Patriot Hearts (36 page)

“I’ve heard that the young wife of the President’s secretary died of the fever—one of the first cases, I believe,” he told Abigail. “Mr. Hamilton and his wife were both taken ill, though Mr. Hamilton, being from the West Indies himself, treated himself and her with cool infusions, and stayed away from doctors. Never a bad idea,” Sam added with a chuckle, though his only son, who had died soon after the War, had been a surgeon in Washington’s Army.

“You don’t think Mr. Hancock has the fever?” asked Bess, genuinely concerned. “He’s not been well all summer.”

The dapper little ex-tea-smuggler had beaten Sam for Governor of the State of Massachusetts every year for the past seven years, to Sam’s bitter chagrin. In 1789 Sam had been elected lieutenant governor, and his friends in the legislature had gotten together and pushed through a bill attaching a salary of five hundred pounds to the post, so that Sam would have something to live on.

“The Hancocks have a summer place in Braintree—Quincy,” Louisa corrected herself with a fleeting smile that reminded Abigail heartbreakingly of Louisa’s father, her scapegrace brother William, when he was young. “It’s mostly dropsy, Mrs. Hancock says, and he gets so tired so easily, for all that he’s only a few years younger than Uncle John.”

Shortly before they’d sailed from England in ’88, Abigail had gotten word of her brother William’s death, and of the fact that William had left his wife and daughters penniless.

Will hadn’t been a bad man, Abigail insisted. Just a very foolish one, given to drink and bad company. During her years in Europe, she and sister Mary had had a code between them: If a letter concerned Will, Mary would put a special mark on the outside of it, to warn Abigail not to open it until she was alone. She would usually speak to John later about it, but it was understood in the family that matters concerning Will were not for unguarded public consumption.

In sixteen-year-old Louisa—whom Abigail had not seen since her good-bye party at Cousin Isaac’s, when the girl had been twelve—Abigail had found the company she so painfully missed, now that Nabby and Colonel Smith were living near New York. In some ways more satisfactory than Nabby, much as Abigail loved and missed her daughter: Louisa was quicker-witted and more outspoken, without Nabby’s silent withdrawals.

Without, also, the unspoken anger at a husband who had turned out to be worse than useless.

“They’re saying that in Philadelphia, the worst of the fever is always along the waterfront,” put in Sam’s daughter Hannah. “Wasn’t it that some ships had unloaded sacks of rotten coffee from the West Indies, and it was the fumes from those, piled along the wharves, that engendered the plague?”

“And I’ve heard it said,” provided her husband, “that it was the refugees from Saint-Domingue that brought it in.”

“Refugees. Or the sailors from the French fleet that was in Philadelphia when it began,” growled Johnny.

The young clerk Mr. Boyne snapped to attention like a dog at an alien step. “That’s precisely the sort of tale that the Federalists are putting about in their tame newspapers, to stir up hatred against the French.”

So much for Bible oaths.

“You think Americans with their nation’s good at heart need to be ‘stirred up’ to mistrust an invading force that seeks to overthrow the government by riots?” demanded Johnny. “The way they’ve already overthrown half a dozen of their own?”

Sam set down his spoon. “As much as you Federalists seem to think that Americans need to be ‘stirred up’ by outsiders, to take up arms in the cause of Liberty, both abroad and at home.”

“If it
were
Liberty that is being practiced in France, I shouldn’t have any objection,” interposed Abigail calmly. “But there is a line between the cause of Liberty intelligently pursued, and the chaos that leaves men open to the manipulation of demagoguery, and I hope we all know on which side of the line the massacre of innocent people falls.”

The remainder of the meal reminded Abigail a great deal of those arguments that had taken place around the kitchen table of her old house on Queen Street, with brilliant, passionate Joseph Warren arguing for the necessity of organizing the colonies, and James Otis rising from his seat and spreading his arms in the firelight as if he would embrace all the sleeping earth, speaking of his vision of a world where every man would be free.

But Joseph Warren’s bullet-torn body had been carried from the field at Breed’s Hill, Abigail remembered as Briesler drove her and Louisa home along the shores of the bay. How would the government now be different, had he lived to contribute his intelligence to the nation for which he’d given the last blood in his heart?

