Patriot Hearts (58 page)

She was once more, in her own eyes, the only woman in her father’s life, and Sally was shaken by a sense almost of shame as she saw how the reprieve from unhappiness altered the white woman’s face. It was like watching a woman drinking water, who has stumbled for days in the desert.

“Please don’t speak of it, ma’am. Not to Mr. Peter—please not to your father. Your father’s been so good to me.”

“Of course,” promised Patsy, with an eager sincerity that reminded Sally achingly of their vanished days of mutual innocence. For all her coldness and spite, Sally knew that when she gave her word about something, Patsy Randolph would keep it. “I thought—Of course. Never a word.” She drew a deep breath, as if bands of iron had snapped from off her chest for the first time in twelve years, and the freedom to breathe left her dizzy.

They stood in silence for a few moments in the darkened nursery, the breathing of Patsy’s children soft around them, the house and the mountain sunk in night as if at the bottom of the sea.

Tom returned a few days after that, fuming at the result of Callendar’s trial. Judge Chase had interrupted, disallowed, and overruled the journalist’s defense attorneys until all three of them had walked out of the courtroom in disgust. Callendar had not even been given a chance to speak. He had been convicted, heavily fined, and sentenced to prison for the duration of the Sedition Act’s existence, whether that should be nine months—until Adams was out of office—or nearly five years.

“Every newspaper in the country shall carry it.” Tom’s voice was both enraged and exultant. “Madison’s already writing for the papers in New York, in Philadelphia, in Charleston. No man who loves his country can ignore what’s being done now. When the vote comes, they must surely be driven from office—or the country itself will be destroyed!”

But destruction lay closer than the election, ran deeper than any Sedition Act. It was averted only through the inexplicable machinations of Fate.

On the night of the thirtieth of August, a thunderstorm of unprecedented violence inundated Richmond, swelling Virginia’s rivers to impassable floods and washing out bridges for miles. The following day, two Richmond slaves cracked—as Sally had sworn her own resolve would not crack—and went to their masters with the information that on the previous night, despite the downpour, a band of armed slaves had assembled at the rendezvous point, ready to attack under the command of a slave named Gabriel Prosser.

Because of the rain, Prosser had reset the date of the uprising—which comprised almost eleven hundred armed and organized rebel slaves—for the following night, the thirty-first.

But by the following night, Governor Monroe had militia patrols out sweeping the roads. Within days, almost thirty of the leaders had been taken.

“Did you know?” Tom asked.

Sally didn’t answer. The sharp golden half-light of autumn, slanting through the jalousies of the cabinet’s windows, laid bright slits across his sharp features. In his eyes Sally saw the shaken look of a man who has stood near a tree in a lightning-storm, only to see God’s hammer rend the living thing to pieces a yard from his elbow.

Was it the nearness of their escape that frightened him? she wondered. The fact that he and all his friends had barely avoided being overrun and slain, as the aristocrats of France had been murdered? The fact that while he and his lanky friend Governor Monroe and clever little Mr. Madison had all been scheming about the balance of local rule with the power of the Congress, black men whose labor they all took for granted had been making plans of their own?

Or was it the awareness that he, and they, and his daughters, and his friends’ families, all stood unmasked in the eyes of the country as the oppressors, the exact equivalent of those French aristocrats who had “brought it on themselves”?

Sally folded her hands and answered calmly, “No.”

His eyes met hers.
I think you’re lying, Sally.

And hers replied,
Better a liar than a coward, Tom.

Both knew that the words could never be said. That to speak them would end the friendship that, flawed as it was, was still a source of comfort to them both.

And Sally had known for a long time, that he would not and could not be other than he was, no matter what was said.

It was he who looked aside.

The rebel slave Gabriel Prosser was hanged on the tenth of October. Rumors went around the quarters for weeks beforehand, of slaveholders demanding that the forty or so men condemned with him be “made an example of” by mass executions, or burning alive. Tom Randolph’s cousin (and brother-in-law) John, newly elected to Congress, had written,
The accused have exhibited a spirit, which must deluge the Southern country in blood:
and many had demanded vengeance accordingly.

