Patriot Hearts: A Novel of the Founding Mothers

by Barbara Hambly

  Yet as she took Johnny’s arm to walk back to Sam’s house on Winter Street, Abigail couldn’t help seeing the sag of a much older man beginning in her son’s shoulders. Though only twenty-six, Johnny had a shuttered look to his eyes, like a house whose inhabitants have gone away, or withdrawn to its innermost rooms.

  He didn’t look that way in France.

  His old easy cheerfulness had vanished. It’s because of the factions that have split this country, ever since the fighting began in France.

  That conflict, growing like a cancer as John had predicted that it would, was enough to trouble anyone’s rest, even before the French had declared war on everyone around them and started trying to drag America into it to save their own unwashed necks. In Paris, Johnny had spent at least two evenings a week at Jefferson’s Hôtel, and had looked on the Virginian as a sort of exotic uncle.

  To watch the man he’d respected—the man he thought he knew—become a supporter of the crew of murderers now in charge of France must be as difficult for her son as Abigail knew it was for her husband. Sometimes it seemed to her that she had never really known Jefferson. That the Jefferson she had known had been…What? A dissimulation? A mask?

  But she knew how deeply John felt betrayed.

  The newspapers that supported Jefferson’s faction had begun to claim that John Adams must be a supporter of monarchy and an enemy of freedom. Abigail had grown used to this kind of thing from the Tory press in London. To see this slime being thrown at John by his own people filled her with rage.

  And so it must Johnny.

  The cobbles underfoot were treacherous—she caught her son’s strong arm for support. Wrath for his country’s sake had to be what ate at his heart. His secretive gloom couldn’t, certainly, have anything to do with that silly girl he’d fallen in love with, just after he’d finished his legal studies. Completely aside from the fact that the girl was only fifteen, Johnny had been in no financial position to take on a bride: Abigail wasn’t about to permit a repeat of Nabby’s difficulties. Faced with her objections—and John’s—Johnny had renounced his Miss Frazer, and had settled down to politics and work.

  “Did Father write to you before he left?” he asked, in his abrupt way.

  “I’ve had nothing since last we spoke.” Which had been ten days ago, when Johnny had ridden down for Sunday dinner in Braintree—although the northern part of the town, where John and Abigail had settled upon their return from France, was now called Quincy, in honor of Abigail’s grandfather who had helped found it. “He said that he, and everyone else in the government, had removed from Philadelphia to Germantown, on account of the yellow fever.”

  She shuddered, remembering the women who’d made her Philadelphia receptions so entertaining: Ann Bingham and Eliza Drinker, Eliza Powel and Harriet Manigault and Betsey Hamilton. Educated women, well-read and well-informed. Most of them had the means to flee the city, but how far would the disease spread inland from the wharves where the newspapers said that it had started?

  “Nothing about Tommy?”

  Abigail shook her head. Tommy had been sharing quarters with his father in the house of Mr. Otis, the Secretary of the Senate, but when John had fled, like everyone else, to Germantown, his letter hadn’t said whether Tommy had gone with him, taken up residence elsewhere, or remained in Philadelphia. Since the plague had only begun to take hold then it probably had not seemed important.

  Now long lists of the dead were being published, so many there were not men enough to bury them, nor carts to haul away the bodies. The mansion at Bush Hill, the Boston paper said, “formerly the home of Vice President Adams and his wife”—a drafty, horrible place it had been in the winter of 1790, its fourteen fireplaces beggaring them just to keep from freezing—had now been converted to a plague hospital. Though not in general fanciful, Abigail had had a hideous vision of John being taken there, dying in the place where he had once been honored. The town was empty. Even the church bells had been stilled to avoid panicking the remaining population. The ships at the wharves stood silent, their crews dead or deserted.

  Her hand closed tight over Johnny’s arm as they walked along the bricks of Queen Street—only these days it was the upper half of State Street—toward the Common. They passed Brattle Street: The house still stood where her daughter Susanna had been born and had so quickly died. Their feet trod the same bricks over which she and Nabby had raced at the sound of gunfire, to see the snow of King Street all splashed with blood.

