Patriot Hearts (18 page)

“Captain Ramsay, come look! I’m to have the prettiest room, with flower curtains on the windows, and—”

The little girl stopped at the foot of the stair, looking in startlement at John and Abigail. Then, like a baby animal, she wheeled and plunged through the door back into John’s receiving-room. Abigail heard her scream, “Captain Ramsay!” In a belated rush of skirts Sally came down the stair and made for the receiving-room door, as Polly came bursting out—face washed, hair combed, but still in the torn and dirty green dress—and flung herself at the front door. “Captain Ramsay!” Sally and Abigail caught her at the same time, as she seized the door handle to pull it open. Polly clung to the curving brass, howling—in grief, in betrayal, in despair at being only eight years old and the dupe of adults who’d trade her happiness for their convenience. When Abigail gently prized the child’s fingers loose Polly struck at her, wordlessly sobbing, then turned and flung herself into Sally’s arms.

DOLLEY

Washington City

August 24, 1814

N
ow I think on’t,” said Dolley, with what she hoped was an expression of bright thoughtfulness, “I think I saw the mirror last week in one of the drawers of the sewing-table in the parlor upstairs. Wouldst go seek it, whilst I clear up here?”

Sophie is my friend,
she chided herself as the other woman disappeared through the parlor door.
She is no spy!
But even as she thought this, Dolley strode to the writing-desk and pulled out Jemmy’s most recent letters. Her hands shook with haste as she folded them into a tight packet, bound them with the first piece of string she could find.
And even were she so, what think I she’ll do? Take Jemmy’s letters from me at pistol-point?
She realized she was mentally timing Sophie’s probable progress across the hall, up the stairs, into the big oval parlor. She was still wondering where she could thrust the letters that would be out of sight, when Sukey’s voice nearly startled her out of her skin.

“Ma’am—”

She whirled, breathless, to see the maidservant standing in the doorway.

“Ma’am, the men along the walls? They’s gone.”

Dolley reached the window in a swirl of muslin, and saw that the maid spoke true. The top of the wall was empty. She thrust Jemmy’s papers back into the writing-desk and turned the key, kept it in her hand as she hastened across the cavernous hall to the vast “East Room.” From its long windows she could see Pennsylvania Avenue.

The knots of watchers had gone. A cloud of dust now hung over the Avenue, through which carriages, wagons, and hurrying forms could dimly be made out. Fleeing toward Georgetown.

The sky above the eastern hills was still clear.

Trembling, Dolley crossed back through the hallway. From the entry-hall by the Mansion’s great front doors she could hear her majordomo, M’sieu Sioussat—French John, the servants called him—talking to the butler, his voice measured and calm. French John had trained for the priesthood, sailed the seven seas, and had been held up by his father over the heads of the crowd to see the French King’s execution, twenty years ago: Not much troubled him.

He will stand by me,
thought Dolley.
And he’ll know what to do, should worse come to worst.

Surely I am not the first beneath this roof, who hath known trouble and fear.

To her left, through the door of the oval drawing-room, General Washington’s portrait was visible. Someone had pulled from it the gauze that protected all the house’s paintings and mirrors in summer, and from its rich, muted background of reds and grays, the General gazed out at the world. The throne he had refused stood in shadow behind him, the sword he had wielded transferred to his left hand while his right—the hand of power and intent—stretched out over the pens and papers of due process and law.

He seemed to wait calmly for the army that he had once defeated to make its appearance on the threshold of the house he had built.

And he looked remarkably, thought Dolley, as he had the first time she’d seen him.

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Sunday, May 13, 1787

The church bells began to ring while the family was still in Meeting. Hearing them through the walls of the Pine Street Meeting-House, nineteen-year-old Dolley Payne reflected that if she were a better-disciplined soul, the arrival of General George Washington in Philadelphia would be a matter of sublime indifference to her. Yet at the sound, her glance shot sidelong and caught that of her best friend Lizzie Collins, and saw in her eyes the reflection of the excitement effervescing in her own.

General Washington was coming to Philadelphia!

A buzz riffled the stuffy gloom of the meeting-house as every child in the gallery whispered, poked, and was silenced by the adults whose turn it was to keep order up there. On the way to Meeting that morning one of her ten-year-old sister Lucy’s friends had dashed past them, calling out, “General Washington’s coming today! The cavalry went out to meet him!”

“And why doth Andrew think that the assembly of soldiers to go greet another soldier—and a slave-owner to boot—would interest thee, Lucy?” their father had asked, when Lucy’s blond head snapped around to follow her friend down Third Street.

Lucy had quickly faced front again, her younger siblings following suit like toys on a string: Anna, Mary, and Little Johnnie. Even the older boys, eighteen-year-old Isaac and William, who was twenty-one, kept their mouths shut.

Dolley, the eldest daughter, had turned to say something about the General to her mother, but saw her mother’s glance cut to her father’s face. A year ago, or two, her father would have put his question mildly, even playfully. It was the harsh note of danger that silenced the four youngsters and put the fear in her mother’s eyes.

Now as the bells of Philadelphia rollicked above the city’s low red roofs, Dolley’s eyes went to her father’s face. In the muted light of the meeting-house it seemed to have grown dark and lumpy with anger. So frightening, so alien, was the glare of his eyes that she returned her gaze swiftly to the whitewashed front wall, her heart beating hard. For a moment she wondered if he would stand up, break the meditative silence of the Meeting with the furious words he’d muttered all morning:
Vanity of vanities, all is vanity! What does it profit a man to gain the whole world, if he lose his soul?

But he didn’t. And on the far side of his blunt, tense profile, she could almost feel how rigidly her mother sat, as if she, too, feared what she didn’t understand.

