Patriot Hearts

by Barbara Hambly

  Vanity of vanities, all is vanity, and yes, General Washington is a soldier and a slaveholder who buyeth and selleth his fellow men, but he is still the hero who captured the British army, who won the war that set this country free.

  Dolley remembered clearly the red-coated files of riders, glimpsed through the brown autumn woods of Hanover County. Remembered lying in a thicket behind the house, face pressed to the prickly leaf-mold with two-year-old Lucy clutched against her body, praying baby Anna in her arms wouldn’t cry. At eleven, and tall for her age, she had been dimly aware that her mother feared more for her than rough mishandling at the hands of Banastre Tarleton’s dragoons.

  Worse by far than the British raiding had been the bitter, constant warfare between the local Tories and those who supported the Congress. Small battles and vicious betrayals, ambush and revenge: the constant anxiety of not knowing whom one could trust. When the patriot militia burned out the plantation of her friend Sophie Sparling’s grandparents, it was to Dolley’s parents that Sophie and her mother had fled. Dolley still had dreams of waking in the dead of night with the flare of torchlight visible through the cracks of the shutter, hearing the trample of hooves outside, and men cursing in the yard. Patrick Henry, firebrand of the patriots and first Governor of the new State, was her mother’s cousin, and they’d lived at his backwoods plantation when first her family had returned to Virginia from North Carolina. Even the knowledge that as Quakers the Paynes took no part in the War might not have been enough to save them.

  General Washington’s victory had ended all that.

  And all gratitude aside, Dolley simply loved the sight of sleekly groomed horses, the brilliance of gold-braided uniforms, the stir and lilt of the music that a band was sure to play as the General rode up to be greeted at the State House door. An avid reader of newspapers, she was curious about the delegates who had been arriving for two weeks now for the Convention of the States, longing to put faces to the names she’d heard discussed among her friends.

  The two Morrises she knew by sight, sleek peg-legged young Gouverneur and his not-related business partner, stocky and extremely wealthy Robert, one of the city’s most prominent merchants. On warm spring evenings, when she’d walk with Lizzie and their dear friend Sarah Parker, they’d often see Robert Morris’s carriage rattle past on the cobblestones of Market Street, bright with gilding and varnish. And everyone in the city knew old Benjamin Franklin, at least by sight. He’d smiled at Dolley and spoken to her any number of times in the market, on those days when he was well enough to be about: Even at eighty-one, thought Dolley with a smile, he clearly retained a lively interest in a well-turned ankle.

  But the others, of whom she had only read and heard—Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts and George Wythe the Virginia lawyer; Roger Sherman and Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut; Alexander Hamilton, who’d fought at Washington’s side and was supposed to be dazzlingly handsome—these were the men who would change the way life was lived in Philadelphia and all throughout the country. The men of the Meeting like Lizzie’s father, and young Anthony Morris (no relation to either of the more famous ones), and his friend the sobersided John Todd, might be content with debating the writings of these men, but Dolley wanted to see their faces. To see what they looked like, how they stood, how they dressed. Who they actually were.

  “It should matter nothing, what they look like,” John Todd had argued earlier that week, when she’d walked down to the Indian Queen Tavern on Fourth Street because she’d heard that George Wythe was there. (And he had been, lean and white-haired with a nose like an ax-blade, talking gravely with the proprietor about cheese.) “It is what they have done, and will do—what they have written and thought—that will count.” He’d encountered Dolley on her way home from the tavern, when it had started to drizzle, and had offered her his escort back to her house with his umbrella.

  John was the sort of young man who always had an umbrella.

  “What be the difference, if a man be short or tall, young or venerable, if his eyes be brown or blue or if his skin be white or black for that matter, so that he love God, and do good in the world?” he’d asked.

  Dolley had sighed, and said at once, “Thou art right, John,” because she knew he was.

  Nevertheless, she wanted to know.

