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.”
Betsy pressed her lips together and then, deciding that she was willing to face anything to become a princess, resolutely raised her head. “Is there more?”
Odette started to speak and then seemed to change her mind. “No.”
“What is it? You saw something else.”
“Ça suffit. You are still a child, and I have said enough.” She pulled up her shawl and walked back to Madame Lacomb’s house.
Betsy gazed after the woman without really seeing her. She was going to be a princess someday in a country far from Baltimore. Glancing at the solid brick houses on South Street, she pictured a radically different scene: a gilt-trimmed carriage pulled by white horses rolled up to a turreted chateau, and she stepped out wearing a beautiful purple velvet cloak. Someday she would leave this boring town for such an elegant life. She knew it.
After checking to make sure that no one was near, she said the words Princess Betsy aloud to see how they sounded. Then she shook her head. “No, I shall be the Princess Elizabeth.” Betsy raised her chin and drew back her shoulders to stand taller. I will be royalty, she thought, but I shall not be as foolish as Marie Antoinette. I shall not lose my head. Then she walked down the street trying to move as gracefully as a queen.
II
BETSY glanced through the drawing room window at the grey sky and wondered if spring would ever arrive. The March morning was chilly, and her impatience to break free of winter’s grasp was exceeded only by her desire to escape the drudgery of her never-ending daily chores.
Beside Betsy on the teal damask sofa, her three-year-old sister Caroline struggled with chubby fingers to pull a calico dress off her doll—a lumpy, stuffed cotton figure with yarn hair and embroidered features. Before them, five-year-old George sat cross-legged on the rug in front of the fire. He bent over a slate copying the alphabet from the colonial-era hornbook their mother had used as a little girl.
Caroline tugged the fringe of Betsy’s shawl. “Look.” She held up her doll to show that the skirt of the dress was tearing away from the bodice.
Betsy took the doll and examined the garment. The edges of the fabric had not begun to fray, so she said, “I can mend this.”
“Can you?” The little girl wore such a woebegone expression that Betsy felt a surge of pleasure at being able to relieve her distress.
“Of course, I can, Caro.” Betsy stroked her sister’s golden, floss-fine hair. “If you like, I will sew her something new too. I have some scraps of material and lace that will make a lovely ball gown. Now run upstairs and fetch my workbasket.”
Before running from the room, Caroline hugged her oldest sister’s neck, suddenly reminding Betsy of poor Gussie, dead and buried for more than a decade.
Betsy exhaled slowly to dispel the ache of that old loss, and then she checked on George’s progress. He was not ready to show her his alphabet, so she opened her well-worn copy of La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims. Knowing exactly which maxim would suit her mood, Betsy turned to number 41: “Those who apply themselves too closely to little things often become incapable of great things.”
The observation pithily summarized Betsy’s deepest fear. As the oldest daughter in a family of ten surviving children, she had as full a schedule of domestic duties as many a married woman, and she worried that her mind and talents were growing dull from such pursuits. Her father often reminded her that she was more fortunate than most young women because he had given her an education. Once Betsy left school a year ago, at age sixteen, however, he expected her to put aside intellectual interests and devote herself to women’s duties: “Elizabeth, you have had more than enough schooling to run a household and teach your children to read and cipher.”
Life offered more stimulation to her three older brothers, who all worked in their father’s shipping business. Betsy envied their ability to go out and mingle with people daily while she spent hours trapped at home. She was far more sociable than William Jr., a better writer than Robert, and more skilled at arithmetic than John, yet her father denigrated her wish to employ her talents more productively. From childhood, Betsy had been allowed, even encouraged, to read widely, and now William Patterson regretted it, complaining that books like A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
had given his daughter unsuitable ambitions.
To be fair, Betsy had to admit that her father held the whip hand over each of his children with equal severity—even her two oldest brothers, who were both over twenty-one. Patterson monitored all his children closely and required them to be home and in bed early each night unless they had an engagement he had previously approved.
Pressing her lips together to stifle a sigh, Betsy set aside the Maxims and glanced at her mother, who sat at the table near the front of the room. Although Dorcas was supposed to be working on her household accounts, she was staring through the mullioned windows that overlooked South Street. Her head drooped as she leaned her chin upon her palm. Strands of faded hair escaped her cap, soot stained her bodice, and the lace edging on the sleeve hung limply. All those details told Betsy that her mother was suffering from melancholy again, a condition that had plagued her since Gussie’s death.
