Books We Love Insider Blog: wives of famous men

https://www.amazon.com/Alexander-Hamilton-Elizabeth-Schuyler-Passion-book/dp/B014AY2YU0/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1RNS092GK4E2N&keywords=Juliet+Waldron+%2B+Master+Passion&qid=1674856985&sprefix=juliet+waldron+%2B+master+passion%2Caps%2C74&sr=8-1

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/722879

https://www.kobo.com/us/en/search?query=Juliet+Waldron&ac=1&ac.morein=true&acsrc=gsp&ac.author=Juliet+Waldron&fcsearchfield=author&fclanguages=en&ssId=2LboBEueoN3xEOmskgn4t&sId=f585ccc3-6654-4c6b-a04b-7f2e8fe6b67d

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/search?q=Juliet%20Waldron

Please excuse these ancient links--having tech problems, as it changes faster than I can. These are old-timey control/click links, but will take you to the book through a blue redirect notice. The only links to all my books are now on B&N and Kobo, which actually show every one. Amazon is currently FUBAR.

Here is the opener of A Master Passion, the story of Alexander and Elizabeth Hamilton. This is another 'wife of a famous man' story, related in a way to my Mozart's Wife, but certainly the personalities and the civil landscape in which these actors were enclosed is far different, a continent apart. Hamilton had a rough childhood and he had to fight for respect doggedly in order to overcome the stigma of a "bastard" birth.

Hamilton has been in my imaginary life since my eleventh year and so telling this story was important to me. Of course, no one back in the fifties was going to discuss any of this. The Founders were revered and white-washed in ways many contemporary historians and readers can acknowledge. Two hundred and fifty + years ago, status was fairly well locked in at birth. You were born a gentleman, with all the privileges and open doors that entailed--or, you were not. Hamilton had to fight for his place among the upper class men with whom he spent his life politicking and working. He was, in a way, the clerk to the revolutionary generation, a self-educated lawyer and businessman. Jefferson got the monument, but it was Hamilton who did the unglamorous work--laid the bedrock--for the trade and technology that made us a world power. 250 years of America, standing on shaky ground. I recently learned that the Athenian republic, to which our Constitution is so profoundly indebted, lasted only this long. I hope it's not an omen.

Sharing a sick feeling, Alex and Jamie Hamilton stood on barefoot tiptoe and peeked through flimsy wooden louvers, all that separated the rooms of their small West Indian house. Both boys were red-heads, but there the resemblance ended. Eleven year old James was well-grown and strong. Alexander, seven in January, was delicate, fast-moving and nervous, like a freckled bird.

“An idiot would have known not to trust him.” The beautiful dark eyes of their mother flashed. Rachel faced her husband, a slight man of aristocratic feature, who wore a white linen suit. Like him, it had seen better days. His wife’s tone was challenging, her arms akimbo. Her stays, containing a generous bosom, rose and fell.

“I—I—took him for a gentleman.” Father sputtered, attempting to fall back upon a long ago mislaid dignity. “He gave me his word.”

“His word!? Which means bloody nothing! How many times did I tell you what was going to happen? How many times?”

“Shut your mouth, woman!”

A sharp crack sounded. Rachel, hair spilling from beneath her cap, staggered backwards, cheek red. From the kitchen came the fearful keening of Esther, their mother’s oldest slave.

“There’s naught canna be dune noo!” James Hamilton, his long face flushed, roared the words. Scots surfaced whenever he was angry.

“Yes, nothing to be done. As usual.” A livid mark glowed upon Rachel’s face, but she, with absolute disregard for consequences, righted herself and finished what she had to say.

“This time Lytton’s going to let you go. And if you can’t even manage to hold a job with my kinfolk, where will you get another? What are we supposed to live on? Air?”

In spite of the fact that it was winter on the island, the best weather of the entire year, Alexander shuddered. Distilled fear slid along his spine.

How many times in his short life had he watched this scene replayed? Listened to Mama shout Papa’s failures, watched as his father, humiliated and enraged, used his fists to silence her? A business deal gone bad! More money lost…

Will we have to move again?

Every change of residence, from Alexander’s birthplace on cloudy Nevis, to St. Kitts, and from there to St. Croix, had carried them to smaller houses and meaner streets. The carriage, the two bay horses and the slaves who tended them, were only a memory.

Mama was shrieking now, about loans and due dates, things which she declared “any fool” could understand. Frozen, knowing what would surely come, Alexander watched as his father, crossing the room in two quick strides, caught his mother by the shoulders.

With the strength of rage, he threw her like a rag doll. She struck the wall so violently the flimsy house shook. The tiny emerald lizards stalking the mosquitoes drawn by candlelight vanished into shadow.

Silenced at last, Rachel crumpled against the floor, sobbing. Her once gay calico dress, muted by many, many launderings, lapped her. The under-shift, always scrubbed to a sea-foam white, drifted from beneath.

James Hamilton, breathing hard, blind with rage, tore open the door and strode past his cowering, terrified sons. For the last time, Alexander saw his father’s face, a sweating mask of fear.

**************************************************************************

Hamilton as a young man. This locket would have been painted sometime soon after his arrival in America, when he'd just begun to recreate himself as a gentleman, catching up on the Latin and Greek that his haphazard, mostly self-taught West Indian education had not sufficiently provided and which was necessary for him to be admitted to a King's College (now Columbia). Living in St. Croix, he'd been working for a living--since his eleventh year--in a merchant's office, which was the place from which the priceless knowledge came that made him the perfect first Secretary of the Treasury and treasured right hand man of George Washington.

A handsome reenactor at Saratoga battlefield, who obligingly stopped his equally handsome horse for a picture.

The Schuyler house in Albany, set up for whist and port. Here, in front of that same fireplace, as was Dutch custom, Hamilton and Elizabeth Schuyler, were married during a winter lull in the Revolutionary War.

Juliet Waldron