  Boston had changed. After the noisy grandeur of London and the stinking glamor of Paris, it would always seem small. The streets were as narrow as those of Paris, though they smelled, like everything else in the town, of fish as well as wood smoke and privies. The buildings cramped shoulder-to-shoulder, soot-darkened wood, the tiny panes of window-glass a memory of England’s rules about what could be imported and what couldn’t. The tin horns of fishmongers, the iron wheels of carriages, the muffled thump of workmen’s hammers in cobblers’ and cabinetmakers’ and silversmiths’ shops reechoed through those twisty streets, and the tap of passersby on the cobbles, their voices mingling with tavern dinner-bells.

  But since the new Constitution had gone into effect—since the various states had begun pulling together instead of in whatever direction each chose—Abigail had seen the town’s wharves rebuilt, that had been pulled apart for firewood during the siege. New houses were being constructed on the high ground north of the Common, and up toward Barton’s Point.

  In Boston, reflected Abigail, one didn’t see beggars in every alleyway, as there had been in London and Paris. Or boys who should have been in school sweeping horse-droppings from the pavement in the hopes that someone would throw them a halfpenny so they might eat that day. Trade—with both England and France—was slowly getting back on its feet. Small manufactories were growing in spite of England’s efforts to undersell local competition, new farms were springing up along the frontiers.

  And all of this—all that we have accomplished—will be swept away again, if we go to war.

  She felt the implacable heat of rage rise through her, at those—like Thomas Jefferson, who once had been her friend—whose passion for faction was pulling the country apart.

  Cousin Sam’s house stood on Winter Street, a gloomy three-story structure that had at one time been painted yellow and was long overdue for a freshening-up. For years he’d hung on to the moldering pile of the family home on Purchase Street, though after the damage done to it by the British occupation he’d never had the money to get it put right. The Revolution was pretty much the only thing Sam had ever turned his hand to that had succeeded. He was as bad about keeping track of money as Jefferson was.

  And as deluded in his enthusiasm for France.

  But much as Abigail distrusted Sam, it was difficult not to like the bright-eyed gentleman who met her at the door with a smiling embrace and a kiss on both cheeks. “My dear, you’re as beautiful as ever you were. So glad to see you in better health these days.”

  “Abigail, dearest!” Bess Adams slipped around her husband, took Abigail’s hand. “It’s good to see you in town at last. Louisa’s in the kitchen with Hannah and the children”—Sam’s daughter by his first marriage and her family shared the house with them—“and I’ve made Sam swear a Bible oath to leave off politics for the duration of dinner. We are family,” she went on, sliding a plump arm around Abigail’s waist and leading her down the passageway to the kitchen. “And I’m sure, worried as you must be about John and Tommy, that the last thing you need is a lot of wrangling over the roast.”

  As Bess had promised, Abigail’s niece Louisa was in the kitchen. But instead of Hannah Adams Wells and Sam’s grandchildren, with that dark-haired, pretty young woman was a young man in shirtsleeves, whose raven hair fell in a rakish curl over black brows that flared back like a bird’s wings. He held the coffee-caddy while Louisa set the mill on the table. He was saying something to her, quietly and intently, and both looked around at once as Be
ss and Abigail entered the room.

  “Now, Louisa, don’t you be listening to a single thing Mr. Boyne has to say to you,” warned Bess, with a good-natured shake of her finger. “Abigail, this is Sam’s clerk, Mr. Boyne. Mr. Michael Boyne, Mrs. Adams.”

  “A pleasure and an honor, ma’am.” If his name hadn’t announced his origins, his sliding Irish vowels did so as he bowed. “I’ve read your husband’s work with interest; my employer didn’t lie when he said his cousin had read everything under the sun and had it all at his fingertips.” He glanced at Louisa, catching the young woman’s eye, and added, “He didn’t lie either, when he said Mr. John Adams had done his posterity the favor of marrying into the handsomest family in the state.”

