Patriot Hearts (21 page)

She heard him shouting, as she neared the house. The note of insane rage in his voice pierced her, more than the echoes and snippets of his words: “…obeyed in my own house…uniforms…wild unbeliever with a worldly heart…” She’d been holding her skirts up as much as modesty would permit, to speed her steps; now she snatched them almost up to her knees and ran.

“Will you take this away from me, too?” Her father towered over her mother with both fists raised. “Tell the boys what to do, make the damned starch as well as sell it and spend the money as you think best? Send me off to some corner until you need something else from me?”

“And what am I to do to put bread on the table?” her mother slashed back, in the voice of one goaded beyond all endurance. “It wasn’t I who sent thee off to a corner, ever! That corner where thou hidest half the day and all the night!”

“It is better to dwell in a corner of the house-top, than with a brawling woman in a wide house!
There is no place in this house where I can go to get away from the sound of strife! And you, who want to be the man here—”

“I don’t want to be the man! I want
thee
to be the man!”

“Is that why you let my daughter run after soldiers like a common trull?” He whirled, his face distorted, his finger pointing at Dolley as she stood in the doorway. The blue eyes she remembered with such love stared wildly at her, as if at a stranger.
“She is loud and stubborn; her feet abide not in her house: now is she without, now in the streets, and lieth in wait at every corner!”
The grip of his hand on her arm nearly pulled Dolley off her feet. Like a rag he shook her in her mother’s face.

“Is that what you will have your daughters come to, woman? To go chasing after the vainglory of the world? Is that why you will be the man of this house? So that you can let them run about the streets like harlots?”

“I beg a thousand pardons, Neighbor Payne.”

John Todd’s stout, sensible shoes creaked on the wooden floor of the shop; his voice was pleasant and soft, as if in a chance encounter outside the meeting-house. “I apologize for bringing thy daughter home later than I told her mother I would; doubly so, for importuning her to go walking with me to begin with. I beg thee to make allowances, for myself and for them both. Both were most kind in indulging my pleas.”

He must have been behind me in the street,
thought Dolley. She had had the impression, just before she heard her father’s voice, of quick footfalls hurrying to catch her up. Her eyes thanked him as he concluded, “And now I must go. I should not have come in at all, save that I feared to leave behind me a misunderstanding that would cause strife.”

“No,” said her father uncertainly. “No, you—thou didst right, Neighbor Todd. I knew not…I…I am sorry, Daughter. Molly.” He blinked and held out his hand to his wife, and looking at his face Dolley realized he had not the slightest idea of what he had just said. His cheeks were ashen. “Neighbor Todd, thou wilt stay to dine? We spoke of it, did we not, at Meeting?”

“We did, friend,” John responded. “But the matter was left uncertain, and I would not make extra work for thy good wife.”

Molly Payne was still shaking with anger. In the stairwell door, Dolley was aware of eighteen-year-old Isaac, of Lucy, of the younger children all pressed on one another to listen, frightened and bewildered. It was Mother Amy who said, “I think it will be no great matter to set an extra plate, will it, Mrs. Payne?”

“No,” said Molly Payne, in a voice that sounded to Dolley oddly like her father’s: hesitant, as if she were waking and wasn’t entirely certain where she was. Then, smiling, she went on more strongly, “Thou art entirely welcome, Friend John, and thou knowst it. To dinner, or at any other time.”

Her father was an invisible presence, like a shadow on dinner, and none of the children dared raise their voice or ask what General Washington had looked like.

John, to Dolley’s utter relief, maintained a measured conversation with her mother on the subject of the Meeting’s school committee, boring as dust and, like dust, blanketing all jagged edges in a smoothing mask. Dolley had never been so grateful to anyone in her life. Afterwards he stayed to play Fox and Geese with Lucy and the children while the women cleared the table and carried the dishes back down to the kitchen to wash, so things felt normal and relatively cheerful by the time he took his departure at four.

Her parents’ bedroom at the front of the house was still filled with the gray light of the late-spring afternoon, when Dolley knocked gently at the door. “ ’Tis Dolley, Papa.”

There was silence within. The children had gone out to the yard; Isaac was as usual trouncing William at dominoes; on her way upstairs Dolley had passed her mother in the kitchen, talking with Mother Amy by the open door.

At last a voice replied, “Come, Daughter.”

He sat in the chair by the window. The window was shut and the room airless. Footsteps patted in the street; a woman’s voice chimed plaintively, “But if he’d only agree to sit next to her the whole problem could be avoided!” Her father winced. He moved his head as if the sound were a bodkin, pricking at his ear.

Doth he miss the stillness of our country evenings at Coles Hill?

When you stepped outside in Philadelphia, it was like stepping into a giant open-air drawing-room full of chattering people. That was one of the things Dolley loved about Philadelphia.

Her father looked weary, and she could see where white had touched his dark hair.

“I’m so sorry I disobeyed thee, Father. Sorry that my feet were so quick to run away when Mama said that I might. She meant nothing by it, truly she did not. The fault was mine. Please forgive me.”

“John Todd is a good man,” he said softly. “And a brave one. Why dost thou turn thy face aside from his love?” He spoke like a man speaking from the dark of a cell he knows he’ll never leave.

Dolley wanted to protest,
I don’t,
but knew that would be a falsehood. Every look John Todd gave her asked for something that she avoided.

“What more dost thou want in this life?”

“Father, I know not.”

