Patriot Hearts: A Novel of the Founding Mothers

ABIGAIL

East Chester, New York

Friday, November 7, 1800

In Weymouth, nearly half a century ago—in those bright quaint times when it never occurred to anyone that one day there wouldn’t be a King—there had been a man named Goslin who’d been the Town Drunk. Abigail’s earliest recollections of him included seeing him work now and then, casual labor like digging ditches or splitting shakes, always followed by a spree in Arnold’s Tavern and a stagger through the streets, singing at the top of his lungs. She, Mary, and Betsey had always fled him, at their mother’s orders. But Abigail, being the Original Eve of curiosity, had watched from a distance the man’s innumerable arguments with his long-suffering, snaggle-haired wife. Nobody knew what they lived on or why she’d married him, but through the years Abigail had seen him work less and less; until he became a dirty, whiskered, trembling automaton, stinking of his own urine, glimpsed sitting in a ditch or under a tree, engaged in rambling conversations with people who weren’t there.

She’d often wondered about his wife. It had never occurred to her to even think about his mother.

Until now.

The carriage lurched heavily as it turned through the break in the fence, and despite Jack Briesler’s careful driving its wheels slithered into ruts deep in mud. The jolt of the springs made Abigail feel as if every bone in her body were being broken with hammers.

Even that didn’t hurt as bad as the pain in her heart.

Oh, Charley. Oh, my beautiful boy.

When an infatuated Charley had begged his parents for permission to marry Colonel Smith’s spritely sister in the summer of 1794, both of them—John from Philadelphia, Abigail from the farm in Quincy—had written back immediately, begging him to wait. They’d both had a pretty good idea, by then, of the financial status of the Smith family. Charley had regretfully agreed that his parents were right, and said yes, he would wait.

And had married Sarah Smith within weeks of his letter.

To Abigail, the stone house seemed even more isolated now under snow than it had been when she’d been trapped there, ill in the fall of ’91. The yard was a perfect soup-pit of muck, crisscrossed with ruts around the low stone curb of the well. As Briesler maneuvered the carriage as close as he could to the farmhouse door, Nabby appeared: Nabby grown heavy, silent, and gray-faced in her not-quite-clean blue dress. The woman beside her, under a thick shawl, wore a much-patched caraco jacket that Abigail recognized as one she had herself purchased in London fifteen years ago, and passed on to Nabby.

“Mama Adams,” the woman said, wading through the mud and holding out one chilblained hand. She still retained some of the Colonel’s charm, some of the dark, lively beauty Abigail had seen in her on her first visit to Nabby here back in ’89.

With the other arm, Charley’s wife held a child on her hip, a black-haired girl of two. A four-year-old in a dress made up from the fabric of one of Nabby’s London gowns clung to her skirt, looking from her mother to Abigail with brown eyes heartbreakingly like Charley’s. The mother’s eyes had the wrung-out look of someone who has been weeping, on and off, for weeks.

Abigail was familiar with it. She had only to turn her head, and see its echo in Nabby’s tired face.

“Sarah,” she greeted her daughter-in-law, and mentally thanked God she’d remembered to bring the highest pair of shoe-pattens she possessed. As she got out of the coach, the tall iron cleats sank in the mud like stilts.

“Thank you for coming,” Sarah whispered, and tears began to track from her eyes. She led Abigail through the farmhouse, to the small lean-to built off the kitchen.

The lean-to was bitterly cold. In a way it was a fortunate circumstance, reflected that critical little voice in the back of Abigail’s mind that never left her, not even in her worst moments of shock, of pity, of grief. Had the room been warm, the stink would have knocked one down.

Sarah had clearly done her best to keep Charley clean, and it was a task clearly beyond her.

Oh, my beautiful boy.

Abigail pressed her hand briefly to her mouth, then went to Charley’s bedside while Nabby gently led the two little girls from the room.

How did it come to this? How could it come to this?

Charley’s face was so swollen she hardly recognized him. His puffy hands groped and picked at the stained coverlet. She remembered Nabby writing her—that summer when she and the Colonel had been living like royalty in New York on the proceeds of the Colonel’s “investments”—that Charley and Sarah were wildly happy together, and that she thought that marriage to her husband’s young sister would settle her brother down.

Apparently that had lasted about as long as the Colonel’s latest fortune. By December of that year—1794—Nabby had been alone again, pregnant again, and frantically trying to find money to live on. Again.

And Charley…

“Ma?” he whispered, and fumbled for her hand. His breath almost made her gag.

“I’m here, Son.”

“I’m sorry.” Alcohol—recent and abused for years—slurred his words. “ ’S the las’ time, I swear you ’s the las’ time. I’ll sober up now, I’ll…pull myself together. Not fair to Sarah…”

Abigail had to bite back the urge to snap at him that it wasn’t fair to his daughters, either, not to mention his father. Her jaw ached with the unsaid words and she managed, “I know you will, dear.” Hypocrisy, she thought, furious at herself. You tell him a lie, forgive him, and he’ll only go on getting himself like this….

But no words of hers—no tears, no pleas of Sarah or Nabby or anyone else—had ever kept him from drinking.

And she knew, looking down into his face, that it no longer mattered. She knew she was seeing her son for the last time.

It occurred to her that she hadn’t seen the real Charley, that smiling boy who only wanted to be with his friends in his own home with his family around him, for many years.

He was crying now, a drunkard’s easy tears. “I’ll make you proud, Ma. Make Pa proud. He wasn’t ever proud of me.”

“Now, that’s not true!” protested Abigail sharply. “When you went to Harvard—”

“Got thrown out,” sobbed Charley bitterly—for dashing nude across the snowy Yard, to be exact, Abigail recalled, with a flash of exasperation. An exercise neither he nor his friends could possibly have performed sober. “Couldn’t finish,” he went on tearfully. “Couldn’t stay in Holland with Pa. Johnny stayed. Pa’s so proud of Johnny, goin’ to Russia an’ Berlin an’ Spain.”

And while Johnny had been making John proud, Charley had borrowed, invested, and lost all of Johnny’s savings: just in time for Johnny to be a pauper when he married, in London, a girl Abigail feared was spoilt and pampered.

