“Ma?” Nabby opened her eyes again, struggled to sit a little straighter, to keep her face composed. “Were you afraid? When you had us, I mean, me and Johnny and Charley and Tommy?”
“Of course.” Abigail sat down again beside her. “I think every woman’s afraid, no matter how many times she goes through it safely—as who wouldn’t be?” She rubbed Nabby’s hand, taking comfort, like her daughter, from Mrs. Throckle’s competent bustling presence in the background. “I can assure you, though,” she added, “I was never as afraid having a child as I was crossing the ocean to join your father.”
And Nabby, as Abigail had hoped, blew out her breath in a shaky laugh. Perhaps at the idea of anyone being bothered that much by a sea-voyage—Nabby had been back on her feet and eating heartily within days of boarding the little ship. Perhaps at the idea of her incisive mother being afraid of anything at all.
By the time John’s letter reached her in the fall of ’83, it was too late to embark on the sea. All through the spring of ’84 Abigail made preparations to leave, arranging for the farm to be looked after, and the small rent on the cottage to be collected by John’s brother Peter. Jack Briesler, a veteran who for several years had cut kindling, fixed roofs, and mowed hay at the farm, would go with her, as would Esther Field, the daughter of one of her neighbors, horse-faced, mousy-haired, good-natured, and fifteen. One could not present oneself as the wife of the American Minister to France without servants of some sort, and Abigail wanted to have at least someone around her who could speak English. It was decided that Charley—fourteen now—and twelve-year-old Tommy would remain at the parsonage at Haverhill, fifty miles away near the Vermont border, where her sister Betsey—not an old maid after all—and Betsey’s husband ran a school.
But though Royall Tyler pleaded ardently for an early marriage with Nabby, and pointed to the large and handsome house he’d bought with its eighty acres of farmland, Abigail was beginning to have her doubts. Part of this was due to her own sister. Though Nabby might now hotly defend her suitor, and retort that her aunt Mary had her eye on Royall for a son-in-law herself, as Royall’s landlady Mary had a closer view of him than did anyone else in town. Sister Mary had spoken darkly, both to Abigail and to Nabby, of the young man still having some wild oats to sow. Abigail wondered, too, if Nabby’s sudden “understanding” with Royall had something to do with wanting to remain behind in Braintree.
In the end, when Abigail journeyed to Boston with Briesler and Esther—and a stock of provisions for the voyage including mustard, wine, a barrel of apples, several dozen eggs, tea, coffee, pepper, brown sugar, a sack of Indian meal, and a cow for milk, plus all their bedding, ewers, and chamber-pots—Nabby went with her. For a day or two before the Active sailed, they stayed with Abigail’s uncle Isaac Smith, and it was there, the day before their departure, that Abigail first met Thomas Jefferson.
“I have myself only just been appointed Minister Plenipotentiary in partnership with your husband,” he told her, that summer evening in Uncle Isaac’s wood-paneled company parlor. All the Smiths in Boston had come to bid her and Nabby farewell, and a wide assortment of Quincys, Storers, and Boylstons: that vast spun-steel kinship network that bound New England merchant families together. “Hearing you were in Boston, I came to offer you my escort to Paris.”
“See, Nabby?” Abigail remarked as she extended her hand. “Strange men still accost me out of the blue with offers of elopement to Paris at first acquaintance—not bad for forty.”
Nabby looked shocked, but appreciative laughter danced in Mr. Jefferson’s hazel eyes. He bowed deeply over her hand.
Slender for his gawky height and scholarly-looking, he was one of those fair-skinned sandy redheads who freckle or burn rather than tan, but there was an energy to him, a sort of shy friendliness that Abigail found enormously attractive.
“I’ve made arrangements to cross on the Ceres, out of New York, on the fifth of July, I and my daughter,” he went on, his soft, husky voice marked by slurry Virginia vowels and carelessness with the letter “r.” “If Mrs. Adams would care to accompany me back—”
“That’s very kind of you, Mr. Jefferson,” said Abigail. “But my daughter and I sail tomorrow.”
