Patriot Hearts: A Novel of the Founding Mothers

by Barbara Hambly

  Not her husband’s name, reflected Abigail uneasily. Her brother’s.

  The house John had rented for them on the outskirts of Paris was huge, set amid a wilderness of tangled garden across the road from the Bois de Boulogne. “We’re constantly discovering new rooms,” Abigail said to Jefferson, when he came calling with a basket of apples, four bottles of wine, and a strange old book about clockwork homunculi that he’d found in a shop on the rue Cluny. “We’ll freeze, come winter. Or starve, wandering about in search of the dining-room. Last night I stumbled upon a theater in the north wing!”

  “That doesn’t surprise me,” said Jefferson in his soft voice. “The place was built by the Desmoiselles Verrières, a pair of thoroughly reprehensible sisters.”

  “Hmph. I shudder to think the use they’d put to that room on the second floor that’s entirely paneled in mirrors. John says we’ll need the space to entertain, but on twenty-five hundred pounds a year, after one has bought candles and coal and soap and fodder for the horses, I am at a loss as to what we’ll serve our guests—herring and oatmeal, I suppose.”

  Jefferson’s hazel eyes widened in alarm as if, just for a moment, he feared she’d actually do it. In the green dapple of the garden’s light and shade, he looked better and more rested than he had in Uncle Isaac’s parlor in Boston two months ago—he’d had a pleasant voyage on a sea as calm as a millpond, he said, drat him. John had told her of the death of Jefferson’s wife, as a result of flight from the British too soon after child-bearing; she understood now his cold anger at the British, the war in his heart that no treaty could ever amend.

  “It would help if the servants would actually do some work. The cook won’t hear of so much as washing a dish—it’s all I can do to get him to wash the vegetables. Pauline the coiffeuse—and the Americans we met in London all insist that no woman with pretensions to good society simply hires an itinerant hairdresser or, God forbid, dresses her hair herself—Pauline refuses to sew or sweep or make a bed, not even her own. And our maître d’hôtel doesn’t do anything but make sure that nobody on the staff robs the family but himself.”

  “How many do you have?” Jefferson looked back through the vine-covered trees toward the limestone walls, the glittering windows. “I can’t imagine keeping up a house that large with fewer than fifty servants. The Spanish Ambassador has a hundred of them, fifty in livery—one feels as if one is about to be taken prisoner.”

  “We have eight,” said Abigail incisively, “Esther and Briesler being worth five apiece. Briesler on the subject of ‘Popish French layabouts that don’t speak a Christian language’ is a treat. Our footman Mr. Petit is at least some use, and young Arnaud is energetic—Arnaud is our frotteur. He spends the entire day swabbing the floors, and emptying and cleaning the chamber-pots. This garden is large enough to make a paying wheat-crop in, yet it doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone to install a necessary-house anywhere on the property.”

  “Perhaps you simply haven’t discovered it yet,” suggested Jefferson mischievously. “Who knows what terra incognita lies beyond that pergola there and away into the orchard? A scientific expedition must be mounted—”

  “Go along with you!” Abigail poked him with her fan.

  “Ma!” a voice called out, and two hurrying figures appeared from around the ruined summerhouse, hand in hand like children. A gray-and-white mongrel—who seemed to have come with the house—romped happily around their feet. “Ma, there’s a fountain back here!”

  “You see?” asked Jefferson. “The American spirit will always seek new horizons to explore.”

  One of the greatest and most delightful surprises, on their arrival in Europe, had been Nabby’s reunion with her brother Johnny—John Quincy, Abigail supposed she must learn to call him. That somber young gentleman who’d met them in London was a schoolboy no longer. The last time Nabby had seen her brother she’d been fourteen, and Johnny twelve. It had distressed Abigail during John’s brief return in ’79 to see the boy as withdrawn and aloof as his sister, as if he understood the need for sacrifice and excellence that had taken him from his family.

  Now they were together again, an affianced young lady of nineteen and a well-traveled diplomatic assistant of seventeen, poking and teasing one another and laughing together as if their postponed childhood had been given back to them. Not even with Royall had Abigail seen her daughter so joyful.

