Patriot Hearts: A Novel of the Founding Mothers

by Barbara Hambly

  Her parents’ bedroom at the front of the house was still filled with the gray light of the late-spring afternoon, when Dolley knocked gently at the door. “ ’Tis Dolley, Papa.”

  There was silence within. The children had gone out to the yard; Isaac was as usual trouncing William at dominoes; on her way upstairs Dolley had passed her mother in the kitchen, talking with Mother Amy by the open door.

  At last a voice replied, “Come, Daughter.”

  He sat in the chair by the window. The window was shut and the room airless. Footsteps patted in the street; a woman’s voice chimed plaintively, “But if he’d only agree to sit next to her the whole problem could be avoided!” Her father winced. He moved his head as if the sound were a bodkin, pricking at his ear.

  Doth he miss the stillness of our country evenings at Coles Hill?

  When you stepped outside in Philadelphia, it was like stepping into a giant open-air drawing-room full of chattering people. That was one of the things Dolley loved about Philadelphia.

  Her father looked weary, and she could see where white had touched his dark hair.

  “I’m so sorry I disobeyed thee, Father. Sorry that my feet were so quick to run away when Mama said that I might. She meant nothing by it, truly she did not. The fault was mine. Please forgive me.”

  “John Todd is a good man,” he said softly. “And a brave one. Why dost thou turn thy face aside from his love?” He spoke like a man speaking from the dark of a cell he knows he’ll never leave.

  Dolley wanted to protest, I don’t, but knew that would be a falsehood. Every look John Todd gave her asked for something that she avoided.

  “What more dost thou want in this life?”

  “Father, I know not.”

  “I want to see thee safe,” he said, after a silence so lengthy she wondered if he wished her to go. “Thy mother is right, Daughter. I hide in this corner. The voices of men are an abomination to me. The Spirit will guide me, the Spirit will show me the path I must take, but listen as I may there is only silence. I am tired, Daughter, more tired than I was when I plowed all day behind a team of oxen, and I think if I were to come into the presence of anyone, man or woman, I would—” He hesitated.

  Weep? wondered Dolley.

  Scream?

  Curse God and die?

  “I know it sounds like madness, but I am not mad, Daughter. I know I am of little use to thy mother and the children, yet this is all that I am or can be now. Thy mother says to work on in spite of my melancholy and the good people of the Meeting advise this and that, and yet it is all to me like men describing color to a man who hath lost his eyes. How shall one season salt that hath lost its savor? Please do not give me advice, Daughter.” His eyes were bleak.

  Dolley shook her head, then pulled up the little stool that stood beside the tall bed, so that she could sit beside him, and take his hand.

  “Child, I want only thy happiness. Thou art made for better things than to lose thy days in poverty, and I fear that this is what is to come. This is why I say to thee, Marry John Todd. Marry him now. His heart is faithful, yet disappointment breaks even the strongest back in the end. Then what shalt become of thee?”

  “Papa, what woman would have any use for a man who deserted her in the face of adversity?” Dolley spoke playfully, and his mouth tugged a little at the corner in response. Since she was fourteen, he’d been joking her about the number of young gentlemen who came calling on her, and the number of requests he’d gotten, from men who wanted permission to seek her hand.

  Personally, Dolley never could see why. She was too tall, and inclined to bossiness. She knew she had pretty coloring, white and black and blue, but knew also that she lacked the fineness of feature that made true beauty. She enjoyed the attention, and enjoyed flirting, but it was hard to take any man seriously who threw himself on his knees before her and went into raptures about how lovely she was.

  For all his sober stuffiness, and his inability to see a jest, she never had the feeling that John Todd gazed at her thinking, I am looking at the most beautiful woman in the world.

  Just, I am looking at my friend Dolley Payne.

  But her father’s responsive smile faded before it reached his eyes. “Times are cruel, Dolley. More cruel than we knew when all we had to fear was the redcoats and the Tories. I fear thou shalt find that few men—maybe none—will seek to wed a woman who must work for her bread and who can bring nothing to the marriage, no matter how pretty she be. I do not know what the future holds for this family, but when I look ahead I see only blackness. I say again, Dolley, John Todd is a good man. What more dost thou want in this life? For what dost thou wait?”

