Patriot Hearts: A Novel of the Founding Mothers

1814

Washington City

Wednesday, August 24, 1814

4:30 P.M.

The white sandstone walls of the President’s House disappeared behind the trees, and Dolley heard in her mind the whisper of Aaron Burr’s beautiful voice: Has it ever occurred to you that Sophie Hallam might be a British spy?

Hast thou quarreled? Dolley had asked Burr at once, and immediately felt herself blush for the suggestion that Sophie might be his mistress—which of course Dolley was virtually certain Sophie was, that summer of 1803. Her certainty was confirmed when Burr had grinned, like a wicked older brother to whom Dolley could say anything.

“We have not,” he retorted. “Because a man shares a woman’s bed doesn’t mean he has to be blind to all besides her beauty. And no lovers’ spat would excuse a man for inventing such a rumor about a woman. I merely wondered, that’s all. She’d make a fine spy.”

Stifling in the closed carriage as she fled the capital, one arm draped over the jolting stacks of boxes and bundled papers that threatened to avalanche over her every time the wheels struck another rut, Dolley could see her old friend’s face as clearly as if the conversation had occurred yesterday instead of eleven years ago.

“Why should a woman return to this country, whose current government ruined her family, caused the deaths of her father and brother, and drove her and her mother out as camp-followers of the retreating army?” Burr’s eyes, brilliant as a poet’s, narrowed as if he were reading a court document; he had looked past Dolley and through the oval drawing-room’s long windows to the half-built boundary-wall and the inevitable fair of hawkers and hucksters, cockfights and dogfights, in the grounds behind the President’s Mansion that accompanied the Fourth of July celebrations.

The Fourth of July was always boisterous in the Federal City, which was then only beginning to be called after its founder. That year—1803—was quadruply ebullient: President Jefferson had announced, just that morning, that France had sold the United States all its territory of Louisiana.

There would be no fighting over the West, no threat of Spain once again closing the Mississippi to trade. As a Quaker, Dolley’s soul had been deeply satisfied: Fourteen million dollars was less costly than any war she’d ever heard of, and every land-speculator in the country was in ecstasies. Jefferson had held a mammoth levee at the Executive Mansion at noon, and private celebrations were being planned all over the city. Burr had come to the levee alone, and had exchanged no more than a dozen words with Sophie, but turning her head Dolley could pick out her friend Sophie Hallam, in very stylish second mourning, deep in conversation with Hannah Gallatin, the wife of the Secretary of the Treasury.

“More curiously,” Burr went on, following her gaze, “how would she return? Mrs. Hallam’s needlework is unexcelled, naturally—” He lifted his punch-cup in salute to Dolley’s gown of yolk-yellow silk and silver spider-gauze that had been Sophie’s creation. “Yet a woman needs money for materials, to set up as a mantua-maker, much less to purchase a house in Philadelphia—which she did—and another here, which she also did, in excellent parts of both towns. And no one I’ve ever spoken to has heard of a merchant or banker in England by the name of Hallam. A woman can trade on the capital which, God help them, God gives to women—but it generally leaves its mark, on a woman’s soul and on her body also. And I haven’t seen it.”

Her cheeks hot with anger for Sophie, Dolley drew Burr a little further into the relative privacy of the window—the oval drawing-room which the Adamses had used as an entrance-hall was as full as it could hold—and whispered, “I trust thou wilt understand that should I hear a single word of this ever again from any other source, dear as I hold thee, my friend, our friendship will be at an end.”

“I do understand, Mrs. Madison,” replied Burr, inclining his head. “And you will not. I’ve spoken of this to you alone, solely because of all the women in this city, only you and Jefferson’s daughters know the lady well.”

Above him, flanked by the rather faded green curtains that Jefferson had purchased for the oval salon, Washington’s portrait had gazed into space, as if fiercely disapproving still of Burr after all those years. In addition to the usual Congressmen, speculators, and place-servers, the crowd in the oval drawing-room was enlivened by a number of delegates from Western Indian tribes, in full glory of feathers and paint, and representatives from the piratical Barbary States in a gaudy glory of turbans and pearls.

