Patriot Hearts (35 page)

“I doubt John would,” replied Dolley. “He hath a most conscientious regard for the opinion of the Congregation.” But her blue eyes warmed at the thought of a venue in which she might see her sister again, away from the censure of the disappointed family. “He can have no objection to my paying a morning-call, though.”

“Then you shall pay as many morning-calls as you please. And please bring little Payne, and his new
sister,
as well.” As Austin clucked to the horses, Martha looked back to see Mrs. Todd in her black dress on the step, holding Payne by the hand, her sisters flanking her, and everyone waving as if they’d all been friends for years.

She would have to write Lucy a note at Harewood, thought Martha, and ask the new bride to come soon. And she needed also to write to poor Fanny, not only sending her the money she’d asked for, but reassuring and advising her. She felt a pang of regret that Dolley Todd would in all probability not be able to visit until after her confinement. It would be good to have babies in the house again.

But before Martha’s letters were even sent, all things had changed, and even the deadly antics of Citizen Genêt came to seem like those of an ill-mannered child banging on a pot.

Two days after Martha’s visit to Dolley, Pollie Lear died.

And within days, other people, rich and poor, black and white, began to die, all over the town.

The fever summer had begun.

ABIGAIL

Boston, Massachusetts

Thursday, September 27, 1793

A
nd you have had no word from your father?” Abigail knew that if Johnny had, the first words out of his mouth when she came into his dark little office on Queen Street would have been,
I’ve had word from Pa…

But she couldn’t keep from asking.

The news from Philadelphia had been simply too terrifying.

Yellow fever, the whites called it. Blacks, who had seen it in the Caribbean, spoke of
vomito negro,
or of Bronze John.

Thirty people were dying a day.

“None save that Congress had adjourned, and that he would start for home within two days. It was but a note, dated the eleventh.” Her son spoke brusquely over his shoulder as he cleared the books from his desk and put his few papers into drawers. John was habitually neat, and Abigail had inculcated into all three of her sons the need for order and system in all their endeavors. Johnny was the only one upon whom her efforts seemed to have made a lasting impression, though according to John, Tommy—who had just begun his law practice in Philadelphia—was getting better about it.

Charley, at twenty-four a lawyer in New York, sweet and charming as he was, was hopeless. He always claimed he followed a system of his own.

Her boys. Men now in a world that was turning out very differently from that which she and John had imagined, in the days of the War.

When had things begun to go wrong?

“Father did not say whether he meant to return in Tommy’s company or not.” Johnny fetched his coat from the cupboard. Though the day was unseasonably hot—on her way through the streets from wily Cousin Sam’s house near the Common, Abigail had seen more than one gentleman (if such they could be called) in shirtsleeves outside the coffee-houses and taverns—since the age of ten she’d never seen her eldest son leave so much as his bedroom less than properly dressed.

Indeed a son to be proud of,
she decided as she watched him. His old nickname “Hercules” suited him more now as his body settled into a burly strength. As John had done, Johnny had begun his public service, writing for the
Columbian Centennial
a series of scathing rebuttals when Thomas Jefferson had endorsed Tom Paine’s
The Rights of Man
with an introduction bemoaning “the political heresies that have sprung up among us.” It was quite clear that Jefferson meant her husband’s criticism of the way the French were conducting their Revolution, and his evasive apology had come far too late to prevent his supporters—who assumed that John had written the rebuttals himself—from jumping in with their own libelous replies.

Yet as she took Johnny’s arm to walk back to Sam’s house on Winter Street, Abigail couldn’t help seeing the sag of a much older man beginning in her son’s shoulders. Though only twenty-six, Johnny had a shuttered look to his eyes, like a house whose inhabitants have gone away, or withdrawn to its innermost rooms.

He didn’t look that way in France.

His old easy cheerfulness had vanished.
It’s because of the factions that have split this country, ever since the fighting began in France.