“I remember what you tol’ me, Ma, how it was the chance for us to learn French an’ meet important people. An’ I wasted it.”

Tears flooded Abigail’s eyes at the recollection of the inn-yard in the gray port-town of Beverly, where poor little Charley had fetched up after five months on the high seas. Too exquisite a sensibility for Europe, John had said in his letter, and had consigned his eleven-year-old son to home-bound American friends. It was all he could have done at the time—there was no question of John abandoning negotiations for the Dutch loan that had kept Washington’s troops in powder—and Charley hadn’t seemed a penny the worse at the time. He’d spoken of being stranded in Spain, and of finding himself stuck on a ship whose drunkard of a captain couldn’t find his way out of the North Sea, as a sort of astonishing lark.

But the fact remained that John had sent him away, while Johnny had done his duty and stayed.

And Johnny, after a wretched attempt to set himself up as a lawyer in the already lawyer-infested Boston, had gone back to Europe as George Washington’s Minister to Holland only weeks before Charley had married Sarah.

“I wasted it all,” Charley mumbled, his bloated fingers slacking, picking at the coverlet. “Nuthin’ I could do, could make him proud. Forgive me, Ma. Forgive me.”

Forgive me, Ma. The words sliced at Abigail’s heart. Her brother Will had always pleaded for forgiveness after his binges, or when he’d come back to Braintree during the War, penniless and with rumors of counterfeiting and swindling trailing him like flies after stale meat. And their mother always had forgiven him, and always had given him money, even during that last year of her life, when the British had been bottled up in Boston and their raiding-parties were burning farms, and prices were so high that there was no sugar or coffee or medicine to be had in the town.

Dying, that dreadful autumn of ’75, Abigail’s mother had neither smiled nor wept, but she had whispered her son’s name again and again, with love and sorrow in her voice. She had had three daughters, but only one son, and he the youngest, her baby boy. And he, of course, had been nowhere around.

Had Will looked as Charley did now, before he died?

But somehow the memory of her anger at her mother, like a cold stone dropped into boiling water, turned her own anger to pity as she finally understood. Whatever she’d felt about Charley’s sins—against her and John, against his wife and daughters in their patched dresses—he was dying now. And he was her son. The child who’d played on the sanded floor of their kitchen back on Queen Street in Boston, listening to the British drums on the Common. The child who’d chirped up gamely in the face of a British raid, “We’ll kill ’em, Ma!”

She put her arms around his shoulders, laid her face against his chest. “My darling, what’s done is done. I love you. I, and your father, have always loved you.”

He was just thirty years old.

She knew that later she’d be angry at him again, furious at the weakness that had led him to throw away everything she and John, Sarah and Johnny and Tommy and Nabby, had given him. Knew that before she left this place—and she planned to flee as soon as she could—she’d be back to pacing, to demanding of Nabby and Louisa, How could he? But the tears she shed were tears of love and of untainted grief.

She knew when she journeyed south again, to that brand-new Federal City on the Potomac that people were already starting to call Washington City, she’d be taking Charley’s little Susie with her as well as Nabby’s red-haired Caroline. Permanently, she hoped, the way she’d taken Louisa.

The world was cruel to the daughters of wastrels.

Mount Vernon Plantation

Wednesday, December 3, 1800

“I have tried not to—to take blame upon myself,” she said, some weeks later, to Martha Washington. “My brother—Louisa’s father…” And she lowered her voice with a glance across the Blue Parlor at the little group on the sofa near the fireplace, “…was—was weak that way.”

Louisa, now twenty-seven, was relating to the other two women beside her how Abigail had dealt with the Quincy neighbors who’d objected to Jamey Prince, their free black servant, attending school with their precious sons. Martha’s dear Nelly—who could not possibly, Abigail reflected, be twenty-one years old and a mother herself now!—was laughing and shaking her head. On Louisa’s other side Sophie Sparling—now the Widow Hallam—merely looked amused, as if such hypocrisy were to be expected of those who’d rebelled against the King.

“And I’ve often wondered,” she went on quietly, turning back to meet Martha’s troubled gaze. “Was there something amiss in the way my parents raised my brother? Was there something they could have done, or failed to do, to turn him from drink and ill company?”

Martha set down her cup, and laid one plump black-mitted hand on Abigail’s. “You cannot think that, dearest,” she said softly. In her eyes Abigail saw pain that was the twin of her own, perfect comprehension of shared grief and shared doubt. In the footsore aftermath of innumerable teas and levees in Philadelphia when they’d shared the duty of sociable small-talk with each and every guest, Martha had spoken often of her own concerns about the disordered household in which her granddaughters were growing up: a pattern that clearly seemed to be repeating itself now in Eliza’s.

And if the current condition of Mount Vernon was any indication, Abigail reflected, there wasn’t much to be said about young Wash Custis, either.

Would any of the long-dead Jacky Custis’s children have been different—happier or more capable of finding happiness—had the matriarch of the family chosen to rule the family instead of follow her husband and her heart?

“Men, and women, become what they become.” In the frame of Martha’s cap—black gauze, as all her clothing was of deepest mourning for the General, who had not yet been a year in his brick-lined tomb—her pale plump face and white hair were a pretty echo of the woman Abigail had first met that chaotic winter in Cambridge almost twenty-five years before.

“We can help them—guide them—but their own basic natures will emerge. And when all is said, I think we have little to do with it. I wish it weren’t that way,” she added with a sigh, and a glance toward the parlor door. “But I suspect that it is.”

Though it was almost noon, young Wash Custis—it had taken Abigail a moment to recognize the tall young man who’d answered the door—still loitered in the paneled hall, talking horses with Nelly’s cousin-husband. Little as Abigail approved of slave-labor plantations, she’d had enough conversations in Paris with Tom Jefferson to know that unless the planter himself—not simply an overseer—rode his acres and checked everyone’s work, work would not get done.

And by the look of it, a great deal of work was not being done at Mount Vernon.

Or had it always been this unkempt?

