Patriot Hearts: A Novel of the Founding Mothers

DOLLEY

Washington City

August 24, 1814

Now I think on’t,” said Dolley, with what she hoped was an expression of bright thoughtfulness, “I think I saw the mirror last week in one of the drawers of the sewing-table in the parlor upstairs. Wouldst go seek it, whilst I clear up here?”

Sophie is my friend, she chided herself as the other woman disappeared through the parlor door. She is no spy! But even as she thought this, Dolley strode to the writing-desk and pulled out Jemmy’s most recent letters. Her hands shook with haste as she folded them into a tight packet, bound them with the first piece of string she could find. And even were she so, what think I she’ll do? Take Jemmy’s letters from me at pistol-point? She realized she was mentally timing Sophie’s probable progress across the hall, up the stairs, into the big oval parlor. She was still wondering where she could thrust the letters that would be out of sight, when Sukey’s voice nearly startled her out of her skin.

“Ma’am—”

She whirled, breathless, to see the maidservant standing in the doorway.

“Ma’am, the men along the walls? They’s gone.”

Dolley reached the window in a swirl of muslin, and saw that the maid spoke true. The top of the wall was empty. She thrust Jemmy’s papers back into the writing-desk and turned the key, kept it in her hand as she hastened across the cavernous hall to the vast “East Room.” From its long windows she could see Pennsylvania Avenue.

The knots of watchers had gone. A cloud of dust now hung over the Avenue, through which carriages, wagons, and hurrying forms could dimly be made out. Fleeing toward Georgetown.

The sky above the eastern hills was still clear.

Trembling, Dolley crossed back through the hallway. From the entry-hall by the Mansion’s great front doors she could hear her majordomo, M’sieu Sioussat—French John, the servants called him—talking to the butler, his voice measured and calm. French John had trained for the priesthood, sailed the seven seas, and had been held up by his father over the heads of the crowd to see the French King’s execution, twenty years ago: Not much troubled him.

He will stand by me, thought Dolley. And he’ll know what to do, should worse come to worst.

Surely I am not the first beneath this roof, who hath known trouble and fear.

To her left, through the door of the oval drawing-room, General Washington’s portrait was visible. Someone had pulled from it the gauze that protected all the house’s paintings and mirrors in summer, and from its rich, muted background of reds and grays, the General gazed out at the world. The throne he had refused stood in shadow behind him, the sword he had wielded transferred to his left hand while his right—the hand of power and intent—stretched out over the pens and papers of due process and law.

He seemed to wait calmly for the army that he had once defeated to make its appearance on the threshold of the house he had built.

And he looked remarkably, thought Dolley, as he had the first time she’d seen him.

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Sunday, May 13, 1787

The church bells began to ring while the family was still in Meeting. Hearing them through the walls of the Pine Street Meeting-House, nineteen-year-old Dolley Payne reflected that if she were a better-disciplined soul, the arrival of General George Washington in Philadelphia would be a matter of sublime indifference to her. Yet at the sound, her glance shot sidelong and caught that of her best friend Lizzie Collins, and saw in her eyes the reflection of the excitement effervescing in her own.

General Washington was coming to Philadelphia!

A buzz riffled the stuffy gloom of the meeting-house as every child in the gallery whispered, poked, and was silenced by the adults whose turn it was to keep order up there. On the way to Meeting that morning one of her ten-year-old sister Lucy’s friends had dashed past them, calling out, “General Washington’s coming today! The cavalry went out to meet him!”

“And why doth Andrew think that the assembly of soldiers to go greet another soldier—and a slave-owner to boot—would interest thee, Lucy?” their father had asked, when Lucy’s blond head snapped around to follow her friend down Third Street.

Lucy had quickly faced front again, her younger siblings following suit like toys on a string: Anna, Mary, and Little Johnnie. Even the older boys, eighteen-year-old Isaac and William, who was twenty-one, kept their mouths shut.

Dolley, the eldest daughter, had turned to say something about the General to her mother, but saw her mother’s glance cut to her father’s face. A year ago, or two, her father would have put his question mildly, even playfully. It was the harsh note of danger that silenced the four youngsters and put the fear in her mother’s eyes.

Now as the bells of Philadelphia rollicked above the city’s low red roofs, Dolley’s eyes went to her father’s face. In the muted light of the meeting-house it seemed to have grown dark and lumpy with anger. So frightening, so alien, was the glare of his eyes that she returned her gaze swiftly to the whitewashed front wall, her heart beating hard. For a moment she wondered if he would stand up, break the meditative silence of the Meeting with the furious words he’d muttered all morning: Vanity of vanities, all is vanity! What does it profit a man to gain the whole world, if he lose his soul?

But he didn’t. And on the far side of his blunt, tense profile, she could almost feel how rigidly her mother sat, as if she, too, feared what she didn’t understand.

The moment passed, but the bells continued. Voices in the street outside, a clamor very unlike Sunday morning in Philadelphia, and with the day’s clouds even the usual mark of slanted sunlight on the meeting-house wall was gone. It was impossible, thought Dolley, keeping her hands demurely folded, her glance carefully schooled away from Lizzie’s, to gauge how much longer the Meeting had to run or whether she’d have time, after she walked back to the house with her family, to coax them into letting her go see the cavalcade ride in.

Vanity of vanities, all is vanity, and yes, General Washington is a soldier and a slaveholder who buyeth and selleth his fellow men, but he is still the hero who captured the British army, who won the war that set this country free.

