Patriot Hearts: A Novel of the Founding Mothers

DOLLEY

Gray’s Ferry, Pennsylvania

Thursday, October 24, 1793

A child was crying in her nightmare.

I must wake up, Dolley thought. I must wake up and save Payne.

The British are coming and we have to flee to the woods.

No, that’s wrong, she thought. It’s Willie who’s crying. Baby Willie.

The infant’s red face returned to her, fever-flushed, the little withered scrap of body that looked so much like that of a newborn kitten.

It’s just a little summer fever, she told her mother, as she wrung out the damp cloth, over and over again. Sponged the delicate skin that seemed to bag so horribly over bones more fragile than a bird’s. Just a little summer fever. If we can keep him cool, we’ll be fine.

The stone cottage John had rented on the banks of the Schuylkill had a good, deep well behind it. The water came up so cold, even in the sticky October heat, that she had to settle it out in a pan, so it wouldn’t be too cold for poor little Willie’s flesh.

How could she feel so passionate a love for someone whose face she’d first seen only seven weeks ago?

In her nightmare she sat beside the infant’s cot, in the small chamber her mother had laid claim to when first they’d come to Gray’s Ferry. But the sounds she heard through the window were the sounds of Philadelphia, in those last weeks before Willie’s birth: the endless tolling of the church bells, the jolt of wagons on the cobbles of the street as families hurried from the town to seek refuge from the fever in the countryside. The creak of the dead-carts, and the voices of the black drivers calling, “Bring out yo’ dead!”

Dolley’s eyes snapped open.

Morning light streamed in at the wide-flung window, the hot air already rank with the musky scents of the country.

Would the heat never break?

She sat up, and was at once swamped by a wave of dizzy weakness. She clutched at the bedpost. Don’t lie down, she told herself. If you lie down, you’ll fall asleep again, and Willie needs you. Payne needs you.

She took deep breaths.

As she’d dreamed, she saw she was indeed in the stone house at Gray’s Ferry that John had rented for them when the fever began to spread beyond the waterfront.

So that part at least hadn’t been a dream. Birds twittered in the trees outside the window. Somewhere close a dog barked, clear as a bell in the stillness of the morning. Dolley’s head ached from too little sleep, but the autumn scent of turning leaves and clear water revived her. It woke in her heart the echo of pleasure-parties when all the young people of the Meeting would drive here to walk in these green woods by the river, away from Philadelphia’s oppressive heat. In those days she’d strolled past this house a hundred times with barely a glance.

She wondered now, a little superstitiously, how she could not have felt a shudder of dread.

By the time the fever spread inland, Dolley had been too close to her time to be moved. John had rented the cottage at Gray’s Ferry to take her and the children to the moment she could travel.

For some minutes Dolley sat, trying to recruit her strength. Listening to the birds and hearing in her mind, as if it spilled through from her dreams, the tolling bells and the creak of the carts collecting the dead. In her nostrils the spice of autumn leaves, the swoony sweetness of hay, turned to the sulfur reek of the barrels of tar that had been burned in yards and on street corners to cleanse the fever miasma said to hang like an unseen vapor in the air. When, in her final week of pregnancy, Sarah Parker and Lizzie Collins came calling, they carried lengths of tarred rope in their hands, believing that some quality of the tar itself, rather than the smoke of its burning, would keep the fever at bay.

Aaron Burr—completely unrepentant about slipping love-notes from Steptoe to Lucy—wrote her from Germantown, I have entertained myself in the Senate Chamber by devising a catalogue of the talismans clutched by my colleagues in the hope of frightening the Grim Reaper: six lengths of tarred rope, eight handkerchiefs soaked with camphor and four with vinegar, and one peeled onion. The smell is as you may imagine.

He also sent her a copy of Tom Jones, which made the concluding days of August easier to bear, though she had to hide the book from her mother. “Libertine” or not (as John disapprovingly described Burr), it was hard to stay angry at the diminutive Colonel for long, particularly after the joy she read between the lines of Lucy’s first letter from Harewood Plantation.

And as September brought the death-count to sixty and more a day, even John had to agree with her that it was better that Lucy was somewhere safe, even if it did mean she was married to an Outsider.

“We shall leave just as soon as Dr. Kuhn says thou’rt strong enough after the baby’s birth,” John had promised, gripping Dolley’s hand. “The air is better, up in the hills. There is no fever there.”

Listening hard, Dolley heard the murmur of voices elsewhere in the house, and the creak of her mother’s stride on the planks of the hall. Then Anna’s voice saying something about water. Anna and Mary, and her eleven-year-old brother Johnnie had all come out with them to Gray’s Ferry. Dolley closed her eyes, thanking God again that like Lucy, they were away from the horrors of the plague-stricken town.

Though she’d been hale and lively while carrying Payne, eighteen months ago, Dolley had been exhausted by the final weeks of her second pregnancy. Willie’s birth had seemed endless, draining every atom of strength from her as she clung to her husband’s hands. As that night wore on she had wept with weakness, pain, and a fear that she had never known while birthing Payne. Then in the long nightmare of the ordeal’s aftermath, suffocating in the heat and listening to her child’s feeble cries, she had whispered to her mother to leave her, to go out to Gray’s Ferry and not to wait for her. To save themselves, save Payne, save little Willie who was clearly sickly himself.

Before she was even well, she recalled, she had crept from bed to sit holding her frail tiny son in her arms. Nights and afternoons blurred into one long half-dream. Willie had seemed a little better when they removed to Gray’s Ferry, for the family cow could get good fresh grass out here and her milk was better: To Dolley’s mingled sadness and relief, her own milk had dried.

But he hadn’t put on weight as a baby should. And last week, his bouts of fever had returned. Dolley had sat up with him last night and the night before, til the hot lamplight swam before her eyes and the whine of the single mosquito in the room had seemed like the drawn-out note of a hellish violin. She didn’t know what time it had been, when her mother had forced her to go to bed.

Her hands trembled as she reached across to where her wrapper lay on the bed. Just standing up made her pant. Has John come back? she wondered, as she gathered up her long black braid into a loose knot at her nape. And is Willie silent because he’s sleeping at last, or because…?

She pushed the terror away and crossed to the door, only to have it open as she reached it: Anna, her gray dress and white apron water-spotted, a pitcher in her hands. “Sister—!” She was clearly as startled as Dolley had been. “Art well?”

Dolley nodded. “Willie—?”

“Sleeps.” Anna’s voice cracked a little on the word.

A truth, but not the whole truth.

Without a word Dolley brushed past her, hastened down the hall.

The house at Gray’s Ferry was a simple one, built of stone, its plastered walls whitewashed rather than painted. The large room on the east was hers and John’s, with a truckle-bed for Payne. At her mother’s insistence, they’d set up Willie’s cradle in her mother’s cubicle next door, so that Dolley could rest—as if anyone could rest, reflected Dolley, too weary even to feel annoyed, with the sound of her child crying, and the constant frightening shuffle of comings and goings that brought her out of bed a hundred times a day to ask, Doth he better?

