Patriot Hearts: A Novel of the Founding Mothers

ABIGAIL

Boston, Massachusetts

Thursday, September 27, 1793

And you have had no word from your father?” Abigail knew that if Johnny had, the first words out of his mouth when she came into his dark little office on Queen Street would have been, I’ve had word from Pa…

But she couldn’t keep from asking.

The news from Philadelphia had been simply too terrifying.

Yellow fever, the whites called it. Blacks, who had seen it in the Caribbean, spoke of vomito negro, or of Bronze John.

Thirty people were dying a day.

“None save that Congress had adjourned, and that he would start for home within two days. It was but a note, dated the eleventh.” Her son spoke brusquely over his shoulder as he cleared the books from his desk and put his few papers into drawers. John was habitually neat, and Abigail had inculcated into all three of her sons the need for order and system in all their endeavors. Johnny was the only one upon whom her efforts seemed to have made a lasting impression, though according to John, Tommy—who had just begun his law practice in Philadelphia—was getting better about it.

Charley, at twenty-four a lawyer in New York, sweet and charming as he was, was hopeless. He always claimed he followed a system of his own.

Her boys. Men now in a world that was turning out very differently from that which she and John had imagined, in the days of the War.

When had things begun to go wrong?

“Father did not say whether he meant to return in Tommy’s company or not.” Johnny fetched his coat from the cupboard. Though the day was unseasonably hot—on her way through the streets from wily Cousin Sam’s house near the Common, Abigail had seen more than one gentleman (if such they could be called) in shirtsleeves outside the coffee-houses and taverns—since the age of ten she’d never seen her eldest son leave so much as his bedroom less than properly dressed.

Indeed a son to be proud of, she decided as she watched him. His old nickname “Hercules” suited him more now as his body settled into a burly strength. As John had done, Johnny had begun his public service, writing for the Columbian Centennial a series of scathing rebuttals when Thomas Jefferson had endorsed Tom Paine’s The Rights of Man with an introduction bemoaning “the political heresies that have sprung up among us.” It was quite clear that Jefferson meant her husband’s criticism of the way the French were conducting their Revolution, and his evasive apology had come far too late to prevent his supporters—who assumed that John had written the rebuttals himself—from jumping in with their own libelous replies.

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

He didn’t look that way in France.

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

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

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

But she knew how deeply John felt betrayed.

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

And so it must Johnny.

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

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

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

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

“Nothing about Tommy?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And as deluded in his enthusiasm for France.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So much for Bible oaths.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I need him.

Desperately.

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

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

Briesler turned the chaise from the sea-road, inland toward the house that Royall Tyler had once planned to buy for Nabby, in the days when that long-vanished young rake had meant to make her his bride.

And now it is ours. Politics and faction weren’t the only things that turned out differently than Abigail had expected.

While still in England, John and Abigail had bought the house and its acres. Though not nearly as big as Abigail had remembered it after five years abroad, John was pleased with it. “It is but the farm of a patriot,” he had said, and had named the place Stonyfield. Abigail had planted beside the path two white rosebushes that she’d brought from England, and in the garden a lilac tree.

“It sounds a good idea,” agreed Abigail. An evening walk in her niece’s company was certainly an improvement on lying awake yet another sweltering night, wondering if she would ever see John again.

Yet when Briesler drove the chaise in from the road, and helped aunt and niece down, Abigail stopped short, looking up at the house.

Wondering why the dog Caesar hadn’t dashed out to greet them. Wondering what was different.

Too many windows lit.

One of them the window of John’s study.

She felt as if someone could read a book by the light that bloomed instantly from her heart. Without a word she broke from Louisa and Briesler and almost ran up the path, up the steps to the door. He must have heard the carriage-wheels because he was running down the stairs as she burst into the hall, and they clung laughing, rocking in one another’s arms with shaggy little white-nosed Caesar dashing happy circles around their feet. It was dark as a grave in the hall and all Abigail could see of John for that first moment was the blur of shirtsleeve, stockings, and face; she knew she must have been no more than a silhouette.

It didn’t matter. They would have known each other in the darkness of Death.

“Is Tommy with you?” Louisa asked, something Abigail realized she should have asked as well, and surely would, when the incandescent wave of gratitude for John released its grip.

“I hoped to find him here.” John’s voice was grave. Abigail stepped back, cold sickness clutching again at her heart. “He was to leave Philadelphia the same day I left Germantown, and meet me on the road. When I didn’t encounter him, I didn’t know whether to wait a day at Trenton, or hasten my horse.”

“If anything had happened to him,” Louisa pointed out, leading the way down the hall to Abigail’s parlor, “someone would have written us here, you know.”

