“Mark my words,” said Mrs. Drinker darkly, when Burr departed and the others who had come to pay a morning-visit that day gathered around Dolley. “He shall have that poor woman’s place filled with one of those hussies he frequents before Congress reconvenes in the fall.” And the formidable Quaker dame glanced sidelong at Dolley, as if she’d have quizzed her on her own plans for spousal replacement had not others been in the room.
As Dolley looked around the cozy parlor she felt a pang of impending loss. Not only of Lizzie and Lizzie’s family and Mrs. Powel and the others in the Congregation, but of the life she had known in Philadelphia, the life and the friends she cherished.
Jemmy had spoken often of his father’s plantation of Montpelier, in the mountains behind Charlottesville. Within a squirrel’s jump of Heaven, he said—if your idea of Heaven was sweet wooded mountains, climbing to the Virginia sky, and seeing mostly your own family and your own slaves, day in and day out. Having grown up in the Virginia countryside, Dolley knew that one reason everyone in Virginia was considered so hospitable was that to have anyone new come by was an occasion to be celebrated and prolonged.
Lady Washington might pine for the peace of Mount Vernon, but Dolley knew in her heart that she was a city creature. From the moment she had come to Philadelphia at the age of fifteen, she had wanted to live nowhere else. It was true that Jemmy couldn’t imagine not being involved in government, but as an elected official there was no guarantee how long he’d have that option. How could she get from day to day, she wondered, without the lending library, the theater, the lively conversation of a wide circle of friends?
But how could she get from day to day without Jemmy at her side?
“You look pensive, Mrs. Todd.” Mr. Wilkins took advantage of a general discussion of life at Harewood Plantation to speak quietly, and Dolley smiled apologetically, and shook her head.
“Only regretting God’s scandalous oversight in not giving us the ability to see into the future.”
“And, Lizzie, I felt like a hypocrite, not to speak to him,” sighed Dolley, as she later walked her friend downstairs to the door. “He hath been so good to me, helping with old Mr. Todd’s will. But I haven’t even truly made up my own mind.” Behind them on the stairway, her mother laughed over something Mrs. Collins said, and from the tea-room she heard Anna’s voice, and Payne’s demanding why Colonel Burr had gone.
“Hast thou not?” Lizzie turned in the shadows by the front door. The vestibule at the bottom of the stair was darker than Dolley remembered it, since she kept the door to John’s office closed. Even now, with the room a jumble of packing-boxes of books—which James Todd, drat him, would have sold if she hadn’t stopped him—Dolley found that passing its door filled her with sadness. “Is it that—please forgive me prying, Dolley!—is there something about Mr. Madison that makes thee draw back? Or that he is an Outsider?”
“Nothing so elevated, I’m afraid.” Dolley threw her arms out in a helpless shrug. “It’s just that…Now I’m used to it, I rather enjoy living as I do.”
Lizzie laughed, and hugged her. “I’m glad,” she whispered, “that it isn’t being read out of the Meeting that stops thee, I mean…for I think…I’m afraid…Dolley, I think I shall be read out myself!”
“Richard Lee?” Dolley asked.
Lizzie nodded. “Mother doesn’t know yet, but I’m to meet him in New York—”
“Richard Lee of Virginia!”
Her friend nodded again.
“Oh, famous!” Dolley sighed, and flung her arms around her friend. “Then even if we’re both to be a scandal and a hissing in the Congregation, and everyone rolls their eyes and cries, Elizabeth LEE, alas! at least we shall be neighbors!”
Three months later, it was to Lizzie Lee that Dolley wrote—from Harewood Plantation, with Lucy’s laughter coming from downstairs at one of Jemmy’s jokes, and Payne howling because he wasn’t the center of attention, and the brash loud voice of Steptoe’s sister Harriot proclaiming a wedding-toast—and signed herself:
Dolley Madison, alas!
Washington City
Wednesday, August 24, 1814
3:00 P.M.
Dolley Madison, alas!
