There was only one thing that John Master had denied her. A country house. Not a farm, like the old bouweries of the Stuyvesants and their like. A country house might have a few hundred acres of farmland, but that wasn’t really the point. It was also a place to escape the unhealthy city in the hot and humid summer. But above all it was a trophy—a villa in a park—a place for a gentleman to show off his good taste. It was a fine old tradition: rich gentlemen had set up these parks in the Renaissance, the Middle Ages and in the Roman Empire. Now it was New York’s turn. Some were on Manhattan; there was the Watts house at Rose Hill; and Murray Hill of course; and others with names taken from London, like Greenwich and Chelsea. Some were a little further north, like the van Cortlandts’ estate in the Bronx. How well her husband would look in such a place. He could well afford it. But he had adamantly refused.

“There’s always my father’s farm to go to,” he told her. Further north, he’d already bought two thousand acres up in Dutchess County, which he was clearing. “Westchester and Dutchess counties will be the breadbaskets of the North,” he said. “And I’ll grow grain on every yard of land I own.” And if she sighed, the Quaker in her knew he was right.

But from time to time she’d continued to wonder, what else could she do for her husband, within the city’s bounds? They had their house, their furniture, their portraits: what more remained?

Why, a tomb. A mausoleum. If you couldn’t build a house in which to live a few years, you could, for far less expense, build a tomb in which to rest for all eternity. The mausoleum would honor her husband; she could be buried beside him; and their descendants after them. It was a project. You could employ an architect. You could show people the designs. For a month, now, she had been engaged on the business, but in secret. She meant to surprise her husband with it on New Year’s Day.

And so when, at three o’clock that afternoon, her husband came home earlier than expected and discovered her with the architect and the plans, she was much put out.