When her carriage from the Federal City had topped the little rise before Mount Vernon, Abigail’s first thought had been that same sense of completion that she’d experienced on seeing Westminster Abbey for the first time, or Notre Dame de Paris: So this is what it actually looks like.

Martha had described the long white “mansion house” to her many times, as they sat stiffly side by side, smiling as guests were presented, but it was good to see her friend’s home at last.

The place of which President Washington had spoken with such profound love. The place to which he and Martha had so longed to return.

Now, at last, he was finally here to stay.

And, Abigail suspected, Martha as well.

Unscythed grass grew rank in what had to have been the bowling green Martha had spoken about. Weeds choked the little oval of lawn before the door. Even two weeks in the Federal City had served to inform Abigail that in addition to not talking about things they didn’t want to talk about, Southerners as a rule seemed to have far lower standards of tidiness than Abigail was used to. Conditions prevailing in the kitchen of the Presidential mansion—not to mention in the potholed, muddy gravel-dump that surrounded it—made her wonder what Monticello was really like.

Was it as untidy as this, and Jefferson simply hadn’t noticed?

Or were the dilapidated buildings she saw here, the peeling paint and broken window-panes, simply the measure of Martha’s grief?

Wash Custis had answered the door because when Jamey Prince—that same free colored servant to whose education the neighbors had so objected—had knocked, no slave could be found to admit Abigail. “Likely they’re in the kitchen, or playing cards in the tack-room,” Wash had grumbled. “I’ll catch ’em a lick for it!”

Nelly, Abigail had noticed, was the one who’d hurried away to bring more hot water for the tea and meringues from the kitchen.

“Since the General died,” Martha apologized now as Nelly rose again and rustled from the room, “it seems that nothing gets done around here anymore. I know I ought to keep the servants at their work, but it somehow seems more trouble than it’s worth.

“He freed them, you know,” she went on, her dark eyes filling with tears. “Freed them! I can’t imagine what he was thinking.”

Startled, Abigail said, “He never…I mean, he would not have left you without servants, surely!”

“But he did! His will said they were to be freed at my death—his own Negroes, of course, not those belonging to the Custis estate. But Wash thinks—” She lowered her voice, and glanced around her in the way Abigail had seen all slave-owners glance, for fear of eavesdroppers in their own houses. “Well, especially with the rumors of an uprising this past summer. Wash thinks that perhaps it would be…be safer… if they were all freed next year.”

Abigail’s eyes widened at the implications of this and she traded a startled glance with Louisa. But Martha’s thoughts had already returned to her friend’s pain, as if it was the most ordinary thing in the world, to fear members of one’s own household.

“Truly,” she said in her gentle voice, “there is nothing for which you need reproach yourself, dear. I’ve never been as dutiful toward our country as you have, but I knew the General needed me, every bit as much as I needed him. And John needs you, not just to know that you’re keeping things safe at home, but by his side. Men—even the strongest men—need someone’s hand to hold in the middle of the night, bless them. We made our choices. And your Charley, poor boy, made his.”

Abigail was silent. Nelly returned, carrying a green-and-cream French tea-pot with more hot water from the spirit-lamp in the pantry. She was clothed like her grandmother in sable crape that left black smudges on the faded blue woodwork of the West Parlor. Though the pretty, dark-haired young woman was married now and a mother herself—and, Abigail guessed with a shrewd glance at her figure, getting ready for a second child sometime next summer—she still seemed very much the precocious schoolgirl who had poured tea at the receptions in the Morris mansion. The favorite granddaughter still, rather than any man’s adult wife.

Nelly, too, it appeared, had made her choice.

“You treated them all alike,” Martha reminded Abigail. “Now Johnny is Minister to Prussia and may be President himself one day. Had your children grown up with a mother whose heart and mind were elsewhere—or in a country that had just lost a war with England—would they have been better off?”

Abigail whispered, suddenly wretched, “I don’t know.”

“No one knows, dearest,” said Martha. “We go where our hearts command us, in the faith that it is God who formed our hearts.”

Before they left, Abigail took from her pocket, and pressed into Martha’s hand, the small box that had been waiting for her at the President’s House when she had arrived the day before yesterday: “What is it?” Martha asked, astonished. And then, “Oh, how beautiful!” as she took from the wrappings the small bright circle of a gold-framed mirror, and the cold, tiny fire of diamonds winked in the pale sunlight.

“It’s something that belongs to you,” replied Abigail, smiling at the pleasure in her friend’s eyes. “And has rightfully belonged to you for eighteen years now.”

Martha looked up, surprised, from trying to read the engraving traced on the rim. Abigail’s eyes hadn’t been good enough to decipher it without her spectacles, either, but she knew it said Liberté—Amitié. “Dear Heavens, not the Queen’s gift, after all this time?” And she turned it over, to look at the ostrich-plumed portrait on the back.

“A part of it, I believe—Sophie believes,” Abigail added. “She sent it to me, to ask what should be done with it: Did it rightly belong to you, or to the nation? She came by it from a New York friend—” Privately, Abigail suspected Aaron Burr…and suspected that he and Mrs. Hallam were rather more than friends. “—and would have thought nothing of it, she says. But when she was in Paris she was friends with that little slave nursemaid of Mr. Jefferson’s—a dear good-hearted girl but never about when you needed her—and they still correspond.”

For a moment Martha looked as if she had something to say on the subject of anyone so foolish as to teach a slave to read, but then, as if recalling Mr. Jefferson’s known eccentricity, did not.

Which was just as well, thought Abigail. She went on, “Apparently the girl reminded her that they’d seen nécessaires de voyage of the kind at a shop in the Palais Royale—with night-lights, combs, that sort of thing—and that the proprietor had boasted of crafting the one the poor Queen sent to you in some kind of lavish casket in 1782. She ordered it set with her portrait surrounded by diamonds, he said, and engraved: Liberté—Amitié. And I do think this must have come from it, wherever the other bits have gone.”