Jefferson looked disconcerted. By the fact that a woman wouldn’t wait for a gentleman’s escort before crossing the sea? Or because anyone would go ahead and make plans without consulting him? “I hadn’t heard of another ship bound for France that was prepared to take on passengers,” he drawled.
“The Active sails for London.” And, seeing the way those sandy brows shot down over the bridge of his nose, “We’re no longer at war with them, after all.”
“Does that matter, when one counts the dead?”
“If it did, no treaty would have validity and we should never be able to sleep in peace,” retorted Abigail, a little surprised at this prejudice from a man John had described as reasonable and educated. Then she took a second look at the lines of sleeplessness around his eyes, and recalled all she had heard of the viciousness of partisan fighting in the South. And she knew somehow it was his own dead of whom Jefferson spoke.
The Active put to sea on Sunday, June 20, 1784, and immediately began living up to her name. Her cargo was whale-oil and potash, and Abigail’s cow was not the only animal on board. These underlying stenches combined with the ground-in reek of unwashed clothing, sweating bodies, and every meal served and beer spilled in the course of every previous voyage.
From the cabin two small doors let into two eight-by-eight cells, each jammed to the ceiling, it seemed, with trunks. Abigail learned very quickly that chamber-pots had to be emptied out the single porthole immediately, for the next lurch of the ship would inevitably capsize them. The male passengers, Captain Lyde had explained to her, would, like the crew, relieve themselves clinging among the netting draped at the bow.
In all things give thanks unto the Lord.
Abigail shared one cubicle with Esther, and Nabby the other with a woman known universally on board as The Other Mrs. Adams (or, privately, Mrs. Adams of Syracuse, with a nod to Comedy of Errors)—the only Mrs. Adams Abigail had ever met who wasn’t somehow related to John. The Other Mrs. Adams’s brother Lawrence had very gallantly given up his bunk there to Nabby, otherwise the crowding in Abigail and Esther’s cabin would have been impossible. Abigail had intended to go over the bare wooden bunks with arsenic, soap, and camphor before putting a stitch of bedding on them, but even before they were out of the harbor she could only hang on to the door frame for dear life, and within a very few minutes was so sick she could barely stand.
There followed the worst two weeks of her life. In damp weather Abigail had always been prey to rheumatism and headaches, and since the ship was, by its nature, perpetually damp, there were days when, in addition to nausea and the dizziness from dehydration and starvation, her body ached so badly she couldn’t have stood if she’d wanted to. She’d cling to the sides of her bunk, into which she frequently had to be tied because of the high seas and buffeting of the winds, and wonder blindly if she was going to die before she saw John again.
At least she had plenty of company. All night long she could hear the men in the main cabin, and smell them, heaving up such dinners as they’d managed to down in the afternoon. The two cabins allotted to the women were so tiny, so airless, and reeked so badly of the cargo in the holds beneath, that the doors had to be kept open unless their inhabitants were actually in the act of changing clothes or using the bedroom vessels. Whatever modesty had survived the bearing of five children and the housing of large numbers of fleeing refugees in every room of a four-room farmhouse vanished rapidly, Abigail found, when men she’d never seen before came in to assist her while she vomited. When she was able she would return the favor.
This must be, she thought, how men develop the camaraderie they speak of at having passed through battle together.
My strength is made perfect in weakness, Saint Paul had written. Thrice I suffered shipwreck, a
night and a day I have been in the deep…in perils of waters, in perils of robbers, in perils by mine own countrymen…in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea….
Abigail felt that the saint had never quite got the credit he deserved, if he went through this very often on his travels.
Then one morning she woke to feel the ship no longer “lively,” as the sailors said, but moving with a steady surge, like a horse at a smooth gallop. Though she still ached in every joint, the absence of nausea was like the glow of health. She went up on deck, and found herself reborn, into a world of sparkling blue and silver, white clouds and shards of white foam and white sails, and a delicious open wildness of salty air. Everything seemed to be moving, dancing—balancing as she was learning to balance. Above the tangle of ropes and masts it seemed to her the whole of the universe exulted.
I’m actually on a ship, she thought, her mind freed for the first time in twelve days from the shackles of reeling sickness, the repeated blank shock of the fear of going to the bottom in a storm. I’m crossing the ocean.