Dolley remembered clearly the red-coated files of riders, glimpsed through the brown autumn woods of Hanover County. Remembered lying in a thicket behind the house, face pressed to the prickly leaf-mold with two-year-old Lucy clutched against her body, praying baby Anna in her arms wouldn’t cry. At eleven, and tall for her age, she had been dimly aware that her mother feared more for her than rough mishandling at the hands of Banastre Tarleton’s dragoons.

Worse by far than the British raiding had been the bitter, constant warfare between the local Tories and those who supported the Congress. Small battles and vicious betrayals, ambush and revenge: the constant anxiety of not knowing whom one could trust. When the patriot militia burned out the plantation of her friend Sophie Sparling’s grandparents, it was to Dolley’s parents that Sophie and her mother had fled. Dolley still had dreams of waking in the dead of night with the flare of torchlight visible through the cracks of the shutter, hearing the trample of hooves outside, and men cursing in the yard. Patrick Henry, firebrand of the patriots and first Governor of the new State, was her mother’s cousin, and they’d lived at his backwoods plantation when first her family had returned to Virginia from North Carolina. Even the knowledge that as Quakers the Paynes took no part in the War might not have been enough to save them.

General Washington’s victory had ended all that.

And all gratitude aside, Dolley simply loved the sight of sleekly groomed horses, the brilliance of gold-braided uniforms, the stir and lilt of the music that a band was sure to play as the General rode up to be greeted at the State House door. An avid reader of newspapers, she was curious about the delegates who had been arriving for two weeks now for the Convention of the States, longing to put faces to the names she’d heard discussed among her friends.

The two Morrises she knew by sight, sleek peg-legged young Gouverneur and his not-related business partner, stocky and extremely wealthy Robert, one of the city’s most prominent merchants. On warm spring evenings, when she’d walk with Lizzie and their dear friend Sarah Parker, they’d often see Robert Morris’s carriage rattle past on the cobblestones of Market Street, bright with gilding and varnish. And everyone in the city knew old Benjamin Franklin, at least by sight. He’d smiled at Dolley and spoken to her any number of times in the market, on those days when he was well enough to be about: Even at eighty-one, thought Dolley with a smile, he clearly retained a lively interest in a well-turned ankle.

But the others, of whom she had only read and heard—Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts and George Wythe the Virginia lawyer; Roger Sherman and Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut; Alexander Hamilton, who’d fought at Washington’s side and was supposed to be dazzlingly handsome—these were the men who would change the way life was lived in Philadelphia and all throughout the country. The men of the Meeting like Lizzie’s father, and young Anthony Morris (no relation to either of the more famous ones), and his friend the sobersided John Todd, might be content with debating the writings of these men, but Dolley wanted to see their faces. To see what they looked like, how they stood, how they dressed. Who they actually were.

“It should matter nothing, what they look like,” John Todd had argued earlier that week, when she’d walked down to the Indian Queen Tavern on Fourth Street because she’d heard that George Wythe was there. (And he had been, lean and white-haired with a nose like an ax-blade, talking gravely with the proprietor about cheese.) “It is what they have done, and will do—what they have written and thought—that will count.” He’d encountered Dolley on her way home from the tavern, when it had started to drizzle, and had offered her his escort back to her house with his umbrella.

John was the sort of young man who always had an umbrella.

“What be the difference, if a man be short or tall, young or venerable, if his eyes be brown or blue or if his skin be white or black for that matter, so that he love God, and do good in the world?” he’d asked.

Dolley had sighed, and said at once, “Thou art right, John,” because she knew he was.

Nevertheless, she wanted to know.

She was still smiling over this encounter—and John’s complete incomprehension of the female mind—when the Friends filed quietly from the meeting-house into the clamor of Pine Street. Church bells kept their delighted riot from every steeple in town, men and women hastened by them in their Sunday-bests toward the end of Market Street, where the Baltimore road ran in from Chester. Lizzie, walking sedately among her own family, cast her a glance filled with query, and Dolley nodded: Of course I’ll go! Lucy, Anna, Mary, and Little John knew better than to cluster around their parents on the way out of Meeting, but whispers whipped among them: General Washington—General Washington!

Two years ago her father would merely have sighed, and shaken his head. Now he whirled like a baited bull, and snapped at their mother, “Canst thou not keep their minds on God, even on God’s own day?” And as the four little ones halted in their tracks, appalled at his fury, he suddenly shouted at them, “Even a child is known by his doings, whether his work be pure. A high look, a proud heart, and the plowing of the wicked—ay, and riding forth under arms to war!—these are sin. The man that wandereth out of the way of understanding shall remain in the congregation of the dead!”

“John…” Molly Payne put a quieting hand on her husband’s arm. Those of their closer friends in Meeting who’d begun to move toward them to admonish saw her frown, and stepped back. “John, they are only children. And every day is God’s own day. When I was a child, I spake as a child and I reasoned as a child… and nowhere doth Paul in his Epistle say that it is ill to do so.”

Dolley’s father drew in a deep breath, then shook his head as if to clear it. “I—Yes. Thou art correct, Molly, and I—I spoke harsh.” For a moment, as he faced the younger children, huddled around Mother Amy, the only one of her father’s slaves who had remained in the family when he’d freed them, his face bore the puzzled expression of a man newly waked. Then he reached out a big hand, with its bleached, cracked calluses, to Lucy, who stood nearest him, an offer of reconciliation. Lucy clasped it, and smiled her sunny smile.

And at that moment, John Todd, who’d lingered inside the meetinghouse to chat with the scholarly Henry Drinker, came hurrying down the steps to catch up with Dolley. “Might I join my steps to thy family’s, Neighbor Payne?” he asked her father, and his open glance included her mother in the request. When dealing with his clients, the fledgling lawyer wore a more modern coat than the one he kept for Meetings, and a three-cornered hat instead of the broad-brim that the men of the congregation considered less worldly, as if setting aside even Quaker plainness in order to make his clothing less noticeable.

