Patriot Hearts: A Novel of the Founding Mothers

by Barbara Hambly

  “You know Mme. de Blancheville works servants hard,” cautioned Sophie. “Far worse than Mr. Jefferson. You won’t be allowed to go out of the house, and she’ll require you to become a Catholic.”

  “It won’t be forever. Mr. Jefferson thinks he’ll get leave soon. I would have waited til just before they left, so he couldn’t look for me, but I feared I’d start showing before then. He talks about what a wonderful thing it is, that the French are casting off the chains of a thousand years, but he still doesn’t want his daughters here in the middle of it.”

  “Mr. Jefferson has always impressed me as a man who doesn’t quite understand why things can’t be the way they should be: why the Revolution that he considers so purifying to the human soul—God knows why, he can’t have encountered some of the members of the patriot militia I did—doesn’t actually purify the individual men who participate. Maybe he considers that it purified his soul and that’s all he’s aware of.”

  “He thinks men can be better than they are.”

  “Maybe they can.” Sophie rose and collected a rather battered straw hat. “But politics won’t make them so. We’d better go. If there is another riot and the King’s troops do march in to break it up, I’d rather be close enough to Mme. de Blancheville’s to take refuge there.”

  As they descended the stair, Sally said, “After he’s gone I’ll write to him. I’ll tell him where I am, and why I left as I did. Then when he returns next year, he can do as he likes. He’ll be angry,” she added softly. “But I think he’ll understand.”

  Sophie sniffed.

  “As soon as the baby’s born I’ll start looking for something to do for my living. I can cut and pattern dresses as well as sew. After he’s gone I’ll see if Mme. Dupré—our seamstress—will take me in. I’d go to her now but I think she’d tell him, or tell someone in the house, and it would get back to him. She’s not good at keeping her mouth shut. And she always hated it, that a man would be able to have women and girls as slaves.”

  “It’s hard to find grounds upon which to dispute her sentiments,” Sophie remarked drily, as they reached the street. The mob around the wine-shop was larger now, and angrier, stirring and churning like swarming bees. The same orator or another was still shouting at the crowd, and men were waving pamphlets, fresh-printed and smudgy with cheap ink. Sally glimpsed the headings, ARISE! and FRIEND OF THE PEOPLE. She shivered. This, and the mob who had surged past the Hôtel yesterday to burn the customs barrier, were a far cry from Tom’s sharp-featured face in candlelight as he spoke of the National Assembly meeting in Versailles, of the soldiers who were deserting the King’s regiments in droves to join with the men who demanded an end to royal privilege and royal inefficiency.

  She’d seen pamphlets of the same sort in the kitchen at the Hôtel Langeac, and suspected it was Mme. Dupré who’d brought them in.

  She was almost certain it was Mme. Dupré who’d told Patsy.

  All the servants knew, as servants always knew. During those first few weeks, Jefferson was discreet—with Mr. Short and various other guests in his household he could hardly be otherwise. But he quietly arranged times to meet her away from the house, to visit the gardens of the royal châteaus of Marly and St.-Cloud or to walk in the far pathways of the Bois de Boulogne, where they were unlikely to meet anyone Tom knew. Once or twice he took her, in the evenings, to the Palais Royale, masked and with her hair powdered gray, and had an artist there paint a miniature of her on ivory, to carry in a locket, out of sight of all.

  They would return separately to the house, to meet again in his bedroom, behind the bolted door.

  In France Sally was, to all intents and purposes, a white woman, only a little more dusky of skin than the Spaniards and Italians who carried in their veins the blood of the Levant. It was only the Virginians in the household—Mr. Short, and Patsy, and Polly—who saw her as African, and then only because they’d been brought up from childhood to look for the subtle signs.

  How Tom himself saw her, Sally wasn’t sure. She had heard him say to Mr. Short how abhorrent he found the mingling of the white and the African races, but they were speaking of those slave-owners who thought themselves entitled to cover any bondswoman who took their fancy. She had heard him say to several of his French guests that blacks were “inferior in the faculties of reason” to whites, but this hadn’t stopped him from teaching any number of children at Monticello to read. He certainly talked to her, and always had, as if he expected her to follow his reasoning, and gave every sign of enjoying their conversations as much as he enjoyed lying in her arms.

