Page 43 of My Dear Hamilton
Chapter Forty-One
September 1824
New York City
M AMA, WE HAVE a visitor!” Lysbet whispered loudly from outside my office door at the orphanage. I peered up from the account books I kept as the society’s First Directress, my hand cramped around a quill after hours of recording and resolving the entries.
At nearly twenty-five, Lysbet had declared herself a spinster, quite contentedly on the shelf, which was why she often assisted my work at the orphanage’s Bank Street headquarters, where there were now beds for two hundred of the city’s neediest children.
Lysbet reminded me of myself when I was about her age, convinced that I, too, would be a spinster. But more than me, she still resembled a more subtle Angelica, except for her unadorned hair and the spectacles she wore upon her nose whenever it was buried in a book—which was often. Lysbet was a serious and sensible young woman, without girlish caprice, so I couldn’t fathom her excitement as she hovered in the doorway, positively vibrating with giddiness.
“What visitor?” I asked, not remembering any appointments.
“See for yourself,” Lysbet said, stepping aside to reveal two distinguished-looking gentlemen. One, a middle-aged Frenchman.
The other, the last living general of the revolutionary war...
I rushed to my feet, and the familiar sight of him filled my eyes with tears.
Though I’d never seen the Marquis de Lafayette out of uniform before, he was instantly recognizable to me as a hero of a bygone age. And as my friend. Stouter than I remembered, and bent with age and whatever torments he’d suffered all those years he was held in a dungeon during the French Revolution, but still the slope of that forehead and that patrician nose were unmistakable.
“Madame Hamilton,” Lafayette said, making a formal bow with cane and top hat in hand.
“General Lafayette,” I whispered, rounding the desk. And that’s when I realized the taller man at his side was his son. “ Georges ?”
Georges smiled and stepped forward swiftly to kiss my cheeks. “How it fills my heart to see you again. I’ve never forgotten what you did for me all those years ago, when I was in hiding.” He ducked his chin, as if he couldn’t say more without being unmanned.
On instinct, my hands went to his cheeks as if he were still a boy. But in truth, his hair was shot through with silver, and I couldn’t help but think that my Philip would’ve been about his age now, if he’d lived.
Perhaps Lafayette was thinking this, too, because the general spoke to me in consolation for my losses and I returned mine for his. And finally remembering the rest of my manners, I presented my Lysbet, who tittered like such a flibbertigibbet, one might think she’d never met a general before.
But, of course, Lafayette was no mere general. The entire country was poised to give him a hero’s welcome with toasts and spectacles in honor of the forthcoming fiftieth anniversary of the revolution. It was said that in all America there wasn’t a heart that didn’t beat with joy and gratitude at the sound of Lafayette’s name.
Certainly my heart did.
Already the city of New York had greeted him with booming cannons due a conquering hero. Which was quite possibly why Lysbet nearly swooned when Lafayette kissed her hand.
“Mademoiselle Hamilton,” he said to my daughter, his world-weary, haggard eyes crinkling at the corners with his smile. “You must not be shy. Your father was more than friend to me, he was a brother. We were both very young when our friendship formed in days of peril and glory, but it suffered no diminution from time. So you must think of yourself as family to me.”
The enormity of this statement, if only for what it meant to Lysbet, melted my heart.
“And you, madame, ” he said, turning to me. “ You are my sister, and were before you ever met your husband, oui ?”
It was a touching sentiment. One that recalled to me long-ago days in Albany. And though I had brothers of my own, by blood and marriage, I couldn’t help but return it. “I remember, and feel the same.”
So it shamed me when he nodded and said, “I worried for your health when I did not see you at the welcoming parade. Georges told me no esteemed woman of sense would jostle with a New York crowd in this heat. Mon Dieu, this heat. ” Lafayette dabbed at the sweat on his forehead. “But I could not be satisfied of your well-being until I set eyes upon you, myself. As I wished to learn more about your charity work, I tracked you down here.”
I flushed at the shabby state of my crowded little office, with its decades-old desk and sagging bookshelves, but even more so because I hadn’t been invited to the official celebrations by the Republicans who now held power in government. Given how shamelessly they claimed the mantle of patriotism all for themselves, my presence would have been an inconvenient reminder to everyone of my husband. Or perhaps they’d simply forgotten me as they’d forgotten him.