Martha turned it again, the gold sparkling in the firelight. In a moment, thought Abigail, she’d call Nelly and Louisa over to admire it. But for an instant longer the old woman held it to herself, looking into its depths as if within them she could see 1782 again: the General alive, her niece Fanny alive, the French Queen herself and so many others still alive. Charley safely home from Europe and happy again with his family. The bloody consequences of Revolution and the bitter exhaustion of dreams shattered still wool unspun on Fate’s distaff. A year when “happily ever after” was still in sight.

“As you weren’t the Presidentress in 1782,” Abigail went on, “I don’t see how this can belong to the nation. It was simply a gift from one woman to another.”

From the last Queen of a kingdom that no longer existed, she thought, to the first hostess—the first consort—of a nation that, in 1782, had yet to be born.

“So all things do come in time to where they’re meant to be,” Martha murmured. “No matter what happens to us in the meantime. Thank you, dear. I’ll keep this, and look at it whenever I need to remember.”

“Is she all right?” Abigail asked Sophie, as the widow’s black driver helped her into Abigail’s carriage.

“As well as can be expected.” Years, matrimony, and bereavement didn’t seem to have changed Sophie much. She appeared little altered from her days of advising Abigail on the purchase of inexpensive ambassadorial china in Paris. Those cool eyes still regarded the world—or at least the United States—with amused derision. “She took the General’s death very hard. And since those years when the capital was in New York she’s never been really well.”

“Who among us has?” Abigail drew her own thick collection of black shawls and cloaks more tightly about her narrow shoulders. “I swear there was something in the air of that city that gave everyone who lived there an ague. I’ve certainly never gotten over it.”

For a moment an elusive expression flickered on Sophie’s face: Abigail almost had the impression she was about to say, Served the traitors right. But she said instead, “I doubt this new ‘Federal City’ will prove more healthily situated. My father always said these Potomac lowlands bred fevers. I suppose it’s well enough now, when every house is at least half a mile from its nearest neighbor and there’s room for air to circulate. But how it will answer in the future, to have built a city for the enrichment of Southern land-speculators, remains to be seen.”

“Had they not,” replied Abigail, “the government would even yet be at a standstill while they squabbled over payment of the Virginians’ debts to the English—I think that’s how the deal was worked.”

“It is how all such deals are worked,” answered Sophie, with her sidelong cynical smile. “I suppose the placement of the Parthenon in Athens had something to do with which Archon’s brother-in-law owned the land it was to stand on.”

As they crossed the ferry to Georgetown the wind blew up with a bitter chill, though the day remained clear and bright. Abigail shivered, and Louisa pulled up the lap-robe more closely around her. The gray stone houses of the little tobacco-port looked bleak among the bare trees. Beyond the new wooden bridge the woods closed in, the carriage-team floundering in the soupy ruts. “On our way here we were lost for two days, trying to find our nation’s capital,” remarked Abigail drily. “I shall suggest to Mr. Adams that funds be asked from Congress for signposts.”

“One must admit, though, it’s a beautiful situation for a city.” Louisa folded her gloved hands. “And it is indeed a new thing in the history of the world, to have a capital city purpose-built for a new nation, instead of taking history’s hand-me-downs. There is much to be said for that. I expect,” she added, as the carriage emerged from the brown-and-silver shadows of the woods, “it will be beautiful in spring.”

Beside the little clump of buildings that housed the State Department’s seven employees, their driver paused to rest the team. Brushy pastures foraged by cows stretched before them. Here and there buildings rose, inconsequential in the open wilderness, like toys set down and forgotten by giant children. “That’s Mr. Moore’s farm, there among the trees,” pointed out Sophie. “He’s a more reliable source of produce than the markets, if you get on his good side. And General Washington’s friend Mr. Tayloe has just finished a quite handsome town house, and is now waiting for the town to arrive.”

“I count myself lucky the plastering and painting were actually finished in the President’s House before John arrived last month,” remarked Abigail, as the driver clucked the horses into motion. “We keep all twelve fireplaces going, and that helps, though God only knows how we’re to afford to heat the place when winter really sets in. And instead of a grand front staircase, we have a lovely cavern in the front hall, no doors in half the rooms, and not a bell in the house. I suppose its unfinished state simply means Mr. Jefferson will have less to tear down before he starts to make changes.”

She couldn’t keep the bitterness from her voice. Only days after John had gotten on the road for the Federal City in October, someone had brought her Alexander Hamilton’s newly printed pamphlet, A Letter from Alexander Hamilton, Concerning the Public Conduct and Character of John Adams.

Long usage had partially inured her to the spectacle of her husband being called doddering, fat, monarchist, and insane by the people for whose freedom he had broken himself—and sacrificed his own happiness and that of his family—the whole of his life. But coming from a man of his own party—from the man whom many Federalists looked up to as the true leader of America—Abigail knew this meant John’s almost certain defeat in the upcoming contest for President.

Almost certainly, the victor would be Jefferson. And with Jefferson would come the mob-rule that Abigail had feared since the days of Citizen Genêt’s street-riots.

“And the irony of it is,” she sighed, as the horses stopped again so that Sophie could get into her own chaise near the corner of a dilapidated country graveyard, “for all that wretched little man’s venom about John being incompetent, a treaty with France has finally been signed.”

“It’s official, then?” Sophie raised her brows. “I’d heard it printed in the newspapers, but—”

“It’s official,” said Abigail. “First Consul Bonaparte drank a toast to our envoys and dismissed the riots in our streets and the seizures of our ships as a ‘family quarrel’ which will not be repeated. No family of mine.”

“No,” murmured Sophie as she descended from the carriage. “And one wonders what England will have to say on the subject.”

“ ‘Sufficient unto the day,’ ” replied Abigail wisely, “ ‘are the troubles thereof.’ ”

The Mansion bestowed by the country upon its executive stood isolated in a wagon-rutted field, surrounded by heaped stone, building debris, and weeds. Smoke trailed from its chimneys but Abigail wasn’t fooled: It would be cold as a tomb inside. At least, she thought, trying to rub the ache of rheumatism from her shoulder, she wouldn’t be expected to put on many entertainments in the great half-finished pile. At the far end of the brushy two-mile vista of what was pompously referred to as Pennsylvania Avenue, she guessed rather than actually saw the movement around the tiny pale bulk of the Capitol. Electors gathering, to cast their States’ votes for the new President.