  But then, Sally suspected that if Tom were being led to the stake, he’d get wrapped up in conversation with the executioners.

  Did he see her differently, she wondered, because she was nearly white? Because he’d known her from childhood? Because she and her family were halfway between the quarters and the Big House, neither white nor field-hand black?

  Because she was Miss Patty’s sister? Because she was “family”?

  However Tom saw her—whatever they were to one another, in the enclosed and secret world of his bedroom—Sally knew that to his older daughter, she was and would always be not only a slave, but a betrayer.

  She’d known the instant someone told Patsy. The silences, the spate of complaints about insolence, laziness, and imagined thefts, were unmistakable.

  Jefferson would have guessed, too. But Patsy, who loved her father with a ferocious passion, would neither ask nor accuse. And it was unthinkable, for Tom to discuss with Sally the reasons for his daughter’s sudden enmity. If Sally was almost white when she was alone with Tom, the moment they stepped out into the rest of the house—the moment he saw her through Patsy’s eyes—she was black again, slipping from one set of rules to another, the way she herself was long used to slipping from the formal, refined speech of white folks to the language of the quarters as soon as she was with her family.

  He admonished Sally gently—in Patsy’s presence—to be a little more humble, a little more mindful of her duties, and like a good Virginian, Sally had murmured, “Yes, sir,” and apologized to Patsy. In her father’s presence there wasn’t much Patsy could say, since the apology was for insolence and laziness, rather than the true crime of lying with Patsy’s father—or being to him what Patsy herself could never be. When Patsy and Polly had returned to the convent, and Tom next spoke to Sally alone, he had only asked, with nebulous gentleness, that she be “patient and good.”

  Sally had not pressed the matter. She had known, long before the day he first told her she’d be going to Eppington with Polly, that he never let anyone talk to him about things he didn’t want to talk about.

  Then a week later Patsy announced that she was going to remain at the Convent of Panthemont, and take her vows as a nun.

  Jefferson was livid. Like a good philosopher he waited two days to cool down, then went to the convent and withdrew both girls, hiring a tutor for young Polly—or Maria, as she was now called, the fashionable variant of Mary—and making Patsy, on the day after her seventeenth birthday, the hostess of his household.

  And with his daughters under his roof, that was the end of even such small freedom as Sally and Tom once had enjoyed.

  Had that been what Patsy intended all along?

  The day had turned savagely hot. The tall soot-black houses and narrow streets of this most ancient portion of the city trapped the heat like a bath of tepid glue. And over all, the vengeful clanging of the church bells.

  Where the rue de la Verrerie crossed the rue St.-Martin Sophie halted, hissed, “Christ Jesus!” through her teeth. Two carts had been dragged shaft-to-shaft across the rue St.-Martin. The whole of the neighborhood, it seemed, swarmed over them like ants, each man or woman adding something to the reinforcement of the wall. Timbers from houses wrecked or burned, doors, window-gratings, shutters, baskets filled with earth. Chunks of cobblestones dug up from the streets; hampers, roof-tiles, rolled-up mattresses, the ruins of a shed. Someone had b
roken into a wine-shop—the sign was worked into the barricade—and people passed the bottles among them as they hoisted stones and wood into place.

  About thirty feet down the rue de la Verrerie another barricade was being built. A knot of the new civic militia stood by that one watching the work, muskets in their hands. Sophie remarked, “I wonder if they have the slightest idea how to load those things, let alone aim them. Let’s backtrack to the rue de Diamant. They’ll be barricading the bridges if we try to go by the quais.”

  “Do you think the King’s troops really will march on the city today?”

  Sophie cocked her head to listen, as if anything might be heard over the wrangle of the bells, the shouting around the barricade. “I think they’d better,” she remarked after a moment, “if they don’t want the whole city torn apart.”

  When the bell-ringers paused to spit on their hands, or the din diminished around those monstrous walls of cobblestone and garbage, Sally thought she could hear, far off, the crack of gunshots.

