Scandalmonger: A Novel Read online

  “You asked to see that note, of course?” said the lawyer.

  He looked uncertainly at Muhlenberg, who nodded encouragement. Clingman reached inside his shirt, took out a small packet of notes, and slid it across the table to the Congressman, who read the top one aloud: “ ‘It is utterly out of my power, I assure you upon my word of honor, to comply with your request. Your note is returned.’ No signature. Well, if Hamilton wrote this, he did the right thing.”

  “But if that handwriting is Hamilton’s,” the lawyer said, “it does prove a certain connection. That’s hardly the way he would turn down a request from a stranger.” Three other cryptic notes, unsigned, were in the packet, with Reynolds’s endorsement “From Sec. Hamilton, Esq.” on them. “We’ll hold on to these, if it’s all right with you, Mr. Clingman.” He asked for Reynolds’s home address and Clingman told him. As the two men prepared to leave, the lawyer said, “What else can you tell us about Mrs. Reynolds? Is she young?”

  “She’s twenty-two, same as me. She comes from a good family, connected to the Livingstons, in New York.” The connection was remote, but the Livingston clan was as powerful as the Clinton family in that state. He hoped they would understand that Maria was not at fault in all this. “She left her parents’ home hurriedly, under trying circumstances, and in her marriage has been much abused.” The clerk said nothing of her fine figger or elegant carriage or the way Maria’s dark blue eyes could quickly fill with tears; all that they could find out for themselves. “Has a daughter named Susan, about five or six years old, a sweet child terrified of her father. The Reynolds family, sirs, is not a happy one.”

  The men from Congress took their seat in the warden’s office, a sullen gray room with a poor painting on the wall of George Washington astride his white horse. James Reynolds was brought to them from his cell.

  “I am Frederick Augustus Muhlenberg, Mr. Reynolds, and this is my colleague in the Congress.”

  “Does your colleague have a name?”

  “I am Senator James Monroe of Virginia. Are you one of the Richmond Reynoldses?”

  “No, I am a New Yorker.”

  “I was misinformed. Are you the man who claims to have a person in high office in his power?”

  Reynolds showed them a sly smile. “Thanks to my associate in high office, who sometimes writes me the most abusive letters, I am getting out of this place tomorrow morning. Under this gentleman’s influence, Comptroller Wolcott had no choice but to find a way to drop my prosecution. It would have embarrassed his superior.”

  “We are interested in examining those letters,” said Muhlenberg.

  “All in good time, perhaps. I will do nothing to prevent my discharge.”

  The Speaker pressed: “Will you meet us tomorrow morning as soon as you are released?”

  “I’d be delighted.” The prisoner added darkly, “And I’ll have much to tell you about a prosecution that was commenced to keep me low, and oppress me, and ultimately to drive me away from this city. But not yet.”

  “Tomorrow, then,” said Muhlenberg, to pin down an elusive witness. “We come to your home at three.”

  “Done.”

  Monroe, less trusting than the Speaker, suspected they had seen the last of James Reynolds. The chicken was likely to fly the coop as soon as the lid was lifted. If Hamilton had taken the chance to get Reynolds out of jail, the brilliant Secretary would not hesitate to get him out of the country before he could tell his tale.

  Seated at a desk in the failing light of the warden’s office, with the stout Speaker looking over his shoulder, Monroe wrote the first draft of a letter to President Washington reporting in detail the interviews just held with Clingman and Reynolds. He thought it important to get the testimony about Hamilton’s perfidy down on paper while it was fresh in his mind. He intended to amend the letter the next day and make a copy to show to Secretary of State Jefferson, in utmost confidence, of course.

  An hour later, with the troubled Muhlenberg in tow—Monroe assumed that the poor fellow must be worrying about how a corruption scandal in the Treasury would dismay his fellow Federalists—he directed the carriage driver to an address on South Fourth Street.

