The Ambitious Madame Bonaparte (2 page)

After closing the door, Patterson stood before his desk and gazed down at his daughter in silence. Betsy felt miserable. Her cheeks grew hot beneath his severe stare, while her feet were cold and clammy because she had run into the snow wearing flimsy shoes.

After a long moment, he said, “You know that I do not approve of my children running wild in the streets. Especially you, Betsy. You are getting to be a young lady.”

“Yes, Father. I am sorry.”

Patterson walked behind his desk and, from a side drawer, took out the slate he used when he wanted to test Betsy in arithmetic. “Your aunt Nancy says you are making such good progress at multiplication that she has started you on simple percentages. Can you do a problem for me?”

Betsy bit her lip and nodded. She still felt unsure of her skill with percentages, but if she could do the problem correctly, perhaps her father would smile and forget her roughhousing.

He handed her the slate and a pencil. “Listen carefully. You invest a thousand dollars in a security that pays out an income of five percent per annum. How much money will you have after three years?”

As Betsy took the writing implements, her mind raced. The question seemed too easy; even without doing a calculation, she knew that five percent of a thousand would be $50. After three years, the investment would gain $150. What was the trick? Her father never set her such an obvious task, preferring to see if he could catch her in mistaken thinking.

Betsy shed her cloak and sat cross-legged on the wooden floor. Bending over the slate, she carefully did the multiplication for the first year. As she had suspected, the answer was $50. Dutifully, she added that amount to the original $1,000, and as she formed the last zero, she realized the flaw in her thinking. For the second year, she had to take five percent of the new total of $1,050, so the interest would be larger that year and still larger in the third.

She worked with mounting excitement, and after a few minutes, handed her father the slate with her careful calculations and a final total of $1,157.625. Betsy could not keep the triumphant grin off her face as he nodded his way through her figures. “This is almost correct,” he said, raising his eyes from the slate.

Betsy’s smile faded. “What did I do wrong?”

Patterson’s expression softened, and he beckoned for her to lean against his arm. Gesturing to the slate, he said, “You did your calculations correctly. If the money remains invested in the security, the interest will grow each year as this shows. Where you failed was in listening carefully as I instructed. I said that the annuity was to be paid out. That means that you would receive an income of $50 each year, and the principle would hold steady at $1,000 no matter how long it was invested.”

“Oh,” she said in a small voice, crushed by disappointment that even though she had expected a trick, she failed to detect it.

Her father squeezed her shoulder. “Never mind, lass. You did better than Johnny. The first time I set this problem for him, he thought the investment would earn $50 every year even if it accumulated.” Patterson laughed indulgently and put the slate and pencil back in his desk.

“You have an unusual head for figures for a girl, which may keep you from trouble one day. Life does not always turn out the way we plan, Betsy. Many a widow has ended in the poor house because she did not know the first thing about investments.”

“Yes sir,” Betsy said, but she frowned at the thought of someday being poor and alone. Surely that would never happen to her, whom everyone said was so pretty and clever.

Patterson removed his arm from her shoulder and opened a ledger book on his desk. “Go back home now like a good girl and help your mother.”

OVER THE NEXT year and a half, Betsy worked hard at the lessons her mother and Aunt Nancy set her. Her parents gave her books for every birthday, so when she did not have to look after the younger children or do schoolwork, she curled up in the drawing room to read.

One Sunday in September 1795, her mother’s older sister Margaret Smith and her family came for an afternoon visit. Ten-year-old Betsy sat on the double-chair-backed settee near the front windows with her older cousin Elizabeth, who was showing off her latest drawings. Betsy gazed at the pencil sketches with only partial attention because she was listening to the conversation between their mothers at the nearby drawing room table.

“Dorcas, you look unwell,” Aunt Margaret said. “You are as white as my linen shift.”

“I am quite all right.”

Betsy saw her aunt glance toward her husband and brother-in-law, who sat on the teal damask sofa facing the fireplace at the center of the room. She lowered her voice. “Are you with child again?”

Instead of answering, Dorcas shook her head, and Betsy thought she saw tears in her eyes.

Biting her lip, Betsy murmured half-hearted words of approval about her cousin’s artwork as she wondered why her mother was so pale and listless. Was she ill or still plagued with melancholy?