  “That’ll be the Invalides,” Sophie told her. “I think that’s where my neighbors said they were going to get guns. It’s clear on the other side of the river. Let’s go this way.”

  But there was another barricade where they came out of the tangle of medieval streets near the rue St.-Lazare. In the end they walked nearly to the priory of St.-Martin des Champs before they found a place that wasn’t crowded with armed and angry rioters. By that time the distant shouting was audible over the church bells. “Do you think the King’s troops have attacked?” whispered Sally.

  “We’d have heard gunfire.”

  Even in streets where no looting was going on, everyone was out, no one was working. In other neighborhoods every window was shuttered, every door locked, like streets of the dead. It was like being outside in a storm, not knowing where lightning would hit. “Why doesn’t the King do something?” Sally asked, wondering how she was going to live in this city, how she was going to get through her time, bear her child, with all this going on and maybe worse. It couldn’t last, she knew—if nobody was making any money they’d all be starving, they’d have to go back to work….

  “The King doesn’t do anything because he’s waiting for the good people of France to come to their senses.” The girls flattened back in the doorway of a church as a crowd of armed men jostled past. At least half of them wore the white coats of the King’s troops, unbuttoned over dirty shirts and stained with wine and mud. “And because he doesn’t trust his army to obey their officers. Damnation!” she added, stepping out of their shelter and moving on.

  There were barricades in the rue du Temple, huge ones; it looked like the frenzied citizens were tearing down a house to build them.

  Thirsty in the scorching heat and feeling slightly sick, Sally followed her friend as they tried to work their way around the mobs. The sun hammered down into the streets where for four days now neither garbage nor horse-dung had been collected. The air seemed to be a flashing river of black and silver with whirling flies. Sally stopped, gasping, in the doorway of an apartment-block and vomited. Sophie gripped her arms to support her.

  Head spinning, she leaned against the coarse stucco, wondering if she’d faint. Hoping, dizzy and sickened, that M’sieu Petit and Jimmy had barred the doors of the Hôtel Langeac tight, that everyone was safe inside…

  “Listen!”

  Sally raised her head, dark curls straggling from under her cap, sticking to her face with sweat. Gunfire. And the surging shouts of men.

  “Oh, thank God. The army—”

  “No. If it was regular troops they’d be firing in volleys.”

  Sally swallowed, the taste in her mouth indescribable. “Is that near the Place Royale?”

  “Right behind it,” said Sophie grimly.

  People were running, when they stepped into the street again, men and women—children, too, fierce little urchins with eyes like stray cats’—clutching knives and shouting. Sally staggered, giddy. A nightmare of distant gunfire and shouting, of church bells hammering. Someone running by screeched something about the men of the faubourgs coming in, the artisans and laborers who lived around the city outside the customs-barrier. Sally caught the words “powder in the Bastille,” the old royal fortress that was still used as prison and arsenal. Had someone got word to Tom? Would he try to ride back from Versailles to be with his family? Sally knew he’d try, prayed someone would stop him before he got caught in crossfire, when the troops finally marched in. The stink of smoke snagged her throat. Houses must be burning somewhere.

  Keep him safe. Dear God, keep them all safe, even Patsy….

  They reached the Place Royale to find it silent, as if stricken with plague. The shops along the colonnade had been looted. Some of the brown stone town houses were locked and shuttered, barred. Others stood open, scattered trails of silverware, gowns, curtains, and broken furniture marking like blood-tracks from wounds where the rioters had gone. Exhausted, sick with terror—for Sophie was right, the Bastille lay only a street or two away and the shouting and gunshots seemed right at their elbows—Sally quickened her pace to a run. “What number?” she panted over her shoulder. “Dear God, let her open the door to us….”

  Sophie said, “Number fourteen.” She walked more slowly. Sally paused in her flight, looked behind her impatiently, and saw the look on the older woman’s narrow, pale face. Turned and looked ahead of her, at the closest broken doorway with its dribble of smashed china and spilled flour and apples. Looked up at the number, carved in its little stone shield above the door.