And at the end of this voyage, I’m going to see John.
Journeys end in lovers’ meetings—
I’m going to be in London, and in Paris. Cities dreamed of, read of, heard of as a child…
And I’m going to see John.
Enchanted, Abigail walked to the rail and clung to the bar of damp wood, watching the gray porpoises as they raced along in the wake, so near, it seemed, that she felt she could lean down and touch them. One turned a little as it dove, and for an instant regarded her with a black, wise, mischievous eye. Then it was gone.
“Mrs. Adams!” Captain Lyde sprang down the short steps from the quarterdeck, held out his hands to her. “Good to see you on your feet!”
“Good to be on my feet,” she responded. “And good—you don’t know how good—to be able to come out and breathe air!”
The captain laughed. He was a sturdy-built man, fair-haired and red-faced. Abigail couldn’t imagine how he shaved on board without cutting his own throat, but obviously he did. “And your daughter? She’s a bonny one, she is, and as good a sailor as you could ask for. You’ll let me know if there’s anything I can do for you?”
“I’m glad you mentioned that,” responded Abigail briskly. “I hope you understand that I don’t speak from personal animosity, Captain Lyde, but this ship is a disgrace. There’s an inch of filth in the passageway outside the main cabin, the stench below-decks is enough to turn a Christian’s stomach, and there are rats the size of pit-ponies scurrying back and forth across the rafters above my bunk every night.”
“Er…Mrs. Adams, you won’t find a ship afloat that doesn’t have rats.”
“No, but you don’t have to make their lives easier for them. And you could at least have some of your men swab out the passageway. I don’t wonder I’ve been sick for nearly two weeks. If the ship was in dry dock I’d no doubt still have been sick, from the smell alone.”
Within the hour, three deck-hands were at work below-decks with scrapers, mops, brushes, holystones, and buckets of soapy water and vinegar. If there was nothing that could be done to eliminate the ground-in stinks of tar, half-spoiled salt-pork, whale-oil, and potash, at least the boards of the passageway deck were visible again and Abigail no longer had to clean her shoes coming and going from the cabin. The men muttered, but since Abigail herself led the work team until Captain Lyde tugged her gently back into the cabin, there wasn’t much they could say.
Her next project was the galley. The cook had been accustomed to bringing in whatever foods were cooked in whatever order they got hot—a leg of pork, followed by sometimes a pudding, sometimes a pair of roast fowls, and then a quarter of an hour later, when everyone was finished, he’d reappear with a platter of potatoes. “If not for the sake of your own self-respect,” declared Abigail, confronting the big scar-faced African in the mephitic dark of the galley, “I should think you’d want to learn how to serve a meal for the sake of your own future. What if Captain Lyde were to die of consumption? Then you’d have to go back to being a deck-hand.”
She picked her way around the corner of the high-built sand-box where the fire burned, to the copper of water, which was only lukewarm. “Good heavens, a fire this stingy will never get water cleansing-hot! Anyone would think you were planning to sell the leftover charcoal at the end of the voyage.”
The piggy eyes slitted resentfully; Abigail pretended not to notice.
“Let’s get these dishes clean for a start. Then I’ll show you how gentlemen—and ships’ captains—like to be served their meals. And wash your hands. If Captain Lyde or anyone else ever saw you in daylight they’d never touch food you’d prepared again.”
Ten days after that the sea roughened again. The passengers had to remain below. One of the sailors brought word that land had been sighted, but Captain Lyde didn’t recommend anyone going on deck to see for themselves. The Active rocked like a barrel in a millrace, and twice that evening Abigail was flung from her chair at table, until she roped herself into it, as she did when she sat on deck. That night, Nabby clung to her in the swaying gloom and whispered, “Ma, I don’t want to die! I don’t want to die without seeing Royall again.”
If after waiting four and a half years to see John’s face, Abigail reflected, she and her daughter ended up drowned in the ocean a mere hundred miles from where he sat, her first act upon arrival in Heaven would be to ask God for an explanation, and it had better be a good one.
