Patriot Hearts: A Novel of the Founding Mothers

ABIGAIL

Grosvenor Square, London

Monday, April 2, 1787

Mrs. Adams, ma’am!” A scurry of feet in the upstairs hall, as a mob-capped head poked around the door of the little second-floor parlor that Abigail had taken over as her office at 8 Grosvenor Square. “Becky’s just come from Miss Nabby’s—Mrs. Smith’s,” the maid Esther hastily corrected herself, and the tall, wide-shouldered form of Jack Briesler appeared in the doorway behind her. In spite of everything the Adamses’ very proper English butler Mr. Spiller could do, he couldn’t get Briesler to understand that he must don his powdered footman’s wig every time he came upstairs.

To Briesler’s credit, reflected Abigail, folding her hands over the pages of her sister’s letter and regarding her footman with an expression of mild enquiry that she was far from feeling. Briesler had served under Washington at Trenton and Brooklyn Heights; he wasn’t about to wear any sissified wig if he didn’t absolutely have to.

“Her time is on her, Miss Becky says,” Briesler provided, and Esther’s head bobbed in confirmation. Like Briesler, Esther had come to England with Abigail from Massachusetts four years ago, and the excitement in her face was as great as if it was her own sister, and not her employer’s daughter, who was about to bear a child.

“Is she all right?” Abigail stowed the letter and her reply in their drawer, locked it, wiped her pen, and capped the ink-well with gestures as swift and automatic as smoothing her hair before she stood, shaking off the pinching cramp of rheumatism in her legs and back. Really, I’m getting as stiff as an old lady.

And why not? This day, God willing, I shall be a grandmother.

And as Esther nodded again, Abigail remembered her own pain, her own panic, the day her own first child was born.

But her mother, and her sixteen-year-old sister Betsey, had stayed with her all the previous week, she remembered, as she crossed the hall to her husband’s study door, the two American servants right on her heels. Her sister-in-law had been just across the little dooryard of that small brown house on the Plymouth road: in and out of each other’s kitchens all day the way everyone was in the tiny Massachusetts town of Braintree. There had also been Granny Susie, John’s sweet-natured, bouncy, busy mother. I wasn’t alone in a foreign country, much less a country like England….

John wasn’t in the corner room, whose wide window displayed the wet gray spectacle of Grosvenor Square’s bare trees. The fire was embers in the grate, scruffy little Caesar curled in a tight gray ball before it with his nose hidden in his disreputable tail. The door to the gloomy cubbyhole generally occupied by John’s secretary stood open, and that room was empty as well. “Mr. Briesler, please go downstairs and see if Mr. Adams is in his office. Let him know I’m going over to Mrs. Smith’s right away. I shall probably be there all day, so he’ll be on his own for dinner. And please tell Mrs. Stubbs and Mr. Spiller so.” Even after four years, it felt strange to have to inform one’s cook and one’s butler (of all things!) if one was going to be away at dinner-time.

It crossed her mind to wonder if Nabby still had a cook. Nabby’s husband Colonel Smith had been threatening for weeks to sack that wretched woman, and wasn’t the man to think about the inconvenience of finding another, to a woman in the concluding stages of pregnancy.

In many ways, Abigail reflected as she ascended the stair to the front bedroom, things were a great deal simpler in that four-room farmhouse on the Boston-Plymouth road, war or no war.

War or no war. Another woman would have paused at the recollection of the phrase she’d used uncountable hundreds of times during those eight appalling years: War or no war, this family has to eat; war or no war, you have to do your lessons, Johnny; war or no war, you have no excuse for punching your brother….

It wasn’t in Abigail’s nature to pause. Yet the phrase rang in her mind, as she collected a stouter pair of shoes from the wardrobe, plucked warmer stockings and a heavy India-goods shawl from the highboy—it was always freezing in Nabby’s house—and sent Esther flying down three flights to the kitchen for the bag she’d packed last week. War or no war…

The inner contradiction of those words came home to her now, and she realized she could not even imagine her life, her world, her children’s lives, had there been no war.

The War had shaped her life and theirs. Everything had been a part of it, related to it. She was here in London because of the War. Her first grandchild was going to be born on enemy soil, because of the War.

Because of the War, she had not seen her two youngest children in almost three years.

Nor had those children seen her.

For eight years, there had been nothing but the War, and all that the War had brought. But it troubled her a little now to reflect that she literally could not imagine, No war.

That in her heart of hearts, the War was all there was.

That hot July morning in 1765 when she’d felt the birth-pangs of her own first child, she’d sat down for a moment after the milking, to read over the draft of one of John’s articles for the Boston Gazette. For weeks John had been writing protests against the British Parliament’s decision to levy a tax on all court documents, college diplomas, books, real estate certificates, newspapers—anything comprised of printed paper, even dice and playing cards. At the same time it had announced the tax, Parliament had informed the colonists, from Massachusetts down to Georgia, that they were now responsible for housing and feeding the ten thousand British soldiers who were to be sent to guard the colonial frontiers, either in their own homes or in barracks built at their expense.

Abigail well recalled the flame of anger that scorched her at the arbitrary imposition of these duties—What did Parliament know about conditions in the colonies?—and, hard on its heels, the stab of pain in her vitals, the warm wetness of her water breaking. She hadn’t even had time to call out when her mother came in from the dairy with the milk-pans, saw her gasping, and rushed to her side.

The child who’d been born later that day, twenty-two years ago come July, had been Nabby.

Nabby who would today—Please, God, let it BE sometime today and not tomorrow or Wednesday!—birth a child of her own.

Footsteps creaked in the hall of that tall gray stone town house that was so wildly different from the kitchen of her memory, the kitchen whose open back door had let in the scents of summer fields and orchards just beyond. John appeared in the bedroom doorway, stout, round-faced, blue eyes as bright and as sharp at fifty-seven as they’d been when first they’d met. In times of agitation his plump cheeks tended to turn red and they were like cherries now: “Is she all right?” were the first words out of his mouth.

“Esther seems to think so.” Abigail was lacing up her boots.

“Esther has no more brain in her head than your finches do.”

As if to confirm his opinion of them, Beatrice and Benedick went into a chirping flurry of self-induced hysteria in their gilt cage beside the window. Abigail made a shushing gesture to her husband, fearful that Esther might come up the stairs and hear this remark. John was probably the least diplomatic diplomat since the Goths had sent their emissaries to ancient Rome, and didn’t confine himself to referring to one of his fellow delegates as “a demon of discord” whose life was “one continued insult to good manners and to decency.” He’d gotten better over the years, but when enraged or annoyed he would still say pretty much anything to and about anyone, and had more than once had the servant-girl—who really did sometimes seem to have a brain the size of a grain of bird-shot—in tears.

But the servant who appeared behind John wasn’t Esther, but prim Mr. Spiller the butler. “Shall I have Ned harness the carriage, ma’am?”

“Don’t be silly,” retorted Abigail. “It’s five minutes’ walk to Wimpole Street.” It took most people ten.

“It’s also coming over cloudy again,” John told her. “You’ve been ill most of the winter—”

“Nonsense,” said Abigail, though it was perfectly true that since October she’d been racked by the worst bouts of rheumatism since the voyage from Boston. “I shall have Esther bring along an umbrella. You may need the carriage.”

John shook his head. “Surely the mere concerns of hearth and home haven’t driven it from your mind that we’re dining with Lord Carmarthen today? To give me one last chance at getting some satisfaction about those articles of the treaty that the Crown hasn’t honored and shows not the slightest intention of honoring….”

“Drat it!” Abigail had forgotten, though she’d been writing to her sister Mary about dining with the Foreign Secretary moments before Esther and Briesler had come in with the news. “You might as well stop at home, for all the good talking to Carmarthen is going to do. What good is negotiating a treaty, and having even the King sign it, if they refuse to comply with it? They’re still keeping troops along our frontiers, they’re still seizing our shipping and claiming it’s smuggled, and still forcing American sailors into their navy.” She finished lacing her other boot, straightened up to face her husband. “And if they’ve honored a single one of the claims of Americans here in London that you’ve petitioned for—”

She broke off, seeing Esther come up the stairs again, cloaked and hooded for a walk in the harsh spring chill and carrying the oiled-silk umbrella that Abigail had purchased in Paris rather than condemn herself to forever doling out shillings and sous for sedan-chairs when it came on to rain.

Nabby needed her. In Nabby’s position, she herself would have been content to bear a child alone in an enemy land, if doing so would allow her mother to attend a gathering so potentially vital to the cause of the young Republic, always supposing her gentle mother would have done any such thing in her life. But Nabby, Abigail suspected, did not have her strength. She firmly pushed aside her disappointment at not being able to be in two places at once, and said, “Please tender my regrets, and Nabby’s, to Lady Carmarthen. I shall send a note from Nabby’s this afternoon.” She wrapped the thicker India shawl around her shoulders, over the one she’d been wearing that morning already. Though she’d put on weight since coming to England, Abigail still felt the damp cold profoundly. There were weeks on end when it seemed to her that she never got warm.

“Would it help if I came?” John—and his maniacally inquisitive friend Tom Jefferson—were the only men Abigail had ever met who would actually volunteer to be present at a childbirth.

“It will help most, dear sir,” said Abigail, laying a hand to his cheek, “if you do precisely as a minister should: Dine with Lord Carmarthen, and impress upon him the dishonor that he does to his country, and his country to itself, by disregarding the treaty. And let me deal with the mere concerns of hearth and home. I shall send word to you at once if there is…” She hesitated, unwilling even to say it. Instead, she finished with, “if there is anything you need to know.”

For all her fine-boned thinness Abigail had birthed five children without trouble, but for a fleeting instant she saw the shadow in John’s eyes. She knew exactly what was in his mind: the haunted look in Tom Jefferson’s eyes, when anyone spoke of the beloved wife whose childbearing had taken her life. They descended the stairs in silence, to the hall where Briesler waited with heavy cloaks, broad-brimmed hats, tall iron shoe-pattens, stout gloves, and the basket of linen rags, lint, soap, spirits of wine, thread, and fine-honed scissors. Abigail had made sure the best midwife in London had been engaged but never left anything to chance.

On the way downstairs she added her Bible, a copy of Richardson’s Pamela (which she knew to be one of Nabby’s favorites), and Buchan’s Domestic Medicine. John opened the door for the little party onto the chilly sparkle of the cloudy April day, and she turned back and put her hand to John’s cheek again. “All will be well, dear sir,” she promised.

