Patriot Hearts (20 page)

Then from the street an officer cried a sharp “Company halt!” and Dolley looked around, startled, to see General Washington sitting his horse at the foot of Mrs. House’s front steps, close enough that had she put out her hand she might have touched his knee.

The little gentleman in black turned from her, and with Mrs. House descended the step. Dolley pressed quickly back into the crowd as the General dismounted and said, “Mr. Madison.” He had a voice like Jove, deep and very quiet.

“General.” The little gentleman bowed, tiny fingers like bird-bones disappearing into the General’s large, firm grip. “Please allow me to introduce you to Mrs. House. I’ve arranged lodgings here for you.”

“But I hope you will take your dinner with Mrs. Morris and myself this afternoon.” Robert Morris, plump and smiling in his cherry-colored velvet and powdered wig, stepped out of the crowd almost at Dolley’s elbow. This, Dolley thought, was completely unfair: Mrs. House was a notable cook, but Mr. Morris’s chef was renowned throughout the State.

The General inclined his head. Dismounted, he was the tallest man Dolley had ever seen, and looked just like the engravings: the slight curve of the nose, the tight-lipped mouth, strong chin, wide-set cheekbones under those piercing pale eyes. But as the cavalcade formed up again to proceed to the State House for the official welcome, Morris stepped close to the General and Dolley stood near enough to hear him murmur, “I do hope you’ll reconsider my offer and stay with myself and Mrs. Morris, General. We’re quite counting on you.”

And on Mrs. House’s front steps, little Mr. Madison—whom Dolley recalled was one of the organizing delegates from Virginia—for one unguarded instant wore the protesting look of a schoolboy who is too well-mannered to speak when a larger boy takes from under his nose that last cookie on the plate.

“I’d best go back,” she said, as the crowds began to surge off after the retreating Light Horse in the direction of the State House. “Mama needs my help to put dinner on the table.” The church bells still caroled, and with the sky so gray it was difficult to guess the time, but Dolley had the uncomfortable suspicion she’d been gone too long already.

“All the delegates will be at the State House,” pointed out Lizzie, who’d been following accounts of the upcoming convention in the
Philadelphia Packet.

“Oh, there goes Mr. Morris!” cried Sarah, pointing as the red-lacquered carriage edged its way out of Fifth Street and fell in behind the Light Horse, as if Mr. Morris were proclaiming his position within the Convention. “Didst see the dress Mrs. Morris wore the other day, walking along Chestnut Street? All white gauze, with a little green satin coat like a jockey’s, and the most monstrous beautiful hat!” Her hands sketched the shape of a tall crown, a flowerbed of plumes.

Mrs. Morris, hat and all, would probably be at the State House, and the temptation was severe. Dolley shook her head. “I must go,” she said. “Tomorrow, dear friends…” She kissed her hands to them. “Go,” she added, waving them off as Lizzie made a move to walk home with her. It wasn’t quite the thing to walk about by oneself, but it wasn’t far and Dolley had a vague stab of discomfort—almost fear—of what her father would say should he come down and realize she had disobeyed him, whatever her mother had said.

That thought, too, disquieted her: that she should feel fear of her father.

Or did she fear the man she sensed her father was becoming?

She hastened her steps, turning her wide shoulders to slip sidelong through the crowd that pressed the other way. Most of them she knew, and those who might at another time have winked or whistled or tried to accost a young lady walking alone—mechanics and apprentices and sailors from the wharves—were far too intent on following General Washington to take the slightest notice of her.

And in any case, Dolley was not much impressed by would-be accosters. She’d heard too much barnyard language from her rural neighbors in Hanover County to be shocked, and too many of Mother Amy’s forthright opinions about men to be overcome with maidenly modesty. She dressed neatly enough now to pass for a Philadelphia girl, but she’d grown up working hard on her parents’ farm at Coles Hill. She’d been eight when her father had freed all his slaves, in the wake of the Declaration of Independence. She had learned to cook and cut kindling and do everything that, in Philadelphia, servants did.

In those days her father had been different. When she thought of him, that was the man she remembered. Big and rather heavily built, he’d bequeathed her his height, and the Irish brightness of his blue eyes. He’d always been a man of strong passions—one of her most vivid memories was of him shouting down a gaggle of the local patriots when they jeered at him for not joining the militia. Strong as an ox, he’d worked “from can’t-see to can’t-see,” as the field-hands said, to plow and plant corn and wheat, after he’d given the slaves their freedom. God had guided him, he’d told Dolley and her brothers, to take on his own shoulders the yoke of his own upkeep. Of the former slaves who stayed on to farm portions of Coles Hill, he’d charged a crop-rent as low as he could manage, knowing they all had families of their own to support.

Did he regret his decision? Dolley wondered as she turned onto the quiet of Third Street. “Besides turning those poor Negroes off into the world to look after theirselves, which they ain’t fit to do,” had argued her cousin Catherine in horror, “what’s he going to leave you and the boys if he should die? Land’s no good without Negroes to work it!”

“We work it ourselves,” Dolley had replied, annoyed, mostly because it was clear to her that Jonas, Cuffe, Quashie, and their families were doing a perfectly decent job of farming on the land they’d once tilled as slaves.

But Catherine had only gazed at her with aching pity and whispered, “Oh, you poor dear! How
could
your papa have done that to you?”

