Madison shook his head. “I see things have much changed since the days of the Revolution,” he murmured. “I would not have believed the difference between a militia force and regulars, had I not seen it today.”
“I think it’s the British who have changed, sir,” replied Sophie. “Since last Americans fought them, they have sharpened their steel against Napoleon. And the generation that has grown up here since that time has done nothing but call one another names.”
“They’ll rally,” said the General bracingly. “Of course they’ll rally. And men will come into the city to defend it—”
Madison lifted his fingers, shook his head without opening his eyes.
After a moment, Sophie said, “Mrs. Madison has gone on to Bellevue with your son, Mr. Carroll.”
“Too close,” Madison breathed. “The British will pass over this city like breaking surf and follow our troops on into Georgetown. Will you be going out there, too, Sophie?”
“Later, yes.”
“I must find General Winder—rally the men. Keep the government together.” He drew a deep breath and coughed, flinching with pain. Sophie, who had sat with Abigail Adams through bouts of her rheumatism, knew just how agonizing was that net of fire that seemed to clothe bone and muscle beneath the skin. “Should you see my wife before I do, let her know we’ll rendezvous at Salona Plantation. It’s ten miles up the river and she should be safe there.”
“You should rest,” said Sophie again, and the old man waved slightly, brushing the suggestion away.
“Since first the British learned they could not hold us by force,” he said, “they’ve been trying to hold us by other means: all the usual tricks that the strong play on the weak. Debt. Extortion. Isolating us from support elsewhere. Bullying. There always comes a time when the bullied must hold the line and say, No more. There is never any going back, but what we strive for now is to choose our own path forward, not the path that is most convenient for the merchants and bankers who surround the English King.
“They could not conquer us before but they can break us apart. Once union is sundered—once the government centered in this city shatters—we can be dealt with piecemeal. Each State will go back to being England’s handmaiden, now that France and Spain are broken. Sending our men to die in wars of her choosing; paying money to her rather than investing it in ourselves. Tonight—and in the next few weeks—we will need to hold fast.”
He sighed, and sat up. An unlikely-looking kingmaker, thought Sophie, to have maneuvered first Washington and then Jefferson into leading the raw new nation in the direction he believed that it should go.
But he was no Richelieu, she thought. When the enemy turned up again, he had mounted his horse and ridden to the battlefield, something not even Washington had done as President. And had it been necessary, she understood, looking down at him, he would have died under the British guns.
“I hope Dolley understands,” he said, and Sophie smiled.
“She spoke of defending this house with Patsy Jefferson’s Tunisian saber.”
His grin was bright as a boy’s. “That’s my Dolley.”
It was yet daylight when they left the Mansion, the last rays of the sun sickly yellow beneath the blackness of the coming storm. Sophie helped Paul Jennings lock up the doors for what she knew was going to be the last time.
Then the young man set off on foot for the Georgetown ferry, and Sophie went back to her house on Connecticut Avenue, to ready her own gig for a drive.
Not long after that, the British came.
Sophie could see them easily in the thickening twilight. There were about two hundred of them, an advance guard, sailors, not soldiers, with little black hats and tarry pigtails hanging down on their shoulders. Sophie picked out General Ross at their head on a dappled horse, and beside him Admiral Cockburn in his blue Navy uniform. Dust gritted in Sophie’s nose and throat.
Where the Avenue crossed Second Street someone fired a single volley from a house on the corner. Ross’s horse staggered and fell under him, blood glistening on its neck. The general hadn’t even sprung clear of the saddle before men were breaking down the door of the house. A hundred feet away, Sophie saw dark figures dart from the back of the house and vanish into the dusk. An officer came out the front door and called, “Nobody here, sir. And no guns.”
Sophie heard Cockburn snarl, “By God, they’ll pay for this!” and over his voice Ross’s, angry but calm. “Burn the house, Mr. Starrett. Was anyone hurt? Get them back to the ambulance wagons….”
