Patriot Hearts

by Barbara Hambly

  He went on, “At least the Senate approved the treaty with France. Jefferson can’t tamper with that, though the Good Lord only knows what other tricks Bonaparte has up his sleeve. And, thank God, they passed my proposal to increase the number of circuit courts, so at least there’ll be responsible Federalist judges to interpret whatever laws the Republicans dream up. Including,” he added, with the grim ghost of a smile, “John Marshall as Chief Justice, now that Ellsworth has resigned.”

  “John Marshall?” Abigail stood for a moment, sheet over her arms, startled out of her depression. She remembered how the handsome Virginian had bent his head to listen to John at the New Year’s levee—how furiously Tom Jefferson had protested when his enemy (and third cousin) had been named one of the chief negotiators of the French treaty. A slow smile spread over her face. “Well. There’s one Mr. Jefferson won’t be able to talk his way around.”

  “Nor,” said John, handing her the laundry-basket, “without dismantling the Constitution—the very thing he accused us of wanting to do—will he be able to get rid of him.”

  Now, as she folded the crisply ironed petticoats into her trunk, Abigail heard hooves on the hard-frozen gravel of the drive. Looking out, she glimpsed her nephew Billy Shaw—Betsey’s boy, hired as John’s secretary and assistant—limping up the makeshift stair. So it’s done, she thought, and whispered a prayer, because John was perfectly right about Burr. Was an honest Jacobin more to be desired than a man who’d sell his support to the highest bidder?

  Footfalls on the stairs. Billy’s halting, John’s firmer tread.

  Abigail looked up.

  “It’s a deadlock,” said John.

  Abigail had been braced for any news but that. “I thought the House vote was supposed to break the deadlock.” Honestly, couldn’t they even get THAT right?

  “The Federalists still control the House,” said John grimly. “The new Congress hasn’t been seated yet. This is the last session that’s voting. And the Federalists who aren’t under Hamilton’s control trust Burr. Tom has eight states—” He ticked them off on his chubby, chilblained fingers. “Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Georgia, Virginia, New Jersey, New York, and North Carolina. That’s one short of a majority. Burr has six, and Vermont and Maryland are both deadlocked. They’ve cast six ballots already. Nobody’s moving.”

  By eleven o’clock that night, when the Representatives were starting in on their eighteenth or nineteenth ballot, the situation was still the same.

  And still the same when Billy Shaw came back in the morning from the all-night session. Men were sending out for food, he said, and for coffee and some for clean linen.

  And the vote was still tied. The sky was still clear. The road home still open.

  “Fools!” John shoved his breakfast porridge from him, struck the table with the flat of his hand so that all the glasses jumped. “Don’t they see what they’re doing? Weren’t any of them paying attention to what happened in France?”

  His face suffused with anger, the “ungovernable temper” that all his life his foes had exaggerated, though Abigail had never found it ungovernable at all. One just had to let him shout himself breathless, and later he’d be perfectly sensible.

  “It was divisiveness that brought France to ruin, every man pulling his own way! Stabbing one another in the back! Hamilton’s still holding on to the votes of the men who support his party. He won’t back Burr under any circumstances and he won’t back Tom unless Tom will give him assurances of what to expect, which I don’t think is an unreasonable request. Just the assurance that he’s not an outright advocate of anarchy would do!”

  “They’ll all feel very silly,” remarked Sophie Hallam, when she came by later in the day with word that on the twenty-first ballot the House was still split, eight to six to two, “with all the flags put up for the inauguration, if they don’t know who to inaugurate.” She sounded pleased.

  The short winter day was drawing to a close and the last of Abigail’s few callers had departed, when Jack Briesler tapped at the upstairs parlor door. “Mr. Jefferson to see you, ma’am.”

  Jefferson looked as if he had not slept last night. Spots of pink showed high on the Virginian’s elegant cheekbones, and on the end of his long nose. In a year or two his faded hair would all be silver. Abigail had sat next to him at dinner just after the New Year, but this was the first time they had seen one another alone since…

  She tried to calculate, running the years back in her mind.

