I smiled fondly, remembering how shy he’d been in those days. But he seemed far bolder now. “How is it that you’re still unmarried?”
Monroe gave a good-natured shrug. “Well, for one thing, I’m a poor unpaid soldier, having inherited from my father only a small Virginia farm with barren fields turned to dust by tobacco.” Then he looked up at me with those soulful gray eyes, and added, “For another thing, the girl I loved married another man.”
Ordinarily, I was not so vain to have dared imagine that he meant me. Especially since Burr told me Monroe had a sweetheart in Christina Wynkoop, daughter of a Pennsylvania congressman. But the way Monroe now stared at me, blushing to the tips of his ears, made me so uncomfortable that the two of us stood there, like mute blockheads.
Fortunately, we were rescued by a knock at the back door.
It was Theodosia Burr, bundled in a fur-lined cloak. “I thought I saw James Monroe at the end of the street.” As it happened, Theodosia had hosted Monroe when he was in the service of Lord Stirling, so another happy reunion took place in my kitchen. And when Monroe asked her advice on finding a wife in the city, she said, “You’re a congressman, now. An important man of the people. The ladies will flock to you given your accomplishments.”
Monroe gave a belly laugh. “We never accomplish anything in Congress. We couldn’t pass Mr. Jefferson’s Land Ordinance for admitting new states to the Union, because it bans slavery after the year 1800. We couldn’t pass Mr. Jefferson’s proposal to make the dollar a national currency. We can’t agree on a site for our nation’s capital—or even if we are a nation, or a collection of states.”
“Hamilton shares your frustration,” I said, readying the hot water in its pot over the stove. “It’s why he’s not in Congress anymore.”
Monroe raised a brow. “My friend must have changed very much since the war if he is now content with drudgery at the bar while the country slides into disorder.”
“Oh, Colonel Hamilton is never content about anything,” Theodosia replied with an indulgent smile. “He’s never at home. Why, it grieves my poor heart to know how often poor Betsy is left alone.”
Theodosia wasn’t wrong. Even when Alexander was pacing our bedroom, practicing some argument at court, he was somewhere else. But it seemed a shrewish complaint about a man who was striving to provide for me and my children, and I didn’t want Monroe to think badly of him, so I rushed to his defense. “Why, I’m not alone at all. Between fine visitors such as yourselves and my beautiful children, my days are filled. And, honestly, Hamilton wouldn’t be the man I married without his sense of duty.”
Besides, my husband’s work defending Tories had made his law practice thrive. But I didn’t want to explain that to Monroe, who had little cause to know about our financial circumstances or how severely persecuted our neighbors were.
“I’ve heard Hamilton has helped to found a bank,” Monroe said.
I nodded. Amidst all his legal cases, Alexander had written the new bank’s constitution and become actively involved in its organization. “The Bank of New York, just down the street. He hopes to address the derangement of our financial situation in the city.”
“Which reminds me,” Theodosia said, pulling a folded broadsheet from her handbag. “You might wish to show this to Hamilton.”
Inwardly I groaned, not needing to read it to know what it would say, for the New York papers vilified my husband daily for helping the persecuted Tories. He’d built his reputation on heroism but now reaped the bitter seeds of a different sort of fame. And the unfairness of it pained me.
Having seen my father accused of treason, I was acutely sensitive to public censure. And because it set my husband’s temper on edge and fired his combative nature to see his name blackened in the press, it had become my regular practice to burn the papers that came to the house charging him with helping the most abandoned scoundrels in the universe.
I was trying to decide where to hide Theodosia’s paper until I could dispose of it when she eyed the brewing coffee and said, “That’s going to take forever. We should go to a coffeehouse.”
Monroe, who had probably spent all he had to acquire the coffee beans, looked crestfallen. So I ventured forth with, “It’s so cold that I prefer to make coffee at home. And while we’re waiting, let me treat the both of you to some of my homemade waffles,” I said, pulling out the Dutch waffle irons just like Mama’s that she’d given me as a present. “Reuniting with old friends is worthy of celebration.”