We returned to Philadelphia after winter’s frost to find a city that had been entirely savaged by yellow fever. More than five thousand victims—amongst them doctors, clergymen, black freedmen, a former mayor, and members of my Quaker friend’s family. Dolley Todd was now left widowed with a small son, forced to rent her stately three-story brick home on Walnut Street and take up work as a hostess at a boardinghouse to make ends meet.
Despite the slight whiff of scandal that attended Dolley’s new situation, I saw to it that she was welcomed at Lady Washington’s levees, and took food to her whenever I could. Seven months after her husband’s death, when the weather was hot again, I took some freshly made olie koeken to the garden entrance of her boardinghouse and asked, “How are you getting on?”
“I trust in heaven that all will be right,” Dolley said, ignoring the racket her son was making behind her with a copper pot with a wooden spoon. “Thou art kind to think of me when others are less fortunate.”
“You’re my first stop,” I said, motioning to a basket of parcels I intended to deliver to the needy. For in the wake of yellow fever, I’d become convinced that God had spared me for a purpose. Not only to remake my marriage, but also to fulfill a calling.
Long before I met Alexander Hamilton, standing by the grave of my dead baby brother, I’d felt driven to a vocation, if a woman could have such a thing. And so, just as my husband was seeking to disentangle himself from his public calling, I remembered my own and felt the pull of it, stronger than ever.
“I should like to help thee,” Dolley said, inviting me in and pouring us each a cup of coffee while I told her of my charitable plans.
“I’d welcome your help, Dolley. Though I’m sensible that you’re still in mourning.”
Glancing over her shoulder, as if for fear her mother might overhear, Dolley leaned in to confide, “In truth, I’ve an ardent suitor already. ’Tis the custom for a widow to wait, but keen to be wed again, I crave the advice of a woman as sensible as thee.”
Remembering the trial of my own delayed marriage, I knew it was a difficult thing to wait. But still I advised, “You’ll do yourself a great service in the eyes of society to observe the custom.”
“If I was to observe custom, the wait would be eternal,” she said, forlornly. “For my suitor is not of my faith and I shall be shunned if I marry the fellow.”
“Oh, dear.” The churches of my childhood had been Anglican and Dutch Reform. I’d baptized my children at the Episcopal Trinity Church. And having shared services with persons of different faiths, I did not trouble myself with differences of denomination. But the Quakers were much stricter about such things. I sipped at the strong brew as I debated how best to advise her. “Marriage already demands heavy sacrifice. Are you certain your suitor is worthy of it?”
“Oh, he is worthy,” Dolley said a little breathlessly. “I admire him above all other men. He says he dreams of me and burns with such passion for me he that he yearns to relieve his flame!”
“My goodness,” I said, half-convinced she would, in her excitement, run off with this honey-tongued lover by night’s end. Fanning myself against the heat of summer—or perhaps the heat of Dolley’s words, I asked, “Just who is this charming young Romeo?”
Dolley bit her pink lip. “An older gentleman. Decidedly good-looking.”
Several dispossessed but distinguished nobles had recently fled to our shores, so I guessed, “A Frenchman?”
“A Virginian,” Dolley whispered. “Mr. Madison.”
I nearly choked on my coffee. She couldn’t have surprised me more if she’d named a Barbary pirate. “James Madison?”
She nodded in answer, her smile incandescent.
“James Madison, the congressman?”
“The very same,” she chirped.
And truly, in that moment, I knew that love was no respecter of persons or explainable passions whatsoever. For I would scarcely have described little Jemmy Madison, professorial and pale as a parson, as decidedly good-looking, nor imagined him yearning for relief for his flame. And though I was wicked enough to take private amusement in this revelation, I knew I must never tell my husband this gossip or he’d wield it in such merciless mockery that the whole city would be laughing.
“Well,” I said, trying to smother my merriment. “Will you deprive Philadelphia of its last confirmed bachelor, then?”
Dolley weighed the question, staring down at her noisy boy. “In Mr. Madison my little child will have a generous and tender protector. But what a price, to give up one’s faith.”