Patriot Hearts (31 page)

“Abigail had worries of her own that year.” Sophie moved to the mantel, and took down the small clock that Mr. Jefferson had given Dolley and Jemmy at their wedding; wrapped it in one of Dolley’s silver-tissue turbans as she spoke. “Troubles which she could not tell John. They were back in Braintree by then—in the finest house in town, which, she wrote me, looked much larger in her memories than it turned out to be once they tried to get all their French and English furniture into it. It was that year that it began to be clear to her that her daughter’s fine husband hadn’t the slightest intention of actually working for a living, being under the impression that as a Hero of the Revolution—” Her tone was as subtle and sharp as a glass splinter. “—the new government must of course provide him with a lucrative position. I think that was also the year her son Charley—one of the pair she left behind in Massachusetts—was thrown out of Harvard for a drunken prank.”

“Poor Charley.” A shiver of foreboding went through Dolley, at the memory of what had become of that charming, gentle, intelligent young man. “And poor Abigail.”

Her own son’s charming, gentle, intelligent face seemed to her, for a moment, to glance from the little mirror’s depths.

Was that what invariably happened to those whose mothers set them down in what they believed was a safe place, to labor at their husbands’ sides in the vineyard of Liberty?

No,
she thought quickly.
Payne’s case is different. My son will outgrow his bad habits. He will be all right….

Would Payne’s life have been different, without the events of 1789?

She set the mirror down. “It was the year my father—” Even at the distance of two and a half decades, it was hard to understand what had happened to the man Dolley had known.

“He went bankrupt that year,” she said slowly. “Dost know that it is the rule in many Meetings, that a man who cannot pay his creditors is read out of the Congregation? It broke my father. The Meeting was his life. He became lost in some inner darkness. He would not come out of his room. He would bolt the door, and Mama took to sleeping with us—Lucy and Anna and Mary and me. When John Todd offered for my hand, Mama begged me to accept him. To hesitate, and wait upon my own heart, was a luxury I could not afford. We were wed on Twelfth Night, John and I. The thirty-first anniversary of Martha Washington’s marriage to the General, and a bare month before Patsy Jefferson, not even eight weeks returned from France, married her Mr. Randolph.”

“And moved into Monticello with him.” Sophie tucked the clock into the trunk, and packed it into place with a shawl. “To show her father she didn’t need him, yet wasn’t about to leave his side.” She rose, shook out her somber skirts. “I’m going to go see if McGraw’s anywhere in sight, with or without a vehicle. If you’re going to stay here, I think it’s high time we started counting how many able-bodied men we have in the house, and how many weapons.”

“The day before yesterday, we had a hundred,” Dolley said bitterly. “And Colonel Carberry swore upon his sword that they would stay and defend the house from the British. I should like to think they’re on their way to Bladensburg at this moment—Yes, Paul?”

The young valet had appeared again in the parlor door.

“Mrs. Madison? M’sieu Roux wants to know, will you be serving dinner this afternoon?”

“Yes, of course. Please ask M’sieu Sioussat to set the tables for forty.” Dolley turned back to Sophie, who was looking at her as if at a madwoman. “Martha Washington often said to me that the whole of her task, as the Presidentress, was to
show
the country, and the world, the nature of the office of President. The nature of what we, as a republic, are and should be.” Dolley sat again at the desk, where the letter she’d begun yesterday to her sister still lay unfinished beside the Queen’s mirror, a fragment of normality that seemed to say,
I have not fled.

I will not flee.

“It isn’t enough to say it, she would tell me. The French spent years, during the Revolution,
saying
how things should be. One must
live
as an example. That is the reason, whatever happens, I must not flee.”

Dolley looked, for a long moment, into the chilly eyes of her friend.

Then she added, “And why I must not be taken. Nor Jemmy, either.”

“A challenging conundrum,” murmured Sophie, “given the bravery and superb organization of the militia guarding the Bladensburg Bridge. Between counting out dessert-forks, I shall still ask M’sieu Sioussat how many guns are in the house.”