Like her, she thought as she descended the front steps, John, too, wished to be in two places at once, both doing his duty to his country and sitting at his daughter’s side.

London.

Abigail moved along Duke Street at a brisk pace. The pattens on her shoes scraped and clanked on flagstones slimy with the morning’s rain and several days’ accumulation of horse-droppings. London was a far cleaner city than Paris, where passersby had no hesitation about using the doorways and carriage-gates of strangers’ houses as urinals, but even here on its northern edge the air was gritty with the smoke of too many chimneys, redolent of privies, horses, and garbage rotting in back-lanes. Her dressmaker spoke of London being “thin of company,” as Parliament had not yet opened, but you couldn’t tell it from the number of carts and carriages jostling for space along Duke Street, the shaggy louts carrying sedan-chairs, the vendors of everything from coal to hot pies bawling their wares at the top of their lungs.

Gulls cried overhead. Even so far from the river, the air smelled of the sea.

A wild scent that brought back to her the view of Boston, when she’d climb to the rock slabs on top of Penn’s Hill and see it spread before her: the small brown wooden city under its haze of smoke, seeming to rise out of the shining stretches of water that surrounded it; the narrow dry strip of the Boston Neck that linked it with the mainland; the islands all floating in the brightness and the forest on the green hills beyond. The birds like clouds wheeling above the salt-marshes on either side of the Neck, and the white snips of sails clustering along the wharves.

Nabby had climbed Penn’s Hill with her hundreds of times, during those days when John was riding the circuit of the courts, a sturdy little blond girl who’d laugh when the clouds broke and sunlight would sweep across the water as though driven by the wind.

Was it the War, Abigail wondered, that made our daughter so silent?

When the redcoats first swarmed on the Long Wharf to garrison Boston in October of 1768, she and John were living in the town. The rented house on Brattle Street lay close enough to the Commons so that she was waked each morning by the regimental drums. Nabby was three then, toddling about the sand-floored kitchen in stiff muslin pinafores or playing with her Boston cousins, for Abigail’s family—the Smiths—was a large one, and had outposts from Salem all down the coast.

In the evenings John and his wily cousin Sam would argue before the parlor fire, and Abigail would put Nabby, and baby Johnny, to bed and come down to take part in the talk. Joseph Warren had come often, one of the masterminds behind the struggle for colonial liberties, and James Otis, like a half-mad Titan whose mind flashed primordial fire. She remembered elegant little John Hancock presenting her with his best smuggled tea, and quiet, steady Paul Revere going to the shed for another log. How many nights had Nabby lain awake in her cot, listening open-eyed to the voices of the men?

When did she begin to understand?

Susanna was born at the end of that year, named for John’s mother, and died not long after the end of the next. Even her recollection of that awful grief, and of the numb feeling of hollowness that followed, was mingled in Abigail’s mind with the Revolution. A month and a day after little Susanna’s death, a British captain was taunted by a mob in King Street and shouted for reinforcements. To this day, nobody really knew who fired the first shot.

She remembered Nabby’s frantic silence as the five-year-old clung to her in the kitchen, listening to the crackling fusillade of gunfire, the sea-roar of men shouting. She’d tried to leave Nabby and three-year-old Johnny with Pattie, the hired girl, but her daughter had screamed and screamed until Abigail took her along. Heavy already with another pregnancy, she’d refused to accept the woman’s part of sitting at home with her frightened children, waiting for someone to tell her what had happened.

When she saw the bodies in the bloodied snow of King Street she’d bent to cover her daughter’s eyes. Drifts of powder smoke still hung over the street when Abigail reached it, the gritty, sulfurous smell mingling with the metallic tang of blood. Abigail had been barely conscious of Nabby’s arms tightening around her neck, of the little girl pressing her face to her shoulder, small hands gripping her hair.

John was asked to defend the soldiers at their trial. Cousin Sam had been outraged, but John had retorted, “Counsel is the very last thing any accused person should lack in a free country.” Even Sam couldn’t argue with that. Abigail was too far along with child to go to the courthouse—Charley was born in May—the very summation of why there were times when she wished with all her heart that she’d been born a man.

“Nonsense,” sister Mary wrote back to her complaint. “If you’d been born a man, Abby, you’d never get to kiss John without the whole town talking.”

Two years later they bought a house in Queen Street. They were still living there—Nabby nine by then, solemn Johnny seven, Charley a gay and sunny five, and Tommy a toddler of three—when the ships of the British East India Company sailed into the harbor with an immense cargo of tea that they had to sell to someone or go bankrupt. The Crown had decided to crack down on colonial smuggling in America and force the colonies to buy only Company tea, with a nominal Crown tax.

Abigail was ill that December, as she often was, with an inflamed chest and a fever. Beneath the quilts of their gloomy little salt-box of a bedroom, she tossed, unable to sleep through the long nights after the tea-ships docked. She’d listened to the church bells tolling endlessly, as if for a plague. The streets were eerily silent. Everyone knew something was coming.

Through her open door she heard the voices murmuring in the kitchen, at all hours of day or night during those two endless weeks. “What if they do fight?” she heard John ask. “What if they call out soldiers to protect the tea?”

“What a pamphlet that will make!” She could almost see Cousin Sam rub his hands, gloating over the prospect. He was a burly ruddy-faced man who’d failed in half a dozen businesses because he was far too interested in politics to pay attention to merely making a living, a man without fear for his own life nor with regard for the lives of those around him. From the small bedroom where the four children slept, all crowded together in one bed, she heard Nabby cry out softly in one of her nightmares—the child had not had nightmares, thought Abigail, when she was tiny.

“They won’t do it though, my lad.” Cousin Sam sounded regretful. Looking back on it, Abigail often remembered the scene not as something overheard, but as if she’d been down in the dark kitchen herself, seeing the two men’s faces by the glow of the banked embers beneath the chimney’s loops of pots and chains. Sam’s square, mobile features with his short-cropped hair bristling up where his hat had disarrayed it, and the shoulders of his threadbare coat dark with rain; John’s face half hidden in the shadow, expressionless, but his eyes very bright. “Good God, Johnny my boy, have you seen how many men have come in from the countryside? Five thousand! Some of them have walked clear down from Salem to be here—to make sure we stand too many together to be dispersed with a few volleys.”

Sometimes when she’d dream about the scene, Abigail saw that Sam carried a bundle beneath his arm, three feet long and heavy, wrapped in a striped trade-blanket such as peddlers sold to the Indians of the western forests. Where it slipped aside she saw metal glint.

“There’s another meeting at the Old South Church this afternoon,” added a light tenor voice that Abigail knew as John Hancock’s. “That’s where the lobsterbacks will be looking. We’re meeting in the back room of Edes and Gill’s print-shop. As soon as it’s dark we’ll move out. When we pass the Old South we’ll have as many men following us as we need. Believe me, there’ll be no trouble.”

“Oh, there’ll be trouble.” As Abigail drifted deeper into sleep she heard the lightness creep into John’s voice, like a soldier who frets on the eve of battle but sings as the charge begins. “Just not right away.”

Through the drizzling day that had followed those whispered conversations, Abigail remembered now as she turned along Oxford Street, Nabby had not spoken one word about what was going on in the city. The girl had gone about her chores and read her lessons in the indifferent silence that was becoming characteristic of her, in contrast to Johnny and Charley, who were in and out of their mother’s room a hundred times. The boys were going to a nearby dame-school to learn their letters, but since men had been pouring into the town after the docking of the tea ships, and red-coated soldiers patrolled the streets, Abigail had kept them both at home. She’d insisted they keep up with their lessons nevertheless.

“You must be strong,” she’d said to them, when with fall of darkness the voices of the men assembled outside Old South grew louder. She gathered them close to her on the bed, Charley and Nabby and Johnny, and Tommy a babe in the crib. “I expect all of you to be strong, to be worthy and to serve your country as your father is doing.”

God help them, she had thought, they will need strength, if anything goes wrong. If something happens to John.

When Johnny and Charley had been put to bed, Nabby remained in Abigail’s room, reading to her. Her young voice had barely paused, when torchlight had streamed past the window; she had not even looked up. Abigail had wanted to ask her then if she still had nightmares, but could not.

Later, when John had come in and Nabby had run to him to silently clasp him round the waist, he had laid a hand on her head but looked over her at Abigail. He had said only, “The die is cast.”

A scruffy little boy dressed in men’s cast-offs darted up to Abigail at the corner of Marylebone Road and offered, for a halfpenny, to sweep the crossing: “Fine lady like you don’t want to get ’er clogs all shitty,” he explained with a winning smile. He didn’t look any older than Johnny had been when the fighting started with England, and was probably as illiterate as Abigail’s finches.

“Indeed I don’t,” she agreed, and handed him a farthing. “And the rest when we’re safely across the road.” Far from being offended, the boy gave her a dazzling grin and leaped into the traffic with his birch-broom, carving a path through the trampled swamp of dung while he dodged drays, riders, and the fast-moving phaetons of the rich. According to Abigail’s closest London friend Sarah Atkinson, hundreds of parentless children slept under the bushes in the Park, or beneath the arches of the public buildings. They died of pneumonia every winter like the sparrows that fell from the frozen branches.

“You should be in school,” she informed the boy, handing him the second installment of the fee when Briesler, in his stout boots, had steadied her across the slippery cobblestones to the far corner. “Surely you don’t plan to still sweep a crossing when you’re grown?”

The child took the coin with unimpaired cheer. “Lor’ no, ma’am. When I’m growed I’ll take the King’s shillin’ an’ be a soldier.”

Before she could reply he gave her a brisk salute, and dashed away to proposition his next customer, a stout gentleman emerging from a wine-shop. And where will your King send YOU, Abigail wondered, the next time he needs to avenge ninety thousand dollars’ worth of ruined tea?

As she’d feared, her son-in-law had sacked the cook, and the young maidservant who answered the door at 10 Wimpole Street had the flustered look of one overwhelmed with too many jobs. “Ma’am, I’m that glad to see you, and so will Mrs. Smith be, too,” exclaimed the girl as she opened the door, forgetting the cardinal rule that good servants were both invisible and mute. English servants, anyway—Abigail had never encountered an American servant who didn’t think himself or herself the equal of their employer. “We sent Katie—that’s the kitchenmaid, ma’am—out for the midwife, and she should be here any time now.”