“However,” Burr went on quietly, “those ladies seem to have taken their broods back to Virginia for the foreseeable future. Indeed, it isn’t my business to speak of what I cannot prove and only suspect—fond as I am and continue to be of the lady! But as Vice President of this country, I suppose it is my duty to at least let the wife of the Secretary of State know that the thought has crossed my mind that there may be an agent of Britain in our midst.”

His words returned to Dolley now. Through a haze of dust she watched American militiamen staggering along the dirt road beside the carriage, or straggling in the distance among the trees. Joe kept the horses as close to a gallop as was possible in the ruts of Pennsylvania Avenue: Clinging with one hand to the strap, the other arm fending off boxes, Dolley felt as if her bones would be broken even if they didn’t manage to overturn the vehicle.

Through the windows she could see soldiers as well as civilians driving wagons full of supplies. Others rode horses or mules still in the harness of some abandoned dray or limber. There were others, Dolley saw with sudden anger—rough men both black and white in laborers’ clothes—driving carts or pushing barrows full of silk dresses, of silver services hastily bundled up in sheets or shawls, even small pieces of expensive furniture or elaborate, imported screens.

Sophie had been right. Such men had probably been just waiting for her carriage to leave the Mansion, to begin looting what she could not save.

Would Sophie wait there, too, for the British troops to come?

Burr may have been a schemer—and later, a traitor—but he had a keen judgment of humankind.

And under ordinary circumstances it wouldn’t have mattered what Sophie was in the habit of telling the British Minister. All ministers had informants, who picked up bits of news. It was part of a minister’s job. Dolley acknowledged that Sophie—known to be a friend to both Jefferson and Abigail Adams, whose first successes had been due to her friendship with Martha Washington—would be a logical choice for such work.

But these were not ordinary circumstances.

Her mind circled back to Jemmy, sixty-three years old, riding the Bladensburg battlefield in range of the British guns.

I should not have left.

The carriage jolted, veered around a group of stumbling men, without knapsacks or rifles, whose dust-smeared militia uniforms bore the marks of powder but not of blood.

If Jemmy is taken…

He won’t be, she told herself grimly. He will have had the sense to flee, when his Army dissolved about him.

But Jemmy, in masterminding Jefferson’s election, had read hundreds of scoffing broadsides that mocked Jefferson’s “cowardice” in fleeing Richmond ahead of Benedict Arnold’s forces; in getting out of Monticello minutes before Tarleton’s dragoons emerged from the woods. The jeers had followed Jefferson for twenty years, never mentioning the fact that Tarleton would almost certainly have hanged the author of the Declaration of Independence, had he caught him.

Would the recollection of the mockery keep Jemmy on the field a few fatal minutes beyond his own last chance to flee?

Please, God, no, Dolley whispered. Dearest God, hold him safe in Thy hands.

Horsemen clattered up beside the carriage, the blue of the leader’s militia jacket barely visible through the dust. Joe reined in and Dolley put down the window, her hands trembling so badly they could barely work the catches. One of the men she recognized as John Graham, who had been a clerk with the State Department when Jemmy had taken it over—he was Chief there now.

“Where is he?” She thrust open the door, staggering as she stepped down into the road.

“We don’t know, ma’am. But General Winder was defeated. The whole Army’s in flight—”

He’ll go to the Mansion and be captured. I knew I should not have left.

“Hast heard anything?” Her voice cracked. “Mr. Graham, take me back to the Mansion. I shan’t leave him—”

“Mrs. Madison, your being taken will serve him no good—”

“It will if he be taken as well!” She almost screamed the words at him, the whole weight of the day suddenly falling on her, like a dam giving way all at once before the pressure of a flood. Her whole body shook. “I will not leave him! Take the things on to Georgetown, but let me go back!”

“There is no going back,” said Graham.

