Patriot Hearts: A Novel of the Founding Mothers

by Barbara Hambly

  I could say: You have hurt me as nothing has hurt me in my life, save the death of my darling children. Do not hurt me again.

  But looking into his face she saw that he knew all those things. For eight years, woven like a secret code into every letter he had sent her during those summers of war, had been his deep love for the quiet of Mount Vernon. When he’d write about the new dining-room, or which fields should be planted in wheat and corn, he wrote as a man who had every square foot of his land, every brick and floor-board of his house, engraved on his heart. Sleeping at night, he could walk about his home in his dreams.

  This love—those dreams—were in his voice when he spoke again. “Mr. Madison informs me that last year the Congress wasn’t even able to pay the interest on the loans we took out to buy weapons and feed our soldiers through the War.” The distant tone reminded her of the way the men in the camp hospitals would talk to keep their minds from the pain of having a limb set. “Each state took out loans as well, you know, and are no more able than Congress either to pay in gold or to convince France and Spain to take the paper they’re printing. Congress—and the States—paid many of the soldiers in land. How long do you think it will be before the nations of Europe start thinking it their right to claim their payments in our Western lands?”

  It still doesn’t mean YOU have to go.

  Let Mr. Madison be his own authority, if he can.

  She closed her eyes, rested her forehead against the big hand that still clasped her own.

  If you go, this time I must stay behind. It was a very real threat, for a man already genuinely concerned that men would say He seeks to make himself a Caesar after all. As pointed as if she had packed her bags and abandoned his house, a truer supporter of the Republic than he. Maybe more so. People often remembered an action more clearly than any number of words. He couldn’t let himself be seen as less of a Republican than his wife.

  If I say it, will he stay?

  And if he stays, what will it do to him?

  And to us?

  She supposed, if she were as true a supporter of the Republic as all that, she would have added—or thought first—What will it do to our country?

  But she didn’t.

  Abigail Adams would have, she reflected. And had her heart been less sore, Martha would have smiled at the recollection of that small, sword-slim, beautiful woman who’d come to tea at the Cambridge camp one afternoon, all bundled up in a green wool cloak against the cold. A true New England patriot, that one: a passionate, intellectual Roman matron willing to lay her children, her home—maybe even her beloved little red-faced John—on the altar of her country.

  It needs a heart like hers, thought Martha sadly, to follow George where he now must go.

  Heaven only knew what God was thinking of, to have put her hand, not Abigail’s, where now it lay.

  Because she knew that even in the face of the one threat that would truly draw his blood, her husband would not turn aside from the need of his country.

  So she asked only, “When do you leave?”

  “Not until May.”

  “What can I do to help?”

  “What you have always done, Patsie. Be there to guard my back.”

  And felt his kiss press her forehead, his arms gather her close.

  Now make us a king to judge us like all the nations, the Israelites had cried, when even after soundly trouncing the Philistines and the Hittites and the who-all-else they were still disunited and living in tents.

  And the prophet Samuel had gone and picked on poor Saul, who only wanted to get on with his farming but who was the most impressive-looking man in the countryside, and made him be King. (Had Samuel been a withered little gentleman in black, with prematurely whitening hair?)

  And look what had happened to Saul.

  Washington City

  August 24, 1814

  “It was just after Jacky died, that the Queen of France sent her ‘elegant gift,’ as it was called, to Martha.” Sophie shook her head over the wampum-belt, the fossilized mastodon-tooth, and the tiny bronze mechanism for calculating the appearances of comets that were all that the lowest drawer of the dining-room cabinet contained; Dolley closed the drawer again. “It ended up auctioned off on the docks at New York—which was still in British hands until the treaty was signed two years later—but I doubt poor Martha would have been much aware of it if it had made it safely to the American forces. Jacky was the last of her children.”

  “Then just before the General rode away to Philadelphia for the Convention in ’87, Fanny’s baby was born and died.” Still empty-handed, Dolley passed between the tables, the dressmaker like a shadow at her heels. “I know it seemed to her even then that the world she treasured was already coming to pieces.”