That conflict, growing like a cancer as John had predicted that it would, was enough to trouble anyone’s rest, even before the French had declared war on everyone around them and started trying to drag America into it to save their own unwashed necks. In Paris, Johnny had spent at least two evenings a week at Jefferson’s Hôtel, and had looked on the Virginian as a sort of exotic uncle.

To watch the man he’d respected—the man he thought he knew—become a supporter of the crew of murderers now in charge of France must be as difficult for her son as Abigail knew it was for her husband. Sometimes it seemed to her that she had never really known Jefferson. That the Jefferson she had known had been…What? A dissimulation? A mask?

But she knew how deeply John felt betrayed.

The newspapers that supported Jefferson’s faction had begun to claim that John Adams must be a supporter of monarchy and an enemy of freedom. Abigail had grown used to this kind of thing from the Tory press in London. To see this slime being thrown at John by his own people filled her with rage.

And so it must Johnny.

The cobbles underfoot were treacherous—she caught her son’s strong arm for support. Wrath for his country’s sake had to be what ate at his heart. His secretive gloom couldn’t, certainly, have anything to do with that silly girl he’d fallen in love with, just after he’d finished his legal studies. Completely aside from the fact that the girl was only fifteen, Johnny had been in no financial position to take on a bride: Abigail wasn’t about to permit a repeat of Nabby’s difficulties. Faced with her objections—and John’s—Johnny had renounced his Miss Frazer, and had settled down to politics and work.

“Did Father write to you before he left?” he asked, in his abrupt way.

“I’ve had nothing since last we spoke.” Which had been ten days ago, when Johnny had ridden down for Sunday dinner in Braintree—although the northern part of the town, where John and Abigail had settled upon their return from France, was now called Quincy, in honor of Abigail’s grandfather who had helped found it. “He said that he, and everyone else in the government, had removed from Philadelphia to Germantown, on account of the yellow fever.”

She shuddered, remembering the women who’d made her Philadelphia receptions so entertaining: Ann Bingham and Eliza Drinker, Eliza Powel and Harriet Manigault and Betsey Hamilton. Educated women, well-read and well-informed. Most of them had the means to flee the city, but how far would the disease spread inland from the wharves where the newspapers said that it had started?

“Nothing about Tommy?”

Abigail shook her head. Tommy had been sharing quarters with his father in the house of Mr. Otis, the Secretary of the Senate, but when John had fled, like everyone else, to Germantown, his letter hadn’t said whether Tommy had gone with him, taken up residence elsewhere, or remained in Philadelphia. Since the plague had only begun to take hold then it probably had not seemed important.

Now long lists of the dead were being published, so many there were not men enough to bury them, nor carts to haul away the bodies. The mansion at Bush Hill, the Boston paper said, “formerly the home of Vice President Adams and his wife”—a drafty, horrible place it had been in the winter of 1790, its fourteen fireplaces beggaring them just to keep from freezing—had now been converted to a plague hospital. Though not in general fanciful, Abigail had had a hideous vision of John being taken there, dying in the place where he had once been honored. The town was empty. Even the church bells had been stilled to avoid panicking the remaining population. The ships at the wharves stood silent, their crews dead or deserted.

Her hand closed tight over Johnny’s arm as they walked along the bricks of Queen Street—only these days it was the upper half of State Street—toward the Common. They passed Brattle Street: The house still stood where her daughter Susanna had been born and had so quickly died. Their feet trod the same bricks over which she and Nabby had raced at the sound of gunfire, to see the snow of King Street all splashed with blood.

Boston had changed. After the noisy grandeur of London and the stinking glamor of Paris, it would always seem small. The streets were as narrow as those of Paris, though they smelled, like everything else in the town, of fish as well as wood smoke and privies. The buildings cramped shoulder-to-shoulder, soot-darkened wood, the tiny panes of window-glass a memory of England’s rules about what could be imported and what couldn’t. The tin horns of fishmongers, the iron wheels of carriages, the muffled thump of workmen’s hammers in cobblers’ and cabinetmakers’ and silversmiths’ shops reechoed through those twisty streets, and the tap of passersby on the cobbles, their voices mingling with tavern dinner-bells.