But the longer-skirted fashion of an earlier year suited him well, Dolley reflected. And if he had to ask a few times too often if she was making a joke, or quoted Biblical Kings rather frequently on the subject of forward women, the kindness of his heart made up for a great deal.

And, because he hadn’t a deceitful bone in his body, when her father beamingly nodded his assent—Dolley knew he was hoping to make a match between herself and John—John turned to her and said, “And if thou wilt, afterwards, I offer my arm to thee, Friend Dolley, to walk out to the end of Market Street, that thou may see General Washington ride in.”

Dolley could have screamed.

“Thou shalt do nothing of the kind!” Her father whirled, his face suffused with fury. “Bad enough that the children tug and whine to see this slaveholder, this warmonger, with the whole town yelping about him like a pack of brats! When I was a child I spake as a child, thy mother saith! But thou art no child, Dolley, and thou shalt spend God’s Sabbath as a woman ought, among her family!”

Dolley stepped back, her eyes flooding with tears, not of disappointment—though she could have shaken John for his tactlessness—but of shock. When John opened his mouth to protest she caught his arm and squeezed it hard, and when he looked at her, baffled, shook her head. Her father had already turned and stormed away, still dragging the frightened Lucy by the hand; her mother strode forward to catch the little girl’s other hand. Mother Amy gathered the younger children like a hen collecting chicks beneath her ample wing. Dolley was aware that her hand was trembling where it still lay on John’s arm.

John, for his part, looked like he hadn’t the slightest idea what was going on, but walked, obediently silent, at her side down Pine Street, and then along Third. As they crossed Market Street a carriage passed them by, varnished green and drawn by a spanking team of bays: Dolley recognized the livery of the black coachman as belonging to the Willings, glimpsed in the back two of the daughters of the house whose dresses, at any other time, she’d have felt a pang of regret at missing. Her father checked his stride as if he would have spoken, then moved on.

“What—?” John began, but Dolley shook her head again.

They continued in silence to the small brick row-house that for two years now had been her home. “I thank thee for thy company, Friend John,” she said, on the doorstep of the little shop that occupied the two downstairs rooms. “I hope we shall meet again soon.”

When she went inside, her father had already gone upstairs. Her mother was herding the little ones into the narrow staircase after him, but stopped when Dolley came through from the front shop into the workroom behind it. “Mother Amy, see the children into the parlor, an’t please thee,” she said, and took Dolley’s arm. “And see they keep quiet,” she called up after the retreating group. “Friend Payne hath a headache.”

But when she turned back to her oldest daughter, Dolley saw in her eyes that her mother lied. Molly Payne’s face had a weariness in it that Dolley hadn’t seen even during the worst of the War.

For a time the two women stood in the little workroom, gloomy despite the wide windows that looked onto the small yard. With the day’s gray overcast, yard and workroom had become a monochrome still-life, sacks of rice piled in one corner and the grinding-quern standing near the door, the sieves of graduated fineness, from brass wire down to the finest silk, making a pattern of circles on the whitewashed wall. Because of the rain, on and off all last week, the long, shallow settling-trays had been moved into the workroom from the yard, and in their shallow riffles the first rime of starch grayed the wood like a thin frost.

Six days a week this room, the yard, and the kitchen at the back of the yard were the heart of the house. Now they were still, like a heart that rests in meditation.

Dolley saw tears in her mother’s eyes.

“Thy father meant no…”

Tears tightened Dolley’s throat at the recollection of his rebuke that had been like a slap in the face. She kept her voice to a whisper. “What’s wrong with him, Mama?”

Her mother shook her head, but in her shut eyes, and the slump of her shoulders, Dolley saw the sheer relief in the knowledge that someone else, at least, understood that there was something wrong with John Payne. That it wasn’t just a bout of indigestion, or headache, or, worst of all, only their own womanish imaginations.

“He didn’t used to be like this,” Dolley went on softly. “Is he ill?”

“I asked him if he would see Dr. Rush, and he said there was naught amiss. He needeth only to think, he said.”

“Is that what he doth, when he doth shut himself into the bedroom?” Dolley slowly removed her bonnet, the wide-brimmed plain white muslin sunbonnet that was the only headgear a good Quaker girl could wear without drawing whispers from the rest of the Meeting. There were some, like Lizzie’s cousin Hannah, who managed to coax their fathers into buying them brighter colored chintzes and muslins, and even silk, and who wore fashionable hats during the week and dressed their hair in curls. But these “wet” Quakers were treading a dangerous line. Back in Virginia, Dolley had seen members “read out of the Congregation”—cut off from their fellow Quakers, their families, the friends who made up the fabric of their lives—for “following the corrupt ways of the world” and partaking of “vain fashions and customs of the world,” as well as for the more usual offenses such as fighting, defaulting on one’s creditors, committing adultery, using ill words, or marrying one who was not a Quaker.

“I know not what he doth.” Her mother removed her own bonnet, pressed her fingertips to her forehead, as if to crush away some ache there, then looked up into her tall daughter’s eyes. “Reads the Bible, I think. But when he goeth up early, and I’m down here until after dark, I’ll go up and there will be no candle lit and no smell of smoke in the room, as if he hath sat there in the darkness all that time. Sometimes he sitteth in his chair by the window, when I go to bed, and cometh not in with me until nearly dawn.”

Dolley looked into her mother’s face and saw in the bruised circles beneath her eyes, the hollows under her cheekbones, that she, too, did not sleep until nearly dawn. But while more and more often her father remained in the bedroom in the dark of the mornings, her mother was always the one to come down and open the little shop that sold starch and gum arabic, and the fine small irons that ladies’-maids used to press the stiffened ruffles of collars and caps.