  Sophie looked as if she would have made some remark about Martha Washington not being the only one to have lost her peace and her home, but held her tongue. As they crossed the hall, the butler came down the stairs, carrying the smallest of the trunks. He stood aside to let the ladies precede him into the yellow parlor. Throughout the house Dolley could feel, rather than hear, the tension stirring among the servants. Would any of them take the opportunity to flee?

  “It was only weeks after Fanny’s baby was born that Abigail’s first grandchild arrived as well,” Sophie said, as Dolley opened the curio cabinet by the parlor’s sunny window. “Her daughter Nabby’s baby—We should probably take this,” she added, and crossed to the fireplace. Beside it hung a slightly faded drawing, carefully framed in gilt. Dolley had always liked it, though despite its elaborate frame it was plainly an amateur’s work: a rather overgrown garden in autumn, with leaves scattering its paths and bright Chinese tubs filled with marigolds.

  “Dost know who drew it?” she asked, surprised. “I’ve always wondered.”

  “Nabby Adams did,” Sophie replied. “It was their garden, the year the family lived in Paris.”

  “Didst know them there?”

  For an instant her friend’s gray eyes filled with the memory of years she’d never spoken of to Dolley, the years between her own flight with her mother in Cornwallis’s retreating ships, and her somewhat inexplicable return. Then she replied, “Oh, yes. Mr. Jefferson introduced us, because I had helped nurse his wife in her illness. Nabby and I used to sit on the bench by the old fountain, where that picture was drawn. I recognize the view. After they left Paris for London, Mrs. Adams and I corresponded. And of course I sewed for her when she returned to Philadelphia. I did not see this in her parlor in those days.” Sophie’s long fingers traced the little drawing. “I think Abigail must have given it to Mr. Jefferson, in the days when they were friends.”

  There was no sign of the little golden hand-mirror in the cabinet drawer. Dolley felt a stab of frustration, and a sort of panicky anger: It had to be here somewhere. It suddenly seemed critical to her to find the mirror, one of the few mementos she had, she realized, of the woman who had been her friend. To lose it would be like losing Martha all over again: not only Martha, but Martha’s memories, of the War, and of the world as it had been.

  “I’ve always wondered which was worse,” she said softly. “To be perpetually living half normally, half in exile as Martha did all those years, or to live as Abigail did, for years at home without her John and then for years away from the rest of her family and everyone she knew and loved.”

  Sophie tucked the drawing carefully between two large books and wedged it into a corner of the trunk. “I suppose that depends on how one feels about New England in the dead of winter. But if you think Abigail suffered for her family when she left them to follow John across the sea, you don’t know her well.”

  “In fact, I never met her.” But Dolley smiled in her heart at the recollection of tubby, short-tempered little Mr. Adams, holding forth at the dinner-table of that house in Philadelphia that she and Jemmy had rented from Jim Monroe. “She was ill and remained in Massachusetts when the government was in Philadelphia. Then Jemmy and I left Philadelp
hia two months before she arrived after Mr. Adams’s election. I have always regretted that. Everyone said Mrs. Adams was so formidable. But from what Mr. Adams said of her, I think we would have gotten on well.”

  Sophie considered her friend for a moment, then smiled. “I suspect you’re right. When one grew to know Abigail, behind the politics she was a great deal kinder than she seemed.”

  “Politics or not, I cannot imagine any woman not feeling pain when separated from her children, especially when they’re young.”

  “I think she felt pain,” Sophie replied. “But pain was never a thing that affected Abigail’s judgment, when her principles were at stake. Her sins against her children were different sins. She—and they—paid a different price, Dolley.”

  ABIGAIL

  Grosvenor Square, London

  Monday, April 2, 1787

  Mrs. Adams, ma’am!” A scurry of feet in the upstairs hall, as a mob-capped head poked around the door of the little second-floor parlor that Abigail had taken over as her office at 8 Grosvenor Square. “Becky’s just come from Miss Nabby’s—Mrs. Smith’s,” the maid Esther hastily corrected herself, and the tall, wide-shouldered form of Jack Briesler appeared in the doorway behind her. In spite of everything the Adamses’ very proper English butler Mr. Spiller could do, he couldn’t get Briesler to understand that he must don his powdered footman’s wig every time he came upstairs.