But Lafayette hadn’t forgotten.
And I feared I’d given offense. But before I could offer words that might make up for my absence, Lafayette shook his head. “I hope you do not think to apologize. Especially since I wish to impose upon you for something,” he said, a sly twinkle in his eye.
“By all means,” I said, gesturing at the chair. “Shall we sit?” I was pained to see him leaning so heavily on his cane as he lowered himself into the rickety seat. “Lysbet, perhaps our guests would enjoy some lemonade?”
The men exclaimed their thanks, stirring my daughter from where she still stood, riveted at the door. “Oh, right away.”
“I’ll help you,” Georges said, like the good, dutiful boy he’d always been.
“What can I do for you?” I asked Lafayette, aware of the flurry of people suddenly finding reason to pass my office door. The matron of the orphanage, checking the lock on the kitchen larder. Our cook, grabbing a broom from the hall closet. A little girl, not at school because she was sick, peeking down from the stairs.
Lafayette winked at the child, and she scampered away with a delighted giggle. “I am called to America by President Monroe to witness the immense improvements and the prosperity of these happy United States, so I can report back to the world that they reflect the light of a far superior political civilization.”
Though almost everyone who met Monroe in his younger days had dismissed him for a lackwit, I’d been right about him in at least one respect. There was always, always, more to James Monroe than met the eye. And he’d proven, as president, to be more of a master of national propaganda than any of his predecessors. He’d somehow persuaded the nation that the War of 1812 had been a glorious victory instead of a humiliating stalemate. And now, to drum up support for his new doctrine of superiority in the hemisphere, he presented himself as the last founder of our country.
If he could somehow wrap himself in Lafayette’s glory and portray southern slave owners as virtuous guardians of liberty, so much the better.
But our French hero still maintained an independent mind. “I wish to see more than what is on my official itinerary here in New York. I should like you to reveal to me the true United States. What must I see?”
“Me?” I was most assuredly not part of Monroe’s plans for this visit, the realization of which made me instantly intrigued.
“Indeed. For while I feel an inexpressible delight in the progress of every thing that is noble-minded, honorable, and useful throughout the United States, I will not look away from the flaws. And, in particular, the status of the Negro raises a sigh, or a blush, according to the company. The measure of a country is, for me, not to be found in prosperity, but in a virtuous resistance to oppression. Even as President Monroe’s guest, I will not miss an occasion to raise the question of slavery and defend the rights of all men. Which is why I presume upon you.”
My heart beat in sudden excitement that there remained amongst us a patriot willing to stand against Virginian hypocrisy. “I... I will do whatever is in my power if you should name it.”
Lafayette smiled. “I wish to know more about your work here and at the Free School for Young Africans that your husband and the Manumission Society founded for poor children of former slaves. In fact, I would like to tour both with you as my guide.”
My work .
During the War of 1812, I’d been too tired to fight for the country anymore. I’d decided that I’d fight only for my children. And for the hundreds of orphans who depended on me. For whatever I had, or had not been, to Alexander Hamilton, my maker had pointed out a duty to me and given me the ability and inclination to perform it.
My husband had a gift for government, but I had a gift for charity. A talent for it, if there be such a thing. I’d already helped to found a society to care for widows, an orphanage to shelter children, and a school to provide guidance and learning. There was not an aspect of the management for any of these endeavors with which I wasn’t intimately acquainted. I laid cornerstones, raised money, rented property, made visits to the needy, nursed the sick, procured coal, food, shoes, and Bibles. I kept account books, wrote charters, and lobbied legislatures.
How gratifying that Lafayette should appreciate all that and treat me as a person of moral consequence. A warmth stole through me at the flattering notion that he felt I could guide him in seeing the true America. But for the recognition of my calling, I felt more honored than I could ever remember being. More energized, too, as if remembering myself after a long slumber.
***
“ M ARQUIS, MAY I present to you our instructors and students,” I said, introducing him to the gathered ladies and rows of smiling public school children at the African Free School, all wearing Lafayette badges made of satin ribbon, each straining to catch a glimpse of the great man. Our tour of the orphanage had been short but had allowed me to send someone ahead to prepare the school administrators for this little assembly. And that someone was Mrs. Fanny Anthill Tappan—my adoptive daughter, now returned to New York all grown and happy with a husband and children of her own. For years now, it’d been a balm to have Fanny in my busy life again, and her eagerness to assist in my charitable work filled me with pride.
