Patriot Hearts (25 page)

With Polly’s hand in his he ascended the few steps to the door of the house, and Jimmy and Sally followed him into its shadows. Beyond the gatehouse in the avenue, someone was shouting, “We will not forever be slaves!”

Washington City

August 24, 1814

“Mrs. Madison, I cannot allow you to remain here!” Red-faced and covered with dust, Dr. Blake—Washington’s stocky mayor—gestured furiously toward the parlor windows, though Dolley assumed he meant to point northeast at the Bladensburg road. “I have been in Bladensburg since dawn, digging earthworks, and I know what will happen there!”

“Have the British attacked, then?”

“That is not the issue, Mrs. Madison. They are on their way. Last night they took Upper Marlborough. The men in Bladensburg are exhausted. Their rations were lost, they’d been marching all night—”

“And the President?”

Blake shook his head. “He’s there somewhere. I didn’t see him. Armstrong’s an imbecile
—you’d
make a better Secretary of War than he does!—giving orders now to retreat, now to advance…The men are untrained and there isn’t a horse in the Army that’s smelled blood and battle-smoke before.
They’ll
break and run, if the men don’t.”

“I shall stay until Mr. Madison comes.” Dolley folded her hands as if the dusty, exhausted man before her were any morning caller come to pay polite respects, not a messenger from the edge of battle. “I appreciate thy concern, sir, but I will not abandon the capital to an enemy, particularly one who hath not yet fired a shot at me. And I will never abandon my husband. I have a Tunisian saber on the wall of my dining-room and I am perfectly prepared to use it.”

“Do you really?” inquired Sophie, coming in from the hall after Dr. Blake had left, bewildered by the obstinacy of the President’s lady. “Have a Tunisian saber?”

Dolley nodded. “Patsy Jefferson gave it to me; her father got it for her in Paris.” She plucked a fragment of the tea-cake Paul had brought with the refreshments for Dr. Blake and carried it to the window, where Polly had been roving back and forth on her perch for the past hour, cursing under her breath in Italian. “If thou didst know the Adamses in Paris, thou must have known Patsy and her sister there as well.”

“I did, but not well. We were not intimates. To raise the money Mother and I knew we’d need in England, I worked for a time as a sick-nurse for a doctor in Yorktown. Mr. Jefferson had him up to Monticello, when Mrs. Jefferson did not seem to be recovering from her last childbirth; I stayed on to look after her. I think in her heart Patsy Jefferson always considered me a servant. And in Paris I was a paid companion to one of those disreputable old Englishwomen who hung on the fringes of salon society. Patsy was kind, of course. To those who don’t get between her and her father she has great natural kindness of heart.”

Dolley was silent, knowing of whom she spoke. Polly sidled over to her and curled one huge gray claw around Dolley’s wrist, and with the other took the tea-cake.

“Thank you, darling,” the parrot croaked.

And because Polly expected it, Dolley replied gravely, “Thou’rt welcome, Pol.” Plumes of dust were rising now not just along Pennsylvania Avenue, but throughout the muddy, weedy wasteland of scattered groves and still more scattered buildings.
Dr. Blake is right,
Dolley thought, fighting against the panic that scratched within her breast like a rat behind a door.
He and I both know what will happen there, if it has not already begun.
The British were on their way. It was insanity to think that the exhausted, disorganized, starving men could stop them.

It was insanity to stay.

Sophie stepped to her side, her dark clothing like a shadow against the room’s bright color, and a blinding round of light flashed from her palm as she held out her hand.

Dolley’s breath caught.

She should have known, when Martha gave it to her, that it came from the French Queen. The miniature on the reverse wasn’t a good one—it could have been any Frenchwoman with high-piled hair and a fantasia of ostrich-plumes—but who other than Marie Antoinette would have given a hand-mirror whose rim was studded with diamonds?

