“Mr. Jefferson would rather it were not so, naturally,” Dolley went on, shaking her head in kindly affection at the thought of their friend. “Meg Smith told me yesterday that Mr. Jefferson did away with the levees and at-homes Mrs. Adams used to hold. And all the ladies of good society in the city called upon him in a body one morning last week, to force him back into the custom. He, however, went downstairs to them in his riding-clothes, and expressed astonishment at the coincidence of them all calling together like that, at once—and then went right round the room and charmed each one of them individually.”
Anna laughed. “He was lucky to get out of the room alive!”
“Mr. Jefferson is an idealist. He would have things be as he likes to think they are, kept separate and pure, like the principles of Liberty or honor, like politics and law, untouched by the realities of the world.”
Like his love for his daughter and his love—if love it be—for his Sally?
Like two separate fossil bones, stored in different drawers in different rooms.
Dolley sighed. “But the world is real, Anna. And speeches in Congress tell only half the story, and that not the most important half. Nowadays no man of intelligence believes Congressional speech in any case. ’Tis what is said in private that counts.”
The two carriages behind them turned off down the tree-shaded streets of Georgetown. The gold light of sunset illuminated the woods around them, but already the evening chill gathered under the trees, the peculiarly damp, miasmal cold that seemed to seep out of the ground in this place. Abigail Adams, Sophie had written her, had lived last winter in an agony of rheumatism. And even after only a few days in these marshy lowlands, Dolley was wondering what the effect would be on poor Jemmy.
And indeed, she thought, on Payne. In Philadelphia’s muggy summers and damp winters, her son had shown her own tendency to colds and chest complaints. In the mountains at Montpelier he’d been as healthy as a pony. Moreover, she’d already ascertained that there was no such thing as a decent school in the Federal City, and it was getting more and more difficult to get the boy to pay the slightest attention to his tutor. Try as she would not to become one of those fondly doting mamas she had always gently mocked, the thought of losing him filled her with such dread.
She would have to ask some of the older inhabitants of the vicinity—not that there were many “old inhabitants” in the city itself!—what they intended for the education of their sons.
The trees broke to the left of the road, and Dolley contemplated in passing the six red-brick buildings that stood isolated among them. Like nearly every building within the boundaries of the Federal City, they were surrounded by piles of building debris and a latticework of water-filled wagon-ruts that reflected the limpid gold of the evening sky. The State Department had shut up shop hours ago, its six clerks slogging their way back along the muck of Pennsylvania Avenue to the cluster of boardinghouses, taverns, and small shops that huddled behind the unfinished Capitol, over three miles away.
The house next to the State Department, Dolley knew, would be hers. The headquarters from which she would begin setting up the network of calling and being called upon—the country distances would be a challenge in winter—that cemented the foundations of political support.
She took from her reticule the gold hand-mirror Martha had given her and turned it over in her gloved fingers, admiring the flash of the jewels on the frame—not real, surely?—and the ivory miniature of the sweet-faced lady with old-fashioned ostrich-plumes in her hair. A tale, Martha had said. And, Keep it safe… Which she’d do without being asked, for her dear friend’s sake.
In the distance Dolley saw the whitewashed walls of the President’s House.
“A State prisoner,” Martha had called herself, and had dreaded the Federal City that she had herself never seen.
Abigail, Sophie had written to her, had hated the place—Understandably, reflected Dolley, with a pang of pity in her heart for that indomitable Yankee lady who had come to this place only to learn of the death of her younger son.
Yet seeing the white walls, she felt her heart lift, the way it did when she dreamed of flying.
A new city and a new world. A city like none other that the world had known—though she could imagine Mrs. Adams’s horrified expression as she agreed with that statement. A city of tulip trees and wild roses, of streams rank with wild grapevines, of open countryside free of the stinking miasmas of Philadelphia’s alleys. A city unbuilt, with all the promise of things still within the realm of dreams.
A new city for the new world of Washington’s hopes and Jefferson’s visions, Mr. Adams’s stubborn courage and her own Jemmy’s wisdom.