  She was still smiling over this encounter—and John’s complete incomprehension of the female mind—when the Friends filed quietly from the meeting-house into the clamor of Pine Street. Church bells kept their delighted riot from every steeple in town, men and women hastened by them in their Sunday-bests toward the end of Market Street, where the Baltimore road ran in from Chester. Lizzie, walking sedately among her own family, cast her a glance filled with query, and Dolley nodded: Of course I’ll go! Lucy, Anna, Mary, and Little John knew better than to cluster around their parents on the way out of Meeting, but whispers whipped among them: General Washington—General Washington!

  Two years ago her father would merely have sighed, and shaken his head. Now he whirled like a baited bull, and snapped at their mother, “Canst thou not keep their minds on God, even on God’s own day?” And as the four little ones halted in their tracks, appalled at his fury, he suddenly shouted at them, “Even a child is known by his doings, whether his work be pure. A high look, a proud heart, and the plowing of the wicked—ay, and riding forth under arms to war!—these are sin. The man that wandereth out of the way of understanding shall remain in the congregation of the dead!”

  “John…” Molly Payne put a quieting hand on her husband’s arm. Those of their closer friends in Meeting who’d begun to move toward them to admonish saw her frown, and stepped back. “John, they are only children. And every day is God’s own day. When I was a child, I spake as a child and I reasoned as a child… and nowhere doth Paul in his Epistle say that it is ill to do so.”

  Dolley’s father drew in a deep breath, then shook his head as if to clear it. “I—Yes. Thou art correct, Molly, and I—I spoke harsh.” For a moment, as he faced the younger children, huddled around Mother Amy, the only one of her father’s slaves who had remained in the family when he’d freed them, his face bore the puzzled expression of a man newly waked. Then he reached out a big hand, with its bleached, cracked calluses, to Lucy, who stood nearest him, an offer of reconciliation. Lucy clasped it, and smiled her sunny smile.

  And at that moment, John Todd, who’d lingered inside the meetinghouse to chat with the scholarly Henry Drinker, came hurrying down the steps to catch up with Dolley. “Might I join my steps to thy family’s, Neighbor Payne?” he asked her father, and his open glance included her mother in the request. When dealing with his clients, the fledgling lawyer wore a more modern coat than the one he kept for Meetings, and a three-cornered hat instead of the broad-brim that the men of the congregation considered less worldly, as if setting aside even Quaker plainness in order to make his clothing less noticeable.

  But the longer-skirted fashion of an earlier year suited him well, Dolley reflected. And if he had to ask a few times too often if she was making a joke, or quoted Biblical Kings rather frequently on the subject of forward women, the kindness of his heart made up for a great deal.

  And, because he hadn’t a deceitful bone in his body, when her father beamingly nodded his assent—Dolley knew he was hoping to make a match between herself and John—John turned to her and said, “And if thou wilt, afterwards, I offer my arm to thee, Friend Dolley, to walk out to the end of Market Street, that thou may see General Washington ride in.”

  Dolley could have screamed.

  “Thou shalt do nothing of the kind!” Her father whirled, his face suffused with fury. “Bad enough that the children tug and whine to see this slaveholder, this warmonger, with the whole town yelping about him like a pack of brats! When I was a child I spake as a child, thy mother saith! But thou art no child, Dolley, and thou shalt spend God’s Sabbath as a woman ought, among her family!”

  Dolley stepped back, her eyes flooding with tears, not of d
isappointment—though she could have shaken John for his tactlessness—but of shock. When John opened his mouth to protest she caught his arm and squeezed it hard, and when he looked at her, baffled, shook her head. Her father had already turned and stormed away, still dragging the frightened Lucy by the hand; her mother strode forward to catch the little girl’s other hand. Mother Amy gathered the younger children like a hen collecting chicks beneath her ample wing. Dolley was aware that her hand was trembling where it still lay on John’s arm.

  John, for his part, looked like he hadn’t the slightest idea what was going on, but walked, obediently silent, at her side down Pine Street, and then along Third. As they crossed Market Street a carriage passed them by, varnished green and drawn by a spanking team of bays: Dolley recognized the livery of the black coachman as belonging to the Willings, glimpsed in the back two of the daughters of the house whose dresses, at any other time, she’d have felt a pang of regret at missing. Her father checked his stride as if he would have spoken, then moved on.

