Patriot Hearts: A Novel of the Founding Mothers

EPILOGUE

McKeowin’s Hotel, Washington City

Thursday, December 7, 1815

As she moved through the crowd in the candle-lit ballroom of the largest hotel in Washington City—far larger than either the Tayloe town house that had been their original temporary quarters or the dwelling near the State Department they now occupied—Dolley found herself remembering Martha again. Thinking of Abigail Adams as well: her predecessors in this exacting and curious task of creating the unspoken background against which the President of the United States was perceived to stand.

Even Jefferson, who’d claimed the background of “State” didn’t exist, had taken great pains to establish the reverse and paint himself as Common Man Extraordinaire. His only failure in that stage-management had been Sally, still with him at Monticello despite the horrific scandal that James Callendar had trumpeted in the newspapers during Jefferson’s second year in office.

To be President was to do more than to simply hold an office. Like it or not, it was about more than simple “presiding.” Jemmy had understood from the first that in times of trouble, the President was and must be the man around whom other men would rally, as they had rallied—a little to his surprise, Dolley thought—around him.

She was sorry Jefferson had not come tonight. He had emerged from the quiet of Monticello to greet tonight’s guest of honor at Lynchburg, recognizing in him, perhaps, his heir. Jack Eppes was here, somewhere in this mob, and she must, Dolley thought, extend a special welcome to him for poor Maria’s sake. After Maria’s death, Jefferson’s younger son-in-law had wed a very youthful heiress named Miss Jones—and according to Sukey, had taken Sally Hemings’s niece Betsie as his mistress. But as this was something that she, Dolley, wasn’t supposed to know, she would greet him like a good Virginian: In addition to being an old friend, he was one of Jemmy’s supporters in Congress.

Part of the Presidentress’s job was not to have opinions, anyway.

No wonder poor Abigail had always had trouble with the position.

As she struggled to move through the crowd—it seemed as if everyone in Washington had jammed themselves into the hotel’s ballroom, and more arriving all the time—she spared a smile for that redoubtable old lady, safely ensconced, Sophie had informed her, with her dearest John in Quincy. Abigail did not write Sophie as often now as she had done before Nabby’s death from cancer of the breast, but her last letter had mentioned that her John and their old friend Jefferson had resumed their friendship at last.

Despite the raw cold outside, the ballroom was suffocatingly hot. Pomade, candle wax, and wool coats competed with the cloying of women’s perfumes. Wax dripped from the glittering chandeliers. Silk gowns made splashes of color in the thick amber light, among the dark clothing of the men. From inside, it was difficult to believe that beyond the dark windows stretched empty acres of frozen marshes and cow-pastures that were still the leading characteristics of Washington City.

For some time after the British left, during those days when even old friends were refusing Dolley’s dinner invitations, Congress had debated where to move the capital. Somewhere beyond the mountains, certainly. But, if the British took New Orleans, that would scarcely be safer.

Dolley smiled, as she looked around the overcrowded chamber, and beyond the black windows, to the answering sparkle of candle-lit windows in the dark distances.

It was astonishing, how swiftly that had changed.

Out of the babel of talk all around her, three words kept bobbing to the surface.

“New Orleans.”

And, “Jackson.”

“Not a Federalist in the room.” Sophie Hallam appeared at her elbow, sliding serpentlike from a wall of bodies Dolley could not have breached with a battering-ram. “Nor anyone who has ever been one. Just ask them.”

Dolley laughed, and shook her head. “Dost remember that horrid woman at Wiley’s Tavern, when we went there to meet Jemmy before coming back to town?”

Sophie set her fists to her hips and mimicked: “Miz Madison! If that’s you, get out! Your husband has got mine out fighting, and damn you, you shan’t stay in my house!”

“She had the right, alas,” sighed Dolley. “And I cannot fault her for speaking her heart. Compared to what those wretched newspapers said later, she was quite refined.”

“Mama!” Payne worked his way in from the hall, trailed by Jack Eppes. Blond hair a little tousled, eyes as bright and blue as Dolley’s own, and sparkling with pleasure. “What a triumph! You know the downstairs is packed tight as a cheese-hoop, and every one of them singing your praises and Papa’s, at least as much as they are the General’s.”