More than Philadelphia, more than the sleepy beauty of Montpelier, Dolley understood that in coming to this place, she had finally come home.
1814
Washington City
Wednesday, August 24, 1814
4:30 P.M.
The white sandstone walls of the President’s House disappeared behind the trees, and Dolley heard in her mind the whisper of Aaron Burr’s beautiful voice: Has it ever occurred to you that Sophie Hallam might be a British spy?
Hast thou quarreled? Dolley had asked Burr at once, and immediately felt herself blush for the suggestion that Sophie might be his mistress—which of course Dolley was virtually certain Sophie was, that summer of 1803. Her certainty was confirmed when Burr had grinned, like a wicked older brother to whom Dolley could say anything.
“We have not,” he retorted. “Because a man shares a woman’s bed doesn’t mean he has to be blind to all besides her beauty. And no lovers’ spat would excuse a man for inventing such a rumor about a woman. I merely wondered, that’s all. She’d make a fine spy.”
Stifling in the closed carriage as she fled the capital, one arm draped over the jolting stacks of boxes and bundled papers that threatened to avalanche over her every time the wheels struck another rut, Dolley could see her old friend’s face as clearly as if the conversation had occurred yesterday instead of eleven years ago.
“Why should a woman return to this country, whose current government ruined her family, caused the deaths of her father and brother, and drove her and her mother out as camp-followers of the retreating army?” Burr’s eyes, brilliant as a poet’s, narrowed as if he were reading a court document; he had looked past Dolley and through the oval drawing-room’s long windows to the half-built boundary-wall and the inevitable fair of hawkers and hucksters, cockfights and dogfights, in the grounds behind the President’s Mansion that accompanied the Fourth of July celebrations.
The Fourth of July was always boisterous in the Federal City, which was then only beginning to be called after its founder. That year—1803—was quadruply ebullient: President Jefferson had announced, just that morning, that France had sold the United States all its territory of Louisiana.
There would be no fighting over the West, no threat of Spain once again closing the Mississippi to trade. As a Quaker, Dolley’s soul had been deeply satisfied: Fourteen million dollars was less costly than any war she’d ever heard of, and every land-speculator in the country was in ecstasies. Jefferson had held a mammoth levee at the Executive Mansion at noon, and private celebrations were being planned all over the city. Burr had come to the levee alone, and had exchanged no more than a dozen words with Sophie, but turning her head Dolley could pick out her friend Sophie Hallam, in very stylish second mourning, deep in conversation with Hannah Gallatin, the wife of the Secretary of the Treasury.
“More curiously,” Burr went on, following her gaze, “how would she return? Mrs. Hallam’s needlework is unexcelled, naturally—” He lifted his punch-cup in salute to Dolley’s gown of yolk-yellow silk and silver spider-gauze that had been Sophie’s creation. “Yet a woman needs money for materials, to set up as a mantua-maker, much less to purchase a house in Philadelphia—which she did—and another here, which she also did, in excellent parts of both towns. And no one I’ve ever spoken to has heard of a
merchant or banker in England by the name of Hallam. A woman can trade on the capital which, God help them, God gives to women—but it generally leaves its mark, on a woman’s soul and on her body also. And I haven’t seen it.”
Her cheeks hot with anger for Sophie, Dolley drew Burr a little further into the relative privacy of the window—the oval drawing-room which the Adamses had used as an entrance-hall was as full as it could hold—and whispered, “I trust thou wilt understand that should I hear a single word of this ever again from any other source, dear as I hold thee, my friend, our friendship will be at an end.”
“I do understand, Mrs. Madison,” replied Burr, inclining his head. “And you will not. I’ve spoken of this to you alone, solely because of all the women in this city, only you and Jefferson’s daughters know the lady well.”
