Patriot Hearts (10 page)

“I think she felt pain,” Sophie replied. “But pain was never a thing that affected Abigail’s judgment, when her principles were at stake. Her sins against her children were different sins. She—and they—paid a different price, Dolley.”

ABIGAIL

Grosvenor Square, London

Monday, April 2, 1787

M
rs. Adams, ma’am!” A scurry of feet in the upstairs hall, as a mob-capped head poked around the door of the little second-floor parlor that Abigail had taken over as her office at 8 Grosvenor Square. “Becky’s just come from Miss Nabby’s—Mrs. Smith’s,” the maid Esther hastily corrected herself, and the tall, wide-shouldered form of Jack Briesler appeared in the doorway behind her. In spite of everything the Adamses’ very proper English butler Mr. Spiller could do, he couldn’t get Briesler to understand that he must don his powdered footman’s wig every time he came upstairs.

To Briesler’s credit, reflected Abigail, folding her hands over the pages of her sister’s letter and regarding her footman with an expression of mild enquiry that she was far from feeling. Briesler had served under Washington at Trenton and Brooklyn Heights; he wasn’t about to wear any sissified wig if he didn’t absolutely have to.

“Her time is on her, Miss Becky says,” Briesler provided, and Esther’s head bobbed in confirmation. Like Briesler, Esther had come to England with Abigail from Massachusetts four years ago, and the excitement in her face was as great as if it was her own sister, and not her employer’s daughter, who was about to bear a child.

“Is she all right?” Abigail stowed the letter and her reply in their drawer, locked it, wiped her pen, and capped the ink-well with gestures as swift and automatic as smoothing her hair before she stood, shaking off the pinching cramp of rheumatism in her legs and back.
Really, I’m getting as stiff as an old lady.

And why not? This day, God willing, I shall be a grandmother.

And as Esther nodded again, Abigail remembered her own pain, her own panic, the day her own first child was born.

But her mother, and her sixteen-year-old sister Betsey, had stayed with her all the previous week, she remembered, as she crossed the hall to her husband’s study door, the two American servants right on her heels. Her sister-in-law had been just across the little dooryard of that small brown house on the Plymouth road: in and out of each other’s kitchens all day the way everyone was in the tiny Massachusetts town of Braintree. There had also been Granny Susie, John’s sweet-natured, bouncy, busy mother.
I wasn’t alone in a foreign country, much less a country like England….

John wasn’t in the corner room, whose wide window displayed the wet gray spectacle of Grosvenor Square’s bare trees. The fire was embers in the grate, scruffy little Caesar curled in a tight gray ball before it with his nose hidden in his disreputable tail. The door to the gloomy cubbyhole generally occupied by John’s secretary stood open, and that room was empty as well. “Mr. Briesler, please go downstairs and see if Mr. Adams is in his office. Let him know I’m going over to Mrs. Smith’s right away. I shall probably be there all day, so he’ll be on his own for dinner. And please tell Mrs. Stubbs and Mr. Spiller so.” Even after four years, it felt strange to have to inform one’s cook and one’s butler
(of all things!)
if one was going to be away at dinner-time.

It crossed her mind to wonder if Nabby still had a cook. Nabby’s husband Colonel Smith had been threatening for weeks to sack that wretched woman, and wasn’t the man to think about the inconvenience of finding another, to a woman in the concluding stages of pregnancy.

In many ways, Abigail reflected as she ascended the stair to the front bedroom, things were a great deal simpler in that four-room farmhouse on the Boston-Plymouth road, war or no war.

War or no war.
Another woman would have paused at the recollection of the phrase she’d used uncountable hundreds of times during those eight appalling years:
War or no war, this family has to eat; war or no war, you have to do your lessons, Johnny; war or no war, you have no excuse for punching your brother….

It wasn’t in Abigail’s nature to pause. Yet the phrase rang in her mind, as she collected a stouter pair of shoes from the wardrobe, plucked warmer stockings and a heavy India-goods shawl from the highboy—it was always freezing in Nabby’s house—and sent Esther flying down three flights to the kitchen for the bag she’d packed last week.
War or no war…

The inner contradiction of those words came home to her now, and she realized she could not even imagine her life, her world, her children’s lives, had there been
no war.

The War had shaped her life and theirs. Everything had been a part of it, related to it. She was here in London because of the War. Her first grandchild was going to be born on enemy soil, because of the War.

Because of the War, she had not seen her two youngest children in almost three years.

Nor had those children seen her.

For eight years, there had been nothing but the War, and all that the War had brought. But it troubled her a little now to reflect that she literally could not imagine,
No war.

That in her heart of hearts, the War was all there was.

That hot July morning in 1765 when she’d felt the birth-pangs of her own first child, she’d sat down for a moment after the milking, to read over the draft of one of John’s articles for the
Boston Gazette.
For weeks John had been writing protests against the British Parliament’s decision to levy a tax on all court documents, college diplomas, books, real estate certificates, newspapers—anything comprised of printed paper, even dice and playing cards. At the same time it had announced the tax, Parliament had informed the colonists, from Massachusetts down to Georgia, that they were now responsible for housing and feeding the ten thousand British soldiers who were to be sent to guard the colonial frontiers, either in their own homes or in barracks built at their expense.

