Patriot Hearts: A Novel of the Founding Mothers

by Barbara Hambly

  It was the face she never showed her father—never showed anyone. Like Tom, who had molded his daughter into the image of what he thought a woman should be, Patsy was determined to be unfailingly cheerful and polite to all.

  She and Randolph had quarreled that morning, over yet another dunning letter from one of his creditors; his shouting could be heard down on Mulberry Row. He had slammed out of the house, ridden off like a madman leaving the overseers in charge of the harvest. He had not returned for dinner.

  Now—and it was nearly midnight—Patsy looked as if she had a headache as savage as any that so frequently felled her father. As Sally watched, Patsy reached down to stroke the matted hair from Ellen’s forehead—as Sally herself had stroked Bev’s earlier that evening—and drew back her hand, lest she wake the child. Then her whole body shivered, shaking, as if she were being racked with silent, tearless sobs.

  Quietly, Sally withdrew. She descended the narrow twist of stair with the practiced care of one who has studied for years to come and go undetected. She passed like a shadow from the house and down the hill, to her own cabin where Bev dozed fitfully alone, Young Tom having gone to his grandmother’s to sleep. Sally bent over her child, then returned to the hearth and gathered up the ingredients for the “headache tea” she so often made for Tom: catnip, betony, valerian, and rue, which he said the Indians had showed his father.

  Well it isn’t forbidden for me to come into her Sacred Presence, reflected Sally.

  The Big House was dark, save for the dim light visible in the nursery window. But as Sally stepped through Tom’s cabinet window, she heard Patsy’s voice downstairs in the high-ceilinged, half-finished room that would one day (Tom said) be the entry hall, low and reasonable as it always was….

  “That isn’t what I said—”

  “It’s what you thought! It’s what you goddam think every time you see me here! You’d be happy if I took my sorry carcass out of your life so you could turn my children over to Papa for good, like you did before!”

  “You know you were ill—”

  “I know more than you about it, woman! You wish I was ill! You wish I was goddam dead so you could come back here to Papa!”

  From the doorway of Tom’s bedroom Sally could see their shadows in the light of a branch of candles, huge grotesque shapes looming over the half-plastered walls, the unfinished gallery. “That isn’t true—”

  Randolph struck her, a backhand blow that knocked her to her knees. Though Patsy was a towering woman, her husband was built like an oak tree. “Don’t you goddam tell me what’s true, you sneaking bitch! All you wanted was to give your precious Papa grandchildren and you didn’t care whose spunk you made ’em with!” He stepped close to her and she cowered—

  Patsy, thought Sally, shocked and sick. Patsy cowering.

  Cowering like a woman who’s been beaten before.

  He caught her by the hair so that she cried out, twisted her head to force her to look into his face. For a moment they remained frozen thus, a huge shadow and a crumpled pale shape. Then with a strangled groan he shoved her back against the wall, and disappeared into the passageway. Sally heard him collide with a wall, and then the crash of his body on the floor.

  In the nursery, Cornelia and Ellen began to wail.

  Patsy lay where she’d fallen, trembling with soundless sobs as she had before, but Sally knew in her bones that the only thing needed to complete the wretched agony of her humiliation, would be the knowledge that Sally had seen it.

  The only dignity she had left was secrecy.

  Like a swift shadow, Sally ascended the stair, set the tea-pot down on the nursery table, went to the cradle, and gathered Cornelia in her arms. “It’s all right, sugarbaby,” she murmured. “Nothing to be afraid of.” Holding the baby with one arm, she brushed Ellen’s cheek with the backs of her fingers.

  “Mama,” Ellen whispered.

  Grizzle the dog crept to Sally’s feet, glad that a human had come to take charge.

  “Your mama be up soon, or your aunt Carr.” Not that Aunt Carr, who didn’t believe in getting involved in “unpleasantness,” would emerge from her room before morning.

  On the other side of the little room Annie turned her face on her pillow, whispered, “What happened, Sally?”