Another man would have spared his wife’s fears by agreeing, whatever he knew or privately thought. John being John, he only shook his head and said, “You don’t know how it is in Philadelphia, Louisa—or at least how it was when I left there two weeks ago. The corpse-gatherers sometimes don’t even stay to identify those they find. I doubt now I could even write to enquire at his lodgings, for there is no one who would take the letter to that accursed town. Nor anyone there alive to receive it.”

Her dearest Tommy.

Long after John drifted to sleep at her side, Abigail lay in the darkness, listening to the singing of the night-birds.

Thinking about her son. Her gentle, affable Tommy.

He hadn’t seemed any the worse for being left behind when they had departed for England, under the charge of her sister Betsey. Although perhaps too fond of a third glass of wine, of all her sons he seemed the steadiest, without Johnny’s tormented air of being unable to fit in anywhere, and without Charley’s—Her mind ducked away from her suspicion of what might be at the root of Charley’s problems, and substituted, Without Charley’s lightness of mind, as well as of heart.

Though now that Charley was practicing law he seemed much steadier and more mature. So everything might very well be all right.

But as the thought went through her mind she couldn’t put aside the recollection of her brother Will, handsome like Charley and with Charley’s questing intelligence.

They deserved more of us.

Yet another thing that hadn’t turned out as planned.

Five years of entertaining on a scale that even approximated that of the noblemen who comprised most of the diplomatic corps in England and France had driven John into debt. Five years abroad had been five years that neither John nor Abigail had been able to work the farm into a paying proposition. Like the Smith side of the family, Tommy had wanted to be a merchant when he’d emerged from Harvard. But John had simply been unable to provide his youngest son the money to make his start.

In law, at least, a man could get a start with no tools but his mind and his books.

Would Charley have found a vocation that called to his quick mind and restless heart, had there been some other one available?

On his way through New York to Philadelphia last April, John had visited Charley in the city, and had called on Nabby and Colonel Smith in that isolated stone house in the woods of Long Island. At least Colonel Smith appeared, at long last, to be solvent, to such a degree that John had worried about what Jefferson’s tame newspapers would say of him if his daughter and her husband continued to swan about the city in brand-new finery and a coach-and-four. Abigail agreed that it looked bad, with the country on the verge of war, for the daughter and son-in-law of the Vice President to be so obviously rich, but her heart couldn’t avoid a whisper of relief.

Only the autumn before that, 1791, on her way from Philadelphia to Braintree, Abigail had been struck with a rheumatic fever, and had lain for nearly six weeks at Nabby’s, head aching, joints burning as if she had been racked, listening to the newest baby crying and her two undisciplined grandsons—Willie and Little Johnnie—shouting at one another, and wishing she could die.

There had been no servants in her daughter’s house and sometimes, almost no food. Colonel Smith was gone most days and sometimes overnight, and Nabby was very shut-mouthed about what the family was living on. The Colonel’s mother occasionally came over or sent one of her giggling, pretty daughters to help with the cooking or look after the children—apparently nobody bothered with cleaning—and acknowledged that “The dibs ain’t in tune just now,” meaning that the family was almost destitute. “But the Colonel, he’s a knowing one,” she added, and tapped the side of her nose with an expression that was supposed to be wise. “My son’s always got some speculation going. You’ll see.”

On that visit Abigail had seen about as much as she wanted to. She shuddered to think of her grandchildren being raised among that tribe.

It was partly the thought of being taken ill on the road again—of finding herself an enforced guest for who knew how many weeks in that household filled with fictions, pipe-dreams, and promises that turned out to be lies—that decided Abigail not to attempt to travel to Philadelphia last winter, nor again this year.

She realized she, too, had changed, from the woman who’d thrown herself like a dove into the wind to cross the ocean, to be with the man she loved.

John was safe, at least now, at least so far. She turned her head on the pillow, imagining from long familiarity, the pugnacious nose, the sensual lips, every wrinkle and line of his cheeks.

It was her children who were becoming lost to her, body and heart.

Through those long weeks of late summer, Abigail dreamed, again and again, of wandering through the silent streets of Philadelphia, looking for Tommy. The streets were always as she knew them: the neat grid so beloved of the city’s Quaker founders and so different from Boston’s twisting alleys. Sometimes in her dreams the streets were empty, the bricks dotted with dead cats, dead rats, dead birds. In other dreams, they were crowded, and she kept meeting people she knew: Ann Bingham, Martha Washington, her father in his black coat and white clerical bands, the pretty Mme. de Lafayette who had been so kind to her in Paris. All of them were dead, with the faint green rime of grave-mold on their faces. When she’d ask them, “Have you seen my son Tommy?” they would only point.

