Patriot Hearts: A Novel of the Founding Mothers

by Barbara Hambly

  “Are you all right?” whispered Sophie, as they entered the silent bedroom above.

  Dolley nodded. “I’ve seen Jemmy.” Hesitantly, she added, “Hast thou been to Salona?” and Sophie raised a brow, as if she knew exactly what was in Dolley’s mind. Through the open window spits of rain had begun to fall. The wild air outside was suddenly thick with the breath of the storm.

  “I have—alone—and Mr. Madison is not there yet, though I suspect he’s safe. The men have marched thirteen miles in the heat from Bladensburg today, and fought a battle,” she added. There was anger in her voice for the frustrated weariness of the British soldiers—Dolley knew instinctively whom she meant by the men—faced once again with the conquest of cities in a hostile countryside far too big to subdue.

  They were, when all was said, back exactly where they had been in 1776. And they knew it.

  “Now the rain’s begun, even the stragglers will turn back.” Sophie gazed into the night. Flames flickered through the trees.

  “Did they burn the house?”

  “Of course. And the Capitol. And more tomorrow, I think.”

  Dolley closed her eyes, too tired even to think. Remembering Martha, faithfully journeying to all those winter camps. The British had held the cities and the ragged colonial Army had all they could do to keep them bottled up there, in a grueling eight-year stalemate that only France had broken, for reasons of France’s own. Remembering Mr. Adams’s after-dinner stories of Abigail, trying to keep house and household together in the face of British raids and what the War had done to the country—

  We were young then, and the country was young.

  “Must we do it all again?” She wasn’t even aware she’d spoken her thought aloud, until Sophie replied, “Would you not want to?”

  In her mind, Dolley saw the red coats of Banastre Tarleton’s dragoons, like splashed blood against the brown Virginia woods, on their way to sack Monticello. Saw the children and the families that had been left behind when Abigail, or Martha—or she herself—had made the choice to follow a man, and give to their offspring only what was left over, of their hearts, their energy, their too-finite time.

  “I am not sure that I could,” she answered at last. “I don’t mean the fighting. Ye shall hear of wars, and rumors of war: these things shall come to pass. But what it costs, to forge a new world. For it doth take the life of a man, and more of his life than he hath in him to give: constant labor and for the most part unthanked. We have both seen this. And if we go with him—whether to wash his shirt and load his rifle, or to preside over a thousand ill-matched dinners, or only to make sure that he hath a safe place at night to lay his head—do we not betray our children, by giving to the new world what should rightly have been theirs?”

  “Are you thinking of Eliza Custis and her sisters?” asked Sophie quietly. “Or poor Charley Adams—and even poorer Nabby and Johnny?”

  Or the slave-born boy everybody at Monticello except Patsy called President Tom, and his brothers and sister?

  Or—and Dolley flinched from the thought—Payne Todd, Virginia planter’s son, currently living a life of extremely expensive dissipation in Ghent?

  Far-off thunder boomed. Rain whirled in at the window, pounding hard now, and the two women struggled to close the casement against it. The candle flame on its table leaned drunkenly, then straightened; water poured down the panes as if from a bucket.

  “It seems now that it all hath been for nothing,” Dolley murmured. “The country we have tried to build with our dear friends hath all but torn itself to pieces, not only with lies but with different truths. The Revolution in France that split us apart hath ended in Napoleon, and now he, too, is gone down in defeat. A King sits on France’s throne and the English Army is once again on our shores. After all we have given, we stand where we stood before, having robbed our children to no purpose.”

  “Had I faith in God,” replied Sophie, folding her arms, “I would remark that nothing in this world lies outside His purpose. As I don’t, I will only point out that they—those children—are the new world. And bear in themselves all the treasure, good and bad, of the old. Payne would be Payne, however he was raised. His sins might take a different form, but he would still sin them, and bring down your heart in sorrow to the grave—if you let him. Abigail’s brother was a drunkard, in spite of loving, intelligent parents who didn’t deposit him with relatives and go running off to play politics in France. I don’t think there was a thing she could have done to save either him or Charley, or Nabby and Nabby’s children. Maybe there never is.”