George Washington had had two terms, and would have been elected for a third if he’d chosen to stand.

John was being pushed out after one—and that one achieved by only three votes, for which the Democratic-Republicans had never ceased to mock him.

After all he had done—after all they had done, he and she together—the young nation was destroying itself, as France had destroyed itself. The taste of despair was wormwood in her mouth.

She climbed the rattletrap wooden stair that bridged the sunken areaway which let light into the kitchens. The oval reception hall was, as usual, jammed with men—many of whom had clearly neither bathed nor had their shirts washed since the days of Royal governors. Though everyone was fairly sure that John had lost the election, many still hoped for government jobs. Beyond the oval chamber, the Mansion’s central hall was gloomy and the stink of wet plaster overrode even the riper petitioners. She’d have to have the oil-lamps lit. In addition to being clammy, drafty, and without any means of summoning servants bar shouting, the Executive Mansion was also immense, a statement of Presidential majesty. Such furniture as they’d shipped down from Quincy huddled, lost, in those enormous rooms.

The house had been built for a man of George Washington’s wealth (or Martha’s, if truth be told). It would, Abigail estimated, take thirty servants to run the place, counting the stable help.

She and John had six, and would be paying Sophie Hallam’s cook a dollar a week to come on Mondays and help with the laundry. With the weather inclement, she and Esther had been hanging the clothes to dry in the huge unfinished “audience room” at the east end of the house. The bedsheets smelled of paint, but the room was drafty enough that there should be little danger of mold.

She made her way to the winding servants’ stairway that was the sole route to the upper floor. Some of the men rose to tip their hats to her, or murmured, “Good day, Mrs. Adams.” Esther had made up the fire in the bedroom, but like every other room in the house the place still smelled of damp plaster, and the clammy atmosphere made her body ache, as it had at sea. Through the window she could see a slave-gang, clearing away some of the rubble around the new stone Treasury Building, the closest structure to the Executive Mansion and still half a mile away. They were dressed in rags and barefoot. She couldn’t imagine how they could work outside in cold like this. A white overseer sat nearby on a stump, watching them. They worked slowly, though not nearly as slowly as the few white workers hereabouts that Abigail had observed.

Like the slaves on Mount Vernon—Abigail suspected, like slaves anywhere—they had no reason to care if things got done or not.

She was taking off her hat when movement in the mirror caught her eye. Turning, she saw John, a letter in his hand. He held it out to her, and taking it, she put her arm around his waist, pressed herself to him. His face told her what it said, before she read it.

Charley was dead.

The Federal City

Thursday, January 1, 1801

“It is a shocking mix-up,” declared Meg Smith, wife of the editor of the new National Intelligencer, at Abigail’s New Year’s Day reception. A rather horse-faced young lady of twenty-two, she, like everyone else, was a newcomer to the Federal City. “Why no one ever thought what would happen if everyone who voted for Gentleman A as President would also vote for Gentleman B as Vice President…Giving Gentleman B the same number of votes as Gentleman A…”

“They were assuming that—er—Mr. B—actually is a gentleman,” replied Abigail. “And would, as a gentleman, step aside. Though I suppose they all refer to one another as ‘Citizen’ in good French form and the concept of such a distinction as ‘Gentleman’ is a dead letter among them.”

“You do the authors of the Constitution too much credit, Mrs. Adams,” purred Sophie Hallam. “I’m sure they never gave the matter any thought at all. Just as they didn’t consider the fact that in other circumstances the man with the second-highest number of votes stood a good chance of holding views radically different from those of the man with the highest number of votes.”

There had been times, John had told her, during the worst of the “Pseudo-War” with France, when he and Tom Jefferson would pass each other on the streets of Philadelphia without speaking.

It comforted Abigail somewhat to reflect that her husband had done better in the election than either of them had thought he would. He’d carried New England, and had garnered a total of sixty-five electoral votes. Only eight votes behind Jefferson’s seventy-three.

Equally, only eight votes behind Aaron Burr’s seventy-three.

“Well, of course everyone meant for Mr. Jefferson to be President and Mr. Burr, Vice—”

“Vice” being an apt title for Mr. Burr, reflected Abigail, but she merely agreed, “I think there is no doubt as to who is the greater genius.”

Young Mrs. Smith beamed. Though the Intelligencer concentrated on news rather than personalities (or invective), she clearly worshipped Jefferson. Sophie Hallam, elegant in silver-gray silk in the new French style, remarked, “Perhaps not everyone. Mr. Burr is a New Yorker, and it was New York that made the difference in the election. He brought it to Mr. Jefferson as his dowry.”

Abigail followed Sophie’s sardonic gaze across the overcrowded levee-room to Tom Jefferson, surrounded as usual by his supporters—charming, warm, unpowdered, untidily dressed, and radiating a quirky scholarly brilliance. She remembered how diffidently he’d stepped into that family gathering in her uncle Isaac’s parlor, and had had all those stiff dark-clothed New England patriots eating out of his hand before the end of the afternoon.

Remembered the many afternoons he’d come to dinner with them, at that preposterous mansion on the outskirts of Paris; the evenings he’d walk with her in the gardens, talking of architecture, flowers, the inherent rights that God had given to Man.

What had gone through his mind, she wondered, when word came in November of Bonaparte’s coup that had ended once and for all even the pretense of the Revolution in France? Or because a Corsican tyrant was on the throne now instead of a French dunce, did he still pretend to himself that the Revolution had ended in victory instead of defeat?

All around them men kept crowding into the Mansion, darting up the makeshift wooden stairway in the rain to straighten their coats and refurbish their hair-powder in the oval hall. Fires roared in every fireplace, but the evening was still wickedly cold. Abigail wondered that Sophie, slender as the girl she’d been in Paris, didn’t freeze. The new French style seemed to consist of diaphanous silk, no petticoat (and the French Minister’s wife was clearly not wearing a corset either!), high-cut in the waist and so shockingly low in the bosom that Abigail was hard-put not to blush for some of the ladies who wore it, although Sophie herself managed to make the disgraceful costume seem elegant.