“When all was said and done, yours was one of the better marriages that took place around then,” Sophie remarked, as she and Dolley wedged the last of the silver service into the trunk. “Not terribly long after that, Charley Adams married yet another of the egregious Smith clan, his brother-in-law’s sister Sarah. Abigail was spitting bloody nails over it, the letter she wrote to me.”
Dolley rose, shook out her skirts, and walked back to the desk for another pinch of snuff. Though the sky was clouded over, still the southern window’s brightness turned the surface of the Queen’s mirror to a round of burning light.
I’ve always been sorry I never met her, Martha had said.
The last Queen before the inevitable Revolution. The victim of what revolution could become. Yet she had had the frame engraved: Liberté—Amitié. In those days everyone had been so trusting about what Liberté would bring.
Sophie eased the trunk-lid down, calculating what else might fit, then opened it again. “We’d best wrap that up carefully. What next, do you think?”
“The drawing-room winter curtains,” said Dolley promptly. “They’re in the attic, I’m pleased to say; I have my mother’s good teaching to bless, that I got the room in summer dress right after Congress rose. Now is not the time I should care to wrestle a hundredweight of red velvet down from the windows on a fifteen-foot ladder.”
“Mrs. Madison, what on earth are you still doing here?” Mr. Carroll—youngish, hawk-faced, the son of one of the wealthiest landholders in Maryland and a frequent dinner-guest—entered the room. Her sister Anna’s husband, Congressman Richard Cutts, was at his side. Both were rumpled, dusty, and exhausted; Dolley hoped they’d put their horses somewhere out of sight. “Cutts tells me—”
Dolley drew herself up and hastily slipped both snuffbox and mirror into the desk-drawer. “Mr. Carroll, I know how much respect I would have, for a leader who fled at the mere sound of cannon—or for one whose wife so little respected his courage or the courage of the men behind him.” She turned toward the window with calm she was far from feeling, and pretended to scan the distance under her palm. “I see no trace of British grenadiers as of yet. By the sound of the guns, I collect the battle is not yet over.”
Even as she spoke the words, her heart sank within her. The constant crashing of the guns had diminished, about half an hour ago, to intermittent booms and the broken spatter of musket-fire. Among the fugitives on Pennsylvania Avenue, she now saw that many wore militia uniforms, filthy and torn, some of them, and some bearing the blood and powder-blackening of battle.
Deserters in retreat. Their Army had fallen apart on the field.
Summer soldiers and sunshine patriots, she thought bitterly, recalling those who had sworn on their swords to remain in her defense.
Untrained men, Dr. Blake had said—was it only this morning?
Jim Monroe is with him, she tried to comfort herself. He was a soldier. He shall get Jemmy out of there before there’s real danger….
But in her heart she guessed Jemmy wouldn’t run.
Like herself—like General Washington before him—Jemmy understood what a leader could and could not be seen to do.
Carroll gestured impatiently. “Ma’am, you know they cannot hope to win.”
Dolley turned back. “If I recall correctly, that is what was said about General Washington and his forces.” And more quietly she added, “I will not go without my husband.”
Both men opened their mouths to argue and both fell silent at the sudden crash of hooves on the drive. Dolley ran to one window and saw Sukey leaning from another upstairs, but the rider had already rushed inside, leaving only a bay horse, trembling and foaming with exhaustion, before the front steps. “Sophie, get one of the servants to bring that horse to the—”
Fo
otfalls in the hall, booted feet, running. The next second Jemmy’s manservant Jamie Smith strode in, face, shirt, jacket streaked and matted with dust and sweat. He gasped, “Clear out, ma’am! You got to clear out!” and thrust a slip of sweaty paper into her hand.
Run for your life or be taken prisoner by the British.
In pencil. In Jemmy’s neat hand.
Her eyes met Jamie’s and the young man said hastily, “He’s all right, ma’am, he’s well. But General Armstrong ordered a retreat—”
Cutts cried, “Devil take it!” and Carroll exclaimed something considerably less refined.
“Now you shall go!” he added, making a move as if he would have seized Dolley by the arm and frog-marched her to the door, had he not remembered who and where they were.