The cradle stood near the window, where the light was best. Her mother sat on the edge of the bed beside it, a basin near her feet and on a tray a pile of rags. Molly Payne was working steadily, mechanically, as she and Dolley had worked all last night and the nights before, wringing the rags out in the water, and gently laying them on the little body. From the doorway Dolley could hear what she had not, in her own room next door: the faint, sobbing whimper of an infant too exhausted to make any other sound.

Molly looked up. She was crying as she worked, without breaking the movement of what she did and without making a noise. Dolley came to her side. From downstairs in the parlor she heard Payne’s shrill voice, insisting, “Mama!” and Mary, with artificial brightness, “Now, sugarplum, thy mama is laid down on her bed. Dost not want the hobbyhorse?”

“Want Mama now!”

Payne had made no secret that the acquisition of a tiny brother—and one who did nothing but cry—was not an acceptable exchange for a mother who no longer had the time to play with, fuss over, or sing to him. Through her illness and fatigue, Dolley had always made time in the evenings to play with Payne before she slept. It was not her son’s fault that his world had turned topsy-turvy.

Molly got to her feet, crossed to close the bedroom door against the high-pitched insistent protests. Dolley lifted tiny William Temple Todd from the damp mattress on which he lay, sat with him on the edge of her mother’s bed. She didn’t need to touch him to know he was burning with fever. He was bone-thin, unable since yesterday to swallow either gruel or milk. She wrapped him in the crib’s sheet and held him against her shoulder, rocking him gently, knowing in her heart that it was time to say good-bye to her son.

“No word yet from John?”

“Nothing. Mrs. Ridgley tells me that none come or go from Philadelphia now, and that it is like a city of the dead.”

Dolley shivered, trying to imagine any situation worse than the one she had seen there nearly four weeks ago. At John’s request she had returned briefly to Philadelphia, to witness his ailing father’s will. She shivered at the recollection of the empty streets, of the choking miasma of burning tar, sulfur smudges, waste and garbage left in streets because there was no one to cart them away. She had never warmed to her father-in-law, whom she considered too quick with his schoolmaster’s rod—one reason, she suspected, for John’s profound gentleness with Payne. But she carried enough of the love she had felt for her own father to understand John’s deep love for the stern Todd senior, and his stubborn loyalty when the old man had fallen ill.

After the will was signed, both she and John had tried to talk John’s mother into taking refuge with them in Gray’s Ferry. She would not leave her sick husband’s side. Nor would John desert his father, despite Dolley’s pleas. As her closely shrouded carriage had rolled through the streets once more, the rattle of its wheels in the deathly silence had sounded to her like the echo of pursuit.

That visit was the last time she’d seen John. Nearly a week after that, a letter had reached them from John’s brother James, who had taken his family even farther into the Pennsylvania countryside. His first letter to Dolley had gone astray. With this, his second, came the news that Todd senior was dying; that John’s clerk Isaac Heston, who had been left to look after their Walnut Street house, was dead. After agonized days of waiting, word came from John: His father had died; his mother lay dying.

No one knew why one man sickened and died, and another survived. Through the leaden heat of the summer’s end, all had discussed endlessly what caused the disease, and by what means it was transmitted. The formidable Mrs. Drinker recommended Duffy’s Elixir mixed with vinegar, while Dr. Rush prescribed mercury purges, “heroic” bloodletting, and blisters to draw forth the evil humors. Sometimes a man would greet his friends hale and healthy in the morning, and be carried to his grave before the sun was down. Others lingered for weeks, until the black blood flowed out of their mouths and their souls flickered away like candles going out. Sometimes those who worked among the sick took ill themselves, as Dr. Rush had. Others came away unscathed. Still others, who kept themselves to their homes and walked only down the centers of the streets, died in their isolation.

Dolley laid her baby back into his crib, tenderly peeled off the damp rags from his flesh and began again the process of wringing them out in cool water, rewrapping those sticklike arms and legs. Willie’s eyes were glimmering slits, his face grotesque from the flesh he’d lost. “Thou shouldst be back in bed, child,” said her mother softly, and Dolley only shook her head.

“Thou must be weary thyself, Mama.”

“ ’Tis naught I haven’t seen before.”

Dolley glanced across at her, remembering the three little babies between her brother Isaac and sister Lucy, born in those first years after they had returned to Virginia from the woods of North Carolina where Dolley’s earliest memories lay. She couldn’t imagine going through this three times.

My son, she thought, caressing the baby’s cheek. John’s son.

She thought she’d known the depth and breadth of John Todd before they had gone before the Congregation to be approved to partner one another. She had known the steady capacity for affection that made up for his lack of humor, had appreciated the gentle tolerance of others that went hand in hand with his own stringent adherence to the principles of their faith. Though she usually had to explain to him why she laughed at jests or at the foibles of their friends, he would always smile and join in her mirth. After her father’s erratic rages, John’s phlegmatic nature had been a welcome relief. And if she’d felt no passion for him, she took great pleasure in his undemanding company.

Yet for weeks before and after their marriage she had been plagued with dreams of being lost in the woods, of having strayed down the wrong path, wandering farther and farther from the place she truly wanted to get to. Waking, she had never felt the smallest doubt about the strength of her husband’s love for her. But the dreams persisted, ceasing only after she found herself with child.

The boundless, exalted delight that radiated from John Todd from the moment he saw his baby son had taken Dolley completely by surprise. John loved Payne to adoration, carrying him about the streets, buying him trinkets and toys with joyful abandon. As if Payne were a new sun whose light showed John the world in unsuspected colors. Where once John would have said, Thou canst wear only one ribbon at a time, he began to surprise her with little gifts. He hath such joy in a rattle or a ball, John would say, smiling, that I think, “My Dolley would have such joy, too.”

He had completely refused to join in the guessing-games played by Dolley and her sisters, about whether her second child would be Little William or Little Mary. Instead he would say, Since the foundations of Time, God hath known who it were best to send to us. Who are we to guess at His intent?

How can I write to him, Dolley wondered, stroking the hot, wrinkled skin that felt like the most fragile silk, and tell him that his son is dead? Closing her eyes, she saw John standing at her bedside in the flickering glow of the candles, with her mother and the midwife smiling in the background as he rocked Willie in his arms for the first time, and wept with joy.

A wild flurry of stomping in the hall. The door slammed open. “Want Mama now!” As Payne flung himself at Dolley, grabbing and dragging the skirts of her wrapper as if by main force he could pull her downstairs, Mary’s voice could be heard in the staircase muttering, “Drat the boy—!”

“Mama, now!” pleaded Payne, bursting into tears as Molly tried to seize him. “Want Papa! Want Mama! Want Limberjack!” Limberjack was the wooden stick-puppet whose continuing adventures Dolley would illustrate for Payne at bedtime. As Molly tried to pull him away, Payne began to scream, the frantic wailing of one whose secure golden world has shattered into an incomprehensible exile of loved ones too long absent, and explanations that meant nothing except that he was neglected, rejected by those whose idol he had once been.