  Was it because neither of her older children formed close friendships easily, Abigail wondered, that they became so quickly inseparable? Coming from large and close-knit families themselves, she and John were both used to looking no further than the family for intimacy. In France that meant the small circle of themselves, Nabby, Johnny, and Thomas Jefferson and his daughter. John and Jefferson had worked together in the Philadelphia Congress, John’s hardheaded practicality meshing perfectly with Jefferson’s lyric idealism. But even in ’76, Abigail had detected in their letters something deeper. Jefferson was like a brother neither she nor John had previously realized they’d had; Nabby and Johnny adopted gawky, twelve-year-old Patsy as a sister.

  Jefferson, a naturalist to his bones, had a wide circle of friends in Paris. He spent many of his evenings with cronies from the Philosophical Society, and every day but Sunday Patsy lived at the convent school of the Abbaye Royale de Panthemont. There were, of course, no Protestant boarding-schools in France, and to Abigail’s indignant protest, Jefferson replied that he would not have his daughter left alone for most of the day with only the servants.

  For the most part, the four Adamses were the whole of each other’s world. In the mornings, Abigail would wake her son and daughter with a brisk tap on their bedroom doors, at opposite ends of the long range of rooms that made up the main block of the house; together they would breakfast in the little red-and-white chamber adjacent to Johnny’s room.

  While John and John Quincy—and shaggy little Caesar—were taking a long walk in the Bois de Boulogne, Abigail would outline the day’s chores to the maître d’hôtel, and go over the household accounts. Often she would have their superannuated coachman drive her and Nabby into the city, at an hour when the streets still swarmed with black-clothed lawyers and clerks on their way to the opening of the law-courts, and with barbers and barbers’ assistants en route to customers in lodgings. After being invited to dine with the Swedish, Prussian, and Spanish ministers—with their battalions of liveried servants—Abigail knew that new linens, new china, and new silverware were in order, if the United States was going to appear as anything but a parcel of beggars.

  Even with most of its better-off citizens in the country for the summer, Paris was an astonishing place. Its streets seemed perpetually crowded with carriages, carts, sedan-chairs, and vendors shouting their wares at the top of their lungs. The narrow lanes were a constant hazard to life and limb with the rattling speed of light English carriages frantically driven; every wall and fence was placarded with advertisements for plays, books, lost dogs, or lost diamonds, all of which had to be licensed by the chief of police and all of which were pulled down every night, to be reposted the next morning.

  On these shopping expeditions she and Nabby were often accompanied by a young Virginia lady named Sophie Sparling, to whom Jefferson introduced them: Sophie’s father had been a Loyalist, Jefferson explained, but his friend (and distant cousin) nevertheless. Miss Sparling, now a paid companion to an Englishwoman living in the Faubourg St.-Antoine, served not only as translator but as their guide to the shops of Paris.

  Jefferson shopped, according to John, like an extremely tasteful army sacking a town. Linen for which the Virginian paid three hundred francs in the ultra-fashionable boutiques of the Palais Royale, Sophie showed them for a hundred in the Mont de Piété, the government-run pawnshop where used furniture, dishes, and linens in all states of wear or nonwear might be obtained.

  “And whatever you do, don’t buy pepper already ground,” Sophie would advise in her aloof smoky voice. “The shopkeepers adulterate it
with powdered dried dog-feces.” Of equal value, to Abigail, were the young woman’s briefings on French social usages: In France, one made calls upon one’s arrival in town, rather than waiting to receive cards from one’s social equals. Before she could undertake the daunting exercise of appearing in a total stranger’s drawing-room in order to bow in French-less silence, Abigail was called upon in the more reassuring American fashion by several American ladies as they returned to Paris with the coming of fall, and the business of making calls and receiving them quickly settled into place in the early afternoons.

  This enterprise of calling and being called on, while John was at work in his study, was, to Abigail, the heart of the day and of her life: the business of being a diplomatic hostess, of being at the center of the young Republic’s affairs. Dinner was at two, or a little later if they were invited to dine with other members of the diplomatic corps—Spanish, Swedish, Prussian, Russian. If they dined at home, guests could include Americans engaged in politics or trade in Paris, like the wealthy William Bingham and his beautiful wife Ann, or French favorable to the Americans, like the Duc de la Rochefoucauld.

