“You may call me whatever you like as long as you are here,” I said.
“I am here. And now that we are such close neighbors, I foresee you and I spending much time here together, presuming . . .”
When she trailed off, I prompted, “Presuming?”
She looked to the sky. “Presuming, of course, that the Jacobins don’t burn it all down.”
A wreath of smoky haze had enveloped the city for months, the remainder of a series of devastating fires that had been set in protest of the election of John Adams to the presidency. Not even the fact that Jefferson, having received the second most number of votes in the election, was now vice president seemed to stem the tide of discontent. The culprit had never been caught, but the stench of the ashes remained.
And like everyone else, Angelica had a definite opinion about who was to blame. “How could you let Hamilton quit the government when the spirit of Jacobinism threatens the political and moral world with a complete overthrow? He’s needed there more than ever.”
It had been the loss of our baby that convinced him to leave government, which she knew from my letters. Still, I felt the need to say, “He said the change was necessary and agreeable.”
Angelica sighed. “The country has lost one of her best friends, and you, my dear Eliza, are the only person to whom this change can be either necessary or agreeable. Yes, I am decidedly inclined to believe that it was your influence.”
So what if it was? Angelica had charmed all of Europe and understood more about politics and philosophy than I did, but she didn’t understand all that had happened here, in our marriage and our country. I loved my sister, but I was no longer the young girl who deferred to her every opinion. Especially since she and Church still kept slaves, whilst my husband was finally free to devote more time to abolishing slavery. “No one’s done more for this government than Alexander Hamilton. And he’s done enough.”
She blinked, then finally nodded. “Of course.”
Wanting to smooth things over, I smiled. “Besides, as we now both benefit from his increased attention, you’ll soon see it’s altogether agreeable.”
She laughed. “That so good a wife, so tender a mother, should be so bad a patriot is wonderful!”
So bad a patriot.
Her tone was teasing, but she’d somehow hit upon a guilty nerve. Was I so selfish for wanting my husband to belong more to me than to an ungrateful public? Was it wrong to enjoy the fruits of all our labor, the domestic pleasures of picnics with our children and long walks together on kissing bridges and dinner at our own table without expecting a horde of guests?
Perhaps sensing my inner turmoil, my sister sat at the edge of her fountain to say, “I suppose it’s for the better. Now that Papa is back in the Senate, he wouldn’t like to be outshone by his son-in-law.”
We both smiled, knowing how much pleasure it gave Papa to have been reelected, nearly unanimously. He’d bided his time and Burr, sensing the change of political fortune on the wind, had resigned his seat rather than lose it. My family counted that a good thing, but I remembered what Burr had said at Vauxhall Gardens.
Retirement is very fashionable these days amongst men who wish to be president . . .
Angelica went on, “Besides, it’s better that you have Hamilton to look over you in your condition.” I half-wished to remind her that our own mother had children well into her forties, and I was only thirty-nine. But my sister had centered directly on another of my most keen anxieties, as was her way.
I feared miscarrying another child and I said so.
“This time you’ll have me here with you, my dearest,” she promised. “I shall watch over you with such overbearing insistence, you’ll think I’ve turned into Mama!”
* * *
LIKE A SENTINEL who’d forgotten his duty, I startled awake. Round with a child that often awakened me in the night by kicking in eagerness to be out into the world, I was now prone to nap in the heat of the day. This time in a rocking chair on my porch while shucking peas, lulled to sleep by the sound of Ana practicing at the piano while Fanny sketched with charcoal beside me.
But now everything was silent but for the buzzing of a few lazy bees, and Fanny was nowhere to be seen. Only my husband, who stood, staring, not three feet away, his brow furrowed, his hands deep in his pockets.
Disoriented, I squinted against the blazing sun, then pushed myself up, but Alexander stopped me. “No, my darling, don’t get up. I didn’t mean to wake you.”