As Payne, still screaming, grabbed at Dolley’s hands, Willie began to wail, too, the thin feeble protest of inexpressible pain.

“Here,” said Dolley, seeing her mother’s face cloud with anger. “Here, I’ll take him.” Payne clutched at her neck, grabbed handfuls of her hair, wrapped his short chubby legs around her waist as she lifted him despite her mother’s protest. Payne was sobbing something that could have been either Mama or Papa. He refused to release her, as Mary tried to take him.

“Now, Payne, thy mama shouldn’t be picking thee up, thou’rt grown too big—”

“It’s all right.” Dolley cast a quick look back over her shoulder, at the wet, crimson, sobbing little bundle of Willie now gathered in her mother’s arms. “I’ll be back directly.”

By her mother’s dark glance she could tell Molly didn’t believe the older child would turn his mother loose anytime soon.

But Dolley understood. Payne and John had shared a secret world, from the moment Payne was born, a pact of absolute unquestioning mutual adoration. John had been Payne’s world, as Payne was John’s.

And John was not here.

To a boy twenty months old, four weeks is eternity. As it was, Dolley reflected, to a woman of twenty-five.

John had written that old Mother Amy, who had remained behind to watch over the now-deserted boardinghouse, would come to help him nurse his mother, and did the cooking and washing while John made forays through the stricken city for either money that was owed him by law clients, or food to buy with the little that he had.

As fewer and fewer would take produce into the city, bands of looters raided abandoned houses for the contents of their storerooms. Ships at the wharves, whose crews had died or fled, provided rations of stolen rum. Flour, potatoes, and oatmeal could be bought, but for frightening sums. Dolley heard rumors of families trading silver or clothing for a few pounds of corn.

John’s last message had been a brief note, saying that his mother had died, and that he was going to gather up what money he could and return to them.

That had been ten days ago.

“Limberjack,” whimpered Payne pitifully, tugging on Dolley’s shoulders as she sat with him beside the cold downstairs hearth. So Mary fetched Limberjack from the corner where Payne had flung him in a temper, and Dolley forced cheer back into her voice as she recounted the wooden puppet’s adventures. Fortunately she was widely read: Limberjack had already encountered Cyclopes, battled infuriated Lilliputians, defeated giants cleverly disguised as windmills, and rescued any number of princesses from threats shamelessly gleaned from Greek myth and King Arthur—Payne listened in open-mouthed delight. But every time Dolley would attempt to finish and go back upstairs, he clung to her and wept afresh, and she had not the heart to push him away.

“I’ll see how he’s doing,” Mary would whisper, and scurry upstairs. Thunder boomed heavily in the distance, and instead of bringing coolness the air grew muggy and thick as treacle. Payne followed Dolley upstairs and stood jealous guard in the hallway while she washed her face and dressed. Waited, clinging to her skirt, with ill-concealed tears in his eyes as she visited Willie again, and began at once to weep and fret for his dinner.

“I shall have to go up and lie down again,” said Dolley, as she sat once more with Payne after dinner. Payne, too, was exhausted. Still he clung to her hand, his mouth turning stubbornly down.

“And I shall have to go back to thy brother,” she added, as firmly as she could. “Willie is littler than thee, Payne, and needs his mama more.” Before Willie’s birth, John had carefully explained to Payne that another little soul was standing beside the gates of Heaven, eagerly waiting God’s signal to fly to earth and join their family, to be Payne’s dear brother or sister. Payne had smiled and hugged him, and had seemed to accept. But then, Payne would accept anything, from John.

“Thou’rt all but a man.” She smiled, and patted his golden curls. “ ’Tis for a man to possess himself of patience. Dost not wish to play with thy aunt Anna?”

A tear slid from the huge blue eye. “Mama—”

Shadow winked past the window, gone before Dolley could turn her head. She heard the splat and thud in the muddy gravel outside, as if something had fallen; got to her feet and started to cross to the door. Someone knocked, flat hard sounds as if struck not with the knuckles but with an open hand.

Someone ill.

Some sojourner from the city.

Her stride lengthened on the stone-flagged floor: He will have a letter from John…

Her visitor was John.

In that first instant Dolley thought, Why do I think it’s John? That isn’t John’s face—

In that first instant, Dolley wondered if she had slipped into sleep again, and if this was a nightmare, where no one looked like they did in waking life.

The face of the man was a stranger’s, gaunt instead of squarely plump, stubbled with a week’s worth of beard. The skin was ghastly orange-yellow where it could be seen at all under the streaks of mud and rain-thinned black vomit. He’d vomited on his clothing. The rainwater spread the horror; flecks of it clung to his chapped lips.

From a skeletal face, blue eyes stared at her. John’s eyes. Begging her to recognize him.

Dolley caught him as his knees buckled, dragged him inside. Payne ran forward, crying “Papa!” and stopped abruptly, the horror hitting him like a club. Dolley called out, “Mama! Get some water, quick. Get Mama—”

Through his clothes John’s body radiated heat like a smoldering log. His face, pressed to her bare throat, seemed to scorch the skin. Dolley whispered, “Oh, dear God,” as they sank together to the floor before the open door, the tail-end of the afternoon rain spattering in around them.

John whispered, “Dolley,” and fumbled for her hands.

She caught them, pressed them to her breast. Footsteps shook the enclosed wooden staircase and she felt rather than saw her mother and Anna come running out; heard her mother say, “Open the bedroom door,” meaning the door of the downstairs “best bedroom” where guests would sleep. Anna raced to obey; young Johnnie came dashing in, face pallid with shock. “Get him to the bed,” said her mother, and Dolley whispered, “No,” as John’s body convulsed in her arms, his fingers crushing her hands.

Black vomit began to flow out of his mouth again, not in spasms, but like a dirty stream. Around it he whispered, “Payne?”

“He is well,” answered Dolley. And because she knew it didn’t matter, she added, “Willie also.” The stench was absolutely appalling. Dolley gathered John’s head to her shoulder, as she had only minutes ago held Payne’s.

“Dolley,” he said again, or something she assumed was her name. Then he convulsed again, writhing and striking, his elbow ramming her belly, the strength of his arm nearly breaking her back. To hold him away would only expose her to more injury and she wouldn’t throw him aside to flop like a dying fish on the floor. Instead, she closed her arms tight and held on, with all the strength of a farm-girl who has done the work of the slaves her father freed.

It felt like minutes but couldn’t have been more than a few seconds. Then he seemed to slither down, his weight like the weight of a sack half filled with corn.

How long Dolley sat on the wet stone of the floor, her husband’s body cradled in her arms, she never afterwards knew. It felt like hours—it actually could not have been more than a few minutes. When her mother tried to make her stand she pulled away from her hand, tightened her hold around John’s chest, unable to speak, or cry, or make a sound.

At last her mother got her to her feet, and led her from the room.

