Excerpt from Scandalmonger by William Safire, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

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.

Copyright William Safire February 2000. All rights reserved. Reproduced with the permission of the publisher, Simon & Schuster