Patriot Hearts (11 page)

For all her fine-boned thinness Abigail had birthed five children without trouble, but for a fleeting instant she saw the shadow in John’s eyes. She knew exactly what was in his mind: the haunted look in Tom Jefferson’s eyes, when anyone spoke of the beloved wife whose childbearing had taken her life. They descended the stairs in silence, to the hall where Briesler waited with heavy cloaks, broad-brimmed hats, tall iron shoe-pattens, stout gloves, and the basket of linen rags, lint, soap, spirits of wine, thread, and fine-honed scissors. Abigail had made sure the best midwife in London had been engaged but never left anything to chance.

On the way downstairs she added her Bible, a copy of Richardson’s
Pamela
(which she knew to be one of Nabby’s favorites), and Buchan’s
Domestic Medicine.
John opened the door for the little party onto the chilly sparkle of the cloudy April day, and she turned back and put her hand to John’s cheek again. “All will be well, dear sir,” she promised.

Like her, she thought as she descended the front steps, John, too, wished to be in two places at once, both doing his duty to his country and sitting at his daughter’s side.

London.

Abigail moved along Duke Street at a brisk pace. The pattens on her shoes scraped and clanked on flagstones slimy with the morning’s rain and several days’ accumulation of horse-droppings. London was a far cleaner city than Paris, where passersby had no hesitation about using the doorways and carriage-gates of strangers’ houses as urinals, but even here on its northern edge the air was gritty with the smoke of too many chimneys, redolent of privies, horses, and garbage rotting in back-lanes. Her dressmaker spoke of London being “thin of company,” as Parliament had not yet opened, but you couldn’t tell it from the number of carts and carriages jostling for space along Duke Street, the shaggy louts carrying sedan-chairs, the vendors of everything from coal to hot pies bawling their wares at the top of their lungs.

Gulls cried overhead. Even so far from the river, the air smelled of the sea.

A wild scent that brought back to her the view of Boston, when she’d climb to the rock slabs on top of Penn’s Hill and see it spread before her: the small brown wooden city under its haze of smoke, seeming to rise out of the shining stretches of water that surrounded it; the narrow dry strip of the Boston Neck that linked it with the mainland; the islands all floating in the brightness and the forest on the green hills beyond. The birds like clouds wheeling above the salt-marshes on either side of the Neck, and the white snips of sails clustering along the wharves.

Nabby had climbed Penn’s Hill with her hundreds of times, during those days when John was riding the circuit of the courts, a sturdy little blond girl who’d laugh when the clouds broke and sunlight would sweep across the water as though driven by the wind.

Was it the War,
Abigail wondered,
that made our daughter so silent?

When the redcoats first swarmed on the Long Wharf to garrison Boston in October of 1768, she and John were living in the town. The rented house on Brattle Street lay close enough to the Commons so that she was waked each morning by the regimental drums. Nabby was three then, toddling about the sand-floored kitchen in stiff muslin pinafores or playing with her Boston cousins, for Abigail’s family—the Smiths—was a large one, and had outposts from Salem all down the coast.

In the evenings John and his wily cousin Sam would argue before the parlor fire, and Abigail would put Nabby, and baby Johnny, to bed and come down to take part in the talk. Joseph Warren had come often, one of the masterminds behind the struggle for colonial liberties, and James Otis, like a half-mad Titan whose mind flashed primordial fire. She remembered elegant little John Hancock presenting her with his best smuggled tea, and quiet, steady Paul Revere going to the shed for another log. How many nights had Nabby lain awake in her cot, listening open-eyed to the voices of the men?

When did she begin to understand?

Susanna was born at the end of that year, named for John’s mother, and died not long after the end of the next. Even her recollection of that awful grief, and of the numb feeling of hollowness that followed, was mingled in Abigail’s mind with the Revolution. A month and a day after little Susanna’s death, a British captain was taunted by a mob in King Street and shouted for reinforcements. To this day, nobody really knew who fired the first shot.

She remembered Nabby’s frantic silence as the five-year-old clung to her in the kitchen, listening to the crackling fusillade of gunfire, the sea-roar of men shouting. She’d tried to leave Nabby and three-year-old Johnny with Pattie, the hired girl, but her daughter had screamed and screamed until Abigail took her along. Heavy already with another pregnancy, she’d refused to accept the woman’s part of sitting at home with her frightened children, waiting for someone to tell her what had happened.

When she saw the bodies in the bloodied snow of King Street she’d bent to cover her daughter’s eyes. Drifts of powder smoke still hung over the street when Abigail reached it, the gritty, sulfurous smell mingling with the metallic tang of blood. Abigail had been barely conscious of Nabby’s arms tightening around her neck, of the little girl pressing her face to her shoulder, small hands gripping her hair.

