Louisa (10 page)

To Louisa's humiliation
, and no doubt to John Quincy's indignation, men clutching Joshua's bills came to their hotel room. “Every rap at the door,” she wrote, “made me tremble.” They wanted John Quincy to pay, and he refused. The debts were not his. But she felt they were hers. She knew how things looked: her father had married off his daughter under false pretenses and then left her new husband in the lurch, and she'd been in on the scheme.

In October, Frederick Delius sent John Quincy a damning letter, impugning Joshua's character while implicitly and insultingly suggesting that John Quincy was privy to the truth. “It is impossible for me to describe to you the horror I feel at such a low mean and unpardonable conduct which has done more injury to my credit and reputation than Mr Johnson and his family can ever make good again,” Delius wrote. (
And his family
—how those words must have stung.) “I have been very much mistaken in Mr Johnson's character,” Delius continued. “I always took him to be open, upright and candid and without any deceit
whatever, but his present conduct towards me shews what he meant by all his affectionate and tender expressions.”

John Quincy passed
Delius's letter along to Joshua, in Washington. “The turn of affairs here has not been such as your friends could have wished,” John Quincy wrote. “Appearances and allegations are advanced which bring in question something more than merely your credit.” And John Quincy gave it to Louisa to read, too.

Years later, recounting
the moment, she defended her father by saying that his “misfortunes were as unexpected as they were sudden.” Really, she was defending herself. She knew how things looked. “Every appearance was against me; actions proceeding from the most innocent causes looked like deliberate plans to deceive; and I felt that all the honest pride of my soul was laid low for ever,” she wrote nearly thirty years later, the pain fresh. She marked that moment as the one that changed her—that broke her. The timing couldn't have been worse. She was discovering a terrible truth about her family at the same moment she was forced to join a new one, turning a natural break into a traumatic rupture. And it was the worse, because she felt her husband judge her.

There is little evidence
that John Quincy was anything but patient with her. But no record exists of what he said to her behind closed doors. Most likely, she wanted him to defend her “beloved father,” which he would not do. Whatever he said, or whatever she imagined him saying, burned her. “It was strict and rigid justice and I had nothing to complain of—Such was my honey moon.”

Louisa saw her character
and position called into question. The question of money became a question of standing in the marriage, and she had lost her claim. For years, it would weigh on her. She would refer to it constantly, especially during times of stress. She could not buy her son a present because she had no money. She could not defend herself against John Quincy's reproaches about “strict economy” because her
father had gone bankrupt. “Beggar as I am,” she would write. She would consider herself poor, even when her husband was not.

The memory of her
father's fall would haunt Louisa for the rest of her life, especially when she felt most vulnerable. She used it to mark the moment that divided her life: she had been a Johnson, and now she was an Adams. She had been a child, and now she was a woman. She had been innocent, but now knew shame. “It has been forty three years since I became a wife,” she would write when she was sixty-five years old, “and yet the rankling sore is not healed which then broke upon my heart of hearts. . . . It has hung like an incubus upon my spirit.”
An incubus.
A demon that has sex with sleeping women. This was the level of her fixation, her terror, her sense of powerlessness—her loss of innocence.

The timing was unfortunate for another reason. On October 18, Louisa and John Quincy left London for Berlin. She was already
pregnant.

1

T
HEY
ARRIVED
at Gravesend
on Wednesday, October 18, 1797, after night had fallen, and discovered that the
Frans
, the ship they planned to take to Prussia, had already gone. They were late and despairing; there had been some confusion about the passports, and John Quincy was upset that the documents were still not right. After some inquiries, they learned that the ship had anchored for the night about ten miles downriver, at a place called Hope. They would have to row to meet it.

Louisa was exhausted. Night after night, the rowdy cheers of men lighting bonfires and shattering glass in the name of the king, celebrating Britain's recent victory over the Dutch fleet, allies of France, had kept her and John Quincy awake. Perhaps those boisterous shouts were also a hint of what she was about to face—a continent roiled in conflict. Only two years earlier Prussia had been at war, part of the coalition of European monarchies that had united against Revolutionary France and its charismatic general, Napoleon Bonaparte. For John Quincy, at least, the clamor would have been a troubling reminder of the dangerous and difficult situation he was in, as a diplomat representing a new nation that had too often been treated as a pawn by the
old great powers in their own conflicts. No doubt Louisa tossed and turned with her own fears of the unknown—the alien country to which she was headed; the dangers of pregnancy, which she faced without a friend; the almost-stranger to whom she had united her fate; and the trauma of her parents' and sisters' flight to the United States.

