Needless to say, the Democratic-Republicans sided with their fellow revolutionaries in France, whether by wearing tricolor emblems, writing fierce articles for the newspapers, or parading in the streets. Of course the Colonel supported the French. He’d always been fond of the French way of thinking, regarding them as the most civilized and intellectual of peoples. He ate French food and drank French wines, purchased French paintings and books, and enjoyed French music. He and Mistress had often spoken French to each other, and he’d insisted that Miss Burr learn the language, too. My ability to speak the language was one of the things he’d always found most beguiling about me as well, and he’d even given our son a French name.
The Federalists were so determined against anything with the taint of the French that they tried to deny a French-speaking congressman from Pennsylvania, Albert Gallatin, from taking his seat. Born in Switzerland, Mr. Gallatin had immigrated many years ago, and had already served in several other political posts. He’d become a good friend of the Colonel, who found him intelligent, educated, and agreeable company. But because his native language was French—and because more importantly he objected to Colonel Hamilton’s financial designs for the country—the Federalists in Congress had declared him to have been in the country for an insufficient time to be considered a true citizen, and that he was therefore ineligible for his elected office.
The Colonel was rightly furious on his friend’s behalf, pointing out that Colonel Hamilton himself had been born on a foreign isle in the Caribbean. He led the Democratic-Republicans defending Mr. Gallatin in congressional debates, his speech being praised for its elegance and logic, but to no avail. In the majority, the Federalists voted against Mr. Gallatin, and stripped him of his seat, thereby violating the rights of the voters who had elected him.
But the entire affair did have the effect of making the Colonel better known, both among those who judged him a champion, a wise and eloquent gentleman, and those who decried him as a deceitful, conniving rogue. His name now appeared often in the newspapers, and in the anonymous broadsides that appeared from nowhere, like mushrooms in the grass after a rainy night.
While I had been in New York tending his dying wife, he had been here, becoming a leader in his party and growing more powerful by the day. I often thought back to the first time I’d met him during the war, when he’d appeared at the Hermitage fresh from an ambush and still spattered with Redcoat blood. He’d been supremely confident and supremely male, his aggression apparent but contained.
Honed and refined and intensified beneath a veneer of refinement, those same qualities remained within him now. I was certain he would be merciless with anyone who crossed him. No wonder he made the Federalists anxious.
I would not wish to be his enemy.
“There is Papa!” cried Miss Burr, her face alight as she spotted the Colonel on the steps of Congress Hall.
“Don’t run,” I said quickly. “You know your father doesn’t wish you to be bold in your manners.”
Visibly she controlled herself, straightening her shoulders and raising her chin, and tamping her excitement into a genteel smile worthy of a lady. It was a remarkable demonstration of restraint for a girl her age, and exactly what her father expected of her.
“Good day, Papa,” she said with a small curtsey. “I trust your day was a pleasant one?”
“Good day to you, Theo,” he said, taking her hand to bow over it. “And to you as well, Mrs. Emmons.”
He smiled warmly at me, as much a greeting as was wise in so public a place, before he turned back to his daughter.
“My day was as pleasant as can be expected, Theo,” he said as we three began to walk slowly toward the City Tavern, where they would dine, while I would return to our lodgings to eat alone; some things had grown more familiar between us, and others had not. “But I commend the progress in your manners, my dear. Agreeable moderation, with spirits neither too high, nor too low, always makes for pleasurable company. Did you complete the translation Mr. Leshlie set for you?”
She nodded, always eager to please him. “The passage from Terence’s Heauton Timorumenos. I writ a fair copy especially for you, Papa.”
“‘Nothing is so difficult but that it may be found out by seeking, ’” I said, repeating the translated line that she’d labored to perfect through much of the afternoon.
He glanced up at me and grinned with delight. “‘Nil tam difficile est quin quaerendo investigari possit.’”