Washington City

August 24, 1814

“I sometimes wonder what I would have been, had John not died.” Dolley raised her head from her half-written letter as Sophie came back into the parlor, a trio of silver compote-bowls in her hands. From the dining-room next door the muted rustle of tablecloths, the tiny chink of porcelain being set in its place, made a whispered through-line to the dim counterpoint of cannon and the jangle of fleeing wagons and running feet.

Dolley’s heart was beating hard, but oddly, remembering John’s death gave her a sense of calm.

After John had died, she had gone into the kitchen, stripped out of her fouled dress, washed her face, put on something else that her mother brought her—to this day she couldn’t remember what it was—and went out, first to comfort the howling, terrified Payne, then to wash her husband’s body.

A few hours after that, just before sunset, Willie died.

She understood then that even the worst days contained only twenty-four hours. One did what one had to do to get through them, and afterwards, one slept.

“I venture to guess, a respectable Philadelphia matron and a—” Sophie visibly stopped herself from adding something. Probably, Dolley guessed, the queen of the Quakers for miles around. Even after all these years, that was the single regret that stung. “A doting grandmother—and in fairly short order, knowing Payne,” Sophie finished, with a wry twist to her mouth. Dolley rolled her eyes. Jemmy had already been obliged to get Payne out of several scrapes with girls.

“John could have kept Payne on the straight and narrow road, if any could,” she agreed after a moment. “That he hath sometimes strayed is not Jemmy’s failing, but my own. And I hear he doth well, in Ghent with Mr. Adams’s son.” This wasn’t entirely true, but if Sophie had heard rumor of the swathe Payne was cutting through Dutch diplomatic society—and the gambling-hells of Amsterdam—she didn’t show it.

As she returned to her letter, Dolley wondered: Would Payne have been different, had she done as her mother had urged her to do? If she had limited herself to being the wife John had wanted her to be, even after his death?

Instead of being herself?

Philadelphia, 1794

Winter and Spring

The hard cold of November ended the yellow fever in Philadelphia. The winter was a bitter one. The river froze, further crippling sea-commerce already disrupted by the summer’s riots and plague. The whole city seemed to be in mourning, numbed by grief and shock.

“Everyone I know hath lost members of their families,” Dolley said to Lady Washington, when she and her mother called at the Morris mansion to thank the older woman for her note of condolence. “Going to Meeting for the first time, ’twas hard not to weep, seeing so many clothed in black. So many empty seats.”

Lady Washington set down her cup, and leaned across to take Dolley’s hands. She, too, wore the sable of mourning.

“Doth Master Lincoln well, in New Hampshire with his granny?” Dolley asked.

And the plump little lady smiled. “Yes. Mary Lear and I have been writing all the summer, and have concluded that we must actually be sisters, our thoughts are so much akin. She is of the opinion—as am I—that it would do the city of Philadelphia much good, if instead of keeping all the theaters and assembly-rooms closed, some kind of public amusements could be available. I don’t mean Roman orgies or revel-routs through the streets, of course—”

“I should give a great deal to see Alexander Hamilton in a toga,” remarked Dolley thoughtfully, at which her mother looked shocked.

Lady Washington suppressed a delighted giggle with the greatest of difficulty. “My dear, so would he. But it would be a good thing, I think, for people to get out of their homes a bit.” She cocked a bright brown eye up at Dolley and added, “And that means you, dear, when you’re feeling up to it. Will you be removing back to Walnut Street?”

“I think so, yes.” The thought of reentering the big brick house on Fourth and Walnut felt strange to her. The thought of sleeping in the big bed alone, without John.

On the other side of the drawing-room, beside the hearth’s cheerful blaze, her mother and her sister Lucy—a startlingly stylish Lucy in a rose-pink polonaise dress and a Norwich silk shawl that had to have cost several pounds—were chatting with the Custis girls about the sale of the boardinghouse and the removal of Molly Payne and her two youngest children to Steptoe Washington’s plantation.

“Anna will be staying with me, to help look after Payne,” Dolley told Lady Washington. “And as we have finally gotten my father-in-law’s estate probated, I am able now to hire a cook and a maid-of-all-work.” While Dolley was still in the first shock of bereavement in Gray’s Ferry, John’s brother James had gone into Philadelphia and collected all the papers and receipt-books, not only from the house of Todd senior, but from John’s office in the Walnut Street house as well. To Dolley’s repeated requests for the papers—since she knew very well that under her father-in-law’s will she stood to inherit some six hundred pounds, plus whatever John had left her—James sent a little housekeeping money and the suggestion that she apply to the Meeting for support.

“I trust all things have worked out well?”

“Well, there is much yet to be done—” Like making James hand over John’s papers, thought Dolley, though she couldn’t say so at tea. “But Mr. Wilkins, a friend of my husband’s in the Congregation and a lawyer himself, hath offered me his services.”

“Will that answer?” Nelly Custis joined them from where she and Mary had been feeding bits of plum-cake to Payne. Like her grandmother, Nelly wore the muted grays and blacks of half-mourning for young Pollie, who had been so integral a member of their household; a sharp contrast to the dramatically funereal garb affected by her older sister Eliza. “For a member of the Congregation to handle the affairs of another in the Congregation, who might have to collect from still others in the Congregation?”

Lady Washington frowned at this talk of business, but Dolley replied cheerfully, “There are those in the Congregation, of course, who might find it inappropriate.” And who might side with James and frown on even the suggestion of a lawsuit. “But Colonel Burr—who as thou knowst was one of my mother’s boarders last year—hath also offered his assistance. So I do not think there shall be any difficulty.”

“Not with legal matters, at least,” agreed Lady Washington darkly. She glanced across at Lucy, as if Burr had seduced her himself instead of playing Cupid for her nephew Steptoe.

“When I see how happy Lucy is, ma’am, I cannot find it in my heart to hold the Colonel’s role in their romance against him.” Dolley smiled.

“Well, no.” Lady Washington sounded unwilling even to credit the New York Senator with inadvertent good. “But you watch out for Colonel Burr, Dolley—if I may call thee Dolley? Oh, dear, now you’ve got me saying ‘thee’ and ‘thou.’ He is a rake, and a man who knows how to make himself fatally attractive to women.”

“I don’t imagine a man could be a rake—at least not a very successful one—who did not,” pointed out Dolley, and squeezed Lady Washington’s plump, black-mitted hand again. “Do not trouble thyself, ma’am. I know Colonel Burr too well to be taken in by his ways. And indeed, it seems to me now that it will be enough, for me to look after my Payne and Anna, and to…to live in quiet. I do not think I shall marry again.”

“Oh, you will, my dear,” predicted Martha wisely. “You will.”

Dolley wasn’t so sure of that. It was, of course, expected that every widow would remarry, if for nothing else than to provide a guardian to her children, though from remarks Nelly Custis let drop about her mother’s morose and reclusive second husband, some guardians were more effective than others.

The truth was that she enjoyed being a widow.

She missed John. In those first few weeks of December, back in their home on Walnut Street, there were days when she could only sit beside her bedroom fire, gazing out the window at the falling snow. But the dazed, uprooted confusion she saw in the eyes of Lady Washington’s dear friend Mrs. Powel—widowed also by the fever—was strange to her, and a little frightening.