“Mama!” Colonel William Smith came striding down the stairs, holding out his hands to grasp Abigail’s. “Thank God you’ve come!” Big, dark, and flamboyantly handsome, Colonel Smith looked concerned but not scared. When he kissed Abigail, his breath smelled of brandy.

“When did her pains begin?” asked Abigail, and her son-in-law looked completely nonplussed. “You’re a soldier and you didn’t note the time of the battle’s opening guns? Shame, sir.”

“Eight o’clock or thereabouts,” provided the maid. “And nobbut a few moments long. I’ve got water on the boil, and made her some tea.” And snatching up the apron she had clearly stripped off and dropped onto the hall table moments before opening the door, she vanished down the kitchen stairs again.

The house, Abigail observed as Colonel Smith escorted her volubly up the stairs, though a third the size of 8 Grosvenor Square, was ill-kept and a trifle dirty, and, as she’d feared, freezing cold. No one had cleaned the lamp-chimneys in days, and every candle-holder bore a burned-down stump of melted wax. Wax, she noted, and not the less expensive tallow that Abigail bought for every room in her own house where the smell of them wouldn’t be detected by guests.

She understood, of course, the need to keep up appearances, but she knew also what Colonel Smith was paid as John’s secretary. Though a hero of the War, the handsome New Yorker had no family money, a fact which had not entered into the discussion when Smith had asked for Nabby’s hand. And indeed, in a new nation, with the Colonel’s obvious ambition and drive, family money was less important. John’s father had been a farmer, like the Colonel’s, and a ropemaker in his spare time.

At all events, a cheerful fire burned in the bedroom where Nabby sat, propped among pillows, on a sheet-draped chair before the blaze. In spite of herself Abigail glanced at the sides of the hearth. She was relieved to find that it, at least, had been swept the previous day.

“Mama…” Nabby caught her mother’s hands, and Abigail dropped to her knees to hold her.

It was as if the stiff, withdrawn silences, the indifferences of the war years had never been.

Abigail didn’t know how she could have endured the War, if it had not been for Nabby at her side. Nabby had turned nine four months before the tea was dumped in Boston Harbor; the first shots were fired at Lexington bridge three months before her tenth birthday. When a man weds, he gives hostages to fortune, John Dryden had said a century and a half before. Unspoken in Abigail’s partnership with John was the promise that it was she who would keep those hostages safe.

With the closing of the port of Boston after Cousin Sam’s so-called Tea Party, John and Abigail had moved back to Braintree, to the house on the Plymouth road. Abigail was infinitely thankful for the move in April, when the Minutemen drove the British back into Boston and barricaded them there by encampments on the Boston Neck. Only weeks after that, while John was away at the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, four British warships dropped anchor not four miles from the house. Their goal was to seize hay stored on the nearby Grape Island as fodder for their horses in the town, but they could just as easily have come ashore in force and burned the farms.

All that summer, the countryside seethed. Refugees fled Boston and militiamen marched toward it, and all of them had to be provided with food, drink, and in many cases lodging for a night or a week. With her farm help disappearing into the Army and the tenant in the farm-cottage refusing to either pay rent or vacate, Abigail had been worked to a shadow milking, weeding, mending, cleaning. In June the British had tried to break the seige, and from the top of Penn’s Hill, Abigail and eight-year-old Johnny had watched through her spyglass as crimson-coated British regulars had twice charged the patriot defense works on Breed’s Hill, before the ragged militiamen had finally been driven away. Too mauled to follow up their victory, the British had returned to Boston. The settlement of Charles Town, beneath Breed’s Hill, lay in ashes.

Keep your spirits composed and calm, John wrote her that summer, and don’t suffer yourself to be disturbed by idle reports and frivolous alarms. Every refugee and soldier carried rumors. They spread them like an infestation of lice: of British attack, of smallpox in Boston, of Indians in British pay poised to murder. Moreover, every village and farmstead bubbled sullenly with suspicion, as patriots burned the barns and mutilated the stock of those who remained loyal to the Crown, and Loyalists fled to Boston carrying with them intelligence about the countryside and the disposal of patriot troops.

In case of real danger, John wrote, fly to the woods with our children. Abigail was aware that John’s place was unquestionably with the Congress, fighting to unite the disparate colonies into an entity capable of fielding an army—

But if he’d been in the same room with her then, she’d have brained him with a stick of firewood.

Through all that, Nabby was at her side. Washing clothes and making soap, churning butter and dragging ashes to the ash-heap, trying to save pins and medicine, salt and tinware, coffee and fabric and all the other things that British trade had provided and British laws had forbidden the colonies to manufacture. Trying to make the tiny cache of “hard” currency hidden in the attic floor-boards last as long as it could.

Six-year-old Charley thought that another raid by the British would be a tremendous lark (“I’ll kill ’em, Ma, you’ll see!”) and Johnny drew up intricate contingency plans on the sanded kitchen floor. But what Nabby thought of any of it, Abigail never knew.

At night she told them stories from Virgil and Horace and Livy, of Roman strength and Trojan determination: Horatio guarding the bridge, and Appius who stabbed his own daughter to death rather than have her live a slave. Or tales from the Bible: David and Gideon and Deborah, who led God’s chosen people to victory.

My heart is toward the governors of Israel, that offered themselves willingly, the ancient prophetess had sung. They fought from heaven; the stars in their courses fought against Sisera—the river Kishon swept them away.

“We must be strong,” she told her children, “and keep ourselves fit to be of use to our country.” Johnny’s eyes brooded in the firelight and Charley’s shone, and even Tommy forgot his ever-present fear. Nabby quietly stitched at their shirts, or braided candlewicking, and said nothing. Abigail tried not to think of what would become of them during a British raid, or if she were killed.

Winter came. In its shadow, the pale horseman of sickness rode over the barren fields. John’s brother Elihu died in the camp at Cambridge. Abigail’s sharp-tongued sister Mary fell ill in Salem, and at the Weymouth parsonage, so did her younger sister Betsey, twenty-six that winter and still unwed. When John’s mother fell ill, and Abigail’s servant-girl Pattie and little Tommy, Abigail sent the older boys away to her sister in Salem. Eventually eight of their neighbors died. Some nights Abigail was so exhausted she could only cling to her daughter’s shoulders and weep with weariness, feeling the girl’s thin body stiff as a doll with fear. The day Pattie died, it was Nabby who brought Abigail word that Abigail’s mother was sick as well.

John’s mother recovered, tough as a little walnut.

Abigail’s mother died.

“I’m sorry about the cook.” Nabby winced, groped for her mother’s hand. In her voice Abigail could hear the tremor of pain and fright. “Dinner on Sunday was absolutely frightful, and William went down to the kitchen and found her by the hearth, drunk—and on his brandy, too! It was the third time since Christmas—”

“Don’t fret yourself about the cook.” In Abigail’s opinion William Smith should have been looking for a new cook since Christmas. She said instead, “It’s all right.”

Nabby shook her head, blond hair tangling against the pillows. Tears sprang into her eyes. “It isn’t! I’ve tried—I’ve tried so hard…”

“Child, what are you talking about?” Abigail demanded, gripping her daughter’s swollen hands. “You have done all that can be asked of any woman: to love and obey your parents, to be a good sister to your brothers, to marry a good man and bear strong sons and daughters for the new Republic. She’ll be a new little American, you know,” she added, with an encouraging smile. “One of the first of the new generation.”

“Like those stories you used to tell us.” Nabby managed a smile in reply. “Remember? I always liked Cloetia, escaping from the enemy and swimming across the Tiber under a hail of spears.” Her breath caught and her fingers tightened on Abigail’s. “But I always felt like I’d have been one of her friends, who got left behind as a hostage because Cloetia chose to free the young men, knowing Rome would need the soldiers. I always felt—”

“I daresay the Romans carried their patriotism a bit too far,” responded Abigail firmly, looking down at her daughter’s taut face. “Any woman who bears a child, of either sex, is doing far more for our country than the bravest soldier ever did, and enduring more pain as well. But you’ll come through it, dearest. You’re a Smith—my family Smith, as well as William’s. And we Smith girls are tough as ponies.”

Nabby’s eyes pressed shut, her breath coming in gasps and her hands crushing Abigail’s now as the wave of pain swept over her—Where on earth is that miserable midwife? The pains, though sharp, were still some minutes apart, but who knew how long that would last?

“It won’t be long before she’ll go home—we’ll all go home—and see our country again,” Abigail continued, remembering how desperately she’d needed to hear a friendly voice while she herself had been in labor. “Even your father knows what a waste of his time it is, trying to deal with Parliament. They have no more intention of living up to the terms of the treaty than they do of going back to wearing loincloths and painting themselves blue, though I daresay with the fashions I’ve seen here this season it may come to that. They haven’t made a single reparation for American property seized at sea during the War. Your father has sent to Congress asking for his recall. If they do as they’ve said, and reorganize the government, they’ll need him there. And if he goes, almost certainly Colonel Smith will be called home as well.”

Nabby’s body was racked with an aftermath of sobs. She whispered something, Abigail thought she said, “New York.” Meaning, she guessed, that William Smith’s mother, sister, and younger brothers lived outside New York City, a week’s hard travel from Braintree. But when she leaned close and asked softly, “What did you say, dear?” Nabby asked brokenly, “Did I do the right thing, Ma?”

Tears streamed down her face. As Abigail dried them with the clean spare handkerchief she invariably carried, she felt her own heart contract with guilt. She knew exactly what her daughter meant.

In the spring of 1782, Royall Tyler came to board with Abigail’s sister Mary, who had by that time returned to Braintree to live. Nabby was sixteen.

John had been gone two and a half years by that time. The Congress had sent him to France early in 1778, when the French King had allied himself with the American cause. He’d taken Johnny, not quite eleven years old, ostensibly as an assistant but in truth so that there would be one soul at his side whom he could completely trust. He’d come home for four brief months late in the summer of ’79, and had then departed. This time he took with him both Johnny and Charley.

Nine-year-old Charley had wept to leave Braintree, his cousins, his family, and his friends—Johnny at least had borne his own earlier departure with the stoicism of one who knows his duty to family, country, and his own future worth. No amount of parental encouragement about seeing a foreign land, learning a language that would serve him well in the future, and meeting friends who could put his feet on the road of profession and honor seemed to make a difference to Charley. In the end, all Abigail could do was tell her sobbing middle son that he must strive to excel, and hope.