  For a wider world?

  For a girl of even middling means, the world was never wide. As a youngster in Hanover County she’d been enchanted by the books in Sophie Sparling’s grandfather’s library, but not, as Sophie was, out of a steely hunger for learning. It was the stories that delighted her, the dizziness of looking through an infinity of windows into other experiences, other places and times. Living in Philadelphia, especially at such a time and with such events going on, was surely to be living in the widest world she would ever see.

  For a man I can laugh with?

  But it was silly, to wish for a man who shared her mirth above a man who would treat her and her children well. And while the Friends were far from humorless, she had never met a young man in the Meeting yet who had her zesty curiosity, her love of laughter.

  And to look outside the Meeting was unthinkable.

  So all she could say was, “I know not what I wait for, Father. Maybe for just the guidance of the Spirit?”

  Once he would have agreed with her. Now he frowned. “Dost not think that this is the guidance of the Spirit? As a mother will push a child out of the path of danger, or into a safe and sunny garden, if from timidity or foolishness that child will not be coaxed?”

  She heard her mother’s voice in the parlor next door, and William answering something. Footsteps creaked, and Dolley was standing by the time a light tap sounded on the bedroom door. Her father closed his eyes briefly, as if the sound were the scrape of nails on slate. He whispered, “Go, Daughter. Think of what I have said. It is for thine own good that I speak.”

  But as she climbed to the stuffy heat of the attic bedroom she shared with her sisters, and opened the window there onto the wilderness of roofs and birds, Dolley felt only a great sense of confusion, and longing for something for which she had no name. Timid and foolish, her father had said. And, she mentally added, remembering her mother’s tired face, selfish as well.

  For what dost thou wait?

  She knew John Todd would make her a good husband.

  Did she really think some dashingly handsome Friend was going to come striding into the Meeting one morn, take her hand, and lead her into a world where she could read and talk, surround herself with music and bright colors, and not meekly grind away her days in work that had no end and little relief?

  She had prayed often for guidance concerning John Todd, as she had prayed for guidance about her father. Now she rested her forehead on her window sash and whispered to the shining light that she saw within her heart, Send me where I’ll do the most good, by the route that doth seem best to You.

  Over the rooftops of Philadelphia, the church bells were silent. The cannons by the State House were stilled. The sky was beginning to darken at the end of the long afternoon. Dolley pictured the candlelight and mirrors of Robert Morris’s elegant dining-room, and General Washington, resplendent in black velvet and powder. Delighted, she was sure, to be at his destination and able to partake of a decent meal—Would he write to his wife tonight and tell her he’d arrived safe?

  Thunder rumbled grumpily over the hills west of town. Big, thick drops of rain began to fall.

  Robert Morris had the finest mansion in Philadelphia, whose red-tiled roof and gleaming third-floor windows Dolley could see, a few streets over on Fourth Street. The British General Howe
had occupied it as his own, the winter the British held Philadelphia in their grip. Now the merchant would be rubbing his chubby hands at the prospect of having the General’s prestigious presence and the General’s undivided attention on his own arguments and plans.

  Dolley had been around meeting-house committees long enough to know that most of what got decided got decided over dinner or punch in some congenial parlor, not over debates in a sweltering meeting room.

  Poor little Mr. Madison. He so clearly intended for precisely that reason to keep the whole of the powerful Virginia delegation together under his eye. Now he’d been left to wait at Mrs. House’s boardinghouse, out-jockeyed by the Philadelphia merchant.

  It was going to be a long, hot summer for everyone in Philadelphia.

  Washington City

  August 24, 1814

  Light footfalls under the cold high hanging lamps of the hall: Dolley turned her head. “Didst find it?” she asked, a little surprised, seeing Sophie holding something small, cupped in the palm of one hand. In the other she held a slender bundle of letters.

  “These weren’t in the sewing-table,” Sophie replied as she approached. “They were shoved in behind the cabinet—when was that cabinet last moved?—They’re unsigned.”