“No, Elizabeth has taken her husband’s death very hard, poor darling,” Lady Washington agreed, when, after another of Martha’s “at-home mornings” Dolley remained to help her and Nelly wash up the good china. “When my Daniel died—Mr. Custis…” Her brown eyes lost a little of their bright focus, gazing back across the gap of years. “I was…I was shocked, of course, and devastated—I had nearly lost our son Jacky to fever, only weeks before—But I never felt that the world itself had ended.”

She glanced up at Dolley—who stood nearly a head taller than she—and in her face Dolley saw the shadow of the future. “I don’t think…” she began, and hesitated to even speak of it. In a tiny voice very unlike her own usual briskness, she said, “I am not sure that I could survive losing the General.”

The pain in her eyes, the dread of a grief greater than she knew herself able to bear, and the aching love, caught Dolley’s throat, so that she put her arm around her friend’s shoulders, wet hand and all, and declared, “And I am very sure he could not survive the loss of thee, ma’am. Which presents a terrible conundrum, doth it not? So thou must take care to predecease him, and steel thyself to look down from Heaven and see him falling prey to the wiles of Kitty Burke, or Georgina Morris—” She named two of the most intently marriage-minded belles in Philadelphia society, and Martha, surprised into laughter, gave her a schoolgirl shove and went back to drying cups.

But Dolley understood. With John’s death, she had no feeling that the world had ended. She only felt deeply confused, and for many nights the old dream returned to her, of having taken the wrong road and being unable to find her way back.

“For Heaven’s sake, Mrs. Todd, rearrange the furniture,” Aaron Burr advised, when he came in February to help her draft yet another demand that James surrender John’s papers to her for probate. “Every widow I’ve ever met says it’s the quickest way to lay ghosts. Paint the rooms, if you can spare the time—in a month you won’t have an unscheduled week to do it in—and buy yourself new dishes.”

He’d been holding Payne on his knee while the boy examined his watch and fob, but when the servant-girl came in with the tea things, Payne leaped down—watch in hand—to show it off to her, and Dolley met Burr’s eyes. “Thinkst thus I will forget him?” she asked softly.

“Nothing of the kind.” The dark eyes looking across into her own were kindly, their perpetual ironic amusement muted by the recollection of griefs of his own. “My Theodosia says—” And his voice, beautiful as cut black velvet, hesitated over the name of the wife he never ceased, despite his many infidelities, to adore. “Theodosia says, and I believe her to be correct, that while one doesn’t always remember, one never forgets.”

Privately, Dolley wondered how much remembrance Theodosia Burr gave to her first husband, a British officer during the Revolution, whom she had enthusiastically betrayed with Burr for some time before his death. Then she shook herself inwardly for the judgment. Theodosia Burr was ill—dying, Dolley suspected, though Burr remained at least outwardly optimistic. The poor woman would no doubt be remembering the first husband whom she was so shortly to meet.

And rather to her surprise, Dolley found that rearranging the furniture, and having the tea-room painted a sprightly yellow, did in fact dispel a degree of her grief. What her mother would have said about it, she wasn’t sure: It occurred to her that perhaps in selling the boardinghouse, and taking Lucy’s invitation to return with her to Harewood to live, her mother had been dispelling the brooding ghost she had lived with for two years.

In any event, Dolley bought new dishes, too, and began to entertain her friends in the tea-room: not simply the ladies of the Meeting, but more and more frequently the ladies whom she met at Lady Washington’s.

Even with young Wash away at school, Lady Washington had her hands full, and often asked Dolley to assist her at her “at-home mornings” between eleven and twelve. Eliza and Pattie Custis were still in residence, having a “season” in Philadelphia, but they, like their younger sister Nelly, were as often as not on an outing with their friends, as life slowly stirred back into the city. Moreover, Dolley guessed that the older two girls were less than completely useful socially. Shy Pattie was aglow with her first serious courtship. Eliza—who as the older of the two considered it her right to be married first—consequently swung from tragic airs to petulant rages.

So Dolley stepped in to assist, and found herself in the company of women whom she had only previously glimpsed from afar: the brilliant Ann Bingham and her remarkable sisters; the elegant Maria Morris; sweet-tempered Betsey Hamilton, and the fascinating Harriet Manigault. Though few of the members of Congress brought their wives to Philadelphia—particularly not after the yellow fever—Lady Washington’s callers also included émigré ladies from France, the wives and daughters of exiles in flight from the Terror, who brought with them fearful stories of events in Paris, and the news of the execution of the French Queen, the beautiful and doomed Marie Antoinette.

“I’ve always been sorry I never met her,” Martha confided once. “She sent me a present, I’m told—which of course those dreadful British intercepted and sold…Still, it was a kind thought. Mr. Jefferson despised her, and said she brought all her troubles down on herself, but no one deserves such a fate.”

Dolley, since girlhood an avid reader of newspapers, was quick to flesh out her knowledge of world events by listening. Always good with faces and details, she slipped easily into the role of conversation-starter. And because she was genuinely interested in people, she found herself receiving cards of invitation to houses where, as merely the wife of a Quaker lawyer, she would never have had cause to visit: the astonishing Bingham mansion with its curving staircase and its wallpapers of brilliant red, yellow, and blue; the Chew mansion, graceful with age.

This meant new clothes, and under the Presidentress’s careful eye she passed quickly into the grays and silvers of second mourning, touched up with enough black that she did not look dull. Fourteen-year-old Anna, who always accompanied her, wore the pale pinks and gauzy whites of a young lady in her first season, and rather to Dolley’s amusement began to be seriously flirted with by the younger attachés of the various legations, and by occasional diplomats, bankers, and unmarried Congressmen.

There was a great deal to talk about, as winter passed into spring.

Repercussions of the Proclamation of Neutrality still shook the country and the world. England declared that it would enforce its blockade against France by confiscating French cargoes even when they were carried by American ships, and hundreds of vessels were seized in the West Indies, which were America’s largest customers for corn and wheat. And since the cargoes were sold to the profit of the Crown, very few of them were judged to be not French. As long as they were stopping American ships anyway, the British captains generally helped themselves to whatever crew-members they thought they could get away with, claiming the men were “British deserters.”

Technically, Dolley supposed they were right. Any American had, in 1776, “deserted” the British Crown.

And without a Navy—or sufficient money to build one—there wasn’t a solitary thing America could do about the situation.

Nor, implied a good many merchants, should the solution involve naval power. France was the enemy, not England. The bulk of American trade was with England, and the French had lost whatever rights they had to American aid when they’d turned themselves into a howling mob of bloodthirsty atheists. At this point in any discussion, Dolley usually sallied in to shift the conversation either to provable facts like how the fighting in Europe was actually going, or to a less volatile aspect of the situation such as where the émigrés were settling and how they were making their livings, or, with luck, to a complete change of topic. She found she could distract almost any Virginian by a well-placed query about either horses or land speculation in the Ohio Valley. Even this last was tricky, with the British garrisons still occupying forts on the Great Lakes. These garrisons deliberately exacerbated Indian grievances against American settlers, playing hob with speculators’ efforts to get people to buy Western lands.

