A More Perfect Union: A Novel (The Midwife Series Book 3)

by Jodi Daynard

  The sun shone brightly, and it was with a lift in his spirits that Johnny went off to purchase a trunk. Since coming to Tunnicliff’s that past May, he had acquired many books and clothing as would no longer fit in a single trunk.

  Item purchased, he was just approaching his lodgings, dragging the new trunk behind him, for it had grown heavy, when he noticed a great pile of clothing and papers in front of Tunnicliff’s. As he came closer, he saw with rising horror: his small clothes, several books that he’d purchased at great expense, even his wedding suit, had all been dumped onto the dirty road. Some of his papers had already blown far down the street. Johnny hurriedly set down his new trunk and began to chase after the rogue papers. One of them was Jefferson’s letter to Sally Hemings. It went tumbling down Pennsylvania Avenue.

  Johnny managed to retrieve most of the items, although several books and his one good hat had been purloined. He shoved everything he could into the trunks and began to drag them behind him down Pennsylvania Avenue. But the trunks were not locked and kept opening, spilling their contents onto the road.

  The wind shifted and began blowing into his face. The sky suddenly grew black; frozen rain came down, light at first and then harder, slanting and painful as shards of glass upon his skin.

  He felt like a vagrant as he dragged the trunks down the road. At some point, the sharpness of the glassy rain and the biting wind forced him to relinquish one of them. He hesitated only a moment before choosing to keep the case with the books. He donned his sad worn winter coat and left the rest of his clothing, including his wedding costume, by the side of the road, just across from the Bunch of Grapes Tavern. He suspected that it would all be gone when he returned to recover it the following day.

  Tears sprang to Johnny’s eyes, mixed with a growing, genuine fear. He was known now, ripe for the picking. Whether by Jefferson’s men or bounty hunters hardly mattered. Fortunately, few men knew what he looked like.

  If only I can make my way to Mr. Adams, he kept repeating to himself. Mr. Adams shall take care of me.

  He came to a Negro lodging. Shadows stirred within; the sound of a violin wafted out of the front entry, along with drifting pipe smoke. He approached hesitantly, but the hostile stares that greeted him made him back away.

  At last, Johnny reached the President’s House. He was wet through and shivering. He mounted the icy ramp at the south end and rapped on the door. An old butler with a thick head of white hair answered.

  The butler took a good look at Johnny and said, “The president is receiving no callers. It is too late in the day.” He began to shut the door.

  “I am a friend, and it’s most urgent.”

  Johnny’s hair was in a chaotic tangle. His hands trembled as if with drink and his coat was threadbare. He bent down and retrieved a piece of paper and quill from his trunk. Then he scratched out a hasty note and proffered it to the butler. The old man took it with two fingers of his gloved hand. As the frozen rain hit the ink, it began to stain his white glove blue.

  “Tell him at once, if you will, that I am come. Tell him I—” Johnny hesitated. “I have nowhere else to go.”

  “That is most unfortunate.” The old man frowned. He shut the door in Johnny’s face.

  Johnny paced for a while outside the door and then, unsure what to do, sat himself down upon the ramp. He removed his coat and used it as a blanket, then wrapped one arm protectively about his trunk. There he remained, until he could no longer feel his limbs. A deathly, indifferent drowse overcame him as he lay upon the ramp. This time, there were no dreams. No Bridgetown, Cassie, or Madame Pringle. No Quincy or Cambridge. His sleep was black, wordless, cold.

  Johnny was awakened an unknown time later, while it was yet dark, by the sound of the door opening and a cry of “Dear Lord! Lowell! At once, you miserable cur!”

  Johnny knew the voice—or did he merely dream it? He tried to sit up but found his limbs would not move. Ice had almost completely sheathed him.

  “Sir,” Johnny whispered, “I—”

  “I arrive, I arrive!” cried Adams.

  Mr. Adams, in stockings, dressing gown, and nightcap, stooped to help Johnny up. “Lowell” had finally materialized as well.

  “Help me with him, Lowell. Why did I not know this boy was here?”

  “You said to hold all seekers, sir, being indisposed.”

  Adams looked at the man balefully, and then he perceived the smudged letter in the servant’s gloved hand. Lowell proffered it belatedly.