Of a piece, thought Abigail despairingly, with the libertinism that the Revolution had brought in its bloody wake.

“I hope your husband will offer his support to Mr. Jefferson, when the voting in the House begins in February.” Meg Smith was, Abigail knew, a faithful attender of Congressional sessions, sitting in the gallery with the most amazingly motley crowd of society women, free blacks, idlers, and prostitutes to observe the debates and cheer during speeches. Had the weather not been so raw—had her grief for Charley not weighed so heavily on her heart—Abigail might have gone herself: Who knows? Sophie had said cheerily a few weeks ago, We might see another brawl.

But though once Abigail would have done murder for a chance to attend sessions of Congress, it seemed to her now a hollow victory. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity….

The truth was, she suspected she would simply become too angry.

“My husband is a firm believer in the separation of powers,” replied Abigail. “He says it is a matter for the legislature now, and that it is not his business.”

“One’s heart might almost go out to Mr. Hamilton.” Meg giggled like a schoolgirl behind her fan. “He has to choose whom he hates least. Whichever way the Federalist votes go, that man will be placed above him. And between Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Burr, I’m not sure that he can choose.”

“Mr. Hamilton will lean toward Jefferson.” Sophie smiled her slightly malicious smile. “He knows Burr, and Burr knows him, through to his marrow-bones. Hamilton believes he can talk his way around Jefferson, given time.”

“Obviously,” remarked Louisa, coming up to join the little group. “A man who would believe Citizen Genêt would believe anyone.”

The others laughed, but Abigail wasn’t so sure. Craning her neck a little, she returned her gaze to Jefferson, wondering if she had ever truly known him. If anyone did. He would almost certainly pardon that pack of foul-minded journalists who’d been jailed for Sedition, not seeing where their lies would lead and perhaps not caring. As a Virginian, and like all Virginians desperately in debt to English tobacco-factors, he might very well repudiate not only the treaty with England but the power of the central government to make any such treaty.

The man is dangerous, she realized. His followers, more dangerous still.

A part of her wished with all her heart that she was back in Quincy again, back on the farm that was now the rock on which their lives were founded, with Louisa and little Caro and Susie. Nabby’s boys would join them, too, when they were done with school for the summer. Johnny would be home from Europe next year, with his bride—

But a part of her wondered, Should John step down? Or should he make a stand against what is clearly the beginning of ruin for this country?

The voting in the House of Representatives took place on Wednesday, the eleventh of February; Abigail was already packing to leave. After weeks of pounding rains, the sky had cleared. Though the cold remained arctic, the northward roads were drying. Whoever won the House vote, Abigail knew, it would not be John. The thought of staying on in the Federal City—in a hotel? As a guest of one of Martha Washington’s granddaughters?—was more than John, or she, could bear.

If John had ever entertained the thought of not stepping down, of not leaving the country to the mercies of a Jacobin demagogue, he never spoke of it. And since John spoke to her of whatever entered his mind, it was safe to believe that it hadn’t. At one point he had considered resigning in protest a few days before the inauguration, but Abigail had talked him out of it. It would not do, she said, for him to appear a bad loser.

“I am a bad loser,” he’d replied. “Tom…Well, Burr would be worse. Tom may be a Deist, and a Jacobin, but Burr is…Burr is nothing.”

He’d come down to the great East Room where Abigail was taking down the laundry, which took two days to dry in the clammy cold. Only politicians could have designed this house, Abigail reflected, flexing her aching shoulders. It had no service courtyard, nor even a fence around it, and the stables were nearly a mile away. Going back and forth to the Presidential Necessary-House was bad enough. Weeks of rain aside, she wasn’t about to hang the Presidential linen out in full view of the likes of James T. Callendar’s spiritual brethren.

“Burr is all technique.” John’s breath puffed white in the silvery window-light. “All slick cleverness. He’s the kind of lawyer I used to hate coming up against in court because he’s half an actor. He has all the facts but moves them around like chess-pieces, to whatever angle will look best to the jury. Tom, at least, there’s a real man inside. A good man. But whether that man’s decisions can be trusted…”

His breath blew out in a sigh. “Well,” he said after a moment, “I’ve done what I can. And will do what I can.” At the far side of the great chamber, Charley’s tiny daughter Susie ran giggling among the clothes-ropes, hotly pursued by little Caro Smith. It was a relief, to see how John’s eyes brightened at the sight of the girls.

He went on, “At least the Senate approved the treaty with France. Jefferson can’t tamper with that, though the Good Lord only knows what other tricks Bonaparte has up his sleeve. And, thank God, they passed my proposal to increase the number of circuit courts, so at least there’ll be responsible Federalist judges to interpret whatever laws the Republicans dream up. Including,” he added, with the grim ghost of a smile, “John Marshall as Chief Justice, now that Ellsworth has resigned.”

“John Marshall?” Abigail stood for a moment, sheet over her arms, startled out of her depression. She remembered how the handsome Virginian had bent his head to listen to John at the New Year’s levee—how furiously Tom Jefferson had protested when his enemy (and third cousin) had been named one of the chief negotiators of the French treaty. A slow smile spread over her face. “Well. There’s one Mr. Jefferson won’t be able to talk his way around.”

“Nor,” said John, handing her the laundry-basket, “without dismantling the Constitution—the very thing he accused us of wanting to do—will he be able to get rid of him.”

Now, as she folded the crisply ironed petticoats into her trunk, Abigail heard hooves on the hard-frozen gravel of the drive. Looking out, she glimpsed her nephew Billy Shaw—Betsey’s boy, hired as John’s secretary and assistant—limping up the makeshift stair. So it’s done, she thought, and whispered a prayer, because John was perfectly right about Burr. Was an honest Jacobin more to be desired than a man who’d sell his support to the highest bidder?

Footfalls on the stairs. Billy’s halting, John’s firmer tread.

Abigail looked up.

“It’s a deadlock,” said John.

