Patriot Hearts: A Novel of the Founding Mothers

by Barbara Hambly

  “Can you come with me as far as the Champs-Elysées?” she whispered to Sophie. “I have to go back. To go home. I want to go home.”

  It was twilight before Sally and Sophie reached the double line of chestnut trees, the handsome houses of the Champs-Elysées. There were barricades in the rue St.-Honoré, and crowds still gathered, shouting, around orators in the Place Louis XV. Sally suspected that’s where the mob had taken their trophies from the Bastille: gunpowder, food, and severed heads. Wine, too. As she and Sophie made their way along those quiet fashionable streets, past the shuttered town houses, she could hear the drunken shouting.

  He’s got to be all right, she told herself, her anxiety growing as they passed first one house and then another silent and dark. He was to ride out to the National Assembly today at Versailles. He wouldn’t have heard about the rioting until noon or maybe later. They were all over at the Bastille on the other side of the city….

  The thought of what she would do—of what they would all do—if Tom had been killed was more than she could bear.

  Please, God. Please.

  Beside that, the prospect of another several months in a household ruled by that bitterly silent girl who had once been her friend, of six weeks and maybe more sharing a ship’s cabin with her, faded.

  Please, God, don’t let me find at Langeac what I found at the Place Royale….

  In her heart she saw the familiar courtyard strewn with shattered crockery and dropped silverware, with scarves and gloves and the broken corpses of books. Saw the rooms she knew sacked and emptied. Saw blood splashed on the library walls.

  Not that. Please not that.

  “Sally!”

  The voice stopped her in her tracks—almost stopped the breath in her lungs. In the deepening twilight she couldn’t imagine how he’d even seen her, much less recognized her.

  As if she were no more than a trick of shadow, Sophie faded back into the trees and was gone.

  Sally was alone when Jefferson came striding across the road to her, breaking into a run. He caught her in his arms, crushed her, as if uncertain whether to embrace her or shake her til her teeth rattled: “Are you all right? Where did you go? Why did you leave? Don’t ever do that—don’t ever go out like that….”

  She pulled back from him, looked up into his face. I’m a free woman, she told herself. And I can choose.

  It took all her strength to speak. “I’m going to have a baby.” She saw him reel back, eyes widening at the news, all the anger going out of him for the moment. Say it, Sally, say it—“And I didn’t want my baby born a slave.”

  His face changed. Blood surged up under the thin fair skin as he understood that she hadn’t meant to come back. His eyes turned bleak with the same pale rage she had seen when her brother had dared to bargain with him. When Patsy had turned from him toward the Church that he hated.

  An anger made greater, maybe, because he had no reply that would fit in with the ideals he had proclaimed before all the world.

  She went on, “But I can’t stay here in France now. The men—the mob—They killed the soldiers at the Bastille. They carried their heads down the street, and the King’s army didn’t do a thing. There’s no bread in the city, no food—”

  “And that’s the only reason you came back?” He caught her face in his hand, forcing her eyes to his. The strength in his hand was enough, she felt, to break her jaw. “Because you were afraid?”

  She closed her eyes, her whole body rigid and cold. “I didn’t want you to stop me.”

  By the hoarse draw of his breath he was fighting to keep his temper, the temper of a Virginia gentleman, trained since childhood to rule his slaves and his womenfolk. The temper against which he had struggled all his life.

  “Do you trust me so little, Sally?” he asked at last, and she opened her eyes to see in his not only icy anger, but grief, and guilt, and shame for his country, whose laws she feared. And still deeper, the fear of being left alone by those he cared for. “You should have told me—”

  “When it comes to my child I can’t trust anyone. I don’t know who to trust.”

  His eyes turned from hers.

  “You could die the day after we put foot in Virginia, Tom. And then I’d belong to Patsy—”

  “Patsy doesn’t know.” It was one of the few times her name had been spoken between them, as if his daughter were a wife he was betraying, an adultery of the heart.