Her low spirits always seemed to worsen with pregnancy, and that morning at breakfast, Dorcas had confirmed Betsy’s suspicion that she was expecting her twelfth child. Betsy said little about the news, not wanting to wound her beloved mother, yet she feared her determined silence had eloquently conveyed her disgust.
To make amends for that earlier coldness, Betsy said, “Is there any way I can help you?”
“What?” Dorcas turned, revealing a weary countenance. The skin below her eyes was shadowed purple. Betsy glanced at the gilt-framed portrait that hung over the fireplace, the one that showed Dorcas holding her as a one-year-old child. In that painting, both faces displayed a delicate roselike beauty. At age forty-one Dorcas was still a lovely woman, but to her daughter’s eyes, her bloom seemed to be fading, not blossoming.
“I asked if I could help you with anything.”
Her mother smoothed the bent corner of the page she was working on in her ledger. “Your father wants me to have these accounts ready for him by the time he comes home tonight, but I cannot make them balance.”
“Allow me to look at them.” Betsy walked to her mother’s side and swiftly checked her figures. “Here is the problem. In this column, you forget to carry the tens.”
“Oh, I see.” Dorcas crossed out the mistake and wrote in the correct number so that it would be in her handwriting, not Betsy’s. “I fear I shall never have your skill with numbers.”
“You are overly tired. That is reason enough for the error.” Betsy kissed her forehead and then returned to the sofa. Picking up her book again, she extracted a folded letter from its pages. It had come from her cousin Elizabeth Smith, but Betsy had little interest in rereading Elizabeth’s message. Instead, she skipped straight to the postscript added at the bottom by another cousin, Smith Nicholas. Smith had described in detail how he had been distracted by “ten thousand inexpressible sensations” simply from seeing Betsy’s name on the address.
Betsy smiled with satisfaction that he had fallen under her spell, even though she did not intend to encourage him. Ever since receiving Odette’s prophecy, she had believed she was destined for something greater than a life as a Maryland housewife. To achieve that aim, she needed to attract suitors. Sometimes she worried that her small stature—she was only four feet, eleven inches tall—might cause men to overlook her, but she consoled herself with the reflection that it was probably better to be too short than too tall like her unmarried aunt Nancy.
As Betsy pensively refolded the letter, Caroline rushed back into the room with Betsy’s workbasket. Betsy threaded a needle and began to mend the doll’s garment. Moments later, George rose and handed her his smudged slate.
Checking the alphabet he had copied, Betsy saw that his B, R, and S were reversed. She reached down to pick up the hornbook, abandoned on their father’s prized Turkish carpet, which displayed magenta and blue flower sprays against a gold-beige ground. “Look, Georgie, can you see any differences between what you wrote and what is printed here?”
The little boy squirmed and twisted his neck as though he were wearing a too-tight collar. “No,” he said without glancing at his work.
“You have these letters backwards.” She pointed to them with the pencil. “I want you to wipe the slate and then write each of these three letters ten times.”
“But you said I could play with my soldiers.”
“I said you had to do your alphabet correctly first.” Betsy handed him the slate, trying not to smile at his pout. “When you do, I will fetch you a piece of gingerbread.”
As George settled to his task, Betsy finished stitching the short seam of the doll’s dress. She was just knotting her thread when she heard the knocker rap on the front door. Too restless to wait for a servant, she jumped up. “I will answer it.”
The visitor was her friend Henriette Pascault, the oldest daughter of the émigré Marquis de Poleon. Henriette, who was several years older than Betsy, had red-gold hair, a lightly freckled complexion, and a pretty heart-shaped face. Today she was wearing a scarlet pelisse and a yellow bonnet with a white lace veil. After the two young women exchanged greetings, Henriette said, “Papa allowed me to take the carriage so I could drive to the milliner’s shop. Would you like to accompany me?”
Betsy bit her lip, glanced over her shoulder at the open doorway to the drawing room, and whispered, “I would love to go, but I cannot leave my mother. She is very low this afternoon.”