“It will be all right,” she said, stroking the girl’s fair curls. “It will be fine.”
On the third day the shaken, exhausted passengers crept forth onto the deck. Far off to port, Abigail saw a line of green-rimmed white cliffs, that shallowed to gray beaches and a gray-walled town, and white surf like the ruffle of a petticoat. Between surged an enormous expanse of monstrous gray waves that fell away into still more monstrous troughs, like chasms opening down Neptune’s root-cellar. The sails flapped and cracked like cannons. Spits of rain lashed her face as she stood. Overhead, the sky loured blacker still.
“We could stay beating here in the Channel for days, trying to get around into the Estuary,” explained Captain Lyde, looking more cheerful than he had any right to be considering that nobody on board had had more than an hour’s sleep in three days. “Since these gales sometimes blow for weeks, I’m having the pilot-boat lowered, to take you into Deal.” And he pointed to the wet-black huddle of roofs, the castle that poked up so improbably pale against the drenched green slopes of the hills. “You can get a post-chaise to Canterbury and then on to London, and can be there in a day.”
London, thought Abigail, dazed at the thought.
I’m going to be in LONDON…
In someplace that won’t sink under me, and drown me and Nabby before ever I see John again.
She looked down over the rail at the churning sea and her heart turned to water.
Only the thought of going down with the Active in the Channel, within touching distance of John’s hand, got Abigail down the jerking, swaying, wooden wall of the hull and into the pilot-boat. This lurched and knocked and veered from the ship’s side, leaving a gap of icy sea. Only her own courage, Abigail suspected, got Nabby, Esther, and The Other Mrs. Adams to follow her. The sailors at the oars seemed to treat the matter as all in a day’s work, but with what Abigail knew of Mr. Blunt’s cooking, she suspected life and death were as one to this crew.
Gray rain streamed down into the gray sea. The Other Mrs. Adams wailed that she was going to die, a prophecy she had made hourly for the past thirty days. As a wave the size of a church rose up under the boat like a wall, then dropped away to nothingness, Abigail was inclined to agree with her, though nothing would have induced her to say so. Soft-spoken fellow passenger Mr. Foster grabbed her in his arms and clung fast to the rail, Abigail embracing him as she’d only ever embraced John while spray and rain soaked them both to the skin.
Just let me see him again, she found herself
praying. Just let me see him—
There was a noise like thunder and a wave swept the boat up broadside, black oars flailing in air. Mr. Foster’s arms tightened around her and Abigail shut her eyes, and the next instant the keel ground on pebbles.
She opened her eyes to see gray stone beach and emerald hill above her, sailors jumping from the boat to drag it farther up the beach, water the color of steel rushing around their bare shins.
It was Tuesday, the twentieth of July, 1784, and they were in England at last.
Rain began to fall at about noon. Nabby’s pains grew harder, yet the baby showed no signs of coming. Mrs. Throckle’s businesslike cheerfulness settled into a watchful quiet. Exhausted, Nabby clung to Abigail’s hands. Between pains she would ask about her aunt Mary or her cousins Bettie and Luce, or whether Mr. Jefferson had written from Paris—“Do you know if his little daughter is on her way to France, as he said she’d be?”
“She is, and she’ll be landing in England first, to stay with us til he comes for her.” Little Polly Jefferson was seven, too young, in Abigail’s opinion, to suffer the rigors of a sea-voyage. But when news had reached the Virginian in Paris, over two years ago now, that Polly’s tiny sister Lucie had died, Jefferson had been inconsolable. He had been counting the days until Polly was marginally old enough to send for; Abigail could not deny him that, even in her heart. “It will be nice,” added Abigail, watching her daughter’s face worriedly, “to have a child in the house again.”
“Mrs. Jefferson died,” whispered Nabby, “from having a child. That’s what Patsy told me—” Patsy was Jefferson’s oldest daughter, a tall and awkward twelve when Abigail had met her briefly in Boston before their departure. “She had her child early, after they fled from the British attack. She never got over it, Patsy said.” Then as her face convulsed with pain, she cried out, “Johnny!”
Patriot Hearts: A Novel of the Founding Mothers Page 10