Since the British had abandoned Boston in 1776, there had been no more fighting in Massachusetts. But the War had gone on. With many of the able-bodied men either in the State militia or the Continental Army, it was hard to find anyone to do the farm’s heavy work, especially given the sharp increase in wages and the scarcity of any kind of real money. Both Congress and the State of Massachusetts had printing-presses instead of treasuries, and most people demanded either specie—of which almost no one had any—or payment in kind: crops, eggs, a lamb. It cost a hundred and fifty dollars just to get a new fence. John took to sending Abigail, from France, small packages of the kind of goods that were scarce in Massachusetts: pins, silk gloves, handkerchiefs of fine muslin, ribbons, the occasional length of fine white lawn. All of these she could sell, or trade.

Somehow, they survived.

Her loneliness, as the months stretched into a year, then two years, was agony. There were days when her longing for his company yawned like a bottomless pit in her soul; nights when sheer carnal hunger for his body filled her with a fever no medicine could slake. Snow heaped around the house in the winters and darkness closed down by four in the afternoon. John’s letters were too often brief, for John had a horror of the British intercepting his correspondence on the high seas.

In the summer of 1781, only months before Cornwallis surrendered, John wrote that he was sending Charley home: He had “too exquisite a sensibility for Europe,” meaning, Abigail guessed, that neither John nor anyone else knew what to make of the boy’s sensitive nature and odd combination of introversion and happy-go-lucky charm. Fear of having the letter—and Charley—intercepted precluded John from saying how, where, or when, which turned out to be just as well for Abigail’s peace of mind. Charley, and one of the two Americans John had entrusted him to, ended up stranded in Spain, caught in high-seas battle with privateers, and becalmed in mid-ocean for weeks before fetching up, five months after setting forth from France, in the shipping town of Beverly, a long day’s journey north of Boston.

Abigail didn’t know whether to fall to her knees praising God for the return of her son or to write her merchant cousin Will in Amsterdam and ask about hiring someone to break a broom over John’s head for sending their boy off alone.

And a few months after that, Royall Tyler had come into her—and Nabby’s—life.

Nabby had at first wanted to have little to do with the handsome young lawyer. Royall was twenty-five, and according to sister Mary—who admittedly had two marriageable daughters of her own to dispose of—had thoroughly disgraced himself at Harvard with drunkenness, profanity, fathering a bastard on the charwoman, and informing the faculty that he cared nothing for a “little paltry degree” which might be bought for twenty shillings anytime he really wanted one.

“My sins were a wild boy’s sins,” he admitted to Abigail, when he ran to catch up with her one summer afternoon on her way home from Mary’s house. “Of them I can only ask, with the Psalmist, that you remember not the sins of my youth, nor my transgressions…Pardon my iniquity, for it is great.” He bowed his head meekly before her, but his dark eyes laughed through his long lashes. “I adore your daughter, Mrs. Adams. Without your aid I am nothing. I cannot open my breast and lay my reformed heart before you on a tray for your inspection, though I would if I could. I ask only that you regard me as tabula rasa, and look upon my present actions with an open mind.”

Abigail was perfectly well aware that she was being flirted with, but she also knew the effects of gossip in Braintree. Though Royall was said to have dissipated a substantial part of the fortune his father had left him (“Of course I did! I was fifteen!”), he was still in possession of a ship, a store, a chaise-and-pair, and a house in Boston, and was negotiating for purchase of the handsomest house in Braintree. It would be no bad thing, she thought, should Nabby wed a man who would be able to keep her well.

And, it was always hard for Abigail to turn a cold shoulder to an educated man. There were few enough people in Braintree with whom she could talk about Voltaire, Cicero, and Plutarch, as she did with John. Royall would drop in at the house on the Plymouth road, as if by accident on his way to and from Boston, to chat in the kitchen or the dairy with mother and daughter. Even when Nabby went to spend weeks in Boston with her Smith relatives, Royall would visit Abigail, to help with the legal business of collecting the long-overdue debts owed John, and to advise her on the details of running the farm and whether investing in land in Vermont would be wise. Afterwards Abigail would write to Nabby, saying that her suitor sent her his love.

She had, she admitted, high hopes for the match, if for no other reason than that Nabby’s aloof silences had begun to worry her. She feared that something in Nabby had been changed or broken in the years of war and fear. If she could not love a man as devoted to her as Royall was, and as educated, clever, and witty, to whom would she ever gift her heart?

Was a part of her fear, she wondered now, looking down at her daughter’s face, a fear for herself? Petals scattered on the wind of time can never be regathered. And her own mirror, that icy winter of 1783, showed her gray in her dark hair, and the spoor of age beginning in the corners of her eyes and lips. When she turned thirty-nine in November she wrote to John, Who shall give me back my time? Who shall compensate me for the years I cannot recall?

In France the treaty-wrangling with England dragged on. John sent letters filled with maddened frustration. Two of the other delegates at the Court of Versailles were completely untrustworthy and bickered like cat and dog; another member of the delegation, he suspected, was selling information to the British by means of a letter-drop in a hollow tree by the Tuileries garden. To make matters worse, he shared quarters in Paris with Benjamin Franklin, and the spectacle of the philosopher—who at seventy-seven was arguably too old for that sort of carrying-on—merrily leaping into and out of half the beds in Paris was almost more than he could stand.

In ’81 John had been taken ill on a journey to Holland—“As near to death as any man ever approached without being grasped in his arms”—and since that time, Abigail had lived with fear.

No more letters signed Portia or Lysander, their old courting nicknames.

No more pillow-fights, followed by burning kisses that consumed the whole of her flesh; no more long evenings of talk and argument and jokes about Plutarch in bed until the candles burned out.

No more hope that she would one day look up from weeding the vegetable-garden and see him striding up the path.

Was that why I pushed you to marry Royall Tyler? Because I wanted you to have what I feared I would lose? Another woman would have gently stroked her daughter’s sweat-damp hair—Abigail prosaically wrung out a washrag in the basin, and mopped Nabby’s face. Rewarded by Nabby’s faint shut-eyed smile, and the plump hand stealing up to briefly close around hers.

I only wanted what was best for you, my dearest child.

And at about the time Nabby at last began to unbend, and yield herself to Royall’s enraptured kisses, the letter came from John.

Will you come to me this fall, and go home with me this spring?

“Lord, ma’am, I am that sorry.”

Abigail looked up swiftly as the midwife came in, plump and wheezing and shadowed by a girl who carried a wicker basket bigger than Abigail’s own.

“It’s as if God sent out a circular letter to all the ladies in London at once, saying He wanted every baby birthed sharp this morning and no shilly-shallying about it. I’ve just got back from Clarges Street, with a fine young lady come into the world.” The midwife beamed, and Abigail, who’d ascertained at a glance that the woman had taken the time to change not only her apron but her dress between deliveries, returned her smile.

“And I devoutly hope we shall see another such before the day’s much older,” she replied, and held out her hand. “Mrs. Throckle, as I recall?”

“It is. And you’re Mrs. Adams, if I remember aright, Mrs. Smith’s good mother. I knew when I came home and found that girl of Mrs. Smith’s there, and she told me you’d been sent for as well, I said to myself, ‘Well, there’s one I don’t have to worry will come to harm before I arrive,’ which I’m sorry to say in my business you can’t always count on and that’s the truth.” After a brisk, firm clasp of Abigail’s hand—a welcome change from the upper-class English habit of extending two limp fingers—she turned away at once and began her examination.

“Her waters broke not long after eight, her maid tells me,” Abigail provided, kneeling at Nabby’s other side. “So it’s been—” She glanced at the elaborate little clock that decorated the bedroom’s marble mantel, “—nearly three hours. The pains are about three minutes apart by my watch.”

“Early days yet.” Mrs. Throckle removed the clean towel that covered her basket, and began removing little flasks of olive oil, chamomile, belladonna.

Nabby gave a gasp and a stifled cry, and her hand closed hard on Abigail’s again, her back arching as if it would break. She sobbed, “Ma!” through gritted teeth, and then, desperately, “Papa!” She had been only seven when her youngest brother was born, too young to remain in the house during her mother’s travails, but the knowledge of childbirth’s pain was something it seemed to Abigail that every woman was born understanding. When the contraction was over she clung to Abigail, and shivered, sobbing.

From the street outside the bedroom window Abigail heard the jingle of harness, and rising, angled her head to look down. It was, as she’d half suspected, Nabby’s husband Colonel Smith, just getting into a smart green-and-gold chaise behind a sleek bay gelding. Abigail thought, Damn him, and then, remembering the brandy on his breath as he’d hugged her, Just as well.

“Ma?” Nabby opened her eyes again, struggled to sit a little straighter, to keep her face composed. “Were you afraid? When you had us, I mean, me and Johnny and Charley and Tommy?”

“Of course.” Abigail sat down again beside her. “I think every woman’s afraid, no matter how many times she goes through it safely—as who wouldn’t be?” She rubbed Nabby’s hand, taking comfort, like her daughter, from Mrs. Throckle’s competent bustling presence in the background. “I can assure you, though,” she added, “I was never as afraid having a child as I was crossing the ocean to join your father.”

And Nabby, as Abigail had hoped, blew out her breath in a shaky laugh. Perhaps at the idea of anyone being bothered that much by a sea-voyage—Nabby had been back on her feet and eating heartily within days of boarding the little ship. Perhaps at the idea of her incisive mother being afraid of anything at all.

By the time John’s letter reached her in the fall of ’83, it was too late to embark on the sea. All through the spring of ’84 Abigail made preparations to leave, arranging for the farm to be looked after, and the small rent on the cottage to be collected by John’s brother Peter. Jack Briesler, a veteran who for several years had cut kindling, fixed roofs, and mowed hay at the farm, would go with her, as would Esther Field, the daughter of one of her neighbors, horse-faced, mousy-haired, good-natured, and fifteen. One could not present oneself as the wife of the American Minister to France without servants of some sort, and Abigail wanted to have at least someone around her who could speak English. It was decided that Charley—fourteen now—and twelve-year-old Tommy would remain at the parsonage at Haverhill, fifty miles away near the Vermont border, where her sister Betsey—not an old maid after all—and Betsey’s husband ran a school.