  “No,” Dolley whispered tiredly. “No, thou art right. It needs no revolution for sons and daughters both to make foolish choices that lead them to unhappiness. We only think there should have been something that we could have done.”

  “But you’ll never get Abigail to admit it,” said Sophie briskly. “Do you think we could open the window again a little? The rain seems to be slacking and it’s like an oven in here.”

  Only a trace of the stench of smoke remained in the green sweet magic that filled the room with the opening of the window again. The magic of a summer night in Virginia. Dolley leaned her forehead against the wet window-jamb, breathing in the scent of it, and with it the childhood she’d shared with Sophie in Hanover County, while Jemmy was off studying law and reading Tom Paine and going to Princeton and falling in love with that dreadful Fulton girl who broke his heart, all unbeknownst to her.

  The past and the dreams she’d felt, an hour ago, to have been lost with a Queen’s mirror in a burning Mansion, suffused the air around her with their living presence, as close as the patter of rain on the trees.

  “They may have taken the city,” said Dolley, looking out through the blackness where lightning still flickered, but where now no trace of flame could be seen. “Yet Mr. Madison will rally the militia, and the tide will turn. We will drive them out as we did before. And make our new world, in their despite.”

  A half-smile touched the corner of Sophie’s mouth, just before the guttering candle puffed itself out in a whisper of smoke. “Do you know,” she replied softly, “I think we will.”

  EPILOGUE

  McKeowin’s Hotel, Washington City

  Thursday, December 7, 1815

  As she moved through the crowd in the candle-lit ballroom of the largest hotel in Washington City—far larger than either the Tayloe town house that had been their original temporary quarters or the dwelling near the State Department they now occupied—Dolley found herself remembering Martha again. Thinking of Abigail Adams as well: her predecessors in this exacting and curious task of creating the unspoken background against which the President of the United States was perceived to stand.

  Even Jefferson, who’d claimed the background of “State” didn’t exist, had taken great pains to establish the reverse and paint himself as Common Man Extraordinaire. His only failure in that stage-management had been Sally, still with him at Monticello despite the horrific scandal that James Callendar had trumpeted in the newspapers during Jefferson’s second year in office.

  To be President was to do more than to simply hold an office. Like it or not, it was about more than simple “presiding.” Jemmy had understood from the first that in times of trouble, the President was and must be the man around whom other men would rally, as they had rallied—a little to his surprise, Dolley thought—around him.

  She was sorry Jefferson had not come tonight. He had emerged from the quiet of Monticello to greet tonight’s guest of honor at Lynchburg, recognizing in him, perhaps, his heir. Jack Eppes was here, somewhere in this mob, and she must, Dolley thought, extend a special welcome to him for poor Maria’s sake. After Maria’s death, Jefferson’s younger son-in-law had wed a very youthful heiress named Miss Jones—and according to Sukey, had taken Sally Hemings’s niece Betsie as his mistress. But as this was something that she, Dolley, wasn’t supposed to know, she would greet him like a good Virginian: In addition to being an old friend, he was o
ne of Jemmy’s supporters in Congress.

  Part of the Presidentress’s job was not to have opinions, anyway.

  No wonder poor Abigail had always had trouble with the position.

  As she struggled to move through the crowd—it seemed as if everyone in Washington had jammed themselves into the hotel’s ballroom, and more arriving all the time—she spared a smile for that redoubtable old lady, safely ensconced, Sophie had informed her, with her dearest John in Quincy. Abigail did not write Sophie as often now as she had done before Nabby’s death from cancer of the breast, but her last letter had mentioned that her John and their old friend Jefferson had resumed their friendship at last.

  Despite the raw cold outside, the ballroom was suffocatingly hot. Pomade, candle wax, and wool coats competed with the cloying of women’s perfumes. Wax dripped from the glittering chandeliers. Silk gowns made splashes of color in the thick amber light, among the dark clothing of the men. From inside, it was difficult to believe that beyond the dark windows stretched empty acres of frozen marshes and cow-pastures that were still the leading characteristics of Washington City.

  For some time after the British left, during those days when even old friends were refusing Dolley’s dinner invitations, Congress had debated where to move the capital. Somewhere beyond the mountains, certainly. But, if the British took New Orleans, that would scarcely be safer.

