Louisa (22 page)

But Louisa came to find herself fascinated by her youngest son—his precocity, his arrogance, his tenderness, and his temper, which could be as stormy as his parents'. He was seven years old and very small, with ginger hair and hazel eyes, fiercely loyal to his mother and sensitive to her moods. In many ways he was so young, a child who took delight in fantastical stories or in discovering a row of tiny cucumbers underneath the blossoms in the garden, who threw tantrums, who missed his father. He liked to test his mother's authority, but he was curious, intelligent, and could be tender. They spent endless hours together. Most unusually, he had learned to read his mother's feelings and moods. When she was grieving for her daughter, he comforted her with “little tender assiduities; attentions gentle and affectionate beyond [his] years.” He had drawn her back into the world, breathing “new hope” into her. And when she found herself fully in charge, she came to see how her influence might shape him, too—not only her husband's. She was also capable of giving an education. “I found delight,” she would later tell him, “in your opening mind.” In Charles, she found a companion when she most needed one.

On some days
, though, not even he could help her feel less alone. After Kitty and William Smith left that summer, she spent days
roaming the house like a ghost. Sometimes, she could not help but cry, and when winter came, her sadness grew worse. She was “sick and weary,” too keenly aware of the “gaudy loneliness” of the court. “I know not what ails me to day but these holidays do not suit me at all I feel so isolated among all the gay folks,” she wrote to John Quincy, “and it makes me feel our separation more keenly than ever.”

“
Mama is a great amateur of cards
,” young Charles wrote to his father that November. “She is always laying out the cards, to see if you will come back soon.”

Still, when 1814
ended, she was stronger on her own than she had been when the year began. She even had a stronger sense of herself as an American. The War of 1812 had clarified her allegiance. Where before she had been cynical, more distant, now she spoke fervently of “our country.” In that, she was like many Americans. Even from afar, John Quincy thought he could see that the war had brought together a fractured nation. He wrote to Louisa, “The sentiment is the same among us all—It is profound—anxious—and true to the honour and interest of our Country—It is a sentiment which is generally felt by the People of the United States, will rouse them to exertion.”

She agreed. “Our situation is perilous in the extreme, but it is extreme distress alone which can ever discover to us the extent of our resources.” It was also true of herself.

On December 27, John Quincy wrote to Louisa to announce that the treaty, finally, had been signed. The terms were not all he had wished for—it was
status quo ante bellum
—but still, it was peace. They would be headed next to London; he was the new minister plenipotentiary to Great Britain. First, though, as she had suggested he should, he would make a trip to Paris.

“
I therefore now
invite you, to break up altogether our establishment at St. Petersburg,” he wrote to her, “to dispose of all the furniture which you do not incline to keep, to have all the rest packed up carefully, and
left in the charge of Mr Harris to be sent next summer either to London or to Boston, and to come with Charles to me at Paris, where I shall be impatiently waiting for you.”

 • • • 

“
I
AM
TURNED
woman of business,” Louisa declared to John Quincy. She had to sell the furniture, dispose of the house, and buy a carriage that could carry her across the continent. She needed supplies: food, drink, clothing, maps, and tools. As one who was so often sick, she needed medicines. If she consulted a guidebook for what to bring (John Quincy's library had several), she might have brought enough herbs and remedies for a small apothecary. One 1820 guidebook recommended: “Iceland moss—James's powder—sal volatile—aether—sulphuric acid—pure opium—liquid laudanum—paregoric elixir—ipecacuanha—emetic tartar—prepared calomel—diluted vitriolic acid—essential oil of lavender—spirit of lavender—sweet spirit of intro—antimonial wine—super-carbonated kali—court-plaster and lint.”

Her largest expense was the carriage. She bought a berline, a large vehicle with four seats and glass windows, all balanced on an elaborate suspension of springs intended to smooth the rough ride. At first the carriage would travel on runners, like a sleigh; wheels—large for the rear axle, small for the front—were packed for when she reached melting roads. This was only the beginning. She needed to be able to sleep when they were forced to travel through the night. She procured a bed for Charles that could be spread on the carriage's floor, and blankets and pillows for herself. She needed servants, preferably ones who could handle weapons. She needed letters of credit, which she would exchange for cash on the road. She needed a great deal of money, because each post house exacted a toll, and her carriage, with its six horses and two postilions, was taxed at the highest rate. She sewed gold and silver into her skirts to hide her wealth from robbers on the road (and from her male servants). She bought a hooded sledge,
called a
kibitka
, which would carry the servants as far as Riga. All of this was very expensive, so expensive that it “frightened me.” Selling the furniture had brought her $1,693—a good sum; she had negotiated well—but in the end, John Quincy's accounting reckoned that her trip, altogether, cost $1,984.99, or somewhere between twenty-five and thirty thousand dollars in today's value.

What she didn't sell
, she packed up to send to Massachusetts, or to London to furnish their new home. There were tables, chairs, plates, clothes. There were gifts from their friends. Had John Quincy been with her, he might have insisted that she turn some of the treasures down. But he was not there, and she was not inclined to say no. According to family lore, an exquisite malachite and gold necklace, earrings, bracelet, and a brooch that she kept were given to her by the tsar. The jewelry remained in her descendants' possession, and it is hard to imagine where else the priceless jewelry could have come from.