John was asked to defend the soldiers at their trial. Cousin Sam had been outraged, but John had retorted, “Counsel is the very
last
thing
any
accused person should lack in a free country.” Even Sam couldn’t argue with that. Abigail was too far along with child to go to the courthouse—Charley was born in May—the very summation of why there were times when she wished with all her heart that she’d been born a man.

“Nonsense,” sister Mary wrote back to her complaint. “If you’d been born a man, Abby, you’d never get to kiss John without the whole town talking.”

Two years later they bought a house in Queen Street. They were still living there—Nabby nine by then, solemn Johnny seven, Charley a gay and sunny five, and Tommy a toddler of three—when the ships of the British East India Company sailed into the harbor with an immense cargo of tea that they had to sell to someone or go bankrupt. The Crown had decided to crack down on colonial smuggling in America and force the colonies to buy only Company tea, with a nominal Crown tax.

Abigail was ill that December, as she often was, with an inflamed chest and a fever. Beneath the quilts of their gloomy little salt-box of a bedroom, she tossed, unable to sleep through the long nights after the tea-ships docked. She’d listened to the church bells tolling endlessly, as if for a plague. The streets were eerily silent. Everyone knew something was coming.

Through her open door she heard the voices murmuring in the kitchen, at all hours of day or night during those two endless weeks. “What if they
do
fight?” she heard John ask. “What if they call out soldiers to protect the tea?”

“What a pamphlet
that
will make!” She could almost see Cousin Sam rub his hands, gloating over the prospect. He was a burly ruddy-faced man who’d failed in half a dozen businesses because he was far too interested in politics to pay attention to merely making a living, a man without fear for his own life nor with regard for the lives of those around him. From the small bedroom where the four children slept, all crowded together in one bed, she heard Nabby cry out softly in one of her nightmares—the child had not had nightmares, thought Abigail, when she was tiny.

“They won’t do it though, my lad.” Cousin Sam sounded regretful. Looking back on it, Abigail often remembered the scene not as something overheard, but as if she’d been down in the dark kitchen herself, seeing the two men’s faces by the glow of the banked embers beneath the chimney’s loops of pots and chains. Sam’s square, mobile features with his short-cropped hair bristling up where his hat had disarrayed it, and the shoulders of his threadbare coat dark with rain; John’s face half hidden in the shadow, expressionless, but his eyes very bright. “Good God, Johnny my boy, have you seen how many men have come in from the countryside? Five thousand! Some of them have walked clear down from Salem to be here—to make sure we stand too many together to be dispersed with a few volleys.”

Sometimes when she’d dream about the scene, Abigail saw that Sam carried a bundle beneath his arm, three feet long and heavy, wrapped in a striped trade-blanket such as peddlers sold to the Indians of the western forests. Where it slipped aside she saw metal glint.

“There’s another meeting at the Old South Church this afternoon,” added a light tenor voice that Abigail knew as John Hancock’s. “That’s where the lobsterbacks will be looking. We’re meeting in the back room of Edes and Gill’s print-shop. As soon as it’s dark we’ll move out. When we pass the Old South we’ll have as many men following us as we need. Believe me, there’ll be no trouble.”

“Oh, there’ll be trouble.” As Abigail drifted deeper into sleep she heard the lightness creep into John’s voice, like a soldier who frets on the eve of battle but sings as the charge begins. “Just not right away.”

Through the drizzling day that had followed those whispered conversations, Abigail remembered now as she turned along Oxford Street, Nabby had not spoken one word about what was going on in the city. The girl had gone about her chores and read her lessons in the indifferent silence that was becoming characteristic of her, in contrast to Johnny and Charley, who were in and out of their mother’s room a hundred times. The boys were going to a nearby dame-school to learn their letters, but since men had been pouring into the town after the docking of the tea ships, and red-coated soldiers patrolled the streets, Abigail had kept them both at home. She’d insisted they keep up with their lessons nevertheless.

“You must be strong,” she’d said to them, when with fall of darkness the voices of the men assembled outside Old South grew louder. She gathered them close to her on the bed, Charley and Nabby and Johnny, and Tommy a babe in the crib. “I expect all of you to be strong, to be worthy and to serve your country as your father is doing.”

God help them,
she had thought,
they will need strength, if anything goes wrong. If something happens to John.

When Johnny and Charley had been put to bed, Nabby remained in Abigail’s room, reading to her. Her young voice had barely paused, when torchlight had streamed past the window; she had not even looked up. Abigail had wanted to ask her then if she still had nightmares, but could not.

Later, when John had come in and Nabby had run to him to silently clasp him round the waist, he had laid a hand on her head but looked over her at Abigail. He had said only, “The die is cast.”

A scruffy little boy dressed in men’s cast-offs darted up to Abigail at the corner of Marylebone Road and offered, for a halfpenny, to sweep the crossing: “Fine lady like you don’t want to get ’er clogs all shitty,” he explained with a winning smile. He didn’t look any older than Johnny had been when the fighting started with England, and was probably as illiterate as Abigail’s finches.