Then she’d wake and lie in the heat, sweating and praying while John slept at her side.

“At least the yellow fever’s dispersed the mobs,” John told her, the morning after his arrival. “Even those who haven’t money to flee avoid human contact, and walk for safety down the center of the street. If Citizen Genêt can get as many as five men to attend a Jacobin club meeting, I shall be very much surprised.”

As Johnny had said, the sailors of the French fleet were widely blamed for bringing in the fever in the first place. To the further chagrin of the troublemaking French Minister, a large number of those same French sailors, when informed of plans to sail out of New York against Canada and Louisiana, mutinied, burned Genêt’s house, got on their ships again, and set sail for France. Abigail hoped uncharitably they’d carry the yellow fever to Paris as a souvenir. Before President Washington left the Germantown house where he was staying, he informed the French Minister that he had sent a request for his recall.

“Whatever instructions Genêt had from his government,” remarked John, as they strolled along the green shade of the orchard rows, “they won’t be happy that he’s made himself this unpopular—if indeed they’re still alive by this time.”

From his pocket he took the folded sheets of the New York Advertiser. “A Correspondent” reported from Paris that after six weeks of intermittent riots and uprisings, the Girondist faction had been expelled from the National Convention, Danton had been ousted from his position on the Committee of Public Safety, and a man named Maximilien Robespierre had taken his place. “Genêt is a Girondist,” John told Abigail. “A number of Girondists, including Genêt’s chief, have been arrested. One could almost feel sorry for the man.”

“One could,” retorted Abigail acidly, “were one not paying attention to what damage is happening in this country as a result of his activities.”

She turned her face from him, looked out through the pale gray columns of the apple trees, toward the open pastureland and the stream beyond. Across the road the voices of the hired men drifted as they swung their scythes at the curing yellow wheat-stalks; John had promised to join them no later than noon. At breakfast, though clearly still weary from his journey, Abigail had thought he already looked more relaxed, as if anticipating the joy of having a scythe in his hands again, and sweat on his face.

It seemed almost incongruous, to be standing here knee-deep in orchard grass, she in the faded apron she’d put on to work in the dairy and he in his smock and his braided straw hat, discussing the deadly wranglings of the so-called French government.

Yet why not? It was as it should be, that a farmer and his wife would understand the meaning of these things. That a farmer and his wife would make the decisions that would affect the whole of the country.

That was the world they had seen, beyond the smoke of the War. The world they had striven to found.

“Tom Jefferson’s an intelligent man,” she said, frustrated, as they walked back toward the house, Caesar trotting, arthritic but game, at their heels. “How can he not see what happens, when factions and parties develop? How can he go on saying that this divisiveness is of any benefit to anyone? We won our freedom by acting together, John. The Sons of Liberty, and the people of Boston, took their direction from a small group of men who knew all the facts, who had been educated and took time to study the matter. Now all is anarchy, with the newspapers spilling out the most horrible lies! You remember what the press was in France! Printing filth about anyone they didn’t agree with, only to whip on the mobs, as rags like the Aurora and the Examiner whip them on now.” Her voice shook with anger.

John regarded her for a moment with watchful eyes. Then he put his arms around her, and said gently, “We’ve found our way through this so far, dearest Portia. We’ll make it safe to harbor. Now tell me, if you will, how Cousin Sam looked, and all his family, and what’s been happening in Boston. I take it there’s no sign there yet of the fever?”

So they spoke of other things. But all through the day, as Abigail returned to the kitchen and the dairy, fed her finches (this latest pair she’d named Anthony and Cleopatra) and settled down to the task of sorting through John’s laundry for mending, washing, replacing, her mind kept going back to its anger, as if anger were easier to deal with than her fear for the Republic, and dread for Tommy’s sake.

As the day lengthened into a week, and the week into another, she found it was the same. Whenever there wasn’t anything else to occupy her, the fear would return. And in the wake of dread that her son was dead would come anger at Tom Jefferson, or annoyance at the French and the Irish, who were just as vocal about wanting a war with Britain, for obvious reasons of their own. Boston was filled with both.

Fortunately, it was the busiest time of year on the farm, and there was much to occupy Abigail’s mind and time. The corn was brought in, husked, cribbed; the wheat harvested, winnowed, taken to the mill; apples to be picked, cider pressed. There were work-crews to feed, Peter and his men helping John, or John and his men going down the road to Peter’s, or both going to the neighbors. Peter’s wife Mary, and Abigail’s sister, and old Granny Susie would come, to sew and bake and make cheeses.