  “So there was a message, too? Help me into a chamber with him. Then you may pack your bags and be gone from my sight.”

  “Sir—”

  “Do it now, dammit!” Adams growled.

  The two of them helped Johnny to his feet and took him into the First Lady’s chamber. There, a young chambermaid soon appeared; she helped Johnny out of his stiff, frozen clothing and into an enormous nightshirt, no doubt belonging to Mr. Adams himself. She disappeared and returned five minutes later with hot tea, urging him to take a few sips. Johnny’s fingers could scarcely hold the cup. They had gone from corpse white to a hot and painful red.

  Adams came in holding Johnny’s letter.

  “I’m most grievously sorry, son. I have a terrible cold and have been imprisoned in my chamber near a week, or I should have known what Lowell was up to. Anyway, he is gone now and shan’t bother us any longer. Come, Marie, dear,” he said to the maid, “let him sleep.”

  Within Abigail’s chamber, as in all the rooms, a good fire blazed. Johnny fell asleep at once and slept through the following day. He awoke at an unknown hour and stumbled to the chamber pot. He then returned to his bed and slept until the next morning. He did not want to think of the trunk he had left on the road or about Marcia’s explanations. He knew now that there could be no good ones.

  For the next two weeks, Adams’s last two in office, Johnny lived in Abigail’s sparse chamber. By day he slept, and by night, under cover of darkness, he trawled the seedy taverns where he was unknown. Adams had given him money, which he spent on drink. It dulled the pain.

  When he could, Mr. Adams spoke gently to him. “I blame myself for believing that your secret could be kept,” he said. He further spoke of the double-edged sword that was leadership, and of hard times and new beginnings. “That villainous pamphlet shall be but one assault among many.”

  For you, perhaps, Johnny thought. Not bitterly, but with a bluntness and clarity that reminded him of Eliot. You shall move beyond the shame of my association. You shall retire to your farm and keep chickens. But how may I live with myself? What future have I?

  Mr. Adams soon gave up his attempts at consolation, for no words were forthcoming on Johnny’s side. Concerned, he wrote a letter to Abigail expressing his fear for the boy. He wrote a more tempered one to Eliza, in which he said merely that he believed her son’s engagement had been broken off.

  Mr. Adams assumed that Johnny would travel with him by carriage back to Quincy, and on the afternoon of March 3, Adams said to him, “We leave tomorrow morning, John. And good riddance to Washington, I say.”

  But Johnny replied with a slow shake of his head. He spoke equally slowly when he said, “I thank you, sir, for your unforgettable kindness. But there are some things I would yet do.” Adams thought at once that Johnny meant to drink himself into a stupor, alone. But then Johnny added, “I shall stay for the inauguration and then board a ship bound for Boston. One leaves tomorrow afternoon.”

  “The inauguration? What for?”

  “My reasons are personal. Rest assured they’re not disloyal to you in any way.”

  But Adams was only partly mollified.

  “And a ship, you say? Have you enough—er—for your passage?”

  “I believe so, sir.”

  The president fished about in his waistcoat until he found his billfold. From this he pulled out several bills and proffered them to Johnny.

  “Fifty dollars?” Johnny was incredulous.

  “A kingly sum, I a
gree. But don’t argue. You may return what you don’t spend. Better to have too much than too little. Keep it well hidden. Know you the name of the ship? We shall have a carriage waiting for you in Boston.” This last was said in a peremptory tone, and Johnny accepted with a small nod. “Well, that’s settled, then,” said Adams. Johnny bowed and removed to Abigail’s chamber.

  In the First Lady’s chamber, Johnny took up Mrs. Adams’s looking glass, which lay upon the dresser. He looked at himself. Whose was that long face staring back at him? He didn’t know. But for a terrifying moment, his mind played a cruel trick on him and he thought he saw the craggy face of James Callender. Johnny jumped, and the mirror fell to the floor, smashing to pieces.