She regarded the painted face on the ivory, the long chin and sweet, pouting mouth. In 1782, this frivolous, softhearted woman couldn’t have known that the powder-trail ignited at Concord Bridge was going to bring down the Bastille’s walls. In 1782, Martha Washington hadn’t even been the wife of the head of state: just a woman whose husband—and whose husband’s cause—was the
dernier cri
of fashion in the salons of Paris.

Martha had probably sent the French Queen a letter of congratulation on the birth of her son—Dolley recalled Martha speaking of the celebrations in the new Dauphin’s honor, held by the American troops at the tail-end of the winter camp on the Hudson. Martha, who at that time had just lost her own son. And because Martha’s famous husband had just defeated France’s enemy—or was it simply out of fellow-feeling for a woman who followed her husband to the dirt and hardship of war? Marie Antoinette had sent a gift in reply.

She’s adorned / Amply that in her husband’s eye looks lovely,
someone had written somewhere.
The truest mirror that an honest wife / Can see her beauty in.

Dolley turned the mirror over in her hand.
Liberté—Amitié,
the graven letters said, that most ancient of riddles:
Freedom and Friendship.
Though her faith in a truly omnipotent God precluded superstition, the echo of old beliefs still whispered in her heart, that those who’d looked into mirrors left some fragment of themselves, some echo behind within the glass. It seemed to her that she should be able to catch a glimpse of the pretty French Queen, in her diamonds and her ostrich-plumes and her fatal nimbus of impenetrable naïveté, kindheartedly sending off this gift to the woman whose cause would transform itself into the monster that would devour the giver.

Certainly she should be able to see in it Martha’s face, pale within the black of her final mourning. Or to meet within its depths Abigail’s indomitable gaze.

Half to herself, she murmured, “I don’t suppose either Martha or Abigail would have fled.”

“No,” Sophie replied. “But then, neither did the Queen who sent Martha that mirror, and these days no one calls
her
brave for not getting out when she had the chance.”

Dolley looked up quickly, to meet her friend’s implacable eyes.

A horse rushed by on the Avenue, appearing, then vanishing, through the dust. Voices shouted incoherently. Another gunshot cracked, followed by the frenzied barking of dogs.

Into the silence that followed, Dolley said shakily, “I don’t expect even this is as bad as Paris was, in the summer of ’89.”

“No,” said Sophie softly. “No—Even if the British sacked this city and burned it to the ground, it could not be as bad as it was in Paris, that summer of ’89.”

Paris

Monday, July 14, 1789

Sally woke and lay for a long time, listening in the darkness.

All was silent, but the smell of burning hung thick in the air.

Yesterday a mob had torn down and burned the wooden palisades on either side of the customs pavilions that flanked the city gate up in the
Étoile,
had stormed and sacked the pavilions themselves and routed the inspectors there. The Champs-Elysées had been jammed with carts, wagons, carriages, and terrified horses, people fleeing the town or people rushing in from the faubourgs to join in the fray. Furious, filthy men and women had rampaged among them, waving butcher-knives, clubs, makeshift pikes. Mr. Jefferson had been away at Versailles, where the newly formed National Assembly was meeting. At the first sign of trouble, M’sieu Petit had closed and barred the courtyard gates. When he’d reopened them in the evening, at Mr. Jefferson’s return, the stink had been horrific, because of course every member of the mob on the way to and from the
Étoile
had used the gateways of every house on the avenue as a toilet.

Mr. Jefferson had called a meeting of the whole household in the candle-lit dining-room: servants, stableboys, his daughters, and his secretary Mr. Short. “The King’s troops have surrounded the city,” he said in that soft voice that everyone had to strain to hear. “But the King has pledged to General Lafayette and the National Assembly that he will not attack his own people. These are but the birth-pangs of a new government, the fire that will release the phoenix. We have no call to fear.”

Sally wasn’t so sure about that.

“There’s every kind of rumor coming in through the kitchen, Tom,” she had said to him, softly, much later in the night when he went up to bed. There was a signal between them, a Boccherini piece he would play on his violin, when all the house fell silent. Then Sally would wrap herself in a faded old brocade gown, and move like a ghost barefoot down the dark attic stair.