“It could just be worry,” she said, seeking the illusion of a comfort in which neither of them really believed. “Thou knowst since the end of the War things have been hard everywhere. I’ve heard Father say the tariffs on rice from the Carolinas are ruining him, and many of the rice-growers won’t accept Pennsylvania currency.”

Her mother’s eyes asked bitterly, Dost thou truly believe ’tis that simple? But Molly Payne patted her daughter’s cheek. “ ’Tis possible,” she agreed. She turned her head as movement flickered in the yard: Lizzie slipping through the narrow gate beside the kitchen, her gray dress like a paler shadow in the gray of the afternoon. She saw Dolley’s mother and halted, guilt all over her face.

Molly Payne smiled. “Go along, then,” she said softly.

“Thou’lt need help getting dinner—”

“I put dinners on the table before thou wert born, girl, and shall do so after thou’rt wedded and gone away. Now hurry, or all thy sisters and brothers will be yapping to go as well.”

Dolley caught up her bonnet, ducked into the yard. She would have liked to unearth the tiny cache of worldly baubles she wore for festive occasions—a gold necklace given her by her non-Quaker granny Anna, a ruffled lace collar she’d stitched herself—but didn’t dare delay. The sound of church bells followed the two gray-clothed girls as they raced down the little alleyway and out into Third Street, where Sarah Parker and Beth Brooke waited for them, then blended into the larger crowd on its way to Market Street.

Cannon had begun to boom, fired by the ships along the wharves, and in the square before the State House, Dolley could hear the sound of cheering ahead. Around them, men and women in fine broadcloths or gay sprig-muslins pressed and craned for a glimpse up Market Street, and crowded past the line of posts that marked the pedestrian flagway to choke the street itself. Every doorstep was three deep, every window along the route occupied. Carriages further blocked the way, but the pressing crowds made the horses pull at their reins, and it would be a miracle, thought Dolley, if the morning passed without someone being bitten or kicked. She and her friends had to dodge and slip between market-women, citizens, wealthy gentlemen in fine coats and powdered wigs, along the walls where the press was thinner.

They’d almost reached Fifth Street, still clinging to one another’s hands in a line like children playing crack-the-whip, when someone shouted, “Here they come!”

Dolley pressed forward, to where half a dozen people jammed the step of old Mrs. House’s big red-brick residence. A gentleman on the lowest step, turning to protest, took a second look at her, changed his glare to an ingratiating smile, and raised his hat. She gave him a dazzling smile in return, and he edged back off the step, gallantly surrendering his place to the girls.

Like a country stream in winter, half choked by ice and snow, Market Street had been reduced to a single narrow channel of brick. Dolley could see the flags, and the mounts of the Pennsylvania Light Horse, even in the wan gloom seeming to gleam like burnished copper and bronze; see the men looking out straight before them with their swords drawn and held upright, and the gold of buttons and braid sparkling bright.

Even had General Washington not ridden in the place of honor in their midst, Dolley was certain she would have known it was he. He wore, not the blue-and-buff uniform of the Continental Army, but the plain black suit of a private citizen—an act of modesty which would not, Dolley suspected, earn him the slightest indulgence from John Todd. The man proclaimed before all the world that he would retire to private life, never more to meddle in the affairs of the nation, the young lawyer had pointed out, when the subject of the National Convention had arisen. To go back so upon his word would be to admit himself a Caesar before all the nation, ambitious for a crown!

But there was nothing, thought Dolley, of the Caesar in this man who came riding down Market Street through the thunder of cannon-fire and church bells. Though he sat straight on his dapple-gray stallion, there was no triumph in his face. He looked, if anything, tired and a little grim, as anyone would, she supposed, after a week’s journey up from Virginia.

But would not a Caesar have stretched out his arms to the welcoming crowd, whose cheers reverberated against the flat pink brick of the house-fronts? A Caesar at least would have looked pleased.

The General looked like a knight calculating what he’s going to need to take with him to fight a very dangerous dragon; a knight who, alone among the clamoring crowd, doubts his own strength to prevail.

Even surrounded by loyal troops and howling admirers, Dolley was startled at how alone he seemed.

Beside her on the step the crowd stirred and pushed as the door opened behind them. Old Mrs. House, who had rented rooms to members of the Congress since the days of the War, emerged, beaming and attired in the half-mourning she’d worn for as long as Dolley had known her. She was escorted by a thin, shy-looking little gentleman in black, whose graying hair was braided in a neat queue. Everyone on the step was jostled back, as those who’d thought themselves secure in possession of higher ground jockeyed for position. Dolley teetered, her heel slipping off the granite step, and as she staggered the little black-clothed gentleman turned with surprising swiftness to catch her elbow in a steadying hand.

“Easy,” he said.

She smiled her thanks as he helped her down and their eyes briefly met: a young man’s eyes, bright blue-gray in the settled lines of old illnesses and lack of sleep.

Then from the street an officer cried a sharp “Company halt!” and Dolley looked around, startled, to see General Washington sitting his horse at the foot of Mrs. House’s front steps, close enough that had she put out her hand she might have touched his knee.

The little gentleman in black turned from her, and with Mrs. House descended the step. Dolley pressed quickly back into the crowd as the General dismounted and said, “Mr. Madison.” He had a voice like Jove, deep and very quiet.

“General.” The little gentleman bowed, tiny fingers like bird-bones disappearing into the General’s large, firm grip. “Please allow me to introduce you to Mrs. House. I’ve arranged lodgings here for you.”

