Patriot Hearts: A Novel of the Founding Mothers

by Barbara Hambly

  That one day his real papa would come back.

  But for Dolley, it was as if she stood on a wharf watching John at the rail of a ship. And the winds took the sails very quickly, bearing John out of sight.

  And with John’s departure—and that of her mother—she was free for the first time in her life to be herself.

  The note was a short one.

  My dear Mrs. Todd,

  My esteemed friend and colleague, Mr. James Madison of Orange County, Virginia, has asked me to introduce him to you. Shall you be home this evening after six?

  Ever sincerely,

  Col. A. Burr.

  James Madison!

  Dolley lowered the note to her desk.

  The Great Little Madison, he was called—and she remembered those brilliant blue eyes, the tired premature lines and graying hair of the slender gentleman in black velvet, who had kept her from falling off the step of Mrs. House’s boardinghouse the day General Washington had ridden into Philadelphia for the Convention, seven years ago.

  James Madison wanted to meet her!

  She realized her heart was pounding hard.

  She had read almost everything Madison had written—either under his own name or a variety of pseudonyms—in newspapers and pamphlets protesting such issues as the corruptibility of the National Bank, and the perils of placing too much power with the President, even a President as honest as Washington. As always, logic, cogency, and clarity impressed her—and at heart, Dolley never quite trusted Alexander Hamilton’s thrust to make the Presidency stronger than the Congress.

  She had too strong an impression that Hamilton intended to occupy that strengthened Presidency himself.

  But because Washington loved his former Secretary of the Treasury as a son, James Madison was seldom a guest at Lady Washington’s receptions, and almost never at those given by ardent Federalists. Dolley had always heard his name spoken with respect, even by men who pointed out that most of the Republicans who objected to friendship with England (like Madison) were Virginians who owed huge sums of money to British merchants (like Madison).

  Burr liked him.

  Dolley wrote two notes, one directed to Burr, saying that of course he must bring his friend to dinner that afternoon at four, if they had no other engagement, and the second to Lizzie Collins.

  Dear friend, thou must come to me. Aaron Burr says that “the Great little Madison” has asked to be brought to see me this evening.

  Having first encountered President Washington in the dining-room of the Executive Mansion while she was helping Martha wash up the good china (he’d offered to help dry), Dolley felt perfectly at ease with most members of the government. As a Quaker, she had been taught from tiniest childhood to disregard worldly titles, and to see all men and women equally as the blessed and fallible children of God. She’d already met many Senators and Congressmen at her mother’s boardinghouse at suppertime, or at least had overheard details of their personal lives discussed by their colleagues. It was disconcerting to be introduced at a Presidential levee to a man whom she’d heard wore women’s clothing when he attended the theater.

  But she found herself worrying, uncharacteristically, what she’d say to Mr. Madison. “Colonel Burr saith he is the most brilliant of the Republicans.” She passed a hairpin back over her shoulder to Anna, who was coaxing Dolley’s raven curls into a fashionable style à la Méduse, and met her eyes in the mirror. “Which he must be, for Colonel Burr to admit anyone is more brilliant than himself. Mr. Madison will think I’m a goose.”

  “If Mr. Madison has asked Colonel Burr to introduce him to thee,” pointed out Anna pragmatically, “he isn’t coming here to pick out flaws.” Her hands rested on Dolley’s shoulders, white, plump, and unfashionably broad above the stiff restriction of corset. “He’s just another gentleman who’s going to make a little bit of a fool of himself.”

  “Colonel Burr come to dinner?” Payne appeared in the doorway behind Anna; Dolley turned in her chair.

  “He is. But I promise thee, he shan’t come up to visit thee if thou give cause for one single problem during dinner—and he surely shall, if thou’rt patient and good.”

  The boy climbed confidingly into Dolley’s lap, unimpressed with the threat. “I be good.” He picked up from the dressing-table the gold locket and chain John had given her, put it around his own neck and admired the effect in the mirror, then turned back to seek his mother’s approval. “Mama, thou’lt marry Colonel Burr?”