The moment passed, but the bells continued. Voices in the street outside, a clamor very unlike Sunday morning in Philadelphia, and with the day’s clouds even the usual mark of slanted sunlight on the meeting-house wall was gone. It was impossible, thought Dolley, keeping her hands demurely folded, her glance carefully schooled away from Lizzie’s, to gauge how much longer the Meeting had to run or whether she’d have time, after she walked back to the house with her family, to coax them into letting her go see the cavalcade ride in.

Vanity of vanities, all is vanity, and yes, General Washington is a soldier and a slaveholder who buyeth and selleth his fellow men, but he is still the hero who captured the British army, who won the war that set this country free.

Dolley remembered clearly the red-coated files of riders, glimpsed through the brown autumn woods of Hanover County. Remembered lying in a thicket behind the house, face pressed to the prickly leaf-mold with two-year-old Lucy clutched against her body, praying baby Anna in her arms wouldn’t cry. At eleven, and tall for her age, she had been dimly aware that her mother feared more for her than rough mishandling at the hands of Banastre Tarleton’s dragoons.

Worse by far than the British raiding had been the bitter, constant warfare between the local Tories and those who supported the Congress. Small battles and vicious betrayals, ambush and revenge: the constant anxiety of not knowing whom one could trust. When the patriot militia burned out the plantation of her friend Sophie Sparling’s grandparents, it was to Dolley’s parents that Sophie and her mother had fled. Dolley still had dreams of waking in the dead of night with the flare of torchlight visible through the cracks of the shutter, hearing the trample of hooves outside, and men cursing in the yard. Patrick Henry, firebrand of the patriots and first Governor of the new State, was her mother’s cousin, and they’d lived at his backwoods plantation when first her family had returned to Virginia from North Carolina. Even the knowledge that as Quakers the Paynes took no part in the War might not have been enough to save them.

General Washington’s victory had ended all that.

And all gratitude aside, Dolley simply loved the sight of sleekly groomed horses, the brilliance of gold-braided uniforms, the stir and lilt of the music that a band was sure to play as the General rode up to be greeted at the State House door. An avid reader of newspapers, she was curious about the delegates who had been arriving for two weeks now for the Convention of the States, longing to put faces to the names she’d heard discussed among her friends.

The two Morrises she knew by sight, sleek peg-legged young Gouverneur and his not-related business partner, stocky and extremely wealthy Robert, one of the city’s most prominent merchants. On warm spring evenings, when she’d walk with Lizzie and their dear friend Sarah Parker, they’d often see Robert Morris’s carriage rattle past on the cobblestones of Market Street, bright with gilding and varnish. And everyone in the city knew old Benjamin Franklin, at least by sight. He’d smiled at Dolley and spoken to her any number of times in the market, on those days when he was well enough to be about: Even at eighty-one, thought Dolley with a smile, he clearly retained a lively interest in a well-turned ankle.

But the others, of whom she had only read and heard—Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts and George Wythe the Virginia lawyer; Roger Sherman and Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut; Alexander Hamilton, who’d fought at Washington’s side and was supposed to be dazzlingly handsome—these were the men who would change the way life was lived in Philadelphia and all throughout the country. The men of the Meeting like Lizzie’s father, and young Anthony Morris (no relation to either of the more famous ones), and his friend the sobersided John Todd, might be content with debating the writings of these men, but Dolley wanted to see their faces. To see what they looked like, how they stood, how they dressed. Who they actually
were.

“It should matter nothing, what they look like,” John Todd had argued earlier that week, when she’d walked down to the Indian Queen Tavern on Fourth Street because she’d heard that George Wythe was there. (And he had been, lean and white-haired with a nose like an ax-blade, talking gravely with the proprietor about cheese.) “It is what they have done, and will do—what they have written and thought—that will count.” He’d encountered Dolley on her way home from the tavern, when it had started to drizzle, and had offered her his escort back to her house with his umbrella.

John was the sort of young man who always had an umbrella.

“What be the difference, if a man be short or tall, young or venerable, if his eyes be brown or blue or if his skin be white or black for that matter, so that he love God, and do good in the world?” he’d asked.

Dolley had sighed, and said at once, “Thou art right, John,” because she knew he was.

Nevertheless, she wanted to know.

She was still smiling over this encounter—and John’s complete incomprehension of the female mind—when the Friends filed quietly from the meeting-house into the clamor of Pine Street. Church bells kept their delighted riot from every steeple in town, men and women hastened by them in their Sunday-bests toward the end of Market Street, where the Baltimore road ran in from Chester. Lizzie, walking sedately among her own family, cast her a glance filled with query, and Dolley nodded:
Of course I’ll go!
Lucy, Anna, Mary, and Little John knew better than to cluster around their parents on the way out of Meeting, but whispers whipped among them:
General Washington—General Washington!

Two years ago her father would merely have sighed, and shaken his head. Now he whirled like a baited bull, and snapped at their mother, “Canst thou not keep their minds on God, even on God’s own day?” And as the four little ones halted in their tracks, appalled at his fury, he suddenly shouted at them,
“Even a child is known by his doings, whether his work be pure. A high look, a proud heart, and the plowing of the wicked—
ay, and riding forth under arms to war!
—these are sin. The man that wandereth out of the way of understanding shall remain in the congregation of the dead!”

“John…” Molly Payne put a quieting hand on her husband’s arm. Those of their closer friends in Meeting who’d begun to move toward them to admonish saw her frown, and stepped back. “John, they are only children. And every day is God’s own day.
When I was a child, I spake as a child and I reasoned as a child…
and nowhere doth Paul in his Epistle say that it is ill to do so.”