  Since London. They’d gone to the theater together, on a night when John had been obliged at the last minute to meet with the Portuguese Ambassador. They’d walked home through the chilly March mists, talking of fossil bones and Indians and mesmerism and the education of women…What one always talked about with Tom.

  Everything except what he truly thought on any subject, or the contents of his heart.

  That was the evening she’d given him Nabby’s sketch of the garden of the Paris house.

  You will be welcome in our home, she had said to him that evening, as often as you care to come, as long as you care to remain, at whatever hour you make your appearance.

  Like so many last times, she had been unaware that it would be the last.

  She had not realized how much she had missed her friend.

  Tears filled her eyes and she blinked them away. Weak, she thought, furiously. Losing Charley has made me weak—

  “Mrs. Adams.” He bowed over the hand she held out to him. “Is there any service I can offer you, before you take your leave?”

  Not urging your journalist friends to call my husband a fat dotard before all the nation? Not lying about him behind his back to the President he served?

  Perhaps giving him support he could trust?

  Or had these acts been only Tom’s view of how politics should be conducted? Part and parcel of his inability to see any inconsistency in hating slavery and giving his daughter twelve families of living human beings as a wedding-present?

  For a moment silence hung between them in the shadowy parlor, chilly with the sinking of the fire. Only her own chair remained unsheeted near the hearth.

  They had met in a crowded room, she recalled, looking across at the tall man before her. Life and promise glinting like the diamonds on the frame of Martha’s French mirror. The War over, the world of sea-voyages and new romances ahead. Journeys end in lovers meeting….

  Now there was nothing but stillness, and shadow, and years that could never be recovered.

  She sighed, and said, “None that I can think of, sir. We’ve been living here like a couple of vagabonds, John and I. It only remains to bundle our tooth-brushes up in our spare shirts and be on our way….”

  And Jefferson laughed. Slipping easily into the banter of friendship, as if the more recent past had not existed. “Perhaps I could offer you a cow to take along, as you did to France?” He looked around him at the oval parlor. A beautiful room, Abigail thought, with its gold-starred wallpapers, but like everything in the house, too big to be really comfortable. “To tell you the truth, this house has always appalled me,” he remarked. “It’s a palace—it would swallow Versailles and have room left for the Dalai Lama. My heart bled for you, trying to heat it.”

  “I always wished,” said Abigail quietly, meeting his eye, “that those wretches who called us ‘monarchial’ could have seen how we actually lived here. With six servants and no way to get wood, in spite of the fact that there were trees whichever way we looked. Of all the accusations, that was the most unjust.”

  Another small silence fell. Just for a moment, Jefferson’s eyes avoided hers. “On behalf of the men who supported me,” he said at last, “I do apologize, for causing you pain. Of which, this year, you have had enough.”

  It was all he would say, concerning politics, concerning the election, concerning his supporters who were still in jail for trying to whip up hatred against the President. Concerning all the blood spilled in France, all the lies told and trust violat
ed, only to put a dictator on its throne.

  Jefferson is a dreamer, thought Abigail. Who had said that to her once? And his dream today was, before she took her leave, to reestablish something of the friendship they had lost. To pretend that all was actually well.

  Briesler brought fresh tea, and candles, and another log for the fire. They drank together and Abigail pretended, for the sake of the man she’d once called her friend.

  As she listened to his footfalls retreat down the echoing hall, she realized there was little likelihood that she would ever see Thomas Jefferson again.

  The Federal City

  Friday, February 13, 1801

  As dreams went, Abigail reflected—as fairy-tales went—“happily ever after” was not, as Martha Washington had often said, “all it was cracked up to be.”

  She stood in the long French window of the downstairs entrance-hall, waiting for the carriage in the gray chill of dawn. The furniture was gone. Louisa sat by one of the fireplaces cradling a bored and sleepy Susie in her arms.

  We fought our war—we won our freedom…Journeys did end in lovers meeting.