  Lately he’d begun asking that question about several of the gentlemen who called to take Dolley and Anna to the theater, or to assemblies, or even walking along Chestnut Street now that the weather was fine again. Usually they’d call in company with friends of Dolley’s—William Wilkins the lawyer generally enlisted the Drinkers, and more than once theater parties had been made up including Lady Washington’s three granddaughters with assorted bachelor Congressmen. Dolley supposed it meant that Payne had accepted that his own father wasn’t coming back, but couldn’t be sure.

  “I cannot marry Colonel Burr, my love, because Colonel Burr is already married to someone else.” She smiled as she said it, but her heart pinched her. Only the week before, when he’d paid her a morning visit at one of her own “at-homes,” Burr had quietly confided his despair over his wife’s eroding health. He had had a letter that day from his daughter—“my two Theos,” he called them—and he’d apologized immediately for letting personal concerns intrude.

  It’s all right, Dolley had said.

  Burr had looked away. For years now I’ve had to prepare myself for what I should do without her, he’d said. It was the first time she’d seen the Senator’s self-possessed confidence broken, like a duelist driven weaponless to the wall. I still haven’t succeeded.

  “Besides,” she added, removing the necklace from Payne’s throat, “even were he a bachelor, Colonel Burr is not of the Congregation. I could not marry him.”

  Payne looked crestfallen. Had he had a bigger vocabulary, reflected Dolley with a sigh, he’d have tried to argue the point, for he was very fond of the catlike little Senator.

  She had Anna lace her into her mulberry silk dress—one of the new ones Martha had urged her to have made, when she began to emerge from mourning—and laced Anna into a complementary white, with a long cherry-colored sash. She privately suspected neither her mother nor John would have approved, but when she and Anna came into the tea-room, Lizzie exclaimed, “Oh, famous!” at the sight of the rich silk. “Richard—Mr. Lee,” she amended hastily, “—said he hath seen thee in red at Mrs. Morris’s. He said how much it became thee—”

  “Richard?” Dolley’s eyebrows went up, and her friend colored. “Not Mr. Lee of the Congress?” She had introduced Lizzie to Virginia Congressman Richard Lee. Lee had been very taken with her friend, but Lizzie, at twenty-six, was notorious in the Congregation for her unsusceptible heart.

  “Mr. Lee is a perfectly rational gentleman, and a pleasure to converse with.” Lizzie opened her fan.

  It occurred to Dolley that at her last several at-home mornings, Richard Lee had made it a point to call…and had spent a good deal of time in conversation with the quiet Lizzie.

  “And,” went on Lizzie, “he tells me that the great scandal at Mrs. Morris’s—dost remember the French émigré bishop, M’sieu Talleyrand? The tall one who looks so strange? They say he was seen walking down Chestnut Street with his mistress, a woman of color, as if this were Paris or Lisbon!”

  “Oh, I’ve seen her!” gasped Anna. “Getting out of her carriage, and she was wearing one of the new Grecian gowns from Paris, like an ancient statue, they say, and no petticoat under it, nor corset either!”

  “Ma’am.” The servant-girl appeared in the tea-room doorway. “Colonel Burr is here, with Mr. Madison.” And she held out her silver tray bearing two white cards.

  Looking back across the years from her desk in the oval parlor—the dim thunder of the guns crackling in the capital city’s heavy air—Dolley sti
ll smiled, remembering Jemmy as a stranger.

  She had remembered Mr. Madison was small, from that first fleeting encounter on the steps of the boarding establishment, and had taken care to wear flat slippers instead of her white silk shoes with their raised French heels. Standing in the doorway of the tea-room, James Madison was indeed an inch shorter than Burr, who frequently claimed he was exactly Dolley’s height and flattered himself when he did so. Though Burr had said they’d been up at Princeton together, Jemmy Madison was five years older than Burr and looked three times that. At forty-three, his hair was nearly white: unpowdered, the way the Republicans were wearing it now, but braided back in an old-fashioned queue and tied with a black velvet ribbon.

