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The evening falls dark and heavy. Eliza makes dinner, and puts the children to bed; she sits with Alexander in the front room, and watches him watch out the window. The party's already begun, she knows, but it's good to be fashionably late: Angelica's the one who taught her that.
When her carriage finally rolls up in front of the house Alexander jumps up, already standing at the open door when Angelica soars up the front path.
"Hey," he says, hands in the pockets of his newest suit as Angelica reaches the door, all rustling silk and bright smile. Eliza stands too, but hangs back: she's not dressed for the ball and feels suddenly very plain, next to them.
She had been the one to suggest that Alexander start taking Angelica to at least some of the numerous balls and parties and dances that seem to have multiplied under the new government: Eliza was exhausted and Angelica was bored and it seemed only logical. Still, now, watching the two of them smile at each other and talk over each other and laugh, bright and happy, she holds herself back. Together they're impossibly dazzling, quick smiles and sharp eyes: they seem to suck the color from the rest of the room, only to make themselves brighter.
Eliza doesn't know how to do that. She knows how to be small, small in a way that's steady and that's strong, but small nonetheless. She doesn't know how to light herself up like that, doesn't know how to draw people to her the way Alexander and her sister seem to do on instinct. When they walk into a room the room lights up: when they walk in together it nearly catches fire. They are unignorable.
Eliza never learned how to take up that kind of space. Eliza doesn't know how to light herself on fire, knows only how to burn, slow and steady and warm. A kitchen fire, more useful than bright. She accepts this, even likes it about herself. She is content in small things: this house she's made a home, the garden she tends outside. Her children. Alexander. She wouldn't want that bright insatiability that Angelica's had since they were girls, the relentless fear at Alexander's heels. But she doesn't know how to explain that (doesn't have their way with words, her mind supplies), and she can't stop the horrible, inadequate feeling in her stomach whenever she watches Alexander with her sister.
She knows the other society women think she's stupid, that she can't see the way Alexander looks at Angelica—and worse, perhaps, the way Angelica looks at him in return. They think she is so sweet, so trusting, that it's made her blind, or stupid, her husband betraying her with her own sister and her sitting at home, tending to the children without a care.
She wants to explain to them that it's not stupidity, but trust. Or if it is stupidity, it's a stupidity she's willing to live with, because the other option is worse. Believing the worst of her sister, of her husband. Stupidity, she thinks, is a small price to pay for believing the best in people.
Angelica breaks away first, and comes to Eliza with her arms open. Eliza hugs her and says, "You look beautiful," because she does.
Angelica kisses her cheek, then sheds her cloak and spins a little, showing off what must be a new dress, peach silk catching at the candlelight. Alexander crosses his arms, smiling as he watches her.
"I suppose your American tailors are all right," she says, arch and teasing.
"They're your American tailors, too," Alexander points out, teasing right back. "Or have you truly left us for the French?"
"Never," she tells Alexander, but smiles at Eliza. She goes back to her, taking her hands. "You're sure you don't want to go?" she asks, low and serious. "I'd even lend you the dress," she says, teasing again but sincere, Eliza knows, if Eliza had wanted it. No matter that it's not really her style, that Angelica is taller and slimmer and it wouldn't fit her anyway.
Eliza shakes her head. "I get enough of it already," she says. "The parties. Besides, it's not my color."
Angelica laughs, delighted, and squeezes her hands. "All right," she says. "I promise to return him not too much the worse for wear."
Alexander looks mildly put out at being discussed like a stray trinket, and Eliza laughs too. "Go," she says, kissing her sister's cheek, "before you wake up the baby and my evening of peace is ruined."
"Fine, fine," Angelica says. She goes to take her cloak from where she'd tossed it over the back of the settee, and Alexander fills her place, giving Eliza a quick warm smile.
He kisses her, says, "Enjoy your quiet."
"I will," she tells him. He laughs and kisses her again, on the forehead, palm warm and fleeting on the back of her head.
She watches them, Alexander idly straightening one of the wings of Angelica's cloak. She watches them leave together, and tells herself all she feels is relief that she doesn't have to dress up tonight, talk and laugh and smile on command. Tells herself that Alexander will come home to her tonight, to their home, and that that's enough. It should be enough.
*
The ball is glittering and bright, full of dull people that Angelica will tolerate for the sake of the music, the dancing, the occasional witty comment. She's laughably glad when Alexander cuts off the young man who's about to ask her for the next dance, taking her hand in his and raising his eyebrows, a question.
"Of course," she says, and Alexander fits his hand to her waist, pulls them toward each other.
"So," he says, corner of his mouth curved in a smile as they start to dance, "how do our American parties hold up against the French?"
"The wine's worse," she says. "The dancing's better," she adds slyly, as he spins her around a corner.