“ ’Tis kind in thee to say so, dearest.” She beamed at him and pressed her hand to his cheek, glad to have her son home again. He’d been vague about how he’d gotten along with the younger Mr. Adams—Abigail’s Johnny—during the negotiations for the peace treaty in Ghent, but the reports sent by the other delegate, Dolley’s fellow Hanover County émigré Henry Clay, hadn’t been encouraging. Once the peace had been signed, the younger Mr. Adams had returned to St. Petersburg where he was the Minister. Instead of coming back with Henry Clay, Payne had gone on to Paris.

He’d been home only a few weeks now, but the bills were already starting to come in.

Still, Dolley reflected, her handsome son had acquired a whole new polish in Paris, from the tips of his patent-leather pumps to his shining golden curls. Surely that was something.

“Truly, Mama, it’s your triumph tonight.” Payne kissed Dolley’s hand. “Yours and Papa’s.” Dolley wondered for an instant if Payne even recalled his first Papa, the Papa who had adored him….

He didn’t seem to. He went on blithely, “But Papa just disappears in a crowd, while you stand out as a beacon for everyone I’ve talked to: such a gown! Your work, ma’am?” he asked Sophie. “Mama, Jack says there’s to be a gathering of some of the choicer spirits down at Ogle’s tonight—just for a little jollification, you know—” He leaned close to her, sliding effortlessly into the real reason for seeking her out, “—and with one thing and another I haven’t a sou to call my own. Would Papa mind very much if I stopped by the house on our way there, and fished a little in his desk-drawer? I shouldn’t need but twenty dollars or so.”

His breath smelled of port and champagne. Dolley guessed that of the fifty dollars’ housekeeping money in Jemmy’s desk, not a dollar would be left if she said yes, but it wasn’t the time or the place for an argument. She said, “Only twenty—and I shall count it—”

“Mama—” He gave her his angel smile. “I’m a reformed character now! Besides, we need to celebrate! How often have we the nation’s savior to entertain?”

As she watched his tall height, his broad shoulders in their beautifully cut Parisian coat weave through the crowd toward the ballroom door, Dolley tried to hope that her son hadn’t already helped himself to the contents of the drawer before coming here to ask.

She knew there was gambling going on already in the parlors downstairs. There would almost certainly be tables of whist, vingt-et-un, and faro at Mr. Ogle’s.

It was something, she hoped, that Payne would outgrow.

But she’d hoped that before she’d sent him off to the Netherlands to learn a diplomat’s trade. She’d hoped, indeed, that he could have stepped in as Jemmy’s secretary, as Johnny Adams had been the former President’s. Dearly as she loved her boy, Dolley was honest enough to admit that only a wittol would appoint Payne as secretary to anything.

It was simply not his skill.

“I trust, at least, there’ll be no more talk of moving the capital?” Sophie’s voice broke into Dolley’s thoughts, and thankfully, Dolley turned her mind from the ongoing, hurtful puzzle of what Payne’s skills were.

“No, and I cannot say how thankful I am for it. I’ve a mind to go over to Mr. Clay and General Jackson and kiss the pair of them.” She smiled in the direction of the two tall Westerners, whose heads could be seen above the crowd at the far end of the room. Clay, born only a few miles from her father’s farm at Coles Hill, was one of the handsomest men she’d ever seen. His tawny brilliance seemed to blaze across the room like fire. Jackson, beside him, had that shining quality as well: cadaverously thin, maniacally intense, gesturing furiously to Clay as he spoke in his hoarse booming voice.

The victor at New Orleans. The man who’d driven the British into the sea.

The one people meant now, when they said “the General.”

“They have already begun to rebuild the President’s Mansion. Jemmy hath said that he’s instructed the commissioners, that the house shalt be rebuilt exactly as it formerly was.”

“For ‘the General’ to come in and put his feet on the table?” Sophie followed Dolley’s glance, her gray gaze steely. “And for ‘Miz Rachel’—” She imitated Jackson’s harsh drawl, “—to serve up hush-puppies and burgoo to the representatives of Europe’s Kings? He’ll be President, you know.” She glanced down at Dolley. “Oh, we’ll probably have one last hurrah of gentility in Mr. Monroe, but can you really see a colorless cold fish like Johnny Adams being able to defeat the Victor of New Orleans?”

“General Jackson doth seem to be a force of nature,” agreed Dolley.

Sophie sniffed. “The boiled-down quintessence of the worst of the Revolutionary patriots mixed with the worst of the French radicals. No wonder Jefferson came down from his mountain to greet him the other day. You managed to miss him when he was in Congress—Jackson, I mean—not that he was in town long before he resigned and went home in high dudgeon. Jackson and his over-mountain men will run the last of good manners out of the government like a house-fire.”

