With a deep, calming breath, I started again. “Mr. Monroe, the scurrilous newspapermen will say what they will. The whispers I shall have to bear. But when you investigated my husband for corruption, you were convinced of his innocence, were you not?”
Monroe nodded, though I sensed reluctance. “Your husband’s explanation of how he was extorted removed our suspicions of his being connected with Mr. Reynolds in speculation.”
Relieved, I smiled at him. “If you will only say as much—if you will give a sworn statement for the public, then you will relieve my husband of the necessity of a defense—the extreme delicacy of which will be very disagreeable to me.”
Monroe turned, strode a few paces, then returned, his voice gentler, a little warmer. “Trust that I regret the publication of these papers—but trust, too, that dragging me into it will draw more public attention to it and make it a matter of even greater consequence. It will not help.”
An easy thing for him to say, I thought. “Still, we should like the option. And as you’ve been the inadvertent cause of this business, it’s incumbent upon you as a man of honor and sensibility to come forward in a manner that would shield me.”
I didn’t hesitate to appeal to his honor now. But again, I shouldn’t have, because his eyes flew wide. “I am the cause of this business? Oh no, madam. It was the scoundrel to whom you pledged your troth who exposed you to this. Not me.”
Scoundrel. A word that betrayed utter contempt. The sort of word that could start a duel. The word was nearly a slap to my cheek. And perhaps I needed a good slap to bring me to my senses.
“Are you enjoying having me at your mercy, a damsel in distress?” I asked. “Do you wish for me to beg?”
Monroe pinched at the bridge of his nose. “Good God, I could never enjoy causing you distress.”
“But if I’m a casualty of your partisan revenge, it doesn’t trouble you?”
“That’s not the way of it. In truth, I have no desire to persecute your husband, though he justly merits it.”
“Does he?” I asked, bristling. The offense Alexander committed was against me. What right did Monroe have to judge him? “He’s innocent of the charges that Mr. Jefferson’s faction lay at his feet.”
“Not according to the latest tale told by Mr. Reynolds.”
A flash of rage burned through me at the implication that my husband’s word should weigh no more than that of a low-bred villain who played the pimp for his own wife. That my brilliant husband stood upon the same footing as this insignificant little fraud . . .
A champion of equality might see it that way, but that wasn’t why Monroe put my husband into the same category. It was because Monroe considered himself a member of a club to which a bastard-born foreigner might never truly be admitted, no matter his merits and talent. James Monroe was born on the right side of the blanket, with a speck of dirt in Virginia to call his own, and he thought that made him better.
“My husband is not capable of corruption.”
Monroe stared as if he couldn’t quite believe a woman would challenge him this way. “I presume you didn’t know he was capable of adultery, either. I wish the public might behold in Hamilton that immaculate purity to which he pretends. But, my lady, we both know he pretends. And even if I were tempted by your friendship to say otherwise, I have other friends to whom I am obligated.”
“Other friends? Mr. Jefferson, I presume.”
He didn’t answer, and he didn’t have to. For partisan politics had become so strident and divisive that even someone as honorable as James Monroe refused to do what was right because it would cost him politically. He didn’t want to offend Jefferson. He couldn’t afford to offend Jefferson.
The thought of such craven calculation made me angry enough to spit. And perhaps a little petty, too. “Do you know, Mr. Monroe, that I’ve always dismissed the gossip that you were in Jefferson’s thrall? I was foolish enough to defend you when Federalist ladies said that it’s to Jefferson that you owe the whole of your advancement. And that you and Madison vie for his approval like royal courtiers.”
Monroe stiffened. “I’m afraid the hour grows late and our interview must come to an end.”
I was not finished. “I refused to believe that while my husband suffered yellow fever, you sat at a table and toasted to my husband’s speedy demise.”
“I did not join in that toast,” Monroe snapped.
My heart sank, because I’d never truly believed the toast took place at all. Now, at his admission, the flame of rage scorched my cheeks, and where I would normally restrain myself, my voice boomed low like a cannon. “It seems I have been very mistaken about you, or you have changed very much. Because the James Monroe I thought I knew, the Hero of Trenton, was not the sort to sit back in cowardice and allow such a toast to be made in his presence.”