Someone brought him up a fresh horse.
That was the sum total of the capital’s defense.
The men set up a rough camp on an empty field east of the Capitol Building. From the trees that surrounded the nearby Carroll Hotel, Sophie watched the detachment led by Ross ascend Capitol Hill, the flares of their torches dripping fragments of tar that burned in the dirt behind them as the Devil’s hoofprints were said to burn. She heard the crack of rifles, the shattering of window-glass. Moments later, scarlet reflections flitted in the windows of the two legislative houses and in the open wooden passageway between. They must have either brought powder with them, she thought, or found it there. The sound it made when it exploded in the connecting passageway was unmistakable, and as the flames rippled up, Sophie saw the men moving about inside, gathering up whatever they could to feed the blaze.
They moved on by torchlight up Pennsylvania Avenue, walking in double column without drum-beat or bugle, muffled footsteps a heavy whisper in the dust. Strange little gusts of wind had begun to stir the trees, and overhead the tar-black sky was streaked with heat-lightning. Like the ghost of her own parents—or of the girl she had once been—Sophie followed in her dark gown, as if she’d been assigned the task by someone else, to fulfill a rite for those who were dead.
She stood for a long time outside the President’s House, watching torchlight play through the windows as it was first searched, then ransacked for whatever the looters had missed. Since that first winter, when she’d called on Abigail Adams, the place had gone from a dank and gloomy cavern to a very respectable mansion, thanks to Jefferson’s delight in remodeling, and to Dolley’s exquisite taste.
They might all have saved themselves the trouble.
As her grandparents might have, back in Virginia, had they known.
She had waited a long time, she reflected, to watch this. And yet she felt almost nothing. She heard the breaking glass as the men smashed out the ground-floor windows, and torchlight flowed around the doors as everyone came out again. By that torchlight she saw Ross line up men outside each window, with poles like javelins in their hands. At the end of each pole was a ball about the size of a soup-plate—oiled rags. The British army had a system for everything.
A torch was borne the full circuit of the house, touching each javelin in turn, until the white sandstone walls were ringed with fire. In the silence Sophie was aware of others, half glimpsed in shadow, among the young trees that Mr. Jefferson had had planted to screen the house from the Avenue. Civilians, watching in silence—listening to the shouts of the bands of stragglers from the British camp who were now roving through the darkness, looking for what they might steal.
General Ross spoke his word of command, and a color-sergeant shouted it. In unison the men threw their javelins through the broken windows, like a well-crafted machine. The whole house went up at once, each window around the lower floor glaring like yellow eyes into Hell. Red flickered, then blazed, in those on the second floor.
For a time they stood in silence and watched it burn.
Thinking what? Sophie wondered. Feeling what? The sweet brandy of vengeance? Or just a solid craftsmanlike awareness of a job well done?
Had any man of them been born in these colonies? Watched his own family’s house go up in flames, knowing there was no other place of refuge to be had in all the land?
She wondered why she felt so little. Flames licked through the windows, danced over the blazing ro
of. Yet her only experience was a slight sensation of disappointment: like the much-anticipated embrace of a lover who turns out to be only a man like other men.
She tried to recapture the shouts of the patriot militia who’d torched her grandparents’ plantation, but the only words she heard were Madison’s: There is never any going back, but what we strive for now is to choose our own path forward.
And Dolley: We all need reminders of who we were and where we came from, if our hearts are to survive.
But survive to go on to where?
And others behind them, like spectres taking shape within the smoke. Plump little Mrs. Washington, hiding her fears for the General and her grandchildren behind chatty efficiency. Mrs. Adams like spring-steel, ready to shed her own blood or anyone else’s for John’s sake and for her country’s. Sally seeming to appear and disappear through the smoke, a spirit outlasting scandal and time.
If I hate those men and what they did, I must hate the women who helped them—let them—be what they were.
Yet she found she did not. Nor did she feel pity for them. Only the comradeship of those who have passed through the same battle, albeit on different parts of the field.