There would be no turning back, and no relief. At eight in the evening, the five members of their group—Louisa and John Quincy, John Quincy's brother Thomas (who would serve as his brother's secretary, as he had at The Hague), and two servants, Tilly Whitcomb and Elizabeth Epps—stepped into a rowboat. The pilot pushed off, and the boat whispered through the quiet Thames, as the river widened toward the sea and opened into darkness. The moon that night was only a sliver; what little light there was came from lamps and distant stars. The air, though mid-October, was almost warm, and the travelers marveled at the fineness of the evening. It took two hours for the rowboat to reach the
Frans
. As soon as Louisa climbed on board, the water moved and the ship rolled. She felt ill right away.

She was sick
all eight days at sea, and she was scared. When huge gales blew through, Louisa became convinced the boat would sink. Passengers took turns at the pumps. The ship heaved and plunged. “Almost sick myself,” John Quincy wrote in his diary. The ship was dirty, “very disgusting,” he thought. There was little relief when she stepped onto firm ground at the harbor at Hamburg, on October 26. She hardly knew what to make of the country that would be her new home: the unfamiliar lattice of canals and narrow streets, the smell of peat that made her nauseous, the sound of water as it sluiced through rooftop gutters and shattered on the ground.

From Hamburg they traveled
south toward Berlin, their English carriage lurching over the rough Prussian roads. Everything was strange and horrible. She found the inns almost uninhabitable. “The house was dirty, noisy, and uncomfortable—The beds miserable; the table execrable; the manners of the Mrs of the mansion”—the only
women she would have contact with on the road—“coarse though kind, and between
us
, no means whatever existed of communication, which would have made my situation more agreeable.” Probably, nothing would have made her situation agreeable. She was homesick, and her mind was still fixed on her family's “downfal.”

Still, she marveled at what she saw. At her father's dinner table and in the parlor, she had heard about the extraordinary travels of captains come recently from the West Indies, envoys to Europe, and traders who trafficked in China, and she thought that she knew something about the world. So she was surprised by how much surprised her. She watched, fascinated, as the ship's crew passed around a string with a cube of sugar tied to the end, which they sucked as they drank tea. There was something fresh about those experiences, something that made her mind reach even as she recoiled. She could not help but be curious. Later, she would insist that during those first few months of marriage, she spent her time mourning for the life she had lost. And yet, even then, she looked at the world and was amazed by what she saw. She may have thought her life was over, but when she arrived in Berlin, she discovered that it had just begun. She was twenty-two years old, weary, pregnant, and worried. And yet she was enchanted. “To me,” she wrote a quarter century later, looking back, “life was
new.
”

 • • • 

A
LIEUTENANT
stopped
Louisa, John Quincy, and their group at the gates to the city. The official looked at the travelers, studied their papers, and questioned them, suspicious “until one of his private soldiers explained to him, who the United States of America were,” wrote John Quincy in his diary. John Quincy made no more comment—but the situation was enough to make any man wry and despairing. He was representing a nation that did not exist in the minds of many. What was worse, the traditional great powers of Europe generally treated the young nation as an annoying child.

The tired travelers
went to find lodgings at the Ville de Paris, where they were turned away, and then to the Hotel de Russie, at the end of Unter den Linden. And there, finally, they were able to stop and look around. John Quincy knew something of what to expect from the city. He had been to Berlin before, when he was fourteen years old, on his way to St. Petersburg to serve as secretary to the American envoy Francis Dana. The city had impressed him. It conformed to his ideals, his desire for order and structure. The land was flat. The streets ran parallel or met at right angles, so unlike the tangled cowpaths of Quincy. “It is the handsomest and the most regular city I ever saw,” the boy had written in his diary. At thirty, not everything about Berlin would please him. The roads would turn to clouds of dust in summer, unless it had rained, when they were bogs; the climate was oppressive; finding and furnishing a cheap apartment was hard. But he had routes for his walks, and a place to arrange his books.

What Louisa thought
when she saw Berlin is surprising. Many foreign visitors found it ugly. They looked at the windy plain and saw desolation; they looked down the wide avenues and saw absence. It was an old city, a settlement dating to the twelfth century, but most of the construction was recent, and its grand proportions were optimistic. To those who liked the look of history, the brick and plaster buildings looked unused, too large and low slung against the open sky. It strained for magnificence. Louisa, though, thought the city “beautiful.” It was November when they arrived, and the days were already short. But the late-autumn sun was incandescent; it could edge statues with fire and make creamy walls blush. Their hotel was situated near the winding river Spree, at the end of the long boulevard of lime trees. The open, blank plan of the place was so unlike the stacked and crowded old cities that were her reference. Here was a place that looked toward its future instead of back at its past.