While tidying Tom’s cabinet, Sally found a letter from Governor Monroe, asking Tom’s advice. Pinned to it was a note containing Prosser’s reply to the question asked in court, of why he had conspired to revolt.

I have nothing more to offer than what General Washington would have had to offer, had he been taken by the British and put to trial by them. I have adventured, endeavoring to obtain the liberty of my countrymen, and am a witness to their cause.

After a little further search among the papers, Sally found Tom’s polygraph copy of his reply.

The world at large will forever condemn us if we indulge a principle of revenge, or go beyond absolute necessity. They cannot lose sight of the rights of the two parties, and of the unsuccessful one.

Later, Lam Hawkin told her that on Tom’s recommendation, ten of the accused had been reprieved, and their death sentence commuted to banishment.

Not a spectacular change of heart, Sally reflected. But like her decision to help Patsy and her children, what he could do without betraying his own. And more than one might expect, of a man who sought the Presidency, a month before the election in the South.

ABIGAIL

East Chester, New York

Friday, November 7, 1800

I
n Weymouth, nearly half a century ago—in those bright quaint times when it never occurred to anyone that one day there wouldn’t be a King—there had been a man named Goslin who’d been the Town Drunk. Abigail’s earliest recollections of him included seeing him work now and then, casual labor like digging ditches or splitting shakes, always followed by a spree in Arnold’s Tavern and a stagger through the streets, singing at the top of his lungs. She, Mary, and Betsey had always fled him, at their mother’s orders. But Abigail, being the Original Eve of curiosity, had watched from a distance the man’s innumerable arguments with his long-suffering, snaggle-haired wife. Nobody knew what they lived on or why she’d married him, but through the years Abigail had seen him work less and less; until he became a dirty, whiskered, trembling automaton, stinking of his own urine, glimpsed sitting in a ditch or under a tree, engaged in rambling conversations with people who weren’t there.

She’d often wondered about his wife. It had never occurred to her to even think about his mother.

Until now.

The carriage lurched heavily as it turned through the break in the fence, and despite Jack Briesler’s careful driving its wheels slithered into ruts deep in mud. The jolt of the springs made Abigail feel as if every bone in her body were being broken with hammers.

Even that didn’t hurt as bad as the pain in her heart.

Oh, Charley. Oh, my beautiful boy.

When an infatuated Charley had begged his parents for permission to marry Colonel Smith’s spritely sister in the summer of 1794, both of them—John from Philadelphia, Abigail from the farm in Quincy—had written back immediately, begging him to wait. They’d both had a pretty good idea, by then, of the financial status of the Smith family. Charley had regretfully agreed that his parents were right, and said yes, he would wait.

And had married Sarah Smith within weeks of his letter.

To Abigail, the stone house seemed even more isolated now under snow than it had been when she’d been trapped there, ill in the fall of ’91. The yard was a perfect soup-pit of muck, crisscrossed with ruts around the low stone curb of the well. As Briesler maneuvered the carriage as close as he could to the farmhouse door, Nabby appeared: Nabby grown heavy, silent, and gray-faced in her not-quite-clean blue dress. The woman beside her, under a thick shawl, wore a much-patched caraco jacket that Abigail recognized as one she had herself purchased in London fifteen years ago, and passed on to Nabby.

“Mama Adams,” the woman said, wading through the mud and holding out one chilblained hand. She still retained some of the Colonel’s charm, some of the dark, lively beauty Abigail had seen in her on her first visit to Nabby here back in ’89.

With the other arm, Charley’s wife held a child on her hip, a black-haired girl of two. A four-year-old in a dress made up from the fabric of one of Nabby’s London gowns clung to her skirt, looking from her mother to Abigail with brown eyes heartbreakingly like Charley’s. The mother’s eyes had the wrung-out look of someone who has been weeping, on and off, for weeks.

Abigail was familiar with it. She had only to turn her head, and see its echo in Nabby’s tired face.

