sad smile as Laurens chuckles and Lafayette waves.

“Nevertheless, now that you are here, I should leave you with your husband and go arrange for quarters for you to stay in,” Laurens says. “I assume you have luggage somewhere?”

“I left it with the carriage,” Eliza blushes. “I was in a bit of a hurry.”

“That’s understandable. I will see that it is brought here. We will free one of the rooms for you, the aides can all bunk together again just like old times.”

“I can sleep here,” Eliza says.

Laurens looks around with a frown. “Hammie should be moved as little as possible, doctor’s orders. But maybe we can get a bed for you from upstairs and squeeze it in. Now that things are calming down, more people are leaving.”

“Madame Washington left to go tend to her son, who fell ill and was evacuated,” Lafayette explains. “The General will soon join her. Hamilton should be able to travel by then.”

Alexander grimaces. “Hopefully. Though I suspect it won’t be comfortable.”

Eliza fidgets with her sleeve. She wants to touch him, if only to reassure herself that he’s alive – even beyond his injuries, having him ride away from her for several months right after waking up from fifty years of mourning him has been trying – but she can’t take his hand and she doesn’t dare pat his shoulder. Laurens solves it by gently guiding her to the chair he vacated. From there, she can both rest her hand on his thigh and relieve her aching back.

“We will give you some privacy,” Lafayette says.

“If you need anything at all, I will be in the main room,” Laurens adds. “The doctor should come before dinner. The General will probably visit after dinner, though he’s very busy.”

“Thank you,” Eliza nods.

She waits until Laurens has closed the door behind him to focus back on Alexander. “My love,” she whispers. “I’ve missed you.”

Alexander sighs. “I would hug and kiss you if I could do it without much pain. Is Philip behaving?”

Eliza chuckles. “Yes, just like last time, he is a quiet baby so far. He kicks occasionally, but nothing like some of his brothers, let alone Angie.”

She briefly closes her eyes in pain at the memory of her daughter, who she had no choice but to place in an institution when the caring for her became too difficult.

“Did she live?” Alexander asks in a small, fearful voice.

They didn’t have any real time to talk about Eliza’s life after his death before he left. They discussed the more pressing matters only, and left that for the future.

“She was still alive when I wrote us back,” Eliza says. “But she never… got better.”

Alexander bites his lip. “Was she happy?”

“I think so. I did my best to care for her, and to find a good place for her when I no longer could.”

“You are a wonderful mother.”

Eliza averts her gaze. “Am I really? Look at how things are already changing for the worse,” she nods toward Alexander’s hands. “I put us all in danger, I took the risk of losing them, again. I took the risk of erasing them. What if I get into an accident and die, or you… They won’t ever be born!”

“Lower your voice, darling,” Alexander says calmly. “I know that you didn’t make this decision lightly. Everything will be alright.”

Eliza would like to believe him. She would like to rely on his strength, on his relentlessness, and have faith that things will work out. But she catches his glance down at his bandaged hands, and the way his certainty fades away before he can hide it. She squeezes his thigh.

“Alexander. Your hands…”

He sighs. “I was reloading my musket, and a horse fell on me. It was carrying some… I don’t even know what, but it was heavy and hard. It crushed my hands. The surgeon did his best to set the bones, but he had to amputate some fingers, and the rest is,” he swallows, “unlikely to heal well.”

Eliza stares at his hands in horror.

Alexander chuckles darkly. “I might be able to hold a fork again, eventually, but anything else, writing, fighting—” He shakes his head, without meeting her gaze.

“This wasn’t supposed to happen,” Eliza murmurs, fighting a strong urge to curse.

She can barely think of it. Alexander, unable to write? She’s still struggling to think of this new life as anything but a rewind of the old one, and every divergence is jarring, but this? It’s unimaginable.

“I could write us back,” she offers in a whisper. “Try again.” She thinks of Philip, of those horrible months desperately trying to fix things, and she can see that reflected in Alexander’s gaze as he assesses her.

