It was Theodosia Burr, bundled in a fur-lined cloak. “I thought I saw James Monroe at the end of the street.” As it happened, Theodosia had hosted Monroe when he was in the service of Lord Stirling, so another happy reunion took place in my kitchen. And when Monroe asked her advice on finding a wife in the city, she said, “You’re a congressman, now. An important man of the people. The ladies will flock to you given your accomplishments.”
Monroe gave a belly laugh. “We never accomplish anything in Congress. We couldn’t pass Mr. Jefferson’s Land Ordinance for admitting new states to the Union, because it bans slavery after the year 1800. We couldn’t pass Mr. Jefferson’s proposal to make the dollar a national currency. We can’t agree on a site for our nation’s capital—or even if we are a nation, or a collection of states.”
“Hamilton shares your frustration,” I said, readying the hot water in its pot over the stove. “It’s why he’s not in Congress anymore.”
Monroe raised a brow. “My friend must have changed very much since the war if he is now content with drudgery at the bar while the country slides into disorder.”
“Oh, Colonel Hamilton is never content about anything,” Theodosia replied with an indulgent smile. “He’s never at home. Why, it grieves my poor heart to know how often poor Betsy is left alone.”
Theodosia wasn’t wrong. Even when Alexander was pacing our bedroom, practicing some argument at court, he was somewhere else. But it seemed a shrewish complaint about a man who was striving to provide for me and my children, and I didn’t want Monroe to think badly of him, so I rushed to his defense. “Why, I’m not alone at all. Between fine visitors such as yourselves and my beautiful children, my days are filled. And, honestly, Hamilton wouldn’t be the man I married without his sense of duty.”
Besides, my husband’s work defending Tories had made his law practice thrive. But I didn’t want to explain that to Monroe, who had little cause to know about our financial circumstances or how severely persecuted our neighbors were.
“I’ve heard Hamilton has helped to found a bank,” Monroe said.
I nodded. Amidst all his legal cases, Alexander had written the new bank’s constitution and become actively involved in its organization. “The Bank of New York, just down the street. He hopes to address the derangement of our financial situation in the city.”
“Which reminds me,” Theodosia said, pulling a folded broadsheet from her handbag. “You might wish to show this to Hamilton.”
Inwardly I groaned, not needing to read it to know what it would say, for the New York papers vilified my husband daily for helping the persecuted Tories. He’d built his reputation on heroism but now reaped the bitter seeds of a different sort of fame. And the unfairness of it pained me.
Having seen my father accused of treason, I was acutely sensitive to public censure. And because it set my husband’s temper on edge and fired his combative nature to see his name blackened in the press, it had become my regular practice to burn the papers that came to the house charging him with helping the most abandoned scoundrels in the universe.
I was trying to decide where to hide Theodosia’s paper until I could dispose of it when she eyed the brewing coffee and said, “That’s going to take forever. We should go to a coffeehouse.”
Monroe, who had probably spent all he had to acquire the coffee beans, looked crestfallen. So I ventured forth with, “It’s so cold that I prefer to make coffee at home. And while we’re waiting, let me treat the both of you to some of my homemade waffles,” I said, pulling out the Dutch waffle irons just like Mama’s that she’d given me as a present. “Reuniting with old friends is worthy of celebration.”
“Waffles?” Beaming, Monroe grinned. “You remembered.”
“I can’t promise they’ll be the same as your Mammy’s,” I said, laughing again at the memory of how he’d blurted out his craving to me all those years ago. “But I’ll slather them in butter.”
Theodosia rolled her eyes but settled in at the table and assisted me as I prepared the old family recipe and heated the irons. “At least come out with us tonight. Both of you.”
“Oh, I couldn’t. Not without Hamilton.”
“Of course you can,” Theodosia said. “Your Jenny can watch over the babies and Monroe can be your escort.”
At that, Monroe stared at his feet. “I—I cannot imagine that would be thought, well, at all proper.”
Theodosia laughed, and the next words she spoke reminded me so much of Angelica. “Perhaps not in your country of Virginia. But you’re in New York, now. A veritable vortex of folly and dissipation if the gazettes are to be believed.”
I ladled the thick, golden batter into a hot iron. “Oh, be nice, Theodosia. Monroe is a very mannerly gentleman.” I recounted how, upon my offering to help tend his wounded shoulder, he’d nearly tripped over my mother’s sideboard table in fear my father would shoot him.
Theodosia howled with laughter while Monroe chuckled at the memory, and the impasse about our plans for the evening was solved when my husband stumbled into the house stamping snow off his boots, nearly crashing headlong into his old friend. I could scarcely contain my amusement when Alexander murmured, with utter bewilderment, “Monroe?”
The two men clasped hands, appraising one another from head to toe before clapping one another on the back with glad tidings. And within hours, Alexander had sent word of the reunion and called together an impromptu gathering in our dining room of Washington’s young upstarts, a heaping plate of waffles between them. Colonel Burr appeared at dusk with whiskey, and these one-time brothers-at-arms talked late into the winter’s night, telling old stories and debating how, in Monroe’s words, we could cement the union.
I can never express how much good it did my heart to see these old friends and survivors
