Eliza and Alex meet her younger brother, seventeen-year-old John Schuyler who is arriving in New York to study at Columbia, formerly King's College. John who is nine years younger than Eliza is the only surviving son of the Schuylers and great things are expected of him. Other changes in their household include taking on a new footman. Simon, the son of their cook, Rowena has moved to the Beekman estate where he is working as a groom. To replace him, Eliza and Alex have taken on Rowena's nephew, Drayton Pennington, her sister Nigella's son.Now well established in the home on Wall Street, Eliza and Alex are working on starting a family. However, after eight months of trying, there seems to be no baby on the horizon. Until Eliza begins complaining about Rowena's cooking and feeling unsettled in the morning. She soon realizes that she is pregnant after a dream in which her mother asks her to name the baby Philip after her father.
Their house sees two new additions; Drayton Pennington the new footman and Emma Trask, the orphaned cousin of Prudence Schlesinger and whom Eliza takes on as a maid.Soon Eliza finds herself wanting to match make, specifically Emma with her brother John. To that end she decides to hold a party in honour of her two new house members, John and Emma.
Meanwhile Alex is retained by the Reverend Provoost of Trinity Church to find a way around the church's charter which limits Trinity to an income of five thousand pounds per annum, so that a new and larger church can be built. As he's working on the Trinity file, Alex's clerk, Nippers ushers in a woman named Maria Reynolds. When Alex learns that she is married, he feels he is safe from any sort of indiscretion. However, Alex could not be more wrong.
Discussion
All For One concludes the Alexander Hamilton trilogy which capitalized on the Hamilton musical craze that began a few years back. De La Cruz has taken her readers through the meeting of Eliza Schuyler and Alexander Hamilton in Eliza and Alex and through the very early years of their marriage in Love and War. In this novel, De La Cruz tackles Eliza's first pregnancy and Alex's entanglement with Maria Reynolds. De La Cruz plays with the timeline somewhat: Alex and Eliza's first son, Philip was born in 1782 and not 1785, and Alex's affair with Maria Reynolds occurred in 1791-92 when Eliza was pregnant with their son John Church Hamilton.
All For One weaves together the lives of Eliza and Alex through two storylines; the first involves Eliza and her efforts to get her orphanage off the ground while dealing with her pregnancy and two new members of her household, and the second involves Alex's work on the Trinity case as well as his relationship with Maria Reynolds.
In All For One, Eliza's primary focus seems to be playing match maker, reminiscent of Jane Austen's Emma Woodhouse. Eliza insists that the new country not need to obey the Old World conventions of class and family status. To that end she attempts to match her brother John from her wealthy Schuyler family with the penniless, orphaned Emma Trask. Likewise Eliza suggests the ultra-wealthy Betty Van Renasselaer consider her handsome footman, Drayton Pennington. Although Eliza is in earnest, both Betty and John find her efforts comical and impractical. Eliza is convinced that the United States be different than "the hidebound ways of the Europeans." Eliza tells Betty and John, "...The rules came from the king down, and each step on the rung was clearly demarcated. Their roles restricted them, but it also gave them a sense of identity. Our generation is much more open to possibility. We can choose our own roles. We are not bound by expectations of family or class,...in the United States, one is free to fall in love with a gentleman as well as with a footman."
It is while visiting the Van Cortlandts that Eliza, like Austen's Emma realizes she has it all wrong. At a ball at the Beekman estate, James Beekman points out to Eliza that it is Emma and Drayton who are wooing one another, while Jane Beekman suggests to Eliza the following morning that in fact Betty and John appear to be "taken" with one another. These revelations stun Eliza who feels betrayed since her intention was to improve both Emma and Drayton's "stations" in life! When confronted later on, Emma tells Eliza "...You like to pretend that America is a classless society, and while that may be true in Mr. Hamilton's speeches and essays, in real life the world is still very much divided by how much money one has, and for how long. There are still rich and poor, and the former still have very strong ideas about the latter's place." Emma tells Eliza that "a snob like the wealthy Betty Van Renasselaer is easier to deal with. And at least she is honest about her place in the world and has a sense of humor about it as well."
The second storyline deals with Alexander Hamilton and his efforts on behalf of Trinity Church as well as his relationship with Maria Reynolds. It was interesting to see how De La Cruz approached the events surrounding Alexander Hamilton's affair with Maria Reynolds. Hamilton is portrayed as being willfully blind towards Maria Reynolds, convinced that her story about being ill-treated by her husband is true. Hamilton's trusted detective Miguel de La Vera uncovers evidence that suggests that Maria Reynolds is really Maria Lewis who has never married James Reynold and that the latter "uses women to swindle married men. Honest married men...". He warns Hamilton that she may be part of a effort to entrap and blackmail him. Instead, Hamilton decides, "No...She was a woman alone in the world, a woman in a position not unlike the one his mother had found herself in - and his mother was innocent and deserved a better life. So did Maria Reynolds. She deserved his trust, and if he were honest, he was lonely." And so instead of dropping her as his client, he goes to visit her.
While Eliza is visiting the Van Cortlandt's to secure a donation for her orphanage, she becomes seriously ill and spends a month at their home recuperating, leaving Alex alone. It is in her absence that Hamilton's affair begins with Maria Reynolds. In All For One, De La Cruz suggests that Alex forms a bond with Maria because they had similar life experiences. "She knew the world as it was, like he did, the cruelty and the coarseness, she knew abandonment an deceit and hunger and survival, just as he did. They were alike in a way that Eliza would never understand."
Alex is able to tell Maria about his past in a way he could never manage with Eliza. "Alex told her the full story of his early years in St. Croix and Nevis. All the things he had never told Eliza, for fear that she would reject him for being too common...Maybe it was because Eliza, for all her independence and empathy, was still a woman of her class, a little too inclined to think of the poor as projects rather than real people, as evidenced by her meddling in the love lives of Emma Trask and Drayton Pennington, or maybe it was because he had never shared this part of his past with her..." It is this connection that seemingly leads him to commit adultery with Reynolds.
But it is Eliza who is the star in this re-telling of the Alexander Hamilton saga: she races from her sickbed to save her husband from possible death after learning of his infidelity and his pending duel with rival Aaron Burr (a duel that in real life did not occur at this time). And against all reason, she forgives him, saving her marriage, although her husband's reputation is ruined. Eliza explains, "Either she truly forgave her husband or she didn't. If she didn't, then there was no point in continuing the marriage. And if she did, then she must do it fully. She must remember the man she had married, and why she had married him." In the 1700's it is likely that the prospect of divorce was far worse than a husband's infidelity. Or perhaps Eliza Schuyler Hamilton was truly a remarkable woman.
All For One is the finale in De La Cruz's trilogy. At close to four hundred pages, All For One sometimes gets bogged down in extraneous detail that perhaps could have been edited out or at least pared down. For example there are detailed passages about what life was like in New York in 1776 and how it has changed in the last nine years. There are several pages explaining the situation with the Trinity church that Alex is retained to sort out. While some of these details are interesting, they tend to distract from the overall storyline.
Nevertheless, fans of Hamilton will enjoy this final installment with all its heartbreak and betrayal as well as the post-colonial detail of life in the newly founded United States of America.
Book Details:
All For One by Melissa De La Cruz
New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons 2019
386 pp.
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