Patriot Hearts (13 page)

Nabby’s body was racked with an aftermath of sobs. She whispered something, Abigail thought she said, “New York.” Meaning, she guessed, that William Smith’s mother, sister, and younger brothers lived outside New York City, a week’s hard travel from Braintree. But when she leaned close and asked softly, “What did you say, dear?” Nabby asked brokenly, “Did I do the right thing, Ma?”

Tears streamed down her face. As Abigail dried them with the clean spare handkerchief she invariably carried, she felt her own heart contract with guilt. She knew exactly what her daughter meant.

In the spring of 1782, Royall Tyler came to board with Abigail’s sister Mary, who had by that time returned to Braintree to live. Nabby was sixteen.

John had been gone two and a half years by that time. The Congress had sent him to France early in 1778, when the French King had allied himself with the American cause. He’d taken Johnny, not quite eleven years old, ostensibly as an assistant but in truth so that there would be one soul at his side whom he could completely trust. He’d come home for four brief months late in the summer of ’79, and had then departed. This time he took with him both Johnny and Charley.

Nine-year-old Charley had wept to leave Braintree, his cousins, his family, and his friends—Johnny at least had borne his own earlier departure with the stoicism of one who knows his duty to family, country, and his own future worth. No amount of parental encouragement about seeing a foreign land, learning a language that would serve him well in the future, and meeting friends who could put his feet on the road of profession and honor seemed to make a difference to Charley. In the end, all Abigail could do was tell her sobbing middle son that he must strive to excel, and hope.

Since the British had abandoned Boston in 1776, there had been no more fighting in Massachusetts. But the War had gone on. With many of the able-bodied men either in the State militia or the Continental Army, it was hard to find anyone to do the farm’s heavy work, especially given the sharp increase in wages and the scarcity of any kind of real money. Both Congress and the State of Massachusetts had printing-presses instead of treasuries, and most people demanded either specie—of which almost no one had any—or payment in kind: crops, eggs, a lamb. It cost a hundred and fifty dollars just to get a new fence. John took to sending Abigail, from France, small packages of the kind of goods that were scarce in Massachusetts: pins, silk gloves, handkerchiefs of fine muslin, ribbons, the occasional length of fine white lawn. All of these she could sell, or trade.

Somehow, they survived.

Her loneliness, as the months stretched into a year, then two years, was agony. There were days when her longing for his company yawned like a bottomless pit in her soul; nights when sheer carnal hunger for his body filled her with a fever no medicine could slake. Snow heaped around the house in the winters and darkness closed down by four in the afternoon. John’s letters were too often brief, for John had a horror of the British intercepting his correspondence on the high seas.

In the summer of 1781, only months before Cornwallis surrendered, John wrote that he was sending Charley home: He had “too exquisite a sensibility for Europe,” meaning, Abigail guessed, that neither John nor anyone else knew what to make of the boy’s sensitive nature and odd combination of introversion and happy-go-lucky charm. Fear of having the letter—and Charley—intercepted precluded John from saying how, where, or when, which turned out to be just as well for Abigail’s peace of mind. Charley, and one of the two Americans John had entrusted him to, ended up stranded in Spain, caught in high-seas battle with privateers, and becalmed in mid-ocean for weeks before fetching up, five months after setting forth from France, in the shipping town of Beverly, a long day’s journey north of Boston.

Abigail didn’t know whether to fall to her knees praising God for the return of her son or to write her merchant cousin Will in Amsterdam and ask about hiring someone to break a broom over John’s head for sending their boy off alone.

And a few months after that, Royall Tyler had come into her—and Nabby’s—life.

Nabby had at first wanted to have little to do with the handsome young lawyer. Royall was twenty-five, and according to sister Mary—who admittedly had two marriageable daughters of her own to dispose of—had thoroughly disgraced himself at Harvard with drunkenness, profanity, fathering a bastard on the charwoman, and informing the faculty that he cared nothing for a “little paltry degree” which might be bought for twenty shillings anytime he really wanted one.

“My sins were a wild boy’s sins,” he admitted to Abigail, when he ran to catch up with her one summer afternoon on her way home from Mary’s house. “Of them I can only ask, with the Psalmist, that you
remember not the sins of my youth, nor my transgressions…Pardon my iniquity, for it is great.”
He bowed his head meekly before her, but his dark eyes laughed through his long lashes. “I adore your daughter, Mrs. Adams. Without your aid I am nothing. I cannot open my breast and lay my reformed heart before you on a tray for your inspection, though I would if I could. I ask only that you regard me as
tabula rasa,
and look upon my present actions with an open mind.”

