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.”
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.