Patriot Hearts (45 page)

The face of the man was a stranger’s, gaunt instead of squarely plump, stubbled with a week’s worth of beard. The skin was ghastly orange-yellow where it could be seen at all under the streaks of mud and rain-thinned black vomit. He’d vomited on his clothing. The rainwater spread the horror; flecks of it clung to his chapped lips.

From a skeletal face, blue eyes stared at her. John’s eyes. Begging her to recognize him.

Dolley caught him as his knees buckled, dragged him inside. Payne ran forward, crying “Papa!” and stopped abruptly, the horror hitting him like a club. Dolley called out, “Mama! Get some water, quick. Get Mama—”

Through his clothes John’s body radiated heat like a smoldering log. His face, pressed to her bare throat, seemed to scorch the skin. Dolley whispered, “Oh, dear God,” as they sank together to the floor before the open door, the tail-end of the afternoon rain spattering in around them.

John whispered, “Dolley,” and fumbled for her hands.

She caught them, pressed them to her breast. Footsteps shook the enclosed wooden staircase and she felt rather than saw her mother and Anna come running out; heard her mother say, “Open the bedroom door,” meaning the door of the downstairs “best bedroom” where guests would sleep. Anna raced to obey; young Johnnie came dashing in, face pallid with shock. “Get him to the bed,” said her mother, and Dolley whispered, “No,” as John’s body convulsed in her arms, his fingers crushing her hands.

Black vomit began to flow out of his mouth again, not in spasms, but like a dirty stream. Around it he whispered, “Payne?”

“He is well,” answered Dolley. And because she knew it didn’t matter, she added, “Willie also.” The stench was absolutely appalling. Dolley gathered John’s head to her shoulder, as she had only minutes ago held Payne’s.

“Dolley,” he said again, or something she assumed was her name. Then he convulsed again, writhing and striking, his elbow ramming her belly, the strength of his arm nearly breaking her back. To hold him away would only expose her to more injury and she wouldn’t throw him aside to flop like a dying fish on the floor. Instead, she closed her arms tight and held on, with all the strength of a farm-girl who has done the work of the slaves her father freed.

It felt like minutes but couldn’t have been more than a few seconds. Then he seemed to slither down, his weight like the weight of a sack half filled with corn.

How long Dolley sat on the wet stone of the floor, her husband’s body cradled in her arms, she never afterwards knew. It felt like hours—it actually could not have been more than a few minutes. When her mother tried to make her stand she pulled away from her hand, tightened her hold around John’s chest, unable to speak, or cry, or make a sound.

At last her mother got her to her feet, and led her from the room.

Washington City

August 24, 1814

“I sometimes wonder what I would have been, had John not died.” Dolley raised her head from her half-written letter as Sophie came back into the parlor, a trio of silver compote-bowls in her hands. From the dining-room next door the muted rustle of tablecloths, the tiny chink of porcelain being set in its place, made a whispered through-line to the dim counterpoint of cannon and the jangle of fleeing wagons and running feet.

Dolley’s heart was beating hard, but oddly, remembering John’s death gave her a sense of calm.

After John had died, she had gone into the kitchen, stripped out of her fouled dress, washed her face, put on something else that her mother brought her—to this day she couldn’t remember what it was—and went out, first to comfort the howling, terrified Payne, then to wash her husband’s body.

A few hours after that, just before sunset, Willie died.

She understood then that even the worst days contained only twenty-four hours. One did what one had to do to get through them, and afterwards, one slept.

“I venture to guess, a respectable Philadelphia matron and a—” Sophie visibly stopped herself from adding something.
Probably,
Dolley guessed,
the queen of the Quakers for miles around.
Even after all these years, that was the single regret that stung. “A doting grandmother—and in fairly short order, knowing Payne,” Sophie finished, with a wry twist to her mouth. Dolley rolled her eyes. Jemmy had already been obliged to get Payne out of several scrapes with girls.