But though Royall Tyler pleaded ardently for an early marriage with Nabby, and pointed to the large and handsome house he’d bought with its eighty acres of farmland, Abigail was beginning to have her doubts. Part of this was due to her own sister. Though Nabby might now hotly defend her suitor, and retort that her aunt Mary had her eye on Royall for a son-in-law herself, as Royall’s landlady Mary had a closer view of him than did anyone else in town. Sister Mary had spoken darkly, both to Abigail and to Nabby, of the young man still having some wild oats to sow. Abigail wondered, too, if Nabby’s sudden “understanding” with Royall had something to do with wanting to remain behind in Braintree.

In the end, when Abigail journeyed to Boston with Briesler and Esther—and a stock of provisions for the voyage including mustard, wine, a barrel of apples, several dozen eggs, tea, coffee, pepper, brown sugar, a sack of Indian meal, and a cow for milk, plus all their bedding, ewers, and chamber-pots—Nabby went with her. For a day or two before the Active sailed, they stayed with Abigail’s uncle Isaac Smith, and it was there, the day before their departure, that Abigail first met Thomas Jefferson.

“I have myself only just been appointed Minister Plenipotentiary in partnership with your husband,” he told her, that summer evening in Uncle Isaac’s wood-paneled company parlor. All the Smiths in Boston had come to bid her and Nabby farewell, and a wide assortment of Quincys, Storers, and Boylstons: that vast spun-steel kinship network that bound New England merchant families together. “Hearing you were in Boston, I came to offer you my escort to Paris.”

“See, Nabby?” Abigail remarked as she extended her hand. “Strange men still accost me out of the blue with offers of elopement to Paris at first acquaintance—not bad for forty.”

Nabby looked shocked, but appreciative laughter danced in Mr. Jefferson’s hazel eyes. He bowed deeply over her hand.

Slender for his gawky height and scholarly-looking, he was one of those fair-skinned sandy redheads who freckle or burn rather than tan, but there was an energy to him, a sort of shy friendliness that Abigail found enormously attractive.

“I’ve made arrangements to cross on the Ceres, out of New York, on the fifth of July, I and my daughter,” he went on, his soft, husky voice marked by slurry Virginia vowels and carelessness with the letter “r.” “If Mrs. Adams would care to accompany me back—”

“That’s very kind of you, Mr. Jefferson,” said Abigail. “But my daughter and I sail tomorrow.”

Jefferson looked disconcerted. By the fact that a woman wouldn’t wait for a gentleman’s escort before crossing the sea? Or because anyone would go ahead and make plans without consulting him? “I hadn’t heard of another ship bound for France that was prepared to take on passengers,” he drawled.

“The Active sails for London.” And, seeing the way those sandy brows shot down over the bridge of his nose, “We’re no longer at war with them, after all.”

“Does that matter, when one counts the dead?”

“If it did, no treaty would have validity and we should never be able to sleep in peace,” retorted Abigail, a little surprised at this prejudice from a man John had described as reasonable and educated. Then she took a second look at the lines of sleeplessness around his eyes, and recalled all she had heard of the viciousness of partisan fighting in the South. And she knew somehow it was his own dead of whom Jefferson spoke.

The Active put to sea on Sunday, June 20, 1784, and immediately began living up to her name. Her cargo was whale-oil and potash, and Abigail’s cow was not the only animal on board. These underlying stenches combined with the ground-in reek of unwashed clothing, sweating bodies, and every meal served and beer spilled in the course of every previous voyage.

From the cabin two small doors let into two eight-by-eight cells, each jammed to the ceiling, it seemed, with trunks. Abigail learned very quickly that chamber-pots had to be emptied out the single porthole immediately, for the next lurch of the ship would inevitably capsize them. The male passengers, Captain Lyde had explained to her, would, like the crew, relieve themselves clinging among the netting draped at the bow.

In all things give thanks unto the Lord.

Abigail shared one cubicle with Esther, and Nabby the other with a woman known universally on board as The Other Mrs. Adams (or, privately, Mrs. Adams of Syracuse, with a nod to Comedy of Errors)—the only Mrs. Adams Abigail had ever met who wasn’t somehow related to John. The Other Mrs. Adams’s brother Lawrence had very gallantly given up his bunk there to Nabby, otherwise the crowding in Abigail and Esther’s cabin would have been impossible. Abigail had intended to go over the bare wooden bunks with arsenic, soap, and camphor before putting a stitch of bedding on them, but even before they were out of the harbor she could only hang on to the door frame for dear life, and within a very few minutes was so sick she could barely stand.

There followed the worst two weeks of her life. In damp weather Abigail had always been prey to rheumatism and headaches, and since the ship was, by its nature, perpetually damp, there were days when, in addition to nausea and the dizziness from dehydration and starvation, her body ached so badly she couldn’t have stood if she’d wanted to. She’d cling to the sides of her bunk, into which she frequently had to be tied because of the high seas and buffeting of the winds, and wonder blindly if she was going to die before she saw John again.

At least she had plenty of company. All night long she could hear the men in the main cabin, and smell them, heaving up such dinners as they’d managed to down in the afternoon. The two cabins allotted to the women were so tiny, so airless, and reeked so badly of the cargo in the holds beneath, that the doors had to be kept open unless their inhabitants were actually in the act of changing clothes or using the bedroom vessels. Whatever modesty had survived the bearing of five children and the housing of large numbers of fleeing refugees in every room of a four-room farmhouse vanished rapidly, Abigail found, when men she’d never seen before came in to assist her while she vomited. When she was able she would return the favor.

This must be, she thought, how men develop the camaraderie they speak of at having passed through battle together.

My strength is made perfect in weakness, Saint Paul had written. Thrice I suffered shipwreck, a night and a day I have been in the deep…in perils of waters, in perils of robbers, in perils by mine own countrymen…in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea….

Abigail felt that the saint had never quite got the credit he deserved, if he went through this very often on his travels.

Then one morning she woke to feel the ship no longer “lively,” as the sailors said, but moving with a steady surge, like a horse at a smooth gallop. Though she still ached in every joint, the absence of nausea was like the glow of health. She went up on deck, and found herself reborn, into a world of sparkling blue and silver, white clouds and shards of white foam and white sails, and a delicious open wildness of salty air. Everything seemed to be moving, dancing—balancing as she was learning to balance. Above the tangle of ropes and masts it seemed to her the whole of the universe exulted.

I’m actually on a ship, she thought, her mind freed for the first time in twelve days from the shackles of reeling sickness, the repeated blank shock of the fear of going to the bottom in a storm. I’m crossing the ocean.

And at the end of this voyage, I’m going to see John.

Journeys end in lovers’ meetings—

I’m going to be in London, and in Paris. Cities dreamed of, read of, heard of as a child…

And I’m going to see John.

Enchanted, Abigail walked to the rail and clung to the bar of damp wood, watching the gray porpoises as they raced along in the wake, so near, it seemed, that she felt she could lean down and touch them. One turned a little as it dove, and for an instant regarded her with a black, wise, mischievous eye. Then it was gone.

“Mrs. Adams!” Captain Lyde sprang down the short steps from the quarterdeck, held out his hands to her. “Good to see you on your feet!”

“Good to be on my feet,” she responded. “And good—you don’t know how good—to be able to come out and breathe air!”

The captain laughed. He was a sturdy-built man, fair-haired and red-faced. Abigail couldn’t imagine how he shaved on board without cutting his own throat, but obviously he did. “And your daughter? She’s a bonny one, she is, and as good a sailor as you could ask for. You’ll let me know if there’s anything I can do for you?”

“I’m glad you mentioned that,” responded Abigail briskly. “I hope you understand that I don’t speak from personal animosity, Captain Lyde, but this ship is a disgrace. There’s an inch of filth in the passageway outside the main cabin, the stench below-decks is enough to turn a Christian’s stomach, and there are rats the size of pit-ponies scurrying back and forth across the rafters above my bunk every night.”

“Er…Mrs. Adams, you won’t find a ship afloat that doesn’t have rats.”

“No, but you don’t have to make their lives easier for them. And you could at least have some of your men swab out the passageway. I don’t wonder I’ve been sick for nearly two weeks. If the ship was in dry dock I’d no doubt still have been sick, from the smell alone.”

Within the hour, three deck-hands were at work below-decks with scrapers, mops, brushes, holystones, and buckets of soapy water and vinegar. If there was nothing that could be done to eliminate the ground-in stinks of tar, half-spoiled salt-pork, whale-oil, and potash, at least the boards of the passageway deck were visible again and Abigail no longer had to clean her shoes coming and going from the cabin. The men muttered, but since Abigail herself led the work team until Captain Lyde tugged her gently back into the cabin, there wasn’t much they could say.

Her next project was the galley. The cook had been accustomed to bringing in whatever foods were cooked in whatever order they got hot—a leg of pork, followed by sometimes a pudding, sometimes a pair of roast fowls, and then a quarter of an hour later, when everyone was finished, he’d reappear with a platter of potatoes. “If not for the sake of your own self-respect,” declared Abigail, confronting the big scar-faced African in the mephitic dark of the galley, “I should think you’d want to learn how to serve a meal for the sake of your own future. What if Captain Lyde were to die of consumption? Then you’d have to go back to being a deck-hand.”

She picked her way around the corner of the high-built sand-box where the fire burned, to the copper of water, which was only lukewarm. “Good heavens, a fire this stingy will never get water cleansing-hot! Anyone would think you were planning to sell the leftover charcoal at the end of the voyage.”

The piggy eyes slitted resentfully; Abigail pretended not to notice.

“Let’s get these dishes clean for a start. Then I’ll show you how gentlemen—and ships’ captains—like to be served their meals. And wash your hands. If Captain Lyde or anyone else ever saw you in daylight they’d never touch food you’d prepared again.”

Ten days after that the sea roughened again. The passengers had to remain below. One of the sailors brought word that land had been sighted, but Captain Lyde didn’t recommend anyone going on deck to see for themselves. The Active rocked like a barrel in a millrace, and twice that evening Abigail was flung from her chair at table, until she roped herself into it, as she did when she sat on deck. That night, Nabby clung to her in the swaying gloom and whispered, “Ma, I don’t want to die! I don’t want to die without seeing Royall again.”

If after waiting four and a half years to see John’s face, Abigail reflected, she and her daughter ended up drowned in the ocean a mere hundred miles from where he sat, her first act upon arrival in Heaven would be to ask God for an explanation, and it had better be a good one.

“It will be all right,” she said, stroking the girl’s fair curls. “It will be fine.”