  Bess stooped to the hearth and swept the coals from the top of the Dutch oven. “I told you not to listen to a word he said.” She lifted the lid and the rich odor of duck and molasses billowed into the air like the music of trumpets.

  Sam’s Bible oath held good for about ten minutes, which wasn’t bad, for Adamses. During that ten minutes, Abigail related to Sam and Bess, to Hannah and her husband Captain Wells, the contents of John’s most recent letter from Philadelphia, which was the reason she’d accepted Bess’s invitation to dine. Despite their political differences—and despite John’s occasional jealousy, during the War years, when in Paris people would lose interest in him the moment they realized he wasn’t the Mr. Adams—Sam and John loved one another like brothers. Sam had gathered every fragment of news from Philadelphia that he could, though it was little enough.

  “I’ve heard that the young wife of the President’s secretary died of the fever—one of the first cases, I believe,” he told Abigail. “Mr. Hamilton and his wife were both taken ill, though Mr. Hamilton, being from the West Indies himself, treated himself and her with cool infusions, and stayed away from doctors. Never a bad idea,” Sam added with a chuckle, though his only son, who had died soon after the War, had been a surgeon in Washington’s Army.

  “You don’t think Mr. Hancock has the fever?” asked Bess, genuinely concerned. “He’s not been well all summer.”

  The dapper little ex-tea-smuggler had beaten Sam for Governor of the State of Massachusetts every year for the past seven years, to Sam’s bitter chagrin. In 1789 Sam had been elected lieutenant governor, and his friends in the legislature had gotten together and pushed through a bill attaching a salary of five hundred pounds to the post, so that Sam would have something to live on.

  “The Hancocks have a summer place in Braintree—Quincy,” Louisa corrected herself with a fleeting smile that reminded Abigail heartbreakingly of Louisa’s father, her scapegrace brother William, when he was young. “It’s mostly dropsy, Mrs. Hancock says, and he gets so tired so easily, for all that he’s only a few years younger than Uncle John.”

  Shortly before they’d sailed from England in ’88, Abigail had gotten word of her brother William’s death, and of the fact that William had left his wife and daughters penniless.

  Will hadn’t been a bad man, Abigail insisted. Just a very foolish one, given to drink and bad company. During her years in Europe, she and sister Mary had had a code between them: If a letter concerned Will, Mary would put a special mark on the outside of it, to warn Abigail not to open it until she was alone. She would usually speak to John later about it, but it was understood in the family that matters concerning Will were not for unguarded public consumption.

  In sixteen-year-old Louisa—whom Abigail had not seen since her good-bye party at Cousin Isaac’s, when the girl had been twelve—Abigail had found the company she so painfully missed, now that Nabby and Colonel Smith were living near New York. In some ways more satisfactory than Nabby, much as Abigail loved and missed her daughter: Louisa was quicker-witted and more outspoken, without Nabby’s silent withdrawals.

  Without, also, the unspoken anger at a husband who had turned out to be worse than useless.

  “They’re saying that in Philadelphia, the worst of the fever is always along the waterfront,” put in Sam’s daughter Hannah. “Wasn’t it that some ships had unloaded sacks of rotten coffee from the West Indies, and it was the fumes from those, piled along the wharves, that engendered the plague?”

  “And I’ve heard it said,” provided her husband, “that it was the refugees from Saint-Domingue that brought it in.”

  “Refugees. Or the sailors from the French fleet that was in Philadelphia when it began,” growled Johnny.

  The young clerk Mr. Boyne snapped to attention like a dog at an alien step. “That’s precisely the sort of tale that the Federalists are putting about in their tame newspapers, to stir up hatred against the French.”

  So much for Bible oaths.

  “You think Americans with their nation’s good at heart need to be ‘stirred up’ to mistrust an invading force that seeks to overthrow the government by riots?” demanded Johnny. “The way they’ve already overthrown half a dozen of their own?”