“But I hope you will take your dinner with Mrs. Morris and myself this afternoon.” Robert Morris, plump and smiling in his cherry-colored velvet and powdered wig, stepped out of the crowd almost at Dolley’s elbow. This, Dolley thought, was completely unfair: Mrs. House was a notable cook, but Mr. Morris’s chef was renowned throughout the State.

The General inclined his head. Dismounted, he was the tallest man Dolley had ever seen, and looked just like the engravings: the slight curve of the nose, the tight-lipped mouth, strong chin, wide-set cheekbones under those piercing pale eyes. But as the cavalcade formed up again to proceed to the State House for the official welcome, Morris stepped close to the General and Dolley stood near enough to hear him murmur, “I do hope you’ll reconsider my offer and stay with myself and Mrs. Morris, General. We’re quite counting on you.”

And on Mrs. House’s front steps, little Mr. Madison—whom Dolley recalled was one of the organizing delegates from Virginia—for one unguarded instant wore the protesting look of a schoolboy who is too well-mannered to speak when a larger boy takes from under his nose that last cookie on the plate.

“I’d best go back,” she said, as the crowds began to surge off after the retreating Light Horse in the direction of the State House. “Mama needs my help to put dinner on the table.” The church bells still caroled, and with the sky so gray it was difficult to guess the time, but Dolley had the uncomfortable suspicion she’d been gone too long already.

“All the delegates will be at the State House,” pointed out Lizzie, who’d been following accounts of the upcoming convention in the Philadelphia Packet.

“Oh, there goes Mr. Morris!” cried Sarah, pointing as the red-lacquered carriage edged its way out of Fifth Street and fell in behind the Light Horse, as if Mr. Morris were proclaiming his position within the Convention. “Didst see the dress Mrs. Morris wore the other day, walking along Chestnut Street? All white gauze, with a little green satin coat like a jockey’s, and the most monstrous beautiful hat!” Her hands sketched the shape of a tall crown, a flowerbed of plumes.

Mrs. Morris, hat and all, would probably be at the State House, and the temptation was severe. Dolley shook her head. “I must go,” she said. “Tomorrow, dear friends…” She kissed her hands to them. “Go,” she added, waving them off as Lizzie made a move to walk home with her. It wasn’t quite the thing to walk about by oneself, but it wasn’t far and Dolley had a vague stab of discomfort—almost fear—of what her father would say should he come down and realize she had disobeyed him, whatever her mother had said.

That thought, too, disquieted her: that she should feel fear of her father.

Or did she fear the man she sensed her father was becoming?

She hastened her steps, turning her wide shoulders to slip sidelong through the crowd that pressed the other way. Most of them she knew, and those who might at another time have winked or whistled or tried to accost a young lady walking alone—mechanics and apprentices and sailors from the wharves—were far too intent on following General Washington to take the slightest notice of her.

And in any case, Dolley was not much impressed by would-be accosters. She’d heard too much barnyard language from her rural neighbors in Hanover County to be shocked, and too many of Mother Amy’s forthright opinions about men to be overcome with maidenly modesty. She dressed neatly enough now to pass for a Philadelphia girl, but she’d grown up working hard on her parents’ farm at Coles Hill. She’d been eight when her father had freed all his slaves, in the wake of the Declaration of Independence. She had learned to cook and cut kindling and do everything that, in Philadelphia, servants did.

In those days her father had been different. When she thought of him, that was the man she remembered. Big and rather heavily built, he’d bequeathed her his height, and the Irish brightness of his blue eyes. He’d always been a man of strong passions—one of her most vivid memories was of him shouting down a gaggle of the local patriots when they jeered at him for not joining the militia. Strong as an ox, he’d worked “from can’t-see to can’t-see,” as the field-hands said, to plow and plant corn and wheat, after he’d given the slaves their freedom. God had guided him, he’d told Dolley and her brothers, to take on his own shoulders the yoke of his own upkeep. Of the former slaves who stayed on to farm portions of Coles Hill, he’d charged a crop-rent as low as he could manage, knowing they all had families of their own to support.

Did he regret his decision? Dolley wondered as she turned onto the quiet of Third Street. “Besides turning those poor Negroes off into the world to look after theirselves, which they ain’t fit to do,” had argued her cousin Catherine in horror, “what’s he going to leave you and the boys if he should die? Land’s no good without Negroes to work it!”

“We work it ourselves,” Dolley had replied, annoyed, mostly because it was clear to her that Jonas, Cuffe, Quashie, and their families were doing a perfectly decent job of farming on the land they’d once tilled as slaves.

But Catherine had only gazed at her with aching pity and whispered, “Oh, you poor dear! How could your papa have done that to you?”

At the time—she’d been ten, in 1778—Dolley had thought Catherine a fool and a bit of a sissy. Sophie Sparling, three years older and the only girl in the neighborhood to treat her as an equal, had remarked, “Cathy only thinks it’s horrible because she couldn’t make a kitchen fire to save her own life.” Sophie’s doctor father had also freed his few slaves, though her grandparents had kept theirs—for all the good that had done them.

As the War dragged on, and Dolley had seen her parents’ shoulders acquire the slump of tiredness that never finds rest—as she’d seen how Isaac had to wear patched rags inherited from Walter and William, and how she herself had no garments that had not been worn shapeless by either her mother or one of the other women in the Meeting—Dolley had wondered what her father thought of his decision. “It’s all very well for a man to follow where the Spirit leads him, darling,” one of her well-dressed Payne aunts said to her mother. “It’s him dragging you, and his poor children, along after him that I cannot stomach.”

