Patriot Hearts (67 page)

But survive to go on to where?

And others behind them, like spectres taking shape within the smoke. Plump little Mrs. Washington, hiding her fears for the General and her grandchildren behind chatty efficiency. Mrs. Adams like spring-steel, ready to shed her own blood or anyone else’s for John’s sake and for her country’s. Sally seeming to appear and disappear through the smoke, a spirit outlasting scandal and time.

If I hate those men and what they did, I must hate the women who helped them—let them—be what they were.

Yet she found she did not. Nor did she feel pity for them. Only the comradeship of those who have passed through the same battle, albeit on different parts of the field.

Liberté—Amitié:
Liberty and love, that most ancient of conundra.
Did
all things come at last to where they were meant to be?

Sophie had meant to go to General Ross, when the burning was done, as she’d been instructed to do, and let him know where Dolley and her husband were to be found. A fast-moving company could be at Salona Plantation by midnight. She knew Mr. Madison was right: Without a rallying-point, the scattered militia companies, the fragments of the fast-dissolving government, would disperse.

Without a central focus, the individual States would take up their old position of leadership, and each State—squabbling with the others as usual over debts and privileges and shipping rights as they had all throughout the Revolution and for four years beyond—could be dealt with piecemeal far more easily than the Congress of the whole.

But when the officers barked out orders to form up columns, Sophie turned away.

Fairfax County, Virginia

Thursday, August 25, 1814

1:00 A.M.

From the upper windows of a house called Rokeby, Dolley watched Washington City burn.

Though it lay some ten miles off, she could see the red reflection against the underside of roiling clouds of smoke. The trees around the house tossed and fretted as the winds strengthened. The sky smelled of storm, and of smoke.

Dolley felt very, very tired.

Jemmy at least was safe. Or at least he had been safe four hours ago, when he and his little band of friends had caught up with her carriage on the river road. The team’s pace had slowed to a crawl, the way blocked by carts, carriages, wheelbarrows, and dead-tired trudging militia, mostly invisible in the suffocating darkness. Like themselves, everyone in Georgetown had realized that the British would sweep through the city.

Somewhere ahead of them was a family with a wailing baby. Its cries wrenched Dolley’s heart. Was there no one there to comfort it? Then Sukey had called down from the box, “Riders comin’ behind us, ma’am!” and the next instant, it seemed, lantern-light flashed in the window of the carriage and old Mr. Carroll’s voice called out, “Mrs. Madison?”

And a moment later, Jemmy’s, unmistakable, “Dolley?”

The drivers behind them cursed as Joe reined the team over. Men and women jostled past with barrows and bundles, sparing barely a glance as the tall buxom black-haired woman nearly fell out of the carriage into the arms of the dust-covered little man.

For a time Dolley knew nothing and cared less, only the grip of Jemmy’s arms around her and the taste of his mouth on hers.
Dear God, he’s alive! Dear, dear God, Thou has spared him….

“Move along there!” groused someone behind them whose wagon couldn’t pass on the narrow road. “We ain’t got all night here!” and another voice added, “Kiss ’er in the carriage, pilgrim!”

“Shut up, Matt, let ’em kiss!” retorted a woman’s voice. “Catch me kissin’ you, if you was lost.”

“I can’t stay.” Jemmy’s hands gripped her shoulders as he spoke, as if convincing himself against all odds that they were together, both alive, both unhurt. “We’ve heard the men are regrouping in Fairfax County—perhaps at Wren’s Tavern, or near there. They say that’s where Monroe has gone.”

“Where shall we meet, then?” asked Dolley.

“Salona. If I don’t reach there tonight, or can’t reach there, meet me tomorrow night at Wiley’s Tavern near Little Falls. I should at least know by then what is being done, by way of counterattack.”

“All right.” He looked ready to drop, but there was no time for more, and Dolley only drew him to her again in fierce embrace, whispered, “God go with thee.”

“And thee.” He cupped her face in his hands, kissed her again, hard. “We’ll come through this, Doll. And come through victorious.”

It was only after he’d ridden away, that Carroll mentioned that Sophie Hallam had been present when Salona had been decided upon as their meeting-place.