  Only the lover Nabby met turned out to be a good-for-nothing, and the freedom we fought for turned out to be freedom for dirty-minded newspapers to call John names while he battled to keep the country out of a war it couldn’t win.

  And the prize for all our striving was the privilege of living in a world that we do not understand.

  And along the way we lost our daughter’s hope and happiness, as surely as we lost poor Charley. As surely as John and I lost our dear friend Jefferson.

  Abigail pulled her cloak tighter around her shoulders, watching the black-cloaked, slender figure that had to be Sophie Hallam walking toward her along Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol.

  “They just finished ballot twenty-three,” she reported, as she arrived. “Still nothing. Some of the Federalists talk of asking the President Pro Tempore of the Senate to take over the position of Chief Executive if the deadlock cannot be resolved; or possibly Chief Justice Marshall…In which case, Mr. Jefferson says, he will call for another Convention to rewrite the Constitution again—presumably more to his liking.”

  “Which is precisely what they did in France,” said Abigail bleakly. “Over, and over again. Whenever one faction didn’t like what was going on.”

  “I understand militia is gathering in Virginia.”

  Abigail shook her head, and for a long while was unable to speak. Unable to frame into words the anger and sickened pain in her heart. At last she said, “It’s just that I sat on Penn’s Hill and watched the fighting before Boston. And now, after all our struggle, it seems I’m going to see the Republic break into pieces within my lifetime, after seeing it born.”

  “Mrs. Adams…” Sophie’s expression of sardonic amusement was gone. “You know Hammy isn’t going to let it happen. He wrote the Federalist Papers, for Heaven’s sake, if for no other reason than his pride won’t let him stand by and watch the Constitution he championed be swept away, completely aside from the fact that without General Washington to dote on him he has less control now over what the Republicans might come up with on a second try. He’ll back down, and give the election to Jefferson.”

  “So that’s what we have come to,” asked Abigail bitterly, “in so short a time? To be thankful that one man’s vanity truckles to another man’s pride?”

  “At least as things stand there is little likelihood that anyone is going to come posting up to Quincy to demand Mr. Adams return to public life the way they did to poor General Washington.”

  Surprised into a cackle of laughter, Abigail responded, “Poor my grandmother’s lumbago! He delighted in being called back to the colors, when it looked as if we were to go to war with France. Poor Martha, to have waited for happiness for sixteen years, only to have it end in two—”

  She broke off. Remembering that plump, black-clothed figure in the dilapidated parlor of Mount Vernon. The dreadful silence of slaves waiting for her death to bring them freedom. The footworn track that led from the house to the brick tomb overlooking the river. Where thy treasure is, there will your heart be also.

  Wondering how many years of happiness were left to her and John, when they returned to the stony acres of their farm.

  “Only, she didn’t wait for happiness, you know,” mused Sophie. “I think she was happy every day, just to be with him.”

  Abigail thought about that. Balancing those grievous winter evenings by the kitchen fire in Braintree against the sparkle of sunrise on the jeweled sea, that first day she woke up on the Active and wasn’t seasick. Balancing the terror of waiting for British assault, against the salons of Paris in the last days of the Kings. The amazement of Handel’s “Messiah” sung in Westminster Abbey. Her garden in Auteuil and the wind in her hair, as she and John climbed hand in hand up the short green turf of the English downs…

  Being John’s partner, all these years. As if she’d gone along to some vast war with him to stand at his elbow and load his gun. Even were their work to be swept away tomorrow, the fact that they had done it would remain in God’s heart, where all things were eternal.

  And perhaps, too, in the minds of both women and men.

  “I haven’t been happy every day,” she told Sophie. “But you know, I wouldn’t have traded a single one of them for anything.”

  With a rattle of harness the carriage came around the corner of the drive, the wagon behind it heavy with furniture, trunks, servants bound for home. The inner door of the huge cold room opened and John came in. “The barometer’s holding steady,” he reported, as Sophie faded tactfully through the French window and down the wooden stair. “I pray you’ll be comfortable—”

  “If I made it in safety across the ocean,” Abigail assured him, “I’m sure I’ll reach Quincy in one piece, and have the house snug for you on your return.”