The Paynes were wealthy, and owned many slaves. The fact that her family had coffee or occasional dress-lengths of new calico during the War, or pins and needles to sew with, had been due to that aunt. Her father refused to drink the coffee, Dolley recalled.

In any case, when Dolley was fifteen her father had sold the little farm. He’d announced that they were going to live in Philadelphia, now that the War was done and there was no further danger of the British burning the town.

At that point the truth of her cousin’s assertion had been borne on Dolley: a farm of close to two hundred acres, without slaves, brought barely enough to acquire the small house on Third Street and the equipment to make starch. Her mother ran the shop in front, Dolley and Lucy keeping house while Mother Amy looked after the little ones. Dolley still wore dresses handed down to her from her mother, sewing ruffles at the hems, for none of them were ever long enough for her unmaidenly height. William and Isaac helped their father grind and pulverize the Carolina rice, then patiently sieve and settle, sieve and settle, until the fine powder of starch collected on the riffles of the shallow pans. Nobody in the family could ever get new clothes at the same time. Coffee was still adulterated with parched corn.

But in Philadelphia there were friends, both in the Meeting and outside of it, to whom it didn’t matter that Dolley helped Mother Amy with the cooking and the marketing and the bed-making. In Philadelphia she could buy newspapers the day they were printed, instead of having to wait weeks for secondhand information. She could see all manner of people in the streets, admire and make mental notes of the newest fashions; talk and listen to people who had been other places, seen and done other things.

As a tiny child, Dolley had dreamed of flying. In her dreams she would stretch forth her arms and run, and feel her feet thrust away the earth; feel the wind stroke her hair. She would look down from above at the trees and fields, then look ahead, to a beautiful city filled with light. Philadelphia might not be Paris or London, but here she felt alive as she never had in the countryside.

John Todd, God bless his sober heart, might temperately agree that the polish of conversation was to be desired in that it made a woman tolerant and gave her a certain experience with others. This would in turn make her a better wife and mother—the only criteria, as far as Dolley could see, upon which Friend John judged any accomplishment, either in a woman or a man. Love of talk for its own sake, the desire to hear what Rome looked like, and what ladies wore in the south of France, puzzled him as much as her desire to learn whether Roger Sherman of Connecticut was clean or grubby in his person, or her satisfaction in knowing that James Madison, spearhead of the movement to not simply repair the government but to reconstitute it entirely, had kindly eyes.

Her father wanted her to marry John Todd. He’d made that clear, from the moment John—then reading law and preparing to open an office of his own—had first asked his permission to walk the sixteen-year-old Dolley home after Meeting one warm summer day three years ago. “He shall give thee a good home, Daughter, and make a fine father for thy children.”

Like John Todd, John Payne saw others in terms of what they could be to their families. But when Dolley had replied—that had been in the fall of 1784, some three months after John had begun seeking out the spot beside hers when they encountered one another at picnics—“A man can give a woman a good home and healthy children, and still not make her happy, Papa,” he had nodded, as if he understood.

“Yet I cannot see John Todd would make thee unhappy, were all the world given to him in return for it.”

“Not unhappy,” Dolley had said, not entirely sure how to put into words what it was that her heart sought. “Just…”

How to explain that though she was deeply fond of John, she wasn’t sure she would be happy as his wife? How to explain the sensation she sometimes had—of living in a cage and looking out through the bars at an astonishing world whose paths she longed to walk? That year she was sixteen, she’d already seen one of the first friends she’d made at the Pine Street Meeting, a girl named Anne Selby only a year older than she, marry a well-meaning young tailor: Anne was already with child. It wasn’t that she didn’t want children: Dolley loved children.

Was it frivolous not to want them just yet?

Selfish, and foolish, to dream of a life other than the one she had? A life no more possible to her than her dreams of flight?

Her eyes returned helplessly to her father, and he’d taken her hand and leaned close, so that not even the wind in the chestnut tree could hear. “Just that the Spirit murmurs in thy heart, ‘Wait,’ without telling thee what for?”

Dolley had closed her eyes, and nodded, her heart at rest.

“John Todd is a good man,” her father had told her. “And he loveth thee very much. But the Spirit models Time the way an artist models clay, and there is indeed a time for every purpose under Heaven. How can we not believe this, when the same sky is sometimes blue and sometimes golden and betimes grows black, the better to show us the glory of God’s stars?” Drawing her closer, he’d kissed her cheek. “The Spirit will never lead thee wrong, Dolley. Just remember that John is led, too.”

That was the father she remembered.

She heard him shouting, as she neared the house. The note of insane rage in his voice pierced her, more than the echoes and snippets of his words: “…obeyed in my own house…uniforms…wild unbeliever with a worldly heart…” She’d been holding her skirts up as much as modesty would permit, to speed her steps; now she snatched them almost up to her knees and ran.

“Will you take this away from me, too?” Her father towered over her mother with both fists raised. “Tell the boys what to do, make the damned starch as well as sell it and spend the money as you think best? Send me off to some corner until you need something else from me?”

“And what am I to do to put bread on the table?” her mother slashed back, in the voice of one goaded beyond all endurance. “It wasn’t I who sent thee off to a corner, ever! That corner where thou hidest half the day and all the night!”

“It is better to dwell in a corner of the house-top, than with a brawling woman in a wide house! There is no place in this house where I can go to get away from the sound of strife! And you, who want to be the man here—”

“I don’t want to be the man! I want thee to be the man!”

“Is that why you let my daughter run after soldiers like a common trull?” He whirled, his face distorted, his finger pointing at Dolley as she stood in the doorway. The blue eyes she remembered with such love stared wildly at her, as if at a stranger. “She is loud and stubborn; her feet abide not in her house: now is she without, now in the streets, and lieth in wait at every corner!” The grip of his hand on her arm nearly pulled Dolley off her feet. Like a rag he shook her in her mother’s face.