The arrival of the housekeeper, a thin, thirty-year-old widow named Mrs. Ford, cut short the women’s conversation. After Mrs. Ford set down the tray with the tea service and departed, Dorcas picked up her English china teapot, formed in the classical style with a fluted barrel decorated with gilt edges and painted garlands. Betsy rose. “May I help you, Mother?”

Dorcas smiled and nodded at the cup she was filling. “Take this to your uncle.”

Betsy carried the cup and saucer carefully as she made her way around the younger children playing on the floor. Then she stood before the sofa.

Uncle Smith and Betsy’s father were deep in conversation, so Betsy waited before interrupting them. Standing there, she noticed how differently the two men dressed. Her father was wearing a dark brown broadcloth tailcoat cut in the new short-waisted fashion with matching breeches, a tan waistcoat, and white stockings, but instead of shoes, he wore comfortable red leather mules. His dark, unpowdered queue was pulled back plainly. Her uncle Samuel Smith—a Revolutionary War officer now serving in Congress—wore a powdered hairstyle with a top puff and side curls. His old-fashioned long blue frock coat had embossed brass buttons, his waistcoat was embroidered, and silver buckles ornamented his shoes.

Uncle Smith said, “I do not think the newspapers have caught wind of the Treaty of Greenville. I just received word of it this morning.”

“I suppose more people than ever will be packing up for Ohio now that the war with the Indians is won.”

“I hope they will. We need to end British influence in the Northwest Territory. I do not trust their intentions.” Uncle Smith stretched out his legs and spotted Betsy. “Why, there is my pretty niece.”

“Your tea, Uncle,” she said, handing him the cup and saucer.

“And what have you been memorizing lately, child?”

“Parts of Edward Young’s poem
Night Thoughts.”

“Be damned if you are. Your aunt Margaret tried to make me read that when we were courting, but it was too long and does not even rhyme.”

Betsy laughed at the thought of such a blunt man trying to plow through the meandering poem. “Procrastination is the thief of time,” she intoned, quoting the most famous line.

“Impertinent chit,” he burst out but then joined her gleeful laughter.

Glancing at her father, Betsy saw that he did not share their amusement. “I will get your tea, sir,” she said before he could rebuke her for teasing her elders.

As she walked away, she heard Uncle Smith say something that made her slow her steps to listen. “You might consider putting Betsy in school. Have you heard of Madame Lacomb? She is an émigré who has opened a boarding school for girls right here on South Street. My sister, Mrs. Hollin, has enrolled her daughters. I believe the Caton girls will attend as well.”

“The Catons?” Betsy’s father asked. He sounded impressed that the Frenchwoman’s students included the granddaughters of Charles Carroll, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and the only man in Maryland wealthier than he was. “Then I shall look into it.”

TO BETSY’S DELIGHT, her father did enroll her in school. Madame Lacomb and her husband had been low-ranking nobles who fled to Saint-Domingue during the French Revolution. Monsieur Lacomb died not long afterward, and Madame Lacomb came to Baltimore with other refugees from the slave revolt of 1793. She moved into a small, blue wooden house that was as much a survivor of a different era as she was—it had been built in the 1750s and remained standing as more imposing brick townhomes replaced the wooden houses around it. It had two bedrooms upstairs and a parlor and a kitchen on the ground floor. Madame Lacomb had furnished the parlor as a classroom with straight-backed wooden chairs and a few plain tables. Under her tutelage, Betsy studied French, history, geography, composition, drawing, fine needlework—and dancing once a week, taught by a French émigré named Moreau whom Monsieur Lacomb had known in Paris.

One Friday afternoon in late autumn, after Monsieur Moreau had spent an hour berating the girls for their clumsiness and then departed following a torrent of French complaint to his countrywoman, Madame Lacomb directed the girls to replace the furniture that had been shoved against the walls. Then the schoolmistress rang the bell. Odette, the slave she had acquired during her brief stay in Saint-Domingue, carried in tea. As the tall West African set down the tray on a small mahogany table, her gaze settled on Betsy with an intensity that made the girl shiver. Then Odette left the room.