Bracing upon his cane, Lafayette kissed both of Fanny’s cheeks in the French style, then he walked the length of the gathering, greeting every child. “What a bright, industrious group of pupils,” he said.
“The original Free School for Africans was only one room, and could admit only forty students,” I explained as we toured the new buildings, in which were educated more than seven hundred of the best and brightest. “The English headmaster finds these black children every bit as capable as white children.”
Lafayette didn’t seem surprised. “I regret that my own efforts to emancipate slaves in the French colonies was forestalled...”
He trailed off there, his mind seeming to retreat to a dark place, and I worried it was the darkness of his old prison cell. To draw him back, I said, “There’s still more to be done, but our state legislature passed a law of gradual emancipation, and complete abolition is nearly accomplished. It cannot happen soon enough.”
Though I’d long been a convert to the cause of abolition, I hadn’t before spoken in public against the national cancer. And Lafayette’s presence encouraged me. No longer needing to measure my words for fear of how they might affect my husband’s political career, I felt a freedom to say exactly how disillusioned I was. “In the South, the vile institution of slavery spreads like a contagion. Such is inevitable when the country has been run these past twenty years by presidents and congresses elected by the counting of slaves as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of representation, while not otherwise counting them as a person at all. The South doubly reaps the benefits of slavery at the expense of fairness, morality, and liberty.”
Lafayette turned an appraising smile on me. “I hear something of the passion of Hamilton in your speech, madame .”
Heat infused my cheeks as I struggled with the complicated emotions dredged up by the comparison, but fortunately, a gaggle of awed children swarmed the general, distracting him from my reaction to words which were, at once, the highest praise and a painful reminder.
Finally, Lafayette escorted me outside and turned to me with fondness. “You do good work here, Elizabeth. You will perhaps finish what we started.”
I tilted my head. “What we started?”
“The revolution. It is unfinished. Maybe liberty must always be fought for. And you have kept fighting when others laid down their swords in defeat, or exhaustion, or corruption.”
“I’m afraid you misjudge me,” I said, feeling an ache of shame in my breast. “I stopped fighting long ago.”
Lafayette gestured at the school behind us. “Then what is this school? What is your orphanage? These things seek to expand the promise of America. To give opportunity to all as free citizens.”
Tears pricked at the corners of my eyes as my ache of shame melted into recognition. I’d not thought of my work as more than charity. But it always had been. Whatever I told myself, I never stopped trying to finish what we started when we were all so young and idealistic about what this nation could be.
“Would that my friend was here to help you.” Lafayette sighed. “Will you take me to see him? I wish, with your blessing, to lay a wreath upon Hamilton’s grave, but there is no ceremony planned for it.”
Of course, no ceremony had been planned. For years now, even I had shied away from the monument in Trinity Churchyard where my husband was buried. I made any number of excuses for my reticence. The distressing reminder of my losses; the spectacle of people looking at me when I knelt beside the stone. The fact that I’d suffered for a public life and didn’t wish my most private grief to be exposed. All these things were true, of course, but the real reason I didn’t go was because both Angelica and Alexander were buried there.
For ten years, I’d hid the festering wounds of my suspicions from everyone, in every way I could. My greatest failing in that endeavor had been with William, who was, I’d learned, never fooled by my facade. He’d seen his father’s letters to my sister and, worse, he’d seen me laid low. It’d changed something in him to have the heroic image of his father shattered. And we’d lost him over it. He’d withdrawn from West Point and gone west, as far as he could go from civilization, all because I couldn’t leave a matter alone. So I didn’t intend to reopen it now. “You have my blessing to go to the grave, of course, General, but I’ve already taken too much of your time. Your public is waiting.”
“Let them wait,” Lafayette said, offering me his arm. “Hamilton is more important.”
Having no way to refuse him without exposing myself, I took his arm, but anxiety seized me as we made the short carriage ride to Trinity Churchyard. “For your itinerary,” I said, hoping to distract myself from the clawing dread, “there are other benevolent societies you might visit, almshouses and the great hospital, too. You might take in the Trumbull painting at the Academy of Arts, and I’ve no doubt the Society of the Cincinnati would host you for—”
“Dear sister, is it so strange that I wish to visit graves?”
