Patriot Hearts (62 page)

Another small silence fell. Just for a moment, Jefferson’s eyes avoided hers. “On behalf of the men who supported me,” he said at last, “I do apologize, for causing you pain. Of which, this year, you have had enough.”

It was all he would say, concerning politics, concerning the election, concerning his supporters who were still in jail for trying to whip up hatred against the President. Concerning all the blood spilled in France, all the lies told and trust violated, only to put a dictator on its throne.

Jefferson is a dreamer,
thought Abigail. Who had said that to her once? And his dream today was, before she took her leave, to reestablish something of the friendship they had lost. To pretend that all was actually well.

Briesler brought fresh tea, and candles, and another log for the fire. They drank together and Abigail pretended, for the sake of the man she’d once called her friend.

As she listened to his footfalls retreat down the echoing hall, she realized there was little likelihood that she would ever see Thomas Jefferson again.

The Federal City

Friday, February 13, 1801

As dreams went, Abigail reflected—as fairy-tales went—“happily ever after” was not, as Martha Washington had often said, “all it was cracked up to be.”

She stood in the long French window of the downstairs entrance-hall, waiting for the carriage in the gray chill of dawn. The furniture was gone. Louisa sat by one of the fireplaces cradling a bored and sleepy Susie in her arms.

We fought our war—we won our freedom…Journeys did end in lovers meeting.

Only the lover Nabby met turned out to be a good-for-nothing, and the freedom we fought for turned out to be freedom for dirty-minded newspapers to call John names while he battled to keep the country out of a war it couldn’t win.

And the prize for all our striving was the privilege of living in a world that we do not understand.

And along the way we lost our daughter’s hope and happiness, as surely as we lost poor Charley. As surely as John and I lost our dear friend Jefferson.

Abigail pulled her cloak tighter around her shoulders, watching the black-cloaked, slender figure that had to be Sophie Hallam walking toward her along Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol.

“They just finished ballot twenty-three,” she reported, as she arrived. “Still nothing. Some of the Federalists talk of asking the President Pro Tempore of the Senate to take over the position of Chief Executive if the deadlock cannot be resolved; or possibly Chief Justice Marshall…In which case, Mr. Jefferson says, he will call for another Convention to rewrite the Constitution
again—
presumably more to his liking.”

“Which is
precisely
what they did in France,” said Abigail bleakly. “Over, and over again. Whenever one faction didn’t like what was going on.”

“I understand militia is gathering in Virginia.”

Abigail shook her head, and for a long while was unable to speak. Unable to frame into words the anger and sickened pain in her heart. At last she said, “It’s just that I sat on Penn’s Hill and watched the fighting before Boston. And now, after all our struggle, it seems I’m going to see the Republic break into pieces within my lifetime, after seeing it born.”

“Mrs. Adams…” Sophie’s expression of sardonic amusement was gone. “You know Hammy isn’t going to let it happen. He wrote the
Federalist Papers,
for Heaven’s sake, if for no other reason than his pride won’t let him stand by and watch the Constitution
he
championed be swept away, completely aside from the fact that without General Washington to dote on him he has less control now over what the Republicans might come up with on a second try. He’ll back down, and give the election to Jefferson.”

“So that’s what we have come to,” asked Abigail bitterly, “in so short a time? To be thankful that one man’s vanity truckles to another man’s pride?”

“At least as things stand there is little likelihood that anyone is going to come posting up to Quincy to demand Mr. Adams return to public life the way they did to poor General Washington.”

Surprised into a cackle of laughter, Abigail responded, “
Poor
my grandmother’s lumbago! He delighted in being called back to the colors, when it looked as if we were to go to war with France. Poor
Martha,
to have waited for happiness for sixteen years, only to have it end in two—”

She broke off. Remembering that plump, black-clothed figure in the dilapidated parlor of Mount Vernon. The dreadful silence of slaves waiting for her death to bring them freedom. The footworn track that led from the house to the brick tomb overlooking the river.
Where thy treasure is, there will your heart be also.

Wondering how many years of happiness were left to her and John, when they returned to the stony acres of their farm.

“Only, she didn’t wait for happiness, you know,” mused Sophie. “I think she was happy every day, just to be with him.”