It was a good place
, then, for a young woman who had experienced something she wanted to forget, and who was newly married and
pregnant. But almost immediately Louisa fell ill. Two days later she was up the whole night “in the most excruciating pain,” John Quincy wrote in his diary. She was starting to miscarry. The pregnancy was not far along, but there must have been severe complications; it took more than a week to discharge the fetus, and she lost a lot of blood. At one point, she heard Thomas's voice through the haze of her pain asking the doctor if she was still alive. He had heard a rumor spread through the hotel that she had died.

The recovery was slow and painful, not only physically but emotionally. She wanted her mother, or at the least a woman to talk to, and there was none. Her maid, Elizabeth Epps, was seventeen years old and as frightened as Louisa. Louisa needed more than a doctor, someone who could heal more than her body. She had lost her parents and sisters, and now she had lost the hope of a child.

She was mortified, too, because she sensed herself violated. Strange men surrounded her bedside and took off her clothes. Most likely, until her wedding night only months before, no man had ever seen her naked. The attendants at the hotel were unblinking when they saw her. A German professor arrived at her bedside to poke and probe her; she came to hate him so much that she later refused to let him back into her sight. “It is almost impossible to imagine a situation more truly distressing for a woman of refinement and delicacy than the one into which I was thrown,” she later wrote. She was “shocked by the disgusting and to me indecent manners” of those who attended her. Only a kind Scottish doctor, Charles Brown, the king and queen's physician, treated her with a gentleness and understanding that made her feel safe.

At least her husband
was by her side, day after day and night after night. He was tender and attentive to her, as he had not yet been and as she might not have expected. He shared her agony, and in his diary, his normally stiff tone gave way to sadness and sympathy for her pain and for the loss of her—and his—child. Under the pressure of his distress,
the abstract platitudes John Quincy had once used to describe Louisa to his mother now turned to real—if pointed—expressions of affection. “My wife is all that
your
heart can wish,” he wrote to his mother.

But as he returned
to his work, her husband was not always all her own heart could wish. Louisa had the company of Elizabeth Epps and often Thomas Adams, but sometimes she felt abandoned and alone—the more so after the Adamses moved from the Hotel de Russie into apartments over the guardhouse at the gigantic Brandenburg Gate. On one side was the Tiergarten, Berlin's great park, which stretched all the way to the king's palace at Charlottenburg. Once she could rise from her bed and step outside, she could walk along paths past lovely ponds, espaliers, and neat little forests. But on the other side of the gate, below her bedroom windows, stood a soldiers' parade ground. Every royal personage or ambassador—and there seemed to be countless of them—who passed through the gate received a noisy presentation of arms. Berlin had had a large garrison since the days of Frederick the Great, even if, for the past decade, the king (son of Frederick William II) was better known for his courtesans than commanders. To Louisa's horror, “few days nay even hours passed without my ears being assailed and my eyes shocked by the screams and blows” when an unruly soldier was beaten or dressed down.

She was not locked
in a fortress, but it could seem that way. “I felt that I was an exile,” she wrote. While her husband met people and made connections, she was isolated in the guardhouse, unable to leave with no carriage, no escort, nowhere to go. She was frightened at the thought of entering the royal court, but it was worse to be excluded.

Finally, Miss Dorville
, the daughter of the master of ceremonies to the first wife of Frederick William II, appeared at her door, curious to see the reclusive new arrival. Miss Dorville was a tall and self-assured beauty, and she had eyes that seemed to price a person at a glance. Louisa, still weak, shrank as she felt herself sized up—and with reason; she would later hear that Miss Dorville reported that she had “
a face
like a horse
.” But the second visitor was a godsend. Pauline Neale was eighteen years old—only a few years younger than Louisa—and a lady-in-waiting to the queen and the maid of honor to Princess Radziwill (also known as Princess Louise). Pauline swept in, “full of animation and esprit,” exuding at once sympathy and a bracing confidence. Pauline was born in Berlin (her father had been the chamberlain and at one point “grand cupbearer” to Frederick the Great and Frederick William II, and her mother was the mistress of the household to Prince Ferdinand), but she had Irish ancestry, had been to Britain, and she spoke English, which put Louisa at ease. Louisa could not have dreamed of a better friend—nor a more necessary one, because when Miss Dorville came back to while away the hours before husband-hunting began, she very casually (and no doubt with a hint of malice) asked when Louisa expected to be presented at court. There were rumors, Miss Dorville continued, about the delay; indeed it was wondered whether the Adamses were really married.