Abigail had been braced for any news but that. “I thought the House vote was supposed to break the deadlock.” Honestly, couldn’t they even get THAT right?

“The Federalists still control the House,” said John grimly. “The new Congress hasn’t been seated yet. This is the last session that’s voting. And the Federalists who aren’t under Hamilton’s control trust Burr. Tom has eight states—” He ticked them off on his chubby, chilblained fingers. “Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Georgia, Virginia, New Jersey, New York, and North Carolina. That’s one short of a majority. Burr has six, and Vermont and Maryland are both deadlocked. They’ve cast six ballots already. Nobody’s moving.”

By eleven o’clock that night, when the Representatives were starting in on their eighteenth or nineteenth ballot, the situation was still the same.

And still the same when Billy Shaw came back in the morning from the all-night session. Men were sending out for food, he said, and for coffee and some for clean linen.

And the vote was still tied. The sky was still clear. The road home still open.

“Fools!” John shoved his breakfast porridge from him, struck the table with the flat of his hand so that all the glasses jumped. “Don’t they see what they’re doing? Weren’t any of them paying attention to what happened in France?”

His face suffused with anger, the “ungovernable temper” that all his life his foes had exaggerated, though Abigail had never found it ungovernable at all. One just had to let him shout himself breathless, and later he’d be perfectly sensible.

“It was divisiveness that brought France to ruin, every man pulling his own way! Stabbing one another in the back! Hamilton’s still holding on to the votes of the men who support his party. He won’t back Burr under any circumstances and he won’t back Tom unless Tom will give him assurances of what to expect, which I don’t think is an unreasonable request. Just the assurance that he’s not an outright advocate of anarchy would do!”

“They’ll all feel very silly,” remarked Sophie Hallam, when she came by later in the day with word that on the twenty-first ballot the House was still split, eight to six to two, “with all the flags put up for the inauguration, if they don’t know who to inaugurate.” She sounded pleased.

The short winter day was drawing to a close and the last of Abigail’s few callers had departed, when Jack Briesler tapped at the upstairs parlor door. “Mr. Jefferson to see you, ma’am.”

Jefferson looked as if he had not slept last night. Spots of pink showed high on the Virginian’s elegant cheekbones, and on the end of his long nose. In a year or two his faded hair would all be silver. Abigail had sat next to him at dinner just after the New Year, but this was the first time they had seen one another alone since…

She tried to calculate, running the years back in her mind.

Since London. They’d gone to the theater together, on a night when John had been obliged at the last minute to meet with the Portuguese Ambassador. They’d walked home through the chilly March mists, talking of fossil bones and Indians and mesmerism and the education of women…What one always talked about with Tom.

Everything except what he truly thought on any subject, or the contents of his heart.

That was the evening she’d given him Nabby’s sketch of the garden of the Paris house.

You will be welcome in our home, she had said to him that evening, as often as you care to come, as long as you care to remain, at whatever hour you make your appearance.

Like so many last times, she had been unaware that it would be the last.

She had not realized how much she had missed her friend.

Tears filled her eyes and she blinked them away. Weak, she thought, furiously. Losing Charley has made me weak—

“Mrs. Adams.” He bowed over the hand she held out to him. “Is there any service I can offer you, before you take your leave?”

Not urging your journalist friends to call my husband a fat dotard before all the nation? Not lying about him behind his back to the President he served?

Perhaps giving him support he could trust?

Or had these acts been only Tom’s view of how politics should be conducted? Part and parcel of his inability to see any inconsistency in hating slavery and giving his daughter twelve families of living human beings as a wedding-present?

For a moment silence hung between them in the shadowy parlor, chilly with the sinking of the fire. Only her own chair remained unsheeted near the hearth.

They had met in a crowded room, she recalled, looking across at the tall man before her. Life and promise glinting like the diamonds on the frame of Martha’s French mirror. The War over, the world of sea-voyages and new romances ahead. Journeys end in lovers meeting….

Now there was nothing but stillness, and shadow, and years that could never be recovered.

She sighed, and said, “None that I can think of, sir. We’ve been living here like a couple of vagabonds, John and I. It only remains to bundle our tooth-brushes up in our spare shirts and be on our way….”

And Jefferson laughed. Slipping easily into the banter of friendship, as if the more recent past had not existed. “Perhaps I could offer you a cow to take along, as you did to France?” He looked around him at the oval parlor. A beautiful room, Abigail thought, with its gold-starred wallpapers, but like everything in the house, too big to be really comfortable. “To tell you the truth, this house has always appalled me,” he remarked. “It’s a palace—it would swallow Versailles and have room left for the Dalai Lama. My heart bled for you, trying to heat it.”

“I always wished,” said Abigail quietly, meeting his eye, “that those wretches who called us ‘monarchial’ could have seen how we actually lived here. With six servants and no way to get wood, in spite of the fact that there were trees whichever way we looked. Of all the accusations, that was the most unjust.”

Another small silence fell. Just for a moment, Jefferson’s eyes avoided hers. “On behalf of the men who supported me,” he said at last, “I do apologize, for causing you pain. Of which, this year, you have had enough.”

It was all he would say, concerning politics, concerning the election, concerning his supporters who were still in jail for trying to whip up hatred against the President. Concerning all the blood spilled in France, all the lies told and trust violated, only to put a dictator on its throne.

Jefferson is a dreamer, thought Abigail. Who had said that to her once? And his dream today was, before she took her leave, to reestablish something of the friendship they had lost. To pretend that all was actually well.

Briesler brought fresh tea, and candles, and another log for the fire. They drank together and Abigail pretended, for the sake of the man she’d once called her friend.

As she listened to his footfalls retreat down the echoing hall, she realized there was little likelihood that she would ever see Thomas Jefferson again.

The Federal City

Friday, February 13, 1801

As dreams went, Abigail reflected—as fairy-tales went—“happily ever after” was not, as Martha Washington had often said, “all it was cracked up to be.”

She stood in the long French window of the downstairs entrance-hall, waiting for the carriage in the gray chill of dawn. The furniture was gone. Louisa sat by one of the fireplaces cradling a bored and sleepy Susie in her arms.