Abigail thought about that. Balancing those grievous winter evenings by the kitchen fire in Braintree against the sparkle of sunrise on the jeweled sea, that first day she woke up on the
Active
and wasn’t seasick. Balancing the terror of waiting for British assault, against the salons of Paris in the last days of the Kings. The amazement of Handel’s “Messiah” sung in Westminster Abbey. Her garden in Auteuil and the wind in her hair, as she and John climbed hand in hand up the short green turf of the English downs…

Being John’s partner, all these years. As if she’d gone along to some vast war with him to stand at his elbow and load his gun. Even were their work to be swept away tomorrow, the fact that they had done it would remain in God’s heart, where all things were eternal.

And perhaps, too, in the minds of both women and men.

“I haven’t been happy every day,” she told Sophie. “But you know, I wouldn’t have traded a single one of them for anything.”

With a rattle of harness the carriage came around the corner of the drive, the wagon behind it heavy with furniture, trunks, servants bound for home. The inner door of the huge cold room opened and John came in. “The barometer’s holding steady,” he reported, as Sophie faded tactfully through the French window and down the wooden stair. “I pray you’ll be comfortable—”

“If I made it in safety across the ocean,” Abigail assured him, “I’m sure I’ll reach Quincy in one piece, and have the house snug for you on your return.”

“My return.”
John sighed. “God knows what will happen here in the meantime…. And Jefferson, of course, is still refusing to tell anyone athing about his intentions—” He shook his head, like a horse enraged by a horse-fly. “He could be plotting to abolish religion entirely in this country, the way they did in France—he’s completely capable of it—or turn the states loose to do as they please, and undo everything the Convention labored to—”

Abigail put her hands on his shoulders: “It will be all right, John,” she said, as she had said to Nabby, when her daughter had clung to her in the blackness of storm at sea, their lives in balance between the world they’d known and a future unforeseen. She wasn’t entirely sure she believed it, but Martha’s words came back to her mind.
We go where our hearts command us, in the faith that it is God who formed our hearts.
Which included Mr. Jefferson, as well as John. Whether Mr. Jefferson believed it or not.

Perhaps all things
did
return at last, to where they were meant to be.

She said again, more firmly, “It will be all right.”

As John walked her down the steps to the carriage, Abigail looked from the dreary, bare expanse of stumps and trees back to the house: enormous, unfinished inside, still smelling of newness, like the country itself. Waiting for what would come.

But that was out of her hands now. And out of John’s.

“God willing, I shall see you in a month,” John said, and kissed her gloved hands, then her mouth. “And God willing, from that point on,
‘I’ll go no more a-rovin’ with you, fair maid.’
”

The carriage started off; Abigail hummed the old song a little, to the creak of the wheels on the icy road.

A-rovin’, a-rovin’, since rovin’s been my ru-i-in,

I’ll go no more a-rovin’ with you, fair maid….

Looking back, she saw his stumpy black figure, standing on the steps of the great raw half-finished Mansion, in the muddy wilderness that civilization had barely scratched. Her John. A stout balding patriot who had seen everything of one of the most astonishing events of History—and who had seen it at her side. She sighed and settled back, and hoped they’d make Baltimore by nightfall.

MARTHA

Mount Vernon Plantation

Saturday, March 6, 1801

O
n the thirty-sixth ballot, Vermont and Maryland switched their support to Mr. Jefferson,” Sophie Hallam reported. “Delaware and South Carolina cast blank ballots, withdrawing their votes from Mr. Burr. I understand that rumor is rife that Mr. Jefferson indeed reached an understanding with the Federalists, though he has been protesting to everyone who’ll listen that he did nothing of the kind. I assume that his first act upon taking office will be to propose an Amendment to the Constitution making sure such a situation never arises again.”

“After all that ink wasted slandering poor Mr. Adams.” Martha sighed, and rang the bell for Christopher, for the third time.

Nelly said, “I’ll get it, Grandmama.” She collected the empty tea-pot, and rustled away in quest of more hot water. Her footfalls echoed in the shabby emptiness of the hall.

“After all that ink wasted slandering poor Mr. Adams, and Mr. Jefferson’s real foe was there at his elbow the whole time.” Sophie dipped a final shard of bread and butter into the dregs of her tea. “A pity, really. Those frightful newspapermen wouldn’t have
had
to make up scandals about Mr. Burr’s personal life.”

“Did you hear the story the Republicans tried to put about,” put in Pattie, “about Mr. Adams sending Mr. Pinckney to France with instructions to bring back four beautiful opera-dancers, two apiece, as mistresses for them? When Mr. Adams heard it, he only said, ‘I declare, Pinckney’s cheated me, for I never got my two!’ ”

If the absence of her undivided guidance and care had pressed hard on her elder granddaughters, Martha reflected as they all laughed, at least Pattie seemed to have surmounted its effects. While Eliza still wore dramatic mourning for the General, Pattie had returned to ordinary dress, if one could call “ordinary” the high-waisted, narrow-cut gowns that more and more women seemed to be wearing nowadays.