Still, a mother can never be comforted by quiet; noisy little ones were much less likely to be up to mischief. “But the children—”
“They’re at your sister’s house for the night. I had Philip take them.” The flatness of his voice told me something was amiss. My husband could, in a courtroom, exhibit a hundred different expressions from anger to sympathy to joy. His blank, haggard expression made me go hollow inside, even before he said, “There is something I must tell you, my angel.”
My mouth went instantly dry.
For I remembered the last time he said, There is something I must tell you, my angel.
And I was sure that he remembered it, too. “I am usually a man who knows the right thing to do. But today . . .” He sighed. “I’m at a loss. I thought to shield you from this, but I don’t wish for you to be taken unawares. Especially not in your condition.”
“Tell me.” I stiffened, wondering, traitorously, if he was going to confess another mistress. I hated myself for that.
“You know of the newspaperman James Callender?” I nodded, because that vile Jacobin scandalmonger had been the source of too many libels to count. “He’s published a pamphlet dredging up the old accusations of my supposed corruption at the treasury.”
I blew out a cautious breath. “A thing for which you’ve been exonerated at least three times over by my count.”
“He is also exposing my connection to Mrs. Reynolds.”
Connection.
The euphemism was a blow. And just like that, the fragile foundation I’d rebuilt myself upon began to fracture. I could almost hear the crack. I’d thought this all done and buried. Now, someone had resurrected it. Resurrected her. Maria.
I’d always worried that the secret might come out. That Aaron Burr might blurt it drunkenly at a dinner party. That the harlot herself might whisper it on the pillow of whatever man she was bedding now. But I’d imagined only whispers. Never that anyone would be depraved enough to print it.
“What does the newspaperman know?” What could he know, after all?
“Everything,” Alexander replied, quietly. “Callender has copies of letters exchanged between us.”
Letters? I’d somehow never understood that my husband had done more than go to bed with this woman. He wrote to her. Were they love letters? Letters like the ones he’d written to me when we were courting?
I didn’t ask. Truthfully, in that moment, I didn’t want to know the answer. What I wanted, most of all, in the face of this humiliation, was to hold on to calm dignity. “She sold her correspondence,” I guessed.
Alexander shook his head. “No. These are the letters I provided to James Monroe. He’s leaked them.”
Monroe? My first thought was that I must’ve misheard. Of all the friends with whom we’d parted for political reasons, Monroe was the most upright and honorable. He was a gentleman; I could scarcely credit that he would trade in such filth. My second thought was that, years ago, he’d promised to protect my honor. And my third was that it wasn’t even possible, because Monroe had been serving as our minister to France. “He isn’t even in the country.”
“The president revoked his credentials and recalled him. He’s just returned to our shores. And, no doubt, straightaway conspired with Jefferson’s loathsome faction. He’s given the newspapers every scrap of evidence he promised to keep confidential.”
I could make no sense of this. “But Monroe gave me his word of honor to keep quiet about this affair.”
At this, m
y husband glanced at me, then again, plainly startled. “You discussed it with him?”
Under my husband’s stunned scrutiny, I reminded him exactly how such conversation came about. “Yes. On the night the investigators came to the house.”
Alexander’s jaw clenched, though he knew what it had cost me, that night, bleeding with near fatal humiliation. “Well I regret to report that you prevailed upon his friendship in vain.”
I still didn’t want to believe this of Monroe. I rebelled against believing it. I was no longer naive about the sins men were capable of—even men I’d loved—but there seemed some part of the story untold.
I’d taken solace in the idea that there ought to be no reason for anyone to attack us if only Hamilton stayed out of the public eye. If he stayed out of politics.
“Why now?” I asked. Monroe had kept the secret four years. “With you in retirement, what possible advantage—”
“I don’t know,” my husband said, hanging his head, the weight of his guilt forcing the slump of his shoulders. “Revenge, maybe. It was upon my advice that the president recalled Monroe from France.”