“Sarah,” she greeted her daughter-in-law, and mentally thanked God she’d remembered to bring the highest pair of shoe-pattens she possessed. As she got out of the coach, the tall iron cleats sank in the mud like stilts.

“Thank you for coming,” Sarah whispered, and tears began to track from her eyes. She led Abigail through the farmhouse, to the small lean-to built off the kitchen.

The lean-to was bitterly cold. In a way it was a fortunate circumstance, reflected that critical little voice in the back of Abigail’s mind that never left her, not even in her worst moments of shock, of pity, of grief. Had the room been warm, the stink would have knocked one down.

Sarah had clearly done her best to keep Charley clean, and it was a task clearly beyond her.

Oh, my beautiful boy.

Abigail pressed her hand briefly to her mouth, then went to Charley’s bedside while Nabby gently led the two little girls from the room.

How did it come to this? How could it come to this?

Charley’s face was so swollen she hardly recognized him. His puffy hands groped and picked at the stained coverlet. She remembered Nabby writing her—that summer when she and the Colonel had been living like royalty in New York on the proceeds of the Colonel’s “investments”—that Charley and Sarah were wildly happy together, and that she thought that marriage to her husband’s young sister would settle her brother down.

Apparently that had lasted about as long as the Colonel’s latest fortune. By December of that year—1794—Nabby had been alone again, pregnant again, and frantically trying to find money to live on. Again.

And Charley…

“Ma?” he whispered, and fumbled for her hand. His breath almost made her gag.

“I’m here, Son.”

“I’m sorry.” Alcohol—recent and abused for years—slurred his words. “ ’S the las’ time, I swear you ’s the las’ time. I’ll sober up now, I’ll…pull myself together. Not fair to Sarah…”

Abigail had to bite back the urge to snap at him that it wasn’t fair to his daughters, either, not to mention his father. Her jaw ached with the unsaid words and she managed, “I know you will, dear.”
Hypocrisy,
she thought, furious at herself.
You tell him a lie, forgive him, and he’ll only go on getting himself like this….

But no words of hers—no tears, no pleas of Sarah or Nabby or anyone else—had ever kept him from drinking.

And she knew, looking down into his face, that it no longer mattered. She knew she was seeing her son for the last time.

It occurred to her that she hadn’t seen the real Charley, that smiling boy who only wanted to be with his friends in his own home with his family around him, for many years.

He was crying now, a drunkard’s easy tears. “I’ll make you proud, Ma. Make Pa proud. He wasn’t ever proud of me.”

“Now, that’s not true!” protested Abigail sharply. “When you went to Harvard—”

“Got thrown out,” sobbed Charley bitterly—for dashing nude across the snowy Yard, to be exact, Abigail recalled, with a flash of exasperation. An exercise neither he nor his friends could possibly have performed sober. “Couldn’t finish,” he went on tearfully. “Couldn’t stay in Holland with Pa. Johnny stayed. Pa’s so proud of Johnny, goin’ to Russia an’ Berlin an’ Spain.”

And while Johnny had been making John proud, Charley had borrowed, invested, and lost all of Johnny’s savings: just in time for Johnny to be a pauper when he married, in London, a girl Abigail feared was spoilt and pampered.

“I remember what you tol’ me, Ma, how it was the chance for us to learn French an’ meet important people. An’ I wasted it.”

Tears flooded Abigail’s eyes at the recollection of the inn-yard in the gray port-town of Beverly, where poor little Charley had fetched up after five months on the high seas.
Too exquisite a sensibility for Europe,
John had said in his letter, and had consigned his eleven-year-old son to home-bound American friends. It was all he could have done at the time—there was no question of John abandoning negotiations for the Dutch loan that had kept Washington’s troops in powder—and Charley hadn’t seemed a penny the worse at the time. He’d spoken of being stranded in Spain, and of finding himself stuck on a ship whose drunkard of a captain couldn’t find his way out of the North Sea, as a sort of astonishing lark.