“Oh. No, of course not,” I said, swallowing down the nerves that had me rambling.
Lafayette’s shrewd gaze told me he sensed something amiss, and I was relieved he didn’t press the point. “As a young man, I would have thought so. But then, I did not expect to live this long.”
“Considering the way you’ve habitually thrown yourself into danger for the cause of liberty, it is rather a miracle that you’re still alive.”
“You are not the first to say so.” He chuckled, but then his smile faded. “Is it too painful for you to visit Hamilton’s graveside?”
“No.” I folded my gloved hands in my lap. Then, unable to withstand his scrutiny, I finally admitted, “Yes, it’s painful. But a duty too long neglected.”
“I understand,” Lafayette said with a sympathetic nod. He couldn’t possibly understand, but I smiled politely. “After all these years, I go too little to visit where my Adrienne sleeps her final sleep.”
I realized, almost with a start, that he’d been a widower nearly as long as I’d been a widow. “Is your wife buried far from where you now reside?”
Lafayette nodded, his eyes going to the window. “She wanted to be buried with her family. A mass grave in Paris, where, after being guillotined for the misfortune of noble blood and a relation to me, the bodies of her loved ones were dumped. It is sometimes too difficult for me to go where I must bear the weight of it upon my shoulders. Instead, I made a shrine of Adrienne’s room, still as she left it, and where it seems I am less separated from her than anywhere else.”
This sentiment was familiar to me, having myself sought in vain for the essence of Alexander in this world. And I was moved by the raw pain in his voice for a loss experienced nearly twenty years before.
Unfortunately, his embarrassment at having betrayed that pain was obvious and he pleaded, “ S’il vous pla?t, pardonnez-moi. It is only that I wished many times to show my wife this country, and now, here I am without her, welcomed in a manner that exceeds the power to express what I feel. Thus I cannot resist an opportunity to confide my anguish to a friend who can understand.”
I could understand. I once pored over my husband’s letters every night, trying to recall the inflections of his voice. And every morning, gazed upon his portraits and bust, trying to remember the lines of his face. “General, you must never ask forgiveness for confiding in me. I know this same unhappiness well.”
He let out a breath of relief. “It was worse in the beginning. Having married so young, I was so much accustomed to all that she was to me that I did not distinguish her from my own existence. I knew that I loved her and needed her. But it was only in losing her that I finally see the wreck of me that remains. Now, I am not unsatisfied with my excellent children or friends, but I recognize the impossibility of lifting the weight of this pain. This irreparable loss.”
“Yes,” I whispered, because emotion rose like a knot in my throat as he eloquently echoed my own feelings. My whole life had been fused with my sister and my husband, and having lost them both to death and betrayal, I also lost myself. I put my hand upon Lafayette’s and whispered, “You must believe that your loving wife wouldn’t wish you to carry this weight.”
Though Lafayette didn’t look at me, the corner of his lips hinted at a smile. “No, she would not. My sweet companion was a forgiving woman and an angel who, for thirty-four years, blessed my life.”
It was the word angel, spoken so reverently, that triggered a memory of Alexander whispering it against my hair, my ear, my neck. And my mind threw up a now familiar defense against these memories whenever they assaulted me.
It was all a lie. You never knew him. You never knew him at all.
Perhaps that was why I murmured, with something akin to envy, “You may at least take consolation that after so many years of happy marriage, you achieved perfect knowledge of one another.”
At this, Lafayette roared with sudden laughter. “Perfect knowledge! Mon Dieu, my wife kept secrets to the very end. Do not ask me to reveal them, but they confound me to this day. Just like a woman.”
I blinked, thinking that it wasn’t only women who could keep confounding secrets. And it occurred to me like a bolt from the blue that I was sitting next to the only man alive who might know the answers to any of the questions that burned through the fabric of my very soul.
Lafayette would understand.
That’s what Alexander had said to me upon the death of John Laurens. The only words he would say, in fact. The thought that the general might’ve been aware of the true nature of my husband’s relationship with Laurens made heat sear its way from the tips of my ears to my toes, leaving me in unbearable mortification.
“Are you unwell, madame ?”