Martha had long ago given up wondering whether she would have been different, had she, Martha, been able to raise all four of her grandchildren instead of the younger two when Jacky died.

Now Eliza declared, “I have heard that rather than endure seeing his foe made President, Mr. Adams sneaked out of the city in the dark before dawn on the day of the inauguration.”

“If one is going to catch the public stage from Baltimore to Massachusetts,” said Nelly reasonably, returning, “one had better sneak out of the city in the dark before dawn. Did Mr. Jefferson even think to invite Mr. Adams?”

Sophie said, “I understand Mr. Jefferson—whose inaugural address was perfectly inaudible, by the way—is still in residence at Conrad and McMunn’s Tavern, taking his meals in the ordinary with the other guests.” She leaned to scratch the ears of Nelly’s elderly lapdog Puff, who had come around to sit at Nelly’s feet again in hopes of a tea-cake. “Since I’ve never known him to occupy any building without tearing it down and putting it back together again to suit his fancy, I expect there will be changes in that dreadful Mansion.”

“Will he live in it?” asked Pattie.

“Oh, he’ll live in it,” prophesied Nelly wisely. “It’s all very well to proclaim one’s Republican principles by living in a cottage, but one can’t do one’s work properly in one’s sitting-room. You know how Grandpapa was driven distracted by people coming to see him. Mr. Jefferson shall want offices and some kind of state rooms to receive Ambassadors in. And once he’s got those, whatever he’d replace the current Mansion with would have to be almost as large. And we certainly haven’t seen him building a humble little dwelling at Monticello, have we? The question is, who will receive for him? Mr. Jefferson’s a widower, and I think both of his daughters have too many small children to come here from Albemarle County to look after things. Will it be Mr. Burr’s daughter, then, since he, too, has no wife?”

She glanced at Martha, and Eliza added in her booming voice, “Yes, Grandmama, what would be proper? You were, after all, the first Presidentress. You remain the ultimate arbiter of what is proper in a Republic.”

Martha couldn’t keep from smiling. Mr. Madison and Mr. Jefferson, and Mr. Hamilton, had all labored to bring forth the
principles
of a Republic. But to the best of her knowledge, only she and George had considered what the actual
practices
would be. Rather like playwrights who didn’t give a thought to how the scene would be set or performed, as Dolley would have put it, Martha had long suspected that her dinners at Valley Forge had done more to convince the French that they were dealing with civilized reformers rather than wild-eyed King-haters than had any amount of rhetoric.

“Mr. Burr’s daughter was married in February, just before the voting in the Senate began,” said Sophie. “To a rice-planter, from South Carolina, a very wealthy man. So I expect Mr. Jefferson’s hostess will be Dolley Madison, won’t it?”

Martha smiled. “It will indeed.”

Dinner was served at three, as always in Mount Vernon in winter and spring. Nelly saw to it at least that the reduced kitchen staff turned out a respectable meal. To Martha’s disappointed shock, during their last return-journey from Philadelphia to Mount Vernon in March of 1797—in that crowded carriage with Nelly and Puff and Nelly’s parrot, and young George Lafayette and his tutor and Martha couldn’t recall who-all else—their faithful and excellent cook had run away, disappearing into Philadelphia’s community of free colored without so much as a backward glance at the masters who’d been so good to him the whole of his life. His replacement wasn’t nearly as good. Moreover, bills in the kitchen had risen appreciably since he’d taken over, despite all Nelly’s watchfulness.

After dinner Sophie departed in her chaise, and the girls all piled into Eliza’s husband’s extremely elegant open landaulet, with nursemaids and children. It had been a delight, to visit not only with Pattie and Eliza, but to see five-year-old “Toad,” as Nelly called Pattie’s bouncy daughter Elinor, and three-year-old Columbia and Little Eliza, playing and tumbling on the brown winter lawn under charge of their nursemaids, with Nelly’s toddler Parke.

Jacky’s granddaughters.

The heiresses of the Custis estate, which Martha had guarded and husbanded all those decades.

When the carriages were out of sight down the drive, she slipped out of the house, and followed the path worn through the grass of the unscythed lawn, past the smokehouse and the washhouse, the coach-house and the stables, down the steep hill beside the vegetable garden, and so to the brick tomb overlooking the river.

