Patriot Hearts (46 page)

He’d been holding Payne on his knee while the boy examined his watch and fob, but when the servant-girl came in with the tea things, Payne leaped down—watch in hand—to show it off to her, and Dolley met Burr’s eyes. “Thinkst thus I will forget him?” she asked softly.

“Nothing of the kind.” The dark eyes looking across into her own were kindly, their perpetual ironic amusement muted by the recollection of griefs of his own. “My Theodosia says—” And his voice, beautiful as cut black velvet, hesitated over the name of the wife he never ceased, despite his many infidelities, to adore. “Theodosia says, and I believe her to be correct, that while one doesn’t always remember, one never forgets.”

Privately, Dolley wondered how much remembrance Theodosia Burr gave to
her
first husband, a British officer during the Revolution, whom she had enthusiastically betrayed with Burr for some time before his death. Then she shook herself inwardly for the judgment. Theodosia Burr was ill—dying, Dolley suspected, though Burr remained at least outwardly optimistic. The poor woman would no doubt be remembering the first husband whom she was so shortly to meet.

And rather to her surprise, Dolley found that rearranging the furniture, and having the tea-room painted a sprightly yellow, did in fact dispel a degree of her grief. What her mother would have said about it, she wasn’t sure: It occurred to her that perhaps in selling the boardinghouse, and taking Lucy’s invitation to return with her to Harewood to live, her mother had been dispelling the brooding ghost
she
had lived with for two years.

In any event, Dolley bought new dishes, too, and began to entertain her friends in the tea-room: not simply the ladies of the Meeting, but more and more frequently the ladies whom she met at Lady Washington’s.

Even with young Wash away at school, Lady Washington had her hands full, and often asked Dolley to assist her at her “at-home mornings” between eleven and twelve. Eliza and Pattie Custis were still in residence, having a “season” in Philadelphia, but they, like their younger sister Nelly, were as often as not on an outing with their friends, as life slowly stirred back into the city. Moreover, Dolley guessed that the older two girls were less than completely useful socially. Shy Pattie was aglow with her first serious courtship. Eliza—who as the older of the two considered it her right to be married first—consequently swung from tragic airs to petulant rages.

So Dolley stepped in to assist, and found herself in the company of women whom she had only previously glimpsed from afar: the brilliant Ann Bingham and her remarkable sisters; the elegant Maria Morris; sweet-tempered Betsey Hamilton, and the fascinating Harriet Manigault. Though few of the members of Congress brought their wives to Philadelphia—particularly not after the yellow fever—Lady Washington’s callers also included émigré ladies from France, the wives and daughters of exiles in flight from the Terror, who brought with them fearful stories of events in Paris, and the news of the execution of the French Queen, the beautiful and doomed Marie Antoinette.

“I’ve always been sorry I never met her,” Martha confided once. “She sent me a present, I’m told—which of course those dreadful British intercepted and sold…Still, it was a kind thought. Mr. Jefferson despised her, and said she brought all her troubles down on herself, but no one deserves such a fate.”

Dolley, since girlhood an avid reader of newspapers, was quick to flesh out her knowledge of world events by listening. Always good with faces and details, she slipped easily into the role of conversation-starter. And because she was genuinely interested in people, she found herself receiving cards of invitation to houses where, as merely the wife of a Quaker lawyer, she would never have had cause to visit: the astonishing Bingham mansion with its curving staircase and its wallpapers of brilliant red, yellow, and blue; the Chew mansion, graceful with age.

This meant new clothes, and under the Presidentress’s careful eye she passed quickly into the grays and silvers of second mourning, touched up with enough black that she did not look dull. Fourteen-year-old Anna, who always accompanied her, wore the pale pinks and gauzy whites of a young lady in her first season, and rather to Dolley’s amusement began to be seriously flirted with by the younger attachés of the various legations, and by occasional diplomats, bankers, and unmarried Congressmen.

There was a great deal to talk about, as winter passed into spring.

Repercussions of the Proclamation of Neutrality still shook the country and the world. England declared that it would enforce its blockade against France by confiscating French cargoes even when they were carried by American ships, and hundreds of vessels were seized in the West Indies, which were America’s largest customers for corn and wheat. And since the cargoes were sold to the profit of the Crown, very few of them were judged to be not French. As long as they were stopping American ships anyway, the British captains generally helped themselves to whatever crew-members they thought they could get away with, claiming the men were “British deserters.”

Technically, Dolley supposed they were right. Any American had, in 1776, “deserted” the British Crown.