We fought our war—we won our freedom…Journeys did end in lovers meeting.

Only the lover Nabby met turned out to be a good-for-nothing, and the freedom we fought for turned out to be freedom for dirty-minded newspapers to call John names while he battled to keep the country out of a war it couldn’t win.

And the prize for all our striving was the privilege of living in a world that we do not understand.

And along the way we lost our daughter’s hope and happiness, as surely as we lost poor Charley. As surely as John and I lost our dear friend Jefferson.

Abigail pulled her cloak tighter around her shoulders, watching the black-cloaked, slender figure that had to be Sophie Hallam walking toward her along Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol.

“They just finished ballot twenty-three,” she reported, as she arrived. “Still nothing. Some of the Federalists talk of asking the President Pro Tempore of the Senate to take over the position of Chief Executive if the deadlock cannot be resolved; or possibly Chief Justice Marshall…In which case, Mr. Jefferson says, he will call for another Convention to rewrite the Constitution again—presumably more to his liking.”

“Which is precisely what they did in France,” said Abigail bleakly. “Over, and over again. Whenever one faction didn’t like what was going on.”

“I understand militia is gathering in Virginia.”

Abigail shook her head, and for a long while was unable to speak. Unable to frame into words the anger and sickened pain in her heart. At last she said, “It’s just that I sat on Penn’s Hill and watched the fighting before Boston. And now, after all our struggle, it seems I’m going to see the Republic break into pieces within my lifetime, after seeing it born.”

“Mrs. Adams…” Sophie’s expression of sardonic amusement was gone. “You know Hammy isn’t going to let it happen. He wrote the Federalist Papers, for Heaven’s sake, if for no other reason than his pride won’t let him stand by and watch the Constitution he championed be swept away, completely aside from the fact that without General Washington to dote on him he has less control now over what the Republicans might come up with on a second try. He’ll back down, and give the election to Jefferson.”

“So that’s what we have come to,” asked Abigail bitterly, “in so short a time? To be thankful that one man’s vanity truckles to another man’s pride?”

“At least as things stand there is little likelihood that anyone is going to come posting up to Quincy to demand Mr. Adams return to public life the way they did to poor General Washington.”

Surprised into a cackle of laughter, Abigail responded, “Poor my grandmother’s lumbago! He delighted in being called back to the colors, when it looked as if we were to go to war with France. Poor Martha, to have waited for happiness for sixteen years, only to have it end in two—”

She broke off. Remembering that plump, black-clothed figure in the dilapidated parlor of Mount Vernon. The dreadful silence of slaves waiting for her death to bring them freedom. The footworn track that led from the house to the brick tomb overlooking the river. Where thy treasure is, there will your heart be also.

Wondering how many years of happiness were left to her and John, when they returned to the stony acres of their farm.

“Only, she didn’t wait for happiness, you know,” mused Sophie. “I think she was happy every day, just to be with him.”

Abigail thought about that. Balancing those grievous winter evenings by the kitchen fire in Braintree against the sparkle of sunrise on the jeweled sea, that first day she woke up on the Active and wasn’t seasick. Balancing the terror of waiting for British assault, against the salons of Paris in the last days of the Kings. The amazement of Handel’s “Messiah” sung in Westminster Abbey. Her garden in Auteuil and the wind in her hair, as she and John climbed hand in hand up the short green turf of the English downs…

Being John’s partner, all these years. As if she’d gone along to some vast war with him to stand at his elbow and load his gun. Even were their work to be swept away tomorrow, the fact that they had done it would remain in God’s heart, where all things were eternal.

And perhaps, too, in the minds of both women and men.

“I haven’t been happy every day,” she told Sophie. “But you know, I wouldn’t have traded a single one of them for anything.”

With a rattle of harness the carriage came around the corner of the drive, the wagon behind it heavy with furniture, trunks, servants bound for home. The inner door of the huge cold room opened and John came in. “The barometer’s holding steady,” he reported, as Sophie faded tactfully through the French window and down the wooden stair. “I pray you’ll be comfortable—”

“If I made it in safety across the ocean,” Abigail assured him, “I’m sure I’ll reach Quincy in one piece, and have the house snug for you on your return.”

“My return.” John sighed. “God knows what will happen here in the meantime…. And Jefferson, of course, is still refusing to tell anyone athing about his intentions—” He shook his head, like a horse enraged by a horse-fly. “He could be plotting to abolish religion entirely in this country, the way they did in France—he’s completely capable of it—or turn the states loose to do as they please, and undo everything the Convention labored to—”

Abigail put her hands on his shoulders: “It will be all right, John,” she said, as she had said to Nabby, when her daughter had clung to her in the blackness of storm at sea, their lives in balance between the world they’d known and a future unforeseen. She wasn’t entirely sure she believed it, but Martha’s words came back to her mind. We go where our hearts command us, in the faith that it is God who formed our hearts. Which included Mr. Jefferson, as well as John. Whether Mr. Jefferson believed it or not.

Perhaps all things did return at last, to where they were meant to be.

She said again, more firmly, “It will be all right.”

As John walked her down the steps to the carriage, Abigail looked from the dreary, bare expanse of stumps and trees back to the house: enormous, unfinished inside, still smelling of newness, like the country itself. Waiting for what would come.

But that was out of her hands now. And out of John’s.

“God willing, I shall see you in a month,” John said, and kissed her gloved hands, then her mouth. “And God willing, from that point on, ‘I’ll go no more a-rovin’ with you, fair maid.’ ”

The carriage started off; Abigail hummed the old song a little, to the creak of the wheels on the icy road.

A-rovin’, a-rovin’, since rovin’s been my ru-i-in,

I’ll go no more a-rovin’ with you, fair maid….

Looking back, she saw his stumpy black figure, standing on the steps of the great raw half-finished Mansion, in the muddy wilderness that civilization had barely scratched. Her John. A stout balding patriot who had seen everything of one of the most astonishing events of History—and who had seen it at her side. She sighed and settled back, and hoped they’d make Baltimore by nightfall.