But since the new Constitution had gone into effect—since the various states had begun pulling together instead of in whatever direction each chose—Abigail had seen the town’s wharves rebuilt, that had been pulled apart for firewood during the siege. New houses were being constructed on the high ground north of the Common, and up toward Barton’s Point.

In Boston, reflected Abigail, one didn’t see beggars in every alleyway, as there had been in London and Paris. Or boys who should have been in school sweeping horse-droppings from the pavement in the hopes that someone would throw them a halfpenny so they might eat that day. Trade—with both England and France—was slowly getting back on its feet. Small manufactories were growing in spite of England’s efforts to undersell local competition, new farms were springing up along the frontiers.

And all of this—all that we have accomplished—will be swept away again, if we go to war.

She felt the implacable heat of rage rise through her, at those—like Thomas Jefferson, who once had been her friend—whose passion for faction was pulling the country apart.

Cousin Sam’s house stood on Winter Street, a gloomy three-story structure that had at one time been painted yellow and was long overdue for a freshening-up. For years he’d hung on to the moldering pile of the family home on Purchase Street, though after the damage done to it by the British occupation he’d never had the money to get it put right. The Revolution was pretty much the only thing Sam had ever turned his hand to that had succeeded. He was as bad about keeping track of money as Jefferson was.

And as deluded in his enthusiasm for France.

But much as Abigail distrusted Sam, it was difficult not to like the bright-eyed gentleman who met her at the door with a smiling embrace and a kiss on both cheeks. “My dear, you’re as beautiful as ever you were. So glad to see you in better health these days.”

“Abigail, dearest!” Bess Adams slipped around her husband, took Abigail’s hand. “It’s good to see you in town at last. Louisa’s in the kitchen with Hannah and the children”—Sam’s daughter by his first marriage and her family shared the house with them—“and I’ve made Sam swear a Bible oath to leave off politics for the duration of dinner. We are family,” she went on, sliding a plump arm around Abigail’s waist and leading her down the passageway to the kitchen. “And I’m sure, worried as you must be about John and Tommy, that the last thing you need is a lot of wrangling over the roast.”

As Bess had promised, Abigail’s niece Louisa was in the kitchen. But instead of Hannah Adams Wells and Sam’s grandchildren, with that dark-haired, pretty young woman was a young man in shirtsleeves, whose raven hair fell in a rakish curl over black brows that flared back like a bird’s wings. He held the coffee-caddy while Louisa set the mill on the table. He was saying something to her, quietly and intently, and both looked around at once as Bess and Abigail entered the room.

“Now, Louisa, don’t you be listening to a single thing Mr. Boyne has to say to you,” warned Bess, with a good-natured shake of her finger. “Abigail, this is Sam’s clerk, Mr. Boyne. Mr. Michael Boyne, Mrs. Adams.”

“A pleasure and an honor, ma’am.” If his name hadn’t announced his origins, his sliding Irish vowels did so as he bowed. “I’ve read your husband’s work with interest; my employer didn’t lie when he said his cousin had read everything under the sun and had it all at his fingertips.” He glanced at Louisa, catching the young woman’s eye, and added, “He didn’t lie either, when he said Mr. John Adams had done his posterity the favor of marrying into the handsomest family in the state.”

Bess stooped to the hearth and swept the coals from the top of the Dutch oven. “I told you not to listen to a word he said.” She lifted the lid and the rich odor of duck and molasses billowed into the air like the music of trumpets.

Sam’s Bible oath held good for about ten minutes, which wasn’t bad, for Adamses. During that ten minutes, Abigail related to Sam and Bess, to Hannah and her husband Captain Wells, the contents of John’s most recent letter from Philadelphia, which was the reason she’d accepted Bess’s invitation to dine. Despite their political differences—and despite John’s occasional jealousy, during the War years, when in Paris people would lose interest in him the moment they realized he wasn’t
the
Mr. Adams—Sam and John loved one another like brothers. Sam had gathered every fragment of news from Philadelphia that he could, though it was little enough.