  Sally said nothing. Only looked up at him with her green eyes.

  “Don’t leave me.” His hand tightened around her hair, where it straggled down from beneath her cap. “Don’t ever leave me.” A man speaking, not a philosopher. Perhaps the closest she’d ever seen him, to the man he was inside. Not as good a man as he needed people to think he was, but a real one.

  “I’ll make arrangements for the child.” His long hand was now cupping her cheek, his eyes, dark in the gathering darkness, looking down into hers. As if by will alone he could force her heart to return as well as her body. She saw that he wore the rough corduroy coat and boots that he’d wear to go rambling in the woods, looking for butterflies or rare plants. Later she learned that he hadn’t gone into Versailles that day at all, but that the whole household had been imprisoned in the Hôtel Langeac since sunup, hearing the gunfire and the shouting across the river at the Invalides.

  “I promise you our son will be a free man. I’ll be coming back here next year, I’ll send for you—and for him—as soon as it’s safe. I swear it, Sally.”

  Looking up into his eyes, Sally thought, He probably even believes that.

  “But I want you with me. I want you near me.” His soft voice, husky and hesitant at the best of times, stumbled over the admission, as if he weren’t used to speaking the truth about anything he felt. “I’ve lost too many people in my life, too many dead. People I loved, people who were the bricks and stones of my heart. One can only lose so many bricks from a wall before the wall gives way. You’ve always been—”

  He stopped himself, as if some part deeper than conscious thought realized he was about to say words to her that no Virginia gentleman could say to a black girl. As if he were in danger of forgetting, in this darkness that smelled of drifting powder-smoke, that she was a black girl, and he a white man. They were both of them prisoners within their skins.

  But there was a part of him that couldn’t forget.

  “I need to know you’ll be there,” he finished, stumblingly.

  Like a footstool? Or a water-bottle to keep his bed warm?

  Like the wife he had sworn never to take? When he’d reach for her in the darkness, press his face to her hair, was that because he needed her, Sally Hemings, or just that he needed someone to fill that empty hole in his life?

  Would he understand if she asked him that question?

  And if he knew, would he speak a true answer?

  Since the dark before dawn that morning, she felt she had aged a dozen years. Like the officers of the Bastille guard, she had opened her eyes on a world that now no longer existed.

  And where else was there for her to go, but back to Virginia with him? To what acquaintance in England or Italy or Holland could the American Minister send a pregnant girl who had once been his slave, without admitting what no Virginian, much less the much-acclaimed Apostle of Liberty, would ever speak of?

  “I’ll be there,” she said. “I promise you. Just free my children—our children—and I’ll be there for you, as long as I live.”

  His arms closed around her, tightly, greedily, pressing her against him as he did in the secret enclave of his bedroom, that world-within-a-world which was the only place in which they could be to one another what they actually were. Having said the words, having stepped past the point of no return, Sally felt a kind of dazed relief that she wouldn’t be obliged by Fate and duty to leave him. That he’d remain a part of her life, and she of his.

  A voice within her was crying, What have I done?

  But she had no answer to that.


  He kissed her then, in the dark beneath the chestnut trees, and led her back across the Champs-Elysées, bloodied and filthy with the debris of yesterday’s riots. His hand felt warm and strong against the small of her back.

  “Did you indeed see them, when they destroyed the Bastille?” There was a wistfulness in his voice, a vibrant eagerness, as if he wished he had been there, too.

  She wished he had. Maybe then he would be less ready to say, It is a glorious time.

  Or maybe he would say it still. He was a man, and his first love was and always would be liberty. As genuine as his possessive need for her was the craving to see other men cast off the chains of tyranny, and freedom was worth more to him than his own life.

  “I saw them,” she said. “I heard people saying that they’re tearing down its very walls, to show the King that he can no longer make them slaves.”

  “And I daresay to remove a potential royal cannon emplacement commanding the gate into the city,” commented Jefferson, with a swift flash of practicality. “It is indeed a glorious time to be alive, Sally—but not one in which I’d wish to see my daughters embroiled. Or my son.”