  Mr. Adams didn’t care about the mirror; he now feared for Johnny’s life. The child was not well. What’s more, fights of all kinds broke out upon those rough cargo ships. Brawls, theft, drunkenness, illness. What if someone followed him on board in order to do him a harm? In his current condition, Johnny could not defend himself. Adams had never known the boy to drink before; now, he seemed inebriated most of the time. Adams had suffered the long, slow death from drink of his own son Charles. Youth, he understood, suffered far more sharply for its inexperience of pain. But this was not merely the ordinary pain of lost love. Yes, he thought, heading off to make his own final preparations, perhaps they had all done Johnny a disservice to treat him like a white child, with every hope of a great American success.

  Johnny woke early on the morning of the fourth to find a note from Mr. Adams and several more dollars:

  Take care on that ship, Johnny. The fellows can be rough, and I fear that in your weakened state you shall succumb to their abuse.

  Johnny had no worries about seamen; he knew seamen, understood them. He had no fear of bandits, either. His thoughts were what he feared. Thoughts, self-recriminations, doubts, and cruel visions: these attacked him relentlessly. Try as he might, he could not escape them. He should have stayed in Barbados. His family had warned him. He was unworthy of either love or success. A miserable liar and fraud! Only the drink succeeded, for a short while, in making him feel immune to attack from within, a stranger to himself. He had a powerful urge to stay that way forever.

  Before quitting Washington, Johnny bathed and donned the same clothes he had slept in the night he spent on the president’s ramp. Someone had seen to cleaning them. He took nothing but the clothes on his back. No books, no mementos, but only those few items that had first gone to Baltimore, like his box of precious beads.

  And Jefferson’s letter to Sally Hemings.

  Without, it was sunny, and a note of spring was in the air, though ice still glistened upon the road. It glazed the branches along Pennsylvania Avenue, forming a forest of translucent tubes.

  It was just past noon when he reached Jenkins Hill and the Capitol Building. The inauguration was about to begin when Johnny pushed his way through the crowd to enter the Senate chamber. He had toured this chamber with Marcia once, but now he hardly recognized the place: It was crowded to bursting. People from the remotest areas of the Union were there—every planter, farmer, mechanic, and merchant that could squeeze himself in. Chief Justice John Marshall and Senator John Langdon sat in the back of the room, speaking softly to each other. He wondered if they had seen the pamphlet, too. No doubt they had. It hurt to think that Langdon had not yet written to him, though Johnny believed he would.

  Finally, through a window, he saw Jefferson approach, alone and on horseback, looking the part of a simple citizen. But he was met by a detachment of Alexandria militia officers, swords drawn; they preceded him into the building. A discharge of the artillery was sounded, and as Jefferson entered, members of the House and Senate rose to their feet.

  Mr. Jefferson made his way through the crowd. He turned and saw Johnny, and his eyes looked at him with keen emotions: recognition, surprise, fear, and knowledge. Johnny approached; he allowed himself to be swallowed up into the crowd, which pushed him inexorably toward the soon-to-be president. But it was Johnny’s will that truly drove his feet, not the crowd. When he reached Jefferson, he removed the paper from his pocket. He groped for Jefferson’s hand and felt Jefferson start at the sensation of something being placed there. The man blinked once, tucked the paper in his own pocket, and then moved to the front of the chamber, where he began his address.

  After a few minutes, Johnny had heard enough. He turned to leave when he caught the profile of another familiar face. Marcia Burnes was sitting in the front row, among the men. She was dressed in a stunning black-and-white gown. As Jefferson spoke, she looked up at him with naked admiration. A blond, wasted youth in a pale-green silk suit sat beside her. Sensing eyes upon her, Marcia turned her head, at which movement Peter Fray placed a possessive hand upon her forearm. And though she looked directly at Johnny, it was as if she saw nothing at all.

  Part IV

  54

  IN HIS MIND, HE WAS GOING HOME. Not to Quincy but to his real home, on the hill overlooking Carlisle Bay. To palm trees and trade winds. To Cassie and his complaining grandmother. They would scold him for riding the turtles or playing with the slave children on the windmills instead of going to Mrs. Husband’s, where he was to school his mind. The older children would hit him hard with a cudgeling stick made of wild guava, turning his shins purple. But he didn’t mind. Pain sharpened his reflexes. There was only the burning sun, the sand, and the children’s cries. Later, he would walk in bare feet down to Madame Pringle’s establishment, and women squatting at the side of the road would call to him, “Johnny! Where you goh? What you do?” Calling out for a child’s sweet kiss in exchange for a few colorful beads.