Sukey scrambled from the carriage-box and took her other arm, said with surprising gentleness, “Ma’am, he’s right. You can’t—”

Like the rolling boom of thunder, an explosion cut across her words. All of them swung around, looking toward the south. Black smoke rolled toward the storm-blackening sky. Even at this distance, Dolley could see in it flickers of flame.

“It’s the Navy Yard,” said Graham. “Secretary Jones ordered its destruction, to keep our powder and ships out of the hands of the British.”

Dolley stood for a long moment, watching the smoke and the flame, as another explosion echoed across those flat green marshes, the scattered buildings and cut-down stumps that made up the Republic’s capital. Refugees jostled around them, poured like a dirty river along the road to Georgetown.

More quietly, Graham repeated, “Ma’am, there is no going back.”

Dolley let herself be coaxed back into the carriage. Joe whipped up the horses; they clattered on their way.

Sophie Hallam was still at the Executive Mansion when James Madison stumbled up the front steps. French John, with Pol in her cage and a bottle of the Madisons’ best champagne in either coat-pocket, had departed shortly after four, and immediately thereafter looters had broken in, helping themselves to whatever Dolley had left. Sophie had simply retreated to the yellow parlor and seated herself by the window with a pistol and a bottle of champagne—after all, these men and women had presumably paid the taxes that purchased the silver candlesticks and bottles of port and cognac.

She was still there, and the last of the shouting was just dying down in the hall, when she heard Paul Jennings gasp, “Mr. Madison, sir!”

Stepping quickly through the parlor door she saw the little white-haired gentleman stagger, then sink onto one of the hall benches as if he’d been shot. The men with him crowded around, supporting him and jabbering, Sophie thought, like so many frightened monkeys. She crossed unhurriedly to the dining-room, poured a glass of champagne, and brought it back out.

“Drink this, sir.”

The thin white fingers could barely keep a grip around the stem, but he glanced up and met her eyes and there was nothing weak or beaten in his sharp glance. “Mrs. Hallam.” He shook the others off him—the senior Charles Carroll, whose son had so recently hustled Dolley out of the Mansion, and one of his generals—and stood to bow.

“Mrs. Madison left safely about half an hour ago,” reported Sophie calmly—she had always liked Mr. Madison. “And as you see—” She gestured at the shadowy front hall, strewn with Dolley’s dresses and shawls, with broken china and sweetly reeking puddles of spilled wine, “—the looters were a bare ten minutes behind.”

“I hope you managed to secure something worthwhile for yourself, ma’am?”

“Only memories.”

“Ah.” Madison sank back onto the bench, closed his eyes. “A woman of discernment.” His black clothing was gray with dust, his white hair and dead-white exhausted face, blackened with powder-smoke.

“Dolley, on the other hand, carried off all the Cabinet papers, a small clock, General Washington’s portrait, and the drawing-room curtains, so as you see, she exhibited more discernment than I. Will you lie down, sir?”

“Lie down?” exploded old Mr. Carroll. “Dammit, woman, the British are on our heels—!”

“I see no sign of them on the Avenue,” Sophie retorted coolly. “And I believe Mr. Madison would be the better for twenty minutes’ rest.”

“The lady is right, sir,” affirmed Mr. Barker, kneeling to hold the wineglass again to Madison’s lips. “I think those louts about cleared out the cellar, sir, but I’ll have a look round for cognac if thou’rt mindful for it.”

Madison shook his head. “I see things have much changed since the days of the Revolution,” he murmured. “I would not have believed the difference between a militia force and regulars, had I not seen it today.”

“I think it’s the British who have changed, sir,” replied Sophie. “Since last Americans fought them, they have sharpened their steel against Napoleon. And the generation that has grown up here since that time has done nothing but call one another names.”

“They’ll rally,” said the General bracingly. “Of course they’ll rally. And men will come into the city to defend it—”

Madison lifted his fingers, shook his head without opening his eyes.

After a moment, Sophie said, “Mrs. Madison has gone on to Bellevue with your son, Mr. Carroll.”

“Too close,” Madison breathed. “The British will pass over this city like breaking surf and follow our troops on into Georgetown. Will you be going out there, too, Sophie?”

“Later, yes.”