Liberté—Amitié: Liberty and love, that most ancient of conundra. Did all things come at last to where they were meant to be?
Sophie had meant to go to General Ross, when the burning was done, as she’d been instructed to do, and let him know where Dolley and her husband were to be found. A fast-moving company could be at Salona Plantation by midnight. She knew Mr. Madison was right: Without a rallying-point, the scattered militia companies, the fragments of the fast-dissolving government, would disperse.
Without a central focus, the individual States would take up their old position of leadership, and each State—squabbling with the others as usual over debts and privileges and shipping rights as they had all throughout the Revolution and for four years beyond—could be dealt with piecemeal far more easily than the Congress of the whole.
But when the officers barked out orders to form up columns, Sophie turned away.
Fairfax County, Virginia
Thursday, August 25, 1814
1:00 A.M.
From the upper windows of a house called Rokeby, Dolley watched Washington City burn.
Though it lay some ten miles off, she could see the red reflection against the underside of roiling clouds of smoke. The trees around the house tossed and fretted as the winds strengthened. The sky smelled of storm, and of smoke.
Dolley felt very, very tired.
Jemmy at least was safe. Or at least he had been safe four hours ago, when he and his little band of friends had caught up with her carriage on the river road. The team’s pace had slowed to a crawl, the way blocked by carts, carriages, wheelbarrows, and dead-tired trudging militia, mostly invisible in the suffocating darkness. Like themselves, everyone in Georgetown had realized that the British would sweep through the city.
Somewhere ahead of them was a family with a wailing baby. Its cries wrenched Dolley’s heart. Was there no one there to comfort it? Then Sukey had called down from the box, “Riders comin’ behind us, ma’am!” and the next instant, it seemed, lantern-light flashed in the window of the carriage and old Mr. Carroll’s voice called out, “Mrs. Madison?”
And a moment later, Jemmy’s, unmistakable, “Dolley?”
The drivers behind them cursed as Joe reined the team over. Men and women jostled past with barrows and bundles, sparing barely a glance as the tall buxom black-haired woman nearly fell out of the carriage into the arms of the dust-covered little man.
For a time Dolley knew nothing and cared less, only the grip of Jemmy’s arms around her and the taste of his mouth on hers. Dear God, he’s alive! Dear, dear God, Thou has spared him….
“Move along there!” groused someone behind them whose wagon couldn’t pass on the narrow road. “We ain’t got all night here!” and another voice added, “Kiss ’er in the carriage, pilgrim!”
“Shut up, Matt, let ’em kiss!” retorted a woman’s voice. “Catch me kissin’ you, if you was lost.”
“I can’t stay.” Jemmy’s hands gripped her shoulders as he spoke, as if convincing himself against all odds that they were together, both alive, both unhurt. “We’ve heard the men are regrouping in Fairfax County—perhaps at Wren’s Tavern, or near there. They say that’s where Monroe has gone.”
“Where shall we meet, then?” asked Dolley.
“Salona. If I don’t reach there tonight, or can’t reach there, meet me tomorrow night at Wiley’s Tavern near Little Falls. I should at least know by then what is being done, by way of counterattack.”
“All right.” He looked ready to drop, but there was no time for more, and Dolley only drew him to her again in fierce embrace, whispered, “God go with thee.”
“And thee.” He cupped her face in his hands, kissed her again, hard. “We’ll come through this, Doll. And come through victorious.”
It was only after he’d ridden away, that Carroll mentioned that Sophie Hallam had been present when Salona had been decided upon as their meeting-place.
Rokeby House lay about a mile from Salona, and from it Dolley hoped to be able to watch the road. The house was crammed already with other refugees, mostly people she’d met at receptions and parties over fourteen years in Washington City. Her very young hostess, Mrs. Love, offered her her own bedroom for the night, and would have found floor-space for herself in one of the already innlike guest-rooms had not Dolley forbidden her to even think of such a thing.