“Perhaps she could come with us?”
As Betsy shook her head, her mother came out to the hall. “Hello, Henriette.”
Henriette curtsied. “Madame Patterson. I came to see if Betsy could come with me to the milliner’s shop.”
“How kind. I am sure she would be delighted.”
“But, Mother, I am still in the middle of George’s lesson.”
“Nonsense.” Dorcas displayed the first smile of genuine pleasure that Betsy had seen from her in days. “I presume that he will not object to having his lesson cut short.”
“Thank you.” Betsy kissed her and inwardly resolved to bring back some ribbon and a silk flower to refresh the trimming on one of her mother’s bonnets. Then she put on a hooded cape and gloves.
The two friends went outside and descended the marble steps to where the Pascault carriage waited. It was a handsome coach—cream with gilt swags framing the family crest painted on the door—a conveyance more appropriate to the noble status the marquis had held in pre-revolutionary France than to his current occupation as a Baltimore merchant.
As soon as the two young women were seated within, Henriette laughed. “Oh, I am so glad that you decided to accompany me. I have the most delicious news.”
Betsy pushed back her hood. “What is it?”
“Do you remember Nathan Montgomery, the young Bostonian we met at Justice Chase’s house last week? He was overheard to say that you were so lovely he could not look at anyone else once you entered the room.”
“What a charming deceit.”
Henriette arched one eyebrow. “You know very well it was no lie.”
Betsy glanced instinctively toward the window to check her reflection, but it was impossible to see anything in the glass during daytime. It did not matter. She knew her appearance well enough. She had inherited her mother’s Grecian nose, hazel eyes, and auburn hair, although Betsy’s curls were darker than Dorcas’s and her chin was rounded rather than pointed so that her face was an almost perfect oval. Betsy accepted that she was beautiful the way she accepted that she was female, as a simple fact of birth. For the past two years, she had been known throughout town as the Belle of Baltimore.
Turning back to Henriette, she waved a hand in the air and answered, “What good is it to be attractive if we never meet anyone but merchants’ sons?”
“Is that what bothers you today? You begin to doubt your future?”
“How can I have a future in a city such as this? Baltimore has no culture to speak of. All anyone here cares about is making pots of money and raising hordes of obedient children. I feel that I am suffocating.” Betsy removed her gloves
and flung them on the royal blue velvet seat. Thinking of all the tantalizing stories Madame Lacomb had told during lessons, she exclaimed, “I wish I could go to Paris!”
“They say that Britain and Napoleon are on the verge of peace. Perhaps—”
Betsy rolled her eyes. “Oh, of course. I am sure my father would be delighted to send me to Europe on a pleasure trip.”
Henriette patted her arm. “There are many French émigrés here in Baltimore. Perhaps you will meet someone dashing at my father’s house.”
“The Europeans I have met so far have all been your father’s age, and I am not yet so desperate to escape as to marry a middle-aged widower.” Betsy bit her lip. “So far, my suitors have been merchants’ sons, planters’ sons, and one tongue-tied schoolteacher. Marriage to any one of them would sentence me to a life like my mother’s, bearing child after child until my mind is rusted from disuse.”
The carriage halted before the shop. Henriette touched her hair to make sure it was in place and then handed Betsy back her gloves. “You do not need a score of suitors to fulfill the prophecy. Only the right man. Be patient, my friend. Your destiny will find you.”
ON AUGUST 28, 1802, Dorcas Patterson bore her eighth son and accordingly named him Octavius. She recovered slowly from his birth, and the melancholy to which she was prone deepened into pervasive gloom. Betsy tried to cheer her with unexpected cups of tea or little presents of fruit or marzipan from the market. Dorcas would smile gratefully at the gestures, but the improvement they produced in her spirits was ephemeral.
With a new infant in the family, Mammy Sue had less time for baby Henry, who had begun to walk that summer. Often, it fell to Betsy to make sure he did not tumble into a fireplace or down stairs. At the same time, Betsy began to teach Caroline the alphabet. The winsome child trailed her everywhere, prattling constantly, so Betsy had little time alone even though she finally had her own bedroom, the small front chamber next to her parents’ room on the second floor.
The Ambitious Madame Bonaparte Page 3