“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, my 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
