“Don’t answer,” I said, hurriedly telling him what I’d seen.
“I’m sure it’s nothing,” he replied, retrieving a pistol—one I hadn’t guessed he kept in a drawer by the bed until that very moment. “But I will be cautious.”
I stood at the landing, listening as he made some low murmuring answer to the woman at the door, sending her away. But when he didn’t come back up, I went down to find him seated on the bottom stair, his head in his hands.
I went to him, filled with dread. “What is it? What’s happened?” I took his hand. That’s when I realized he was cold, his fingers gone to ice, and given his obvious torment, I could do nothing but guess. Good news did not come in the dead of night.
Remembering how learning of John Laurens’s death had so devastated Alexander, I could only imagine the news was of a similar nature now. So I feared it was Lafayette, another brother-at-arms, who last we’d heard, awaited execution in a prison. Contrary to Mr. Jefferson’s sunny predictions, the French Revolution had taken a very dark turn. A political faction calling themselves Jacobins had somehow seized the reins of government, arrested the French king, and condemned Lafayette as a traitor. Our French friend had fled France but had been captured and imprisoned in neighboring Austria, last we heard.
“Is he dead?” I asked, my throat tightening with emotion as I knelt beside my husband, preparing for bitter grief. For a time, it had seemed as if we could save Lafayette. My husband supported the president’s effort to formally request Lafayette’s release. Our ambassadors—William Short and Gouverneur Morris—tried to negotiate his freedom. In London, Angelica recruited rescuers to break Lafayette out of prison. Even Secretary Jefferson discovered a loophole by which payment for Lafayette’s war service could be sent for the upkeep of his family. Lafayette was the one thing all American factions agreed upon, but now I feared all efforts to save him had failed. “Has he been executed?”
“Who?” Alexander asked, blankly.
“The marquis,” I said, as much bewildered as relieved. “Have you received news?”
“Bad news,” he said. “But not of Lafayette. There is something I must tell you, my angel.” I nodded, steeling myself, even as relief flooded through me that it was no bad news about our friend, and I hoped he still survived. “There’s been a fraud in the Treasury Department involving stolen war pensions.”
I let out a breath, for it was merely a government matter, though why such a thing would be communicated in the mid-night and by a woman at that, I couldn’t imagine. “How terrible. I hope the culprits may be prosecuted to the full extent.”
“They won’t be,” Alexander replied, his voice now as shaky as his hands. “Three of Mr. Jefferson’s partisans have, as a consequence of this, begun an investigation into my conduct.”
“Your conduct?” I asked, stunned. My husband’s gaze fell away. He tried to speak, but from that notoriously eloquent mouth, came naught but silence. In the hurry to put together a Treasury Department, my husband had trusted the wrong people. His former assistant had only recently been thrown into debtors’ prison for speculation schemes, setting off a financial panic. Now, some corrupt clerk had stolen government documents right under Alexander’s nose. “They’re going to blame you.”
Hamilton glanced at me, then away again. “They’ll blame me for the fraud and for anything else they can lay at my doorstep. Speculation. Corruption. These are the charges.” Suddenly my husband leaped to his feet, pacing, while I tried to rub the chill from my arms. “And Jefferson’s paper once called me a cowardly assassin who strikes in the night!”
I thought to quiet him so as not to wake the children, but it was better to see him angry than anguished. Better by far. My husband was quite possibly the most combative man I knew, and if he was ready to fight, he would win. “Have a word with Madison,” I suggested. “Whatever your disagreements, he knows your character and—”
“Madison is my personal and political enemy now,” Alexander insisted. “To think I once mistook him as being naive, but incorruptible. The sort of man who has so many slaves at his beck and call that he’s seldom had to so much as wipe himself clean in the privy.”
“That’s hardly fair,” I said. I knew he was angry with Madison; I was, too. But I didn’t want to believe we were enemies.
“Isn’t it? Madison has fallen entirely under the spell of Jefferson’s utopian philosophies. Either that, or Madison has always been a facile, deceitful little man. He won’t help me.”
At a loss as to what else to do, I followed my husband into his study, where broken feather pens littered his desk and an untidy stack of books made me feel a neglectful housekeeper. My hands to my face, I shook my head. “Alexander, none of this makes any sense. Why would a woman come to the house in the middle of the night to tell you this?”
On a groan, he braced against the top of his desk. “They must have believed it was the only way I’d open the door.”
I heard what he said, but his explanation only added to my confusion. “But why would they use a woman to communicate the charges? Who are these investigators?”
“Monroe is one,” Hamilton answered, bitterly.
Well, that was some good news. Whatever the other Virginians might do, Monroe had fought in the war beside my husband. “He’ll exonerate you when he finds no evidence of wrongdoing. He might chastise you for hiring scoundrels, but he’ll see you’re not guilty.”
Guilty. That word made my husband wince. Why should that be? He wasn’t guilty. He couldn’t be guilty. Not my honorable husband. He could never be involved in a scheme to cheat soldiers’ families and defraud the treasury. And yet, he stared bleakly out the frosted