But between winter and spring of 1794, Dolley estimated she learned the bloodlines of every horse south of the Potomac and at least fifty percent of the mules.

And the pain of remembering John lessened. It would return sharply sometimes, after she had kissed Anna good-night and sung a little to Payne, as the child drifted to sleep holding her hand. Sometimes when she would pass the stairway that led to John’s office, she would glance down, looking for the smudge of lamplight there, fully knowing there would be only darkness. When she lay in bed, she would call to mind what it had been like, to feel John’s warm bulk beside her, to smell the scent of his flesh and his hair and his clean-laundered nightshirt. What it had been like to know that if she put out her hand, she’d feel the round firm curve of his back.

It was Payne who brought him back to her, mostly. For months, when Payne was unhappy or uncomfortable or when his will was crossed, her son would strike at her and shriek, “Papa! Want Papa!” and then turn away in floods of tears, as if he saw again his last terrible vision of Papa, thrashing out his life on the floor of that stone cottage at Gray’s Ferry. At times like that, there was nothing Dolley would refuse him.

In time, these tantrums grew fewer. In time, Payne slept the night through, and he swiftly learned that his ready charm would win him attention and praise from his mother’s new friends. Payne especially adored Aaron Burr, who on his legal visits was never too busy or too preoccupied to listen to the boy’s concerns, to answer his questions or tell him a story. Burr was the only person, besides Dolley, who “did Limberjack right.”

But the light of Payne’s life had somehow been extinguished. He clung to Dolley in a passion of disoriented grief, but Dolley was aware that he was always looking past her, always hoping that that dirty, yellow-faced man who had sunk down limp in his mama’s arms hadn’t really been Papa.

That one day his real papa would come back.

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

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

The note was a short one.

My dear Mrs. Todd,

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

Ever sincerely,

Col. A. Burr.

James Madison!

Dolley lowered the note to her desk.

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

James Madison wanted to meet her!

She realized her heart was pounding hard.

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

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

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

Burr liked him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s all right, Dolley had said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That fact in itself filled her with alarm.

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

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

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

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

And most of Dolley’s closest friends still were.

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

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

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

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

John dead.

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

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

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

She murmured, “No, ma’am.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Eight months.”

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

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

Dolley shook her head.

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

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

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

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

For Love, said the ancient Romans, was a disease transmitted first through the eye.

“Nonsense,” declared Burr, when he called to take his leave of her early in June. “In that case, you’d have been stricken with heart-disease.” And he raised her hand to his lips.

The lines settled deeply around his eyes gave the lie to the light jesting tone of his voice. Against the black of his coat his face looked pale and tired, but to Dolley’s words of condolence, he only shook his head. “She was ill for so many years, almost since first I knew her. I know she became very tired of it.”

Dolley said softly, “Of course,” squeezed his hand, and dropped the subject at once.

“Mark my words,” said Mrs. Drinker darkly, when Burr departed and the others who had come to pay a morning-visit that day gathered around Dolley. “He shall have that poor woman’s place filled with one of those hussies he frequents before Congress reconvenes in the fall.” And the formidable Quaker dame glanced sidelong at Dolley, as if she’d have quizzed her on her own plans for spousal replacement had not others been in the room.

As Dolley looked around the cozy parlor she felt a pang of impending loss. Not only of Lizzie and Lizzie’s family and Mrs. Powel and the others in the Congregation, but of the life she had known in Philadelphia, the life and the friends she cherished.

Jemmy had spoken often of his father’s plantation of Montpelier, in the mountains behind Charlottesville. Within a squirrel’s jump of Heaven, he said—if your idea of Heaven was sweet wooded mountains, climbing to the Virginia sky, and seeing mostly your own family and your own slaves, day in and day out. Having grown up in the Virginia countryside, Dolley knew that one reason everyone in Virginia was considered so hospitable was that to have anyone new come by was an occasion to be celebrated and prolonged.

Lady Washington might pine for the peace of Mount Vernon, but Dolley knew in her heart that she was a city creature. From the moment she had come to Philadelphia at the age of fifteen, she had wanted to live nowhere else. It was true that Jemmy couldn’t imagine not being involved in government, but as an elected official there was no guarantee how long he’d have that option. How could she get from day to day, she wondered, without the lending library, the theater, the lively conversation of a wide circle of friends?

But how could she get from day to day without Jemmy at her side?

“You look pensive, Mrs. Todd.” Mr. Wilkins took advantage of a general discussion of life at Harewood Plantation to speak quietly, and Dolley smiled apologetically, and shook her head.

“Only regretting God’s scandalous oversight in not giving us the ability to see into the future.”

“And, Lizzie, I felt like a hypocrite, not to speak to him,” sighed Dolley, as she later walked her friend downstairs to the door. “He hath been so good to me, helping with old Mr. Todd’s will. But I haven’t even truly made up my own mind.” Behind them on the stairway, her mother laughed over something Mrs. Collins said, and from the tea-room she heard Anna’s voice, and Payne’s demanding why Colonel Burr had gone.

“Hast thou not?” Lizzie turned in the shadows by the front door. The vestibule at the bottom of the stair was darker than Dolley remembered it, since she kept the door to John’s office closed. Even now, with the room a jumble of packing-boxes of books—which James Todd, drat him, would have sold if she hadn’t stopped him—Dolley found that passing its door filled her with sadness. “Is it that—please forgive me prying, Dolley!—is there something about Mr. Madison that makes thee draw back? Or that he is an Outsider?”

“Nothing so elevated, I’m afraid.” Dolley threw her arms out in a helpless shrug. “It’s just that…Now I’m used to it, I rather enjoy living as I do.”

Lizzie laughed, and hugged her. “I’m glad,” she whispered, “that it isn’t being read out of the Meeting that stops thee, I mean…for I think…I’m afraid…Dolley, I think I shall be read out myself!”

“Richard Lee?” Dolley asked.

Lizzie nodded. “Mother doesn’t know yet, but I’m to meet him in New York—”

“Richard Lee of Virginia!”

Her friend nodded again.

“Oh, famous!” Dolley sighed, and flung her arms around her friend. “Then even if we’re both to be a scandal and a hissing in the Congregation, and everyone rolls their eyes and cries, Elizabeth LEE, alas! at least we shall be neighbors!”

Three months later, it was to Lizzie Lee that Dolley wrote—from Harewood Plantation, with Lucy’s laughter coming from downstairs at one of Jemmy’s jokes, and Payne howling because he wasn’t the center of attention, and the brash loud voice of Steptoe’s sister Harriot proclaiming a wedding-toast—and signed herself:

Dolley Madison, alas!

Washington City

Wednesday, August 24, 1814

3:00 P.M.

Dolley Madison, alas!

