New York City, 1797

Eliza had the carriage bring her into a somewhat seedy part of town. She checked the piece of paper on which she had written the address. It had taken some asking around to find the address, but it was not difficult to track down a woman like Maria Reynolds.
"Stop here, please," she told the coachman.
They pulled up in front of one of the more respectable looking buildings on the street. Eliza knocked on the door. A stout older woman who stank of whiskey and onions opened it.
"I'm looking for Mrs. Reynolds," Eliza told her.
"Second floor, a fifth door down," the woman grumbled.
After climbing up a steep, narrow, creaking staircase and coming to the end of a wide but shallow hallway, Eliza stood in the doorway of Mrs. Reynolds's lodging. A young woman, a few years shy of thirty, opened the door for her.
"Mrs. Reynolds?" Eliza asked.
"Yes, I am she," the young woman answered. Her voice was high and sweet with a babyish lisp, which was either real or affected.
She was very beautiful but in an overblown sort of way: her figure was voluptuous but would probably run to fat later in life and she wore too much rouge. Her fair hair was worn in girlish ringlets which she was at least a decade too old to wear.
"What can I do for you, Madam?" she continued
"I am Mrs. Hamilton."
Maria's face paled with fright and perhaps guilt. Her corset creaked from somewhat labored breathing.
"Oh," was all she could say.
"I've come to bring you some money to help you get out of New York until the heat dies down."
Eliza opened up her reticule and took out a wad of dollar bills. Maria hesitantly reached to take the money.
"I don't know how I could ever thank you. If only more women were was kind and generous as you are. I could have been good if I had been blessed with a man as noble as your husband."
"Save your sob story for someone who cares, Mrs. Reynolds."
Maria was startled by Eliza's harsh tone like a horse used to being beaten, perhaps the latest man she had taken up with was no better than the last.
Eliza found it easy to forgive this woman who she pitied more than anything, so she softened her tone.
"If you would really like to thank me, take the money, leave town and start a new life."

Maria Reynolds eventually divorced her husband James. In a strange twist of fate, her lawyer in her divorce case was Aaron Burr, who would later fatally kill her former lover, Alexander Hamilton, in a duel. After freeing herself from James, she took up Jacob Clingham, James's former partner in crime, who she would later separate from as well.
She put aside her disreputable former life and became a devout Methodist and married to a respectable doctor and enjoyed the love and good-will of all who knew her until her death in 1825