Above him, flanked by the rather faded green curtains that Jefferson had purchased for the oval salon, Washington’s portrait had gazed into space, as if fiercely disapproving still of Burr after all those years. In addition to the usual Congressmen, speculators, and place-servers, the crowd in the oval drawing-room was enlivened by a number of delegates from Western Indian tribes, in full glory of feathers and paint, and representatives from the piratical Barbary States in a gaudy glory of turbans and pearls.
“However,” Burr went on quietly, “those ladies seem to have taken their broods back to Virginia for the foreseeable future. Indeed, it isn’t my business to speak of what I cannot prove and only suspect—fond as I am and continue to be of the lady! But as Vice President of this country, I suppose it is my duty to at least let the wife of the Secretary of State know that the thought has crossed my mind that there may be an agent of Britain in our midst.”
His words returned to Dolley now. Through a haze of dust she watched American militiamen staggering along the dirt road beside the carriage, or straggling in the distance among the trees. Joe kept the horses as close to a gallop as was possible in the ruts of Pennsylvania Avenue: Clinging with one hand to the strap, the other arm fending off boxes, Dolley felt as if her bones would be broken even if they didn’t manage to overturn the vehicle.
Through the windows she could see soldiers as well as civilians driving wagons full of supplies. Others rode horses or mules still in the harness of some abandoned dray or limber. There were others, Dolley saw with sudden anger—rough men both black and white in laborers’ clothes—driving carts or pushing barrows full of silk dresses, of silver services hastily bundled up in sheets or shawls, even small pieces of expensive furniture or elaborate, imported screens.
Sophie had been right. Such men had probably been just waiting for her carriage to leave the Mansion, to begin looting what she could not save.
Would Sophie wait there, too, for the British troops to come?
Burr may have been a schemer—and later, a traitor—but he had a keen judgment of humankind.
And under ordinary circumstances it wouldn’t have mattered what Sophie was in the habit of telling the British Minister. All ministers had informants, who picked up bits of news. It was part of a minister’s job. Dolley acknowledged that Sophie—known to be a friend to both Jefferson and Abigail Adams, whose first successes had been due to her friendship with Martha Washington—would be a logical choice for such work.
But these were not ordinary circumstances.
Her mind circled back to Jemmy, sixty-three years old, riding the Bladensburg battlefield in range of the British guns.
I should not have left.
The carriage jolted, veered around a group of stumbling men, without knapsacks or rifles, whose dust-smeared militia uniforms bore the marks of powder but not of blood.
If Jemmy is taken…
He won’t be, she told herself grimly. He will have had the sense to flee, when his Army dissolved about him.
But Jemmy, in masterminding Jefferson’s election, had read hundreds of scoffing broadsides that mocked Jefferson’s “cowardice” in fleeing Richmond ahead of Benedict Arnold’s forces; in getting out of Monticello minutes before Tarleton’s dragoons emerged from the woods. The jeers had followed Jefferson for twenty years, never mentioning the fact that Tarleton would almost certainly have hanged the author of the Declaration of Independence, had he caught him.
Would the recollection of the mockery keep Jemmy on the field a few fatal minutes beyond his own last chance to flee?
Please, God, no, Dolley whispered. Dearest God, hold him safe in Thy hands.
Horsemen clattered up beside the carriage, the blue of the leader’s militia jacket barely visible through the dust. Joe reined in and Dolley put down the window, her hands trembling so badly they could barely work the catches. One of the men she recognized as John Graham, who had been a clerk with the State Department when Jemmy had taken it over—he was Chief there now.
“Where is he?” She thrust open the door, staggering as she stepped down into the road.
“We don’t know, ma’am. But General Winder was defeated. The whole Army’s in flight—”
He’ll go to the Mansion and be captured. I knew I should not have left.
“Hast heard anything?” Her voice cracked. “Mr. Graham, take me back to the Mansion. I shan’t leave him—”
“Mrs. Madison, your being taken will serve him no good—”
“It will if he be taken as well!” She almost screamed the words at him, the whole weight of the day suddenly falling on her, like a dam giving way all at once before the pressure of a flood. Her whole body shook. “I will not leave him! Take the things on to Georgetown, but let me go back!”