“I must find General Winder—rally the men. Keep the government together.” He drew a deep breath and coughed, flinching with pain. Sophie, who had sat with Abigail Adams through bouts of her rheumatism, knew just how agonizing was that net of fire that seemed to clothe bone and muscle beneath the skin. “Should you see my wife before I do, let her know we’ll rendezvous at Salona Plantation. It’s ten miles up the river and she should be safe there.”

“You should rest,” said Sophie again, and the old man waved slightly, brushing the suggestion away.

“Since first the British learned they could not hold us by force,” he said, “they’ve been trying to hold us by other means: all the usual tricks that the strong play on the weak. Debt. Extortion. Isolating us from support elsewhere. Bullying. There always comes a time when the bullied must hold the line and say, No more. There is never any going back, but what we strive for now is to choose our own path forward, not the path that is most convenient for the merchants and bankers who surround the English King.

“They could not conquer us before but they can break us apart. Once union is sundered—once the government centered in this city shatters—we can be dealt with piecemeal. Each State will go back to being England’s handmaiden, now that France and Spain are broken. Sending our men to die in wars of her choosing; paying money to her rather than investing it in ourselves. Tonight—and in the next few weeks—we will need to hold fast.”

He sighed, and sat up. An unlikely-looking kingmaker, thought Sophie, to have maneuvered first Washington and then Jefferson into leading the raw new nation in the direction he believed that it should go.

But he was no Richelieu, she thought. When the enemy turned up again, he had mounted his horse and ridden to the battlefield, something not even Washington had done as President. And had it been necessary, she understood, looking down at him, he would have died under the British guns.

“I hope Dolley understands,” he said, and Sophie smiled.

“She spoke of defending this house with Patsy Jefferson’s Tunisian saber.”

His grin was bright as a boy’s. “That’s my Dolley.”

It was yet daylight when they left the Mansion, the last rays of the sun sickly yellow beneath the blackness of the coming storm. Sophie helped Paul Jennings lock up the doors for what she knew was going to be the last time.

Then the young man set off on foot for the Georgetown ferry, and Sophie went back to her house on Connecticut Avenue, to ready her own gig for a drive.

Not long after that, the British came.

Sophie could see them easily in the thickening twilight. There were about two hundred of them, an advance guard, sailors, not soldiers, with little black hats and tarry pigtails hanging down on their shoulders. Sophie picked out General Ross at their head on a dappled horse, and beside him Admiral Cockburn in his blue Navy uniform. Dust gritted in Sophie’s nose and throat.

Where the Avenue crossed Second Street someone fired a single volley from a house on the corner. Ross’s horse staggered and fell under him, blood glistening on its neck. The general hadn’t even sprung clear of the saddle before men were breaking down the door of the house. A hundred feet away, Sophie saw dark figures dart from the back of the house and vanish into the dusk. An officer came out the front door and called, “Nobody here, sir. And no guns.”

Sophie heard Cockburn snarl, “By God, they’ll pay for this!” and over his voice Ross’s, angry but calm. “Burn the house, Mr. Starrett. Was anyone hurt? Get them back to the ambulance wagons….”

Someone brought him up a fresh horse.

That was the sum total of the capital’s defense.

The men set up a rough camp on an empty field east of the Capitol Building. From the trees that surrounded the nearby Carroll Hotel, Sophie watched the detachment led by Ross ascend Capitol Hill, the flares of their torches dripping fragments of tar that burned in the dirt behind them as the Devil’s hoofprints were said to burn. She heard the crack of rifles, the shattering of window-glass. Moments later, scarlet reflections flitted in the windows of the two legislative houses and in the open wooden passageway between. They must have either brought powder with them, she thought, or found it there. The sound it made when it exploded in the connecting passageway was unmistakable, and as the flames rippled up, Sophie saw the men moving about inside, gathering up whatever they could to feed the blaze.

