*
LIKE A SENTINEL who’d forgotten his duty, I startled awake. Round with a child that often awakened me in the night by kicking in eagerness to be out into the world, I was now prone to nap in the heat of the day. This time in a rocking chair on my porch while shucking peas, lulled to sleep by the sound of Ana practicing at the piano while Fanny sketched with charcoal beside me.
But now everything was silent but for the buzzing of a few lazy bees, and Fanny was nowhere to be seen. Only my husband, who stood, staring, not three feet away, his brow furrowed, his hands deep in his pockets.
Disoriented, I squinted against the blazing sun, then pushed myself up, but Alexander stopped me. “No, my darling, don’t get up. I didn’t mean to wake you.”
Still, a mother can never be comforted by quiet; noisy little ones were much less likely to be up to mischief. “But the children—”
“They’re at your sister’s house for the night. I had Philip take them.” The flatness of his voice told me something was amiss. My husband could, in a courtroom, exhibit a hundred different expressions from anger to sympathy to joy. His blank, haggard expression made me go hollow inside, even before he said, “There is something I must tell you, my angel.”
My mouth went instantly dry.
For I remembered the last time he said, There is something I must tell you, my angel.
And I was sure that he remembered it, too. “I am usually a man who knows the right thing to do. But today . . .” He sighed. “I’m at a loss. I thought to shield you from this, but I don’t wish for you to be taken unawares. Especially not in your condition.”
“Tell me.” I stiffened, wondering, traitorously, if he was going to confess another mistress. I hated myself for that.
“You know of the newspaperman James Callender?” I nodded, because that vile Jacobin scandalmonger had been the source of too many libels to count. “He’s published a pamphlet dredging up the old accusations of my supposed corruption at the treasury.”
I blew out a cautious breath. “A thing for which you’ve been exonerated at least three times over by my count.”
“He is also exposing my connection to Mrs. Reynolds.”
Connection.
The euphemism was a blow. And just like that, the fragile foundation I’d rebuilt myself upon began to fracture. I could almost hear the crack. I’d thought this all done and buried. Now, someone had resurrected it. Resurrected her. Maria.
I’d always worried that the secret might come out. That Aaron Burr might blurt it drunkenly at a dinner party. That the harlot herself might whisper it on the pillow of whatever man she was bedding now. But I’d imagined only whispers. Never that anyone would be depraved enough to print it.
“What does the newspaperman know?” What could he know, after all?
“Everything,” Alexander replied, quietly. “Callender has copies of letters exchanged between us.”
Letters? I’d somehow never understood that my husband had done more than go to bed with this woman. He wrote to her. Were they love letters? Letters like the ones he’d written to me when we were courting?
I didn’t ask. Truthfully, in that moment, I didn’t want to know the answer. What I wanted, most of all, in the face of this humiliation, was to hold on to calm dignity. “She sold her correspondence,” I guessed.
Alexander shook his head. “No. These are the letters I provided to James Monroe. He’s leaked them.”
Monroe? My first thought was that I must’ve misheard. Of all the friends with whom we’d parted for political reasons, Monroe was the most upright and honorable. He was a gentleman; I could scarcely credit that he would trade in such filth. My second thought was that, years ago, he’d promised to protect my honor. And my third was that it wasn’t even possible, because Monroe had been serving as our minister to France. “He isn’t even in the country.”
“The president revoked his credentials and recalled him. He’s just returned to our shores. And, no doubt, straightaway conspired with Jefferson’s loathsome faction. He’s given the newspapers every scrap of evidence he promised to keep confidential.”
I could make no sense of this. “But Monroe gave me his word of honor to keep quiet about this affair.”
At this, my husband glanced at me, then again, plainly startled. “You discussed it with him?”
Under my husband’s stunned scrutiny, I reminded him exactly how such conversation came about. “Yes. On the night the investigators came to the house.”