“Exactly so, sir,” I said, and smiled, too. To be sure, that was the sum of my Latin. I knew that the Colonel had a special weakness for learning in women, and I’d been hoping all afternoon that I’d find a way to repeat that scrap of Miss Burr’s lesson to surprise him.
“Did you bid farewell to Colonel Monroe today, Papa?” Miss Burr asked.
“I did,” her father said. “He sends you his regards, and Mrs. Monroe said she would be sure to bring you a special remembrance from Paris.”
President Washington had recently appointed Colonel Monroe the new Ambassador to France, and he and Mrs. Monroe were leaving Philadelphia to take their passage across the ocean from New York. The Monroes had long been acquaintances of the Burrs. Colonel Monroe had been another of the young officers among Mistress’s admirers at the Hermitage during the war, and although he was a Virginian, his wife was from the City of New York. More recently the two gentlemen had been drawn closer together as political allies in Congress.
“Bartow said he would bring me a dozen French novels,” Miss Burr said. Her stepbrother Bartow Prevost, now twenty-six, was joining Colonel Monroe as his private secretary, a post arranged by his stepfather and an enviable adventure for any young gentleman.
“Only after I’ve read the books first,” the Colonel warned. “There’s a wide assortment of French novels, and I’m not certain that Bartow will know which are suitable for you as a lady.”
“He would. He knows my tastes.” She sighed with obvious longing. “How I wished you’d been named ambassador instead, Papa, so we could all go to Paris together.”
“If I had, you would not be joining Bartow and me,” he said. “Paris is too dangerous at present for little girls such as yourself. But I am certain that before long the French will return to their senses, and then I promise you I shall take you myself.”
She nodded with excitement, then caught herself. “I thank you, Papa. I shall be honored to accompany you.”
“One day, my dear,” he repeated his promise. “For now I’ll have my hands full with everything that Colonel Monroe has left behind for me in Congress.”
“I’m sure you’ll be equal to it, sir,” I said. “Either you possess twice the energy of Colonel Monroe, else he has but half of yours.”
He smiled, but didn’t laugh as I’d expected. “Oh, Monroe shall find it easier to contend with Jacobins than Federalists,” he said with a forced lightness, and a quick glance to me before he returned the conversation to his daughter. “This evening truly does put me into mind of summer. Tell me, Theo, do you think the roses we planted last summer at Richmond Hill will have blossomed by now?”
I understood. There was more he’d tell me later, once Miss Burr was asleep and we were alone.
He did, too, in the narrow bed of his lodgings.
“I expect to be reviled for my convictions, Mary.” He lay beside me, his head pillowed beneath his clasped hands, a posture I’d learned he often took when making declarations. “It is part of the game of politics. I always presume that my friends will treat as false everything that is said of me, which ought not to be true. The darts aimed at my appearance, my history, my morality, and my acuity are of no consequence to me. The larger my role becomes on this particular stage, the larger a target I must appear as well.”
I curled beside him, my cheek resting on my palm and my hair loose around me. These kinds of conversations reminded me of how we’d first talked together long ago in Mistress’s kitchen, of how he’d encourage me to speak my thoughts and t
hen listen to what I’d said. If the Colonel chose to entrust me with his confidences, what more private place could there be than here in his bed?
“You shouldn’t be called a traitor on account of supporting the French, sir,” I said, thinking of a recent tirade I’d read in the Philadelphia newspaper supported by the Federalists. “You’re not a Jacobin.”
“Oh, that’s all carefully calculated to increase the public fears,” he said. “If they can raise enough of a racket about godless Jacobins ready to swarm like locusts into every port, ready to murder, rape, and steal, then they hope the people won’t take notice of how they’re letting the British destroy our shipping and kidnap our sailors. But the people are not fools, Mary. The people know lies when they hear them.”
“I fear there are plenty who do not, sir,” I said. “I heard from a cook at the market that her master had forbidden her to serve any French dishes at his table because it was treasonous to do so, and another woman told me that her landlord now refuses to grant lodgings to any French refugees, from fear that they will burn down his establishment.”