  His precious hoard was still in the box Aunt Martha had given him on the morning of his Harvard entrance exams. That was near six years ago. As Johnny walked to the ferry, he pulled out Aunt Martha’s box and returned those beads to his wrists and neck. He returned the ruby ring to his finger. He removed the ribbon from his hair and let it spring loose around his head. He’d not pomaded it that morning.

  When Johnny reached Lear’s Wharf at the foot of M Street, the packet was already there, waiting to embark. But there was no wind, and it was near six in the evening before he was able to board. With him, tucked protectively beneath one arm, was a jug of spirits procured in a shop on the wharf.

  Johnny cut a strange figure as he boarded the ship: a noble youth in a worn but finely tailored coat and trousers, with dogs’ teeth and fish vertebrae about his neck and wrist, his hair wild. One could not tell if he were a gentleman who had gone native or a native who endeavored to pass for a gentleman. Nor could he have told you which he was.

  They finally set sail at around eleven that night. Once on board, and snugly installed in his berth, Johnny drank. It rained all night, and in the darkness the bottle of spirits rained down his throat.

  Johnny’s destination gradually became indistinct. At times, he knew he was headed to Boston and dreamed that his mother would be waiting on the pier for him. But then, dead in the night, with the moon obscured by clouds and his mind obscured by drink, he thought he might be headed home to Bridgetown. His father lived, and the moment John Watkins saw the ship approach on the horizon, he would drop his adze and come running to meet his long-lost son. Johnny saw them: the tall Negro women in bare feet on the shore, monkey jars on their heads; and monkeys free in the trees, not caged and mad with worry as he had found them in Cambridge. As he drifted in and out of consciousness, Johnny thought he could hear the distant beat of the slaves’ forbidden Coromantee drums, calling other slaves to action . . .

  The ship made its way up the coast. It put in briefly at New York, and some passengers descended. In the harbor at Manhattan Island, Johnny thought he heard the sound of the drums once more, but it was only the halyards of moored ships hitting their masts in the wind.

  Johnny was now feverish, in and out of delusion, part gin and part an ague that had traveled through the ship and laid all the passengers low. Was he at the
good place? Not yet, he thought. Not yet. Coming to welcome him home were Abigail and his mother, Lizzie and Martha, and, of course, Kate. Surely Kate would come. But their white faces darkened in his dream and became Cassie and Madame Pringle and the hucksters by the side of the road. Well, they would all be there, white and black, to remind him that he truly existed.

  At last, on the night of March 12, he heard the excited cry, “There it is! The North Church tower! Boston!”

  Johnny was belowdecks in his berth, a large puddle of puke at his feet, so old and augmented over the days and nights that he no longer smelled it, though others, believing him to be deranged and near death, kept their distance. Several even chose to sleep on the poop deck to avoid him.

  “Gather up your possessions, mates—we’ll be in the harbor in an hour’s time.”

  Johnny, still feverish but excited to be landing at last, stumbled up the narrow ladder to the deck and shot forward onto the ship’s bow. He looked out across the dark sea, unlit by any light save the stars and a half-moon, and he believed himself to be already on land. He spread out his arms and grinned with joy. They were all waiting for him. He lifted his right foot as if he would step onto shore just as a sudden gust of wind came up from behind and pushed him forward, over the gunwales. With a weak cry, Johnny plunged into the icy waters of Boston Harbor.

  “Man overboard!” someone shouted. But Johnny heard it not, for he was in a place of cold, calm silence, beneath the waves.

  55

  NO DREAMS, NO SENTIENCE OF ANY KIND, invaded the darkness. For three weeks, Johnny lay as if dead. When he did finally wake, he knew not who or where he was. Three concerned faces stared down at him.

  “He’s awake. He lives,” one whispered, seeing the slit of a single eye. The slit shut tight once more, clamlike, to prevent the tears that threatened to leak from it. Was he truly alive, or was it merely those dreams that come? He felt bruised everywhere, as if he’d dropped from the sky. Then, Johnny fell back into the darkness before he could finish the thought.