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

For my parents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Far too many people contributed to the final version of this book for all of them to be listed here, but I would like to express my appreciation of the staffs at Mount Vernon, Monticello, Montpelier, Philadelphia’s Congress Hall, and Colonial Williamsburg for the way in which they have brought the past to life. Special thanks go to Buzz Harris and the staff of the Arisia Science Fiction Convention in Boston, for getting me into the Adams houses in the middle of winter and for taking me out to Old Sturbridge Village. Thanks also to Nancy Smith with the National Park Service at the two Adams houses in Quincy, Massachusetts.

Thank you to my dear friends Laurie, Hazel, Ev, and Nina for putting up with me on the Colonial Death-March through Virginia doing research: I could not have done it without you.

And as always, thanks to my agent Fran Collin; to my editor Kate Miciak; to Kathleen Baldonado for her untiring devotion to detail in preparing the manuscript; and to Nita Taublib, for the original idea of this novel.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Patriot Hearts is a work of fiction. It is not—and cannot be—a history of the United States in the Revolutionary and Federalist periods; it cannot even be a comprehensive fictionalized biography of any of the four women about whom it is written. There are acres of territory I would have loved to cover, had my intent been simply to write the accounts of four women’s lives (and to end up with about half a million words at the lowest reasonable estimate).

I would have loved to go on at greater length about the scandal that rocked the Washington Administration in the aftermath of the Whiskey Rebellion, about the circuslike atmosphere of Congress in the 1790s, about the skullduggery surrounding the treaty that ended the Revolution. I would have loved to include Abigail Adams’s reaction to Ben Franklin’s Parisian girlfriend, the details concerning Martha Washington’s illegitimate half-caste East Indian stepgrandchildren, and the more Gothic ramifications of the eccentric family into which Jefferson’s daughter Patsy married.

But all of these things, I found, wandered from the focus of the story.

Patriot Hearts is a book about the relationships of four women—Martha Washington, Abigail Adams, Sally Hemings, and Dolley Madison—with their families, with their men, with the societies they lived in, with the choices their men made…and with one another. They were four women who lived in astonishing times, and they were called upon, as women usually are, to perform the age-old juggling-act of caring for their children while following their hearts, insofar as they were permitted to do so by the world in which they lived.

“My children give me more pain than all my enemies.”

—JOHN ADAMS

1814

DOLLEY

Washington City

Wednesday, August 24, 1814

9:00 A.M.

Crowds started to gather outside the President’s House not long after breakfast.

“ ’Tis a good sign,” remarked Dolley Madison, setting down her coffee-cup with a hand she hoped wasn’t visibly shaking.

When they were girls together in Hanover County, Virginia, Dolley had always striven to live up to her friend Sophia Sparling’s elegance, and Sophie, she observed now, almost forty years later, awaited news of the invasion with perfect calm.

Because she hath less to lose?

Or for some other reason entirely?

It was true that Sophie was only a dressmaker these days, and Dolley the wife of the President—the man whom the British commander had sworn to bring back to London in chains.

Jemmy Madison had ridden out in the black predawn cool, to join the militia camped by the Navy Yard. Since first light, Dolley had been at the window with her spyglass, watching the road from the Chesapeake shore.

Sophie half-turned from the parlor window, raised an eyebrow. Even in the thick summer heat she wore her usual widow’s black. “They’re waiting to see if you’ll flee. Taking bets, I shouldn’t wonder.”

“Excellent.” Dolley touched the coffee-pot’s gay green-and-cream cheek with expert fingers, poured another half-cup for her friend while the brew was still warm. In spite of the grinding millstone of anxiety behind her breastbone, she made her voice light. “If enough people remain in the town to loiter about watching what I shall do, the British can’t be all that near. When they flee—” She nodded toward the windows, through which, beyond the ragged lawn and groves of half-grown poplar trees, could be seen the southern wall of the grounds topped with a frieze of boys and young men, “—I shall know to worry.”

A gunshot cracked the morning air and Dolley’s hand jerked, giving the lie to her calm. The coffee-pot’s foot caught the handle of her cup and sent the smaller vessel and its saucer somersaulting to the floor. In her cage beside the open window, Polly spread her gaudy wings and screamed appreciatively, “Merde alors!”

The hall door flew open and Paul came in, fifteen, slender, and very grave in his new duties as valet. “It’s all right, ma’am,” he said quickly, hurrying to the table as if it were a point of honor to clean up the mess before his mistress could stir from her chair. “Some of those white gentlemen outside the house got guns, and more than one been drinkin’ by the sound of it. That’s all it is.”

He whipped the folded towel from its place on his shoulder and wiped the spilled coffee from the woven straw mat that was the parlor’s summer flooring. “If it was the British, you’d be hearin’ more than one shot, that’s for sure. I get you a clean cup, ma’am.”

“Don’t trouble thyself, dear,” said Dolley. “Mrs. Hallam and I are quite finished here, are we not, Sophie?”

As she gathered the newspapers she’d been perusing when Freeman the butler had announced Sophie, her eye touched again the printed columns: We feel assured that the number and bravery of our men will afford complete protection to the city…It is highly improbable that the enemy…would advance nearer to the capital…

“Will you flee?” Sophie asked abruptly.

Dolley turned to face her. Grilling sunlight already made the yellow parlor uncomfortably hot, and her light muslin gown—fashionably “Greek” and mercifully appropriate for Washington City’s swampy summer climate—stuck to her thighs. The parlor windows, open to catch the slightest whisper of breeze, admitted no sound but the occasional uneasy mutter of voices beyond the trees and the wall.

Further than that, silence lay on the Federal City’s marshy acres of woods and cow-pastures like fevered sleep.

“No,” she answered quietly. “No, I am staying.”

“To meet Admiral Cockburn? I’m sure he’ll be flattered.” Fifteen months ago, Cockburn’s marines had sacked and burned the Maryland port of Havre de Grace. In addition to parading James Madison through the streets of London as a trophy, the Admiral had announced his intention to bring Dolley Madison—the Presidentress, they called her, and foremost hostess of the upstart Republic—to walk in fetters at her husband’s side.

When Jemmy had come back late last night from a day in the saddle at the militia camp, he’d been so exhausted he could barely speak: A forced journey even under the mildest of conditions would surely kill him.