“John could have kept Payne on the straight and narrow road, if any could,” she agreed after a moment. “That he hath sometimes strayed is not Jemmy’s failing, but my own. And I hear he doth well, in Ghent with Mr. Adams’s son.” This wasn’t entirely true, but if Sophie had heard rumor of the swathe Payne was cutting through Dutch diplomatic society—and the gambling-hells of Amsterdam—she didn’t show it.

As she returned to her letter, Dolley wondered: Would Payne have been different, had she done as her mother had urged her to do? If she had limited herself to being the wife John had wanted her to be, even after his death?

Instead of being herself?

Philadelphia, 1794

Winter and Spring

The hard cold of November ended the yellow fever in Philadelphia. The winter was a bitter one. The river froze, further crippling sea-commerce already disrupted by the summer’s riots and plague. The whole city seemed to be in mourning, numbed by grief and shock.

“Everyone I know hath lost members of their families,” Dolley said to Lady Washington, when she and her mother called at the Morris mansion to thank the older woman for her note of condolence. “Going to Meeting for the first time, ’twas hard not to weep, seeing so many clothed in black. So many empty seats.”

Lady Washington set down her cup, and leaned across to take Dolley’s hands. She, too, wore the sable of mourning.

“Doth Master Lincoln well, in New Hampshire with his granny?” Dolley asked.

And the plump little lady smiled. “Yes. Mary Lear and I have been writing all the summer, and have concluded that we must actually be sisters, our thoughts are so much akin. She is of the opinion—as am I—that it would do the city of Philadelphia much good, if instead of keeping all the theaters and assembly-rooms closed, some kind of public amusements could be available. I don’t mean Roman orgies or revel-routs through the streets, of course—”

“I should give a great deal to see Alexander Hamilton in a toga,” remarked Dolley thoughtfully, at which her mother looked shocked.

Lady Washington suppressed a delighted giggle with the greatest of difficulty. “My dear, so would he. But it would be a good thing, I think, for people to get out of their homes a bit.” She cocked a bright brown eye up at Dolley and added, “And that means you, dear, when you’re feeling up to it. Will you be removing back to Walnut Street?”

“I think so, yes.” The thought of reentering the big brick house on Fourth and Walnut felt strange to her. The thought of sleeping in the big bed alone, without John.

On the other side of the drawing-room, beside the hearth’s cheerful blaze, her mother and her sister Lucy—a startlingly stylish Lucy in a rose-pink polonaise dress and a Norwich silk shawl that had to have cost several pounds—were chatting with the Custis girls about the sale of the boardinghouse and the removal of Molly Payne and her two youngest children to Steptoe Washington’s plantation.

“Anna will be staying with me, to help look after Payne,” Dolley told Lady Washington. “And as we have
finally
gotten my father-in-law’s estate probated, I am able now to hire a cook and a maid-of-all-work.” While Dolley was still in the first shock of bereavement in Gray’s Ferry, John’s brother James had gone into Philadelphia and collected all the papers and receipt-books, not only from the house of Todd senior, but from John’s office in the Walnut Street house as well. To Dolley’s repeated requests for the papers—since she knew very well that under her father-in-law’s will she stood to inherit some six hundred pounds, plus whatever John had left her—James sent a little housekeeping money and the suggestion that she apply to the Meeting for support.

“I trust all things have worked out well?”

“Well, there is much yet to be done—”
Like making James hand over John’s papers,
thought Dolley, though she couldn’t say so at tea. “But Mr. Wilkins, a friend of my husband’s in the Congregation and a lawyer himself, hath offered me his services.”

“Will that answer?” Nelly Custis joined them from where she and Mary had been feeding bits of plum-cake to Payne. Like her grandmother, Nelly wore the muted grays and blacks of half-mourning for young Pollie, who had been so integral a member of their household; a sharp contrast to the dramatically funereal garb affected by her older sister Eliza. “For a member of the Congregation to handle the affairs of another in the Congregation, who might have to collect from still others in the Congregation?”