They moved on by torchlight up Pennsylvania Avenue, walking in double column without drum-beat or bugle, muffled footsteps a heavy whisper in the dust. Strange little gusts of wind had begun to stir the trees, and overhead the tar-black sky was streaked with heat-lightning. Like the ghost of her own parents—or of the girl she had once been—Sophie followed in her dark gown, as if she’d been assigned the task by someone else, to fulfill a rite for those who were dead.

She stood for a long time outside the President’s House, watching torchlight play through the windows as it was first searched, then ransacked for whatever the looters had missed. Since that first winter, when she’d called on Abigail Adams, the place had gone from a dank and gloomy cavern to a very respectable mansion, thanks to Jefferson’s delight in remodeling, and to Dolley’s exquisite taste.

They might all have saved themselves the trouble.

As her grandparents might have, back in Virginia, had they known.

She had waited a long time, she reflected, to watch this. And yet she felt almost nothing. She heard the breaking glass as the men smashed out the ground-floor windows, and torchlight flowed around the doors as everyone came out again. By that torchlight she saw Ross line up men outside each window, with poles like javelins in their hands. At the end of each pole was a ball about the size of a soup-plate—oiled rags. The British army had a system for everything.

A torch was borne the full circuit of the house, touching each javelin in turn, until the white sandstone walls were ringed with fire. In the silence Sophie was aware of others, half glimpsed in shadow, among the young trees that Mr. Jefferson had had planted to screen the house from the Avenue. Civilians, watching in silence—listening to the shouts of the bands of stragglers from the British camp who were now roving through the darkness, looking for what they might steal.

General Ross spoke his word of command, and a color-sergeant shouted it. In unison the men threw their javelins through the broken windows, like a well-crafted machine. The whole house went up at once, each window around the lower floor glaring like yellow eyes into Hell. Red flickered, then blazed, in those on the second floor.

For a time they stood in silence and watched it burn.

Thinking what? Sophie wondered. Feeling what? The sweet brandy of vengeance? Or just a solid craftsmanlike awareness of a job well done?

Had any man of them been born in these colonies? Watched his own family’s house go up in flames, knowing there was no other place of refuge to be had in all the land?

She wondered why she felt so little. Flames licked through the windows, danced over the blazing roof. Yet her only experience was a slight sensation of disappointment: like the much-anticipated embrace of a lover who turns out to be only a man like other men.

She tried to recapture the shouts of the patriot militia who’d torched her grandparents’ plantation, but the only words she heard were Madison’s: There is never any going back, but what we strive for now is to choose our own path forward.

And Dolley: We all need reminders of who we were and where we came from, if our hearts are to survive.

But survive to go on to where?

And others behind them, like spectres taking shape within the smoke. Plump little Mrs. Washington, hiding her fears for the General and her grandchildren behind chatty efficiency. Mrs. Adams like spring-steel, ready to shed her own blood or anyone else’s for John’s sake and for her country’s. Sally seeming to appear and disappear through the smoke, a spirit outlasting scandal and time.

If I hate those men and what they did, I must hate the women who helped them—let them—be what they were.

Yet she found she did not. Nor did she feel pity for them. Only the comradeship of those who have passed through the same battle, albeit on different parts of the field.

Liberté—Amitié: Liberty and love, that most ancient of conundra. Did all things come at last to where they were meant to be?

Sophie had meant to go to General Ross, when the burning was done, as she’d been instructed to do, and let him know where Dolley and her husband were to be found. A fast-moving company could be at Salona Plantation by midnight. She knew Mr. Madison was right: Without a rallying-point, the scattered militia companies, the fragments of the fast-dissolving government, would disperse.

Without a central focus, the individual States would take up their old position of leadership, and each State—squabbling with the others as usual over debts and privileges and shipping rights as they had all throughout the Revolution and for four years beyond—could be dealt with piecemeal far more easily than the Congress of the whole.

But when the officers barked out orders to form up columns, Sophie turned away.

Fairfax County, Virginia

Thursday, August 25, 1814

1:00 A.M.

From the upper windows of a house called Rokeby, Dolley watched Washington City burn.