“Surely the British won’t—”

“I’m not thinking of the British,” said Sophie quietly. “I’m thinking of looters.”

She disappeared into the dark of the hall. For a long minute Dolley sat at the desk, the unfinished letter to her sister Lucy beneath her fingertips.

I am determined not to go myself until I see Mr. Madison safe…Disaffection stalks around us…My friends and acquaintances are all gone…

The words seemed clear one moment, gibberish the next.

And do those who remain do so only to speed our enemies’ pursuit?

She plucked her tortoiseshell snuffbox from the desk-drawer, inhaled a pinch—a nasty habit, she knew, but the nicotine soothed her.

Lucy,
she thought, lifting the letter and half smiling in spite of her fear at the thought of her brash and pretty blond sister. It was Lucy who had first brought her and Martha Washington together in 1793.

In the year that the world tore itself apart.

If 1789 had been an ill year for everyone, 1793 had at times had the quality of nightmare, as if the Horsemen of the Apocalypse had ridden across the land.

War, Greed, Plague…and Death on his pale horse, following after.

Outside the windows, above the curtain of dust, clouds had begun to thicken, and far off she heard the rumble of thunder.

It will storm,
she thought,
and soak the men….

But the thunder did not stop. Not a single peal, but a heavy sustained booming, muffled by distance…

“Do you hear it?” Sophie reappeared, her hands full of silver plate and Dolley’s shawls.

Dolley understood then, with a sudden chilling sensation beneath her breastbone, that it wasn’t thunder.

“Cannon,” Sophie said.

                  
1793
                  

MARTHA

Philadelphia

Friday, July 27, 1793

Pray, dearest Aunt, do not think worse of me, for prices of all things remain high here and there have been so many expenses. Would I could hold household as you do always and if you will but help us in our difficulty, in future I will do so, I promise. Little Charlie sends his love to his “dear Nuncle” and to that I add my own, and to you, my dearest aunt.

In deepest love and
gratitude——Your Fanny.

Martha sighed, and set the letter down. In the yard a dog was howling, though amid the constant din and confusion of Philadelphia that could mean anything. There were days when she felt that if she were a dog, she’d sit in the yard and howl, too.

Mount Vernon seemed a hundred thousand miles away.

It had rained that afternoon, and the brick pavement of High Street gave back a dense and humid heat. The whole of the summer had been so, wet and dispiriting. Though that had not stopped the mobs that had roved the city streets and waterfronts, either to cheer the arrival of privateers escorting captured British ships to be auctioned off, or to demand that their President declare war on England on behalf of Revolutionary France.

Since April, Martha had dreamed of being locked in a room watching a gunpowder-trail burn toward piled kegs of explosives, helpless to stop it. The situation—not only in Philadelphia, but in all the cities of the United States—was turning George’s hair white. Even the War, she thought, had not been this bad.

And the man behind it—bumptious, obnoxious, and dangerous “Citizen” Édouard Genêt—would almost certainly be at her reception tonight.

He was the Minister of France; she couldn’t very well have the servants throw Genêt out. Much as she’d like to do so.

Dinner was over. In the front of the house—Robert Morris’s house, which both Benedict Arnold and the British General Howe had occupied in turn—the footmen were clearing up the family dining-room. In the kitchen Uncle Hercules, Mr. Hyde, and Mrs. Hyde were in the process of getting coffee, tea, and Martha’s special plum-cake ready for the guests who would begin arriving at eight. Fidas and Austin were putting fresh candles into the sconces and chandelier of the green drawing-room, while Moll made sure twelve-year-old Wash was clean, powdered, and presentable. It was astonishing how disarrayed the boy could get between six and eight o’clock.

In the office next door, Martha could hear George’s light tread as he crossed from desk to window, then back again. Wary and alert as he had been at Cambridge or Valley Forge. Watching the street, over the wall of the garden. Listening for the too-familiar shouting of half-drunken sailors, singing French songs about hanging aristocrats from the nearest lamp-post. The Americans were singing them by rote, she presumed, since most of them didn’t know enough French to ask for water in that language if they were dying. Not that America had many aristocrats to hang, but anybody to whom the singers owed money would do.