  Dolley smiled, as she looked around the overcrowded chamber, and beyond the black windows, to the answering sparkle of candle-lit windows in the dark distances.

  It was astonishing, how swiftly that had changed.

  Out of the babel of talk all around her, three words kept bobbing to the surface.

  “New Orleans.”

  And, “Jackson.”

  “Not a Federalist in the room.” Sophie Hallam appeared at her elbow, sliding serpentlike from a wall of bodies Dolley could not have breached with a battering-ram. “Nor anyone who has ever been one. Just ask them.”

  Dolley laughed, and shook her head. “Dost remember that horrid woman at Wiley’s Tavern, when we went there to meet Jemmy before coming back to town?”

  Sophie set her fists to her hips and mimicked: “Miz Madison! If that’s you, get out! Your husband has got mine out fighting, and damn you, you shan’t stay in my house!”

  “She had the right, alas,” sighed Dolley. “And I cannot fault her for speaking her heart. Compared to what those wretched newspapers said later, she was quite refined.”

  “Mama!” Payne worked his way in from the hall, trailed by Jack Eppes. Blond hair a little tousled, eyes as bright and blue as Dolley’s own, and sparkling with pleasure. “What a triumph! You know the downstairs is packed tight as a cheese-hoop, and every one of them singing your praises and Papa’s, at least as much as they are the General’s.”

  “ ’Tis kind in thee to say so, dearest.” She beamed at him and pressed her hand to his cheek, glad to have her son home again. He’d been vague about how he’d gotten along with the younger Mr. Adams—Abigail’s Johnny—during the negotiations for the peace treaty in Ghent, but the reports sent by the other delegate, Dolley’s fellow Hanover County émigré Henry Clay, hadn’t been encouraging. Once the peace had been signed, the younger Mr. Adams had returned to St. Petersburg where he was the Minister. Instead of coming back with Henry Clay, Payne had gone on to Paris.

  He’d been home only a few weeks now, but the bills were already starting to come in.

  Still, Dolley reflected, her handsome son had acquired a whole new polish in Paris, from the tips of his patent-leather pumps to his shining golden curls. Surely that was something.

  “Truly, Mama, it’s your triumph tonight.” Payne kissed Dolley’s hand. “Yours and Papa’s.” Dolley wondered for an instant if Payne even recalled his first Papa, the Papa who had adored him….

  He didn’t seem to. He went on blithely, “But Papa just disappears in a crowd, while you stand out as a beacon for everyone I’ve talked to: such a gown! Your work, ma’am?” he asked Sophie. “Mama, Jack says there’s to be a gathering of some of the choicer spirits down at Ogle’s tonight—just for a little jollification, you know—” He leaned close to her, sliding effortlessly into the real reason for seeking her out, “—and with one thing and another I haven’t a sou to call my own. Would Papa mind very much if I stopped by the house on our way there, and fished a little in his desk-drawer? I shouldn’t need but twenty dollars or so.”

  His breath smelled of port and champagne. Dolley guessed that of the fifty dollars’ housekeeping money in Jemmy’s desk, not a dollar would be left if she said yes, but it wasn’t the time or the place for an argument. She said, “Only twenty—and I shall count it—”

  “Mama—” He gave her his angel smile. “I’m a reformed character now! Besides, we need to celebrate! How often have we the nation’s savior to entertain?”

  As she watched his tall height, his broad shoulders in their beautifully cut Parisian coat weave through the crowd toward the ballroom door, Dolley tried to hope that her son hadn’t already helped himself to the contents of the drawer before coming here to ask.

  She knew there was gambling going on already in the parlors downstairs. There would almost certainly be tables of whist, vingt-et-un, and faro at Mr. Ogle’s.

  It was something, she hoped, that Payne would outgrow.

  But she’d hoped that before she’d sent him off to the Netherlands to learn a diplomat’s trade. She’d hoped, indeed, that he could have stepped in as Jemmy’s secretary, as Johnny Adams had been the former President’s. Dearly as she loved her boy, Dolley was honest enough to admit that only a wittol would appoint Payne as secretary to anything.

