Becoming Miss Lee

Prologue - 1804

I received some very dreadful news yesterday that my dear friend, Alexander Hamilton, had been killed. I have gotten used to death. It was not too long ago that my adopted father, the Honorable Richard Henry Lee, may his soul rest in peace, had also passed. I seem to be getting all too used to wearing black. It seems as though every time I seem to be able to step out of it, a new death occurs, and I must don my veil and my black petticoats and weep for the loss of another dear friend. What else is there to say? It occasionally seems to me that, every time I can count, my life is a great adventure, a great blunder, or a great tragedy. Despite all of that, I have had only one true fear my whole life, brought on by my constant state of loneliness and abandonment. That fear was being forgotten, unloved, and miserably alone.

My name is Beatrice Fisher Lee, but my friends know me as simply "Bea". I was the daughter of Mister and Missus Fisher, both of whom died in a tragic accident when they tried to cross a flooded bridge after a storm. My family goes back with the Lees as good friends for years and they repaid their debts by taking me into their home. I'm not overly remarkable. I have been said to be a beautiful woman and I presume that my sources, being other fine Virginians, are credible. I have full brown hair that has a tendency to curl lushly on its own, my eyes are a pale greyish blue on my best days and grey on the worst, and I have a nose that, as Miss Anne always liked to say, was so like Mister Lee's that it would be almost impossible to guess that I was not his blood daughter. I love to bury myself in books, which was an old undying habit from my rather lonely childhood. I would spend hours in Mister Jefferson's library when we made social calls while the adults talked politics, or whatever good Virginian men talked about, and Miss Anne would practically have to pull me out while Mister Jefferson jested that they should simply leave me as it would be easier than trying to take me home.

My family originally hailed from New York. Not that that is much to brag about, but it is a fine state and I am not one to ever speak down about my familial home. Virginia, now, is most certainly the state where my heart and soul do and always shall reside. I live on a farm of my own. The house is small, but it is all I had ever needed in my life and my children and I are quite content with it. It is certainly a far cry from the busy house where I lived with Mister Lee and Miss Anne. My adopted siblings were always around and we had visitors constantly, political and social visitors. Now, however, most of the people who came to visit us are too busy running a new government to have any time for social prattle with friends who live many states away. Call me sentimental, but I miss that house. It's bustling atmosphere and excitement is one I greatly miss. For the time being, I am staying with my dear Aunt Becky, the wife of my late uncle Francis Lightfoot Lee, at their home of Menokin. Since his death, she had been grieving and lonely, and with no children of her own to dote on, I thought it best to make my visits frequent.

Now, I sit in the parlor, reading over my old letters, while Aunt Becky sleeps upstairs. The oldest one I have is dated back to 1764. I read over the curling wonderful handwriting with the long lost nostalgia of love. The content of the letter is hardly romantic. It speaks of everything but romance with the passion that only a student can speak. Perhaps it was because we were both painfully young when our correspondence began and our relationship was certainly not one that bloomed out of the typical love at first sight aspect that most people suspect when they think of young people writing letters to one another. On the contrary, at seven years old, I do believe that romance was the farthest thing from my dreaming mind. My companion was nine at the time. He was brilliant and charming with the most wonderfully handsome face. We had met in Connecticut when I had the most unfortunate plight of being forced to stay with my aunt while my father and mother went on an extended business trip to Virginia. She was a wicked old woman with a hawk nose and beady eyes and a temper to match. It is next to needless to say that I fled the house at every opportunity and that is how I met Nathan. I had run away one night and gotten hopelessly lost near his family's home. He had found me and offered to let me stay in his house until morning, with the permission of his family of course, and with the reputation that my aunt had in the town, they happily said that I could. He admired my early nursed passion to read and we must have stayed up half of that night reading to each other. My aunt was by no means pleased and told me that I shouldn't keep company with people like the Hales. I didn't see what the problem was. Nathan was kind and friendly. What did it matter if his parents didn't come from the elite social class that I was born into? He was my first real friend. Had I known where our paths would take us, mayhap I would have cut off our correspondence long before we met again in 1773. It would have made everything so much easier, but, alas, when you are young, what do you have to lose? We wrote to each other every day from that point onwards. It would be many letterless years before I would ever lay eyes upon my charming childhood companion again.

Now, we move on to the tragedy of my parents. They travelled often, leaving me in the charge of my horrid aunt. One particular summer, it was rainy and the weather was unpredictable beyond belief. They had to attend to business in New Jersey and I was flung aside into my aunt's care for what was to be the final time. They were gone for two months and neither my aunt nor I had heard anything from them until we received terrible news. On their return, a strong storm had swelled the rivers up considerably, which destroyed many bridges. They attempted to cross and their carriage was swept away. The way I describe this may sound callus, but I never had a close connection with my parents. They were never around me when I was little because they always travelled and, as such, I never felt any daughterly bond or obligation to bond with them when they were with me. Their death saddened me, they were my parents, after all, but I was by no means inconsolable. There was a funeral, but I was one of only seven figures who attended. There I stood: eleven years old and an orphan with the terrible feeling of dread in my chest of being trapped with an evil, malicious woman like my aunt to care for me. Little did I know of providence's grand design for my future, but if I had, I cannot say that I would have ever made any changes.

My life completely changed in a way I could never imagine after that. Standing over their caskets as they were lowered into the ground without so much as a twinge of true and honest grief, I watched my parents buried. My aunt had seen me and was moving towards me about the time I felt a hand on my shoulder. It smelled of horses, but in a way not displeasing, and I turned my eyes upon who had to have been the most regal man I had ever seen. He spoke in a way that was foreign and beautiful. My name rolled across his tongue in three distinct syllables and my ears took pleasure in the slight drawl laced with a cultivated accent of a man well-educated. I recall how he had talked to my aunt and then taken my hand in his own, which so dwarfed my own and so completely encompassed it that I wondered if all men had hands like that. It was callused from riding often, but I enjoyed how warm it was. As he accompanied me back to the house, he introduced himself. "I desired to part from the maddening gaggle of crows before I introduced myself, Miss Beatrice. I am Richard Henry Lee of Virginia." There it was: my first encounter with American nobility. He explained that he would be taking me in, adopting me into the Lee family, as he put it. It was all part of repaying an old debt. I wondered for a long time what that debt was, why someone with so much prestige would go out of their way to take in a penniless orphan from a less-than-well-off family, and I would be a full grown woman before I would ever know. At the time, though, it did not matter much. I was going away from the destitute old pit that I was forced to call home. I was going to be taken so far away that I would never have to see my aunt again. As I loaded my things into the carriage a few days after the funeral, as I had stepped into the carriage, for one tiny moment, I thought of my friend Nathan and how we might never see one another again. If only I had known what providence had in store for me.