  Monroe sat forward, most of his weight on his feet to absorb the bumps and ruts in the road. He found the port city of Philadelphia close and oppressive; it teemed with 55,000 Pennsylvanians, ten times the population of his native Richmond. In winter, one usually froze; in summer, at night one’s ears were assaulted by the incessant croaking of frogs in the nearby swamps. He was glad to have voted to remove the national capital, eight years hence, to a place at the mouth of the Potomac River.

  Curiously, that compromise on location was Hamilton’s doing. In return for the South’s willingness to let the national government take over all State debts, the Northern Federalists agreed to situate the capital near Virginia. Hamilton won his long-sought centralization of financial power, the basis for national empire; Jefferson won the presence of a new national capital near his home and far from the urban influences of Boston, New York and Philadelphia. Monroe knew that Jefferson and Madison thought the compromise would serve the anti-Federalists well in the long run, but the Virginia Senator was not so sure; Hamilton was dangerous because he understood the use of government power better than most and seemed to enjoy its exercise more than anyone. Like his New York rival Aaron Burr, he was fourteen years younger than Jefferson and would be around a long time.

  The Reynolds house was in a pleasant neighborhood not far from Alexander Hamilton’s home; one could hardly hear the frogs. Monroe stood back and let Muhlenberg rap on the door.

  Maria Reynolds appeared and motioned them to enter as if she expected their visit and was resigned to it. The tall young woman’s blue eyes directly engaged him; on first impression, she struck the Virginian as both capable and vulnerable. Dressed in a high-necked maroon dress with a tight bodice that had been the fashion a few years before, the striking young lady held herself proudly. Monroe presumed from the interview with Clingman that the two were having an illicit romance; if so, he decided, the sallow young man was getting much the better of the bargain.

  He let Muhlenberg take the lead in gaining her confidence. Mrs. Reynolds offered them tea and served it with a relaxed grace that Monroe considered almost Southern. Though the teapot was respectable silver, the earthenware dishes were chipped, the pewter mugs were somewhat battered and the furniture in the modest home was inelegant. A general messiness suggested the presence of a small child and a lack of domestic help. Gentle questioning by the avuncular Congressman from Pennsylvania revealed that she was a Van Der Burgh from New York, related by marriage to the wealthy Livingston clan. Or so she said. Monroe wondered, but did not ask, what could have driven a young lady of such fine bearing and aristocratic attraction to leave home at a tender age and follow the fortunes of a blackguard like Reynolds.

  “We have just come from your husband, who will be free to come home tomorrow,” Monroe informed her. He did not essay a smile. “And we understand that Colonel Hamilton has been a frequent visitor in this house.” He left the impression that the prisoner had told them that.

  “I know,” she said. “A friend of my husband’s observed your visit at the jail and rushed here to tell me to expect two gentlemen from the Congress. I have been instructed to tell you nothing and—more important—to give you nothing.”

  “Ach,” said Muhlenberg, taken aback.

  “But that is not your intent,” said Monroe quickly. He assumed she would not have told them about being forewarned had she not intended to cooperate to some extent.

  “I am reluctant, sir,” the composed young woman replied, “to say anything that would renew Mr. Reynolds’s difficulties with the law.”

  Monroe judged that she expected to be persuaded. “Let me be frank,” said the Virginia Senator, to whom candor did not come easily. “Your husband is not the primary object of our concern. Tell us, as a good citizen, all you can about the visits of Colonel Hamilton
and any written communication your husband may have received from him.”

  She took a deep breath. “My husband sent word to me to burn them and I did.” Monroe instantly doubted that; if letters from Hamilton to her husband existed, it would be in the interest of both Reynoldses to hold on to them. “He said that Colonel Hamilton told him that he would provide us with enough money to leave the country as soon as he was released.” That part, at least, sounded true.

  “The person who came just now with a message from your husband—what else did he tell you, besides to tell us nothing?”

  “He said Mr. Hamilton had enemies who would try to prove he engaged in some speculation, but that he would be shown to be immaculate.”

  “And what did you say?”

  “I said I rather doubted that.”

  Monroe raised his eyebrows. “Why do you doubt it?” When she remained silent, he refined the question, presenting it this time more firmly: “What led you to believe Hamilton would not be ‘immaculate’?”