He shifts, grimacing in pain. “Eliza,” he says slowly. “John isn’t going back to South Carolina because he thinks he needs to stay with me.”

“So he won’t die down there,” Eliza whispers, her eyes widening.

She only wrote that he chose to stay with Alexander. She didn’t write why. Is this…

“You think this is the price?” she asks. “The story’s way of fighting back?”

Alexander closes his eyes. “No,” he says after a moment. “This isn’t… a punishment, or anything like that. The story doesn’t work like that, that directly. But I think… I think we should take it as a reminder that we’re not just…” he pauses, swallowing. “We’re not simply here to fix things. We have to live this life, not just repeat the first one.”

Eliza presses a hand to her mouth. “It’s my fault,” she murmurs.

“No, you can’t think like that,” Alexander says with a surprisingly firm voice. Eliza’s gaze locks onto his almost against her will. “I’ve been thinking about this. The changes we make will have unintended consequences. We might make things worse rather than better. We can’t carry that guilt.”

Eliza searches his face. It may feel like a long time ago, but she remembers him fretting over every decision he made as Treasury Secretary, knowing that it would always harm some people. He carried guilt his whole life, for so many things he didn’t even have control of – for not stopping Laurens from leaving, for not stopping his cousin from killing himself, for letting his mother nurse him back to health as she was dying herself. His guilt over Philip’s death almost crushed him.

She takes a steadying breath, glancing at his bandaged hands again – she can barely bear to really look at them. “You’re right,” she says, knowing as well as he does that they will both carry this new guilt until the day they die. “I knew there would be a price.”

Alexander swallows. “At least it’s not Philip,” he says. “I couldn’t have handled that.” He stares down at his hands, his gaze suddenly far away. “It’s poetic, in a way. No more writing for me. I wrote my way into this mess. You wrote us out.”

“Alexander, don’t say things like that,” Eliza half-sobs, unable to hold it in.

Alexander looks at her for a while in silence, as she tries and fails to stop her tears. His own eyes are dry. “It’s true, though,” he says eventually. “I’ll never hold a quill again. I guess things are going to be very different this time.”

Eliza shakes her head and sniffs. “No. I will write for you. My gift doesn’t work if I write someone else’s words, so we don’t have to worry about that.” He opens his mouth, but she shakes her head to stop him. “You can still dictate. I’ll write for you, and when I can’t, we’ll hire a secretary. We’ll make it work. What really matters is your ideas, your words, not your penmanship.”

Alexander lets out a breath and nods, trying hard to look hopeful. “We’ll figure it out.”

Eliza stands from her chair and carefully leans over to kiss him. “Exactly.”

*

John accompanies them back to Albany. The journey is excruciating for Alexander, and incidentally makes Eliza and John bond over their common worry for him. They take turns trying to distract him from the pain, each bump in the road sending agony into his broken hands. His arms have been strapped to his chest in slings by Doctor Craik, and the high doses of laudanum mean that he’s barely aware of his surroundings.

Sometimes in the weeks before Eliza made it to Yorktown, Alexander got over the humiliation of needing someone to feed him and keep him clean, as long as it’s John or Eliza and not a servant. But it doesn’t make the task much easier on him, and among other unpleasant side effects, the laudanum kills his appetite. He’s already lost more weight than he can really afford, and he’s too weak to do more than lie on his back in the modified carriage and try to breathe through the pain.

Eliza can’t help being thrown back to the day and night she sat at his bedside as he lay dying, paralyzed and in agony. Even Alexander’s manner, his way of trying to reassure her as he faded away, is the same. In the various boarding houses and taverns they stop at for the night, after tending to him as long as she can stomach, she silently cries herself to sleep.

He notices. Of course he does. “I wish I could hold you,” he murmurs to her one night as she wipes his sweaty brow.

“I’m sorry for making you go through this again,” he says another day, while John is taking care of the horses.

“I would do this for you over and over again, as long as I have you here with me,” Eliza murmurs back.

