Patriot Hearts (15 page)

“Er…Mrs. Adams, you won’t find a ship afloat that doesn’t have rats.”

“No, but you don’t have to make their lives easier for them. And you could at least have some of your men swab out the passageway. I don’t wonder I’ve been sick for nearly two weeks. If the ship was in dry dock I’d no doubt still have been sick, from the smell alone.”

Within the hour, three deck-hands were at work below-decks with scrapers, mops, brushes, holystones, and buckets of soapy water and vinegar. If there was nothing that could be done to eliminate the ground-in stinks of tar, half-spoiled salt-pork, whale-oil, and potash, at least the boards of the passageway deck were visible again and Abigail no longer had to clean her shoes coming and going from the cabin. The men muttered, but since Abigail herself led the work team until Captain Lyde tugged her gently back into the cabin, there wasn’t much they could say.

Her next project was the galley. The cook had been accustomed to bringing in whatever foods were cooked in whatever order they got hot—a leg of pork, followed by sometimes a pudding, sometimes a pair of roast fowls, and then a quarter of an hour later, when everyone was finished, he’d reappear with a platter of potatoes. “If not for the sake of your own self-respect,” declared Abigail, confronting the big scar-faced African in the mephitic dark of the galley, “I should think you’d want to learn how to serve a meal for the sake of your own future. What if Captain Lyde were to die of consumption? Then you’d have to go back to being a deck-hand.”

She picked her way around the corner of the high-built sand-box where the fire burned, to the copper of water, which was only lukewarm. “Good heavens, a fire this stingy will never get water cleansing-hot! Anyone would think you were planning to sell the leftover charcoal at the end of the voyage.”

The piggy eyes slitted resentfully; Abigail pretended not to notice.

“Let’s get these dishes clean for a start. Then I’ll show you how gentlemen—and ships’ captains—like to be served their meals. And wash your hands. If Captain Lyde or anyone else ever saw you in daylight they’d never touch food you’d prepared again.”

Ten days after that the sea roughened again. The passengers had to remain below. One of the sailors brought word that land had been sighted, but Captain Lyde didn’t recommend anyone going on deck to see for themselves. The
Active
rocked like a barrel in a millrace, and twice that evening Abigail was flung from her chair at table, until she roped herself into it, as she did when she sat on deck. That night, Nabby clung to her in the swaying gloom and whispered, “Ma, I don’t want to die! I don’t want to die without seeing Royall again.”

If after waiting four and a half years to see John’s face, Abigail reflected, she and her daughter ended up drowned in the ocean a mere hundred miles from where he sat, her first act upon arrival in Heaven would be to ask God for an explanation, and it had better be a good one.

“It will be all right,” she said, stroking the girl’s fair curls. “It will be fine.”

On the third day the shaken, exhausted passengers crept forth onto the deck. Far off to port, Abigail saw a line of green-rimmed white cliffs, that shallowed to gray beaches and a gray-walled town, and white surf like the ruffle of a petticoat. Between surged an enormous expanse of monstrous gray waves that fell away into still more monstrous troughs, like chasms opening down Neptune’s root-cellar. The sails flapped and cracked like cannons. Spits of rain lashed her face as she stood. Overhead, the sky loured blacker still.

“We could stay beating here in the Channel for days, trying to get around into the Estuary,” explained Captain Lyde, looking more cheerful than he had any right to be considering that nobody on board had had more than an hour’s sleep in three days. “Since these gales sometimes blow for weeks, I’m having the pilot-boat lowered, to take you into Deal.” And he pointed to the wet-black huddle of roofs, the castle that poked up so improbably pale against the drenched green slopes of the hills. “You can get a post-chaise to Canterbury and then on to London, and can be there in a day.”

London,
thought Abigail, dazed at the thought.

I’m going to be in LONDON…

In someplace that won’t sink under me, and drown me and Nabby before ever I see John again.

She looked down over the rail at the churning sea and her heart turned to water.

Only the thought of going down with the
Active
in the Channel, within touching distance of John’s hand, got Abigail down the jerking, swaying, wooden wall of the hull and into the pilot-boat. This lurched and knocked and veered from the ship’s side, leaving a gap of icy sea. Only her own courage, Abigail suspected, got Nabby, Esther, and The Other Mrs. Adams to follow her. The sailors at the oars seemed to treat the matter as all in a day’s work, but with what Abigail knew of Mr. Blunt’s cooking, she suspected life and death were as one to this crew.

Gray rain streamed down into the gray sea. The Other Mrs. Adams wailed that she was going to die, a prophecy she had made hourly for the past thirty days. As a wave the size of a church rose up under the boat like a wall, then dropped away to nothingness, Abigail was inclined to agree with her, though nothing would have induced her to say so. Soft-spoken fellow passenger Mr. Foster grabbed her in his arms and clung fast to the rail, Abigail embracing him as she’d only ever embraced John while spray and rain soaked them both to the skin.

Just let me see him again,
she found herself praying.
Just let me see him—

There was a noise like thunder and a wave swept the boat up broadside, black oars flailing in air. Mr. Foster’s arms tightened around her and Abigail shut her eyes, and the next instant the keel ground on pebbles.

She opened her eyes to see gray stone beach and emerald hill above her, sailors jumping from the boat to drag it farther up the beach, water the color of steel rushing around their bare shins.