  She held them out, after the briefest pause. Dolley saw the top one was in English, though it started out, Ma mie—My little one—written in a clear strong hand. The superscription was “Rotterdam.” “Dost know the hand?” she asked, and Sophie replied without hesitation.

  “Of course not. This was with them,” she added, and held out three broken fragments of ivory, and a few bits of ornamental gold. Put together, Dolley could see that it had once been a miniature: a beautiful girl in the simple white costume so popular in France in the 1780s. A girl with clear eyes of bright turquoise-green, and long dark curly hair hanging down her back.

  She looked up, and met Sophie’s eyes for a long moment; then turned the pieces over again in her hand. On the back of the miniature was written only, Paris 1788. The delicate paint was scratched and smudged, as if the girl’s painted image had been shattered by being stomped again and again beneath a furious heel.

  SALLY

  Paris

  Friday, July 27, 1787

  Do you remember my mama, Sally?”

  Polly Jefferson had been quiet for so long that Sally Hemings had thought the little girl asleep. The woods through which the post-chaise drove did little to mitigate the heat of the day; the vehicle’s swaying was like the rocking of a cradle. At the beginning of the journey from Le Havre, Polly had been as wildly excited as Sally by every new glimpse of farmhouses, trees, and distant châteaus; after four days, she had grown accustomed enough to doze.

  Sally could have looked forever, marveling at each half-seen roof or unfamiliar shrub. But she heard the wistfulness in her charge’s voice, and tore her eyes from the green shadows of what M’sieu Petit had told them was the forest of St.-Germain—or at least that’s what Sally thought he’d said. After the tricked parting from Captain Ramsay, Polly had become quieter than she’d been on the Arundel. Mrs. Adams at least hadn’t tricked or lied to the girl, to get her to leave the house at Grosvenor Square with the dapper little Frenchman Mr. Jefferson had sent. Still, Sally was aware of long silences where there had been nonstop, childish chatter before.

  It was the first time Sally had heard her ask about her mother.

  “That I do, sugarbaby.” She put her arm around Polly’s thin shoulders. “I think your mother was about the most beautiful lady I’ve ever seen in my life.” Because of the longing in the little girl’s face, Sally probably would have said so even had it not been true, but in fact Mrs. Jefferson—Miss Patty, she’d been called in the quarters—had been truly lovely.

  “Did she look like Aunt Eppes?” Polly sat up a little straighter, tugged at the brim of her sunbonnet, as if still worried about her father’s admonition not to let herself get freckled. “Jack says Aunt Eppes was Mama’s sister.”

  Jack was Aunt Eppes’s fourteen-year-old son, and the idol of Polly’s young life. On the voyage from Virginia, snuggled together in the curtained bunk she and Sally shared, Polly had asked to hear almost as many stories about Cousin Jack as about her father and her sister Patsy. In addition to listening to Sally’s recollections, Polly would make up tales herself, some of them quite fantastic, involving the slaughter of dragons or the defeat of the armies of the King of Spain. Back at Eppington Plantation, Aunt Eppes used to frown at Polly’s tales and scold primly, Now you know that isn’t so….

  Sally knew she ought to do the same. But it was more fun to pitch in and add magical birds and the Platt-Eye Devil to the mix.

  Besides, Polly knew perfectly well that their stories were only stories.

  “You look more like her than your Aunt Eppes does,” said Sally. She did not add that she herself looked more like the long-dead Patty Jefferson than either Miss Patty’s white half-sister or younger daughter did.

  It was one reason, Sally suspected, Aunt Eppes had been just as happy to get her out of the house. There were many white Virginia ladies who simply accepted the fact that their fathers took slave-women into their beds—sometimes for a night or two, sometimes, in the case of Sally’s mother Betty and old Jack Wayles, for years. Patty Wayles Jefferson had treated Betty’s “bright” children—Sally’s brothers and sisters—if not as members of the immediate family, at least as a privileged sub-branch, and after her father’s death Sally’s mother had been Miss Patty’s maid and confidante.