  She shrugged. “My husband often said he could tell of something that would make the heads of great departments tremble.”

  Muhlenberg put in a question that had not occurred to Monroe. “You say you burned letters to your husband from Hamilton. Did he send any letters directly to you, that you kept?”

  For the first time, Maria Reynolds lost some of her poise. “Colonel Hamilton asked me to destroy those. I did. Last week, in that fireplace.”

  “You would recognize his handwriting, then?” asked Monroe. He lay before her one of the unsigned notes to Reynolds that Muhlenberg and he had taken from Clingman. “This is from Colonel Hamilton, is it not?”

  She glanced at it and nodded.

  “And this one?”

  Maria Reynolds nodded again.

  “But the handwriting on the two notes is not the same, Mrs. Reynolds,” Monroe said, as if puzzled. He thought that he had caught her out in a falsehood, but he did not want to appear the aggressive questioner.

  She showed no surprise, which surprised him. “In the first one, Hamilton tried to disguise his handwriting. He often did that.” She hesitated, appearing to weigh the alternatives of trusting them or not. “I do have a note from Colonel Hamilton that arrived only last week—I haven’t destroyed it yet.” She went to the desk and took a sheet out of the middle drawer. “That’s the Colonel’s normal writing.”

  It was a brief note, dated the sixth of December, offering to be of help to her, and signed boldly “Hamilton.” Muhlenberg reached for it, but Maria Reynolds did not part with it. After denying again that she had any other written communication from the Treasury Secretary, or that any money had been included with that last note, she rose and politely showed them to the door.

  Jacob Clingman had been upstairs in the Reynoldses’ bedroom throughout the interview. When he heard the door close, he raced down and embraced Maria to comfort her. After a few moments, she pushed him away and told him she had shown them the note Hamilton sent her a few days before.

  “Did they ask you about us?”

  She shook her head. “Only about Hamilton and my husband. They showed me the notes you gave them, and I said they were in Hamilton’s writing, sometimes disguised.”

  “Did they ask about any relationship between you and Hamilton?” Clingman knew that the Treasury Secretary had taken advantage of her at least once, over a year ago. She had told him it was during her faithless husband’s pursuit of another woman, when she found herself lonely and destitute, but she had assured him that she yielded to the handsome Hamilton only in a moment of passionate gratitude. Jacob believed her when she said it was a single occasion of moral weakness, not a prolonged affair.

  She sat down. “They did not ask if he and I were lovers. They are gentlemen. They would never presume to inquire into indelicate matters.”

  “If this ever gets into the hands of newsmongers,” Clingman warned her as gently as he could, “everyone will believe the worst.”

  “Jacob, that hateful man I was so foolish to marry when I was fourteen years old,” she said, “now wants me to play the whore. I won’t do that. Not to save him, not for the money I need so desperately, not for anything. I won’t abase myself. I have a daughter—” She took the handkerchief from his breast pocket and covered her eyes.

  Stroking her hair, Clingman asked, “Does Hamilton have letters of yours?”

  “I never wrote him, never had occasion to. After Reynolds and I reconciled, I saw my husband write him often, pleading for money—the Colonel surely has those, if he hasn’t destroyed them. But nothing from me.”

  “Then your reputation is safe. You don’t have to worry.” Clingman assumed she was protected from her husband’s design to have her “play the whore” not only by her own past discretion, but by Hamilton’s interest in keeping their brief amorous encounter secret, lest it bring dishonor to him and shame to his wife and children. It seemed like a safe bet.

  December 18, 1792

  At three the next afternoon, Monroe and Muhlenberg appeared at the Reynolds home to find the freed prisoner had come and gone. Maria Reynolds let them in and said Reynolds told her he was sailing to New Jersey. Her eyes were reddened, but she carried herself bravely. Muhlenberg expressed his indignation at her husband’s deception of the investigators and his abandonment of wife and child. Monroe was unsurprised; in his eyes, Reynolds was a thief.

