“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 window onto the now-empty street.
“Alexander, tell me you had nothing to do with these swindlers . . .”
I expected he’d fly into high dudgeon at the mere suggestion. At the very least, he should have turned to shout Good God, woman, is that what you think of me? But instead, to my increasing dread, the man who was almost never at a loss for words still said nothing.
The bottom of my stomach fell away. I could not—would not—believe that my husband would steal from the treasury, for even if he were such a knave, such a blackguard, he was a man of such brilliance and easy financial connections that he could find a thousand untraceable ways to make a fortune. Yet, in the back of my mind, a treasonous thought lingered.