  He kissed her again, and handed her back her parcel which he’d been carrying. Then with a businesslike air he led her to the gate of the Hôtel, and rapped at it sharply, two quick raps, then three more.

  The judas slid open. Sally saw candlelight and Adrien Petit’s dark eyes. Then as swiftly it shut, and the wicket beside the carriage-gate opened. “I found her,” said Jefferson, and led her inside. “She went to take some things to Miss Sparling, early, before trouble could start in the streets.”

  As he led the way quickly across the black pit of the courtyard, the house door opened. In the dim light Patsy stood silhouetted, tall and rigid with fury, like the angel with the sword guarding the gate of a vanished paradise, as her father and Sally came up the steps.

  “Sally says the mob destroyed the Bastille.” Tom’s eyes almost glowed in the candlelight. “The King cannot pretend, now, that things can go back as they were.”

  And Sally thought, No. No one can pretend that things can go back as they were.

  Washington City

  Wednesday, August 24, 1814

  11:30 A.M.

  “It was an ill year,” said Sophie quietly, “1789.”

  Dolley turned the mirror over in her hand. Beyond the windows, the street was now a torrent of carts, wagons, carriages, masked in yellow dust. The silence of the morning had given way to the constant clatter of harness, the yelling of men, and the barking of dogs.

  “An ill year all around,” she murmured.

  Pol sidled along her perch, flapped her wings for attention and, when Dolley stretched out a hand to stroke her head, ducked into the touch like a cat. What will happen to Pol, wondered Dolley, should worse come to worst? Her mind still flinched from coming out with the words: If the British defeat us. If the British march into Washington.

  If the city is sacked, Jemmy taken prisoner…

  She studied, with a curious sadness, the ivory miniature on the back of the mirror. It was in 1789 that the armies had started marching again.

  “We all thought it such a marvelous thing,” she told Sophie. “The French rising in revolt against their King.”

  “You weren’t there.”

  “No. But those who were, who saw the bloodshed, some of them saw the wider end: that Liberty should blossom in another land than ours. That year poor Martha saw her husband made President, and her hopes that she would live quietly with him and those she loved dashed. Not so great a tragedy, one would say, whose granddaughters and nieces had someone to look after them properly. Abigail would have reveled in it, save of course, that Mr. Adams was furious that he hadn’t been elected Vice President unanimously, as General Washington was elected President. And so of course Abigail had to be indignant, too.”

  “Abigail had worries of her own that year.” Sophie moved to the mantel, and took down the small clock that Mr. Jefferson had given Dolley and Jemmy at their wedding; wrapped it in one of Dolley’s silver-tissue turbans as she spoke. “Troubles which she could not tell John. They were back in Braintree by then—in the finest house in town, which, she wrote me, looked much larger in her memories than it turned out to be once they tried to get all their French and English furniture into it. It was that year that it began to be clear to her that her daughter’s fine husband hadn’t the slightest intention of actually working for a living, being under the impression that as a Hero of the Revolution—” Her tone was as subtle and sharp as a glass splinter. “—the new government must of course provide him with a lucrative position. I think that was also the year her son Charley—one of the pair she left behind in Massachusetts—was thrown out of Harvard for a drunken prank.”

  “Poor Charley.” A shiver of foreboding went through Dolley, at the memory of what had become of that charming, gentle, intelligent young man. “And poor Abigail.”

  Her own son’s charming, gentle, intelligent face seemed to her, for a moment, to glance from the little mirror’s depths.

  Was that what invariably happened to those whose mothers set them down in what they believed was a safe place, to labor at their husbands’ sides in the vineyard of Liberty?

  No, she thought quickly. Payne’s case is different. My son will outgrow his bad habits. He will be all right….

  Would Payne’s life have been different, without the events of 1789?

  She set the mirror down. “It was the year my father—” Even at the distance of two and a half decades, it was hard to understand what had happened to the man Dolley had known.