  “Your papa got mad at one of the grooms, that didn’t put his horse away right,” Sally replied. “That’s all, sweetheart.” She gently laid Cornelia back down, wrung out another rag and wiped the baby’s face with it. It was impossible to distinguish much about the rash in the nursery’s near-dark, but she thought Cornelia’s fever seemed less, no more than what Bev’s had been yesterday. The little girl had grown quiet with the touch of careful hands.

  Tom’s granddaughters. Her own kin. And if they weren’t, thought Sally despairingly, could I really stand aside and watch even the children of total strangers killed, for what their parents did?

  Ellen whimpered, “Mama,” again, and Sally said, “Your mama’s on her way, baby.” She thought she heard the creak of a footfall in the hall, and Grizzle raised her head and thumped her tail eagerly. But looking toward the door, Sally saw only darkness. It was ten minutes before Grizzle thumped her tail again, and this time Sally saw the moving fire-fly of a candle there, and a moment later, materializing in its glow, Patsy’s haggard face. She’d re-braided her hair and her eyes looked swollen, as if she’d been crying.

  Sally got at once to her feet, curtseyed, said, “Ma’am,” and made to go. Patsy stepped in front of her, her face cold and hard as carved bone. Weary, as if Sally were one more rock in the load of rocks that she was forced to carry to her grave.

  Yet she made her voice low and pleasant as she said, “Thank you, Sally. I appreciate your taking over.”

  “Ma’am.” Sally curtseyed again, as if she’d never played with this person when they both were children; as if Patsy had never taught her to read, or let her into her father’s library in quest of books. Then, because of that unspoken past: “I made you some tea, ma’am; a tisane I should say, that’s supposed to be good for headaches.”

  Patsy’s breath drew in, blew out in a sigh like the sigh of the dying. She whispered again, “Thank you,” in a voice that made it very clear that the tea was going to be poured out the window the minute Sally was out of the room.

  “Ma’am,” said Sally quietly, “if you’d like, I’ll stay with them tonight, so you can get some sleep. I think Miss Cornelia’s fever’s less.”

  Patsy turned immediately to feel her daughter’s forehead; Sally saw her wide, flat shoulders relax. “I think you’re right. Thank God.” She closed her eyes for an instant, though her hand pressed briefly to her mouth as if she would hide from Sally even its momentary tremor. “Thank you very much for your concern, Sally, but I shall be all right here.” And as she turned back her eyes said, Anything, rather than accept a favor from the hand of my father’s whore.

  Sally wanted to shake her. Wanted to shout at her, Can’t you see that you and I can’t go on living this way?

  He needs us both.

  Why don’t you admit the truth? We’re both going to be in his life for a long time.

  But Sally knew, as surely as she knew her own name, that if she said those words, even now alone in the deep of the night, Patsy would simply gaze at her with those chilly eyes and change the subject, exquisitely polite and stone-deaf.

  Like her father, when there was something he didn’t want to hear.

  Sally curtseyed again, and turned away with a sense of despair. She was the betrayer, the seductress. The succubus who had lured the father Patsy adored away from his true nature, into the disgrace of being a man who bedded his slaves.

  And beyond that, Patsy could not see and would not look.

  Sally thought, Dammit. Took a deep breath, and turned back in the doorway. “Miss Patsy?”

  Patsy straightened up from Ellen’s bed, face stiff with distaste. “What is it now?”

  “Miss Patsy.” Sally injected a note o
f what she hoped sounded like shyness into her voice. “You wouldn’t know whether—whether Mr. Peter is coming back with Mr. Jefferson, would you?”

  As disgusted as she was at herself for this piece of play-acting, Sally was astonished to see that it worked exactly as Critta had said it would. For one moment Patsy regarded her with a startlement—an expression of enlightenment—that was almost comical. “Mr. Peter Carr?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Sally dropped her eyes, and for good measure twisted her apron a little in her hands. And as she lifted her gaze again to the other woman’s face, she saw there a look of such dawning relief that it struck her to the heart with a sense of shock and pain.

  Did she truly need the illusion that much?

  Had her spite, her cold talebearing, come from pain that desperate?