  Burr—and Lady Washington—called this man a kingmaker: unimpressive himself, Madison certainly had an unerring eye for charismatic men who could draw the loyalty of both thinking men and the mob. Eliza Custis described him as “a dried-up apple-doll,” though he lacked an apple-doll’s roundness: It was a lifetime of uncertain health which had left him with a labyrinth of fine-pleated wrinkles around his eyes, his mouth, his cheekbones.

  His bright blue eyes were still a lifetime younger than his face.

  “I trust after last summer, every man in the Congress hath his bags packed and one foot out the door already, the moment Mr. Adams’s gavel comes down for the final time?”

  Madison’s dry smile altered the whole of his narrow face. “Alas, Mrs. Todd, I’ve never yet been in any city that wasn’t foul in the summer. New York was just as bad. My friend Mr. Jefferson tells me that Paris was unspeakable even before they started chopping off each other’s heads there, and on the authority of classical writers, ancient Rome was the worst of all. I am forced to assume that the gods intended government to be a winter affair only.”

  Dolley understood at once why Burr and Jemmy were friends. Both had the same dry wit, the same lively sense of humor, the same extraordinary erudition. Like Burr, Madison had an outlook of amused irony on the world, without Burr’s cynical edge. Like Burr, Madison was brilliant, but unlike him, he had, over the years, kept his ideals—Talking to the pair of them was like learning to juggle comets.

  After they left, Dolley lay for a long time awake, trying to read by candlelight and instead reliving bits of the evening’s laughter.

  Almost from that first evening, she knew Jemmy was interested in her. She knew, too, that if he asked her to be his wife, she’d say yes, without a second’s hesitation.

  That fact in itself filled her with alarm.

  The pestering, recurring dreams about taking the wrong road, the nagging sense that her true destiny—her true self—lay elsewhere, if only she could find it…The deep-felt alteration that had consumed her thoughts during her earlier courtship: when sometimes it had been Yes, I do love John, and sometimes only, He is a dear man and a dear friend BUT…

  These were as absent as clouds on a clear morning in summer.

  The morning after their first dinner, Jemmy sent her a note asking her and Anna to be part of a small theater party he was making up. The three lines filled her with as much exultation as if he’d asked her to fly with him to some distant corner of the earth. She found herself blushing when Anna mentioned the dinner—and the theater party—to Mrs. Drinker, and that good-natured Quaker matron raised her brows…as well she might, reflected Dolley.

  The other thing that Jemmy Madison and Aaron Burr had in common was that neither one was a Quaker.

  And most of Dolley’s closest friends still were.

  She recalled her mother’s tears, when she’d found Lucy’s elopement note. Remembered how Molly Payne had sat on the bench in the meeting-house, weeping with a face like stone, when Lucy had been “read out” of the Congregation. Walking home afterwards, she had murmured to Dolley, “I have lost my daughter, and all of her children as well.”

  And yet, thought Dolley, her mother was with Lucy now, looking after her daughter as she prepared for the birth of the first of those children. Molly Payne had written her, inviting her to Harewood that summer. Dolley had already found an émigré Frenchman willing to rent the Walnut Street house with all its furniture until the first of November.

  How utterly had the world changed, since the morning they had gone to Lady Washington’s with that note!

  The child about whom she’d laughed with Martha, born and already dead.

  John dead.

  And herself, lying awake at night, secretly wondering what it would be like, to have Jemmy Madison lying at her side. Knowing she should feel shame, and feeling none.

  She found herself examining John’s old map of Virginia, to see how far Harewood lay from Orange County, where Jemmy would go the moment Congress adjourned in June.

  “Art thou engaged to James Madison?” Martha Washington asked. The last of the morning callers had just departed and Martha’s pretty green-and-white parlor was quiet. Dolley started and flushed like a schoolgirl. The President’s closest supporters—fat Secretary Knox and lean-and-hungry Secretary Pickering—regarded Jemmy as both enemy and apostate for supporting Jefferson and the French.

  She murmured, “No, ma’am.”