  To Briesler’s credit, reflected Abigail, folding her hands over the pages of her sister’s letter and regarding her footman with an expression of mild enquiry that she was far from feeling. Briesler had served under Washington at Trenton and Brooklyn Heights; he wasn’t about to wear any sissified wig if he didn’t absolutely have to.

  “Her time is on her, Miss Becky says,” Briesler provided, and Esther’s head bobbed in confirmation. Like Briesler, Esther had come to England with Abigail from Massachusetts four years ago, and the excitement in her face was as great as if it was her own sister, and not her employer’s daughter, who was about to bear a child.

  “Is she all right?” Abigail stowed the letter and her reply in their drawer, locked it, wiped her pen, and capped the ink-well with gestures as swift and automatic as smoothing her hair before she stood, shaking off the pinching cramp of rheumatism in her legs and back. Really, I’m getting as stiff as an old lady.

  And why not? This day, God willing, I shall be a grandmother.

  And as Esther nodded again, Abigail remembered her own pain, her own panic, the day her own first child was born.

  But her mother, and her sixteen-year-old sister Betsey, had stayed with her all the previous week, she remembered, as she crossed the hall to her husband’s study door, the two American servants right on her heels. Her sister-in-law had been just across the little dooryard of that small brown house on the Plymouth road: in and out of each other’s kitchens all day the way everyone was in the tiny Massachusetts town of Braintree. There had also been Granny Susie, John’s sweet-natured, bouncy, busy mother. I wasn’t alone in a foreign country, much less a country like England….

  John wasn’t in the corner room, whose wide window displayed the wet gray spectacle of Grosvenor Square’s bare trees. The fire was embers in the grate, scruffy little Caesar curled in a tight gray ball before it with his nose hidden in his disreputable tail. The door to the gloomy cubbyhole generally occupied by John’s secretary stood open, and that room was empty as well. “Mr. Briesler, please go downstairs and see if Mr. Adams is in his office. Let him know I’m going over to Mrs. Smith’s right away. I shall probably be there all day, so he’ll be on his own for dinner. And please tell Mrs. Stubbs and Mr. Spiller so.” Even after four years, it felt strange to have to inform one’s cook and one’s butler (of all things!) if one was going to be away at dinner-time.

  It crossed her mind to wonder if Nabby still had a cook. Nabby’s husband Colonel Smith had been threatening for weeks to sack that wretched woman, and wasn’t the man to think about the inconvenience of finding another, to a woman in the concluding stages of pregnancy.

  In many ways, Abigail reflected as she ascended the stair to the front bedroom, things were a great deal simpler in that four-room farmhouse on the Boston-Plymouth road, war or no war.

  War or no war. Another woman would have paused at the recollection of the phrase she’d used uncountable hundreds of times during those eight appalling years: War or no war, this family has to eat; war or no war, you have to do your lessons, Johnny; war or no war, you have no excuse for punching your brother….

  It wasn’t in Abigail’s nature to pause. Yet the phrase rang in her mind, as she collected a stouter pair of shoes from the wardrobe, plucked warmer stockings and a heavy India-goods shawl from the highboy—it was always freezing in Nabby’s house—and sent Esther flying down three flights to the kitchen for the bag she’d packed last week. War or no war…

  The inner contradiction of those words came home to her now, and she realized she could not even imagine her life, her world, her children’s lives, had there been no war.

  The War had shaped her life and theirs. Everything had been a part of it, related to it. She was here in London because of the War. Her first grandchild was going to be born on enemy soil, because of the War.

  Because of the War, she had not seen her two youngest children in almost three years.

  Nor had those children seen her.

  For eight years, there had been nothing but the War, and all that the War had brought. But it troubled her a little now to reflect that she literally could not imagine, No war.

  That in her heart of hearts, the War was all there was.

