“It’s a cabal of villains. Inspector General Conway is involved for certain and . . .” Monroe trailed off there, as if aware that perhaps he’d said more than he ought to have.
But I pressed him. “Gates? Is it Gates?”
Monroe peered over his shoulder, then met my gaze and nodded, slowly. “Gates is trying to replace Washington as commander in chief of the military.”
“Outrageous. Gates is a scheming bumbler,” I hissed, though I knew my father would never approve of my saying so. But it was true. Gates would have lost even the Battle of Saratoga were it not for Benedict Arnold’s heroics.
But as indignant as I was at the idea that the New England darling would ever be commander in chief, that wasn’t as awful as my other fear. “Is there anyone close enough to Washington to do him harm?” I asked, because two years before there had been a plot to assassinate him and the culprit had been amongst his own bodyguards. And given that Gates had already used rumors of my father’s treachery to oust him from command, and seemed willing to condemn Lafayette and the whole Northern Army to an icy death in Canada, what else might he stoop to in clawing his way to the top?
“No chance of that,” Monroe assured me. “Not since Colonel Hamilton joined Washington’s family as aide-de-camp. My good friend Hamilton is too cunning to let an assassin get close again. He would sniff it out at a mile.”
I knew the name Hamilton already, of course.
We’d all learned about Alexander Hamilton’s military exploits in the gazettes we read each morning at the breakfast table. In fact, when my sisters and I were away visiting our Livingston relations, Hamilton had even stopped to see my father—briefly—in passing through Albany.
But my clearest memory of ever hearing Hamilton’s name was from the mouth of James Monroe. And spoken so fondly, too.
It hurts now to remember how fondly.
“It’s the politicking in Congress and the Board of War that will do General Washington in,” Monroe said, with more shrewdness than I might have expected. “Lafayette is right. We need to give Washington a win to bring back to Congress—even a symbolic one. Or Gates will get command and there goes the war.”
At length, as if to fight off the effects of a large meal and the lateness of the hour, Monroe stood and shook himself like a giant hound caught in the rain. And when I saw him rub again at his shoulder, I asked, “Should it still hurt you?”
“Don’t know,” he replied. “The bullet lodged in my shoulder just likes to remind me of its presence sometimes.”
“I know a little nursing. If you should like me to—”
“Oh, no, miss,” Monroe said, nearly tripping over my mother’s lace-covered sideboard table in his hurry to back away, as if I’d suggested something very untoward.
I’d only meant to offer some of the precious willow bark powder that Mama kept as a remedy for pain, but Monroe almost seemed to think I meant to undress him. “I wouldn’t hazard being shot again. By your father this time.”
Virginians are preposterous creatures, I thought for the first, but not the last, time. Thankfully, the farce was brought to an end because Lafayette emerged from my father’s study, and the officers made ready to take their leave. I was sorry to see them go, especially because I did not wish to leave Major Monroe with the impression I was a coquette.
But when Lafayette came into the parlor to retrieve Monroe and say farewell, he noticed a wampum belt upon a table with Papa’s outgoing parcels and letters, and tilted his head in apparent curiosity. “Mademoiselle Schuyler, your papa says you have accompanied him to treaty conventions with the Six Nations. Can you tell me of this?”
Flattered that Lafayette wished for me to explain it, I answered, “It’s a wampum belt; they served as a form of money, once.” At least until my Dutch ancestors began manufacturing wampum in such quantity as to make it worthless as currency. “Taken by themselves, the beads are merely white, purple, and black shells, sanded and drilled. But string them together and they can tell a story, seal a treaty, or serve as a badge of authority.”
If you knew the patterns and the symbols. And I did, having learned them at a very young age from the native women who bartered with Mama at the back door of our Saratoga house, and with whose daughters I sometimes played in their nearby village.
“What message does this belt convey?” Lafayette asked, peering at me from the corner of his eye.
“It’s an invitation.” For though Papa was no longer in command of an army, he’d long served as Indian commissioner, an important position he still held. “My father arranged to have this wampum belt and others to be delivered throughout Iroquoia to call for a meeting of the Iroquois Confederacy.”