The Colonel grunted with disgust. “What ridiculous rubbish,” he said. “Fearmongering and bigotry should have no place in this country. I expect you to bring French dishes to table as often as you please.”
I laughed softly. “I will not do so because of politics, sir, but because the French dishes please you.”
“Ah, Mary, you do know what pleases me, don’t you?” Gently he pulled me down to kiss, my hair falling around us both. Afterward I rested familiarly upon his chest, a place that it pleased me to be.
“You know you frighten them, sir,” I said. “Otherwise they wouldn’t bother to attack you as much as they do.”
“They may do that as much as they wish,” he said. “My skin is as tough as it comes. But they’ve no right attacking my daughter with me.”
I frowned. “I didn’t see that,” I said. “Where? When? Oh, sir, how dare they say a word against Miss Burr!”
“But they did,” he said grimly. “At least one of them did, in doggerel verse. They slandered my Theo on account of her learning and called her unnatural for it, knowing full well that her education is by my design. To challenge the author or even acknowledge his venom would be exactly what the villains wish, but we must make sure Theo never sees it.”
“Of course, sir,” I said. “But who would dare write such cruelty?”
He sighed, stroking my hair back from my face with his fingers. “Oh, I’ve an idea of who was behind it, because he’s behind most of these attacks in the press. It’s Hamilton.”
I should have been surprised, but I wasn’t. As Secretary of the Treasury, he should have been above such mischief, yet he seemed to be unable to resist.
“Who else could it be?” the Colonel continued. “He’s been doing it for years, slyly planting all manner of lies and tales about me. My old friend Bob Troup has sunk much in his ways, and often acts as his toady. I’m sure Hamilton has convinced himself that he possesses a score of reasons to assault me in print. The one he won’t admit, of course, is that he fears I have become far too popular for his liking in New York, and that I’m a threat to his own power. That’s an unpleasant truth for him.”
“I told you that you frightened the Federalists, sir,” I said. “Or at least him.”
“Wise Mary,” he said, his hand sliding familiarly up and down my bare back. “I once heard that he’d claimed his railing against me was a religious obligation, as if I were some devil who must be destroyed for the good of the country.”
“He’s a fine one to talk, sir,” I said, indignant on his behalf. “I don’t recall often seeing him in Sunday attendance at Trinity. His wife and children, yes, but not Colonel Hamilton himself.”
“I can only imagine the pleas that poor, pious Eliza must make to her husband about the state of his errant soul.” He smiled, doubtless picturing exactly that. “Likely the man was too busy at home composing another scurrilous account of me to spread through his network.”
But all this talk of Colonel Hamilton and his whispered slanders made me feel uneasy and vulnerable. It was one thing for the Colonel to dismiss the rumors about him as beyond his notice, but another entirely for me and my children, who could well find ourselves at the very heart of similar attacks.
“You say that Colonel Hamilton has slandered you for your morality, too,” I asked carefully. “What if he were to learn of our—our friendship?”
“Not again, Mary,” he said, more teasing than perturbed. “How many times must I tell you not to worry? The rumors that have fluttered about me have been the usual concoctions, linking me to a French dancer here or a brothel keeper there, and every one of them lies. Not once have they hinted at you.”
I was taken aback by that. I had never considered that there might be other women besides me in his life and his bed. There was no doubt that he was a man of fierce appetites, and the longer I thought, the more likely it seemed. He’d denied it, of course, as he denied most everything. But why else would he mention it now if there wasn’t some grain of truth to the rumors?
“You and I have been beyond discretion,” he continued, “and always have been. I do not want you fretting over nothing.”
“I wish I shared your conviction, sir,” I said, tracing little circles with my fingers through the hair upon his chest. I must try not to fret over those other mysterious women, either. I’d no right to be jealous, especially since, as he said, they might not even exist. “I do not want to be the reason your career is ruined.”