“Most of ’em you wonder how anyone could believe—that the King’s bringing in Austrian troops, that he’s going to send them in to burn the suburbs where the National Assembly has support, that he’s had explosives put under the hall where the Assembly’s meeting and he’s going to blow the whole lot of you sky-high…How would he get that much powder down into the cellar with you meeting overhead?” She sat cross-legged on the end of his bed as he set aside the violin. “But all over town, people are breaking into gunsmith shops for weapons. I looked out the gate today, and a lot of those men out there had muskets.”

“Good.” Jefferson drew her to him, the faint shift of muscle and rib comforting through the thin layers of muslin that divided flesh from flesh. “The will to liberty must be armed, Sally, and it must show itself willing to shed blood. After all these centuries of oppression, the French people are waking up. They’re remembering that they are men. It’s a frightening time. But the King is a man of good heart, and stronger than the creatures who surround him. He’s shown himself willing to step beyond the old ideas, and to work with the Assembly. Only barbarians fear the clear light of freedom.”

For a moment the glow of the single candle shone in his eyes, as if he looked beyond that small brightness to some greater glory. Then he smiled at her, as if in her silence he read her fear.

“And this house has very stout gates. I’m known to everyone in Paris as a friend of freedom, as a regular guest, if not a participant, in the Assembly. And I’m known to the King as the Minister of his sworn ally. We have nothing to fear from either side, Sally.”

He cupped her face in both hands, brushed her lips with his. “It is a glorious time to be alive.” Then he slipped the nightgown down from her shoulders, and they spoke no more of the King.

A short lifetime spent at Jefferson’s elbow, watching him tinker with inventions that seldom worked out in practice, had taught Sally already that Tom was an incurable optimist who tended to believe whatever he wished were true. Still, when she was with him, whether at his side in the secret stillness of his bedroom or on the opposite side of the dining-room among the other servants, it was impossible to contradict him. Impossible to pull her heart away from the power of his words and his thought.

Lying beside him in the aftermath of loving, she felt safe. Able to look, as he did, beyond the walls of the Hôtel Langeac and the veils of time, to see this beautiful fairy-tale land that had been for so long bound in the chains of the King’s power and the King’s friends and the all-dominating Church. To hear its people saying, at last,
There is another way to live.

The bells of the old abbey on Montmartre Hill chimed distantly. In her attic bedroom, Sally heard the striking-clock in the hallway answer with three clear notes. In another half-hour the cocks in all the kitchen-gardens up and down the Champs-Elysées would begin to crow. Jacques the kitchen-boy would be awake soon after that, as first light stained the sky.

Then it would be too late to flee.

Sally slipped from beneath the sheets of her narrow bed. As she shed her nightgown, found the stays and dress and chemise she’d put out last night knowing she’d have to dress in the dark, she tried not to think about what she was doing. She laced up her shoes, braided her hair by touch alone, and put on a cap. Leaving Tom’s room last night, with the candle sputtering out, she had forced herself not to look back. Not to think,
That was the last time.
But as she slipped away, she did pause in the doorway of the girls’ room to make out, very dimly, the blur of white that was Polly’s sheets, the dark smear of the little girl’s hair.

Almost as much as Tom, she would miss Polly.

She would even miss Patsy, who for nearly a year had made her life a wretched guessing-game of frozen silences, petty frustrations, uncertainty, and spite.

And she would never see her family again.

The front gates would be locked, but Sally drifted like a shadow down to the kitchen, past the cubbyhole shared by Jimmy and the kitchen-boy Jacques. There were times in the past two years that Sally had hated her brother. First, because he had slyly maneuvered to push her and their master together, then later because he had come to her to borrow—or steal, if she wouldn’t lend—the money that Tom would give her, for small pleasures like gloves and shoes and fans. After Patsy came home from the convent and started keeping the household books, Tom began leaving money for Sally in a drawer of his desk, rather than buy her things as he had before.