  Clingman was there and had a useful piece of evidence for them. He said that Reynolds, unaware that his confederate was cooperating with the Congressional investigators, had left a mangled note for him: “Let me read it to you,” Clingman said. “ ‘I hope I have not forfeited your friendship, Jacob . . .’—here three lines were scratched out—‘I will have satisfaction from HIM.’ The ‘him’ is Hamilton, of course. ‘He has offered to furnish me and Mrs. Reynolds with money to carry us off. If I agree to go immediately, he will see that Mrs. Reynolds has money to follow me. That is all I can say till I see you.’ He didn’t sign it, but this is his writing.”

  “What was scratched out?” Muhlenberg asked.

  “He scratched it out, not me,” Clingman said, “so I don’t know. Here’s another note that came to me at home first thing this morning, from Comptroller Wolcott.” The note was on official Treasury stationery, and read, “Mr. Wolcott will be glad to see Mr. Clingman today, at half after ten o’clock.”

  “And did you see him?”

  “Of course, and he took me directly into Colonel Hamilton’s office at Treasury. They wanted to know who I was seeing from the Congress and what was the nature of your questioning.”

  “You told them?”

  “I told the truth, Speaker Muhlenberg. They made it clear they would reopen the proceedings and put me in jail if I didn’t cooperate. I said I went to you—you’re the only one who has helped me in all this, and Colonel Burr, a little. I told them you brought along this gentleman”—he indicated Monroe—“whose name I did not know, and still don’t.”

  Monroe allowed himself a thin smile and did not introduce himself. Let Hamilton wonder who else was on his trail besides the Speaker, a mild Federalist as well as a generous soul, inclined to forgiveness. “What did Hamilton say to that?”

  “He desired me to go into the Gallery, where I could see the Members of the House, and inquire of your name from the bystanders.”

  “Do that,” directed the Senator, who would not be in that chamber. “And when you don’t see me there, report that to Wolcott and his superior. In your meeting this morning, what else did they want to know?”

  “Hamilton wanted—demanded—to know if I turned over any documents. I told him what I gave you, the three. He said I had done very wrong to do that.” The former clerk looked back plaintively at Maria. “I’m caught in the middle.” She put a comforting hand on his shoulder. Monroe sensed that she was in control of whatever they would do.

  “Keep telling us the truth, Jacob,” said Muhlenberg, “it’s the only way you can keep the story straight
in your head.”

  “Now that your husband has fled, Mrs. Reynolds,” said Monroe, “is there anything you think we should know?” Certain that the conspirators would leave the investigators a false story to misdirect them, he was stunned by her answer:

  “My husband told me he was received by Hamilton this morning.”

  Muhlenberg thundered some imprecation in German.

  “Reynolds said that the Treasury Secretary was extremely agitated,” she went on, “walking backward and forward, striking alternately his forehead and his thigh.”

  That detail struck Monroe as having the ring of truth. He had once seen Hamilton agitated, making such gestures unique to him; he remembered thinking it was lucky Hamilton did not carry a riding crop.

  “Colonel Hamilton said he had enemies at work,” Maria Reynolds continued, now at ease with her interrogators, “but he was willing to meet them on fair ground. Then he told my husband not to stay long in his Treasury office in case his presence might be noticed.”

  Monroe asked, “Did Hamilton give him any money, did Reynolds say?”

  “He didn’t say. There were times,” she volunteered, “when Hamilton did give him money—as much as a thousand dollars at a time—but I don’t know about this morning.” She added, more wistfully than bitterly, “He surely didn’t leave any for my daughter and me.”

  Outside, in the carriage, Muhlenberg exploded: “Can you imagine? Hamilton frees this criminal Reynolds and then secretly sends for him. Then the criminal breaks his appointment with us and disappears for good. Hamilton probably gave him hush money. Do you suppose the wife is part of the plot?”

  Monroe thought that Mrs. Reynolds was a charmer who could keep a secret. He also guessed that, as a sensible woman, she had not been inclined to burn any letters that might become useful to her. She was also a disenchanted wife unlikely to follow her reprobate husband out of the country. Maria Reynolds was probably committing adultery with Clingman, and the testimony of both of them had to be evaluated in that light.