Dolley thought about what she said, as Eliza Custis Law—who had the distinction a few years ago of being the first woman in Washington City to be divorced—came surging out of the crowd to regale Sophie with the tale of her own sufferings and heroism last August.

It was true, as Payne had said, that Jemmy tended to disappear in crowds. Had Dolley not known where to look—in the corner by the chimney—she wouldn’t have been able to find her husband at all. As it was, it was only because he was with tall Jim Monroe that he was even visible. What kind of Presidentress would the aloof and sickly Elizabeth Monroe make? An epileptic who hesitated to go out into company at all? Sophie said she’d seen a miniature of young Mr. Adams’s wife Catherine—beautiful and accomplished, by all accounts….

“Excuse me, ma’am.” A soft voice spoke at her elbow, with the gentle accent of Virginia. “Are you familiar with this establishment? Could you tell me if there’s so much as a square foot where I might retire and rest, just for a minute—”

“Of course!” Dolley sized up the woman beside her instantly as one of the throngs who’d come pouring into the town to see the General and his family: a planter’s wife from the western counties of Virginia, to judge by the old-fashioned cut of her gown. Her own age, and getting stout, but still very pretty: dark hair framing a soft rectangular face, kindly dark eyes with an echo in them of hardships that had left her weary. “A sort of little parlor lieth just off the stair-landing, that they always set aside for ladies here—at least I hope they’ve remembered to do so tonight! My experience is that whenever one hath a headache, or had someone step on one’s flounce, that’s the occasion when one’s hosts have decided to put the retiring-room in the broom-closet or a corner of the scullery….”

“At least in a public hotel one isn’t going to find the broom-closet’s been turned into a dormitory for the guests’ servants—”

Dolley laughed, remembering the crowds of overnight guests at Montpelier for Francis’s funeral, or at Monticello when Maria wed Jack Eppes.

“To be honest,” her new protégée went on, “if I could return to our lodging I would—I’m not much use at parties. And traveling, I’m always afraid our son will wake alone in a strange place—he’s only six—”

“What’s his name?” asked Dolley, liking the lilt of joyful pride in this woman’s voice when she spoke of her child.

“Andrew. For his father.” And at the sound of General Jackson’s voice from the other side of the room, her eyes softened and changed, and Dolley realized who this had to be.

“Thou’rt not Mrs. Jackson?” she exclaimed.

The woman hesitated, genuinely unwilling to put herself forward, then said, “Yes, I am. I’m sorry—”

Dolley held out her hand impulsively. “And I’m Mrs. Madison. Drat these public assemblies where they haven’t a proper receiving-line. I have so wanted to meet thee.” She recalled someone—Sophie?—telling her there had been some scandal attached to Rachel Jackson’s name—bigamy? But her impression was that the woman had been more sinned against than sinning. In any case General Jackson had already fought a number of duels whose ostensible cause was his wife’s reputation.

And this soft-voiced Virginia lady was a far cry indeed from the pipe-smoking frontierswoman she’d been led to expect, although of course it was perfectly possible that Mrs. Jackson did smoke a pipe in the privacy of her own front porch. She herself would certainly have killed for a pinch of snuff at the moment.

“Rot!” She heard Jackson’s strange, hoarse voice slash out over the general din. “That’s the business of the States, not the Congress. There’s no reason on earth why a State shouldn’t have the sovereign right to—”

Dolley’s eyes met Mrs. Jackson’s. The two women wheeled as one toward the far end of the room, where the red-haired General seemed to be working himself up to the point of physical assault on Congressman Webster beside the punch-bowl. Rachel Jackson headed straight for her husband with the air of one who has matter-of-factly defused a thousand such arguments.

Before Dolley could reach the scene, her sister Anna had appeared as if by magic at Webster’s elbow; Dolley could almost hear her asking breathlessly, as Dolley had taught her, for some information about farming—specific to Webster’s own New England acres. Jackson turned aside at the touch of his wife’s hand on his sleeve.

Beside her, Dolley heard Eliza Custis Law’s booming voice declare, “Horribly common—”

“Yet men will follow him,” murmured Sophie, reappearing at Dolley’s other side. “I take it the lady in blue is Mrs. Jackson?” Watching the pair of them together, Dolley was startled and touched at the transformation of the General’s cold blue eyes, as he looked down into the face of his wife. “I have this for you,” she added, taking something from her reticule. Dolley saw that it was her old tortoiseshell snuffbox, the one she’d left in the desk-drawer at the Mansion before her flight.

