“Oh, no,” I said, wanting him to stop talking. I willed him to stop talking.
But Lafayette was never a man easily silenced. “In America, a mistress is scandal. In France? Expected. In my mind, having nothing to do with my love for my wife. I am certain it was the same for my friend.”
I gasped softly, my stomach clenching at the realization he was defending my husband. And all I could hear was my sister’s words.
All husbands stray.
The memory made me so angry, I snapped, “I am long acquainted with these justifications.”
“You mistake my purpose. I only mean to say that though a man might cause misfortune and pain to his loved ones, he can still love them. I spent five years in a dungeon, convinced I would die there, and yet, I did not actually know what it was to be unhappy until I lost my wife. That is how completely I loved her. My friend Hamilton loved you the same way.”
“You cannot know that.”
“How can I not know how he felt about you after a thousand intimate conversations?” Lafayette shifted toward me. “I am grateful to speak for a man who spoke for me when I was imprisoned and could not speak for myself. But what I say only echoes the voice inside you that already knows from a lifetime of kisses and tender proofs that Hamilton belonged to you. Hear me when I say there was never a person—not a soldier, coquette, or femme fatale—that he ever spoke of with such devotion, or besotted passion, as he spoke of you to me.”
Oh, how dangerous were his words! Believing them would only lead to disappointment. No man could have been devoted to and besotted by me, and taken my sister as a mistress.
Except perhaps for one man, said that accursed inner voice that Lafayette had summoned. Needy, insecure Alexander Hamilton, who could never forgo an impulse or resist the affections he’d been starved of as a child.
And while these thoughts battered me, Lafayette took the liberty of resting his aged hand upon mine. “Maybe it is impossible to forgive. This I understand. But I beg of you remember that our dear Hamilton was not a man to govern his emotions. It was not in his nature. If ever you felt his love, it was real. Because to pretend at hate or friendship or love is possible for some men. But not for Hamilton. For him, impossible.”
This, I couldn’t deny. And Lafayette was, I realized, still a resourceful general. He’d somehow stolen inside my inner fortifications and brought them down. And now my defenses were left in smoldering ruins, leaving me only to retreat. “You are too loyal a friend.”
“I take this for a compliment, madame.”
Sniffing, and remembering a long-ago conversation with Hamilton, I shook my head. “I’m not sure that I meant it as one.”
“Yet, I take it anyway,” Lafayette replied. “Did I not sometimes find myself being angry with Hamilton, making within my heart a ridiculous fight between love and anger, and wishing for him to behave more sensibly? Oui! He was no perfect man. But he was a great one. It is only plain justice that his wife should remember him better. And his country, too.”
Chapter Forty-Two
LAFAYETTE WAS THE Guest of the Nation, and despite my repeated demurs, he was determined to win me to his side.
The general’s campaign began the next morning when Georges delivered to us a handwritten invitation to attend the grand festival at the Castle Garden, along with a gift of a book by Fanny Wright, an advocate for women’s rights and abolitionist school reformer who was traveling in Lafayette’s entourage.
Clasping the book and the invitation with equal delight, Lysbet cried, “Can we go, Mama?”
I didn’t relish the inevitable crowds, but it wouldn’t do for me to be seen holding myself aloof from a celebration of Lafayette to which he’d specifically invited me. Besides, I wanted to make my daughter smile.
But when I told her we could go, her smile fell away. “Oh, but I have nothing to wear . . .”
My Lysbet, who’d never come out properly into society, possessed a wardrobe that consisted entirely of drab workaday calicos and one fancier brocaded gown for church. Her whole life, my Lysbet had patiently forborne the money spent to educate her brothers and the attention paid to her troubled sister. She wasn’t the oldest, or the youngest, and therefore, had often been lost in the shuffle.
But she was the daughter I’d always wished for, and she deserved a ball gown.
It was far too late to employ a seamstress; there wasn’t a tailor or sewing girl in the city not feverishly engaged in last-minute alterations for the forthcoming ball. But inside a very old and neglected trunk, I found a beguiling gown made of blue satin with a golden belt, embroidered in the pattern of a Greek key.
“It was your Aunt Angelica’s,” I said, unwrapping it. It was the gown my sister had worn to our dinner party at the Grange not long before Hamilton’s death and it was now two decades out of style. I’d saved it—even when I’d wanted to burn every token of every person who ever hurt me—because when I’d burned Monroe’s kerchief, it’d seemed almost to do him too much honor.
Nevertheless, I expected that the sight of the dress would pain me deeply, as all reminders of my sister now did. But when my daughter pulled the gown against herself and twirled, a different emotion rose in my breast. For the dress flattered Lysbet to the point of transformation, revealing the natural beauty she usually hid behind seriousness and spectacles.
Instead of pain, I felt nothing but my daughter’s joy.
And that now seemed to be a wonderful gift. One my sister had made possible.
“Oh, but the beadwork and embroidery,” Lysbet suddenly fretted. “It’s too much for a