He laughs, and blushes a little, she would swear on it. "Good thing you came back."
"Good thing."
"I thought." He looks away, and suddenly his smile has dropped from his face. His fingers tighten, tense over her back, fingertips pressing against the lacings of her dress. "I thought, watching you leave last time. I thought I might never see you again."
He looks back at her, glancing up through his lashes: sheepish, and suddenly flirting again, as if he could pass off the clear note of fear in his voice as simply an exaggeration, hyperbole in the name of some romantic sentiment. She knows him better, but it occurs to her that he might not know that. He thinks himself a puzzle, convinces himself that no one will figure out the pattern, but in some things, she thinks, his motivations are as straightforward as a child's.
As in this: when someone leaves him, he never expects to see them again. She still remembers the look of naked, nearly unbearable joy on his face when she and Eliza had returned from Albany. She remembers too the way he had held Eliza in his arms, as if he still wasn't convinced she wasn't a phantom, about to dissolve as soon as he reached for her. She thinks with a strange guilt about her trip back to England, only a few weeks away. Thinks about leaving, and wonders if this is what she'll think of now, as the ship drags away from the harbor: how she might never see them again, him and Eliza. Her family. Wonders if his fears will be grafted onto her.
She thinks about all this, but she smiles at him still, coy look for coy look. This is easier, or if not easier, simpler: as long as they flirt, as long as she pretends they understand each other less than they do, this thing between them is only a game. Letters written back and forth across the ocean, sly comments cased safely in ink and paper. Warm glances and dancing smiles, his hand on her waist as they float across the ballrooms of people who whisper about them behind their hands. That Mrs. Church, look at her cavorting with her own sister's husband. And Hamilton—well. You'd think he'd at least have the good sense to keep his affairs less conspicuous . It doesn't matter, because it's nothing, only a game.
It becomes dangerous when the game falls away, when they play their last card and make their last move, and they're left with just themselves, with the way his eyes are brighter when he looks at her, the way she feels sharper and smarter and better when she's near him. These are the things she could learn not be able to live without: these are the things that could lead them into the kind of affair that would hurt Eliza whether or not they ever laid hands, mouths on each other. Even if they never fell into bed with each other, even if they only fell into dark corners of drawing rooms and late nights at dining room tables discussing Smith and Locke and Rousseau, she would still be betraying her sister in the kind of fundamental, intrinsic way that she'd like to think is beyond her capabilities.
In truth, there is nothing beyond her capabilities. In truth, she will never be the kind of good her sister is, the kind of good that assumes best things and better natures. In truth, Angelica is too smart to lie to herself, to betray her own mind in that way, and so in truth Angelica knows that she isn't better than this, knows that she will grasp at anything that makes her feel sated, full, her lines colored in.
Alexander is still watching her from under his lashes: she is still smiling back, as if she thinks his confession is nothing more than pretty words meant to show his own affection. She says nothing of what's churning in her mind, only, "Is that so? I hope my reappearance wasn't too disappointing."
He laughs, her intention: they both remember the way they'd flown to each other's arms on the dock that day she'd returned, his small delighted laugh in her ear. He didn't hold her like he thought she'd disappear, whatever he may've thought in her absence: he'd reached for her like she was the sole solid thing in his world of uncertainties. She likes that, too much: she likes being known, at least by him.
The song ends and he breaks away from her just enough to bow, gallantly. She laughs at him and they're okay again, back on even ground. She can hide away her thoughts and ignore the way he holds her too close, looks at her too deeply. She can keep her own longing back with thorns, each prick a reminder that she did this to herself, that once, just once, she was the good one, and she hasn't stopped hurting for it since.
She doesn't regret it. She's looked at herself long, and hard, and she doesn't. But there are different kinds of regret, she thinks, and she can regret the fact that Alexander will never truly be hers, can regret the brief doubting looks on her sister's kind face, can regret her own selfish nature that won't put that needed distance between them. But she can't regret Eliza's happiness with Alexander, nor Alexander's happiness with her. She can't regret the way Eliza looks at him like he is everything in her world. She can't regret Alexander the best wife anyone could ever have.
And still, when Alexander holds out his hand to her for the next dance, she takes it. She doesn't regret that, either.
*
They ride back to the house he'd rented for her, her and Church. It's late and Alexander feels good, the two o'clock high that's born of exhilaration, not panic. Angelica's talking about the party in perfect, scathing tones, and he keeps surprising himself by laughing. Her tone is a little too sharp, a little too bitter, and he knows something is on her mind. Knows, too, that if he were anyone else she would mask it better, not let them see. He likes that, likes being able to see a part of her others don't get to.
When they arrive, he follows her inside, not quite ready to go home yet, wanting to stay in orbit of Angelica and the way the very air goes bright and sharp around her. It's not—and Eliza will be asleep by now, anyway. An extra half-hour won't hurt any of them, he thinks hopefully.