At hearing this, I was overcome with the urge to reach for the bowl of shucked peas and throw it. Into the yard, at the house, maybe even at my husband. I didn’t know which. I’d never guessed, not even once, that the wreck of Monroe’s diplomatic career was my husband’s doing.
And as I struggled to calm myself, Alexander took my hand. “I promise you, my darling, I wasn’t the only one urging the president to revoke Monroe’s credentials. Our foreign policy must be spoken in one voice. Monroe in France and Jay in England were at cross-purposes overseas. I gave the president my best advice.”
Reeling, I yanked my hand away.
He met my eyes, beseechingly. “Eliza, I didn’t think it right to risk the good of the country, all for fear of a secret any man held over me. I didn’t want to think that Monroe—who’d been a friend to me and a fellow soldier—would prove to be both a man mistaken in his political beliefs and also without honor as a gentleman.” As I listened, his voice softened. “Would you have me done differently?”
I paused to think about it, but I was not, in the end, so bad a patriot. “No. You did precisely as you should have.” There was a moment of grace between us that I could admit this. I think he felt it, too. “What will we do now?”
Bringing my fingertips to his lips, he said, “I fear I must confess my wrongdoing.” And as panic tightened my throat, he explained why. Callender claimed that my husband invented an imaginary infidelity to cover up his real crime of having enriched himself at the taxpayer’s expense.
As if we’d been at all enriched!
How often had I accepted gifts from my parents to put food on our table? How many years had I borrowed and bartered and scrimped to make ends meet? My husband had left the service of our country poorer than when he entered it, deeply indebted to my brother-in-law and without any real property of his own.
But as I wrestled with my anger at the injustice of this accusation, I also realized the perversity of the situation. “You can’t defend yourself against charges of corruption without confessing the affair . . .” Worse, he couldn’t defend himself without convincing the public of the affair.
“I’ve no choice but to expose everything.”
But I saw a way out of the corner he’d been backed into. “If Monroe will explain to the public that he investigated the matter long ago and believed your innocence, surely that will put an end to it.”
“He won’t,” Alexander replied.
“He might, if you asked him.”
“Not after our quarrel this morning . . .”
I startled. “You’ve seen Monroe?”
There in the stifling heat, Alexander bit out a laugh. “By happenstance he’s here in New York visiting his wife’s relatives. I deduced his part in this conspiracy and confronted him.”
“And?” I asked.
Alexander’s gaze darkened, as if in stormy remembrance. “And some words were said that ought never be said amongst gentlemen. If it hadn’t been for Church breaking us apart, we’d have come to blows then and there.”
My baby kicked inside me, as if to express its own dismay at this revelation. Church had been there? My brother-in-law knew everything then. Maybe Angelica did, too. And soon, so would the whole country know about my husband’s infidelity. Though I had little idea of the extent of it, I realized that my marriage was to be sported with. That I was soon to be a laughingstock, my children subject to mockery. That our enemies were going to destroy all the happiness we’d fought so hard to find—the happiness that we’d earned.
Unless I did something about it . . .
* * *
IT WASN’T A far walk to Monroe’s lodgings on Wall Street, where I handed a Negro slave my calling card and was shown into a gilded parlor to wait. The hour was late for a visit, but none of the usual rules of propriety seemed to matter to anyone else, so why should they matter to me?
I hadn’t told my husband of my intention for fear he might attempt to prevent me, and he wasn’t entitled to. I’d taken no part in the decisions that brought us to this place, but I wanted some choice in what happened now.
I didn’t ask permission. I just went.
And waited.
It’d been four years since I’d last seen James Monroe, but when, at length, the Virginian strode into the parlor, he was as tall and strapping as ever. Though he eschewed pantaloons in favor of old-fashioned knee breeches and stockings, he’d acquired a new elegance to his gait in Paris. In truth, I might’ve been intimidated by the personage he presented if I didn’t still remember him as a blushing, stammering boy of a soldier, with a dimple on his chin just like mine . . .
