I was also eager to meet my new little sister, and see which among us she favored. I’d been an older sister as long as I could remember, and perhaps because of that, I’d always adored babies and young children. To be mother to Alexander’s children was a dream I cherished above all others, and I spent more time than was likely wise imagining these unknown little cherubs: would they have Alexander’s golden red hair or my dark eyes, his strong nose or my dimpled chin?
Babies were much on my mind. Despite Angelica’s assurances, Alexander and I had been married for four months now, and I’d yet to conceive. In Albany, my aunts pointedly surveyed my waistline and made impolite inquiries, and Mamma offered sympathy and assurances that my time would come soon enough, which was almost worse. There were no guarantees. I could consider my parents with their houseful of children, and then look to the general and Lady Washington, who’d not been blessed with a single one. When Angelica wrote that she was expecting her third child, my joy for her condition was tempered by an unseemly regret for my own. My distress and frustration grew as each month passed, and though Alexander, once again with me, tried to make light of it for my sake, I knew that he was every bit as disappointed as I.
He watched me whenever I held my little sister Catherine, her wobbly small head in a white-work bonnet against my shoulder and my fingers spread to support her narrow back as I cradled her against me. I’d be kissing her forehead and whispering nonsense into her tiny dark curls, and then I’d catch his gaze, and the tenderness and longing I saw in his eyes mirrored my own. It hurt, that much longing for something I might never have, and I had to look away before I wept, and shamed us both.
*
Although Alexander was no longer an aide-de-camp, he decided that it would be advantageous to remain near to headquarters as he sought his next position. The new lodgings he found for us were less than a mile across the Hudson River from New Windsor on a long finger of land called De Peyster’s Point. By the end of April, we were once again living in a small Dutch house of brick and stone, though this one had a pretty view overlooking the river, with the hills turning green with the new spring. I expected that view would be much less cordial in the winter months, when the wind would blow off the river, but Alexander assured me with confidence that we would be gone to a more permanent home long before then. I was determined to share his confidence, and unpacked only the things we might use each day.
There was another feature of this house, however, that did not enchant me. Alexander proudly pointed to a boat tied to a makeshift mooring at the end of the path. The boat was included with the house, and further, the house’s owner’s thick-armed sons would be willing to row the boat across the river to New Windsor and back for a small remuneration; the father promised his sons could make the crossing in less than half an hour.
Now, I had been raised on this same Hudson River, albeit farther to the north where the channel was less imposing, but I still maintained a healthy respect for the hazards of small boats in open water. I wasn’t pleased when Alexander announced that he would on occasion employ the boat to cross to New Windsor, and when he tried to sweeten the prospect by offering to take me as well, I swiftly declined. Like most men from the Caribbean, Alexander could swim. I, like every other lady of my acquaintance, could not, and the prospect of being dragged down to the river’s bottom by the anchor of my water-logged quilted petticoats was one I chose to avoid.
Yet despite Alexander’s restlessness and the uncertainty of his future (and my refusal to employ the boat), we were wonderfully content that spring. By most standards, we could still be considered newlyweds, and able to find true happiness with nothing more than each other’s company.
Now freed from his aide’s desk at headquarters, Alexander attacked his future with furious energy. He wrote letter after letter, no longer for His Excellency but on his own behalf, beseeching every man of rank or influence whom he knew (and a few whom he didn’t) in hopes of securing the much-desired field appointment.
But he was also looking beyond the army. The cost of the long war and the parsimony of the individual states had finally made the Continental currency issued by Congress worthless, and the only money that meant anything was hard coins from other countries. To seek a solution to the crisis, Congress had at last decided to appoint a minister specifically to address the country’s finance—a decision that Alexander thought was long overdue. In fact, Alexander had many more opinions and thoughts on financial affairs than I’d ever realized.
With our windows thrown open to the breezes off the water, our little brick lodgings became almost a schoolhouse for me as Alexander outlined his beliefs and the policies he’d implement if it were up to him. He’d seen the woes that the states caused to Congress and the army, and doubted the country could continue in such a scattered condition. Instead he believed the individual states must abandon much of their individual powers, and come together to create a single, stronger entity through a national government. He believed this government should have the power to levy taxes and tariffs, create laws, and raise an army if necessary, all to better serve its citizens. Most of all he believed the country needed a single treasury or bank to secure a national currency, and do away with the worthless paper money issued by each state.
These were such new ideas that I marveled. To hear Alexander speak this way gave me fresh appreciation of his innate brilliance, and the complicated workings of his elegant mind. He could speak by the hour, raking his fingers through his hair as he paced back and forth, and I listened, rapt.
I was a sounding board for him, and he claimed that explaining to me helped him to clarify these complicated theories and notions. I’d heard many well-educated gentlemen discuss similar subjects at my father’s table; Alexander outspoke them all with a depth of knowledge and a neatness of speech so that I, as untutored as I was, could understand him with ease, and share his excitement.
While Alexander himself could have made an excellent superintendent of finance, even I had to concede that the post would never be given to him: a twenty-six-year-old gentleman without family or fortune whose sole business experience had been working as a merchant’s clerk on Nevis. Instead Congress chose Robert Morris, a former fellow member, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and most importantly, a gentleman-merchant said to be the wealthiest in Philadelphia. I remembered seeing his carriage drive past me when I’d visited that city, with his family’s crest painted on the door and footmen in livery with silver lace, as if he were a great nobleman in London.