It was Tuesday, the twentieth of July, 1784, and they were in England at last.

Rain began to fall at about noon. Nabby’s pains grew harder, yet the baby showed no signs of coming. Mrs. Throckle’s businesslike cheerfulness settled into a watchful quiet. Exhausted, Nabby clung to Abigail’s hands. Between pains she would ask about her aunt Mary or her cousins Bettie and Luce, or whether Mr. Jefferson had written from Paris—“Do you know if his little daughter is on her way to France, as he said she’d be?”

“She is, and she’ll be landing in England first, to stay with us til he comes for her.” Little Polly Jefferson was seven, too young, in Abigail’s opinion, to suffer the rigors of a sea-voyage. But when news had reached the Virginian in Paris, over two years ago now, that Polly’s tiny sister Lucie had died, Jefferson had been inconsolable. He had been counting the days until Polly was marginally old enough to send for; Abigail could not deny him that, even in her heart. “It will be nice,” added Abigail, watching her daughter’s face worriedly, “to have a child in the house again.”

“Mrs. Jefferson died,” whispered Nabby, “from having a child. That’s what Patsy told me—” Patsy was Jefferson’s oldest daughter, a tall and awkward twelve when Abigail had met her briefly in Boston before their departure. “She had her child early, after they fled from the British attack. She never got over it, Patsy said.” Then as her face convulsed with pain, she cried out, “Johnny!”

Not her husband’s name, reflected Abigail uneasily. Her brother’s.

The house John had rented for them on the outskirts of Paris was huge, set amid a wilderness of tangled garden across the road from the Bois de Boulogne. “We’re constantly discovering new rooms,” Abigail said to Jefferson, when he came calling with a basket of apples, four bottles of wine, and a strange old book about clockwork homunculi that he’d found in a shop on the rue Cluny. “We’ll freeze, come winter. Or starve, wandering about in search of the dining-room. Last night I stumbled upon a
theater
in the north wing!”

“That doesn’t surprise me,” said Jefferson in his soft voice. “The place was built by the Desmoiselles Verrières, a pair of thoroughly reprehensible sisters.”

“Hmph. I shudder to think the use they’d put to that room on the second floor that’s entirely paneled in mirrors. John says we’ll need the space to entertain, but on twenty-five hundred pounds a year, after one has bought candles and coal and soap and fodder for the horses, I am at a loss as to what we’ll serve our guests—herring and oatmeal, I suppose.”

Jefferson’s hazel eyes widened in alarm as if, just for a moment, he feared she’d actually do it. In the green dapple of the garden’s light and shade, he looked better and more rested than he had in Uncle Isaac’s parlor in Boston two months ago—he’d had a pleasant voyage on a sea as calm as a millpond, he said, drat him. John had told her of the death of Jefferson’s wife, as a result of flight from the British too soon after child-bearing; she understood now his cold anger at the British, the war in his heart that no treaty could ever amend.

“It would help if the servants would actually do some work. The cook won’t hear of so much as washing a dish—it’s all I can do to get him to wash the vegetables. Pauline the
coiffeuse—
and the Americans we met in London all insist that
no
woman with pretensions to good society simply hires an itinerant hairdresser or, God forbid, dresses her hair herself—Pauline refuses to sew or sweep or make a bed, not even her own. And our maître d’hôtel doesn’t do anything but make sure that nobody on the staff robs the family but himself.”

“How many do you have?” Jefferson looked back through the vine-covered trees toward the limestone walls, the glittering windows. “I can’t imagine keeping up a house that large with fewer than fifty servants. The Spanish Ambassador has a hundred of them, fifty in livery—one feels as if one is about to be taken prisoner.”

“We have eight,” said Abigail incisively, “Esther and Briesler being worth five apiece. Briesler on the subject of ‘Popish French layabouts that don’t speak a Christian language’ is a treat. Our footman Mr. Petit is at least some use, and young Arnaud is energetic—Arnaud is our
frotteur.
He spends the entire day swabbing the floors, and emptying and cleaning the chamber-pots. This garden is large enough to make a paying wheat-crop in, yet it doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone to install a necessary-house anywhere on the property.”

“Perhaps you simply haven’t discovered it yet,” suggested Jefferson mischievously. “Who knows what
terra incognita
lies beyond that pergola there and away into the orchard? A scientific expedition must be mounted—”

“Go along with you!” Abigail poked him with her fan.

“Ma!” a voice called out, and two hurrying figures appeared from around the ruined summerhouse, hand in hand like children. A gray-and-white mongrel—who seemed to have come with the house—romped happily around their feet. “Ma, there’s a
fountain
back here!”

“You see?” asked Jefferson. “The American spirit will always seek new horizons to explore.”

One of the greatest and most delightful surprises, on their arrival in Europe, had been Nabby’s reunion with her brother Johnny—John Quincy, Abigail supposed she must learn to call him. That somber young gentleman who’d met them in London was a schoolboy no longer. The last time Nabby had seen her brother she’d been fourteen, and Johnny twelve. It had distressed Abigail during John’s brief return in ’79 to see the boy as withdrawn and aloof as his sister, as if he understood the need for sacrifice and excellence that had taken him from his family.