“Even if Hamilton were to learn of us, I doubt he’d ever make use of the knowledge,” he said. “Do you recall me handling the divorce of a young woman named Mrs. Reynolds?”
I shook my head. “You handle so many divorces, sir, that I cannot begin to keep them straight. You’ve never been able to resist a lady in legal distress.”
He chuckled. “The ones who come to me are often in need of a knight to save them,” he said. “Mariah Reynolds was among those in the very deepest distress. She’d a worthless, faithless husband who beat her, refused to support her, and acted as her pimp in a clumsy blackmailing scheme. Madison was the first to tell me of the whole sordid affair, and Mrs. Reynolds supplied the details.”
“Poor Mrs. Reynolds.” This did in fact sound more sordid than his usual divorce cases, and I could not think of another where the husband had treated his wife so ill. “Did you ever learn the name of the gentleman her husband blackmailed?”
“He’s the point of this entire tale,” he said. “It’s Hamilton.”
I caught my breath. I couldn’t have predicted that, not at all. “Yet he dares to lecture you upon morality?”
“Exactly so,” he said. “It seems that Mr. Secretary was eager enough to go rutting with Mrs. Reynolds while his family was away in Albany. The payments he made to Reynolds to keep quiet about it were discovered and brought to the attention of Monroe and several others. They believed the payments indicated financial impropriety. Hamilton assured them that he was only being blackmailed by the husband of his inamorata, his political reputation apparently more dear to him than his poor wife’s love and trust.”
I remembered Mrs. Hamilton well, not only from the early dinners that she’d attended as guests of the Burrs, but also from various gatherings that her children had attended with Miss Burr in New York, when they’d all been neighbors. She’d always been kind to Miss Burr and to me as well, recalling my name and asking me how I did, a rarity among fine women.
It saddened me to think of such a pleasant lady betrayed by her husband, but then I’d also pitied Mrs. Reynolds, who’d been forced into the affair by her own husband. Behind the smirking scandal were two women who’d suffered grievously because of the base desires of men.
“Hamilton should have thanked me for closing that particular door for him,” the Colonel continued. “The former Mrs. Reynolds is now divorced and safely removed from his sphere and living with another man, in Virgi
nia, I believe. At least her daughter was spared. Perhaps now the girl has an opportunity for the virtuous life denied her mother.”
“Mrs. Reynolds has a daughter, sir?” I was sorry to hear that there was a child caught in the intrigues of her parents; the Hamiltons also had a half dozen children, and the ones who were old enough to comprehend the scandal were doubtless suffering along with their mother.
He nodded. “The Reynolds girl is a sweet-faced child named Susan, about Theo’s age,” he said. “I persuaded her mother to give her over to me as her ward. It was an easy decision to place the girl in the care of a family in Boston, where she will attend school and learn a trade. I determined it would be for the best, given the general slatternly ways of her mother.”
To me this didn’t sound as if it were for the best, and it troubled me as well. The Colonel knew how to arrange the law to follow his purposes. No man was more adroit in a courtroom, which was why he’d always more cases than he could handle. If he’d been the one to determine that Mrs. Reynolds’s daughter must be separated from her mother and sent far away, then he would also have made sure legally that her “slatternly” mother would have no further contact with her daughter.
Uneasily I thought of Louisa and Jean-Pierre in New York. Now that we’d all been given our freedom, I’d always believed the Colonel would have no further power over them. They were my children, in my care. There existed no document to prove that he was their father. He’d always been careful about that, given how wary he was about committing anything to paper and pen.
But what if the time came when he decided that he knew better than I what was right for my children? I could never rival him in a courtroom, nor could I find another attorney in New York who’d dare go against him. In a way, I was no more secure than when I’d still belonged to Mistress and she’d had the power to keep or sell my children as it pleased her. The sooner I could take us all from New York and from his influence, the better.
The Secret Wife of Aaron Burr Page 46