Lady Washington frowned at this talk of business, but Dolley replied cheerfully, “There are those in the Congregation, of course, who might find it inappropriate.”
And who might side with James and frown on even the suggestion of a lawsuit.
“But Colonel Burr—who as thou knowst was one of my mother’s boarders last year—hath also offered his assistance. So I do not think there shall be any difficulty.”

“Not with legal matters, at least,” agreed Lady Washington darkly. She glanced across at Lucy, as if Burr had seduced her himself instead of playing Cupid for her nephew Steptoe.

“When I see how happy Lucy is, ma’am, I cannot find it in my heart to hold the Colonel’s role in their romance against him.” Dolley smiled.

“Well, no.” Lady Washington sounded unwilling even to credit the New York Senator with inadvertent good. “But you watch out for Colonel Burr, Dolley—if I may call thee Dolley? Oh, dear, now you’ve got me saying ‘thee’ and ‘thou.’ He is a rake, and a man who knows how to make himself
fatally
attractive to women.”

“I don’t imagine a man
could
be a rake—at least not a very successful one—who did not,” pointed out Dolley, and squeezed Lady Washington’s plump, black-mitted hand again. “Do not trouble thyself, ma’am. I know Colonel Burr too well to be taken in by his ways. And indeed, it seems to me now that it will be enough, for me to look after my Payne and Anna, and to…to live in quiet. I do not think I shall marry again.”

“Oh, you will, my dear,” predicted Martha wisely. “You will.”

Dolley wasn’t so sure of that. It was, of course, expected that every widow would remarry, if for nothing else than to provide a guardian to her children, though from remarks Nelly Custis let drop about her mother’s morose and reclusive second husband, some guardians were more effective than others.

The truth was that she enjoyed being a widow.

She missed John. In those first few weeks of December, back in their home on Walnut Street, there were days when she could only sit beside her bedroom fire, gazing out the window at the falling snow. But the dazed, uprooted confusion she saw in the eyes of Lady Washington’s dear friend Mrs. Powel—widowed also by the fever—was strange to her, and a little frightening.

“No, Elizabeth has taken her husband’s death very hard, poor darling,” Lady Washington agreed, when, after another of Martha’s “at-home mornings” Dolley remained to help her and Nelly wash up the good china. “When my Daniel died—Mr. Custis…” Her brown eyes lost a little of their bright focus, gazing back across the gap of years. “I was…I was shocked, of course, and devastated—I had nearly lost our son Jacky to fever, only weeks before—But I never felt that the world itself had ended.”

She glanced up at Dolley—who stood nearly a head taller than she—and in her face Dolley saw the shadow of the future. “I don’t think…” she began, and hesitated to even speak of it. In a tiny voice very unlike her own usual briskness, she said, “I am not sure that I could survive losing the General.”

The pain in her eyes, the dread of a grief greater than she knew herself able to bear, and the aching love, caught Dolley’s throat, so that she put her arm around her friend’s shoulders, wet hand and all, and declared, “And I am very sure he could not survive the loss of thee, ma’am. Which presents a terrible conundrum, doth it not? So thou must take care to predecease him, and steel thyself to look down from Heaven and see him falling prey to the wiles of Kitty Burke, or Georgina Morris—” She named two of the most intently marriage-minded belles in Philadelphia society, and Martha, surprised into laughter, gave her a schoolgirl shove and went back to drying cups.

But Dolley understood. With John’s death, she had no feeling that the world had ended. She only felt deeply confused, and for many nights the old dream returned to her, of having taken the wrong road and being unable to find her way back.

“For Heaven’s sake, Mrs. Todd, rearrange the furniture,” Aaron Burr advised, when he came in February to help her draft yet another demand that James surrender John’s papers to her for probate. “Every widow I’ve ever met says it’s the quickest way to lay ghosts. Paint the rooms, if you can spare the time—in a month you won’t have an unscheduled week to do it in—and buy yourself new dishes.”