  “What—?” John began, but Dolley shook her head again.

  They continued in silence to the small brick row-house that for two years now had been her home. “I thank thee for thy company, Friend John,” she said, on the doorstep of the little shop that occupied the two downstairs rooms. “I hope we shall meet again soon.”

  When she went inside, her father had already gone upstairs. Her mother was herding the little ones into the narrow staircase after him, but stopped when Dolley came through from the front shop into the workroom behind it. “Mother Amy, see the children into the parlor, an’t please thee,” she said, and took Dolley’s arm. “And see they keep quiet,” she called up after the retreating group. “Friend Payne hath a headache.”

  But when she turned back to her oldest daughter, Dolley saw in her eyes that her mother lied. Molly Payne’s face had a weariness in it that Dolley hadn’t seen even during the worst of the War.

  For a time the two women stood in the little workroom, gloomy despite the wide windows that looked onto the small yard. With the day’s gray overcast, yard and workroom had become a monochrome still-life, sacks of rice piled in one corner and the grinding-quern standing near the door, the sieves of graduated fineness, from brass wire down to the finest silk, making a pattern of circles on the whitewashed wall. Because of the rain, on and off all last week, the long, shallow settling-trays had been moved into the workroom from the yard, and in their shallow riffles the first rime of starch grayed the wood like a thin frost.

  Six days a week this room, the yard, and the kitchen at the back of the yard were the heart of the house. Now they were still, like a heart that rests in meditation.

  Dolley saw tears in her mother’s eyes.

  “Thy father meant no…”

  Tears tightened Dolley’s throat at the recollection of his rebuke that had been like a slap in the face. She kept her voice to a whisper. “What’s wrong with him, Mama?”

  Her mother shook her head, but in her shut eyes, and the slump of her shoulders, Dolley saw the sheer relief in the knowledge that someone else, at least, understood that there was something wrong with John Payne. That it wasn’t just a bout of indigestion, or headache, or, worst of all, only their own womanish imaginations.

  “He didn’t used to be like this,” Dolley went on softly. “Is he ill?”

  “I asked him if he would see Dr. Rush, and he said there was naught amiss. He needeth only to think, he said.”

  “Is that what he doth, when he doth shut himself into the bedroom?” Dolley slowly removed her bonnet, the wide-brimmed plain white muslin sunbonnet that was the only headgear a good Quaker girl could wear without drawing whispers from the rest of the Meeting. There were some, like Lizzie’s cousin Hannah, who managed to coax their fathers into buying them brighter colored chintzes and muslins, and even silk, and who wore fashionable hats during the week and dressed their hair in curls. But these “wet” Quakers were treading a dangerous line. Back in Virginia, Dolley had seen members “read out of the Congregation”—cut off from their fellow Quakers, their families, the friends who made up the fabric of their lives—for “following the corrupt ways of the world” and partaking of “vain fashions and customs of the world,” as well as for the more usual offenses such as fighting, defaulting on one’s creditors, committing adultery, using ill words, or marrying one who was not a Quaker.

  “I know not what he doth.” Her mother removed her own bonnet, pressed her fingertips to her forehead, as if to crush away some ache there, then looked up into her tall daughter’s eyes. “Reads the Bible, I think. But when he goeth up early, and I’m down here until after dark, I’ll go up and there will be no candle lit and no smell of smoke in the room, as if he hath sat there in the darkness all that time. Sometimes he sitteth in his chair by the window, when I go to bed, and cometh not in with me until nearly dawn.”

  Dolley looked into her mother’s face and saw in the bruised circles beneath her eyes, the hollows under her cheekbones, that she, too, did not sleep until nearly dawn. But while more and more often her father remained in the bedroom in the dark of the mornings, her mother was always the one to come down and open the little shop that sold starch and gum arabic, and the fine small irons that ladies’-maids used to press the stiffened ruffles of collars and caps.