It comforted her beyond measure, to know that he was there.

To know that he wasn’t going to be off to Philadelphia, or Cambridge, or the heights above New York. To know that he wasn’t going to be shot at by the British or hanged for a traitor or exposed to the filthy miasmas that seemed to hang over cities, like angels with burning swords.

He was home.

Mount Vernon was very quiet without him.

With the freeing of his slaves in December, of course, there was almost no work getting done. All George had ever had to do was look at a slave, and they’d hasten to obey. There were more whippings, she thought, and many more threats to sell them to men bound for the richer soils of the western part of the state. Perhaps last summer’s abortive uprising was to blame, but the atmosphere felt ugly around Mount Vernon, and dangerous, even with the early release of those who had previously been scheduled for manumission on her death. Resentment was a stink in her house, like some dead thing, rotting under the floor.

When she walked past the stable-yard, past the clerk’s house—past the place where she’d met George that January afternoon in ’87, when Jemmy Madison had come to talk him into attending the Convention that had blasted all her hopes of peace—she felt the silence and the tension. As she moved about the house in the late afternoons when the light softened and shadows pooled in the corners of the hall, she found herself listening, convinced that the servants were whispering in the gloom. She had not realized how protected she had felt in his presence.

Only out here, on the brick bench beside his tomb, did she feel safe.

Such a silly thought, “safe,”
she reflected, blinking at the last shimmer of evening that gilded the treetops on the Maryland shore. Even when she’d genuinely feared that those slaves of George’s who saw her as the obstacle to their freedom would find a way to poison her, she’d kept returning to the thought that it probably wouldn’t be so bad. Then she’d be with George.

And Jacky, and her beautiful Patcy, after all those years.

But mostly what she looked forward to was seeing George again.

She remained where she was, watching the sun go down above the mountains. Remembering all the sweet days of unremarkable peace here, after they’d returned from Philadelphia for that last time in ’97. Crowded years, so that George had been hard-pressed to find time to put his land in order, much less sort through his papers on the Revolution and the years of his Presidency.

For a time Lafayette’s son had lived with them, and his tutor—both of whom had shown signs of falling in love with Nelly. Also living with them was George’s nephew Lawrence Lewis, his sister Betty’s boy, handsome in the strong, quiet way that George had been in his prime. Perhaps because he reminded Nelly of her grandfather—because beneath his air of strength he also had a touching vulnerability—when he, too, fell in love with Nelly, she returned his love.

To further complicate matters, Wash was back with them, too, having dropped out of college. Like his father, he’d gotten engaged to a girl of fifteen, though fortunately nothing came of it. When poor Fanny had finally succumbed to consumption, after less than two years of marriage to Tobias Lear, there had been talk of their four children—Fanny’s three by her first husband Augustine, and Lear’s first wife Pollie’s little Lincoln—joining the household, but Martha had simply refused. George contributed to their support in various boarding-schools, and that had to be enough.

To add to all that, everyone in the country still wanted to simply come and see him. While still President, George had overseen the laying-out of the Federal City on the other side of the river. There was constant coming and going of men engaged in building the President’s House, and the Capitol, and laying out those vast avenues, and of course George could no more resist talking architecture than a drunkard could turn his face from the bottle. When in 1798 it had appeared that the country would go to war with France, an army was called up, and George became once again its Commander in Chief. He was too old to take the field, but he trusted Hamilton and forced Congress to make him second in command, and had spent a good deal of that year in Philadelphia and in the Headquarters at Cambridge.

Nelly and Lawrence had married on George’s sixty-seventh birthday—February 22, 1799—and George wore his old Continental uniform to escort her down the staircase to the wedding in the dining-room.

Good years, Martha reflected, flexing her hands, which lately had shown a distressing tendency to swell so that her wedding-ring cut into her flesh. What there had been of them. Her feet, too, were swollen, and she found that even the short walk down to the tomb brought her breath up short.

She hadn’t told Nelly or Wash about this. If they knew, they’d only discourage her from coming, to this one place in the world where she wanted to be.

Nelly came looking for her, when the last of the daylight faded. Martha found she needed the support of her granddaughter’s arm, going up the steep path to the house. The whitewashed bulk of it seemed to glimmer in the twilight before them, the ground-floor windows gently glowing. It was still hard to remember that he wouldn’t be there when she came inside. She still flinched a little as she passed the shut door of George’s study on the first floor.

She had not crossed the threshold of that room, or of their blue-and-white bedroom above it, for fifteen months, since the night George died.