  The talk was of the young Republic, of the hopes men had for France. Abigail heard very quickly of the notorious Tax-Farmers, the financiers who actually ran the kingdom’s economy and France’s mounting and terrifying debts, many of them connected to the American War. Listening to the strange maze of pamphlet-driven demagoguery, special privileges to the King’s friends, salonnières who used fashion to steer politics, and the rotating carousel of Finance Ministers, Abigail felt a deep uneasiness at being allied with these people, at being beholden to them, as a woman might feel upon discovering that the man she’s married is a drunkard and a gambler.

  And John, she could tell, felt the same.

  After dinner John and Johnny would go to meet Jefferson at Benjamin Franklin’s house to work on the European treaties. On these afternoons Abigail would write—to her sisters, to her nieces, to Uncle Isaac or Uncle Cotton or the friends she’d left behind in Massachusetts. Sometimes she would hear Nabby practicing on the pianoforte in the music-room, or through the windows of her little private parlor see her daughter sketching in the garden, before her mind returned to her correspondence. The gossip of Braintree and the family brought to her not only the tone and timbre of her sisters’ voices; the affairs of the State of Massachusetts, the growing disunion among the States and the increasing snarl of paper-money finances and constant squabbling seemed to be slowly swallowing up the young nation that had so recently come through the fire.

  In return, she wrote to Mary and Betsey of the things they’d never seen: the opera and the theater. She and her sisters had read plays, but had never seen them performed, and for Abigail, opera was like being transported to another world. A very different world from Massachusetts, she reflected, the first time the not-quite-clothed corps de ballet tripped out onto the stage. Her mother would have told her to hide her eyes but she was far too fascinated to do so.

  But it was the evenings she loved best. Evenings spent at home with John and Johnny, with Nabby and sometimes Jefferson as well, in the candle-lit parlor, Caesar dozing at John’s feet. It was the time for talk, of Paris’s fads and fashions, or of politics with John while Johnny—Hercules, she had nicknamed him, for his sturdy frame—studied his Latin and Greek. In November her son had announced his intention to return to Massachusetts to attend college at Harvard, and no arguments she and John could conjure concerning the greater usefulness of diplomatic experience would sway him.

  Those were the evenings, she thought, that for the first time in a decade she felt as if she were having a normal life again. As if the War that had shaped and bent all their lives were finally over, and she could be together with those she loved.

  It wasn’t true, she understood. Because of the War, because of the call of the new nation for her husband’s aid, they were in France, far from her sisters and John’s mother and brother—far from poor Charley and young Tommy, growing up as semi-orphans in their uncle’s boarding-school in Haverhill.

  Far from Royall Tyler, and the life Nabby would have had, as a young bride with a home of her own.

  Between August, when they reached Paris, and their departure in May for John to take up his post as first United States Minister to England, Royall Tyler wrote exactly once to John—as Nabby’s father—and once to Nabby herself. Abigail wrote to Royall a number of times, reminding him how much Nabby looked forward to hearing from him, but with no result. Moreover, her sister continued to provide a disquieting account of Royall’s behavior. He would lose or mislay letters and legal papers sent to him, delay delivery of documents to other members of the family for months.

  Abigail was aware that her sister Mary had never liked Royall. Was aware, too, from nearly ten years’ experience with her own mail-pouch romance, how frequently letters went astray at sea. Yet her own disgust with Royall’s light-mindedness was growing, as spring brought preparations for the move to London, and for Johnny’s departure.

  It was Johnny’s departure—

  The thought half formed itself in her mind, as the baby’s protesting wail rose above the quiet bustle of the stuffy, rain-dark bedroom.

  As her daughter’s head fell back onto her breast, Abigail looked swiftly from the crumpled loosening of Nabby’s features to the child in Mrs. Throckle’s hands and back again. “It’s a boy,” she said, with happy wonder, and tiny William Steuben Smith sucked in a deep breath and let out his debut bellow as he dangled naked by his feet in the first lamplight of evening.