Though it lay some ten miles off, she could see the red reflection against the underside of roiling clouds of smoke. The trees around the house tossed and fretted as the winds strengthened. The sky smelled of storm, and of smoke.

Dolley felt very, very tired.

Jemmy at least was safe. Or at least he had been safe four hours ago, when he and his little band of friends had caught up with her carriage on the river road. The team’s pace had slowed to a crawl, the way blocked by carts, carriages, wheelbarrows, and dead-tired trudging militia, mostly invisible in the suffocating darkness. Like themselves, everyone in Georgetown had realized that the British would sweep through the city.

Somewhere ahead of them was a family with a wailing baby. Its cries wrenched Dolley’s heart. Was there no one there to comfort it? Then Sukey had called down from the box, “Riders comin’ behind us, ma’am!” and the next instant, it seemed, lantern-light flashed in the window of the carriage and old Mr. Carroll’s voice called out, “Mrs. Madison?”

And a moment later, Jemmy’s, unmistakable, “Dolley?”

The drivers behind them cursed as Joe reined the team over. Men and women jostled past with barrows and bundles, sparing barely a glance as the tall buxom black-haired woman nearly fell out of the carriage into the arms of the dust-covered little man.

For a time Dolley knew nothing and cared less, only the grip of Jemmy’s arms around her and the taste of his mouth on hers. Dear God, he’s alive! Dear, dear God, Thou has spared him….

“Move along there!” groused someone behind them whose wagon couldn’t pass on the narrow road. “We ain’t got all night here!” and another voice added, “Kiss ’er in the carriage, pilgrim!”

“Shut up, Matt, let ’em kiss!” retorted a woman’s voice. “Catch me kissin’ you, if you was lost.”

“I can’t stay.” Jemmy’s hands gripped her shoulders as he spoke, as if convincing himself against all odds that they were together, both alive, both unhurt. “We’ve heard the men are regrouping in Fairfax County—perhaps at Wren’s Tavern, or near there. They say that’s where Monroe has gone.”

“Where shall we meet, then?” asked Dolley.

“Salona. If I don’t reach there tonight, or can’t reach there, meet me tomorrow night at Wiley’s Tavern near Little Falls. I should at least know by then what is being done, by way of counterattack.”

“All right.” He looked ready to drop, but there was no time for more, and Dolley only drew him to her again in fierce embrace, whispered, “God go with thee.”

“And thee.” He cupped her face in his hands, kissed her again, hard. “We’ll come through this, Doll. And come through victorious.”

It was only after he’d ridden away, that Carroll mentioned that Sophie Hallam had been present when Salona had been decided upon as their meeting-place.

Rokeby House lay about a mile from Salona, and from it Dolley hoped to be able to watch the road. The house was crammed already with other refugees, mostly people she’d met at receptions and parties over fourteen years in Washington City. Her very young hostess, Mrs. Love, offered her her own bedroom for the night, and would have found floor-space for herself in one of the already innlike guest-rooms had not Dolley forbidden her to even think of such a thing.

Mrs. Love—Tilly, a connection of Jemmy’s by marriage (wasn’t everyone in Virginia?) who’d been a child in the schoolroom when Dolley first came to the Federal City—slept now on the bedroom day-bed she’d had made up, her pet gray cat in her arms like a doll. Her blond braids hung out from under the makeshift tent of mosquito-netting in the glow of the single candle. The big house had fallen silent an hour ago, save for the restless rushing of the trees outside, like the sound of the sea in the darkness. Even the noises of fugitives on the river road had ceased.

The smell of rain and lightning rode like a seraph on the night.

And what now?

Even with her spyglass, Dolley couldn’t see much more of the fires than the red flash of flames, but it seemed to her that they were confined to several wide-separated localities. At least, she thought, no matter how hard the wind blew, flames from one house wouldn’t automatically ignite a whole neighborhood, as they would in Philadelphia. She had to smile a little at that, thinking of how everyone but herself had moaned and wailed about Washington City’s endless distances and scattered houses. If they wished to torch the city, the British would have to do it house by house.