For a moment, I couldn’t answer, for fear of what I might say. What I might ask. What accusations I might make. None of it matters, I told myself. There was no longer any possible reason to care. The opposite of love, I thought, was not hatred, but indifference, and for my own survival, I’d made my heart indifferent to Alexander Hamilton.
There was nothing but humiliation to be gained by asking questions.
Nothing to be gained by caring at all.
“It’s only the heat,” I said by way of excuse, schooling my features into politeness as the soaring steeple of Trinity Church came into view.
***
ALEXANDER HAMILTON
T HE PATRIOT OF INCORRUPTIBLE INTEGRITY .
T HE SOLDIER OF APPROVED VALOUR .
T HE STATESMAN OF CONSUMMATE WISDOM .
W HOSE TALENTS AND VIRTUES WILL BE ADMIRED BY GRATEFUL POSTERITY LONG AFTER THIS MARBLE WILL HAVE MOLDERED INTO DUST.
The last line inscribed on the headstone had been comforting when we buried Alexander here, but I no longer believed it.
Lafayette, however, was deeply affected.
With a quivering lower lip, the old general gently rested his gnarled hand atop the white stone and spoke to my dead husband. “At last, here I am. It is Lafayette, your old and constant friend. It is my hope that wherever you are now, you will remind me to our brother soldiers who have not forgotten their long absent comrade—and to my ancient friends all gathered about you...”
As it happened, it didn’t matter how firmly I had resolved to feel nothing . It simply wasn’t possible to stand at my husband’s grave and give dry-eyed witness to this sad reunion. My own lip quivered when Lafayette placed the wreath against the stone and bowed his head in silent and tearful communion.
He passed a long time like that, quiet and stooped.
And I found that my heart was not made of stone after all. For Lafayette’s emotion stirred something in me that I simply couldn’t contain. And when he raised up again, he noticed. “You will want a moment alone with him.”
“No, it’s—”
“I will wait by the gate,” Lafayette said, withdrawing. “I understand.”
He didn’t. He couldn’t. Because I didn’t understand it myself.
Now left alone at my husband’s graveside, I hugged myself tightly, trying to make sense of it. Aware that for the first time in a very long time, no one was watching me. The way the graveyard was situated, people passed gaily on the street just beyond the iron rail, laughing and going about their business without any sense of respect for the gravity of the place. And maybe I shouldn’t respect it, either.
“ Integrity ?” I scoffed at the engraving. “Was there integrity in deceiving me, Alexander?” Because I didn’t sense any part of him still in this world, it seemed silly to continue. But then it’d been so many years since I’d spoken to my husband that I couldn’t resist imagining that he could hear. “ Valor, I admit you had, in stupid quantity. But wisdom ? I spent our whole marriage keeping you from foolhardiness. And if you’d told me...”
I blinked back a rush of bitter tears.
“If you’d told me what you meant to do that morning at Weehawken, I would have stopped you. You’d be alive, and I more the fool, but—”
My eyes fell upon the spot where our sweet, innocent Philip was buried in the earth, and I brought my fist to my mouth to stifle my words. For I’d protected the rest of my children from this anger I felt for their father. And now, absurdly, I worried about speaking these truths in front of Philip.
I knelt at my son’s grave and pressed my hand to the cool grass.
“You’re with him, aren’t you?” I whispered, realizing that if Philip was united with the Lord, then none of this would be any secret to him. Even so, I couldn’t bring myself to utter the venom at the tip of my tongue, especially not the two words that would’ve hurt Alexander the most.
You bastard.
That’s what I wanted to say. What you did to us. What you did to your children. What you did to yourself!
For a moment, I felt as if I hated Hamilton as much as I’d ever loved him.
That’s when I began to laugh. A sputtering, hiccup of a laugh. Because no one, nowhere, had ever been able to make themselves indifferent to Alexander Hamilton. My husband was loved and hated, but never a subject of dispassion. Not even in death.
And certainly I could never be indifferent to him, no matter how I’d deceived myself to the contrary. I’d never know if he went to Weehawken with the hope of losing his life. If he’d bedded my sister. Or a thousand harlots, for that matter, instead of just the Reynolds woman. These were mysteries for which I’d never have answers. And yet, coming here after all this time put me in a near state of self-destructive madness to know the truth.