  For Elizabeth Wayles Eppes, this had not been the case, perhaps because Sally did so much resemble their mutual half-sister. Once when Polly was five she’d asked Sally, “Ranney says you’re kin to me—” Ranney being one of the kitchenmaids. Even at age ten, Sally had known enough to reply, “You go way back in the Bible, back to Noah and the Ark, and you’ll see we’re all kin to each other.” Whether the little girl had pursued enquiries with her aunt, Sally didn’t know.

  Now she went on, “Your mama had curly hair like yours, dark red like yours, not bright like your papa and sister. And her eyes were sort of green that looked gold in some lights, like your papa, or M’sieu Petit.” And she nodded through the windows toward the trim Frenchman who rode beside the chaise, just far enough behind so that the hooves of his mount would not kick extra dust to drift in through the open windows.

  M’sieu Petit was Mr. Jefferson’s valet, and Sally had to smile to herself at the very evident fact that white French valets seemed to stand just as high in their own self-importance as the high-yellow “fancies” generally picked for the job in Virginia. That reflection made her wonder how her brother Jimmy was getting along, among all those French servants.

  Her heart twitched with joy at the thought of seeing him again.

  “Your mama and papa used to play together, her on the harpsichord, him on his fiddle.” She stroked Polly’s hair, tucked the stray locks back under the linen cap she wore beneath her bonnet. “When they’d sing together in Italian, all the mockingbirds in the trees would stop singing and line up on the windowsill to listen, it was so beautiful. And if the sun had gone down, all the flowers in the garden would open up again just a little wee bit—” She demonstrated with her fingers, to make Polly laugh, “—just to hear one more verse before they had to go to sleep.”

  “Silly.” Polly tried to look prim. “Flowers don’t do that.”

  “For your mama they did.”

  Polly giggled, and settled her head comfortably on Sally’s shoulder, blinking out at the green-and-gold dapple of the sunlight, the soft haze of the dust.

  Were it not for Polly Jefferson—nobody ever called the child Mary—Sally thought she would have broken her heart with loneliness, these past two months. Of course, if it weren’t for Polly she’d still be back in Virginia, and not in a coach on the way to Paris, that storybook capital of a storybook, magical land. She wouldn’t be on the verge of seeing her brother again, for the first time in four year
s.

  Every time Polly wrote a letter to her aunt Carr at Monticello, on shipboard and in London at Mrs. Adams’s marvelous house, Sally had enclosed a short note to be read to her friends and family at the mountaintop plantation. She wished she might do the same for the friends she’d made at Eppington, but though Mr. Eppes was on the whole a kindly master, he didn’t hold with slaves knowing how to read and write. She had merely asked Polly to write at the end of her letters, Sally asks to be remembered with love to you all. That way they would know at least that she was alive and well.

  It was Mr. Jefferson who’d first taught Sally her letters. He loved to teach, and had instructed dozens of the slave-children on Monticello, though most of them—especially the ones who ended up out in the tobacco fields—let the skill go rusty. Destined from childhood to be a house-servant, Sally had kept it up. Because Sally had been reared as much by Miss Patty as by her own mother, she’d spent most of her time in the family house, whether it was at Monticello or one of the other Jefferson plantations, Shadwell or Poplar Grove, or for one astonishing season in the big governor’s palace in Williamsburg. Mr. Jefferson’s older daughter Patsy—only a year older than Sally—had delighted in passing along her own lessons to the younger girl. When Patsy grew old enough to be trusted in her father’s library, she’d often bring Sally along with her: a paradise of histories, stories, poems.

  And at the center of it, like a wizard in an enchanted garden, was Mr. Jefferson himself.

  A ripple of something—not quite heat and not quite the shivers, neither truly anger nor sadness—went through her at the thought of Mr. Jefferson.

  Sally couldn’t remember back before she’d loved him, though the day she’d quit doing so was vivid as yesterday in her mind. It still filled her with sadness, and a sense of confusion for which she had no name. She’d seen them so often together, Mr. Jefferson and Miss Patty. Had been aware of how deeply they loved one another, like the red rose and the briar in the old ballad, inextricably twined.