  Martha left her chair—which did tend to give her the aspect of a diminutive queen on a throne—and came in a rustle of stiff silver taffeta to sit on the couch beside her. “Dearest, don’t be ashamed. You should be proud. All of us are—Nelly and the General and myself, I mean. And pleased, too, if it’s true, because for all his fondness for those horrible ministers the French keep sending over—and doesn’t the latest one look just like a weasel?—Mr. Madison is a dear friend. And we’ve all been so hoping he would find a wonderful woman and fall in love, and she with him. Has that happened?

  “Austin, dear,” she added, as one of the liveried servants opened the door through to the dining-room, “please bring a little more tea for Mrs. Todd and myself…. Such a nuisance,” she added with a sigh. “We’re going to have to send most of the servants back to Mount Vernon when the General goes to visit next week, but we ourselves must remain in Germantown, because of this horrible ship business with the British. Has Mr. Madison found a lady who’ll love him as he truly deserves to be loved?”

  Dolley folded up her fan, held it closed for a time, looking down at it in her yellow silk lap.

  John had given her that fan, she suddenly recalled. The pierced sandalwood was her favorite; it was the first present he’d surprised her with, after he’d discovered the joys of buying things not because his wife or his son needed them, but solely for their pleasure and his.

  “Maybe not as he deserves to be, ma’am,” said Dolley slowly. “I did try to make John a good wife. I know I tried his patience sorely, about things like the cost of running a household, and what I spend on dresses, and not spanking Payne. And now I’m thinking of marriage, and poor John hasn’t been gone but seven months, completely aside from the fact that he’d be horrified at my wedding a man outside of the Congregation. I feel like I want to write him a letter somehow, apologizing, or explaining…But I don’t even know what I’d say.”

  Beyond the window, the tulip tree flourished its pink blooms. When first she’d admired it, Dolley recalled, it had almost been done with its season. She had spoken about its lavish beauty to John.

  Not even a single cycle of its flowering had passed by.

  “Well, dear,” said Martha gently, “perhaps you might think what John would write to you. If he were—Oh, if he were about to be sent on a voyage to Tasmania or China, or the Moon, and it was a condition of the voyage that he would never, ever come back, nor be able to write to you ever again. Do you think he would write, before he left, I want you to be loyal and lonely? I’d rather you weren’t too happy? Please let Payne grow up without a father? Our vows of marriage are until Death comes between us—but only until then.”

  For a long time, Dolley did not answer. Then she asked softly, “How long was it after Mr. Custis died, that thee knew thou wanted to marry the General?”


  “Eight months.”

  Their eyes met. At another time, in another context, Dolley knew they both would have laughed.

  “And yet I very much loved Daniel. There are many sorts of love, Dolley. Do you think John, who is now able to talk daily with the Inventor of all love, doesn’t understand this?”

  Dolley shook her head.

  “And I’ve never subscribed to the belief that each of us is capable of truly loving only one other person in our lives. Thank you, Austin.” Martha smiled at the servant who brought in the fresh tea. “Or is it just that you’re worried what the members of the Congregation will say, who knew and loved John?”

  Her glance was so knowing that this time Dolley did laugh. “Nay, I know what they shall say. And it shall have naught to do with loving or not loving John, but only that Mr. Madison is an Outsider. I shall lose many friends for it.”

  “Perhaps not as many as you think, dear.” Martha held out the dish of tea-cakes: Dolley shook her head. “And for the rest…friends do have a way of coming back to us, the ones who truly have our good at heart. And as the Arabs say, The dogs bark, but the caravan passes on. Would you rather be a village dog in the middle of the desert somewhere, or bound for some marvelous city bearing all the treasure of the world?”

  When she returned home that afternoon, Dolley packed up her mourning dresses and had Anna help her carry them to the attic. They both made silly jokes and laughed a great deal, like schoolgirls playing truant, having a wonderful time yet nervous about the inevitable repercussions. Between her own preparations for renting out the house and visiting Harewood, and lending a hand in Martha’s packing-up of the Presidential Mansion in order to move out to Germantown before the fever could return, there was a great deal of dust raised, and when Dolley came down with an eye infection she couldn’t avoid the superstitious reflection that she was being “punished where she had sinned.”