Patriot Hearts (12 page)

“Indeed I don’t,” she agreed, and handed him a farthing. “And the rest when we’re safely across the road.” Far from being offended, the boy gave her a dazzling grin and leaped into the traffic with his birch-broom, carving a path through the trampled swamp of dung while he dodged drays, riders, and the fast-moving phaetons of the rich. According to Abigail’s closest London friend Sarah Atkinson, hundreds of parentless children slept under the bushes in the Park, or beneath the arches of the public buildings. They died of pneumonia every winter like the sparrows that fell from the frozen branches.

“You should be in school,” she informed the boy, handing him the second installment of the fee when Briesler, in his stout boots, had steadied her across the slippery cobblestones to the far corner. “Surely you don’t plan to still sweep a crossing when you’re grown?”

The child took the coin with unimpaired cheer. “Lor’ no, ma’am. When I’m growed I’ll take the King’s shillin’ an’ be a soldier.”

Before she could reply he gave her a brisk salute, and dashed away to proposition his next customer, a stout gentleman emerging from a wine-shop.
And where will your King send YOU,
Abigail wondered,
the next time he needs to avenge ninety thousand dollars’ worth of ruined tea?

As she’d feared, her son-in-law had sacked the cook, and the young maidservant who answered the door at 10 Wimpole Street had the flustered look of one overwhelmed with too many jobs. “Ma’am, I’m that glad to see you, and so will Mrs. Smith be, too,” exclaimed the girl as she opened the door, forgetting the cardinal rule that good servants were both invisible and mute. English servants, anyway—Abigail had never encountered an American servant who didn’t think himself or herself the equal of their employer. “We sent Katie—that’s the kitchenmaid, ma’am—out for the midwife, and she should be here any time now.”

“Mama!” Colonel William Smith came striding down the stairs, holding out his hands to grasp Abigail’s. “Thank God you’ve come!” Big, dark, and flamboyantly handsome, Colonel Smith looked concerned but not scared. When he kissed Abigail, his breath smelled of brandy.

“When did her pains begin?” asked Abigail, and her son-in-law looked completely nonplussed. “You’re a soldier and you didn’t note the time of the battle’s opening guns? Shame, sir.”

“Eight o’clock or thereabouts,” provided the maid. “And nobbut a few moments long. I’ve got water on the boil, and made her some tea.” And snatching up the apron she had clearly stripped off and dropped onto the hall table moments before opening the door, she vanished down the kitchen stairs again.

The house, Abigail observed as Colonel Smith escorted her volubly up the stairs, though a third the size of 8 Grosvenor Square, was ill-kept and a trifle dirty, and, as she’d feared, freezing cold. No one had cleaned the lamp-chimneys in days, and every candle-holder bore a burned-down stump of melted wax. Wax, she noted, and not the less expensive tallow that Abigail bought for every room in her own house where the smell of them wouldn’t be detected by guests.

She understood, of course, the need to keep up appearances, but she knew also what Colonel Smith was paid as John’s secretary. Though a hero of the War, the handsome New Yorker had no family money, a fact which had not entered into the discussion when Smith had asked for Nabby’s hand. And indeed, in a new nation, with the Colonel’s obvious ambition and drive, family money was less important. John’s father had been a farmer, like the Colonel’s, and a ropemaker in his spare time.

At all events, a cheerful fire burned in the bedroom where Nabby sat, propped among pillows, on a sheet-draped chair before the blaze. In spite of herself Abigail glanced at the sides of the hearth. She was relieved to find that it, at least, had been swept the previous day.

“Mama…” Nabby caught her mother’s hands, and Abigail dropped to her knees to hold her.

It was as if the stiff, withdrawn silences, the indifferences of the war years had never been.

Abigail didn’t know how she could have endured the War, if it had not been for Nabby at her side. Nabby had turned nine four months before the tea was dumped in Boston Harbor; the first shots were fired at Lexington bridge three months before her tenth birthday.
When a man weds, he gives hostages to fortune,
John Dryden had said a century and a half before. Unspoken in Abigail’s partnership with John was the promise that it was she who would keep those hostages safe.

With the closing of the port of Boston after Cousin Sam’s so-called Tea Party, John and Abigail had moved back to Braintree, to the house on the Plymouth road. Abigail was infinitely thankful for the move in April, when the Minutemen drove the British back into Boston and barricaded them there by encampments on the Boston Neck. Only weeks after that, while John was away at the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, four British warships dropped anchor not four miles from the house. Their goal was to seize hay stored on the nearby Grape Island as fodder for their horses in the town, but they could just as easily have come ashore in force and burned the farms.

All that summer, the countryside seethed. Refugees fled Boston and militiamen marched toward it, and all of them had to be provided with food, drink, and in many cases lodging for a night or a week. With her farm help disappearing into the Army and the tenant in the farm-cottage refusing to either pay rent or vacate, Abigail had been worked to a shadow milking, weeding, mending, cleaning. In June the British had tried to break the seige, and from the top of Penn’s Hill, Abigail and eight-year-old Johnny had watched through her spyglass as crimson-coated British regulars had twice charged the patriot defense works on Breed’s Hill, before the ragged militiamen had finally been driven away. Too mauled to follow up their victory, the British had returned to Boston. The settlement of Charles Town, beneath Breed’s Hill, lay in ashes.

