I AM FLYING THROUGH the air, somehow having fallen off the saddle of my horse. I don’t know what’s happening; I can only feel the pain. I can taste the blood dripping from my mouth. I know something bad has happened.
I let out a grunt as I hit the ground, my horse running away from me in surprise as more bullets were shot her way. I knew where I was now, and what had happened. I knew why blood was dripping from my nose and my lips. I knew why my chest felt like it was on fire. This was the Battle of Combahee River on the twenty-seventh of August, 1782, fought in my homе state in South Carolina. I’d just done something stupid, lеd my troops into a minor skirmish with the British, an army that we were completely outnumbered by. But still, I’d grinned when I rode into battle. Maybe I thought it was all just assisted suicide. Maybe that was what I’d intended. Whatever the case, I knew I’d just been shot off of my saddle by a redcoat.
At that spot in time, I felt awful. Alexander was quick to return to his wife and child after Yorktown, not giving me as much as a goodbye after we took the redoubt. I remember the morning when I woke up to a cold bed, no letter penned by my lover explaining where he had gone. He just left. I wasn’t sure why.
The same time as that happened, Martha died of some illness. Frances Eleanor was still in France, and now she was about six years of age. But I didn’t send for her. I couldn’t. She was a living reminder of the wife I had abandoned, the wife I never wrote to—the wife I never loved. It made me feel so guilty. I was never there for either of them. I let her down, and I let Frances Eleanor down, and I let my father down.
Then, a few months later, Alexander began to write letters to me again. They weren’t nearly as affectionate as they had been a few years prior, and it made me feel terrible inside. I was worried that he was falling out of love with me, that his wife Elizabeth and his son Philip were taking all of his love. I remember how many nights I fell asleep crying and crying and crying and crying. I know now how selfish it sounds, but I couldn’t help it, not when I had lost so much in so little time.
Even then, our correspondence declined. I received less and less letters from him. I couldn’t help but think of Francis, how our falling out was because of our distance and inconsistency in writing to each other. It made me panic. Alexander was the only reason I was alive, the only reason I didn’t die right then and there. If he were to remove himself from my life, I wouldn’t be able to bear it.
Multiple times he suggested to me that I join him in the world of politics, that I quit this war and join the battle in the courtroom instead—a battle that proved to be much less life-threatening. But I denied it. With Elizabeth and Philip there, would he make sure to only treat me as a friend instead of what we really were? Would we just forget that what we did with each other—all of our kisses, all of our sweet-nothings, all of our embraces, all of our long nights together—never happened, even when we had times together behind closed doors? Would he decide that he could not bear to cheat on his wife, when anything he was cheating on me with his spouse? I feared that would become reality, and so I refused to join him.
In my last letter to him, I was begging my lover to write to me. I told him how much of a condolence his words were for me, how much I loved to lay my eyes upon them. I used flowery language as if flirting would get him to do what I wanted. That’s what Alexander had told me so many years ago in our bed at Ross Hall: I flirt to get what I want. But then I was shot off my saddle, left without any answer, without any words of his to make me feel better. I kept hoping that it’d be him running toward me and not some redcoat, coming to embrace me, tell me I’d be okay, that he loved me one final time. But that never happened. I was left utterly alone.
At twenty-seven years of age, I became one of the last casualties of the Revolutionary War. Sure, I lived long enough to know that America was becoming a country, but I died before seeing my dear friend Washington become president. I died before seeing my lover, Alexander, create the economy for the country, just like he’d told me so many years before.
My hand, bloody from clutching my wound, fell to the left, residing on the soft blanket of grass. It was almost comforting, the feeling of the grass beneath my fingertips, but it did not distract me from my pain. My other hand reached up to the sky. I could’ve sworn I saw Alexander’s violet eyes among the stars. “Alexander,” I breathed. Then it all went black.
It was just as Louis had said when we weren’t talking over Lafayette: Without Alexander, you’ll die.