Patriot Hearts (48 page)

“Austin, dear,” she added, as one of the liveried servants opened the door through to the dining-room, “please bring a little more tea for Mrs. Todd and myself
…. Such
a nuisance,” she added with a sigh. “We’re going to have to send most of the servants back to Mount Vernon when the General goes to visit next week, but we ourselves must remain in Germantown, because of this horrible ship business with the British.
Has
Mr. Madison found a lady who’ll love him as he truly deserves to be loved?”

Dolley folded up her fan, held it closed for a time, looking down at it in her yellow silk lap.

John had given her that fan, she suddenly recalled. The pierced sandalwood was her favorite; it was the first present he’d surprised her with, after he’d discovered the joys of buying things not because his wife or his son needed them, but solely for their pleasure and his.

“Maybe not as he deserves to be, ma’am,” said Dolley slowly. “I
did
try to make John a good wife. I know I tried his patience sorely, about things like the cost of running a household, and what I spend on dresses, and not spanking Payne. And now I’m thinking of marriage, and poor John hasn’t been gone but seven months, completely aside from the fact that he’d be horrified at my wedding a man outside of the Congregation. I feel like I want to write him a letter somehow, apologizing, or explaining…But I don’t even know what I’d say.”

Beyond the window, the tulip tree flourished its pink blooms. When first she’d admired it, Dolley recalled, it had almost been done with its season. She had spoken about its lavish beauty to John.

Not even a single cycle of its flowering had passed by.

“Well, dear,” said Martha gently, “perhaps you might think what
John
would write to
you.
If he were—Oh, if he were about to be sent on a voyage to Tasmania or China, or the Moon, and it was a condition of the voyage that he would never, ever come back, nor be able to write to you ever again. Do you think he would write, before he left,
I want you to be loyal and lonely? I’d rather you weren’t
too
happy? Please let Payne grow up without a father?
Our vows of marriage are until Death comes between us—but only until then.”

For a long time, Dolley did not answer. Then she asked softly, “How long was it after Mr. Custis died, that thee knew thou wanted to marry the General?”

“Eight months.”

Their eyes met. At another time, in another context, Dolley knew they both would have laughed.

“And yet I very much loved Daniel. There are many sorts of love, Dolley. Do you think John, who is now able to talk daily with the Inventor of all love, doesn’t understand this?”

Dolley shook her head.

“And I’ve never subscribed to the belief that each of us is capable of truly loving only one other person in our lives. Thank you, Austin.” Martha smiled at the servant who brought in the fresh tea. “Or is it just that you’re worried what the members of the Congregation will say, who knew and loved John?”

Her glance was so knowing that this time Dolley did laugh. “Nay, I know what they shall say. And it shall have naught to do with loving or not loving John, but only that Mr. Madison is an Outsider. I shall lose many friends for it.”

“Perhaps not as many as you think, dear.” Martha held out the dish of tea-cakes: Dolley shook her head. “And for the rest…friends do have a way of coming back to us, the ones who truly have our good at heart. And as the Arabs say,
The dogs bark, but the caravan passes on.
Would you rather be a village dog in the middle of the desert somewhere, or bound for some marvelous city bearing all the treasure of the world?”

When she returned home that afternoon, Dolley packed up her mourning dresses and had Anna help her carry them to the attic. They both made silly jokes and laughed a great deal, like schoolgirls playing truant, having a wonderful time yet nervous about the inevitable repercussions. Between her own preparations for renting out the house and visiting Harewood, and lending a hand in Martha’s packing-up of the Presidential Mansion in order to move out to Germantown before the fever could return, there was a great deal of dust raised, and when Dolley came down with an eye infection she couldn’t avoid the superstitious reflection that she was being “punished where she had sinned.”

For Love, said the ancient Romans, was a disease transmitted first through the eye.

“Nonsense,” declared Burr, when he called to take his leave of her early in June. “In that case, you’d have been stricken with heart-disease.” And he raised her hand to his lips.

The lines settled deeply around his eyes gave the lie to the light jesting tone of his voice. Against the black of his coat his face looked pale and tired, but to Dolley’s words of condolence, he only shook his head. “She was ill for so many years, almost since first I knew her. I know she became very tired of it.”

Dolley said softly, “Of course,” squeezed his hand, and dropped the subject at once.

“Mark my words,” said Mrs. Drinker darkly, when Burr departed and the others who had come to pay a morning-visit that day gathered around Dolley. “He shall have that poor woman’s place filled with one of those
hussies
he frequents before Congress reconvenes in the fall.” And the formidable Quaker dame glanced sidelong at Dolley, as if she’d have quizzed her on her own plans for spousal replacement had not others been in the room.

As Dolley looked around the cozy parlor she felt a pang of impending loss. Not only of Lizzie and Lizzie’s family and Mrs. Powel and the others in the Congregation, but of the life she had known in Philadelphia, the life and the friends she cherished.

Jemmy had spoken often of his father’s plantation of Montpelier, in the mountains behind Charlottesville.
Within a squirrel’s jump of Heaven,
he said—if your idea of Heaven was sweet wooded mountains, climbing to the Virginia sky, and seeing mostly your own family and your own slaves, day in and day out. Having grown up in the Virginia countryside, Dolley knew that one reason everyone in Virginia was considered so hospitable was that to have
anyone
new come by was an occasion to be celebrated and prolonged.