  Sam set down his spoon. “As much as you Federalists seem to think that Americans need to be ‘stirred up’ by outsiders, to take up arms in the cause of Liberty, both abroad and at home.”

  “If it were Liberty that is being practiced in France, I shouldn’t have any objection,” interposed Abigail calmly. “But there is a line between the cause of Liberty intelligently pursued, and the chaos that leaves men open to the manipulation of demagoguery, and I hope we all know on which side of the line the massacre of innocent people falls.”

  The remainder of the meal reminded Abigail a great deal of those arguments that had taken place around the kitchen table of her old house on Queen Street, with brilliant, passionate Joseph Warren arguing for the necessity of organizing the colonies, and James Otis rising from his seat and spreading his arms in the firelight as if he would embrace all the sleeping earth, speaking of his vision of a world where every man would be free.

  But Joseph Warren’s bullet-torn body had been carried from the field at Breed’s Hill, Abigail remembered as Briesler drove her and Louisa home along the shores of the bay. How would the government now be different, had he lived to contribute his intelligence to the nation for which he’d given the last blood in his heart?

  When she closed her eyes it seemed to her that she could still smell the gunpowder, the sea, and the heavy green perfume of cut hay as she sat with eight-year-old Johnny on top of Penn’s Hill watching that battle: pale gun-flashes flickering through the smoke and flame of Charles Town’s burning houses.

  And James Otis, so mad that he had sometimes had to be confined, had rushed into that same battle with a borrowed musket and emerged unscathed, only to be claimed within months by the demons within his mind. He had died, Abigail recalled, exactly as he would have requested God to take him: struck by lightning, while watching a summer storm, only months before the end of the War.

  How would the world have been different, had his mind remained clear?

  Had John—and Tom Jefferson for that matter—been here, and not in Europe, when the Constitution was forged?

  Would the country now be facing the twin devils of faction and violence, that were dragging the United States toward a firestorm of fratricidal war?

  She looked at Louisa, who had been quiet since they had left Cousin Sam’s house. The girl’s face was weary and a little sad in the luminous glow of the long summer twilight. If Abigail herself hadn’t been so genuinely frightened at the prospect of the pro-French party precipitating the kind of rioting that was tearing France apart, she would have enjoyed the intellectual swordplay over dinner. Even as angry as she was at Sam for his blind disregard of the facts, she felt alive as she hadn’t in over a year.

  She loved Stonyfield Farm, loved having her family around her. But she missed the steely sparkle of Philadelphia politics, the clash of educated minds. She missed the aroma of power, of being part of the destiny of the young nation that was her life.

  John’s life, too, since first they were wed.

  Dear God, don’t let it be t
oo late, she prayed. Bring me back to John’s side, if it is Your will. He needs me at his side—he WILL need me at his side, if he’s to rule this country after President Washington steps down. The two men who were as brothers to him—Tom Jefferson and Cousin Sam—were deceived into the camp of his enemies. It was only upon his family, upon herself and Johnny, that he could rely.

  If he was not already dead, in a mass grave somewhere in Philadelphia. Vitaque mancipio, nulli datur, omnibus usu, the Roman Lucretius had said: Life is only lent to us to use, not given. As the lights of Quincy gleamed ahead of them, a comforting daffodil-yellow against the matte silhouette of hills and trees, Abigail thought despairingly, But don’t take him away NOW! The country needs him, desperately.

  I need him.

  Desperately.

  Half her life, it seemed to her, she’d been waiting to hear whether John were alive or dead. At forty-nine, Abigail was old enough to know that she could survive his death, if God so willed it. She just couldn’t imagine how.

  “It’s still light,” Louisa remarked. “Shall we walk over to Uncle Peter’s before bed, and tell Gran how we found Cousin Sam?” John’s brother Peter now lived in the old wooden house on the Plymouth road where Abigail and John had raised their children during the War. His family included Granny Susie, at ninety-four still brisk and lively after a second widowhood.