It must have been madness, for I’ve no other explanation for the way I rose up again, suddenly, and charged after Lafayette. On the path by my sister’s tomb, the old general turned, his eyes widening as I marched toward him with purpose and fury. “Did they laugh at me?”
Stopping amidst stone angels and sepulchers, Lafayette tilted his head in confusion, “ Madame ?”
“Laurens and Hamilton,” I said, firing the names like bullets. “Did they laugh as Alexander drew up his list of qualifications for a wife, and then celebrate how easily simple, stupid, saintly Betsy Schuyler was wooed and won for her father’s fortune?”
Lafayette seemed as startled by the question as I was to have allowed it past my lips. “The sun has addled your senses, madame . Let me get you from the heat.”
But when he reached for me, I retreated. “I am not addled. Only insulted by the man I married.”
“Insulted?” Lafayette softened his voice, as if gentling an unruly horse. “My memory for those years is very keen. I can say with conviction that never in my presence did any man disparage you, nor would I have allowed it, then or now. My dear lady, only a derangement of grief could lead you to think the husband who loved—”
“John Laurens,” I said, thinking that perhaps I was deranged. For no woman of sound mind would admit this. “Alexander loved John Laurens.”
There. I said it. And now it hovered between us like a cannonball just before impact.
I didn’t know whether to be horrified or gratified to see a flicker of recognition in Lafayette’s eyes. I thought he’d pretend at ignorance, or deny it, but instead, he shrugged. “I think so. But what of it?”
“ What of it? ”
I was, after all, not speaking of mere fraternity between brother soldiers. And yet I believed that Lafayette knew that perfectly well when he said, “ C’est la guerre . That is war!”
Only a Frenchman would dismiss it with the permissiveness of a libertine, but this Frenchman defied kings and emperors in the pursuit of principle. He was known throughout the world as a deeply honorable man. And his words carried a tone that said such a relationship was less shameful than to question it. Which shocked me into silence.
“ Madame, ” he said, more gently. “You are the mother of Hamilton’s children, his wife, and his beloved companion of more than twenty years. Why should you be troubled by an attachment formed before you met?”
Did he think my resentments were petty jealousy—like a new bride enraged to discover her husband had once danced with a pretty girl at a ball? I, too, had formed attachments before I met Alexander Hamilton. But I did not feel guilty or disloyal for them, nor did I wish Lafayette to think me petty. “I’m troubled because I wasn’t beloved . I’ve read the old letters, and they’ve poisoned everything.”
A good-hearted girl. Not a genius. Not a beauty.
I could recite them line for line, but I told Lafayette only as much as I could bear, feeling diminished with every word I repeated. When I was finished, Lafayette rubbed at his face. “It is regrettable, what haunted people we are, you and I.”
I stood, trembling, aghast at my indiscretion in matters that I feared must have seemed to him quite trivial. And now there was nothing to do but pray his pressing engagements would soon force a merciful end to our conversation. But Lafayette led me to a bench by the church doors, and settled into it, as if he meant to stay with me awhile.
He patted the bench. “Please, we are both of an age now when we must sit.”
Suddenly tired and unimaginably weary, I sank beside him in silent mortification.
Meanwhile, he cast a serene gaze across the cemetery. “We are also of an age when we live in the past. We speak to old ghosts more real for us than the strangers of this new age who pass us on the street, yes? We try, in vain, to crawl into letters and memories for the comfort of those who cannot talk to us any longer.”
Renewed shame washed over me. “I shouldn’t have troubled you—”
“We have a saying in France,” he interrupted. “L’habit ne fait pas le moine. The robe does not make the monk... do you understand?”
“No,” I said, still trembling with humiliation.
“It means that the way things are clothed is not always as they are. Are you so modest, madame, that it has never occurred to you the letters Hamilton wrote you were the sincere ones?”
I took a deep breath as I digested his implication—that Alexander had deceived Laurens, not me.
Lafayette cleared his throat and rested his top hat on his knee. “If this has not occurred to you before, I can only think it is because of a delicate subject yet to be mentioned... Bah . What we do to women.”
I brought my hands to my face with fear of what he might say next.
“My friend has left you haunted by some notion that he did not love you. And to see you in this state, I am now haunted by the idea I may have given my wife the same doubts. A husband at sixteen, what did I know! But there were other women even when I was old enough to appreciate what I had in a wife.”
“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.”