The Ambitious Madame Bonaparte

by Chatlien, Ruth Hull

  She glanced behind her and saw Mammy Sue buttoning the back of Gussie’s frock. “The refugee ship. Was it very horrible?”

  “No, Goose. Just a shipload of miserable people who escaped the island with only the clothes they were wearing.”

  “Mother said cruel things are happening on Saint-Domingue.”

  Robert frowned. “Yes, but I did not see anything like that yesterday.”

  “But you know about it. I can tell.” Betsy smiled in her most coaxing manner.

  Robert shook his head and said quietly, “Father made me promise not to talk about it at home. He says that it is a man’s duty to shield women from ugliness.”

  “Oh, fudge. You know that I have as stout a heart as you do. Johnny is the one who cries if we find a dead sparrow.”

  Bending down, he gazed at her with a serious expression that reminded her of their father. “Both the blacks and whites are killing each other in unspeakable ways. The things Josiah said kept me wakeful all night. Do not ask me anymore.”

  Betsy darted another glance at the family’s enslaved wet nurse and whispered, “Such a revolt could not happen here, could it?”

  Robert shook his head, but his eyes still looked anxious. “No, Goose. Now go put your shoe on and I will tie the lace.”

  ONE NIGHT IN November, the crying of the baby dragged Betsy from heavy sleep. “Mammy Sue?” she murmured and waited for a deep, calming voice to answer.

  When no reply came, Betsy reluctantly opened her eyes. The chilly nursery was dark except for a glimmer of light around the edge of the door. That in itself was unusual. Betsy’s father was always the last person in the household to retire, and he not only made sure the outside doors were locked but also checked that the nursery door was tightly shut. Betsy strained her ears for the sound of Mammy Sue in the hall, but she could not hear anything except her sister’s bawling. Turning on her side and pulling the covers over her ears, Betsy felt surprised to find herself alone in the bed she shared with two-year-old Augusta Sophia. Then she remembered that Gussie was sleeping in their parents’ room next door because she was sick with a sore throat and strangling cough.

  Baby Margaret wailed on, her tone building to outrage at being ignored. After another minute of ineffectually trying to block the noise, Betsy sat up, causing her bed to creak. Her little brother Joe whispered from across the room, “Do something, Betsy. Make her stop.”

  With a sigh, Betsy flung off the bedclothes, stepped onto the cold wooden floor, and half hopped, half scurried to the cradle. As the oldest daughter, she was always the one who had to tend her siblings when Mother and Mammy Sue were too busy, and in a family of eight children, more problems occurred than the adults could handle: quarrels, scraped knees, runny noses, lost toys. Betsy envied her three older brothers, removed from the turmoil of the nursery—especially William Jr., who had a small bedroom of his own.

  Someday when I am older, I will have a room to myself, she thought as she slipped a practiced hand into the cradle to see if Margaret had wet herself. Finding the diaper dry, Betsy decided to carry the baby to her own bed.

  As she placed a protective palm under Margaret’s head and carefully lifted the baby to her shoulder, she heard a muffled shriek followed by the sound of a door being flung open in the hall. Her mother shouted, “No! Leave her with me.”

  Pulled by dread and irresistible curiosity, Betsy crept to the nursery door and opened it a few inches more. Instinctively, she put her thumb in Margaret’s mouth to give her something to suckle, and the baby quieted. Then Betsy looked into the hall.

  Mammy Sue stood by the opposite wall holding a bundle wrapped in a sheet; she cradled it as if it were Margaret, while Betsy’s mother wept and clutched the wet nurse’s arm. Dorcas’s beautiful face was pinched and white. Betsy had never seen her mother in such disarray; her wrapper was unfastened, and her light reddish hair hung tangled on her shoulders.

  Patterson stepped from the master bedroom and gripped his wife’s shoulders. “That is enough. You must not question God’s will.”

  “God’s will?” Dorcas pawed the bundle in Mammy Sue’s arms. “How can it be God’s will to take my pretty girl?”

  Betsy gasped. Then she squeezed the increasingly heavy Margaret as she fixed her gaze on the sheet-wrapped figure. Her father said, “Do not commit blasphemy, Dorcas. You know that such ills are the result of man’s sin, not from any evil in the divine nature.”

  Betsy’s mother slumped and hid her face against his chest. Stroking his wife’s hair, Patterson made a shushing sound. “Remember that our Lord said, ‘Suffer the little children to come unto me.’ Gussie is with Him now.”

  As he led Dorcas back into their room, he nodded at Mammy Sue. Betsy saw the slave begin to come her way, so she stepped back into the darkness of the nursery. She did not want the adults to know she had witnessed the scene.

  FOR THE NEXT few months, Betsy found herself remembering Gussie’s dimpled face at odd moments and wishing she could feel her sister’s arms around her neck. She kept those feelings to herself, however, because her mother remained too sad to discuss Augusta Sophia’s death. Gradually, as baby Margaret began to display her own personality, Betsy stopped thinking of the sister she had lost.

  In late February, two weeks after Betsy’s ninth birthday, a blizzard struck Baltimore. The sight of thick-falling snow outside the front windows proved to be too much for Betsy to resist, especially since her mother was talking to the housekeeper in the back building, which housed the kitchen, pantry, and servants’ quarters. Betsy hurried into the front entryway, donned her cardinal-red winter cloak, pulled up the lined hood, and crept outside.

  When her father first came to Baltimore as a wealthy trader in 1778, he built three-story, red brick houses side-by-side on South Street, one to serve as his residence and the other as his place of business. Each had a front building approximately thirty feet wide and fifty feet deep, connected by a passage to a narrower back building that was not visible from the street. Because of the way the façades were constructed, the two buildings looked like one very wide mansion with two center doors beneath a classical portico. The first floor was raised slightly above street level, so a stoop of five steps—made of the local white marble so characteristic of Baltimore—climbed to the entrance. Betsy crouched by the side of those steps, concealed from her brothers as they returned home from school. As she waited, she formed a snowball and packed it tightly.

  Soon she heard the shouts of boys coming toward her. She lifted her head just enough to peer through the iron railing at the side of the stoop and saw Robert approaching the counting house next door.

  Rushing from her hiding place, Betsy flung the snowball, which missed her brother widely. He spotted her and shouted, “You little minx!”

  Betsy shrieked as an unexpected snowball hit her left ear. Her hood had fallen back, so icy snow slithered down her neck. She whirled in the direction of the missile and saw Johnny slip in the snow as he ran, while William Jr. stood yelling for them to stop.

  All four children fell silent as their father opened the black-painted door of his counting house. “Boys! Come inside.” Patterson stepped backwards. “You too, Betsy.”

  He led them into the large front room where his clerks sat on stools before high slant-top desks, and the dusty ledger books of years past lined the shelves above their heads. Patterson set the boys to doing their daily bookkeeping exercises under the supervision of his senior clerk. Then he motioned for Betsy to follow him into his private office, which was furnished with a glass-fronted bookcase and a wide Sheraton writing desk that had raised cubbyholes along either side edge. A pair of framed etchings of company ships hung above the plain brick fireplace.

  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 mome
nt, 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 re
volt 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.”