Monroe cleared his throat and drawled, “I would delight in your company, Mrs. Hamilton, under other circumstances. However, as your husband has sent you, and my wife is with her family, I cannot invite you to stay.”
“Hamilton didn’t send me,” I said, unfastening the bow of my bonnet and laying it upon the chair beside me to signal that I had no intention of leaving. “Though I’ve been made aware of your quarrel.”
“Quarrel?” Monroe snorted. “Your husband launched into a lengthy diatribe, filled with accusations—”
“I’m not here to accuse you.” I looked directly into the gray eyes of the southern gentleman who had, in a dark time, once been my only confidant, and felt as vulnerable to him now as I did then. “Four years ago, I didn’t doubt your word when you swore you’d spare me humiliation. I don’t doubt it now. Tell me that you didn’t give the Reynolds letters to the newspapermen and I will believe you.”
Monroe’s shoulders rounded. My faith in him plainly pierced his puffed-up sense of outrage. He seemed relieved that I pledged to trust him, but his encounter with Alexander had left him still in an icy cold fury.
“Of course I didn’t give the letters to the newspapers,” Monroe finally said. “When I was sent to France, I entrusted my official documents to a friend in Virginia under seal. I’ve only just returned to the country and had no idea of their publication.”
I believed him. Truly, I did. “Then the blame must go to your friend in Virginia . . .” Who could be none other than Thomas Jefferson.
But Monroe set me onto my heels by saying, “I presume John Beckley published the papers in question.”
Beckley was a name I knew only slightly. A one-time indentured servant who had, through the grace of his populist political leanings, risen to be a clerk in the House of Representatives. “How should a mere clerk come to have possession of these papers?”
Monroe could no longer hold my gaze. “Because I commissioned him to copy them, never suspecting he’d make a set of his own to do mischief with.” A crimson flush swept over Monroe as he admitted to me, however obliquely, that the situation was at least partly his fault.
And all at once, I felt a cold fury of my own. “Mr. Monroe, for what purpose would you have a clerk copy pa
pers that you swore on your honor to keep confidential?”
I should not have said the word honor. Not to a Virginian. “It was your husband who demanded copies!”
Then—perhaps in the horror of having shouted at a lady—Monroe went silent. Perfectly silent. Meanwhile, I marveled at the folly of my husband, who had, like the lawyer he was, apparently asked for copies of the most damning evidence against him.
Oh, Alexander.
When Monroe finally broke his silence, he seethed. “Did Hamilton think I would stoop to set my own hand to the wretched task of copying his lengthy treasons against you?” His gray eyes caught mine again with a meaningful stare that recalled the moment, years ago, when he pressed my hand to his heart. “And if you think me capable, then you’ve never understood my attachment to you.”
Once, such words might’ve touched me, but now my chest heaved with indignation. “Mr. Monroe, how can you claim any manner of attachment when I entrusted to you my fragile happiness, only to find it carelessly disregarded so as to save you a cramp in the wrist and—”
I cut myself off, remembering my purpose. It was not to antagonize James Monroe. It was to enlist his aid. I was becoming too much like Alexander—infected by his short temper. I struggled to regained my composure.
With a deep, calming breath, I started again. “Mr. Monroe, the scurrilous newspapermen will say what they will. The whispers I shall have to bear. But when you investigated my husband for corruption, you were convinced of his innocence, were you not?”
Monroe nodded, though I sensed reluctance. “Your husband’s explanation of how he was extorted removed our suspicions of his being connected with Mr. Reynolds in speculation.”
Relieved, I smiled at him. “If you will only say as much—if you will give a sworn statement for the public, then you will relieve my husband of the necessity of a defense—the extreme delicacy of which will be very disagreeable to me.”
Monroe turned, strode a few paces, then returned, his voice gentler, a little warmer. “Trust that I regret the publication of these papers—but trust, too, that dragging me into it will draw more public attention to it and make it a matter of even greater consequence. It will not help.”
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