Keep your spirits composed and calm,
John wrote her that summer,
and don’t suffer yourself to be disturbed by idle reports and frivolous alarms.
Every refugee and soldier carried rumors. They spread them like an infestation of lice: of British attack, of smallpox in Boston, of Indians in British pay poised to murder. Moreover, every village and farmstead bubbled sullenly with suspicion, as patriots burned the barns and mutilated the stock of those who remained loyal to the Crown, and Loyalists fled to Boston carrying with them intelligence about the countryside and the disposal of patriot troops.

In case of real danger,
John wrote,
fly to the woods with our children.
Abigail was aware that John’s place was unquestionably with the Congress, fighting to unite the disparate colonies into an entity capable of fielding an army—

But if he’d been in the same room with her then, she’d have brained him with a stick of firewood.

Through all that, Nabby was at her side. Washing clothes and making soap, churning butter and dragging ashes to the ash-heap, trying to save pins and medicine, salt and tinware, coffee and fabric and all the other things that British trade had provided and British laws had forbidden the colonies to manufacture. Trying to make the tiny cache of “hard” currency hidden in the attic floor-boards last as long as it could.

Six-year-old Charley thought that another raid by the British would be a tremendous lark (“I’ll kill ’em, Ma, you’ll see!”) and Johnny drew up intricate contingency plans on the sanded kitchen floor. But what Nabby thought of any of it, Abigail never knew.

At night she told them stories from Virgil and Horace and Livy, of Roman strength and Trojan determination: Horatio guarding the bridge, and Appius who stabbed his own daughter to death rather than have her live a slave. Or tales from the Bible: David and Gideon and Deborah, who led God’s chosen people to victory.

My heart is toward the governors of Israel, that offered themselves willingly,
the ancient prophetess had sung.
They fought from heaven; the stars in their courses fought against Sisera—the river Kishon swept them away.

“We must be strong,” she told her children, “and keep ourselves fit to be of use to our country.” Johnny’s eyes brooded in the firelight and Charley’s shone, and even Tommy forgot his ever-present fear. Nabby quietly stitched at their shirts, or braided candlewicking, and said nothing. Abigail tried not to think of what would become of them during a British raid, or if she were killed.

Winter came. In its shadow, the pale horseman of sickness rode over the barren fields. John’s brother Elihu died in the camp at Cambridge. Abigail’s sharp-tongued sister Mary fell ill in Salem, and at the Weymouth parsonage, so did her younger sister Betsey, twenty-six that winter and still unwed. When John’s mother fell ill, and Abigail’s servant-girl Pattie and little Tommy, Abigail sent the older boys away to her sister in Salem. Eventually eight of their neighbors died. Some nights Abigail was so exhausted she could only cling to her daughter’s shoulders and weep with weariness, feeling the girl’s thin body stiff as a doll with fear. The day Pattie died, it was Nabby who brought Abigail word that Abigail’s mother was sick as well.

John’s mother recovered, tough as a little walnut.

Abigail’s mother died.

“I’m sorry about the cook.” Nabby winced, groped for her mother’s hand. In her voice Abigail could hear the tremor of pain and fright. “Dinner on Sunday was absolutely frightful, and William went down to the kitchen and found her by the hearth, drunk—and on his brandy, too! It was the third time since Christmas—”

“Don’t fret yourself about the cook.” In Abigail’s opinion William Smith should have been looking for a new cook since Christmas. She said instead, “It’s all right.”

Nabby shook her head, blond hair tangling against the pillows. Tears sprang into her eyes. “It isn’t! I’ve tried—I’ve tried so hard…”

“Child, what are you talking about?” Abigail demanded, gripping her daughter’s swollen hands. “You have done all that can be asked of any woman: to love and obey your parents, to be a good sister to your brothers, to marry a good man and bear strong sons and daughters for the new Republic. She’ll be a new little American, you know,” she added, with an encouraging smile. “One of the first of the new generation.”

“Like those stories you used to tell us.” Nabby managed a smile in reply. “Remember? I always liked Cloetia, escaping from the enemy and swimming across the Tiber under a hail of spears.” Her breath caught and her fingers tightened on Abigail’s. “But I always felt like I’d have been one of her friends, who got left behind as a hostage because Cloetia chose to free the young men, knowing Rome would need the soldiers. I always felt—”

“I daresay the Romans carried their patriotism a bit too far,” responded Abigail firmly, looking down at her daughter’s taut face. “Any woman who bears a child, of either sex, is doing far more for our country than the bravest soldier ever did, and enduring more pain as well. But you’ll come through it, dearest. You’re a Smith
—my
family Smith, as well as William’s. And we Smith girls are tough as ponies.”

Nabby’s eyes pressed shut, her breath coming in gasps and her hands crushing Abigail’s now as the wave of pain swept over her
—Where on earth is that miserable midwife?
The pains, though sharp, were still some minutes apart, but who knew how long that would last?

“It won’t be long before she’ll go home—we’ll all go home—and see our country again,” Abigail continued, remembering how desperately she’d needed to hear a friendly voice while she herself had been in labor. “Even your father knows what a waste of his time it is, trying to deal with Parliament. They have no more intention of living up to the terms of the treaty than they do of going back to wearing loincloths and painting themselves blue, though I daresay with the fashions I’ve seen here this season it may come to that. They haven’t made a single reparation for American property seized at sea during the War. Your father has sent to Congress asking for his recall. If they do as they’ve said, and reorganize the government, they’ll need him there. And if he goes, almost certainly Colonel Smith will be called home as well.”