Dolley saw Paul Jennings in the hall beyond the doorway, hurrying to the dining-room with a tray-full of dessert-dishes, called, “Paul, put those down, we have to get out. Bring a screwdriver, please, and the stepladder to the drawing-room—”
“A screwdriver?” Carroll looked ready to explode. “What in the name of—?”
But Dolley slipped past him and hurried into the hall.
“Gentlemen, I do not propose to be led in triumph down the streets of London, but neither do I propose to let President Washington’s picture be carried there like a placard on a stick to have mud thrown at it by the populace.” Looking through the door of the big dining-room opposite her, she was struck for a moment by its look of normalcy, the square tables that Jefferson had brought dressed in their white damask like ladies ready for a ball. The blue-sprigged china that Jefferson had ordered from France, the glitter of silver.
The thought crossed through her mind, This is the last time I’ll see this room this way, ready for company.
The last time I shall see the drawing-room, she thought, as she led the men into that graceful salon. From the wall, in the filtered buttery glow from the muslin-curtained windows, the General’s face had a calm look, as if he knew he had delegated authority well. So many times, Martha had repeated Washington’s words, that he relied upon her more than on any of his subordinates, to guard his back.
Not in battle, to be sure, but in those covert wars more conclusive than open violence; the battles for opinion and goodwill.
George had trusted Martha—as Jemmy had trusted Dolley, all these years—to handle the greater and more delicate task of sustaining the goodwill that long-ago battles had won.
She took a breath, looked up at the portrait, dominating the room just as his presence had dominated every gathering, the moment he came into it. It came to her with a sinking dread just exactly how enormous the painting was. In its gilded frame it was over five feet wide and eight feet tall, and so heavy it was screwed to the paneling rather than hung by wires.
Jemmy had talked the General into coming out of retirement twenty-seven years ago. Had shattered the peace her dear friend Martha had so treasured. Had, Dolley knew, shortened the General’s life.
Would that tall, quiet gentleman who’d ridden into Philadelphia that day have agreed to Jemmy’s proposal, had he known what the strain of office would cost him? Dolley suspected he would.
She owed it to her friend, to get his picture away safe.
“This is madness!” Carroll almost shouted, as Dolley helped Paul position the ladder beside the portrait.
We’ll never get it down, she thought despairingly. And if we do, we’ll never get it safe into the carriage.
How close are they? The noise of vehicles, horses, fleeing foot-traffic along Pennsylvania Avenue prevented her from hearing whether the guns were still firing, whether the sound of British drums could yet be heard. Panic closed her throat, made it difficult to breathe. How many of Jemmy’s forces had fled? How many remained around him, between the invading Army and the town?
How hard would those fight, if they saw all around them their comrades break and flee?
Above her, Paul fumbled and scratched at the screws in the frame, and Carroll snarled, “Forget the picture, madame! You must come away!”
“Yes, Dolley, please!” Cutts pressed his hands on her shoulders and Dolley tightened her grip warningly on the stepladder.
They had a point, she supposed. Neither was willing to brand himself a coward by leaving a woman—and a friend and the President’s wife to boot—in the path of a vengeful Army. But if caught, they would be in considerably more physical danger than she.
With the dust, the heat, the noise, how could she tell when the last possible moment was?
And yet, as she had said to Sophie, there were things that could not be left behind. Not only for the sake of the future, but for the sake of those who’d passed them along in trust.
“Paul, get M’sieu Sioussat and Mr. McGraw and get an ax from the garden shed,” she commanded, astonished at how calm she sounded. “We shall have to break the frame.”
“Mrs. Madison—!” protested Carroll, and other voices called from the hallway, “Mrs. Madison!”
French John came in, with a tall gentleman Dolley had never seen before, and—of all people—a Quaker shipowner named Jacob Barker whom Dolley had first met in her days at the Philadelphia Meeting. “Mrs. Madison,” said Barker, sweeping off his rather dusty hat. “Pardon us for coming in on thee thus unannounced—”
“Mr. Barker, if I knew thee better I should fall upon thy neck in hysterics,” said Dolley, and Barker returned a quick grin.