“When all was said and done, yours was one of the better marriages that took place around then,” Sophie remarked, as she and Dolley wedged the last of the silver service into the trunk. “Not terribly long after that, Charley Adams married yet another of the egregious Smith clan, his brother-in-law’s sister Sarah. Abigail was spitting bloody nails over it, the letter she wrote to me.”

Dolley rose, shook out her skirts, and walked back to the desk for another pinch of snuff. Though the sky was clouded over, still the southern window’s brightness turned the surface of the Queen’s mirror to a round of burning light.

I’ve always been sorry I never met her, Martha had said.

The last Queen before the inevitable Revolution. The victim of what revolution could become. Yet she had had the frame engraved: Liberté—Amitié. In those days everyone had been so trusting about what Liberté would bring.

Sophie eased the trunk-lid down, calculating what else might fit, then opened it again. “We’d best wrap that up carefully. What next, do you think?”

“The drawing-room winter curtains,” said Dolley promptly. “They’re in the attic, I’m pleased to say; I have my mother’s good teaching to bless, that I got the room in summer dress right after Congress rose. Now is not the time I should care to wrestle a hundredweight of red velvet down from the windows on a fifteen-foot ladder.”

“Mrs. Madison, what on earth are you still doing here?” Mr. Carroll—youngish, hawk-faced, the son of one of the wealthiest landholders in Maryland and a frequent dinner-guest—entered the room. Her sister Anna’s husband, Congressman Richard Cutts, was at his side. Both were rumpled, dusty, and exhausted; Dolley hoped they’d put their horses somewhere out of sight. “Cutts tells me—”

Dolley drew herself up and hastily slipped both snuffbox and mirror into the desk-drawer. “Mr. Carroll, I know how much respect I would have, for a leader who fled at the mere sound of cannon—or for one whose wife so little respected his courage or the courage of the men behind him.” She turned toward the window with calm she was far from feeling, and pretended to scan the distance under her palm. “I see no trace of British grenadiers as of yet. By the sound of the guns, I collect the battle is not yet over.”

Even as she spoke the words, her heart sank within her. The constant crashing of the guns had diminished, about half an hour ago, to intermittent booms and the broken spatter of musket-fire. Among the fugitives on Pennsylvania Avenue, she now saw that many wore militia uniforms, filthy and torn, some of them, and some bearing the blood and powder-blackening of battle.

Deserters in retreat. Their Army had fallen apart on the field.

Summer soldiers and sunshine patriots, she thought bitterly, recalling those who had sworn on their swords to remain in her defense.

Untrained men, Dr. Blake had said—was it only this morning?

Jim Monroe is with him, she tried to comfort herself. He was a soldier. He shall get Jemmy out of there before there’s real danger….

But in her heart she guessed Jemmy wouldn’t run.

Like herself—like General Washington before him—Jemmy understood what a leader could and could not be seen to do.

Carroll gestured impatiently. “Ma’am, you know they cannot hope to win.”

Dolley turned back. “If I recall correctly, that is what was said about General Washington and his forces.” And more quietly she added, “I will not go without my husband.”

Both men opened their mouths to argue and both fell silent at the sudden crash of hooves on the drive. Dolley ran to one window and saw Sukey leaning from another upstairs, but the rider had already rushed inside, leaving only a bay horse, trembling and foaming with exhaustion, before the front steps. “Sophie, get one of the servants to bring that horse to the—”

Footfalls in the hall, booted feet, running. The next second Jemmy’s manservant Jamie Smith strode in, face, shirt, jacket streaked and matted with dust and sweat. He gasped, “Clear out, ma’am! You got to clear out!” and thrust a slip of sweaty paper into her hand.

Run for your life or be taken prisoner by the British.

In pencil. In Jemmy’s neat hand.

Her eyes met Jamie’s and the young man said hastily, “He’s all right, ma’am, he’s well. But General Armstrong ordered a retreat—”

Cutts cried, “Devil take it!” and Carroll exclaimed something considerably less refined.

“Now you shall go!” he added, making a move as if he would have seized Dolley by the arm and frog-marched her to the door, had he not remembered who and where they were.

Dolley saw Paul Jennings in the hall beyond the doorway, hurrying to the dining-room with a tray-full of dessert-dishes, called, “Paul, put those down, we have to get out. Bring a screwdriver, please, and the stepladder to the drawing-room—”

“A screwdriver?” Carroll looked ready to explode. “What in the name of—?”

But Dolley slipped past him and hurried into the hall.

“Gentlemen, I do not propose to be led in triumph down the streets of London, but neither do I propose to let President Washington’s picture be carried there like a placard on a stick to have mud thrown at it by the populace.” Looking through the door of the big dining-room opposite her, she was struck for a moment by its look of normalcy, the square tables that Jefferson had brought dressed in their white damask like ladies ready for a ball. The blue-sprigged china that Jefferson had ordered from France, the glitter of silver.

The thought crossed through her mind, This is the last time I’ll see this room this way, ready for company.

The last time I shall see the drawing-room, she thought, as she led the men into that graceful salon. From the wall, in the filtered buttery glow from the muslin-curtained windows, the General’s face had a calm look, as if he knew he had delegated authority well. So many times, Martha had repeated Washington’s words, that he relied upon her more than on any of his subordinates, to guard his back.

Not in battle, to be sure, but in those covert wars more conclusive than open violence; the battles for opinion and goodwill.

George had trusted Martha—as Jemmy had trusted Dolley, all these years—to handle the greater and more delicate task of sustaining the goodwill that long-ago battles had won.

She took a breath, looked up at the portrait, dominating the room just as his presence had dominated every gathering, the moment he came into it. It came to her with a sinking dread just exactly how enormous the painting was. In its gilded frame it was over five feet wide and eight feet tall, and so heavy it was screwed to the paneling rather than hung by wires.

Jemmy had talked the General into coming out of retirement twenty-seven years ago. Had shattered the peace her dear friend Martha had so treasured. Had, Dolley knew, shortened the General’s life.

Would that tall, quiet gentleman who’d ridden into Philadelphia that day have agreed to Jemmy’s proposal, had he known what the strain of office would cost him? Dolley suspected he would.

She owed it to her friend, to get his picture away safe.

“This is madness!” Carroll almost shouted, as Dolley helped Paul position the ladder beside the portrait.

We’ll never get it down, she thought despairingly. And if we do, we’ll never get it safe into the carriage.

How close are they? The noise of vehicles, horses, fleeing foot-traffic along Pennsylvania Avenue prevented her from hearing whether the guns were still firing, whether the sound of British drums could yet be heard. Panic closed her throat, made it difficult to breathe. How many of Jemmy’s forces had fled? How many remained around him, between the invading Army and the town?

How hard would those fight, if they saw all around them their comrades break and flee?

Above her, Paul fumbled and scratched at the screws in the frame, and Carroll snarled, “Forget the picture, madame! You must come away!”

“Yes, Dolley, please!” Cutts pressed his hands on her shoulders and Dolley tightened her grip warningly on the stepladder.