“I want to see thee safe,” he said, after a silence so lengthy she wondered if he wished her to go. “Thy mother is right, Daughter. I hide in this corner. The voices of men are an abomination to me. The Spirit will guide me, the Spirit will show me the path I must take, but listen as I may there is only silence. I am tired, Daughter, more tired than I was when I plowed all day behind a team of oxen, and I think if I were to come into the presence of anyone, man or woman, I would—” He hesitated.

Weep?
wondered Dolley.

Scream?

Curse God and die?

“I know it sounds like madness, but I am not mad, Daughter. I know I am of little use to thy mother and the children, yet this is all that I am or can be now. Thy mother says to work on in spite of my melancholy and the good people of the Meeting advise this and that, and yet it is all to me like men describing color to a man who hath lost his eyes.
How shall one season salt that hath lost its savor?
Please do not give me advice, Daughter.” His eyes were bleak.

Dolley shook her head, then pulled up the little stool that stood beside the tall bed, so that she could sit beside him, and take his hand.

“Child, I want only thy happiness. Thou art made for better things than to lose thy days in poverty, and I fear that this is what is to come. This is why I say to thee,
Marry John Todd.
Marry him now. His heart is faithful, yet disappointment breaks even the strongest back in the end. Then what shalt become of thee?”

“Papa, what woman would have any use for a man who deserted her in the face of adversity?” Dolley spoke playfully, and his mouth tugged a little at the corner in response. Since she was fourteen, he’d been joking her about the number of young gentlemen who came calling on her, and the number of requests he’d gotten, from men who wanted permission to seek her hand.

Personally, Dolley never could see why. She was too tall, and inclined to bossiness. She knew she had pretty coloring, white and black and blue, but knew also that she lacked the fineness of feature that made true beauty. She enjoyed the attention, and enjoyed flirting, but it was hard to take any man seriously who threw himself on his knees before her and went into raptures about how lovely she was.

For all his sober stuffiness, and his inability to see a jest, she never had the feeling that John Todd gazed at her thinking,
I am looking at the most beautiful woman in the world.

Just,
I am looking at my friend Dolley Payne.

But her father’s responsive smile faded before it reached his eyes. “Times are cruel, Dolley. More cruel than we knew when all we had to fear was the redcoats and the Tories. I fear thou shalt find that few men—maybe none—will seek to wed a woman who must work for her bread and who can bring nothing to the marriage, no matter how pretty she be. I do not know what the future holds for this family, but when I look ahead I see only blackness. I say again, Dolley, John Todd is a good man. What more dost thou want in this life? For what dost thou wait?”

For a wider world?

For a girl of even middling means, the world was never wide. As a youngster in Hanover County she’d been enchanted by the books in Sophie Sparling’s grandfather’s library, but not, as Sophie was, out of a steely hunger for learning. It was the stories that delighted her, the dizziness of looking through an infinity of windows into other experiences, other places and times. Living in Philadelphia, especially at such a time and with such events going on, was surely to be living in the widest world she would ever see.

For a man I can laugh with?

But it was silly, to wish for a man who shared her mirth above a man who would treat her and her children well. And while the Friends were far from humorless, she had never met a young man in the Meeting yet who had her zesty curiosity, her love of laughter.

And to look outside the Meeting was unthinkable.

So all she could say was, “I know not what I wait for, Father. Maybe for just the guidance of the Spirit?”

Once he would have agreed with her. Now he frowned. “Dost not think that
this
is the guidance of the Spirit? As a mother will push a child out of the path of danger, or into a safe and sunny garden, if from timidity or foolishness that child will not be coaxed?”

She heard her mother’s voice in the parlor next door, and William answering something. Footsteps creaked, and Dolley was standing by the time a light tap sounded on the bedroom door. Her father closed his eyes briefly, as if the sound were the scrape of nails on slate. He whispered, “Go, Daughter. Think of what I have said. It is for thine own good that I speak.”

But as she climbed to the stuffy heat of the attic bedroom she shared with her sisters, and opened the window there onto the wilderness of roofs and birds, Dolley felt only a great sense of confusion, and longing for something for which she had no name.
Timid and foolish,
her father had said.
And,
she mentally added, remembering her mother’s tired face,
selfish as well.

For what dost thou wait?

She knew John Todd would make her a good husband.

Did she really think some dashingly handsome Friend was going to come striding into the Meeting one morn, take her hand, and lead her into a world where she could read and talk, surround herself with music and bright colors, and not meekly grind away her days in work that had no end and little relief?

She had prayed often for guidance concerning John Todd, as she had prayed for guidance about her father. Now she rested her forehead on her window sash and whispered to the shining light that she saw within her heart,
Send me where I’ll do the most good, by the route that doth seem best to You.

Over the rooftops of Philadelphia, the church bells were silent. The cannons by the State House were stilled. The sky was beginning to darken at the end of the long afternoon. Dolley pictured the candlelight and mirrors of Robert Morris’s elegant dining-room, and General Washington, resplendent in black velvet and powder. Delighted, she was sure, to be at his destination and able to partake of a decent meal—Would he write to his wife tonight and tell her he’d arrived safe?

Thunder rumbled grumpily over the hills west of town. Big, thick drops of rain began to fall.

Robert Morris had the finest mansion in Philadelphia, whose red-tiled roof and gleaming third-floor windows Dolley could see, a few streets over on Fourth Street. The British General Howe had occupied it as his own, the winter the British held Philadelphia in their grip. Now the merchant would be rubbing his chubby hands at the prospect of having the General’s prestigious presence and the General’s undivided attention on his own arguments and plans.

Dolley had been around meeting-house committees long enough to know that most of what got decided got decided over dinner or punch in some congenial parlor, not over debates in a sweltering meeting room.