Her own house, she knew, was one of those in flames. She saw the dining-room again in her mind, all dressed in its white and silver as it had been on those evenings when Jefferson had sent her a hasty note begging her to come and preside at his dinner, as there would be other ladies present.

Even for a philosopher who considered etiquette a worthless nuisance, there were limits.

The thought brought others. She turned to her reticule in quest of her snuffbox, and recalled again she’d left it in the desk-drawer, and with it the Queen’s golden mirror. So it was destined to vanish after all, she thought, and felt the stab of grief for what could not be retrieved. For some moments it was as if she’d lost Martha again, and all those vanished days, those years of joy and trial, with her.

Burned to ashes, as Sophie’s early years had been burned, leaving only stony irony and revenge.

Weeping, strangely enough, made her feel better. Maybe I just hunger for snuff. After a few minutes she raised the spyglass again, turned it toward the road. Though the night was pitch-black, she’d been aware that more than refugees prowled the darkness. Twice, since the flow of fugitives had slacked, she’d seen torchlight, and forms moving among the trees. American stragglers or British, she didn’t know.

Waiting to ambush Jemmy, as he rode to Salona, thinking to join her?

But when she thought of Sophie, and of the roving bands of British soldiers, she pushed her doubts aside and breathed a prayer for the safety of her friend. It was said that British stragglers had stripped the countryside between their landing-point at Benedict and the city itself. The half-dozen men and boys in the house, including her host, were grouped in the downstairs hall, but in the event of a determined incursion by the enemy their collection of dueling-pistols and hunting-arms could only serve to trigger deadly violence.

Sooner than that, she thought, as torches and lanterns began to gather again on the road beyond the trees, I will give myself up. The thought turned her sick with dread.

Even flight out the back door and into the surrounding woods might not serve to save her hosts or their dwelling. And in the woods would be looters, and runaway slaves.

She strained her eyes at the glass, to penetrate the wild darkness. On the road she could only guess at a confusion of movement, but it seemed to her there was a large force there. The roaring of the trees carried away any sound. For interminable minutes Dolley watched, heart pounding, before the flickering spots of fire retreated back into the darkness, in the direction from which they’d come.

A single speck of flame detached itself from the woods. Bobbed through the wind-whirled blackness toward the house.

Dolley took a deep breath, and went downstairs.

Joe the coachman was just opening the front door when Dolley reached the hall. Sophie Hallam stood on the threshold with a lantern in her hand. “Who was that?” Dolley asked, breathless, and Sophie replied with a shrug, “Merely some gentlemen who’d missed their way. I sent them back toward Georgetown.” Sophie’s eyes met Dolley’s for a silent moment, tired and bitterly sad. Then Dolley stepped forward and took her in her arms.

“That was good of thee,” she said softly, and led her to the stairs.

“Are you all right?” whispered Sophie, as they entered the silent bedroom above.

Dolley nodded. “I’ve seen Jemmy.” Hesitantly, she added, “Hast thou been to Salona?” and Sophie raised a brow, as if she knew exactly what was in Dolley’s mind. Through the open window spits of rain had begun to fall. The wild air outside was suddenly thick with the breath of the storm.

“I have—alone—and Mr. Madison is not there yet, though I suspect he’s safe. The men have marched thirteen miles in the heat from Bladensburg today, and fought a battle,” she added. There was anger in her voice for the frustrated weariness of the British soldiers—Dolley knew instinctively whom she meant by the men—faced once again with the conquest of cities in a hostile countryside far too big to subdue.

They were, when all was said, back exactly where they had been in 1776. And they knew it.

“Now the rain’s begun, even the stragglers will turn back.” Sophie gazed into the night. Flames flickered through the trees.

“Did they burn the house?”

“Of course. And the Capitol. And more tomorrow, I think.”

Dolley closed her eyes, too tired even to think. Remembering Martha, faithfully journeying to all those winter camps. The British had held the cities and the ragged colonial Army had all they could do to keep them bottled up there, in a grueling eight-year stalemate that only France had broken, for reasons of France’s own. Remembering Mr. Adams’s after-dinner stories of Abigail, trying to keep house and household together in the face of British raids and what the War had done to the country—

We were young then, and the country was young.