“Is that what you will have your daughters come to, woman? To go chasing after the vainglory of the world? Is that why you will be the man of this house? So that you can let them run about the streets like harlots?”

“I beg a thousand pardons, Neighbor Payne.”

John Todd’s stout, sensible shoes creaked on the wooden floor of the shop; his voice was pleasant and soft, as if in a chance encounter outside the meeting-house. “I apologize for bringing thy daughter home later than I told her mother I would; doubly so, for importuning her to go walking with me to begin with. I beg thee to make allowances, for myself and for them both. Both were most kind in indulging my pleas.”

He must have been behind me in the street, thought Dolley. She had had the impression, just before she heard her father’s voice, of quick footfalls hurrying to catch her up. Her eyes thanked him as he concluded, “And now I must go. I should not have come in at all, save that I feared to leave behind me a misunderstanding that would cause strife.”

“No,” said her father uncertainly. “No, you—thou didst right, Neighbor Todd. I knew not…I…I am sorry, Daughter. Molly.” He blinked and held out his hand to his wife, and looking at his face Dolley realized he had not the slightest idea of what he had just said. His cheeks were ashen. “Neighbor Todd, thou wilt stay to dine? We spoke of it, did we not, at Meeting?”

“We did, friend,” John responded. “But the matter was left uncertain, and I would not make extra work for thy good wife.”

Molly Payne was still shaking with anger. In the stairwell door, Dolley was aware of eighteen-year-old Isaac, of Lucy, of the younger children all pressed on one another to listen, frightened and bewildered. It was Mother Amy who said, “I think it will be no great matter to set an extra plate, will it, Mrs. Payne?”

“No,” said Molly Payne, in a voice that sounded to Dolley oddly like her father’s: hesitant, as if she were waking and wasn’t entirely certain where she was. Then, smiling, she went on more strongly, “Thou art entirely welcome, Friend John, and thou knowst it. To dinner, or at any other time.”

Her father was an invisible presence, like a shadow on dinner, and none of the children dared raise their voice or ask what General Washington had looked like.

John, to Dolley’s utter relief, maintained a measured conversation with her mother on the subject of the Meeting’s school committee, boring as dust and, like dust, blanketing all jagged edges in a smoothing mask. Dolley had never been so grateful to anyone in her life. Afterwards he stayed to play Fox and Geese with Lucy and the children while the women cleared the table and carried the dishes back down to the kitchen to wash, so things felt normal and relatively cheerful by the time he took his departure at four.

Her parents’ bedroom at the front of the house was still filled with the gray light of the late-spring afternoon, when Dolley knocked gently at the door. “ ’Tis Dolley, Papa.”

There was silence within. The children had gone out to the yard; Isaac was as usual trouncing William at dominoes; on her way upstairs Dolley had passed her mother in the kitchen, talking with Mother Amy by the open door.

At last a voice replied, “Come, Daughter.”

He sat in the chair by the window. The window was shut and the room airless. Footsteps patted in the street; a woman’s voice chimed plaintively, “But if he’d only agree to sit next to her the whole problem could be avoided!” Her father winced. He moved his head as if the sound were a bodkin, pricking at his ear.

Doth he miss the stillness of our country evenings at Coles Hill?

When you stepped outside in Philadelphia, it was like stepping into a giant open-air drawing-room full of chattering people. That was one of the things Dolley loved about Philadelphia.

Her father looked weary, and she could see where white had touched his dark hair.

“I’m so sorry I disobeyed thee, Father. Sorry that my feet were so quick to run away when Mama said that I might. She meant nothing by it, truly she did not. The fault was mine. Please forgive me.”

“John Todd is a good man,” he said softly. “And a brave one. Why dost thou turn thy face aside from his love?” He spoke like a man speaking from the dark of a cell he knows he’ll never leave.

Dolley wanted to protest, I don’t, but knew that would be a falsehood. Every look John Todd gave her asked for something that she avoided.

“What more dost thou want in this life?”

“Father, I know not.”

“I want to see thee safe,” he said, after a silence so lengthy she wondered if he wished her to go. “Thy mother is right, Daughter. I hide in this corner. The voices of men are an abomination to me. The Spirit will guide me, the Spirit will show me the path I must take, but listen as I may there is only silence. I am tired, Daughter, more tired than I was when I plowed all day behind a team of oxen, and I think if I were to come into the presence of anyone, man or woman, I would—” He hesitated.

Weep? wondered Dolley.

Scream?

Curse God and die?

“I know it sounds like madness, but I am not mad, Daughter. I know I am of little use to thy mother and the children, yet this is all that I am or can be now. Thy mother says to work on in spite of my melancholy and the good people of the Meeting advise this and that, and yet it is all to me like men describing color to a man who hath lost his eyes. How shall one season salt that hath lost its savor? Please do not give me advice, Daughter.” His eyes were bleak.

Dolley shook her head, then pulled up the little stool that stood beside the tall bed, so that she could sit beside him, and take his hand.

“Child, I want only thy happiness. Thou art made for better things than to lose thy days in poverty, and I fear that this is what is to come. This is why I say to thee, Marry John Todd. Marry him now. His heart is faithful, yet disappointment breaks even the strongest back in the end. Then what shalt become of thee?”

“Papa, what woman would have any use for a man who deserted her in the face of adversity?” Dolley spoke playfully, and his mouth tugged a little at the corner in response. Since she was fourteen, he’d been joking her about the number of young gentlemen who came calling on her, and the number of requests he’d gotten, from men who wanted permission to seek her hand.

