Barbara Hambly - Patriot Hearts - A Novel of the Founding Mothers

“That was good of thee,” she said softly, and led her to the stairs.

“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.