Angelica lights a few lamps, and they both relax as much as they can into the stiff silk cushions of the couch. Church isn't home yet—Angelica had said something about him and his card-playing friends, who she pretends to abhor but really loves, he knows. He's watched her, perched on the arm of Church's chair like a bird, playing the wife as they all shower her with compliments and delight in explaining the rules of their game to her like she doesn't already know, like she couldn't beat them all and win their money.
He doesn't understand that, giving people only the thinnest sliver of yourself, letting them think you're less than you are. He doesn't know how she does it, doesn't know how, in all their similarities, she manages to cut herself down like that.
Angelica gets up again almost as soon as she sits down, skirts rustling familiarly. "I'm leaving again, you know," she says, carelessly, as she goes to the sideboard, the cut-glass decanter.
"What?"
"John wants to go back to England." She turns back to him, gives a wry look over the rim of her glass.
He swallows. There seems to be something stuck in his throat, suddenly, the exhilaration wearing down. "Do you want to go back?" he asks, voice quieter than he would've liked.
She swallows her drink. "Of course I don't," she says, as if it's obvious, as if he shouldn't have asked.
"So stay," he says, impulsively. She looks at him. "Stay," he says again, as if, if he said it enough, he could convince her by sheer force of the word. "You could rent this house, you could—" He swallows, realizing the strange desperate edge his voice has taken on.
She shakes her head. "It's urgent. Something about," she waves her hand carelessly, "business. You know."
He grits his teeth: he hates when she does this, pretends to understand less than she does. "So, Church has to go. You don't."
"And what excuse would I give?" she asks him, a challenge. Or that's how he'd like to think of it: like she's giving him a puzzle, and if only he can come up with the right answer then she'll stay, stay with him.
"You could say you couldn't bear to part with your family," he supplies. "Or your new country—you write often enough about how it pains you to be away."
"And what is a burgeoning country next to a husband's love?" she asks, almost spits, like she wants to get the poisonous, parroted words off her tongue. The bitterness he noticed in her earlier had come to the surface like oil. "Who would I convince that I'd rather stay and hear second-hand politics I cannot be a part of, than travel with my fabulously wealthy husband among the best of London society?"
He knows she's right. She puts her glass down with an indelicate thunk on the side table, and turns away from him, for just a moment. He has the strange urge to apologize to her, not for his own actions, but for some great wrong the world has done against her.
"Angelica," he says instead, quiet.
"I'm bored," she tells him, an admission. She looks over her shoulder at him, smiling wryly. "I'm so goddamn bored over there, Alexander, you don't know what I'd do—"
"I know," he says. "I do know."
She nods, short and sharp. "I suppose you do," she says. "So don't try and tell me—you know I would stay if I could."
"I know you would stay if you could," he says, offering her own words back to her as amnesty.
She picks up her glass again, and he stands, coming up next to her. They stand, shoulder to shoulder: she runs the tip of her finger along the edge of her glass, knuckle bending to an angle.
"You should go home," she says after a long silence.
"Yeah," he says. He thinks about Eliza, asleep in their bed, and feels an edge of guilt in his stomach he doesn't want to look at too closely.
He doesn't more right away, though. Even as he can feel the night slipping out of his hands he wants to hold on tighter, wants to do it all over again. Instead, he does something almost unbearably small, slips his hand into hers.
She allows it for a moment, then squeezes his fingers in hers for a brief flashing moment before letting go. She turns away, and she hands him his coat, and they stand there for a moment in front of the door, the thick cloth between both their hands.
He kisses her cheek. Leans into her for just a moment, and she allows it, hand on his arm but not pushing him back. When he does pull back she just looks at him, eyes her perfect shade of polished, wood-brown. It's dark enough in the hall that he can't quite read her expression, and that unnerves him for a moment.
But then she returns the kiss, more fleeting, lips brushing over his skin. Says, "Goodnight," and he says "Angelica—" and she says, "Goodnight, Alexander."
He nods. He leaves her, and steps back into the waiting carriage and goes home to Eliza. Eliza is curled in their bed, hair spread over her shoulders and the pillow. He wants to crawl over the blankets to her, wants to brush her hair back from her face and kiss her neck, the curve of her earlobe, until she wakes up, blinking at him sleepily. She'd say you're back , smiling, and he'd say I am and kiss her for real and she'd push his coat off his shoulders and he'd sink into their bed, sink into her warm skin and soft hands.
But the nameless guilt is back in his stomach, so he takes his coat off himself: he doesn't crawl into bed until he's taken off his shoes and waistcoat. He doesn't wake her up, but he does lean over just far enough to press a kiss to her shoulder, before settling next to her for the night.