  “It could just be worry,” she said, seeking the illusion of a comfort in which neither of them really believed. “Thou knowst since the end of the War things have been hard everywhere. I’ve heard Father say the tariffs on rice from the Carolinas are ruining him, and many of the rice-growers won’t accept Pennsylvania currency.”

  Her mother’s eyes asked bitterly, Dost thou truly believe ’tis that simple? But Molly Payne patted her daughter’s cheek. “ ’Tis possible,” she agreed. She turned her head as movement flickered in the yard: Lizzie slipping through the narrow gate beside the kitchen, her gray dress like a paler shadow in the gray of the afternoon. She saw Dolley’s mother and halted, guilt all over her face.

  Molly Payne smiled. “Go along, then,” she said softly.

  “Thou’lt need help getting dinner—”

  “I put dinners on the table before thou wert born, girl, and shall do so after thou’rt wedded and gone away. Now hurry, or all thy sisters and brothers will be yapping to go as well.”

  Dolley caught up her bonnet, ducked into the yard. She would have liked to unearth the tiny cache of worldly baubles she wore for festive occasions—a gold necklace given her by her non-Quaker granny Anna, a ruffled lace collar she’d stitched herself—but didn’t dare delay. The sound of church bells followed the two gray-clothed girls as they raced down the little alleyway and out into Third Street, where Sarah Parker and Beth Brooke waited for them, then blended into the larger crowd on its way to Market Street.

  Cannon had begun to boom, fired by the ships along the wharves, and in the square before the State House, Dolley could hear the sound of cheering ahead. Around them, men and women in fine broadcloths or gay sprig-muslins pressed and craned for a glimpse up Market Street, and crowded past the line of posts that marked the pedestrian flagway to choke the street itself. Every doorstep was three deep, every window along the route occupied. Carriages further blocked the way, but the pressing crowds made the horses pull at their reins, and it would be a miracle, thought Dolley, if the morning passed without someone being bitten or kicked. She and her friends had to dodge and slip between market-women, citizens, wealthy gentlemen in fine coats and powdered wigs, along the walls where the press was thinner.

  They’d almost reached Fifth Street, still clinging to one another’s hands in a line like children playing crack-the-whip, when someone shouted, “Here they come!”

  Dolley pressed forward, to where half a dozen people jammed the step of old Mrs. House’s big red-brick residence. A gentleman on the lowest step, turning to protest, took a second look at her, changed his glare to an ingratiating smile, and raised his hat. She gave him a dazzling smile in return, and
he edged back off the step, gallantly surrendering his place to the girls.

  Like a country stream in winter, half choked by ice and snow, Market Street had been reduced to a single narrow channel of brick. Dolley could see the flags, and the mounts of the Pennsylvania Light Horse, even in the wan gloom seeming to gleam like burnished copper and bronze; see the men looking out straight before them with their swords drawn and held upright, and the gold of buttons and braid sparkling bright.

  Even had General Washington not ridden in the place of honor in their midst, Dolley was certain she would have known it was he. He wore, not the blue-and-buff uniform of the Continental Army, but the plain black suit of a private citizen—an act of modesty which would not, Dolley suspected, earn him the slightest indulgence from John Todd. The man proclaimed before all the world that he would retire to private life, never more to meddle in the affairs of the nation, the young lawyer had pointed out, when the subject of the National Convention had arisen. To go back so upon his word would be to admit himself a Caesar before all the nation, ambitious for a crown!

  But there was nothing, thought Dolley, of the Caesar in this man who came riding down Market Street through the thunder of cannon-fire and church bells. Though he sat straight on his dapple-gray stallion, there was no triumph in his face. He looked, if anything, tired and a little grim, as anyone would, she supposed, after a week’s journey up from Virginia.

  But would not a Caesar have stretched out his arms to the welcoming crowd, whose cheers reverberated against the flat pink brick of the house-fronts? A Caesar at least would have looked pleased.

  The General looked like a knight calculating what he’s going to need to take with him to fight a very dangerous dragon; a knight who, alone among the clamoring crowd, doubts his own strength to prevail.

  Even surrounded by loyal troops and howling admirers, Dolley was startled at how alone he seemed.