But added to the mobs now were the sailors from the French fleet, in port to refit after an attempt to suppress the slave revolts that for two years had been raging in the Caribbean. Citizen Genêt had started his career as Minister Plenipotentiary by coming, not to Philadelphia to present his credentials, but to Charleston, South Carolina. There he had fitted up privateers to prey on British ships, under the French flag. They’d bring the captured ships back to Charleston and auction the cargoes to Americans, who knew no better than to fuel the growing fire of England’s wrath.

For this appalling piece of meddling, Édouard Genêt had been taken to the unwashed bosoms of the working-class political clubs, the so-called “Democratic-Republican Societies” that had sprouted up in every major city, since the start, four years ago, of the Revolution in France.

Tom Jefferson—George’s Secretary of State these days—insisted the clubs were necessary to educate men in the business of making decisions for themselves. Hammy Hamilton—now Secretary of the Treasury—called them “Jacobin clubs,” after the most radical faction of the French National Convention. But they not only discussed politics. More and more, they noisily espoused “fraternal assistance which would expand the Empire of Liberty” (and incidentally bail France out of the dire financial effects of having declared war simultaneously on Britain, Holland, and Spain when her treasury was empty in the first place).

“Fraternal assistance” meant declaring war on Britain again, which even Martha knew the United States simply could not afford to do. When George had issued a Proclamation of Neutrality, the Republicans had followed the French pattern and begun to demonstrate. They demanded that the Proclamation—and, if necessary, the authority of the President—be set aside for the benefit of their beloved France. Genêt’s presence had only served to fan the flames. Upon the arrival of the French fleet in Philadelphia, the Revolutionary Minister had invited its sailors ashore to join the demonstrators.

The sailors had come armed.

Martha might have been completely apolitical, but she knew the situation was a bad one.

She realized she had been listening, too.

No sound from the streets, at least not of shouting or “La Marseillaise.” In the long summer evenings the din of wagons hauling goods in from the docks and of the voices of passersby didn’t quiet down until nearly nine. But she heard her maid’s light tread in the hall outside her door, then the soft tap on the panels and the heavy rustle of velvet and silk that would be her dress for the evening: “Lady Washington?”

“Wait for me, if you would, please, Oney,” she replied, and slipped Fanny’s letter out of sight into a drawer and turned the key on it. “I’m just going to go up and see how Pollie is doing.”

Three years ago, her granddaughters’ plans to marry off their tutor Mr. Lear had finally borne fruit with the arrival of his childhood sweetheart, Pollie Long from New Hampshire. As Tobias Lear had slipped into the role of George’s secretary, so the pretty fair-haired Pollie had become Martha’s. When the capital had moved from New York to Philadelphia the following year—1791—it was Tobias and Pollie who’d come ahead to make sure the Morris mansion on High Street was ready for Presidential occupancy (it hadn’t been), and it was frequently the tactful, gentle Pollie who made sure that Nelly did her lessons and that bread-and-butter letters went out to the Philadelphia hostesses who entertained the President and his family at dinner.

As Martha ascended the back stair that led from the family rooms on the second floor to the offices and bedchambers of George’s secretaries on the third, she heard Tobias’s voice: “…the way the trick riders used to do in ancient Rome, I believe. He rides without saddle, standing on the horse’s back, a lovely gray named Cornplanter…”

By the sound of it, Tobias was keeping Pollie’s spirits up—and her mind off the shouting in the streets—with an account of Mr. Ricketts’s celebrated circus. Pollie had fallen ill three days before, and when her fever was high, the noise of the mobs terrified her. She’d seemed a little better this afternoon, but long experience nursing the sick had taught Martha that fevers frequently shot up as evening drew on.

Her fear was confirmed when she came into the large, light bedroom, and saw Tobias’s face. Pollie turned her head weakly on the pillows. “Lady Washington?”

“How are you feeling, dearest?” Though it was clear by her young friend’s flushed face and restless movements that she was in pain and barely conscious of what was going on around her.