The ring on her finger is still new and shiny, instead of thin and worn. Sometimes she wishes for this symbol of the relentlessness of her love back, just to prove to herself that this isn’t all a dream. Alexander’s ring had to be cut off to treat his hand, and she tries not to take that as an omen.

John will take a space in their marriage whose shape she can’t quite see yet, and it scares her. She could never fill the hole in Alexander’s heart he left behind, but it remained an idea to Eliza, rather than a constant presence. This time, they will have to reform themselves around him. Around him and around the ghost of the life they’ve already lived.

She was alone more than twice as long as she lived with Alexander, and yet his shadow grew heavier with every year. Now she’s a ninety-seven-year-old in a twenty-four-year-old body, and Alexander is back at her side. Time skips and warps in her mind until it no longer makes sense.

John is oblivious of the tempest in their minds. He gives them privacy as much as he can, and Eliza wonders what Alexander has told him – if he’s told him anything. The truth is too heavy, too complicated for now, but John must have sensed a change.

Eliza has already started to think of him as a friend, and even something more, by virtue of his relationship with Alexander. The part of her that was once jealous, that resented Alexander for not being content with her only, has long been quieted. She’s learned that love can take many forms, and trying to cage it into neat little boxes for the sake of acceptability is counter-productive. There is no doubt in her heart that Alexander loves her, and that’s enough.

Similarly, the part of her that once thought that this kind of love between men was unnatural has learned from the world. Her gift is unnatural too, by that logic – it’s ungodly, to have the power to undo what God did. Eliza has grown to believe in a God who doesn’t give his children evil attribute just to punish them. Alexander’s love for John is as sincere as his love for her, and that’s enough.

Their arrival at the Pastures is a relief, especially for Alexander, but also the start of new hardships. Peggy, Angelica and their mother all fuss over Alexander, who turns deep red at their attention. Eliza can see his lingering looks toward Peggy – that grief, too, is fresh for him.

Eliza has found herself clinging at her family these past months, repeatedly reliving the horrible few years when she went from a respected wife and mother with a supportive family to a penniless widow and orphan. Peggy passed away just months before Philip, and both of her parents died within months of Alexander’s death. Angelica carried her through those times, and when she got sick and passed away a decade later, she took with her all that was left of Eliza’s youth. She was left to finish raising her children in an increasingly hostile world, where her husband and their family by association were openly vilified wherever she went, and she had no one left in the world to support her.

To see them all here again, healthy and happy, is a gift she doesn’t feel that she deserves.

As she gets heavier and closer to her due date, having to rest more and more, Alexander gets progressively stronger – and more frustrated. The pain caused by his broken bones slowly recedes, and the Schuyler family doctor weans him off the laudanum, leaving him grumpy and irritated by the remaining pain and his inability to do anything. If he wants even a chance at regaining some use of his hands, he needs to keep them completely still until they are fully healed, which means that he’s bedridden with absolutely nothing to do. He can’t turn the pages of books by himself, so Eliza and John take turns reading to him. Peggy tries to distract him by talking about the boys she likes – she has a new beau every week, it seems. Angelica strikes up political conversations, which John often joins. Alexander is noticeably quieter during these than he would once have been, but Eliza suspects that it’s largely because he’s afraid of revealing too much of his knowledge of the future.

But frustration isn’t the worst of Alexander’s moods. Periodically, sometimes in the middle of a sentence, his face will turn sour and he’ll retreat into himself. They all quickly learn to leave the room in those moments, lest he suddenly start snapping at them in anger. Eliza is the only one he allows to stay. She doesn’t know exactly what goes through his mind as he lies there and stares at the ceiling for hours, his eyes dark and full of shadows. Does he think of his past deeds, of his regrets and his losses? Does he mourn his hands and his ability to write and take care of himself? Or does he relive the worst moments of his life, over and over, like he used to do in his dreams? How many times over the years has Eliza woken up to his cries as he lost himself in bloody battles, violent hurricanes or horrific illnesses?