When Dolley looked at her in astonishment, Sophie went on, “I found it only this afternoon, in a pawnshop in Alexandria, when I went to fit Mrs. Harrison for that red dress she’s wearing that makes her look like an animate petunia.”

“A looter must have got to the parlor desk,” said Dolley wonderingly, “before the Mansion was burned. I wonder if they took the Queen’s mirror as well? It was in the same drawer—”

“And is obviously worth twenty times as much,” Sophie reminded her. “I believe we can safely assume that in time, the mirror, too, will return to the light. So it might do to alert Mrs. Jackson to be on the lookout for it, when she returns to Washington as Presidentress herself.” She glanced sidelong at Dolley, then back at Jackson, and sniffed. “God help you—us—all.”

Dolley turned the snuffbox over in her gloved fingers, her own gaze following Sophie’s across to the General and his Rachel.

“Yes,” she said slowly. “Yes, I believe God will help us all. In spite of ourselves. Jemmy hath always said that the point of the Constitution—the point of all that we have sacrificed ourselves for—is that no matter who is captain, the ship is able to move forward. And it is the ship, and her cargo, that is important.”

She looked back, smiling, into her friend’s eyes. “They shall play their part, as we have played ours: thou and I both, Sophie. I trust,” she added quietly, “that thou wilt remain to see it?”

“To tell the truth,” drawled Sophie, “I came here tonight intending to tell you that I was returning to England. Since my business here seems to be at an end.” She didn’t say what business, and Dolley didn’t ask.

“But do you know,” she went on, looking about her at the candle-lit room, the illuminated city in the darkness beyond, “I just might find another business, and stay.”

Dolley couldn’t resist the urge to say, “Possibly even dressmaking?” and caught a sidelong glance of startled enlightenment, before Sophie’s features softened into a smile.

“Maybe even that,” Sophie agreed.

“Gentlemen, I regard it as the duty of the government to improve the lives and affairs of its citizens,” Henry Clay was saying in that gorgeous voice, and Jackson’s head swiveled in his direction like an artillery-piece sighting.

“It is nothing of the kind, sir!”

He surged in Clay’s direction. As she, Sophie, and Rachel moved to head off again the volcanic violence that always seemed to bubble beneath the surface of politics, Dolley wondered if anything ever really changed.

Watching the dance of politics and civility, of what is said and what is shown, it seemed to her almost as if the War that she remembered so clearly were in another lifetime, a hundred years ago and not thirty-five. As if the storm of ink and invective had not almost torn the new Republic apart, had not severed friends, had not brought men within a step of tearing up the Constitution and throwing away everything for which they had risked their lives and those of their families. The great patriots had all gone home. Mr. Adams to his Abigail, Jefferson to his Patsy—and his Sally, in their ambiguous private world. General Washington and Martha to their “happily ever after” at last.

And in another fifty years, thought Dolley, we shall all of us be gone, too.

But the ship would sail on.

Carrying Payne, she thought with mingled foreboding and love.

Carrying General Jackson and his Rachel, young Johnny Adams and his gently bred bride, the Custis girls and Jefferson’s children and grandchildren both white and black, forward into a world she could not even imagine.

New quarrels, new issues, new leaders; new answers to the same questions of Federal and State, taxes and debts, principle and compromise, liberty and love.

She laid her hand on Mr. Clay’s arm just as Rachel caught her husband’s sleeve once more, unobtrusively, each woman turning the man aside from a quarrel that could transform a celebration into a brawl. By the time Jemmy and Jim Monroe sprang into action from their chimney-corner to head off the fracas they hadn’t even seen coming, Dolley had deftly passed Clay along to Nelly Lewis; she heard Rachel making some innocuous query of her husband about the lineage of a horse, and almost laughed.

Jemmy slipped an arm around Dolley’s waist.

“I knew I might count on you,” he whispered. Then, more loudly, he added, “Gentlemen, a toast.” He raised his cup, looked to the General to propose it.

Jackson’s glance touched Rachel’s, and she nodded shyly. He raised his cup to Dolley, and said, “I shall leave that to the Presidentress.”

Dolley caught the smile in those chilly pale eyes, saw how close he, too, kept one arm around Rachel, as if guarding her from harm. Not a complete barbarian, after all.

She raised her glass, and said, “To the world to come.”