  Critta had been right. The only thing in the world Patsy had wanted to hear was that her father was not the father of Sally’s children.

  “I—I had no idea—”

  Whether she simply didn’t want to think about the issue of Young Tom, or whether she clutched at the belief that Tom’s Casanova nephew had succeeded his uncle in Sally’s life, Sally didn’t know and never afterwards found out. But the frozen enmity in Patsy’s voice dissolved like mist in the sunlight.

  She was once more, in her own eyes, the only woman in her father’s life, and Sally was shaken by a sense almost of shame as she saw how the reprieve from unhappiness altered the white woman’s face. It was like watching a woman drinking water, who has stumbled for days in the desert.

  “Please don’t speak of it, ma’am. Not to Mr. Peter—please not to your father. Your father’s been so good to me.”

  “Of course,” promised Patsy, with an eager sincerity that reminded Sally achingly of their vanished days of mutual innocence. For all her coldness and spite, Sally knew that when she gave her word about something, Patsy Randolph would keep it. “I thought—Of course. Never a word.” She drew a deep breath, as if bands of iron had snapped from off her chest for the first time in twelve years, and the freedom to breathe left her dizzy.

  They stood in silence for a few moments in the darkened nursery, the breathing of Patsy’s children soft around them, the house and the mountain sunk in night as if at the bottom of the sea.

  Tom returned a few days after that, fuming at the result of Callendar’s trial. Judge Chase had interrupted, disallowed, and overruled the journalist’s defense attorneys until all three of them had walked out of the courtroom in disgust. Callendar had not even been given a chance to speak. He had been convicted, heavily fined, and sentenced to prison for the duration of the Sedition Act’s existence, whether that should be nine months—until Adams was out of office—or nearly five years.

  “Every newspaper in the country shall carry it.” Tom’s voice was both enraged and exultant. “Madison’s already writing for the papers in New York, in Philadelphia, in Charleston. No man who loves his country can ignore what’s being done now. When the vote comes, they must surely be driven from office—or the country itself will be destroyed!”

  But destruction lay closer than the election, ran deeper than any Sedition Act. It was averted only through the inexplicable machinations of Fate.

  On the night of the thirtieth of August, a thunderstorm of unprecedented violence inundated Richmond, swelling Virginia’s rivers to impassable floods and washing out bridges for miles. The following day, two Richmond slaves cracked—as Sally had sworn her own resolve would not crack—and went to their masters with the information that on the previous night, despite the downpour, a band of armed slaves had assembled at the rendezvous point, ready to attack under the command of a slave named Gabriel Prosser.

  Because of the rain, Prosser had reset the date of the uprising—which comprised almost eleven hundred armed and organized rebel slaves—for the following night, the thirty-first.

  But by the following night, Governor Monroe had militia patrols out sweeping the roads. Within days, almost thirty of the leaders had been taken.

  “Did you know?” Tom asked.

  Sally didn’t answer. The sharp golden half-light of autumn, slanting through the jalousies of the cabinet’s windows, laid bright slits across his sharp features. In his eyes Sally saw the shaken look of a man who has stood near a tree in a lightning-storm, only to see God’s hammer rend the living thing to pieces a yard from his elbow.

  Was it the nearness of their escape that frightened him? she wondered. The fact that he and all his friends had barely avoided being overrun and slain, as the aristocrats of France had been murdered? The fact that while he and his lanky friend Governor Monroe and clever little Mr. Madison had all been scheming about the balance of local rule with the power of the Congress, black men whose labor they all took for granted had been making plans of their own?

  Or was it the awareness that he, and they, and his daughters, and his friends’ families, all stood unmasked in the eyes of the country as the oppressors, the exact equivalent of those French aristocrats who had “brought it on themselves”?

  Sally folded her hands and answered calmly, “No.”

  His eyes met hers. I think you’re lying, Sally.

  And hers replied, Better a liar than a coward, Tom.

  Both knew that the words could never be said. That to speak them would end the friendship that, flawed as it was, was still a source of comfort to them both.