  “My return.” John sighed. “God knows what will happen here in the meantime…. And Jefferson, of course, is still refusing to tell anyone athing about his intentions—” He shook his head, like a horse enraged by a horse-fly. “He could be plotting to abolish religion entirely in this country, the way they did in France—he’s completely capable of it—or turn the states loose to do as they please, and undo everything the Convention labored to—”

  Abigail put her hands on his shoulders: “It will be all right, John,” she said, as she had said to Nabby, when her daughter had clung to her in the blackness of storm at sea, their lives in balance between the world they’d known and a future unforeseen. She wasn’t entirely sure she believed it, but Martha’s words came back to her mind. We go where our hearts command us, in the faith that it is God who formed our hearts. Which included Mr. Jefferson, as well as John. Whether Mr. Jefferson believed it or not.

  Perhaps all things did return at last, to where they were meant to be.

  She said again, more firmly, “It will be all right.”

  As John walked her down the steps to the carriage, Abigail looked from the dreary, bare expanse of stumps and trees back to the house: enormous, unfinished inside, still smelling of newness, like the country itself. Waiting for what would come.

  But that was out of her hands now. And out of John’s.

  “God willing, I shall see you in a month,” John said, and kissed her gloved hands, then her mouth. “And God willing, from that point on, ‘I’ll go no more a-rovin’ with you, fair maid.’ ”

  The carriage started off; Abigail hummed the old song a little, to the creak of the wheels on the icy road.

  A-rovin’, a-rovin’, since rovin’s been my ru-i-in,

  I’ll go no more a-rovin’ with you, fair maid….

  Looking back, she saw his stumpy black figure, standing on the steps of the great raw half-finished Mansion, in the muddy wilderness that civilization had barely scratched. Her John. A stout balding patriot who had seen everything of one of the most astonishing events of History—and who had seen it at her side. She sighed and settled
back, and hoped they’d make Baltimore by nightfall.

  MARTHA

  Mount Vernon Plantation

  Saturday, March 6, 1801

  On the thirty-sixth ballot, Vermont and Maryland switched their support to Mr. Jefferson,” Sophie Hallam reported. “Delaware and South Carolina cast blank ballots, withdrawing their votes from Mr. Burr. I understand that rumor is rife that Mr. Jefferson indeed reached an understanding with the Federalists, though he has been protesting to everyone who’ll listen that he did nothing of the kind. I assume that his first act upon taking office will be to propose an Amendment to the Constitution making sure such a situation never arises again.”

  “After all that ink wasted slandering poor Mr. Adams.” Martha sighed, and rang the bell for Christopher, for the third time.

  Nelly said, “I’ll get it, Grandmama.” She collected the empty tea-pot, and rustled away in quest of more hot water. Her footfalls echoed in the shabby emptiness of the hall.

  “After all that ink wasted slandering poor Mr. Adams, and Mr. Jefferson’s real foe was there at his elbow the whole time.” Sophie dipped a final shard of bread and butter into the dregs of her tea. “A pity, really. Those frightful newspapermen wouldn’t have had to make up scandals about Mr. Burr’s personal life.”

  “Did you hear the story the Republicans tried to put about,” put in Pattie, “about Mr. Adams sending Mr. Pinckney to France with instructions to bring back four beautiful opera-dancers, two apiece, as mistresses for them? When Mr. Adams heard it, he only said, ‘I declare, Pinckney’s cheated me, for I never got my two!’ ”

  If the absence of her undivided guidance and care had pressed hard on her elder granddaughters, Martha reflected as they all laughed, at least Pattie seemed to have surmounted its effects. While Eliza still wore dramatic mourning for the General, Pattie had returned to ordinary dress, if one could call “ordinary” the high-waisted, narrow-cut gowns that more and more women seemed to be wearing nowadays.