No doubt because of
the tsar's favoring of the Americans, the Russian minister of the interior (also the tsar's spymaster and prison warden) sent out orders that she should be treated well on the road “on pain of punishment.” She also got passports—a Russian one for passage through the empire (“in pursuance of the edict of His Majesty, the Sovereign Emperor Alexander Pavlovic, Ruler of all the Russias, etc., etc., etc.”), a Prussian one (“
im Namen seiner Majestät des Königs von Preussen
”), and one for France (“
au Nom du Roi
”—since Louis XVIII was restored to the throne after Napoleon was sent into exile). She had to chart her course, calculate travel times, locate post stations. There were many guidebooks, some in John Quincy's library, though in 1814 they were generally by and for men. It was almost unheard of for a woman to make this kind of journey alone.

The trip was nearly two thousand miles. Louisa would be on the road for forty days.

It was still winter, and though the solstice had passed and the sun hung just above the horizon for longer each day, the sky was still
gloomy and gray and freezing. She wanted to move fast, however, because the frozen roads were to her advantage. Spring's thaw would make them treacherous. Louisa had three weeks to make all her preparations. She had no way of knowing if any decision she made was right, and experience had taught her to fear how John Quincy would respond. “My anxiety is unspeakable,” she wrote to John Quincy. “If I do wrong it is unintentional,” she wrote on another occasion. “Mon Ami I am so afraid of cold looks.”

Before she left
, she took leave of the tsarina, who had always been kind to her, and the empress dowager, who, in the end, had decided to like her. John Quincy had explicitly instructed her not to let them know that this farewell was for good, and so Louisa dutifully hinted that she would be back. But the tsarina saw the joy in Louisa's eyes and heard the thrill in her voice, and she laughed and said she'd never seen “a woman so alterd in her life for the better,” and she wished Louisa the best for the rest of her life.

Louisa had not grown to love the society during her five years in St. Petersburg, where scandal masqueraded as civility, and the price of entry was a dress that broke the bank but the price of exclusion much worse. Her closest friend, her sister Kitty, was already gone. But there were a few others left, and they were dear to her. Annette Krehmer, the wife of the Adamses' banker, had been ready with advice from the moment Louisa had arrived in St. Petersburg, telling her what to buy, where to live. Some men found Mrs. Krehmer pushy and gauche, but Louisa had come to think that it was not a bad thing, in an expensive foreign city, to have a friend who would host large dinners in her elegant house in town, or arrange a country retreat during a time of great distress, or (having a young daughter) invite Charles and his friends to play. Annette had been the baby Louisa's godmother.

There was also a small group of expatriates and diplomats with whom Louisa was friendly, occasionally intimate. Some were already gone, their movements dictated by the constantly shifting alliances
and unstable situations of their rulers. Madame Bezerra, wife of the Portuguese minister, had moved to Rio de Janeiro, though for a time they would keep in touch. (“Do you mix much in the gay world,” Madame Bezerra would write to Louisa later. “If so you turn night into day.”) Among those who remained was the Count Joseph de Maistre, the minister from Sardinia, who, having not much diplomatic work to do, spent much of his time writing brilliant essays arguing against the Enlightenment or making conversation in a salon or parlor. With sweeping white hair, a bull's brow, and a noble, strong jaw, Maistre was, one Russian acquaintance wrote, “without contradiction, the outstanding personage of the time and place.” The Sardinian minister first became friends with John Quincy, with whom he could discuss the excesses of the French Revolution or passages of Plutarch, but Louisa was delighted to find that he continued to visit her after her husband was gone. Together, they would swap morsels of gossip, crack jokes about the British, encourage each other's instincts for truancy at the suffocating palace parties, and laugh with their whole hearts.

Most important, there was
the Countess María de Bodé y Kinnersley de Colombi. The Countess Colombi had come to Russia as a child, when her parents, an Englishwoman and a French baron, fled France in 1788 in order to save the baron's head. “She is so gay; so sensible; and so attractive it is impossible to know her without loving her,” Louisa would write, and she would wear the turquoise ring the countess gave her for the rest of her life.

She would think
of the Countess Colombi on her journey, and not only because she was her great friend. Something strange had happened when Louisa went to say goodbye to her. At Countess Colombi's, she encountered another visitor, a Countess Ekaterina Vladimirovna, the wife of Count Stepan Stepanovich Apraxin. She was very fat, very rich, a type of woman Louisa could too well recognize: an idle mischief maker. After the women finished their tea, Countess Apraxin called for a deck of cards and told Louisa to take a queen. Ekaterina studied
the card, said that she could see Louisa's future in her choice, and, to Louisa's amusement, rattled off the predictable fortune: you are going on a long trip, you will be reunited with those you have not seen in a very long time, so on and so forth. But there was a twist. Halfway on her journey, Countess Apraxin said, Louisa would “be much alarmed by a great change in the political world, in consequence of some extraordinary movement of a great man which would produce utter consternation, and set all Europe into a fresh commotion.” This event would disrupt Louisa's plans, and indeed make her journey “very difficult.” Louisa laughed and assured her that there should be no trouble with her journey whatsoever, “as I was so insignificant and the arrangements for my journey so simple.” But Louisa would have reason to remember what the woman had said. Despite her best intentions not to believe in superstitions, she would wonder if her fate had been foretold. Her imagination was warm. The world was so much stranger than reason would allow.