  “He went bankrupt that year,” she said slowly. “Dost know that it is the rule in many Meetings, that a man who cannot pay his creditors is read out of the Congregation? It broke my father. The Meeting was his life. He became lost in some inner darkness. He would not come out of his room. He would bolt the door, and Mama took to sleeping with us—Lucy and Anna and Mary and me. When John Todd offered for my hand, Mama begged me to accept him. To hesitate, and wait upon my own heart, was a luxury I could not afford. We were wed on Twelfth Night, John and I. The thirty-first anniversary of Martha Washington’s marriage to the General, and a bare month before Patsy Jefferson, not even eight weeks returned from France, married her Mr. Randolph.”

  “And moved into Monticello with him.” Sophie tucked the clock into the trunk, and packed it into place with a shawl. “To show her father she didn’t need him, yet wasn’t about to leave his side.” She rose, shook out her somber skirts. “I’m going to go see if McGraw’s anywhere in sight, with or without a vehicle. If you’re going to stay here, I think it’s high time we started counting how many able-bodied men we have in the house, and how many weapons.”

  “The day before yesterday, we had a hundred,” Dolley said bitterly. “And Colonel Carberry swore upon his sword that they would stay and defend the house from the British. I should like to think they’re on their way to Bladensburg at this moment—Yes, Paul?”

  The young valet had appeared again in the parlor door.

  “Mrs. Madison? M’sieu Roux wants to know, will you be serving dinner this afternoon?”

  “Yes, of course. Please ask M’sieu Sioussat to set the tables for forty.” Dolley turned back to Sophie, who was looking at her as if at a madwoman. “Martha Washington often said to me that the whole of her task, as the Presidentress, was to show the country, and the world, the nature of the office of President. The nature of what we, as a republic, are and should be.” Dolley sat again at the desk, where the letter she’d begun yesterday to her sister still lay unfinished beside the Queen’s mirror, a fragment of normality that seemed to say, I have not fled.

  I will not flee.

  “It isn’t enough to say it, she would tell me. The French spent years, during the Revolution, saying how things should be. One must live as an example. That is the reason, whatever happens, I must not flee.”

  Dolley looked, for a long mom
ent, into the chilly eyes of her friend.

  Then she added, “And why I must not be taken. Nor Jemmy, either.”

  “A challenging conundrum,” murmured Sophie, “given the bravery and superb organization of the militia guarding the Bladensburg Bridge. Between counting out dessert-forks, I shall still ask M’sieu Sioussat how many guns are in the house.”

  “Surely the British won’t—”

  “I’m not thinking of the British,” said Sophie quietly. “I’m thinking of looters.”

  She disappeared into the dark of the hall. For a long minute Dolley sat at the desk, the unfinished letter to her sister Lucy beneath her fingertips.

  I am determined not to go myself until I see Mr. Madison safe…Disaffection stalks around us…My friends and acquaintances are all gone…

  The words seemed clear one moment, gibberish the next.

  And do those who remain do so only to speed our enemies’ pursuit?

  She plucked her tortoiseshell snuffbox from the desk-drawer, inhaled a pinch—a nasty habit, she knew, but the nicotine soothed her.

  Lucy, she thought, lifting the letter and half smiling in spite of her fear at the thought of her brash and pretty blond sister. It was Lucy who had first brought her and Martha Washington together in 1793.

  In the year that the world tore itself apart.

  If 1789 had been an ill year for everyone, 1793 had at times had the quality of nightmare, as if the Horsemen of the Apocalypse had ridden across the land.

  War, Greed, Plague…and Death on his pale horse, following after.

  Outside the windows, above the curtain of dust, clouds had begun to thicken, and far off she heard the rumble of thunder.

  It will storm, she thought, and soak the men….

  But the thunder did not stop. Not a single peal, but a heavy sustained booming, muffled by distance…

  “Do you hear it?” Sophie reappeared, her hands full of silver plate and Dolley’s shawls.