Personally, Dolley never could see why. She was too tall, and inclined to bossiness. She knew she had pretty coloring, white and black and blue, but knew also that she lacked the fineness of feature that made true beauty. She enjoyed the attention, and enjoyed flirting, but it was hard to take any man seriously who threw himself on his knees before her and went into raptures about how lovely she was.

For all his sober stuffiness, and his inability to see a jest, she never had the feeling that John Todd gazed at her thinking, I am looking at the most beautiful woman in the world.

Just, I am looking at my friend Dolley Payne.

But her father’s responsive smile faded before it reached his eyes. “Times are cruel, Dolley. More cruel than we knew when all we had to fear was the redcoats and the Tories. I fear thou shalt find that few men—maybe none—will seek to wed a woman who must work for her bread and who can bring nothing to the marriage, no matter how pretty she be. I do not know what the future holds for this family, but when I look ahead I see only blackness. I say again, Dolley, John Todd is a good man. What more dost thou want in this life? For what dost thou wait?”

For a wider world?

For a girl of even middling means, the world was never wide. As a youngster in Hanover County she’d been enchanted by the books in Sophie Sparling’s grandfather’s library, but not, as Sophie was, out of a steely hunger for learning. It was the stories that delighted her, the dizziness of looking through an infinity of windows into other experiences, other places and times. Living in Philadelphia, especially at such a time and with such events going on, was surely to be living in the widest world she would ever see.

For a man I can laugh with?

But it was silly, to wish for a man who shared her mirth above a man who would treat her and her children well. And while the Friends were far from humorless, she had never met a young man in the Meeting yet who had her zesty curiosity, her love of laughter.

And to look outside the Meeting was unthinkable.

So all she could say was, “I know not what I wait for, Father. Maybe for just the guidance of the Spirit?”

Once he would have agreed with her. Now he frowned. “Dost not think that this is the guidance of the Spirit? As a mother will push a child out of the path of danger, or into a safe and sunny garden, if from timidity or foolishness that child will not be coaxed?”

She heard her mother’s voice in the parlor next door, and William answering something. Footsteps creaked, and Dolley was standing by the time a light tap sounded on the bedroom door. Her father closed his eyes briefly, as if the sound were the scrape of nails on slate. He whispered, “Go, Daughter. Think of what I have said. It is for thine own good that I speak.”

But as she climbed to the stuffy heat of the attic bedroom she shared with her sisters, and opened the window there onto the wilderness of roofs and birds, Dolley felt only a great sense of confusion, and longing for something for which she had no name. Timid and foolish, her father had said. And, she mentally added, remembering her mother’s tired face, selfish as well.

For what dost thou wait?

She knew John Todd would make her a good husband.

Did she really think some dashingly handsome Friend was going to come striding into the Meeting one morn, take her hand, and lead her into a world where she could read and talk, surround herself with music and bright colors, and not meekly grind away her days in work that had no end and little relief?

She had prayed often for guidance concerning John Todd, as she had prayed for guidance about her father. Now she rested her forehead on her window sash and whispered to the shining light that she saw within her heart, Send me where I’ll do the most good, by the route that doth seem best to You.

Over the rooftops of Philadelphia, the church bells were silent. The cannons by the State House were stilled. The sky was beginning to darken at the end of the long afternoon. Dolley pictured the candlelight and mirrors of Robert Morris’s elegant dining-room, and General Washington, resplendent in black velvet and powder. Delighted, she was sure, to be at his destination and able to partake of a decent meal—Would he write to his wife tonight and tell her he’d arrived safe?

Thunder rumbled grumpily over the hills west of town. Big, thick drops of rain began to fall.

Robert Morris had the finest mansion in Philadelphia, whose red-tiled roof and gleaming third-floor windows Dolley could see, a few streets over on Fourth Street. The British General Howe had occupied it as his own, the winter the British held Philadelphia in their grip. Now the merchant would be rubbing his chubby hands at the prospect of having the General’s prestigious presence and the General’s undivided attention on his own arguments and plans.

Dolley had been around meeting-house committees long enough to know that most of what got decided got decided over dinner or punch in some congenial parlor, not over debates in a sweltering meeting room.

Poor little Mr. Madison. He so clearly intended for precisely that reason to keep the whole of the powerful Virginia delegation together under his eye. Now he’d been left to wait at Mrs. House’s boardinghouse, out-jockeyed by the Philadelphia merchant.

It was going to be a long, hot summer for everyone in Philadelphia.

Washington City

August 24, 1814

Light footfalls under the cold high hanging lamps of the hall: Dolley turned her head. “Didst find it?” she asked, a little surprised, seeing Sophie holding something small, cupped in the palm of one hand. In the other she held a slender bundle of letters.

“These weren’t in the sewing-table,” Sophie replied as she approached. “They were shoved in behind the cabinet—when was that cabinet last moved?—They’re unsigned.”

She held them out, after the briefest pause. Dolley saw the top one was in English, though it started out, Ma mie—My little one—written in a clear strong hand. The superscription was “Rotterdam.” “Dost know the hand?” she asked, and Sophie replied without hesitation.

“Of course not. This was with them,” she added, and held out three broken fragments of ivory, and a few bits of ornamental gold. Put together, Dolley could see that it had once been a miniature: a beautiful girl in the simple white costume so popular in France in the 1780s. A girl with clear eyes of bright turquoise-green, and long dark curly hair hanging down her back.

She looked up, and met Sophie’s eyes for a long moment; then turned the pieces over again in her hand. On the back of the miniature was written only, Paris 1788. The delicate paint was scratched and smudged, as if the girl’s painted image had been shattered by being stomped again and again beneath a furious heel.