They had a point, she supposed. Neither was willing to brand himself a coward by leaving a woman—and a friend and the President’s wife to boot—in the path of a vengeful Army. But if caught, they would be in considerably more physical danger than she.

With the dust, the heat, the noise, how could she tell when the last possible moment was?

And yet, as she had said to Sophie, there were things that could not be left behind. Not only for the sake of the future, but for the sake of those who’d passed them along in trust.

“Paul, get M’sieu Sioussat and Mr. McGraw and get an ax from the garden shed,” she commanded, astonished at how calm she sounded. “We shall have to break the frame.”

“Mrs. Madison—!” protested Carroll, and other voices called from the hallway, “Mrs. Madison!”

French John came in, with a tall gentleman Dolley had never seen before, and—of all people—a Quaker shipowner named Jacob Barker whom Dolley had first met in her days at the Philadelphia Meeting. “Mrs. Madison,” said Barker, sweeping off his rather dusty hat. “Pardon us for coming in on thee thus unannounced—”

“Mr. Barker, if I knew thee better I should fall upon thy neck in hysterics,” said Dolley, and Barker returned a quick grin.

“Robert dePeyster, of New York, madame—he saith he’s a good friend of Secretary Monroe. We’re staying at Blodgett’s Hotel—”

“We were, if they don’t burn it down,” added dePeyster morosely, and stepped aside as the gardener came in, carrying the kindling-ax.

“—and we came to see if thee stood in need of assistance.”

Quakers never said things like Thank God, but it was as close as Dolley ever came to it. “Hast a cart that we might take?” she asked urgently. “A horse as well, though we could use that poor beast Jamie rode here from the battle—”

“There’s that old nag of Blodgett’s back at the hotel, that nobody can catch. And the cart he fetches groceries in—”

“Canst bring it?”

“Ma’am.” DePeyster snapped her a military salute and strode out the door; Barker came to help steady the portrait as French John began chopping at the gilt wood frame. Sophie returned with a pitcher of cider and a couple of crystal goblets; she poured one out and stood sipping, her shoulder against the corner of the mantel-piece, watching the scene with narrowed eyes.

What part of her past, of her heart, Dolley wondered, had Sophie left behind, in that burning plantation-house in Virginia?

After a moment the dressmaker poured a second goblet and brought it to Dolley, who had stepped back as the portrait was eased down.

“And where will you be taking Mrs. Madison?” she asked Carroll casually. “To Bellevue?” Carroll’s father owned most of the land in and around Capitol Hill; his mansion in Georgetown was justly renowned as one of the most beautiful in the countryside.

“If she’ll come.”

Dolley picked up one of the knives Sophie had been in the process of wrapping to pack. “Can we cut it out and roll it up? We cannot let them take it—we should destroy it rather ourselves.”

“You shall destroy it, madame, if you roll it up,” said French John calmly, and took the knife from her hand. “The brushwork would never survive. I think it can be loosely laid over the top of a load, with the corners weighted. I shall see to it.”

While French John was delicately cutting the canvas free of its stretcher—and Mr. Carroll was pacing furiously in and out, looking through every window he could toward Bladensburg—dePeyster returned, miraculously with the promised cart. The sky was darkening now toward storm, and strange, flickering winds blew the stench of gunpowder through the open windows. Dolley realized she had begun to tremble.

Jemmy will come, she told herself. I know he will.

Yet how could she stay and put everyone else in peril?

She looked up and saw Sophie’s eyes on her, calculating and icy.

French John and Barker lifted the canvas, carried it toward the door. I’m forgetting something, thought Dolley, as Carroll steered her firmly toward the door. I know I am… She balked, turning back.

“Mrs. Madison, please!”

Dolley, her heart pounding, nodded. “Paul, please have Joe bring the carriage.”

Something important. Something that people will one day want, and miss. Like recollection of something we dreamed in childhood, that frightened us, or inspired us, or filled us with understanding or joy.

But all she could remember to say was, “M’sieu Sioussat, please see to it that the food prepared for dinner, and the cider and wine, be given to any of the soldiers who come past.”

“I shall do it, madame, but please—”

“And please see that Pol goes to the French Minister’s house. They’ll look after her there, and I don’t think the British will burn it.”

“I shall see it done, madame,” promised the steward, “but please, go!”

I should wait for Jemmy. He’ll be here soon, I know he will….

As the men hustled her into the hall, Sophie said quietly, “It might be a good idea to take some silver with you in the carriage, in case you become separated from the cart.”

Dolley halted, their eyes meeting.

More softly, for her ears only, Sophie added, “Had we had hard silver when we were burned from our home, my mother and I, we might have fared better than we did.”

“I’ll be going to friends.”

“That’s what my mother thought.”

Dolley broke away, strode into the dining-room to scoop as many forks and spoons as she could fit into her reticule. “Canst ride in the front with Joe and Sukey, Sophie? All the Cabinet papers are on the other seats.”

“I shall be staying here. Don’t worry about me,” her friend added, as Dolley froze at the foot of the front step, looked back in alarm. “I scarcely think they’re going to torch the town.”

Richard Cutts thrust Dolley up into the carriage, clanking reticule and all. Closed the door.

“I shall tell Mr. Madison to look for you at Bellevue, shall I?” asked Sophie, from the mansion’s steps.

“Mrs. Hallam, we cannot allow you—” Cutts protested, but Sophie made a gesture like shooing flies.

“Get Mrs. Madison away. I can look after myself.”

Or knowst thou someone in Cockburn’s force, who shalt look after thee? Dolley turned, watching the enigmatic dark figure on the mansion’s steps as the overloaded carriage jolted into motion. French John and Jacob Barker were gently draping General Washington’s portrait across the top of the grocery-cart as Dolley lost sight of them. For a few minutes more, the white walls of the mansion were visible to her over Mr. Jefferson’s screen of young poplar trees.

Fourteen years, thought Dolley, fighting to keep panic from her heart. She fumbled in her reticule for her snuffbox. I saw this house fourteen years ago….

With Lady Washington’s mirror, she realized in shocked dismay, in my hand!

She half turned in the carriage’s crowded seat, seeing herself sweep snuffbox and mirror together into the desk-drawer as Mr. Carroll entered shouting…If I call out to have us turn back, Joe will pretend he can’t hear me.

Such was the din of traces rattling, hooves pounding, other carriages, carts, fleeing riders, and cursing barrow-pushers all clogging Pennsylvania Avenue in a solid wall of dust, his deafness might not be sham. And even if he did hear, the crowd forced them on.

She twisted back around, looking at the roofline of the big sandstone house, visible still. Her hand closed, recalling the small solid shape of the Queen’s mirror, as it had been that evening she’d seen the house like this beyond the trees.

Recalling, too, the grief and fear of that season of uncertainty. It seemed to her, that year, that everything she had witnessed since 1776—everything Jemmy, and General Washington, and Jefferson, and Mr. Adams had worked for—was shattering to pieces around them.

Dust swallowed the big house. In her heart she knew she’d never see it again.