At the time—she’d been ten, in 1778—Dolley had thought Catherine a fool and a bit of a sissy. Sophie Sparling, three years older and the only girl in the neighborhood to treat her as an equal, had remarked, “Cathy only thinks it’s horrible because she couldn’t make a kitchen fire to save her own life.” Sophie’s doctor father had also freed his few slaves, though her grandparents had kept theirs—for all the good that had done them.

As the War dragged on, and Dolley had seen her parents’ shoulders acquire the slump of tiredness that never finds rest—as she’d seen how Isaac had to wear patched rags inherited from Walter and William, and how she herself had no garments that had not been worn shapeless by either her mother or one of the other women in the Meeting—Dolley had wondered what her father thought of his decision. “It’s all very well for a man to follow where the Spirit leads him, darling,” one of her well-dressed Payne aunts said to her mother. “It’s him dragging you, and his poor children, along after him that I cannot stomach.”

The Paynes were wealthy, and owned many slaves. The fact that her family had coffee or occasional dress-lengths of new calico during the War, or pins and needles to sew with, had been due to that aunt. Her father refused to drink the coffee, Dolley recalled.

In any case, when Dolley was fifteen her father had sold the little farm. He’d announced that they were going to live in Philadelphia, now that the War was done and there was no further danger of the British burning the town.

At that point the truth of her cousin’s assertion had been borne on Dolley: a farm of close to two hundred acres, without slaves, brought barely enough to acquire the small house on Third Street and the equipment to make starch. Her mother ran the shop in front, Dolley and Lucy keeping house while Mother Amy looked after the little ones. Dolley still wore dresses handed down to her from her mother, sewing ruffles at the hems, for none of them were ever long enough for her unmaidenly height. William and Isaac helped their father grind and pulverize the Carolina rice, then patiently sieve and settle, sieve and settle, until the fine powder of starch collected on the riffles of the shallow pans. Nobody in the family could ever get new clothes at the same time. Coffee was still adulterated with parched corn.

But in Philadelphia there were friends, both in the Meeting and outside of it, to whom it didn’t matter that Dolley helped Mother Amy with the cooking and the marketing and the bed-making. In Philadelphia she could buy newspapers the day they were printed, instead of having to wait weeks for secondhand information. She could see all manner of people in the streets, admire and make mental notes of the newest fashions; talk and listen to people who had been other places, seen and done other things.

As a tiny child, Dolley had dreamed of flying. In her dreams she would stretch forth her arms and run, and feel her feet thrust away the earth; feel the wind stroke her hair. She would look down from above at the trees and fields, then look ahead, to a beautiful city filled with light. Philadelphia might not be Paris or London, but here she felt alive as she never had in the countryside.

John Todd, God bless his sober heart, might temperately agree that the polish of conversation was to be desired in that it made a woman tolerant and gave her a certain experience with others. This would in turn make her a better wife and mother—the only criteria, as far as Dolley could see, upon which Friend John judged any accomplishment, either in a woman or a man. Love of talk for its own sake, the desire to hear what Rome looked like, and what ladies wore in the south of France, puzzled him as much as her desire to learn whether Roger Sherman of Connecticut was clean or grubby in his person, or her satisfaction in knowing that James Madison, spearhead of the movement to not simply repair the government but to reconstitute it entirely, had kindly eyes.

Her father wanted her to marry John Todd. He’d made that clear, from the moment John—then reading law and preparing to open an office of his own—had first asked his permission to walk the sixteen-year-old Dolley home after Meeting one warm summer day three years ago. “He shall give thee a good home, Daughter, and make a fine father for thy children.”

Like John Todd, John Payne saw others in terms of what they could be to their families. But when Dolley had replied—that had been in the fall of 1784, some three months after John had begun seeking out the spot beside hers when they encountered one another at picnics—“A man can give a woman a good home and healthy children, and still not make her happy, Papa,” he had nodded, as if he understood.

“Yet I cannot see John Todd would make thee unhappy, were all the world given to him in return for it.”

“Not
un
happy,” Dolley had said, not entirely sure how to put into words what it was that her heart sought. “Just…”

How to explain that though she was deeply fond of John, she wasn’t sure she would be happy as his wife? How to explain the sensation she sometimes had—of living in a cage and looking out through the bars at an astonishing world whose paths she longed to walk? That year she was sixteen, she’d already seen one of the first friends she’d made at the Pine Street Meeting, a girl named Anne Selby only a year older than she, marry a well-meaning young tailor: Anne was already with child. It wasn’t that she didn’t want children: Dolley loved children.

Was it frivolous not to want them just yet?

Selfish, and foolish, to dream of a life other than the one she had? A life no more possible to her than her dreams of flight?

Her eyes returned helplessly to her father, and he’d taken her hand and leaned close, so that not even the wind in the chestnut tree could hear. “Just that the Spirit murmurs in thy heart, ‘Wait,’ without telling thee what for?”

Dolley had closed her eyes, and nodded, her heart at rest.

“John Todd is a good man,” her father had told her. “And he loveth thee very much. But the Spirit models Time the way an artist models clay, and there is indeed a time for every purpose under Heaven. How can we not believe this, when the same sky is sometimes blue and sometimes golden and betimes grows black, the better to show us the glory of God’s stars?” Drawing her closer, he’d kissed her cheek. “The Spirit will never lead thee wrong, Dolley. Just remember that John is led, too.”

That was the father she remembered.