  The midwife’s girl and Nabby’s maid began their clean-up of the inevitable mess of a new human being’s entry into the mortal world. Esther, who’d kept herself busy in the kitchen through the whole of the endless day, peeped around the bedroom door with her long, horsy face wreathed in smiles. Nabby leaned her head back against Abigail’s shoulder, tears tracking down her cheeks.

  My mother cried, Shakespeare’s Beatrice said of her birth; but then there was a star danced, and under that I was born….

  Were you born, little grandson, under a dancing star?

  “Hush, dear, it’s all right,” she whispered, and stroked Nabby’s hair. “It’s a boy, and it’s all done and over.”

  But as Nabby held out her arms for Baby Will, Abigail thought again, It was Johnny’s departure, not Royall’s inconstancy, that sent her into William Smith’s strong arms.

  She frowned at the idea, wondering if it were true. Certainly Nabby had been desolated when her oldest brother sailed for Boston, just before the family left Paris for London. And in London, Colonel Smith had been waiting, big and handsome and self-confident; a hero of the War, and not a man to let letters and papers go undelivered and unanswered for months at a time. The Colonel had lived with them for a while when first they’d taken up residence in Grosvenor Square; he’d been attracted to Nabby instantly.

  And just as quickly, Abigail admitted to herself, she herself had been drawn to Colonel Smith. She had favored the match, and encouraged it, glad, this time, that Nabby was being courted by a man who would care for her.

  For Nabby needs someone, she thought, when a few minutes later deep voices boomed below in the hall. Seeing her reunited with Johnny—seeing her return to smiling wakefulness like the princess in a fairy-tale in Paris—had showed her that. And while Abigail might rail to John about the social laws that robbed a woman of an education, or the judicial ones that forbade her ownership of her own property, she was conscious enough of the world’s ways to know that a woman alone would be subtly ostracized.

  She was aware, too—and a little disappointed—that Nabby had not her own strength, nor the sharpness of mind that made her welcome John’s temper-tantrums and the stimulation of politics and literature.

  Nabby wanted a companion, the way our Johnny wanted one, all those years of travel to Russia and France. Johnny’s latest letter from Harvard returned to Abigail’s mind. The unhappiness in it was unmistakable as he
drove himself in his studies like a man possessed. Nabby was as wretched without a companion as Johnny is now.

  Would Colonel Smith’s suit have succeeded, had her brother been here for her to laugh with instead?

  The thought was an unsettling one. Abigail tried to put it aside as she helped Esther clothe Nabby in a fresh nightdress and bore her to the bed while Mrs. Throckle wrapped little Will in the dress of tucked lawn that Nabby and Abigail had embroidered that winter. Like the dresses I made for Nabby, Abigail thought, remembering those evenings at the kitchen table, stitching while John wrote articles about the Stamp Act beside her.

  So far we have come.

  Then the men were in the room, Colonel Smith catching first his new son, then his wife, then Esther and Abigail and Mrs. Throckle and the little assistant each in his giant embrace, laughing all the while with one incompletely powdered lock of raven-black hair hanging in his eyes.

  And John was quietly holding Nabby’s hand, his gruff-tempered Yankee face glowing with the softness of absolute love as he looked down at his first grandchild. “We have a new little American,” he said gently, and bent to kiss Nabby’s cheek.

  “A new citizen of a new Republic,” agreed Abigail, and joined him by the bed, his arm slipping around her waist. “Colonel Smith works for the legation, which should qualify this house as American soil, I think.”

  From somewhere, Colonel Smith produced a decanter and a glass, which he filled and held high: “To America’s newest citizen! May he bring confusion to that scoundrel Carmarthen and may he ram their wretched treaty down their throats!”

  Nabby smiled at her parents’ enthusiastic declarations of “Hear, hear!” and drew little Will’s head to her breast. But the old withdrawn look was returning to her eyes, that aloof sadness that Abigail had never quite fathomed. As if, with her child in her arms, she still sought for something she had lost, could never retrieve from the river of the past.