Lady Washington might pine for the peace of Mount Vernon, but Dolley knew in her heart that she was a city creature. From the moment she had come to Philadelphia at the age of fifteen, she had wanted to live nowhere else. It was true that Jemmy couldn’t imagine not being involved in government, but as an elected official there was no guarantee how long he’d have that option. How could she get from day to day, she wondered, without the lending library, the theater, the lively conversation of a wide circle of friends?

But how could she get from day to day without Jemmy at her side?

“You look pensive, Mrs. Todd.” Mr. Wilkins took advantage of a general discussion of life at Harewood Plantation to speak quietly, and Dolley smiled apologetically, and shook her head.

“Only regretting God’s scandalous oversight in not giving us the ability to see into the future.”

“And, Lizzie, I felt like a hypocrite, not to speak to him,” sighed Dolley, as she later walked her friend downstairs to the door. “He hath been so good to me, helping with old Mr. Todd’s will. But I haven’t even truly made up my own mind.” Behind them on the stairway, her mother laughed over something Mrs. Collins said, and from the tea-room she heard Anna’s voice, and Payne’s demanding why Colonel Burr had gone.

“Hast thou not?” Lizzie turned in the shadows by the front door. The vestibule at the bottom of the stair was darker than Dolley remembered it, since she kept the door to John’s office closed. Even now, with the room a jumble of packing-boxes of books—which James Todd, drat him, would have sold if she hadn’t stopped him—Dolley found that passing its door filled her with sadness. “Is it that—please forgive me prying, Dolley!—is there something about Mr. Madison that makes thee draw back? Or that he is an Outsider?”

“Nothing so elevated, I’m afraid.” Dolley threw her arms out in a helpless shrug. “It’s just that…Now I’m used to it, I rather enjoy living as I do.”

Lizzie laughed, and hugged her. “I’m glad,” she whispered, “that it isn’t being read out of the Meeting that stops thee, I mean…for I think…I’m afraid…Dolley, I think I shall be read out myself!”

“Richard Lee?” Dolley asked.

Lizzie nodded. “Mother doesn’t know yet, but I’m to meet him in New York—”

“Richard Lee of Virginia!”

Her friend nodded again.

“Oh, famous!” Dolley sighed, and flung her arms around her friend. “Then even if we’re both to be a scandal and a hissing in the Congregation, and everyone rolls their eyes and cries,
Elizabeth LEE, alas!
at least we shall be neighbors!”

Three months later, it was to Lizzie Lee that Dolley wrote—from Harewood Plantation, with Lucy’s laughter coming from downstairs at one of Jemmy’s jokes, and Payne howling because he wasn’t the center of attention, and the brash loud voice of Steptoe’s sister Harriot proclaiming a wedding-toast—and signed herself:

Dolley Madison, alas!

Washington City

Wednesday, August 24, 1814

3:00 P.M.

Dolley Madison, alas!

“When all was said and done, yours was one of the better marriages that took place around then,” Sophie remarked, as she and Dolley wedged the last of the silver service into the trunk. “Not terribly long after that, Charley Adams married yet another of the egregious Smith clan, his brother-in-law’s sister Sarah. Abigail was spitting bloody nails over it, the letter she wrote to me.”

Dolley rose, shook out her skirts, and walked back to the desk for another pinch of snuff. Though the sky was clouded over, still the southern window’s brightness turned the surface of the Queen’s mirror to a round of burning light.

I’ve always been sorry I never met her,
Martha had said.

The last Queen before the inevitable Revolution. The victim of what revolution could become. Yet she had had the frame engraved:
Liberté—Amitié.
In those days everyone had been so trusting about what
Liberté
would bring.

Sophie eased the trunk-lid down, calculating what else might fit, then opened it again. “We’d best wrap that up carefully. What next, do you think?”

“The drawing-room winter curtains,” said Dolley promptly. “They’re in the attic, I’m pleased to say; I have my mother’s good teaching to bless, that I got the room in summer dress right after Congress rose. Now is
not
the time I should care to wrestle a hundredweight of red velvet down from the windows on a fifteen-foot ladder.”

“Mrs. Madison, what on earth are you still doing here?” Mr. Carroll—youngish, hawk-faced, the son of one of the wealthiest landholders in Maryland and a frequent dinner-guest—entered the room. Her sister Anna’s husband, Congressman Richard Cutts, was at his side. Both were rumpled, dusty, and exhausted; Dolley hoped they’d put their horses somewhere out of sight. “Cutts tells me—”

Dolley drew herself up and hastily slipped both snuffbox and mirror into the desk-drawer. “Mr. Carroll, I know how much respect
I
would have, for a leader who fled at the mere sound of cannon—or for one whose wife so little respected his courage or the courage of the men behind him.” She turned toward the window with calm she was far from feeling, and pretended to scan the distance under her palm. “I see no trace of British grenadiers as of yet. By the sound of the guns, I collect the battle is not yet over.”

Even as she spoke the words, her heart sank within her. The constant crashing of the guns had diminished, about half an hour ago, to intermittent booms and the broken spatter of musket-fire. Among the fugitives on Pennsylvania Avenue, she now saw that many wore militia uniforms, filthy and torn, some of them, and some bearing the blood and powder-blackening of battle.

Deserters in retreat. Their Army had fallen apart on the field.

Summer soldiers and sunshine patriots,
she thought bitterly, recalling those who had sworn on their swords to remain in her defense.