Though they don’t share a bed at night for fear of jostling Alexander’s hands, Eliza comes to lie down next to him during the day when she’s tired, and he scoots and squirms until he can lay his head against her swollen belly, listening to Philip’s faint heartbeat. It’s the only thing that soothes him during the bad days.

It soothes her, too. In some way, knowing too much about the future is worse than not knowing anything at all. She spends too much time fretting about the changes they’ve already made, and the ones they need to prepare for. She prays, often and fervently, and hopes that she made the right decision.

But when she’s alone with Alexander and their unborn son, she remembers that whatever happens, she has them back. She gets a new life with them.

That’s when she breaks down and cries.

*

January 22, 1782

Eliza gives birth to a healthy little boy on the twenty-second day of January. It goes exactly as she remembered, although the years have softened her recollection of the pain of childbirth. All the same, Angelica and her mother congratulate her for her fortitude and calm, and Alexander, although sad that he cannot hold his son just yet, looks at her like their whole world has just been made right.

Eliza looks down at their newborn and she feels the same. Her baby is alive again. Her husband is healing. For a few days, the past and the future coalesce into the present and she forgets about the suffering and the grief and she lives again.

She carefully lays Philip on Alexander’s chest that night, so that he can embrace his son without hurting his hands. She keeps a hand on the baby’s back and strokes his cheek with the other.

“What if it happens again?” Alexander asks her in a whisper, like even speaking of it is too painful to bear. “What if like last time, we can’t change the story?”

Eliza looks down at the newborn’s tiny face, the little hand curled around her pinky. “Then it will still have been worth it,” she murmurs.

*

February 13, 1782

The points of convergence and divergence between now and before are like endless avulsions in a river delta. The complexity of it makes Eliza’s head spin. There is a confusing, terrifying euphoria in the deja vu of reliving the exact same scenes as in her memories, but slightly shifted to the left.

The things she is or isn’t surprised by sometimes leave her utterly confounded.

Like that one day in February when, walking back from a short walk with Philip bundled up in her arms, she sees a slender, terribly familiar figure come out of the front door, shaking her father’s hand.

On instinct, she briskly walks around the house to enter through the back door. She can’t stomach the thought of talking to him. Not yet. She will have to eventually – she has no illusion of being able to avoid him forever – but not today.

She finds Alexander in their room, sitting on the edge of the bed, his gaze far away.

“What is he doing here?” she demands, more sharply than she intends, and he snaps to attention.

“Colonel Burr asked your father to use his library,” he says almost mechanically. “He’s studying the law, like last time.”

Eliza stares. “Did he come here? I don’t remember that.”

Alexander nods. “He did, although you probably didn’t see him often. I spent many days sitting with him, exchanging books and debating. We were friends, then.”

They search each other with their eyes for a while. Alexander’s still bandaged hands are trembling, and Eliza sees what she’s missed, the tension in his body, the darkness of his gaze. He’s just as shaken as she is, if not more. She sighs and sits down beside him, carefully rearranging Philip in her arms. Alexander strokes the baby’s head with the tip of a finger.

“I don’t like the thought of you with him,” Eliza admits.

“That history will not repeat itself,” Alexander says quietly but firmly.

“How can you be sure?”

“Because I know what led us there. Hindsight has a way of putting things into perspective, and I can see both of our faults much more clearly. Too many times, we butted heads or betrayed each other’s trust, until it led us onto a path where we could only see one way out.” He sighs. “I do not believe that he wished to kill me.”

“Two of you went out there that morning, and only one walked away,” Eliza says, but her words are not heated. She has Alexander back. There is no room left for that anger.

“I made the choice to go through with the duel. If anything, I am the one who broke the rules, by going in with the intent to delope.”

“That’s not much of a consolation,” Eliza mutters.

“I know. But it’s the truth. Where he is to blame, I am to blame twice as much for deciding that it was worth the risk of leaving you and our children.”