Abigail well recalled the flame of anger that scorched her at the arbitrary imposition of these duties
—What did Parliament know about conditions in the colonies?—
and, hard on its heels, the stab of pain in her vitals, the warm wetness of her water breaking. She hadn’t even had time to call out when her mother came in from the dairy with the milk-pans, saw her gasping, and rushed to her side.

The child who’d been born later that day, twenty-two years ago come July, had been Nabby.

Nabby who would today
—Please, God, let it BE sometime today and not tomorrow or Wednesday!—
birth a child of her own.

Footsteps creaked in the hall of that tall gray stone town house that was so wildly different from the kitchen of her memory, the kitchen whose open back door had let in the scents of summer fields and orchards just beyond. John appeared in the bedroom doorway, stout, round-faced, blue eyes as bright and as sharp at fifty-seven as they’d been when first they’d met. In times of agitation his plump cheeks tended to turn red and they were like cherries now: “Is she all right?” were the first words out of his mouth.

“Esther seems to think so.” Abigail was lacing up her boots.

“Esther has no more brain in her head than your finches do.”

As if to confirm his opinion of them, Beatrice and Benedick went into a chirping flurry of self-induced hysteria in their gilt cage beside the window. Abigail made a shushing gesture to her husband, fearful that Esther might come up the stairs and hear this remark. John was probably the least diplomatic diplomat since the Goths had sent their emissaries to ancient Rome, and didn’t confine himself to referring to one of his fellow delegates as “a demon of discord” whose life was “one continued insult to good manners and to decency.” He’d gotten better over the years, but when enraged or annoyed he would still say pretty much anything to and about anyone, and had more than once had the servant-girl—who really did sometimes seem to have a brain the size of a grain of bird-shot—in tears.

But the servant who appeared behind John wasn’t Esther, but prim Mr. Spiller the butler. “Shall I have Ned harness the carriage, ma’am?”

“Don’t be silly,” retorted Abigail. “It’s five minutes’ walk to Wimpole Street.” It took most people ten.

“It’s also coming over cloudy again,” John told her. “You’ve been ill most of the winter—”

“Nonsense,” said Abigail, though it was perfectly true that since October she’d been racked by the worst bouts of rheumatism since the voyage from Boston. “I shall have Esther bring along an umbrella. You may need the carriage.”

John shook his head. “Surely the
mere
concerns of hearth and home haven’t driven it from your mind that we’re dining with Lord Carmarthen today? To give me one last chance at getting some satisfaction about those articles of the treaty that the Crown hasn’t honored and shows not the slightest intention of honoring….”

“Drat it!” Abigail had forgotten, though she’d been writing to her sister Mary about dining with the Foreign Secretary moments before Esther and Briesler had come in with the news. “You might as well stop at home, for all the good talking to Carmarthen is going to do. What good is negotiating a treaty, and having even the King sign it, if they refuse to comply with it? They’re still keeping troops along our frontiers, they’re still seizing our shipping and claiming it’s smuggled, and still forcing American sailors into their navy.” She finished lacing her other boot, straightened up to face her husband. “And if they’ve honored a single one of the claims of Americans here in London that you’ve petitioned for—”

She broke off, seeing Esther come up the stairs again, cloaked and hooded for a walk in the harsh spring chill and carrying the oiled-silk umbrella that Abigail had purchased in Paris rather than condemn herself to forever doling out shillings and sous for sedan-chairs when it came on to rain.

Nabby needed her. In Nabby’s position, she herself would have been content to bear a child alone in an enemy land, if doing so would allow her mother to attend a gathering so potentially vital to the cause of the young Republic, always supposing her gentle mother would have done any such thing in her life. But Nabby, Abigail suspected, did not have her strength. She firmly pushed aside her disappointment at not being able to be in two places at once, and said, “Please tender my regrets, and Nabby’s, to Lady Carmarthen. I shall send a note from Nabby’s this afternoon.” She wrapped the thicker India shawl around her shoulders, over the one she’d been wearing that morning already. Though she’d put on weight since coming to England, Abigail still felt the damp cold profoundly. There were weeks on end when it seemed to her that she never got warm.

“Would it help if I came?” John—and his maniacally inquisitive friend Tom Jefferson—were the only men Abigail had ever met who would actually volunteer to be present at a childbirth.

“It will help most, dear sir,” said Abigail, laying a hand to his cheek, “if you do precisely as a minister should: Dine with Lord Carmarthen, and impress upon him the dishonor that he does to his country, and his country to itself, by disregarding the treaty. And let me deal with the
mere
concerns of hearth and home. I shall send word to you at once if there is…” She hesitated, unwilling even to say it. Instead, she finished with, “if there is anything you need to know.”