So I was happy to let her have her due, especially at the expense of a Clinton.
“Oh, how marvelous,” Peggy murmured as she joined us, fluttering her eyelashes behind the fan. “A keepsake to treasure.”
I used mine to wave across the room. “Mr. Madison!”
As always, Madison wore black, leading me to worry that the poor bachelor owned just the one suit. His eyes kept darting to the entryway, as if he were reconsidering having come at all, ill at ease in society as he always seemed to be.
And seeing him fidget as I waved to him, Angelica’s eyes widened. “Oh my. Tell me that pale little creature isn’t the exalted Mr. Madison that I’ve heard you talk so much about!”
“Be kind,” I whispered. “He’s very clever but very shy.”
Peggy made a face behind her fan. “He looks like some sort of incorruptible parson.”
Which made my husband laugh. “A rather apt comparison. That he is uncorrupted and incorruptible I have not a doubt.”
At last, the bookish congressman made his way through the press and offered a bow. Clapping Madison on the back with enough force to make him cough, Hamilton introduced his brilliant colleague to my sisters. And the mere sight of Angelica seemed to force Jemmy to retrieve a kerchief from his velvet coat with which to wipe sweat from his brow.
“Congratulations upon your recent election to Congress, Mr. Madison,” I said.
“Hopefully condolences aren’t in order,” he quipped. “How are my favorite little Hamiltons?”
That he always remembered our brood of children so tenderly made me ever fonder of him. “Philip can hold whole conversations in French with Alexander and Angelica. I’m quite left out.”
While Jemmy and I chattered, Peggy sighed impatiently. “Is there no formal order to this reception?”
Angelica’s gaze searched the room. “I’m told the president’s levees are very formal. Are we to be announced, or curtsy as in a royal court?”
Madison cringed. “I’m afraid we’re in a wilderness without a single footstep to guide us. And here we are setting an example for the whole world.”
The whole world. I gulped to think that might not be an exaggeration. After all, no one seemed to know what should be proper in a republic. We were all grasping for ways to behave.
When the president first arrived in the city, he’d been mobbed with well-wishers, job seekers, former soldiers, and gawkers of all classes and variety. Now people—if well dressed—were allowed into his mansion on Fridays. Out of respect for his own majesty, when the president went out, he did so in a richly appointed buff carriage, pulled by six gleaming white horses and two drivers in presidential livery. But he also made a point of taking a walk every day at two o’clock, to see and be seen on the streets—which, though cleaner since the war, still echoed with the noise of rattling carts, roaming livestock, and merchants hawking their wares.
We weren’t even sure what to call the president.
Mr. Adams, in what my husband called a fit of madness, had suggested “His Highness, the president of the United States and Protector of their Liberties.” That had been roundly condemned as having the foul stench of monarchy about it. And perhaps because the antifederalists dared not criticize George Washington, they turned their merciless venom on Vice President Adams, addressing him as “His Rotundity” and “The Duke of Braintree.”
Just then, the hall broke into applause when Washington appeared at the front of the room, Adams standing beside him. Before a backdrop of gold stars upon a blue field, the president offered the shortest of possible welcomes, as if he were embarrassed by the attention, then gave a nod that bade the musicians to play.
With the majority of revelers looking on, Washington led a minuet. Alexander turned to me, holding out his hand. “Shall we?”
Finding Angelica and Peggy in animated conversation, I readily accepted, and soon we were moving through the formations. The crowd and low-hanging crystal chandeliers quickly heated the room, and the wax was still warm when it dripped down onto our shoulders from the candles. And I became acutely aware of the envious stares of ladies, all of whom, it seemed, wished to dance with my handsome husband.
They whispered behind their fans, tittered when he came near, and one of his young female admirers was so entranced that she did not notice that one of the chandeliers had set fire to her ornate ostrich feather headdress until one of the president’s aides clapped the feathers in his hands to rescue her.
“Ask Angelica to dance next,” I said to my husband when our set came to an end.
He kissed my hand. “As you wish.”
I’d no more than sipped at a cup of punch when President Washington appeared beside me. “Mrs. Hamilton,” he said, his tone formal as ever.
“Good evening, Your Excellency, and congratulations.”
“May I have the pleasure of this dance?” Washington asked with a little nod.
A most brilliant entertainment indeed! “Oh, it would be an honor.”
The president pulled me into the center of the dance floor and guided us through the figures of the minuet with his characteristic dignity and grace. And all the while I felt the weight of hundreds of gazes—congressmen, cabinet officers, foreign ministers, and those of their wives and daughters—and my conversation with Angelica came rushing back. Had President Washington singled me out because he intended to make my husband one of his cabinet officers? The thought caused me less anxiety than it had before—for, knowing that Washington and his lady were leaving behind their beloved home at Mount Vernon to serve this country again, I could hardly argue that Alexander and I shouldn’t reconcile ourselves to a lesser sacrifice.
When the music ended, the president bowed, and I beamed. Especially as my sisters