On the third day the shaken, exhausted passengers crept forth onto the deck. Far off to port, Abigail saw a line of green-rimmed white cliffs, that shallowed to gray beaches and a gray-walled town, and white surf like the ruffle of a petticoat. Between surged an enormous expanse of monstrous gray waves that fell away into still more monstrous troughs, like chasms opening down Neptune’s root-cellar. The sails flapped and cracked like cannons. Spits of rain lashed her face as she stood. Overhead, the sky loured blacker still.

“We could stay beating here in the Channel for days, trying to get around into the Estuary,” explained Captain Lyde, looking more cheerful than he had any right to be considering that nobody on board had had more than an hour’s sleep in three days. “Since these gales sometimes blow for weeks, I’m having the pilot-boat lowered, to take you into Deal.” And he pointed to the wet-black huddle of roofs, the castle that poked up so improbably pale against the drenched green slopes of the hills. “You can get a post-chaise to Canterbury and then on to London, and can be there in a day.”

London, thought Abigail, dazed at the thought.

I’m going to be in LONDON…

In someplace that won’t sink under me, and drown me and Nabby before ever I see John again.

She looked down over the rail at the churning sea and her heart turned to water.

Only the thought of going down with the Active in the Channel, within touching distance of John’s hand, got Abigail down the jerking, swaying, wooden wall of the hull and into the pilot-boat. This lurched and knocked and veered from the ship’s side, leaving a gap of icy sea. Only her own courage, Abigail suspected, got Nabby, Esther, and The Other Mrs. Adams to follow her. The sailors at the oars seemed to treat the matter as all in a day’s work, but with what Abigail knew of Mr. Blunt’s cooking, she suspected life and death were as one to this crew.

Gray rain streamed down into the gray sea. The Other Mrs. Adams wailed that she was going to die, a prophecy she had made hourly for the past thirty days. As a wave the size of a church rose up under the boat like a wall, then dropped away to nothingness, Abigail was inclined to agree with her, though nothing would have induced her to say so. Soft-spoken fellow passenger Mr. Foster grabbed her in his arms and clung fast to the rail, Abigail embracing him as she’d only ever embraced John while spray and rain soaked them both to the skin.

Just let me see him again, she found herself praying. Just let me see him—

There was a noise like thunder and a wave swept the boat up broadside, black oars flailing in air. Mr. Foster’s arms tightened around her and Abigail shut her eyes, and the next instant the keel ground on pebbles.

She opened her eyes to see gray stone beach and emerald hill above her, sailors jumping from the boat to drag it farther up the beach, water the color of steel rushing around their bare shins.

It was Tuesday, the twentieth of July, 1784, and they were in England at last.

Rain began to fall at about noon. Nabby’s pains grew harder, yet the baby showed no signs of coming. Mrs. Throckle’s businesslike cheerfulness settled into a watchful quiet. Exhausted, Nabby clung to Abigail’s hands. Between pains she would ask about her aunt Mary or her cousins Bettie and Luce, or whether Mr. Jefferson had written from Paris—“Do you know if his little daughter is on her way to France, as he said she’d be?”

“She is, and she’ll be landing in England first, to stay with us til he comes for her.” Little Polly Jefferson was seven, too young, in Abigail’s opinion, to suffer the rigors of a sea-voyage. But when news had reached the Virginian in Paris, over two years ago now, that Polly’s tiny sister Lucie had died, Jefferson had been inconsolable. He had been counting the days until Polly was marginally old enough to send for; Abigail could not deny him that, even in her heart. “It will be nice,” added Abigail, watching her daughter’s face worriedly, “to have a child in the house again.”

“Mrs. Jefferson died,” whispered Nabby, “from having a child. That’s what Patsy told me—” Patsy was Jefferson’s oldest daughter, a tall and awkward twelve when Abigail had met her briefly in Boston before their departure. “She had her child early, after they fled from the British attack. She never got over it, Patsy said.” Then as her face convulsed with pain, she cried out, “Johnny!”

Not her husband’s name, reflected Abigail uneasily. Her brother’s.

The house John had rented for them on the outskirts of Paris was huge, set amid a wilderness of tangled garden across the road from the Bois de Boulogne. “We’re constantly discovering new rooms,” Abigail said to Jefferson, when he came calling with a basket of apples, four bottles of wine, and a strange old book about clockwork homunculi that he’d found in a shop on the rue Cluny. “We’ll freeze, come winter. Or starve, wandering about in search of the dining-room. Last night I stumbled upon a theater in the north wing!”

“That doesn’t surprise me,” said Jefferson in his soft voice. “The place was built by the Desmoiselles Verrières, a pair of thoroughly reprehensible sisters.”

“Hmph. I shudder to think the use they’d put to that room on the second floor that’s entirely paneled in mirrors. John says we’ll need the space to entertain, but on twenty-five hundred pounds a year, after one has bought candles and coal and soap and fodder for the horses, I am at a loss as to what we’ll serve our guests—herring and oatmeal, I suppose.”

Jefferson’s hazel eyes widened in alarm as if, just for a moment, he feared she’d actually do it. In the green dapple of the garden’s light and shade, he looked better and more rested than he had in Uncle Isaac’s parlor in Boston two months ago—he’d had a pleasant voyage on a sea as calm as a millpond, he said, drat him. John had told her of the death of Jefferson’s wife, as a result of flight from the British too soon after child-bearing; she understood now his cold anger at the British, the war in his heart that no treaty could ever amend.

“It would help if the servants would actually do some work. The cook won’t hear of so much as washing a dish—it’s all I can do to get him to wash the vegetables. Pauline the coiffeuse—and the Americans we met in London all insist that no woman with pretensions to good society simply hires an itinerant hairdresser or, God forbid, dresses her hair herself—Pauline refuses to sew or sweep or make a bed, not even her own. And our maître d’hôtel doesn’t do anything but make sure that nobody on the staff robs the family but himself.”

“How many do you have?” Jefferson looked back through the vine-covered trees toward the limestone walls, the glittering windows. “I can’t imagine keeping up a house that large with fewer than fifty servants. The Spanish Ambassador has a hundred of them, fifty in livery—one feels as if one is about to be taken prisoner.”

“We have eight,” said Abigail incisively, “Esther and Briesler being worth five apiece. Briesler on the subject of ‘Popish French layabouts that don’t speak a Christian language’ is a treat. Our footman Mr. Petit is at least some use, and young Arnaud is energetic—Arnaud is our frotteur. He spends the entire day swabbing the floors, and emptying and cleaning the chamber-pots. This garden is large enough to make a paying wheat-crop in, yet it doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone to install a necessary-house anywhere on the property.”

“Perhaps you simply haven’t discovered it yet,” suggested Jefferson mischievously. “Who knows what terra incognita lies beyond that pergola there and away into the orchard? A scientific expedition must be mounted—”

“Go along with you!” Abigail poked him with her fan.

“Ma!” a voice called out, and two hurrying figures appeared from around the ruined summerhouse, hand in hand like children. A gray-and-white mongrel—who seemed to have come with the house—romped happily around their feet. “Ma, there’s a fountain back here!”

“You see?” asked Jefferson. “The American spirit will always seek new horizons to explore.”

One of the greatest and most delightful surprises, on their arrival in Europe, had been Nabby’s reunion with her brother Johnny—John Quincy, Abigail supposed she must learn to call him. That somber young gentleman who’d met them in London was a schoolboy no longer. The last time Nabby had seen her brother she’d been fourteen, and Johnny twelve. It had distressed Abigail during John’s brief return in ’79 to see the boy as withdrawn and aloof as his sister, as if he understood the need for sacrifice and excellence that had taken him from his family.

Now they were together again, an affianced young lady of nineteen and a well-traveled diplomatic assistant of seventeen, poking and teasing one another and laughing together as if their postponed childhood had been given back to them. Not even with Royall had Abigail seen her daughter so joyful.

Was it because neither of her older children formed close friendships easily, Abigail wondered, that they became so quickly inseparable? Coming from large and close-knit families themselves, she and John were both used to looking no further than the family for intimacy. In France that meant the small circle of themselves, Nabby, Johnny, and Thomas Jefferson and his daughter. John and Jefferson had worked together in the Philadelphia Congress, John’s hardheaded practicality meshing perfectly with Jefferson’s lyric idealism. But even in ’76, Abigail had detected in their letters something deeper. Jefferson was like a brother neither she nor John had previously realized they’d had; Nabby and Johnny adopted gawky, twelve-year-old Patsy as a sister.

Jefferson, a naturalist to his bones, had a wide circle of friends in Paris. He spent many of his evenings with cronies from the Philosophical Society, and every day but Sunday Patsy lived at the convent school of the Abbaye Royale de Panthemont. There were, of course, no Protestant boarding-schools in France, and to Abigail’s indignant protest, Jefferson replied that he would not have his daughter left alone for most of the day with only the servants.

For the most part, the four Adamses were the whole of each other’s world. In the mornings, Abigail would wake her son and daughter with a brisk tap on their bedroom doors, at opposite ends of the long range of rooms that made up the main block of the house; together they would breakfast in the little red-and-white chamber adjacent to Johnny’s room.

While John and John Quincy—and shaggy little Caesar—were taking a long walk in the Bois de Boulogne, Abigail would outline the day’s chores to the maître d’hôtel, and go over the household accounts. Often she would have their superannuated coachman drive her and Nabby into the city, at an hour when the streets still swarmed with black-clothed lawyers and clerks on their way to the opening of the law-courts, and with barbers and barbers’ assistants en route to customers in lodgings. After being invited to dine with the Swedish, Prussian, and Spanish ministers—with their battalions of liveried servants—Abigail knew that new linens, new china, and new silverware were in order, if the United States was going to appear as anything but a parcel of beggars.

Even with most of its better-off citizens in the country for the summer, Paris was an astonishing place. Its streets seemed perpetually crowded with carriages, carts, sedan-chairs, and vendors shouting their wares at the top of their lungs. The narrow lanes were a constant hazard to life and limb with the rattling speed of light English carriages frantically driven; every wall and fence was placarded with advertisements for plays, books, lost dogs, or lost diamonds, all of which had to be licensed by the chief of police and all of which were pulled down every night, to be reposted the next morning.

On these shopping expeditions she and Nabby were often accompanied by a young Virginia lady named Sophie Sparling, to whom Jefferson introduced them: Sophie’s father had been a Loyalist, Jefferson explained, but his friend (and distant cousin) nevertheless. Miss Sparling, now a paid companion to an Englishwoman living in the Faubourg St.-Antoine, served not only as translator but as their guide to the shops of Paris.