“Must we do it all again?” She wasn’t even aware she’d spoken her thought aloud, until Sophie replied, “Would you not want to?”

In her mind, Dolley saw the red coats of Banastre Tarleton’s dragoons, like splashed blood against the brown Virginia woods, on their way to sack Monticello. Saw the children and the families that had been left behind when Abigail, or Martha—or she herself—had made the choice to follow a man, and give to their offspring only what was left over, of their hearts, their energy, their too-finite time.

“I am not sure that I could,” she answered at last. “I don’t mean the fighting. Ye shall hear of wars, and rumors of war: these things shall come to pass. But what it costs, to forge a new world. For it doth take the life of a man, and more of his life than he hath in him to give: constant labor and for the most part unthanked. We have both seen this. And if we go with him—whether to wash his shirt and load his rifle, or to preside over a thousand ill-matched dinners, or only to make sure that he hath a safe place at night to lay his head—do we not betray our children, by giving to the new world what should rightly have been theirs?”

“Are you thinking of Eliza Custis and her sisters?” asked Sophie quietly. “Or poor Charley Adams—and even poorer Nabby and Johnny?”

Or the slave-born boy everybody at Monticello except Patsy called President Tom, and his brothers and sister?

Or—and Dolley flinched from the thought—Payne Todd, Virginia planter’s son, currently living a life of extremely expensive dissipation in Ghent?

Far-off thunder boomed. Rain whirled in at the window, pounding hard now, and the two women struggled to close the casement against it. The candle flame on its table leaned drunkenly, then straightened; water poured down the panes as if from a bucket.

“It seems now that it all hath been for nothing,” Dolley murmured. “The country we have tried to build with our dear friends hath all but torn itself to pieces, not only with lies but with different truths. The Revolution in France that split us apart hath ended in Napoleon, and now he, too, is gone down in defeat. A King sits on France’s throne and the English Army is once again on our shores. After all we have given, we stand where we stood before, having robbed our children to no purpose.”

“Had I faith in God,” replied Sophie, folding her arms, “I would remark that nothing in this world lies outside His purpose. As I don’t, I will only point out that they—those children—are the new world. And bear in themselves all the treasure, good and bad, of the old. Payne would be Payne, however he was raised. His sins might take a different form, but he would still sin them, and bring down your heart in sorrow to the grave—if you let him. Abigail’s brother was a drunkard, in spite of loving, intelligent parents who didn’t deposit him with relatives and go running off to play politics in France. I don’t think there was a thing she could have done to save either him or Charley, or Nabby and Nabby’s children. Maybe there never is.”

“No,” Dolley whispered tiredly. “No, thou art right. It needs no revolution for sons and daughters both to make foolish choices that lead them to unhappiness. We only think there should have been something that we could have done.”

“But you’ll never get Abigail to admit it,” said Sophie briskly. “Do you think we could open the window again a little? The rain seems to be slacking and it’s like an oven in here.”

Only a trace of the stench of smoke remained in the green sweet magic that filled the room with the opening of the window again. The magic of a summer night in Virginia. Dolley leaned her forehead against the wet window-jamb, breathing in the scent of it, and with it the childhood she’d shared with Sophie in Hanover County, while Jemmy was off studying law and reading Tom Paine and going to Princeton and falling in love with that dreadful Fulton girl who broke his heart, all unbeknownst to her.

The past and the dreams she’d felt, an hour ago, to have been lost with a Queen’s mirror in a burning Mansion, suffused the air around her with their living presence, as close as the patter of rain on the trees.

“They may have taken the city,” said Dolley, looking out through the blackness where lightning still flickered, but where now no trace of flame could be seen. “Yet Mr. Madison will rally the militia, and the tide will turn. We will drive them out as we did before. And make our new world, in their despite.”

A half-smile touched the corner of Sophie’s mouth, just before the guttering candle puffed itself out in a whisper of smoke. “Do you know,” she replied softly, “I think we will.”