Eliza lets out a small, tearless sob. The grief is still there, the unbearable pain of the first days, the relentless ache of a life without him. But hearing him admit this, as much as the injustice of it all still hurts, frees something within her. She carried everything alone for so long, his memory and his erased legacy, her anger and betrayal, her love. This is something that she gets to share, now.

“It destroyed him, too,” she says eventually. “At first, I wanted him to hurt like I hurt, and I was furious when he escaped charges, but he paid for it.”

She tells him what she knows, the famous treason trial that was on the first page of the papers for months, because of Jefferson’s insistence that Burr was guilty despite the lack of proof – Eliza didn’t think much of it at the time, still grieving, still too furious at Burr to see what was happening, but now she legitimately wonders if Jefferson wrote the entire affair into existence to get rid of Burr. She tells Alexander about Theodosia and her son’s tragic fates, which truly saddened her as Theo was once Angie’s friend, about Alex helping Burr’s second wife to divorce him in a bizarre twist of fate. She doesn’t tell him about the sickening mix of emotions that came with the news of Burr’s death, nothing at all like the satisfaction she felt at Jefferson’s death a decade earlier.

“I think Burr suffered from Jefferson’s writings as much as you, but he was alive for longer to see it poison everything. I often wondered how much of it he came to believe himself. I saw how Jefferson’s lies affected everyone around us.”

“But not you?” Alexander asks.

“It’s difficult to tell for certain, but I think that my own gift protected me from his words.”

Alexander nods. “Being back here… I have all the same memories, but it’s like a veil has been lifted from my eyes. I see things so much more clearly now, the mistakes I made, the unforgivable things I did. I don’t know how much of that was him and how much was my own obsessions sending me down that self-destructive path. The duel, the affair even, the pamphlet…”

Eliza takes a breath. “I will never know if his words lead you to this or if you made that choice yourself,” she whispers. “I will never know, and I have learned to live with it. I forgave you long ago, Alexander. It was in another life.”

Alexander nods solemnly. “Thank you,” he murmurs, guilt and true gratefulness warring on his always expressive face.

“I have hope that, faced with the same situation now, you will make a different decision.”

He nods fervently. “Of course.”

Eliza doesn’t doubt that she can believe him. He’s not the same man now that he was back then. The last years of their lives together, their shared grief but also their renewed love, changed them both profoundly. And now that he has John back, that they’re young again… There will be hurdles, but they won’t be a repeat of the same, she’s convinced of that.

Philip starts fussing in her arms, so she lays him down on the bed long enough to undress. When she goes to pick him up again, Alexander is cooing at him, his face just inches from the baby’s hands, and Philip is poking at Alexander’s nose with his tiny fingers. Eliza laughs.

Unable to carry or even touch his son with his hands, Alexander has been forced to get creative to interact with him. But creativity is something Alexander has never lacked. He straightens back up to let Eliza breastfeed Philip with a little huff of regret.

With Philip secure against her chest, Eliza squeezes her husbands forearm with her free hand. “Soon,” she says. “You’ll be able to hold him.”

Alexander nods with a small smile. He scoots over to sit closer to her and slips his arm around her waist, careful not to jostle his fingers too much.

“We’ll have to plan carefully to stop Jefferson without him being onto us,” he says after a moment.

“I doubt that he’ll ever figure out what I did,” Eliza points out. “But he won’t be easy to counter. I think the first step will be to tell Angelica. Right now, he doesn’t even know that we exist, and she will meet him years before we will.”

“My dear sister,” Alexander says. “I believe she already suspects that something is different.”

“I would be surprised if she didn’t. She always knew how to tell that I’d used my gift, and the change this time must have been jarring.”

“I don’t doubt that she’ll help us if we can make her understand.”

Eliza nods. “She tried, before. After your death, she tried to help me preserve your legacy, but in the end even she started to forget. And then she fell ill.”

“And you were left all alone,” Alexander says desolately.

“Our children and grandchildren were the joy of my life,” Eliza sighs. “But it was never enough. They suffered too much and lived too little. Our name was synonymous with infamy.”

