I was thankful that he could remember me as I’d been then, slender and elegant in a silk gown with plumes in my hair, because now I was a rare sight indeed. I wore a quilted waistcoat instead of stays beneath one of Mamma’s old calico bedgowns, the only thing that remained that could encompass my belly, with the strings on my petticoat barely tied at what once had been my waist. Because my ankles and feet were so swollen, I could bear only thick knitted stockings that drooped without garters (because I couldn’t wear them, either) and a pair of ancient backless slippers. I had to sit so far back from the keys of the fortepiano that my hands were forced to stretch straight before me, and by the end of even the shortest piece I was huffing and puffing with exertion. Yet still Alexander called me the most beautiful woman in the world, and I loved him all the more for it.
One afternoon, on a whim, he asked me to teach him a few simple notes. Because of the circumstances of his childhood, he’d never had the leisure or opportunity to learn to play an instrument, and he much regretted it. I bade him sit beside me on the bench, and showed him a child’s tune. He concentrated on the lesson with the same intensity that he showed toward everything else, and soon had the pattern of the song learned. My mother and sister applauded, and he bowed his head as grandly as any maestro from the Continent.
I played the harmony part at the other end of the keys to accompany him, and after the first time, I began playing faster to tease him. Laughing and accusing me of foul play, he raced to match my speed, keeping pace even as he struck far more wrong keys than right. Out of breath, I laughed beside him, then suddenly gasped, and clutched at my belly. I felt a rush of wet warmth escape me, and to my mortification saw the growing puddle on the floor beneath the bench.
“What is wrong, my angel?” asked Alexander with concern, his arm instantly around me. “Are you unwell?”
“She’s perfectly well,” Mamma said, hurrying to my side and helping me to my feet. “It’s time she was finally brought to bed with your child.”
As can be imagined having borne so many children herself, my mother was an expert on the process, and like any general of rank, she swiftly took control of my confinement. She permitted me to kiss Alexander one last time, and then I was led upstairs while Alexander was turned over to my father’s care, in the way that these things have always been done.
Throughout the rest of the day, through the night, and into the next morning I suffered through my travail. I was tended by the same Dutch midwives who had helped bring me into the world twenty-four years earlier, and all my mother’s other children since then. Even with their gentle guidance, I foundered on the waves of pain, beyond anything I’d expected. Like all women bringing forth their first child, I’d nothing for comparison, and so was certain my pains were beyond any before endured.
Through it all, I feared most not for myself, but for our child. I remembered the times my mother had given birth to babes who hadn’t survived, their tiny, still, blue-white bodies wrapped not in swaddling clothes, but in winding sheets for burial. I could not fathom how a healthy child could be born from so much anguish, no matter how the other women reassured me.
It was only when I was at last delivered of my child, shortly before noon, and heard its lusty cry, that I could rejoice.
“A boy, Mrs. Hamilton, a fine son,” the oldest midwife declared proudly, as if it had been her doing.
“Please, I wish to see him,” I begged weakly. “I want to see my son.”
Someone put him within my reach on my belly, still sticky with the blood we shared, and I cradled him as best I could. From that first touch, my hands across his tiny, wriggling limbs, I knew such love as only mothers feel, and I wept from the power of it. For a moment he was taken and washed and wrapped while much the same was done to me, and then again we were reunited. He was put to my breast to suckle and I held him tight, and gazed down at him in adoration, marveling at his miniature perfection.
“My own dear wife,” said Alexander, suddenly with me. He was unshaven and disheveled, and I guessed he hadn’t slept last night, either. “A son, they say?”
“Your son,” I whispered. “Our son.”
He touched his fingertip to our baby’s cheek, a feather-light caress of wonder.
“You cannot know how I have longed for this,” he said. “All my life, it seems, this is what I’ve wanted.”
I understood. We were a family now. I’d never felt so loved, nor loved so much.
*
Just as I had made certain that Alexander had kept to his bed to recover from his final campaign, so, too, did he insist that I do the same for the full month of my lying-in. He had my mother as his ally, who agreed that it was the one sure way to regain my health after an arduous delivery. Though it went against my nature to be so idle, I’d no choice but to obey them, and happily gave myself over to doing nothing except lavishing attention on my new little son.
We named him Philip, after my father, a choice that Alexander himself suggested first and I’d heartily agreed. It did lead to some confusion in our family, since Angelica’s older son was also named after my father, but not so much that we changed our intentions.
From birth, our Philip was a handsome, lively child with an even temper. He’d inherited my dark hair and dimpled chin, but the general shape of his face and features belonged to Alexander, or at least as much as could be determined with an unformed infant. He also shared his father’s inquisitiveness, and watched every aspect of his world with wide-eyed interest.
But the center of Philip’s world was his father, and the other way around as well. Alexander adored his son; there was no other way to describe the degree of affection he showered on Philip. Even before his son’s birth, Alexander had resolved to be the best father possible, to make right all the long-ago wrongs that his own negligent father had inflicted upon him. Where other fathers would be content to leave their offspring to the care of mothers and nursery maids, Alexander took every opportunity to hold his son on his knee, or carry him about in his arms. It was to me the most beautiful sight, and one I never tired of watching.
I was also sure that Philip would share his father’s rare gift for elegant speech, for while Alexander held him as they both kept me company, he discussed his plans for his future, and ours together. He did in fact resign his commission from the army early in the year, much to my happiness. His plan to turn his energies to a profession in law seemed doubly fortuitous. Not only would the law be a good match for his talents and a lucrative path toward supporting our family, but the state’s legislature also seemed to smile upon him: a newly passed law prohibited lawyers with Tory sympathies from practicing in any state courts. Lawyers who were veterans of the Continental Army would be considered unquestionably patriotic, and able to reap a windfall of cases.