Sitting in the sole upholstered armchair, Madame Lacomb poured tea into pewter mugs and passed out slices of buttered bread to her students, who ranged in age from six to fifteen. Contrary to Uncle Smith’s prediction, the Caton girls were not among them.

As the girls started to eat, Madame Lacomb poured her own tea into a china cup.
“Mes petites,
perhaps you are saying to yourselves that Monsieur Moreau is too harsh with you. You think that dancing has its place at parties but is not a serious accomplishment?”

Betsy raised her head in surprise because her father had made just such a complaint.

Pausing for effect, Madame Lacomb fingered the edge of the fichu covering her bosom. She had a thin face with sagging cheeks and dark, mournful eyes. “When I was at the court of France, everyone remarked on how beautifully Marie Antoinette walked. She had the graceful, elegant carriage of a goddess. Do you know how she learned to carry herself that way? By taking dancing lessons as a young girl in Austria.”

Sarah, the oldest girl in school and one of the few who boarded there, asked, “Madame Lacomb, what was the queen like? Was she as bad a woman as people say?”

“No, no.” Madame Lacomb raised a hand to readjust her cap. “She was very young when she went to France, younger than you are now, Sarah. She was foolish at times, as when she appointed a friend to be the royal governess for
les Enfants de France
rather than choosing a woman of high birth as was the custom.” The teacher shrugged. “We French do not like to see our cherished traditions tossed aside, especially by a foreigner. The nobles whom she had snubbed spread malicious lies.

“And she liked to play at living the simple life by building a little farm and dressing
à la paysanne.
To spend money on such
frivolités
when the treasury is bankrupt and people want bread seemed like a mockery. By the time I escaped to Saint-Domingue in 1791, she was the most hated person in France.”

“Did you ever see her?” Betsy asked. “Was she beautiful?”

“Naturellement,
I saw her both at court and in the Queen’s box at the opera. She was—” Madame shrugged again. “Not a classic beauty. Her face was long and her lower lip too fat. But she had a lovely complexion and radiant blue eyes. When she was in court dress, her silk skirts as wide as the sea and trimmed in expensive ribbon and lace, with her hair piled high on her head, she looked every inch the queen.”

Betsy sighed, imagining a figure in gleaming blue satin but with reddish-brown hair like hers, dancing lightly across the parquet floor of Versailles. She thought such a life must be glorious and wondered why the French had done away with it. “Do you think France will ever have a king again?”

“Mon dieu,
I do not know.” The teacher shuddered. “After the violence waged by Robespierre and his minions, I think the people are tired of turmoil. No one seems to like the Directory, but they will endure it to keep the peace.” She sighed, and then straightened her posture and clapped her hands. “Enough of this, girls. It is time for our geography lesson.”

AFTER THE LAST class, Betsy walked out to the street with the Hollin girls. As they passed the building next to Madame Lacomb’s small house, Betsy heard a sharp hiss from a figure standing in the shadowy arched passage that led to the back yard.

“Mademoiselle Betsy!” A heavily wrapped woman stepped into the open, and when she lowered the shawl from her head, Betsy saw that it was Odette, Madame Lacomb’s slave.

As the other girls murmured in surprise, Betsy said, “Go on. I will see you next week.”

“But Betsy!” Ann Hollin exclaimed, her voice tight with concern.

“Do not fret. Madame Lacomb must have sent her with a message.”

The Hollin girls walked away, glancing back over their shoulders. Betsy took a step toward Odette. The African woman searched her face and then said in a low voice, “I have been having dreams of great import about you.”

“Why would you dream about me?”

“They contain a message that I must give you.”

A chill of suspense raced down Betsy’s spine.

Odette stared at the space above Betsy’s head as if an image floated there. “I saw you as a woman grown, in France or some other place across the sea. You wore a silk gown with a crown on your head, and when you entered a room full of people, they bowed like you were a princess.”

Betsy caught her breath. “Me? How could I be a princess?”

“Child, that is the wrong question. Seek not how to be high and mighty, seek how to have wisdom.”

“I don’t understand.”

Odette frowned. “I fear for you because I sense in you a hunger for high station, so I consulted the sacred palm nuts on your behalf. If you pursue the life you desire, it will come with great obstacles and a powerful enemy.”