A more temperate man might have hedged his support, but Lafayette threw in for my father with his whole heart. And it thrilled me even as I looked round the table for those who might disagree.
My father nodded gratefully, as if humbled.
Then Lafayette stood and addressed me and Peggy. “Ladies, I am sad to abandon you now so I may hear wise advice from your papa and General Arnold.”
With that, the servants cleared the plates and the most trusted senior officers closeted themselves away. Monroe was too junior to join them, so while Mama entertained the Frenchmen, we took Monroe into the blue parlor, where Peggy kept refilling his wineglass and I bested him in a ferocious game of backgammon.
“I declare, Miss Schuyler,” Monroe drawled in defeat, his accent stronger the more wine he drank. “You take advantage! But I suppose I ought not feel unmanned by a game of chance. Who taught you to play?”
Still holding the dice, I boasted, “Dr. Franklin taught me when he visited to treat with the Six Nations. Besides, backgammon is only partly a game of chance. It is also a game of math and perseverance. You’re forced to learn patterns and choose the best move, even if it is only a choice between evils.”
Monroe dropped his gaze. “Is it in the nature of all New York belles to deprive a man of even his fig leaf?”
I blushed, because I knew what a fig leaf was meant to cover. Because Monroe was the first gentleman, since Lieutenant André had visited, who seemed to prefer talking to me than to flirting with my sisters. And because I believed he was calling me a belle. Pretending as if this were not a rare compliment, I asked, “Are we New York belles so very trying to your Virginian sensibilities, Major Monroe?”
He had the temerity to pause in thinking about it. “Any trial is compensated for how you ladies keep me from missing home. After all, if a man is so stupidly insensible of a belle’s charms as to devote his attention to an absent ideal, she cannot receive a higher insult.”
“I shall not be insulted if you pine for home.” To prove it, I asked, “What do you miss most about your Virginia?”
I thought he’d mention his family or farmland or horses—or really, just about anything other than what he actually said. “My mammy’s waffles, hot from the fire, slathered in melting butter.”
I laughed, expecting that Peggy would laugh, too, when I realized that she’d somehow grown bored and left us alone. She’d later tell me that she thought Monroe a bit too unpolished and simple for her tastes. But he seemed to me as a still part of the river, where it sometimes runs deepest.
And he confirmed that impression when he confided, “As much as I miss home, I am curious about the world, and wish to see as much of it as I can.”
“We’re kindred spirits, then. As a girl, I used to gaze westward at the horizon with a strange yearning, wondering how far the land went, imagining what it would be like to see and explore everything.”
He eyed me with curiosity. “That seems an unusual yearning for a belle.”
I flushed, much less pleased to be described as a belle now. “Not for one who has come of age at the frontier.”
“Albany is hardly the frontier,” he said, with an indulgent smile. “At least, not compared to where I grew up.”
“I’m speaking of Saratoga,” I argued. “Before the war, that’s where I felt most at home.”
Our home at Saratoga had always seemed to be a mysterious gateway to a world I could scarcely fathom and longed to explore. I’d climb rocks and wade in creeks, and come back late with wildflowers in my hair, all brown from the sun. And Papa would tease that perhaps when my mother left me hanging in a cradleboard from that tree, I’d been switched with an Indian child.
When I told Monroe as much, he chuckled. “And were you switched? You can tell me. I’ll always keep your secrets.”
He leaned closer, and for the first time in my life, a flutter of real romantic interest stirred within my breast. Monroe was a patriot. A war hero, even. And possibility sparked between us. “Perhaps I was switched,” I teased. “But I’d rather you tell me a secret.”
“Oh?” he asked, swirling the claret in his glass.
“Do you think there’s really a conspiracy against General Washington?”
“I know it,” Monroe answered, draining his wineglass like a man who preferred beer. “It was within General Stirling’s little family that we discovered the evidence.”
Rapt, I leaned closer. “Who is the villain?”