Abigail was perfectly well aware that she was being flirted with, but she also knew the effects of gossip in Braintree. Though Royall was said to have dissipated a substantial part of the fortune his father had left him (“Of course I did! I was fifteen!”), he was still in possession of a ship, a store, a chaise-and-pair, and a house in Boston, and was negotiating for purchase of the handsomest house in Braintree. It would be no bad thing, she thought, should Nabby wed a man who would be able to keep her well.

And, it was always hard for Abigail to turn a cold shoulder to an educated man. There were few enough people in Braintree with whom she could talk about Voltaire, Cicero, and Plutarch, as she did with John. Royall would drop in at the house on the Plymouth road, as if by accident on his way to and from Boston, to chat in the kitchen or the dairy with mother and daughter. Even when Nabby went to spend weeks in Boston with her Smith relatives, Royall would visit Abigail, to help with the legal business of collecting the long-overdue debts owed John, and to advise her on the details of running the farm and whether investing in land in Vermont would be wise. Afterwards Abigail would write to Nabby, saying that her suitor sent her his love.

She had, she admitted, high hopes for the match, if for no other reason than that Nabby’s aloof silences had begun to worry her. She feared that something in Nabby had been changed or broken in the years of war and fear. If she could not love a man as devoted to her as Royall was, and as educated, clever, and witty, to whom would she ever gift her heart?

Was a part of her fear, she wondered now, looking down at her daughter’s face, a fear for herself? Petals scattered on the wind of time can never be regathered. And her own mirror, that icy winter of 1783, showed her gray in her dark hair, and the spoor of age beginning in the corners of her eyes and lips. When she turned thirty-nine in November she wrote to John,
Who shall give me back my time? Who shall compensate me for the years I cannot recall?

In France the treaty-wrangling with England dragged on. John sent letters filled with maddened frustration. Two of the other delegates at the Court of Versailles were completely untrustworthy and bickered like cat and dog; another member of the delegation, he suspected, was selling information to the British by means of a letter-drop in a hollow tree by the Tuileries garden. To make matters worse, he shared quarters in Paris with Benjamin Franklin, and the spectacle of the philosopher—who at seventy-seven was arguably too old for that sort of carrying-on—merrily leaping into and out of half the beds in Paris was almost more than he could stand.

In ’81 John had been taken ill on a journey to Holland—“As near to death as any man ever approached without being grasped in his arms”—and since that time, Abigail had lived with fear.

No more letters signed
Portia
or
Lysander,
their old courting nicknames.

No more pillow-fights, followed by burning kisses that consumed the whole of her flesh; no more long evenings of talk and argument and jokes about Plutarch in bed until the candles burned out.

No more hope that she would one day look up from weeding the vegetable-garden and see him striding up the path.

Was that why I pushed you to marry Royall Tyler? Because I wanted you to have what I feared I would lose?
Another woman would have gently stroked her daughter’s sweat-damp hair—Abigail prosaically wrung out a washrag in the basin, and mopped Nabby’s face. Rewarded by Nabby’s faint shut-eyed smile, and the plump hand stealing up to briefly close around hers.

I only wanted what was best for you, my dearest child.

And at about the time Nabby at last began to unbend, and yield herself to Royall’s enraptured kisses, the letter came from John.

Will you come to me this fall, and go home with me this spring?

“Lord, ma’am, I am that sorry.”

Abigail looked up swiftly as the midwife came in, plump and wheezing and shadowed by a girl who carried a wicker basket bigger than Abigail’s own.

“It’s as if God sent out a circular letter to all the ladies in London at once, saying He wanted every baby birthed sharp this morning and no shilly-shallying about it. I’ve just got back from Clarges Street, with a fine young lady come into the world.” The midwife beamed, and Abigail, who’d ascertained at a glance that the woman had taken the time to change not only her apron but her dress between deliveries, returned her smile.

“And I devoutly hope we shall see another such before the day’s much older,” she replied, and held out her hand. “Mrs. Throckle, as I recall?”

“It is. And you’re Mrs. Adams, if I remember aright, Mrs. Smith’s good mother. I knew when I came home and found that girl of Mrs. Smith’s there, and she told me you’d been sent for as well, I said to myself, ‘Well, there’s one I don’t have to worry will come to harm before I arrive,’ which I’m sorry to say in my business you can’t always count on and that’s the truth.” After a brisk, firm clasp of Abigail’s hand—a welcome change from the upper-class English habit of extending two limp fingers—she turned away at once and began her examination.