Alexander’s mouth twists, and he turns his head away, closing his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he murmurs. “I wanted so much to leave them a better legacy than the one I carried, and I ended up making things worse.”

“No.” Eliza places Philip against her shoulder to burp him and shifts against Alexander, forcing him to look at her. “You accomplished so much. Yes, you made mistakes, but this isn’t on you.”

Alexander doesn’t answer, his shoulders slumped. Eliza swallows back the knot in her throat that grew through the conversation. “We’re going to fix it,” she says with as much conviction as she can muster.

She will not fail this time. She can’t.

This can’t be for nothing.

Philip burps loudly and whines against her, so she shifts him back onto her lap, holding his head up with one hand. Alexander scoots close again and they stay like this, head to head admiring their son, for several minutes.

This, Eliza thinks. This is what makes it all worth it.

“The Declaration of Independence,” Alexander says suddenly. “Does it mean that the whole revolution was thanks to Jefferson?” He grimaces almost comically at the thought.

“It’s hard to tell what his influence really is,” Eliza answers. “He wrote most of the Declaration, but he didn’t instigate Congress, the ideas were already there. His words were widely published, but if they had that much influence, wouldn’t it have abolished slavery as well? All men are created equal…” she quotes.

“Maybe he needs to mean the words?”

Eliza chuckles. “Given all the outright lies he published about you, I doubt it. I saw it at work. While you were still alive, it was hard to tell his influence apart from… well, you, but after your death, it was impossible to miss. I watched our friends forget you. Even our children, even Angelica, though she tried to hold onto the truth. Within a few years, you’d been replaced in their minds by this caricature of you that he drew with his words. The General, too. Even Burr. All of his enemies. It was heartbreaking.”

Alexander nods darkly. “We have to make it right. For all of us.”

*

March 24, 1782

“John is talking about going back to South Carolina again,” Alexander informs her sometime in March, when she comes back from a day out in town with her sisters.

John has been with them for over six months, now. His relationship with Eliza has slowly shifted from acquaintances to friends to something neither of them have a word for. Their common love for Alexander is a stronger bond than any attraction they could have to each other.

It hasn’t been easy. John is restless and sometimes moody, stuck here in Albany with little to do. Unlike Alexander, he’s not making any plans for the future beside his black regiment project, and that will die with the end of the war. He’s itching to go back to the army, they can all tell. He only stays because Alexander asked him to, because Eliza asked him to.

“I think we should tell him,” Eliza says.

“I’m scared that he won’t understand,” Alexander admits. “He always said that he was willing to die for his country. I think… I think some part of him wanted to.”

Eliza stays silent for a minute, watching him. He’s staring down at his book, laid on the desk, but he doesn’t turn any page, and she knows that he’s waiting for her reaction, unable to look at her.

“You were willing to die for your honor,” she finally says, sitting down in her chair beside him. “And I think somewhere, some part of you wanted to. Would you do it again?”

“No,” Alexander immediately answers. He pauses after that, letting the rest of her words sink in. “You’re right that some part of me didn’t want to go on after Philip—” He chokes, still. “But I didn’t want to leave you.”

“That is not what I asked,” Eliza remarks kindly.

“The list of things I’m willing to die for has shrunk by a lot,” Alexander offers. “My honor and my reputation are not among them.”

“I think maybe this is what you should tell John. He may idealize the idea of his own death, but I don’t think he realizes the grief it would cause.”

“I’m scared that he will think less of me,” Alexander finally confesses. “I made so many mistakes.”

“And you are a better man for them,” Eliza tells him.

Alexander closes his eyes, pained. “I want to wait a little longer. If I can get him to stay until September… It will be easier. I am plagued with nightmares where I say something that angers him and he leaves and dies out there. What if telling him drives him away?”

Eliza sighs and lays a hand on his wrist, caressing the worst of the scars on his right hand. “He loves you.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of. Every time I confessed the extent of my love to him, he responded by running away. He always came back… until he didn’t.”