  No, she thought, as if God had somehow made a mistake and if she pointed it out to Him, He’d rectify it. No.

  Though it was bludgeoningly obvious what had happened, Sally had to go to the broken gateway, climb the graceful stair to the rooms above.

  Blood had been shed in the drawing-room. It was splashed on the pale green wall and on the carpet. The cabinets were broken open and everything of value taken. Even the candles had been stripped from their holders. In the terrible stillness, the noise of shouting around the Bastille was hideously loud.

  She looked back as Sophie came into the room behind her. “Would you know where they’d have gone?”

  Sophie shook her head. Trembling, Sally sank into a brocaded chair. “Let’s check the kitchen,” said Sophie reasonably, “and get something to eat. There’s a fountain in the square where we can get water. Do you want to come back to my room, or try to get home?”

  “Your place,” Sally breathed. The thought of standing up again, of going with Sophie down to the kitchen and out to the fountain, was hideous, but even more hideous was the thought of being in that blood-splashed room alone.

  There was of course not a thing to eat in the kitchen. By the state of the garbage it looked like the house had been looted yesterday, when the mobs burned the customs-barricades.

  How can this be happening?

  The old man who’d sold her and Tom lemonade in the Bois—was he shooting at the garrison in the Bastille, trying to get whatever gunpowder was there? Mme. Dupré’s shabby son-in-law and her chubby, joking daughter—were they in the rue St.-Martin adding cobblestones to the barricade?

  How was she going to live in this?

  “We’d best get back.” Sophie finished her inspection of the pantry stores, returned to where Sally sat at the kitchen table. The shouting nearby seemed frenzied now. It surged like the sea in a storm. There was no more shooting, but the wild baying of the mob had a deeper note to it, a savage shrieking of triumph. “It sounds like everyone’s still at the Bastille. We can probably get down the rue St.-Antoine ahead of them. That way, they’ll be between us and the troops, if troops ever come in.”

  “Do you think they will?” Sally got to her feet, shook out her skirts, so tired she felt she would die. She picked up her parcel of clean chemises and stockings, Tom’s letters to her and a few books, and the silver combs he’d bought her for her hair, a parcel she’d carried through the whole of tha
t broiling, nightmare day.

  Sophie’s gray eyes were like dirty ice, as if she were seeing a repeat of a bad play that had disgusted her once already. “Ever, you mean?”

  Sally hadn’t thought in those terms.

  They crossed the Place to its handsome gatehouse, hastened down the short street that connected it with the rue St.-Antoine. They were almost at the corner when a burst of shouting enveloped them. Howls of diabolical glee rolled down the larger street like the blast of cold wind before a storm. The mob surged into view.

  Army deserters, laborers, laundresses. Butchers who hadn’t had meat to cut in weeks, bakers who had neither flour nor wood. Students and clerks, gunpowder and dirt making their faces as black as their coats. Housewives with a child on one hip and a pike in the other hand, hair unloosed, screaming like vicious harpies. The reek of smoke and sulfur churned in the summer air.

  The men in the front row carried pikes. At first, against the hot glare of the sun, Sally thought that what was impaled on them were loaves of bread.

  Then she saw they had faces.

  The parcel fell from her hands and she pressed her fingers to her mouth, and it seemed to her that the entire world shifted, like one of Tom’s optical experiments when he moved the lens. No food, no law, no army, no safe place to hide—no going back to what the world had been.

  Those men—one of the heads still wore the gold-embroidered hat of a garrison commander—had waked up this morning as she had, in a world where the King ruled France and things would eventually be sorted out. The eyes they’d opened this morning looked at her as the mob passed the end of the street: stared past her into a future incomprehensible, rushing like a world-consuming fireball at them all.

  The mob passed, hauling with them carts and wagons filled with sacks—gunpowder or the garrison’s food?—and, riding in the carts, six or seven bewildered and terrified elderly men, all the prisoners who had been kept in the old fortress’s cells. Sally was afraid, when she and Sophie crept out at last, that the cobbles would be splattered with the garrison officers’ blood. But even that had been swallowed up by the black Paris mud.