And Monroe—as much as any person still alive—has cause to know just how much that loyalty cost me.
Now Monroe rises up from his bow with the hint of the smile I once found so charming. He clears his throat and begins, haltingly. “It’s been many years since we first met . . .”
Oh, after everything, is he truly appealing to our history?
As if I’ve forgotten. But I haven’t. Not for a moment. Especially not recently, when the approach of the fiftieth anniversary of our independence reminds me daily of how my life has been entwined with the creation of this nation.
Monroe’s, too, I must, in justice, admit.
At the start, I was a general’s daughter and he was a handsome war hero. And now I stare at Monroe, wondering if he still has that bullet lodged in his shoulder, or if a surgeon ever managed to dig it out . . .
But I don’t ask. I don’t say anything. In truth, I take perverse pleasure in the pained yearning I imagine I see upon Monroe’s face as I force him to founder against the wall of my silence. Silence is often the only weapon available to ladies. And I wield mine expertly.
In the thick awkwardness, Monroe clears his throat and continues what seems a rehearsed speech. “Yes, it’s been quite a long time since we met. I find that the lapse of time brings its softening influences. Now we are both nearing the grave, when past differences can be forgiven and forgotten.”
Forgiven and forgotten.
I nearly scoff, but I’m determined to hold my tongue as an act of resistance. After all, despite what Hamilton believed, I am no angel.
But Monroe seems not to realize the war I’m silently waging against him, and his gray eyes are hopeful. Why shouldn’t he be hopeful? Napoleon Bonaparte once said that history is merely a set of lies agreed upon, and I know it would advantage me, and my family, to go along with all the little lies this new nation has agreed upon with regard to Alexander Hamilton. My sons will more easily find advancement if I do. My daughter might be courted by more respectable beaus. I myself might more comfortably mingle in society, if I so please.
All I have to do is surrender to James Monroe’s wish for reconciliation.
And I should. I know that I should. I have every reason to put the past behind me.
But as I stand here, trying to form conciliatory words, I am over aware of my husband’s portrait in its gilded frame, his extraordinary eyes looking down upon me. I turn my head toward the arched entryway, where his ghostly marbled bust has beckoned me, each night, like an intimate and a stranger. And I glance past that, to the doorway of the little green study in which I can still remember him toiling at his mahogany and satinwood cylinder desk, leather-bound books piled high on either side of him, ink smudges upon his hands, his quill scratching and candle burning late into the night.
Forgiven and forgotten.
If I am famous for anything, it’s for being a forgiving woman. And as for the forgetting . . . there are so many things I should like to forget. Forgetting would lift the weighty cloak of the past from my shoulders and make the present so much easier. But memory unalterably sets our compass, and guides us down paths we might have preferred never to have walked at all. And my path goes back all the way to the start. To the fathers of this country who fought and bled beneath a starry banner of red, white, and blue. To the mothers who were the menders, the sewers of flags, the darners of uniforms, the binders of wounds. And, in my case, the quilter of the torn scraps of old paper that remind me why we ever fought in the first place . . .
Part One
A War for Independence
Chapter One
You have called together a host of savages, and turned them loose to scalp our women and children and lay our country waste.
—ANONYMOUS AMERICAN SOLDIER TO BRITISH GENERAL JOHN BURGOYNE
October 17, 1777
The Pastures
Albany, New York
I WAS SOMEONE BEFORE I met Alexander Hamilton.
Not someone famous or important or with a learned philosophical understanding of all that was at stake in our revolution. Not a warrior or a philosopher or statesman.
But I was a patriot.
I was no unformed skein of wool for Hamilton to weave together into any tapestry he wished. That’s important for me to remember now, when every thread of my life has become tangled with everything he was. Important, I think, in sorting out what can be forgiven, to remember my own experiences—the ones filled with my own yearnings that had nothing to do with him.
I was, long before he came into my life, a young woman struggling to understand her place in a changing world. And torn, even then, between loyalty, duty, and honor in the face of betrayal.