Mrs. Love—Tilly, a connection of Jemmy’s by marriage (wasn’t everyone in Virginia?) who’d been a child in the schoolroom when Dolley first came to the Federal City—slept now on the bedroom day-bed she’d had made up, her pet gray cat in her arms like a doll. Her blond braids hung out from under the makeshift tent of mosquito-netting in the glow of the single candle. The big house had fallen silent an hour ago, save for the restless rushing of the trees outside, like the sound of the sea in the darkness. Even the noises of fugitives on the river road had ceased.
The smell of rain and lightning rode like a seraph on the night.
And what now?
Even with her spyglass, Dolley couldn’t see much more of the fires than the red flash of flames, but it seemed to her that they were confined to several wide-separated localities. At least, she thought, no matter how hard the wind blew, flames from one house wouldn’t automatically ignite a whole neighborhood, as they would in Philadelphia. She had to smile a little at that, thinking of how everyone but herself had moaned and wailed about Washington City’s endless distances and scattered houses. If they wished to torch the city, the British would have to do it house by house.
Her own house, she knew, was one of those in flames. She saw the dining-room again in her mind, all dressed in its white and silver as it had been on those evenings when Jefferson had sent her a hasty note begging her to come and preside at his dinner, as there would be other ladies present.
Even for a philosopher who considered etiquette a worthless nuisance, there were limits.
The thought brought others. She turned to her reticule in quest of her snuffbox, and recalled again she’d left it in the desk-drawer, and with it the Queen’s golden mirror. So it was destined to vanish after all, she thought, and felt the stab of grief for what could not be retrieved. For some moments it was as if she’d lost Martha again, and all those vanished days, those years of joy and trial, with her.
Burned to ashes, as Sophie’s early years had been burned, leaving only stony irony and revenge.
Weeping, strangely enough, made her feel better. Maybe I just hunger for snuff. After a few minutes she raised the spyglass again, turned it toward the road. Though the night was pitch-black, she’d been aware that more than refugees prowled the darkness. Twice, since the flow of fugitives had slacked, she’d seen torchlight, and forms moving among the trees. American stragglers or British, she didn’t know.
Waiting to ambu
sh Jemmy, as he rode to Salona, thinking to join her?
But when she thought of Sophie, and of the roving bands of British soldiers, she pushed her doubts aside and breathed a prayer for the safety of her friend. It was said that British stragglers had stripped the countryside between their landing-point at Benedict and the city itself. The half-dozen men and boys in the house, including her host, were grouped in the downstairs hall, but in the event of a determined incursion by the enemy their collection of dueling-pistols and hunting-arms could only serve to trigger deadly violence.
Sooner than that, she thought, as torches and lanterns began to gather again on the road beyond the trees, I will give myself up. The thought turned her sick with dread.
Even flight out the back door and into the surrounding woods might not serve to save her hosts or their dwelling. And in the woods would be looters, and runaway slaves.
She strained her eyes at the glass, to penetrate the wild darkness. On the road she could only guess at a confusion of movement, but it seemed to her there was a large force there. The roaring of the trees carried away any sound. For interminable minutes Dolley watched, heart pounding, before the flickering spots of fire retreated back into the darkness, in the direction from which they’d come.
A single speck of flame detached itself from the woods. Bobbed through the wind-whirled blackness toward the house.
Dolley took a deep breath, and went downstairs.
Joe the coachman was just opening the front door when Dolley reached the hall. Sophie Hallam stood on the threshold with a lantern in her hand. “Who was that?” Dolley asked, breathless, and Sophie replied with a shrug, “Merely some gentlemen who’d missed their way. I sent them back toward Georgetown.” Sophie’s eyes met Dolley’s for a silent moment, tired and bitterly sad. Then Dolley stepped forward and took her in her arms.
“That was good of thee,” she said softly, and led her to the stairs.
Patriot Hearts: A Novel of the Founding Mothers Page 47