  It was simply not his skill.

  “I trust, at least, there’ll be no more talk of moving the capital?” Sophie’s voice broke into Dolley’s thoughts, and thankfully, Dolley turned her mind from the ongoing, hurtful puzzle of what Payne’s skills were.

  “No, and I cannot say how thankful I am for it. I’ve a mind to go over to Mr. Clay and General Jackson and kiss the pair of them.” She smiled in the direction of the two tall Westerners, whose heads could be seen above the crowd at the far end of the room. Clay, born only a few miles from her father’s farm at Coles Hill, was one of the handsomest men she’d ever seen. His tawny brilliance seemed to blaze across the room like fire. Jackson, beside him, had that shining quality as well: cadaverously thin, maniacally intense, gesturing furiously to Clay as he spoke in his hoarse booming voice.

  The victor at New Orleans. The man who’d driven the British into the sea.

  The one people meant now, when they said “the General.”

  “They have already begun to rebuild the President’s Mansion. Jemmy hath said that he’s instructed the commissioners, that the house shalt be rebuilt exactly as it formerly was.”

  “For ‘the General’ to come in and put his feet on the table?” Sophie followed Dolley’s glance, her gray gaze steely. “And for ‘Miz Rachel’—” She imitated Jackson’s harsh drawl, “—to serve up hush-puppies and burgoo to the representatives of Europe’s Kings? He’ll be President, you know.” She glanced down at Dolley. “Oh, we’ll probably have one last hurrah of gentility in Mr. Monroe, but can you really see a colorless cold fish like Johnny Adams being able to defeat the Victor of New Orleans?”

  “General Jackson doth seem to be a force of nature,” agreed Dolley.

  Sophie sniffed. “The boiled-down quintessence of the worst of the Revolutionary patriots mixed with the worst of the French radicals. No wonder Jefferson came down from his mountain to greet him the other day. You managed to miss him when he was in Congress—Jackson, I mean—not that he was in town long before he resigned and went home in high dudgeon. Jackson and his over-mountain men will run the last of good manners out of the government like a house-fire.”

  Dolley thought about what she said, as Eliza Custis Law—who had the distinction a few years ago of being the first woman in Washington City to be divorced—cam
e surging out of the crowd to regale Sophie with the tale of her own sufferings and heroism last August.

  It was true, as Payne had said, that Jemmy tended to disappear in crowds. Had Dolley not known where to look—in the corner by the chimney—she wouldn’t have been able to find her husband at all. As it was, it was only because he was with tall Jim Monroe that he was even visible. What kind of Presidentress would the aloof and sickly Elizabeth Monroe make? An epileptic who hesitated to go out into company at all? Sophie said she’d seen a miniature of young Mr. Adams’s wife Catherine—beautiful and accomplished, by all accounts….

  “Excuse me, ma’am.” A soft voice spoke at her elbow, with the gentle accent of Virginia. “Are you familiar with this establishment? Could you tell me if there’s so much as a square foot where I might retire and rest, just for a minute—”

  “Of course!” Dolley sized up the woman beside her instantly as one of the throngs who’d come pouring into the town to see the General and his family: a planter’s wife from the western counties of Virginia, to judge by the old-fashioned cut of her gown. Her own age, and getting stout, but still very pretty: dark hair framing a soft rectangular face, kindly dark eyes with an echo in them of hardships that had left her weary. “A sort of little parlor lieth just off the stair-landing, that they always set aside for ladies here—at least I hope they’ve remembered to do so tonight! My experience is that whenever one hath a headache, or had someone step on one’s flounce, that’s the occasion when one’s hosts have decided to put the retiring-room in the broom-closet or a corner of the scullery….”

  “At least in a public hotel one isn’t going to find the broom-closet’s been turned into a dormitory for the guests’ servants—”

  Dolley laughed, remembering the crowds of overnight guests at Montpelier for Francis’s funeral, or at Monticello when Maria wed Jack Eppes.

  “To be honest,” her new protégée went on, “if I could return to our lodging I would—I’m not much use at parties. And traveling, I’m always afraid our son will wake alone in a strange place—he’s only six—”