We’d come far enough that Hamilton smiled. “It seems you shall always have your way.”
“Then come back to me,” I said, fighting my own battle against foreboding and kissing him farewell.
Martha Washington and I clasped hands as we watched them go. Then I spent the next two months trying to keep the children from missing their father as much as I did. The boys had their schooling, but as my daughter was ten years of age and Fanny only a few months younger, I took them for lessons from the French dance master. And while they danced, I collected donations and delivered them to the needy.
“Voici le chapeau idéal pour Monsieur le secrétaire, Madame,” said Madame le Grand from behind the hatter’s stall in the market. She held up a black felt riding hat with a black cockade.
“Yes, I’ll take the hat. Merci,” I replied, fishing money from my purse as Madame le Grand’s two barefooted children wrestled in the cold street over a loaf of bread.
Not old enough to help their mother look after their hatter’s stall in the market, they were lean as wild dogs and dressed in rags that offered them no defense against the weather. And though I knew it shamed Madame le Grand, and the other refugees, to rely upon charity, they had little choice unless they would starve.
“Take this as well,” I said, pressing into her hand a pouch of donations I’d collected for her. “And if you come by the house on Sunday morning before church service, I’ll have some warm clothes that my children have outgrown.”
“Merci,” Madame le Grand said, clutching the pouch against her faded linen dress, worn without stays, her eyes lowered. She’d had a little cottage outside Paris. With a flower garden. A fine tea service.
Now, without a husband, she had nothing. Alone and desperate. And I had cause to imagine myself in her miserable condition as Madame le Grand thanked me again and again, boxing up a hat for my husband that he might never wear.
“Mrs. Hamilton!” I turned to see Dolley in a swish of red cloak, a veritable rainbow of ribbons flowing from her fancy bonnet. Freed from Quaker restraint, she was never plain now. “Is that a surprise for the secretary?”
“Oh, yes,” I answered. “When my husband returns home, I should like to present him with a little gift.”
A basket of apples looped over one arm, Dolley glanced at my pregnant belly and chirped, “I should think a baby the very best gift of all! Or so Mr. Madison tells me.”
She’d married him, even though it meant expulsion from her faith. Even though it put a little distance between us because of the estrangement of our husbands. But I didn’t blame her. In marrying Madison, she’d lifted her child from poverty to wealth in one stroke. And, despite the strangeness of the pairing, the Madisons were a love match. “Well then, do you mean to give Mr. Madison the gift he most desires?”
“As soon as I can,” Dolley replied, and then, with a twinkle that proved she really never did have the soul of a Quaker, she added, “I’m certainly making every effort to procure it, all hours of the night.”
Halfway between scandalized and horrified by the image that conjured, I laughed too hard, and a sharp pain knifed through my abdomen. Doubling over, I gasped as the market suddenly spun, assaulting me with the sound of horse hooves on cobblestones, passing wagons, brooms being whacked free of dust in doorways.
The roar of grocers in the market shouting the price of mustard, apples, and sugar . . .
I dropped my purse.
And Dolley Madison was at my elbow. “Let’s get her home,” she was saying to a black man who steadied me. One of her husband’s slaves, I suspected, and in a swirl of half-formed, absurd thoughts, I couldn’t help but wonder, given the Quakers’ strict antislavery position, what she thought of now owning slaves herself.
Next I knew, I was jostling in the carriage beside her, shivering with cold. Then I was being put into bed. “Here, drink this,” Dolley said, bringing hot chocolate that she’d stirred together in my kitchen.
I nodded, starting to come back to myself, the pain easing. “Thank you, Dolley.”
“You poor thing. You must be worried for your husband.”
I blew out a breath, torn, perhaps ridiculously, between worry over my unborn child, and worry over admitting to the wife of a political rival that I was concerned about my husband’s expedition against the whiskey rebels.
“I’m sure everything’s all right,” I said, trying to convince myself on both accounts. For I had now only the slightest of cramps.
I wanted to say more. I wanted to confide my worries to her. And I nearly convinced myself that I should. After all, Dolley and I had been friends before she met Madison. And I did hold a glimmer of hope that she might be a good influence on him politically.
Especially now that Mr. Jefferson had retired into private life. Hamilton feared that this retirement from President Washington’s cabinet was just a ruse, that Jefferson was biding his time until he could run for the presidency himself.
But to me, the important thing was that Jefferson was gone.
In Jefferson’s absence, Madison had supported my husband’s whiskey tax. Jemmy also denounced the insurrection as odious. So maybe there was reason for optimism that fences could be mended with our old friend.
Still, I knew better than to confess anything that might be used against Alexander—even my own fears for his survival. “I think I’ve simply taken a chill,” I added, cautiously.
“Well, then, I shall let you get your rest,” Dolley replied, tucking a shawl around my shoulders. She seemed to sense my caution, and perhaps was as saddened by it as I was.