“Robert dePeyster, of New York, madame—he saith he’s a good friend of Secretary Monroe. We’re staying at Blodgett’s Hotel—”
“We were, if they don’t burn it down,” added dePeyster morosely, and stepped aside as the gardener came in, carrying the kindling-ax.
“—and we came to see if thee stood in need of assistance.”
Quakers never said things like Thank God, but it was as close as Dolley ever came to it. “Hast a cart that we might take?” she asked urgently. “A horse as well, though we could use that poor beast Jamie rode here from the battle—”
“There’s that old nag of Blodgett’s back at the hotel, that nobody can catch. And the cart he fetches groceries in—”
“Canst bring it?”
“Ma’am.” DePeyster snapped her a military salute and strode out the door; Barker came to help steady the portrait as French John began chopping at the gilt wood frame. Sophie returned with a pitcher of cider and a couple of crystal goblets; she poured one out and stood sipping, her shoulder against the corner of the mantel-piece, watching the scene with narrowed eyes.
What part of her past, of her heart, Dolley wondered, had Sophie left behind, in that burning plantation-house in Virginia?
After a moment the dressmaker poured a second goblet and brought it to Dolley, who had stepped back as the portrait was eased down.
“And where will you be taking Mrs. Madison?” she asked Carroll casually. “To Bellevue?” Carroll’s father owned most of the land in and around Capitol Hill; his mansion in Georgetown was justly renowned as one of the most beautiful in the countryside.
“If she’ll come.”
Dolley picked up one of the knives Sophie had been in the process of wrapping to pack. “Can we cut it out and roll it up? We cannot let them take it—we should destroy it rather ourselves.”
“You shall destroy it, madame, if you roll it up,” said French John calmly, and took the knife from her hand. “The brushwork would never survive. I think it can be loosely laid over the top of a load, with the corners weighted. I shall see to it.”
While French John was delicately cutting the canvas free of its stretcher—and Mr. Carroll was pacing furiously in and out, looking through every window he could toward Bladensburg—dePeyster returned, miraculously with the promised cart. The sky was darkening now toward storm, and strange, flickering winds blew the stench of gunpowder through the open windows. Dolley realized she had begun to tremble.
Jemmy will come, she told herself. I know he will.
Yet how coul
d she stay and put everyone else in peril?
She looked up and saw Sophie’s eyes on her, calculating and icy.
French John and Barker lifted the canvas, carried it toward the door. I’m forgetting something, thought Dolley, as Carroll steered her firmly toward the door. I know I am… She balked, turning back.
“Mrs. Madison, please!”
Dolley, her heart pounding, nodded. “Paul, please have Joe bring the carriage.”
Something important. Something that people will one day want, and miss. Like recollection of something we dreamed in childhood, that frightened us, or inspired us, or filled us with understanding or joy.
But all she could remember to say was, “M’sieu Sioussat, please see to it that the food prepared for dinner, and the cider and wine, be given to any of the soldiers who come past.”
“I shall do it, madame, but please—”
“And please see that Pol goes to the French Minister’s house. They’ll look after her there, and I don’t think the British will burn it.”
“I shall see it done, madame,” promised the steward, “but please, go!”
I should wait for Jemmy. He’ll be here soon, I know he will….
As the men hustled her into the hall, Sophie said quietly, “It might be a good idea to take some silver with you in the carriage, in case you become separated from the cart.”
Dolley halted, their eyes meeting.
More softly, for her ears only, Sophie added, “Had we had hard silver when we were burned from our home, my mother and I, we might have fared better than we did.”
“I’ll be going to friends.”
“That’s what my mother thought.”
Dolley broke away, strode into the dining-room to scoop as many forks and spoons as she could fit into her reticule. “Canst ride in the front with Joe and Sukey, Sophie? All the Cabinet papers are on the other seats.”
“I shall be staying here. Don’t worry about me,” her friend added, as Dolley froze at the foot of the front step, looked back in alarm. “I scarcely think they’re going to torch the town.”
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