Jefferson shopped, according to John, like an extremely tasteful army sacking a town. Linen for which the Virginian paid three hundred francs in the ultra-fashionable boutiques of the Palais Royale, Sophie showed them for a hundred in the Mont de Piété, the government-run pawnshop where used furniture, dishes, and linens in all states of wear or nonwear might be obtained.

“And whatever you do, don’t buy pepper already ground,” Sophie would advise in her aloof smoky voice. “The shopkeepers adulterate it with powdered dried dog-feces.” Of equal value, to Abigail, were the young woman’s briefings on French social usages: In France, one made calls upon one’s arrival in town, rather than waiting to receive cards from one’s social equals. Before she could undertake the daunting exercise of appearing in a total stranger’s drawing-room in order to bow in French-less silence, Abigail was called upon in the more reassuring American fashion by several American ladies as they returned to Paris with the coming of fall, and the business of making calls and receiving them quickly settled into place in the early afternoons.

This enterprise of calling and being called on, while John was at work in his study, was, to Abigail, the heart of the day and of her life: the business of being a diplomatic hostess, of being at the center of the young Republic’s affairs. Dinner was at two, or a little later if they were invited to dine with other members of the diplomatic corps—Spanish, Swedish, Prussian, Russian. If they dined at home, guests could include Americans engaged in politics or trade in Paris, like the wealthy William Bingham and his beautiful wife Ann, or French favorable to the Americans, like the Duc de la Rochefoucauld.

The talk was of the young Republic, of the hopes men had for France. Abigail heard very quickly of the notorious Tax-Farmers, the financiers who actually ran the kingdom’s economy and France’s mounting and terrifying debts, many of them connected to the American War. Listening to the strange maze of pamphlet-driven demagoguery, special privileges to the King’s friends, salonnières who used fashion to steer politics, and the rotating carousel of Finance Ministers, Abigail felt a deep uneasiness at being allied with these people, at being beholden to them, as a woman might feel upon discovering that the man she’s married is a drunkard and a gambler.

And John, she could tell, felt the same.

After dinner John and Johnny would go to meet Jefferson at Benjamin Franklin’s house to work on the European treaties. On these afternoons Abigail would write—to her sisters, to her nieces, to Uncle Isaac or Uncle Cotton or the friends she’d left behind in Massachusetts. Sometimes she would hear Nabby practicing on the pianoforte in the music-room, or through the windows of her little private parlor see her daughter sketching in the garden, before her mind returned to her correspondence. The gossip of Braintree and the family brought to her not only the tone and timbre of her sisters’ voices; the affairs of the State of Massachusetts, the growing disunion among the States and the increasing snarl of paper-money finances and constant squabbling seemed to be slowly swallowing up the young nation that had so recently come through the fire.

In return, she wrote to Mary and Betsey of the things they’d never seen: the opera and the theater. She and her sisters had read plays, but had never seen them performed, and for Abigail, opera was like being transported to another world. A very different world from Massachusetts, she reflected, the first time the not-quite-clothed corps de ballet tripped out onto the stage. Her mother would have told her to hide her eyes but she was far too fascinated to do so.

But it was the evenings she loved best. Evenings spent at home with John and Johnny, with Nabby and sometimes Jefferson as well, in the candle-lit parlor, Caesar dozing at John’s feet. It was the time for talk, of Paris’s fads and fashions, or of politics with John while Johnny—Hercules, she had nicknamed him, for his sturdy frame—studied his Latin and Greek. In November her son had announced his intention to return to Massachusetts to attend college at Harvard, and no arguments she and John could conjure concerning the greater usefulness of diplomatic experience would sway him.

Those were the evenings, she thought, that for the first time in a decade she felt as if she were having a normal life again. As if the War that had shaped and bent all their lives were finally over, and she could be together with those she loved.

It wasn’t true, she understood. Because of the War, because of the call of the new nation for her husband’s aid, they were in France, far from her sisters and John’s mother and brother—far from poor Charley and young Tommy, growing up as semi-orphans in their uncle’s boarding-school in Haverhill.

Far from Royall Tyler, and the life Nabby would have had, as a young bride with a home of her own.

Between August, when they reached Paris, and their departure in May for John to take up his post as first United States Minister to England, Royall Tyler wrote exactly once to John—as Nabby’s father—and once to Nabby herself. Abigail wrote to Royall a number of times, reminding him how much Nabby looked forward to hearing from him, but with no result. Moreover, her sister continued to provide a disquieting account of Royall’s behavior. He would lose or mislay letters and legal papers sent to him, delay delivery of documents to other members of the family for months.

Abigail was aware that her sister Mary had never liked Royall. Was aware, too, from nearly ten years’ experience with her own mail-pouch romance, how frequently letters went astray at sea. Yet her own disgust with Royall’s light-mindedness was growing, as spring brought preparations for the move to London, and for Johnny’s departure.

It was Johnny’s departure—

The thought half formed itself in her mind, as the baby’s protesting wail rose above the quiet bustle of the stuffy, rain-dark bedroom.

As her daughter’s head fell back onto her breast, Abigail looked swiftly from the crumpled loosening of Nabby’s features to the child in Mrs. Throckle’s hands and back again. “It’s a boy,” she said, with happy wonder, and tiny William Steuben Smith sucked in a deep breath and let out his debut bellow as he dangled naked by his feet in the first lamplight of evening.

The midwife’s girl and Nabby’s maid began their clean-up of the inevitable mess of a new human being’s entry into the mortal world. Esther, who’d kept herself busy in the kitchen through the whole of the endless day, peeped around the bedroom door with her long, horsy face wreathed in smiles. Nabby leaned her head back against Abigail’s shoulder, tears tracking down her cheeks.

My mother cried, Shakespeare’s Beatrice said of her birth; but then there was a star danced, and under that I was born….

Were you born, little grandson, under a dancing star?

“Hush, dear, it’s all right,” she whispered, and stroked Nabby’s hair. “It’s a boy, and it’s all done and over.”

But as Nabby held out her arms for Baby Will, Abigail thought again, It was Johnny’s departure, not Royall’s inconstancy, that sent her into William Smith’s strong arms.

She frowned at the idea, wondering if it were true. Certainly Nabby had been desolated when her oldest brother sailed for Boston, just before the family left Paris for London. And in London, Colonel Smith had been waiting, big and handsome and self-confident; a hero of the War, and not a man to let letters and papers go undelivered and unanswered for months at a time. The Colonel had lived with them for a while when first they’d taken up residence in Grosvenor Square; he’d been attracted to Nabby instantly.

And just as quickly, Abigail admitted to herself, she herself had been drawn to Colonel Smith. She had favored the match, and encouraged it, glad, this time, that Nabby was being courted by a man who would care for her.

For Nabby needs someone, she thought, when a few minutes later deep voices boomed below in the hall. Seeing her reunited with Johnny—seeing her return to smiling wakefulness like the princess in a fairy-tale in Paris—had showed her that. And while Abigail might rail to John about the social laws that robbed a woman of an education, or the judicial ones that forbade her ownership of her own property, she was conscious enough of the world’s ways to know that a woman alone would be subtly ostracized.

She was aware, too—and a little disappointed—that Nabby had not her own strength, nor the sharpness of mind that made her welcome John’s temper-tantrums and the stimulation of politics and literature.

Nabby wanted a companion, the way our Johnny wanted one, all those years of travel to Russia and France. Johnny’s latest letter from Harvard returned to Abigail’s mind. The unhappiness in it was unmistakable as he drove himself in his studies like a man possessed. Nabby was as wretched without a companion as Johnny is now.

Would Colonel Smith’s suit have succeeded, had her brother been here for her to laugh with instead?

The thought was an unsettling one. Abigail tried to put it aside as she helped Esther clothe Nabby in a fresh nightdress and bore her to the bed while Mrs. Throckle wrapped little Will in the dress of tucked lawn that Nabby and Abigail had embroidered that winter. Like the dresses I made for Nabby, Abigail thought, remembering those evenings at the kitchen table, stitching while John wrote articles about the Stamp Act beside her.

So far we have come.

Then the men were in the room, Colonel Smith catching first his new son, then his wife, then Esther and Abigail and Mrs. Throckle and the little assistant each in his giant embrace, laughing all the while with one incompletely powdered lock of raven-black hair hanging in his eyes.

And John was quietly holding Nabby’s hand, his gruff-tempered Yankee face glowing with the softness of absolute love as he looked down at his first grandchild. “We have a new little American,” he said gently, and bent to kiss Nabby’s cheek.

“A new citizen of a new Republic,” agreed Abigail, and joined him by the bed, his arm slipping around her waist. “Colonel Smith works for the legation, which should qualify this house as American soil, I think.”

From somewhere, Colonel Smith produced a decanter and a glass, which he filled and held high: “To America’s newest citizen! May he bring confusion to that scoundrel Carmarthen and may he ram their wretched treaty down their throats!”

Nabby smiled at her parents’ enthusiastic declarations of “Hear, hear!” and drew little Will’s head to her breast. But the old withdrawn look was returning to her eyes, that aloof sadness that Abigail had never quite fathomed. As if, with her child in her arms, she still sought for something she had lost, could never retrieve from the river of the past.

Young William Steuben Smith had just begun to raise his head from the pillow, when the first letters reached John from his old Continental Congress friend, birdlike little Elbridge Gerry, concerning the initial sessions of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. The news from Massachusetts had been unsettling: rebellion in the western counties, rumors of separate governments, even, forming in the Ohio Valley, demands for more paper currency, for equal distribution of property, for summary annihilation of all debts. That at least would put paid to any hope of the British living up to their side of the Treaty of Paris. The Tories in London, who had begun their mockery of John Adams the moment he’d become Minister, jeered that the nation of rabble was clearly showing its true colors and speculated as to how long it would be before they either were conquered by England or returned to the fold of their own chastened accord.

“I should be there,” said John. There was bitterness in his voice.

“In a way, you are.” Abigail set down her pen: a note to Sophie Sparling in Paris, another to her niece Bettie, a third to Cousin Sam’s wife Bess. All the friends whose love sustained her, when one too many Englishwomen exclaimed, “But surely you must prefer it here!” and when the newspapers commented snidely on how “fat and flourishing” the “so-called Ambassador” looked, considering the paltry poverty of his official entertainments.