But the fact remained that John had sent him away, while Johnny had done his duty and stayed.

And Johnny, after a wretched attempt to set himself up as a lawyer in the already lawyer-infested Boston, had gone back to Europe as George Washington’s Minister to Holland only weeks before Charley had married Sarah.

“I wasted it all,” Charley mumbled, his bloated fingers slacking, picking at the coverlet. “Nuthin’ I could do, could make him proud. Forgive me, Ma. Forgive me.”

Forgive me, Ma.
The words sliced at Abigail’s heart. Her brother Will had always pleaded for forgiveness after his binges, or when he’d come back to Braintree during the War, penniless and with rumors of counterfeiting and swindling trailing him like flies after stale meat. And their mother always had forgiven him, and always had given him money, even during that last year of her life, when the British had been bottled up in Boston and their raiding-parties were burning farms, and prices were so high that there was no sugar or coffee or medicine to be had in the town.

Dying, that dreadful autumn of ’75, Abigail’s mother had neither smiled nor wept, but she had whispered her son’s name again and again, with love and sorrow in her voice. She had had three daughters, but only one son, and he the youngest, her baby boy. And he, of course, had been nowhere around.

Had Will looked as Charley did now, before he died?

But somehow the memory of her anger at her mother, like a cold stone dropped into boiling water, turned her own anger to pity as she finally understood. Whatever she’d felt about Charley’s sins—against her and John, against his wife and daughters in their patched dresses—he was dying now. And he was her son. The child who’d played on the sanded floor of their kitchen back on Queen Street in Boston, listening to the British drums on the Common. The child who’d chirped up gamely in the face of a British raid, “We’ll
kill
’em, Ma!”

She put her arms around his shoulders, laid her face against his chest. “My darling, what’s done is done. I love you. I, and your father, have always loved you.”

He was just thirty years old.

She knew that later she’d be angry at him again, furious at the weakness that had led him to throw away everything she and John, Sarah and Johnny and Tommy and Nabby, had given him. Knew that before she left this place—and she planned to flee as soon as she could—she’d be back to pacing, to demanding of Nabby and Louisa,
How could he?
But the tears she shed were tears of love and of untainted grief.

She knew when she journeyed south again, to that brand-new Federal City on the Potomac that people were already starting to call Washington City, she’d be taking Charley’s little Susie with her as well as Nabby’s red-haired Caroline. Permanently, she hoped, the way she’d taken Louisa.

The world was cruel to the daughters of wastrels.

Mount Vernon Plantation

Wednesday, December 3, 1800

“I have tried not to—to take blame upon myself,” she said, some weeks later, to Martha Washington. “My brother—Louisa’s father…” And she lowered her voice with a glance across the Blue Parlor at the little group on the sofa near the fireplace, “…was—was weak that way.”

Louisa, now twenty-seven, was relating to the other two women beside her how Abigail had dealt with the Quincy neighbors who’d objected to Jamey Prince, their free black servant, attending school with
their
precious sons. Martha’s dear Nelly—who could not possibly, Abigail reflected, be twenty-one years old and a mother herself now!—was laughing and shaking her head. On Louisa’s other side Sophie Sparling—now the Widow Hallam—merely looked amused, as if such hypocrisy were to be expected of those who’d rebelled against the King.

“And I’ve often wondered,” she went on quietly, turning back to meet Martha’s troubled gaze. “
Was
there something amiss in the way my parents raised my brother? Was there something they could have done, or failed to do, to turn him from drink and ill company?”

Martha set down her cup, and laid one plump black-mitted hand on Abigail’s. “You cannot think that, dearest,” she said softly. In her eyes Abigail saw pain that was the twin of her own, perfect comprehension of shared grief and shared doubt. In the footsore aftermath of innumerable teas and levees in Philadelphia when they’d shared the duty of sociable small-talk with each and every guest, Martha had spoken often of her own concerns about the disordered household in which her granddaughters were growing up: a pattern that clearly seemed to be repeating itself now in Eliza’s.