“Lincoln—?” she murmured her little son’s name, and Martha took her hand reassuringly.

“Moll has taken Lincoln down to help her get Mr. Tub ready for the reception, so I imagine he’ll take some dusting off before he can come up to bid you good-night.” Eighteen-month-old Benjamin Lincoln Lear was a general favorite of the household. Since Pollie had taken sick, the boy’d been sleeping in Wash’s room, and Wash had confided to Martha that he was glad to have a little brother to show things to.

“I’ll be up after the reception, to tell you how it all went,” she promised. “In the meantime, I’ll send Moll up with some cool water. I imagine that will make you feel a little better, poor sweet.” Martha had already seen the dishes of rice-pudding and coddled egg, on the tray on the dresser-top, barely touched. “Mr. Lear, I’m sure the General won’t
need
three secretaries at his side during the reception, so if you’d like to stay here and read to Pollie for a little…You’ll be missed, of course, but it’s entirely up to you to choose. If you want to take a little time at the reception, or just to rest, of course I’ll have Oney come up.”

“I’ll stay here, thank you, Lady Washington.” Tobias got to his feet, to walk her to the door. As they reached it he went on in a softer voice, “She ate nothing of her dinner, and when she uses the chamber-pot there are black streaks in her urine. I know that can’t be right.”

“I shall send Fidas with a note now, asking Dr. Rush to come first thing in the morning.”

Tobias pressed her hand gratefully, and Martha hurried down the stairs in a rustle of silk dressing-gown, cursing again the necessity of appearing at a reception—and having to be polite to Citizen Genêt of all people!—when her place was with her family. With Tobias and Pollie, and poor little Lincoln; with Fanny in the house they owned in Alexandria, coping as well as she could with shaky health and new widowhood. It was no surprise poor Fanny was not doing well: Augustine’s death in February had come barely six weeks after that of Fanny’s father.

Those are the people who need me.
Those dear ones, and poor Jacky’s girls—she could hear Eliza’s strident voice crying, “Thief, am I? It is
you
who seek to rob
me,
of any chance to achieve my happiness in the world!” and knew she’d be called upon to arbitrate who was going to wear Nelly’s garnets to the reception.

There were times, Martha had confessed to Abigail Adams, when she felt herself to be a State prisoner, forced to watch the sufferings of her loved ones through the bars of her jail.

But George needed her, even more than they. He was a man of iron, but Martha had seen what iron looks like, after four years at the mercy of the sea. At least, in her relatively comfortable cell, she didn’t have to be constantly making decisions of peace or war with a gun held to her head.

George was sixty-one years old. In eight years of leading the Continental Army to war, he had been ill only once. In his first eighteen months in the office of President he had nearly died twice, once when the capital was still in New York, of an abscess whose effects he would simply have shaken off back at Mount Vernon, when he was getting enough rest, and then of pneumonia. And despite that, Mr. Hamilton and Mr. Jefferson—whose vicious bickering in the Cabinet had made poor George’s life a living Hell for four years—had both begged George to stand for a second term as President, probably because neither of them could endure the thought of the other possibly coming to power. Martha would cheerfully have assassinated them both and had the servants throw their bodies in the river.

And Jemmy Madison, too, for getting George into this mess in the first place.

And yet as she took her husband’s arm, as muscular in its sheath of black velvet as that of the twenty-six-year-old militia Colonel who had led her to the preacher, thirty-four years ago, Martha had to admit to herself that for the country’s sake, she was glad George had accepted a second term.

She liked John Adams, and the company of his fragile, outspoken, intimidating Abigail had been the only thing that had gotten her through any number of previous receptions. Yet she suspected that the irascible little New Englander would simply have been unable to cope with Citizen Genêt.

“They’re insane! To think that with a single-house legislature the government wouldn’t be torn apart by factions! These political clubs and salons they have—Girondists and Jacobins and Feuillants—all they do is keep the people in a fever—”

“—aristocrats brought it upon themselves, you know—”

“Their treasury is bankrupt! Of course they want the whole of what we owe them paid in a lump—”