“Hoping that some member of the Convention will have read my book,” said John drily, “is hardly the same as ‘being there.’ ” In January, John’s Defense of the Constitutions of Government in the United States had been published in London, and copies sent home—a distillation of all John’s experience in the Continental Congress and as a diplomat, of his voracious reading in the field of government and history. Abigail, who had read it over his shoulder, thought it disorganized and prolix. She feared, too, that those who read it would see in his impassioned demand for “a strong executive” a thinly veiled euphemism for an American monarchy to sort out the mess.

When she’d said so to John, however, he’d snapped back at her that the book said nothing of the kind. He defied her to show a connection between a necessarily strong central administrator and the well-meaning blockhead that currently disgraced the throne of France. Abigail had said no more. Privately, she suspected that someone like Tom Jefferson, who believed men were nobler at heart than she had ever actually seen them behave, would make the connection, too.

“I am sure the Convention will see things put right.”

John sniffed. “Oh, you’re sure, are you?” he mocked. “If you’d ever sat through a session of Congress, my girl, you wouldn’t be ‘sure.’ If you’d listened to that pipsqueak Rutledge back in ’76, whining that we should wait until the populace was ‘ready’…How much readier could we have been, with British bayonets at our very throats? If you’d met some of the men who sit in Congress now, you’d be upstairs under the bed tearing your hair out.”

“Then it’s just as well that I haven’t,” responded Abigail mildly, and shook sand over her note. “And I can only hope that while they’re about it, the gentlemen meeting in Philadelphia will have the sense to make it possible for people of my gender to sit through a session of Congress—”

“God save the mark, what a mess we’d be in then!” But it was an old argument between them, and even as he said the words he gave her the quickest glint of a smile. “Bad enough we have some of the men in Congress that we do. And God knows what will happen if they decide to combine all the functions of the government into one Assembly, like that fool Frenchman Turgot is preaching. That way lies nothing but chaos and corruption, the way—”

“Mr. Adams?” The drawing-room door opened. Edward the footman stood framed in it.

“What is it?” barked John, interrupted mid-tirade.

“Sir, there’s a Captain Ramsay downstairs, with a Miss Jefferson to see you. From America, sir.”

Abigail heard their voices as she and John descended the stair.

“I won’t stay here! You go to Hell, God blast your eyes!”

“Miss Jefferson, there’ll be no more of that kind of talk!”

“You don’t care! I hate you!”

And as Abigail, with a startled look at John, opened the door of John’s receiving-room, she was cannoned into by a very disheveled little girl in a much-stained dress of white-and-green chintz, who drew back the next instant and started slapping furiously at Abigail’s skirts, crying, “I hate you! I hate you all!”

“Now, Polly, that’s enough!” The tall girl who’d been standing by the windows, gazing out into Grosvenor Square in amazed delight, reached the child in two long strides just as Abigail caught Polly’s hands in her own. “You swear at me all you please, sugarbaby, but you don’t swear at Mrs. Adams. I am so sorry, ma’am, please don’t blame—”

“I HATE Mrs. Adams!” Polly jerked away from Abigail’s grip and flung herself on the tall girl, hiding her face in her neat blue skirts and bursting into tears.

The girl cupped the back of Polly’s head with one long-fingered hand, and met Abigail’s gaze. Her eyes, Abigail saw, were a clear blue-green, like jewels.

At the same moment Captain Ramsay reached the group, caught the little girl by the arm, and jerked her gently but firmly around to face Abigail again. “Miss Jefferson, this is no way for a young lady to behave. Mrs. Adams is going to take care of you, you know, and we don’t hate those who care for us. Mrs. Adams,” he said, “may I present to you Miss Mary Jefferson? Miss Mary Jefferson, Mrs. Adams; Mr. Adams.”

“Now, Miss Mary, whatever you feel in your heart is of course not my business,” said Abigail, and held out her hand. “But we do have a rule that no one swears in this house. Even Mr. Adams has to obey it.”

Polly raised velvet-brown eyes, profound suspicion dimmed by swimming tears. “Captain Ramsay, too?”

“Captain Ramsay, too.”

Far prettier than her sister Patsy would ever be, Polly Jefferson bore the marks of considerable rough play on her porcelain-fine skin: scratches on her nose and temple, a bruise where she’d bumped her chin. Being Thomas Jefferson’s daughter she had his fair redhead’s skin, now covered with freckles from the sun, and her nails were bitten to the quick. Abigail glanced again at the tall girl she’d flown to for comfort, wondering where Polly’s actual nurse was and how she’d been looking after the girl during the voyage, to let her get into this state. This girl, probably the nursery-maid, was—

Ramsay said, a touch of dryness in his voice, “This is Sally, Polly’s—Miss Jefferson’s—nurse.”

Abigail’s first shock was that this girl, who looked no more than sixteen, should have been put in charge of a child under any circumstances, much less in the dangers and discomforts of an ocean voyage. Only in the next moment did she realize belatedly that the girl was a Negro.

She’d heard Jefferson—and her own father, for that matter—refer to “light” or “bright” Negroes, though her father’s two servants, more indentures than actual slaves, had been chocolate-dark of skin. Most of the black sailors she’d seen on the streets of Boston had been the same, with African features marking their ancestry. The single servant Jefferson had brought from Virginia, Jimmy, though very light of skin, had been unmistakable as to his race.

Sally, watching Abigail with a calm wariness under the long, curling lashes of her eyes, was only a little darker than some of the Italian beauties she’d seen in Paris. Her hair, which hung down her back in a style fashionable in both Paris and London, was a river of dark brown, silky curls.

Abigail said the first thing that came into her mind. “Good God, don’t tell me they sent a chit your age across the ocean as Polly’s only companion?” How dared “Aunt Eppes” be so blithe about the safety of this tiny, too-thin girl?

“Yes, ma’am.” Sally’s speech, like Jefferson’s, reflected the soft inflection of Virginia; otherwise there was in it only a whisper of the sloppy, almost slurring usage Abigail had heard among Boston’s few slaves. “My aunty Isabel was going to come with her, but her time was near, so Mrs. Eppes asked, would I come instead?” She rested her hands on Polly’s thin shoulders. “It was because Polly knew me best, ma’am, and so wouldn’t be afraid.”

“It sounds to me as if several persons should have been a great deal more afraid on Polly’s behalf,” Abigail snapped. “Edward, please tell Esther to have Miss Nabby’s old room made up for Miss Mary, and ask Mr. Briesler to bring up her trunk there at once. Tell him to prepare a truckle-bed there for…for her nurse. While he’s doing that, would you be so good as to take up some hot water for her? Sally, I’m sure Miss Jefferson will feel much better when her face has been washed and her hair combed, and she’s in a clean frock.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Sally took Polly’s hand. Polly wrenched away instantly and seized Captain Ramsay’s red, calloused fingers in a frantic grip. Defiance blazed in her eyes.

“I’ll stay right here, child,” promised the captain.

Polly’s grip tightened. She began to tremble, and tears leaked down her face.

“Go,” Ramsay ordered gently, and with inexorable strength turned his hand out of the little girl’s grip. “I’ll be waiting right here for you, when you come down.”

Abigail saw his glance cross Sally’s. The tall girl flinched the tiniest bit, and her green eyes turned aside. Polly Jefferson gazed back over her shoulder as Sally led her out of the room.

“The girl’ll have her work cut out for her, just washing the bairn’s face, never mind her dress,” prophesied Ramsay, picking up his battered leather hat from the sideboard. “She wore that same dress when Mrs. Eppes and her family brought her aboard. Since her father’s been writin’ for her to come to France, she’s said she wouldn’t leave the Eppeses, so they told her they were just going for a picnic on board. They left as soon as she fell asleep, and damn—dashed if we could get her to change her frock for nigh onto a week. Sally’s fond of the child, but the girl’s never to be found when you want her: always off lookin’ over the rail, or gettin’ the mate to tell her how to shoot the sun or what the names of the sails and ropes are, or askin’ the hands about places they’ve been. You’ll need to keep a sharp eye on her, and keep her at her job. It’s my opinion she should be sent back.”

He shrugged, and held out his hand. “It’s been good making your acquaintance, Mr. Adams, Mrs. Adams. Don’t be too hard on the bairn,” he added, as he strode into the hall, John and Abigail in his wake. “She and Sally have been pets of the whole ship, passengers and crew, and I’m afraid the men weren’t as careful as they ought to have been about their language—not that they’d know how to speak proper if you clapped a gun to their heads. She’ll lose her tongue-roughness as quick as she picked it up.”

“Thank you,” said Abigail, struggling with shocked outrage. “But won’t you remain and bid your good-byes to the child, as you said? It’s clear she is most fond of you.”

“Aye, and if I stayed for a good-bye you’d be all the morning getting her to let go of me. It’d be more grief for her in the long run. Believe me, this way’s best, ma’am. Your servant, sir.” He clasped John’s hand again and slipped out through the front door. Through the windows Abigail saw him striding away across Grosvenor Square.

“Of all the blackguards!” Abigail rounded on John, breathless at this casual betrayal. “I daresay that’s how he takes leave of every woman in his life: ‘If I stayed to say good-bye she’d only cry and make a fuss, so I’ll just disappear and let someone else pick up the pieces.’ Isn’t that just like a man!”

John drew back in alarm. “Dearest, in all the years we’ve been together—”

“In all the years you’ve been deserting me for months—or years—at a time,” retorted Abigail, “no, you’ve never skimped on honorable good-byes….” She heard genuine anger flare in her voice, and made herself stop, and breathe. “And God knows you had plenty of practice at them, sir.” She put her hands on his shoulders and kissed him, as running footsteps sounded on the stair, and Polly Jefferson’s voice sang out.

“Captain Ramsay, come look! I’m to have the prettiest room, with flower curtains on the windows, and—”

The little girl stopped at the foot of the stair, looking in startlement at John and Abigail. Then, like a baby animal, she wheeled and plunged through the door back into John’s receiving-room. Abigail heard her scream, “Captain Ramsay!” In a belated rush of skirts Sally came down the stair and made for the receiving-room door, as Polly came bursting out—face washed, hair combed, but still in the torn and dirty green dress—and flung herself at the front door. “Captain Ramsay!” Sally and Abigail caught her at the same time, as she seized the door handle to pull it open. Polly clung to the curving brass, howling—in grief, in betrayal, in despair at being only eight years old and the dupe of adults who’d trade her happiness for their convenience. When Abigail gently prized the child’s fingers loose Polly struck at her, wordlessly sobbing, then turned and flung herself into Sally’s arms.