  That hot July morning in 1765 when she’d felt the birth-pangs of her own first child, she’d sat down for a moment after the milking, to read over the draft of one of John’s articles for the Boston Gazette. For weeks John had been writing protests against the British Parliament’s decision to levy a tax on all court documents, college diplomas, books, real estate certificates, newspapers—anything comprised of printed paper, even dice and playing cards. At the same time it had announced the tax, Parliament had informed the colonists, from Massachusetts down to Georgia, that they were now responsible for housing and feeding the ten thousand British soldiers who were to be sent to guard the colonial frontiers, either in their own homes or in barracks built at their expense.

  Abigail well recalled the flame of anger that scorched her at the arbitrary imposition of these duties—What did Parliament know about conditions in the colonies?—and, hard on its heels, the stab of pain in her vitals, the warm wetness of her water breaking. She hadn’t even had time to call out when her mother came in from the dairy with the milk-pans, saw her gasping, and rushed to her side.

  The child who’d been born later that day, twenty-two years ago come July, had been Nabby.

  Nabby who would today—Please, God, let it BE sometime today and not tomorrow or Wednesday!—birth a child of her own.

  Footsteps creaked in the hall of that tall gray stone town house that was so wildly different from the kitchen of her memory, the kitchen whose open back door had let in the scents of summer fields and orchards just beyond. John appeared in the bedroom doorway, stout, round-faced, blue eyes as bright and as sharp at fifty-seven as they’d been when first they’d met. In times of agitation his plump cheeks tended to turn red and they were like cherries now: “Is she all right?” were the first words out of his mouth.

  “Esther seems to think so.” Abigail was lacing up her boots.

  “Esther has no more brain in her head than your finches do.”

  As if to confirm his opinion of them, Beatrice and Benedick went into a chirping flurry of self-induced hysteria in their gilt cage beside the window. Abigail made a shushing gesture to her husband, fearful that Esther might come up the stairs and hear this remark. John was probably the least diplomatic diplomat since the Goths had sent their emissaries to ancient Rome, and didn’t confine himself to referring to one of his fellow delegates as “a demon o
f discord” whose life was “one continued insult to good manners and to decency.” He’d gotten better over the years, but when enraged or annoyed he would still say pretty much anything to and about anyone, and had more than once had the servant-girl—who really did sometimes seem to have a brain the size of a grain of bird-shot—in tears.

  But the servant who appeared behind John wasn’t Esther, but prim Mr. Spiller the butler. “Shall I have Ned harness the carriage, ma’am?”

  “Don’t be silly,” retorted Abigail. “It’s five minutes’ walk to Wimpole Street.” It took most people ten.

  “It’s also coming over cloudy again,” John told her. “You’ve been ill most of the winter—”

  “Nonsense,” said Abigail, though it was perfectly true that since October she’d been racked by the worst bouts of rheumatism since the voyage from Boston. “I shall have Esther bring along an umbrella. You may need the carriage.”

  John shook his head. “Surely the mere concerns of hearth and home haven’t driven it from your mind that we’re dining with Lord Carmarthen today? To give me one last chance at getting some satisfaction about those articles of the treaty that the Crown hasn’t honored and shows not the slightest intention of honoring….”

  “Drat it!” Abigail had forgotten, though she’d been writing to her sister Mary about dining with the Foreign Secretary moments before Esther and Briesler had come in with the news. “You might as well stop at home, for all the good talking to Carmarthen is going to do. What good is negotiating a treaty, and having even the King sign it, if they refuse to comply with it? They’re still keeping troops along our frontiers, they’re still seizing our shipping and claiming it’s smuggled, and still forcing American sailors into their navy.” She finished lacing her other boot, straightened up to face her husband. “And if they’ve honored a single one of the claims of Americans here in London that you’ve petitioned for—”

  She broke off, seeing Esther come up the stairs again, cloaked and hooded for a walk in the harsh spring chill and carrying the oiled-silk umbrella that Abigail had purchased in Paris rather than condemn herself to forever doling out shillings and sous for sedan-chairs when it came on to rain.