“Alexander.” Eliza shifts her position and gently prods him until he is facing her. “John is withdrawing from us already. With me here, he thinks that he is not truly welcome. I am sure he believes that I don’t know of your relationship. You need to tell him about that, at least. You need to tell him he is welcome into our home. All of him.”

“Your parents—”

“My parents don’t need to know,” Eliza interrupts whatever Alexander is about to say. “This is about the three of us.”

“We will always have to hide.”

“So we will. We will get our own house in the city. No one will frown on a good friend, single and a veteran, moving in with us, not with your injuries. You need help, and I have a new baby to worry about.”

Alexander’s eyes widen in surprise. “You’ve thought it all out?”

“I’ve had a lot of time on my hands,” Eliza says, though she knows that’s not what shocks him. She’s had a lot of time to get used to the idea of sharing him, too.

“Thank you,” he says, his voice tight, and she hugs him tightly. “I will talk to him about moving in with us. I want to wait until August for the rest, but I will convince him to stay until then, at least.”

“I will support you, whatever happens,” Eliza says quietly.

*

August 27, 1782

Eliza carefully sets Philip down in his cradle, smiling as the baby snores lightly and shifts in his sleep. She can’t get enough of him. Her baby. Her Philip. The fear for him is deep-seated, crawling at night in the darkest depths of her chest, but he lights up every other part of her.

Him and Alexander. This new Alexander she’s discovering, who is trying so hard to make things right, to give her that place in his life that he could never quite open for her the first time around. Instead of pulling them apart, John being here helps. More than that, John is becoming an integral part of them, a missing limb she never quite felt.

He’s indispensable to Alexander’s happiness, and Eliza can’t bring herself to resent that.

She tiptoes back to Alexander’s study, where he’s sitting in an armchair by the unlit fireplace, carefully stretching his fingers one by one. He winces in pain with each move, a sure sign that he’s overextended himself again. He’s been tense and moody the last few days, and Eliza knows why. She’s seen the date.

“Give me,” Eliza gently takes his hands in hers.

As Alexander relents to her ministrations, she spreads his arms apart and spins on her heels, dropping onto his lap. He giggles.

“There,” she says, taking his hands again to start massaging them. Deep massages are the only thing that relieves the cramps he gets in his deformed fingers. She takes special care of the skin around the stumps, always tight and irritated.

“Thank you,” Alexander breathes in her ear.

A knock sounds at the door. “Hammie?”

It’s John, just back from town. Alexander was clingy with him this morning, trying to get him to stay home until Eliza had to intervene, and now he sighs in relief at the sight of him.

“Come sit with us, John,” Eliza says.

John looks a little confused, and perhaps uncomfortable to see them in such an intimate position, but he obeys and takes the second armchair. For his sake, Eliza stands up and drags a chair from the desk closer for herself, though she stays close to her husband and keeps his hand in hers.

Alexander takes a deep breath. “I know you’ve been itching to go back to South Carolina and carry on with your project. You’ve stayed here for my sake, and I appreciate it. If I was any less selfish—” his voice pauses almost imperceptibly, “—I would free you to do what you want.”

In another life, you died today, in a trifling skirmish in South Carolina.

“You know how happy I am to be here with you,” John says, with a glance at Eliza as if to check her reaction. “But it is true that I wish to go soon. It would only be for a few months. Once the war is over, my project will be void. I have to try one more time.”

“John, now that peace is almost there, a new scene opens. Congress is where the next steps will be taken for our freedom. For everyone’s freedom. Let us do this hand in hand.”

Alexander’s hand is trembling in Eliza’s. She squeezes it gently, trying to remind him that John is here , that they’ve already changed things.

John looks between them in confusion, and Eliza realizes that they are both more tense and more grave than the situation seems to warrant. “I will come back,” John says. “As soon as the war is over.”

Alexander opens his mouth and closes it, struggling to say another word. Eliza take s over. “ John, w e have something to tell you.”