Rokeby House lay about a mile from Salona, and from it Dolley hoped to be able to watch the road. The house was crammed already with other refugees, mostly people she’d met at receptions and parties over fourteen years in Washington City. Her very young hostess, Mrs. Love, offered her her own bedroom for the night, and would have found floor-space for herself in one of the already innlike guest-rooms had not Dolley forbidden her to even think of such a thing.

Mrs. Love—Tilly, a connection of Jemmy’s by marriage
(wasn’t everyone in Virginia?)
who’d been a child in the schoolroom when Dolley first came to the Federal City—slept now on the bedroom day-bed she’d had made up, her pet gray cat in her arms like a doll. Her blond braids hung out from under the makeshift tent of mosquito-netting in the glow of the single candle. The big house had fallen silent an hour ago, save for the restless rushing of the trees outside, like the sound of the sea in the darkness. Even the noises of fugitives on the river road had ceased.

The smell of rain and lightning rode like a seraph on the night.

And what now?

Even with her spyglass, Dolley couldn’t see much more of the fires than the red flash of flames, but it seemed to her that they were confined to several wide-separated localities. At least, she thought, no matter how hard the wind blew, flames from one house wouldn’t automatically ignite a whole neighborhood, as they would in Philadelphia. She had to smile a little at that, thinking of how everyone but herself had moaned and wailed about Washington City’s endless distances and scattered houses. If they wished to torch the city, the British would have to do it house by house.

Her own house, she knew, was one of those in flames. She saw the dining-room again in her mind, all dressed in its white and silver as it had been on those evenings when Jefferson had sent her a hasty note begging her to come and preside at his dinner, as there would be other ladies present.

Even for a philosopher who considered etiquette a worthless nuisance, there were limits.

The thought brought others. She turned to her reticule in quest of her snuffbox, and recalled again she’d left it in the desk-drawer, and with it the Queen’s golden mirror.
So it was destined to vanish after all,
she thought, and felt the stab of grief for what could not be retrieved. For some moments it was as if she’d lost Martha again, and all those vanished days, those years of joy and trial, with her.

Burned to ashes, as Sophie’s early years had been burned, leaving only stony irony and revenge.

Weeping, strangely enough, made her feel better.
Maybe I just hunger
for snuff.
After a few minutes she raised the spyglass again, turned it toward the road. Though the night was pitch-black, she’d been aware that more than refugees prowled the darkness. Twice, since the flow of fugitives had slacked, she’d seen torchlight, and forms moving among the trees. American stragglers or British, she didn’t know.

Waiting to ambush Jemmy, as he rode to Salona, thinking to join her?

But when she thought of Sophie, and of the roving bands of British soldiers, she pushed her doubts aside and breathed a prayer for the safety of her friend. It was said that British stragglers had stripped the countryside between their landing-point at Benedict and the city itself. The half-dozen men and boys in the house, including her host, were grouped in the downstairs hall, but in the event of a determined incursion by the enemy their collection of dueling-pistols and hunting-arms could only serve to trigger deadly violence.

Sooner than that,
she thought, as torches and lanterns began to gather again on the road beyond the trees,
I will give myself up.
The thought turned her sick with dread.

Even flight out the back door and into the surrounding woods might not serve to save her hosts or their dwelling. And in the woods would be looters, and runaway slaves.

She strained her eyes at the glass, to penetrate the wild darkness. On the road she could only guess at a confusion of movement, but it seemed to her there was a large force there. The roaring of the trees carried away any sound. For interminable minutes Dolley watched, heart pounding, before the flickering spots of fire retreated back into the darkness, in the direction from which they’d come.

A single speck of flame detached itself from the woods. Bobbed through the wind-whirled blackness toward the house.

Dolley took a deep breath, and went downstairs.

Joe the coachman was just opening the front door when Dolley reached the hall. Sophie Hallam stood on the threshold with a lantern in her hand. “Who was that?” Dolley asked, breathless, and Sophie replied with a shrug, “Merely some gentlemen who’d missed their way. I sent them back toward Georgetown.” Sophie’s eyes met Dolley’s for a silent moment, tired and bitterly sad. Then Dolley stepped forward and took her in her arms.