“There is no going back,” said Graham.
Sukey scrambled from the carriage-box and took her other arm, said with surprising gentleness, “Ma’am, he’s right. You can’t—”
Like the rolling boom of thunder, an explosion cut across her words. All of them swung around, looking toward the south. Black smoke rolled toward the storm-blackening sky. Even at this distance, Dolley could see in it flickers of flame.
“It’s the Navy Yard,” said Graham. “Secretary Jones ordered its destruction, to keep our powder and ships out of the hands of the British.”
Dolley stood for a long moment, watching the smoke and the flame, as another explosion echoed across those flat green marshes, the scattered buildings and cut-down stumps that made up the Republic’s capital. Refugees jostled around them, poured like a dirty river along the road to Georgetown.
More quietly, Graham repeated, “Ma’am, there is no going back.”
Dolley let herself be coaxed back into the carriage. Joe whipped up the horses; they clattered on their way.
Sophie Hallam was still at the Executive Mansion when James Madison stumbled up the front steps. French John, with Pol in her cage and a bottle of the Madisons’ best champagne in either coat-pocket, had departed shortly after four, and immediately thereafter looters had broken in, helping themselves to whatever Dolley had left. Sophie had simply retreated to the yellow parlor and seated herself by the window with a pistol and a bottle of champagne—after all, these men and women had presumably paid the taxes that purchased the silver candlesticks and bottles of port and cognac.
She was still there, and the last of the shouting was just dying down in the hall, when she heard Paul Jennings gasp, “Mr. Madison, sir!”
Stepping quickly through the parlor door she saw the little white-haired gentleman stagger, then sink onto one of the hall benches as if he’d been shot. The men with him crowded around, supporting him and jabbering, Sophie thought, like so many frightened monkeys. She crossed unhurriedly to the dining-room, poured a glass of champagne, and brought it back out.
“Drink this, sir.”
The thin white fingers could barely keep a grip around the stem, but he glanced up and met her eyes and there was nothing weak or beaten in his sharp glance. “Mrs. Hallam.” He shook the others off him—the senior Charles Carroll, whose son had so recently hustled Dolley out of the Mansion, and one of his generals—and stood to
bow.
“Mrs. Madison left safely about half an hour ago,” reported Sophie calmly—she had always liked Mr. Madison. “And as you see—” She gestured at the shadowy front hall, strewn with Dolley’s dresses and shawls, with broken china and sweetly reeking puddles of spilled wine, “—the looters were a bare ten minutes behind.”
“I hope you managed to secure something worthwhile for yourself, ma’am?”
“Only memories.”
“Ah.” Madison sank back onto the bench, closed his eyes. “A woman of discernment.” His black clothing was gray with dust, his white hair and dead-white exhausted face, blackened with powder-smoke.
“Dolley, on the other hand, carried off all the Cabinet papers, a small clock, General Washington’s portrait, and the drawing-room curtains, so as you see, she exhibited more discernment than I. Will you lie down, sir?”
“Lie down?” exploded old Mr. Carroll. “Dammit, woman, the British are on our heels—!”
“I see no sign of them on the Avenue,” Sophie retorted coolly. “And I believe Mr. Madison would be the better for twenty minutes’ rest.”
“The lady is right, sir,” affirmed Mr. Barker, kneeling to hold the wineglass again to Madison’s lips. “I think those louts about cleared out the cellar, sir, but I’ll have a look round for cognac if thou’rt mindful for it.”
Madison shook his head. “I see things have much changed since the days of the Revolution,” he murmured. “I would not have believed the difference between a militia force and regulars, had I not seen it today.”
“I think it’s the British who have changed, sir,” replied Sophie. “Since last Americans fought them, they have sharpened their steel against Napoleon. And the generation that has grown up here since that time has done nothing but call one another names.”
“They’ll rally,” said the General bracingly. “Of course they’ll rally. And men will come into the city to defend it—”
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