And without a Navy—or sufficient money to build one—there wasn’t a solitary thing America could do about the situation.

Nor, implied a good many merchants, should the solution involve naval power. France was the enemy, not England. The bulk of American trade was with England, and the French had lost whatever rights they had to American aid when they’d turned themselves into a howling mob of bloodthirsty atheists. At this point in any discussion, Dolley usually sallied in to shift the conversation either to provable facts like how the fighting in Europe was actually going, or to a less volatile aspect of the situation such as where the émigrés were settling and how they were making their livings, or, with luck, to a complete change of topic. She found she could distract almost any Virginian by a well-placed query about either horses or land speculation in the Ohio Valley. Even this last was tricky, with the British garrisons still occupying forts on the Great Lakes. These garrisons deliberately exacerbated Indian grievances against American settlers, playing hob with speculators’ efforts to get people to buy Western lands.

But between winter and spring of 1794, Dolley estimated she learned the bloodlines of every horse south of the Potomac and at least fifty percent of the mules.

And the pain of remembering John lessened. It would return sharply sometimes, after she had kissed Anna good-night and sung a little to Payne, as the child drifted to sleep holding her hand. Sometimes when she would pass the stairway that led to John’s office, she would glance down, looking for the smudge of lamplight there, fully knowing there would be only darkness. When she lay in bed, she would call to mind what it had been like, to feel John’s warm bulk beside her, to smell the scent of his flesh and his hair and his clean-laundered nightshirt. What it had been like to know that if she put out her hand, she’d feel the round firm curve of his back.

It was Payne who brought him back to her, mostly. For months, when Payne was unhappy or uncomfortable or when his will was crossed, her son would strike at her and shriek, “Papa! Want
Papa
!” and then turn away in floods of tears, as if he saw again his last terrible vision of Papa, thrashing out his life on the floor of that stone cottage at Gray’s Ferry. At times like that, there was nothing Dolley would refuse him.

In time, these tantrums grew fewer. In time, Payne slept the night through, and he swiftly learned that his ready charm would win him attention and praise from his mother’s new friends. Payne especially adored Aaron Burr, who on his legal visits was never too busy or too preoccupied to listen to the boy’s concerns, to answer his questions or tell him a story. Burr was the only person, besides Dolley, who “did Limberjack
right.
”

But the light of Payne’s life had somehow been extinguished. He clung to Dolley in a passion of disoriented grief, but Dolley was aware that he was always looking past her, always hoping that that dirty, yellow-faced man who had sunk down limp in his mama’s arms hadn’t really been Papa.

That one day his real papa would come back.

But for Dolley, it was as if she stood on a wharf watching John at the rail of a ship. And the winds took the sails very quickly, bearing John out of sight.

And with John’s departure—and that of her mother—she was free for the first time in her life to be herself.

The note was a short one.

My dear Mrs. Todd,

My esteemed friend and colleague, Mr. James Madison of Orange County, Virginia, has asked me to introduce him to you. Shall you be home this evening after six?

Ever sincerely,

Col. A. Burr.

James Madison!

Dolley lowered the note to her desk.

The Great Little Madison, he was called—and she remembered those brilliant blue eyes, the tired premature lines and graying hair of the slender gentleman in black velvet, who had kept her from falling off the step of Mrs. House’s boardinghouse the day General Washington had ridden into Philadelphia for the Convention, seven years ago.

James Madison wanted to meet her!

She realized her heart was pounding hard.

She had read almost everything Madison had written—either under his own name or a variety of pseudonyms—in newspapers and pamphlets protesting such issues as the corruptibility of the National Bank, and the perils of placing too much power with the President, even a President as honest as Washington. As always, logic, cogency, and clarity impressed her—and at heart, Dolley never quite trusted Alexander Hamilton’s thrust to make the Presidency stronger than the Congress.

She had too strong an impression that Hamilton intended to occupy that strengthened Presidency himself.

But because Washington loved his former Secretary of the Treasury as a son, James Madison was seldom a guest at Lady Washington’s receptions, and almost never at those given by ardent Federalists. Dolley had always heard his name spoken with respect, even by men who pointed out that most of the Republicans who objected to friendship with England (like Madison) were Virginians who owed huge sums of money to British merchants (like Madison).

Burr liked him.

Dolley wrote two notes, one directed to Burr, saying that of course he must bring his friend to dinner that afternoon at four, if they had no other engagement, and the second to Lizzie Collins.

Dear friend, thou must come to me. Aaron Burr says that “the Great little Madison” has asked to be brought to see me this evening.