These summers were and always had been Abigail’s greatest joy. It was as if God had given them to her, like a certain number of gold pieces, as reward for those weeks of being seasick or terrified or exhausted from feeding all those refugees at the time of the Boston siege.

But always she was listening for the sound of hooves. For a message from Tommy, or, worse, from some stranger about Tommy. John walked into town daily to check the post, and the newspapers that he brought back were appalling. A hundred people a day were dying in Philadelphia now. In France, the Committee of Public Safety had seized the reins of government: The Republic, Robespierre explained, was the hope of mankind, and if it disappeared, tyranny would prevail forever. Thus it was necessary to preserve Liberty by temporarily suppressing it. Neither he nor anyone else specified for how long.

Émigrés were flooding into Boston and New York, bearing news of the Terror. Abigail tried in vain to learn whether the friends she’d made in Paris, who had made her welcome in their homes, had gotten out: the Duc de la Rochefoucauld, and the lovely Mme. de Lafayette.

Even Thomas Jefferson, she thought in disgust, could not ignore what was happening there now.

Or maybe he could.

Twice, to Abigail’s annoyance, Sam’s clerk, young Mr. Boyne, rode out to the farm, with messages for John that contained nothing about Tommy nor about much of anything else. It was only on the third occasion, when Louisa shyly suggested that Mr. Boyne be asked to remain for dinner, that Abigail began to suspect that the young man was the one inventing correspondence for his employer to send.

When Sam drove out to visit, the Monday that the church bells tolled through Massachusetts for the death of John Hancock, Boyne came with him. Cousin Sam—Hancock’s partner since the days the pair had conspired to turn Boston Harbor into a tea-pot and thirteen separate colonies into a single self-governing nation—followed the funeral wagon on foot as far as he was able. Afterwards he, his clerk, and his son-in-law Tom Wells came to Stonyfield Farm to dine.

John was the first to raise his wineglass and say, “To his Excellency the Governor,” and Abigail saw a tear glisten in Sam’s bright gray eye.

How many of the men who made France’s Revolution, she wondered, watching Johnny step around the table to shake Sam’s hand, would end their lives quietly governing their home territories, surrounded by their families, growing grizzled and chubby in peace? Lafayette had been outlawed and had had to flee his own country; he would be killed if he returned. Had M’sieu Danton been permitted to go home to his wife, if he had a wife, after he’d been ousted from power? Would M’sieu Robespierre live to quiet old age?

Somehow, Abigail didn’t think so. She wondered what made the difference. Sam had, by all accounts, been a troublemaker and an intriguer in Congress, but nobody had hustled him to prison and beheaded him in the public square.

Of course, if Jefferson and his faction take over, she reflected, who knows? Few of the men who’d started the Revolution—Sam, Mr. Hancock, Patrick Henry—had real power in this new nation.

She looked around for Louisa, and seeing her place empty, rose to fetch the corn pudding herself. The pro-French newspapers were already full of talk of making Jefferson the next President, though it was clearly John’s right to take the office after Washington stepped down. Faction again, she thought, crossing the yard to the summer kitchen, her long skirt rustling in the deep grass. It infuriated her, not only that John might be deprived of the due he had earned, but to know how much that public humiliation would hurt him. Faction and interest, and refusing to follow the best interests of the country!

In the kitchen, Louisa and Mr. Boyne stood, the young woman with her head bowed, the clerk clasping both of her hands. Neither heard Abigail’s step on the gravel until too late; Louisa looked around, startled, and stepped back hastily at the sight of her aunt’s icy eye. Abigail said, “Please get the cream and some more butter from the spring house, if you will, dear,” in her most deadly tone, and brushed past Boyne without a glance or a word.

With her usual quiet speed, Louisa hurried down the path to the branch, while Abigail loaded a tray with cake, pudding, and the molasses pitcher. Mr. Boyne took a pace toward her and said, “Mrs. Adams, I can explain,” and she fixed him with a glacial regard.

“Oh, I’m sure you can,” she replied in a friendly voice that could have cut glass. “But you needn’t.”

Color flooded up under the thin Irish skin. He turned and strode from the little building; the sinking summer sunlight flashed like a blackbird’s wing on his hair. He didn’t return across the yard to the house; instead, he disappeared through the gates onto the road.

“You didn’t need to send him away, Aunt Abigail,” Louisa said, standing in the kitchen doorway. There was anger as well as sadness in her voice.

“I didn’t,” Abigail answered serenely. “The young gentleman seems to have a regrettably Irish temper, and a great deal of pride.”

“The same might be said of Uncle John,” Louisa said. For all that she had lived with her aunt as a dependent for five years, Louisa was no subservient poor relation.