“That was good of thee,” she said softly, and led her to the stairs.

“Are you all right?” whispered Sophie, as they entered the silent bedroom above.

Dolley nodded. “I’ve seen Jemmy.” Hesitantly, she added, “Hast thou been to Salona?” and Sophie raised a brow, as if she knew exactly what was in Dolley’s mind. Through the open window spits of rain had begun to fall. The wild air outside was suddenly thick with the breath of the storm.

“I have—alone—and Mr. Madison is not there yet, though I suspect he’s safe. The men have marched thirteen miles in the heat from Bladensburg today,
and
fought a battle,” she added. There was anger in her voice for the frustrated weariness of the British soldiers—Dolley knew instinctively whom she meant by
the men—
faced once again with the conquest of cities in a hostile countryside far too big to subdue.

They were, when all was said, back exactly where they had been in 1776. And they knew it.

“Now the rain’s begun, even the stragglers will turn back.” Sophie gazed into the night. Flames flickered through the trees.

“Did they burn the house?”

“Of course. And the Capitol. And more tomorrow, I think.”

Dolley closed her eyes, too tired even to think. Remembering Martha, faithfully journeying to all those winter camps. The British had held the cities and the ragged colonial Army had all they could do to keep them bottled up there, in a grueling eight-year stalemate that only France had broken, for reasons of France’s own. Remembering Mr. Adams’s after-dinner stories of Abigail, trying to keep house and household together in the face of British raids and what the War had done to the country—

We were young then, and the country was young.

“Must we do it all again?” She wasn’t even aware she’d spoken her thought aloud, until Sophie replied, “Would you not want to?”

In her mind, Dolley saw the red coats of Banastre Tarleton’s dragoons, like splashed blood against the brown Virginia woods, on their way to sack Monticello. Saw the children and the families that had been left behind when Abigail, or Martha—or she herself—had made the choice to follow a man, and give to their offspring only what was left over, of their hearts, their energy, their too-finite time.

“I am not sure that I could,” she answered at last. “I don’t mean the fighting.
Ye shall hear of wars, and rumors of war: these things shall come to pass.
But what it costs, to forge a new world. For it doth take the life of a man, and more of his life than he hath in him to give: constant labor and for the most part unthanked. We have both seen this. And if we go with him—whether to wash his shirt and load his rifle, or to preside over a thousand ill-matched dinners, or only to make sure that he hath a safe place at night to lay his head—do we not betray our children, by giving to the new world what should rightly have been theirs?”

“Are you thinking of Eliza Custis and her sisters?” asked Sophie quietly. “Or poor Charley Adams—and even poorer Nabby and Johnny?”

Or the slave-born boy everybody at Monticello except Patsy called President Tom, and his brothers and sister?

Or—and Dolley flinched from the thought—Payne Todd, Virginia planter’s son, currently living a life of extremely expensive dissipation in Ghent?

Far-off thunder boomed. Rain whirled in at the window, pounding hard now, and the two women struggled to close the casement against it. The candle flame on its table leaned drunkenly, then straightened; water poured down the panes as if from a bucket.

“It seems now that it all hath been for nothing,” Dolley murmured. “The country we have tried to build with our dear friends hath all but torn itself to pieces, not only with lies but with different truths. The Revolution in France that split us apart hath ended in Napoleon, and now he, too, is gone down in defeat. A King sits on France’s throne and the English Army is once again on our shores. After all we have given, we stand where we stood before, having robbed our children to no purpose.”

“Had I faith in God,” replied Sophie, folding her arms, “I would remark that nothing in this world lies outside His purpose. As I don’t, I will only point out that they—those children
—are
the new world. And bear in themselves all the treasure, good and bad, of the old. Payne would be Payne, however he was raised. His sins might take a different form, but he would still sin them, and bring down your heart in sorrow to the grave—if you let him. Abigail’s brother was a drunkard, in spite of loving, intelligent parents who
didn’t
deposit him with relatives and go running off to play politics in France. I don’t think there was a thing she could have done to save either him or Charley, or Nabby and Nabby’s children. Maybe there never is.”