  And Sally had known for a long time, that he would not and could not be other than he was, no matter what was said.

  It was he who looked aside.

  The rebel slave Gabriel Prosser was hanged on the tenth of October. Rumors went around the quarters for weeks beforehand, of slaveholders demanding that the forty or so men condemned with him be “made an example of” by mass executions, or burning alive. Tom Randolph’s cousin (and brother-in-law) John, newly elected to Congress, had written, The accused have exhibited a spirit, which must deluge the Southern country in blood: and many had demanded vengeance accordingly.

  While tidying Tom’s cabinet, Sally found a letter from Governor Monroe, asking Tom’s advice. Pinned to it was a note containing Prosser’s reply to the question asked in court, of why he had conspired to revolt.

  I have nothing more to offer than what General Washington would have had to offer, had he been taken by the British and put to trial by them. I have adventured, endeavoring to obtain the liberty of my countrymen, and am a witness to their cause.

  After a little further search among the papers, Sally found Tom’s polygraph copy of his reply.

  The world at large will forever condemn us if we indulge a principle of revenge, or go beyond absolute necessity. They cannot lose sight of the rights of the two parties, and of the unsuccessful one.

  Later, Lam Hawkin told her that on Tom’s recommendation, ten of the accused had been reprieved, and their death sentence commuted to banishment.

  Not a spectacular change of heart, Sally reflected. But like her decision to help Patsy and her children, what he could do without betraying his own. And more than one might expect, of a man who sought the Presidency, a month before the election in the South.

  ABIGAIL

  East Chester, New York

  Friday, November 7, 1800

  In Weymouth, nearly half a century ago—in those bright quaint times when it never occurred to anyone that one day there wouldn’t be a King—there had been a man named Goslin who’d been the Town Drunk. Abigail’s earliest recollections of him included seeing him work now and then, casual labor like digging ditches or splitting shakes, always followed by a spree in Arnold’s Tavern and a stagger through the streets, singing at the top of his lungs. She, Mary, and Betsey had always fled him, at their mother’s orders. But Abigail, being the Original Eve of curiosity, had watched from a distance the man’s innumerable arguments with his long-suffering, snaggle-haired wife. Nobody knew what they lived on or why she’d married him, but through the years Abigail had seen him work less and less; until he became a dirty, whi
skered, trembling automaton, stinking of his own urine, glimpsed sitting in a ditch or under a tree, engaged in rambling conversations with people who weren’t there.

  She’d often wondered about his wife. It had never occurred to her to even think about his mother.

  Until now.

  The carriage lurched heavily as it turned through the break in the fence, and despite Jack Briesler’s careful driving its wheels slithered into ruts deep in mud. The jolt of the springs made Abigail feel as if every bone in her body were being broken with hammers.

  Even that didn’t hurt as bad as the pain in her heart.

  Oh, Charley. Oh, my beautiful boy.

  When an infatuated Charley had begged his parents for permission to marry Colonel Smith’s spritely sister in the summer of 1794, both of them—John from Philadelphia, Abigail from the farm in Quincy—had written back immediately, begging him to wait. They’d both had a pretty good idea, by then, of the financial status of the Smith family. Charley had regretfully agreed that his parents were right, and said yes, he would wait.

  And had married Sarah Smith within weeks of his letter.

  To Abigail, the stone house seemed even more isolated now under snow than it had been when she’d been trapped there, ill in the fall of ’91. The yard was a perfect soup-pit of muck, crisscrossed with ruts around the low stone curb of the well. As Briesler maneuvered the carriage as close as he could to the farmhouse door, Nabby appeared: Nabby grown heavy, silent, and gray-faced in her not-quite-clean blue dress. The woman beside her, under a thick shawl, wore a much-patched caraco jacket that Abigail recognized as one she had herself purchased in London fifteen years ago, and passed on to Nabby.

  “Mama Adams,” the woman said, wading through the mud and holding out one chilblained hand. She still retained some of the Colonel’s charm, some of the dark, lively beauty Abigail had seen in her on her first visit to Nabby here back in ’89.