Abigail smiled. “It can indeed.” She studied her niece’s pretty face, with its sharp Smith nose, its dark intelligent eyes. There was something to her after all of Nabby’s closed expression, as if growing up in the tensions and uncertainties of Will’s disorderly household were not so very different from growing up under threat of the British guns.

More quietly, she went on, “But what cannot be said of your uncle John is that he would see harm done to his country for the sake of party politics. Mr. Boyne is a Jacobin. The last thing your uncle needs right now is an enemy on his own hearthstone.”

“Because a man disagrees politically doesn’t mean he is a wicked man. Or that he is an enemy. Or that he would make a bad husband.”

“Any man adhering to the faction that would split the government of this country—that would turn it into the chaos of disunion that we see in France—is by definition your uncle’s enemy,” replied Abigail. “As he is mine.”

In the silence that followed, Abigail wondered how far things had gone, between Sam’s clerk and her niece. As far as a kiss? A surreptitious walk in the orchard one evening when he’d come out with a “message” for John? A betrothal?

Betrayal stirred in her, like coals waked to life around her heart. Louisa had lived under her roof, fed and clothed and educated as if she were the daughter Abigail so dearly missed—the daughter she feared she had lost forever. The young woman had frequently quoted, laughing, the words of Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing: I would rather hear my dog bark at a crow than hear a man swear he loved me.

Recalling her own brisk disavowals, Abigail had waited in amusement to see her young companion encounter the passion and joy of love.

But a Jacobin! Abigail felt as disappointed, as betrayed, as if she’d found her niece with her hand in the family cash box.

And an Irishman, who had no stake in the country to which he’d fled! Who understood only what he was told in those scabrous rags like the Aurora, who wanted to see the bloody French version of revolution spread across the world, so that those who hadn’t worked for their fortunes could take away from those who had.

Such a man would only bring her unhappiness, thought Abigail. And in its wake, chaos in the family.

“I’m sorry, dearest.”

Louisa took a deep breath. “They’ll be waiting for us in the house, Aunt,” she said.

After supper, Abigail lingered at the table to talk of the state of the country with Cousin Sam, John, and Johnny over coffee. It was then that John spoke to his son once again about entering the diplomatic corps. “I thought it a waste of your experiences and skills, when you left France to go to Harvard,” he told Johnny. “But I knew also that you wanted to go. But to simply remain a lawyer in Boston, with your knowledge of Paris, St. Petersburg, and Holland!”

Johnny said, rather stiffly, “I felt that I needed what Harvard could teach me.”

“And you were like to die there of melancholia within a year,” Abigail pointed out.

“We are, God help us, a provincial nation, a nation of ‘colonists,’ most of whom have never left their native shores,” John went on. “That includes the men who now must cope with negotiations in Europe. God knows when I went to Paris I was provincial enough. Your knowledge of both Dutch and French puts you ahead of five sixths of the men Washington has made ministers, never mind that you’ve been there and know how the people live.”

“I’ve been there,” replied Johnny grimly, “and I have no desire to return. I am content here.”

“Content?” erupted his father, turning bright pink as he always did when frustrated. “I was pretty content, too, to remain at home with your mother and let Massachusetts look after itself as best it might. But I didn’t!”

“Nonsense, John.” Sam accepted the sugar-dish from Abigail’s hand with his easy smile. “You’d have died of chagrin if you hadn’t been elected to the Continental Congress, even had you been married to Cleopatra—who would certainly have suffered in comparison,” he added gallantly, “to your charming Portia.”

“Your country needs you, Johnny,” insisted John. “It already has plenty of lawyers.”

“Most of whom can’t make a living,” added Sam, and Johnny’s cheekbones reddened. Though Sam didn’t know it, work for new-fledged lawyers in Boston was so short that John and Abigail had been providing their eldest son with a stipend to keep going, with the argument that he was John’s lawyer.

“It is your choice, of course, Son,” added John grudgingly. But in his voice Abigail heard his thought. For him, as for her, there had never been the question of any other choice. One answered the call of one’s country first. One defended its rights, and all other things came secondarily. Farm, family, wishes, husbands, wives.

Only so could the country remain strong.

Only when Sam departed did Michael Boyne appear out of nowhere, to climb into the chaise at his side. John and Abigail waved them out of sight as they turned onto the road back to town. Over the rich green countryside, the church bells still tolled for the death of John Hancock, the man who’d stepped up to be the first to sign the declaration of the country’s independence. The first to publicly defy the King.

Louisa had gone into the house.

A week later a letter reached them from New Jersey.

It was from Tommy. He’d gotten out of Philadelphia all right and tight, he wrote, but was now perilously short of cash. Might they send him some?