When she closed her eyes it seemed to her that she could still smell the gunpowder, the sea, and the heavy green perfume of cut hay as she sat with eight-year-old Johnny on top of Penn’s Hill watching that battle: pale gun-flashes flickering through the smoke and flame of Charles Town’s burning houses.

And James Otis, so mad that he had sometimes had to be confined, had rushed into that same battle with a borrowed musket and emerged unscathed, only to be claimed within months by the demons within his mind. He had died, Abigail recalled, exactly as he would have requested God to take him: struck by lightning, while watching a summer storm, only months before the end of the War.

How would the world have been different, had his mind remained clear?

Had John—and Tom Jefferson for that matter—been here, and not in Europe, when the Constitution was forged?

Would the country now be facing the twin devils of faction and violence, that were dragging the United States toward a firestorm of fratricidal war?

She looked at Louisa, who had been quiet since they had left Cousin Sam’s house. The girl’s face was weary and a little sad in the luminous glow of the long summer twilight. If Abigail herself hadn’t been so genuinely frightened at the prospect of the pro-French party precipitating the kind of rioting that was tearing France apart, she would have enjoyed the intellectual swordplay over dinner. Even as angry as she was at Sam for his blind disregard of the facts, she felt alive as she hadn’t in over a year.

She loved Stonyfield Farm, loved having her family around her. But she missed the steely sparkle of Philadelphia politics, the clash of educated minds. She missed the aroma of power, of being part of the destiny of the young nation that was her life.

John’s life, too, since first they were wed.

Dear God, don’t let it be too late,
she prayed.
Bring me back to John’s side, if it is Your will. He needs me at his side—he WILL need me at his side, if he’s to rule this country after President Washington steps down.
The two men who were as brothers to him—Tom Jefferson and Cousin Sam—were deceived into the camp of his enemies. It was only upon his family, upon herself and Johnny, that he could rely.

If he was not already dead, in a mass grave somewhere in Philadelphia.
Vitaque mancipio, nulli datur, omnibus usu,
the Roman Lucretius had said:
Life is only lent to us to use, not given.
As the lights of Quincy gleamed ahead of them, a comforting daffodil-yellow against the matte silhouette of hills and trees, Abigail thought despairingly,
But don’t take him away NOW! The country needs him, desperately.

I need him.

Desperately.

Half her life, it seemed to her, she’d been waiting to hear whether John were alive or dead. At forty-nine, Abigail was old enough to know that she could survive his death, if God so willed it. She just couldn’t imagine how.

“It’s still light,” Louisa remarked. “Shall we walk over to Uncle Peter’s before bed, and tell Gran how we found Cousin Sam?” John’s brother Peter now lived in the old wooden house on the Plymouth road where Abigail and John had raised their children during the War. His family included Granny Susie, at ninety-four still brisk and lively after a second widowhood.

Briesler turned the chaise from the sea-road, inland toward the house that Royall Tyler had once planned to buy for Nabby, in the days when that long-vanished young rake had meant to make her his bride.

And now it is ours.
Politics and faction weren’t the only things that turned out differently than Abigail had expected.

While still in England, John and Abigail had bought the house and its acres. Though not nearly as big as Abigail had remembered it after five years abroad, John was pleased with it. “It is but the farm of a patriot,” he had said, and had named the place Stonyfield. Abigail had planted beside the path two white rosebushes that she’d brought from England, and in the garden a lilac tree.

“It sounds a good idea,” agreed Abigail. An evening walk in her niece’s company was certainly an improvement on lying awake yet another sweltering night, wondering if she would ever see John again.

Yet when Briesler drove the chaise in from the road, and helped aunt and niece down, Abigail stopped short, looking up at the house.

Wondering why the dog Caesar hadn’t dashed out to greet them. Wondering what was different.

Too many windows lit.

One of them the window of John’s study.

She felt as if someone could read a book by the light that bloomed instantly from her heart. Without a word she broke from Louisa and Briesler and almost ran up the path, up the steps to the door. He must have heard the carriage-wheels because he was running down the stairs as she burst into the hall, and they clung laughing, rocking in one another’s arms with shaggy little white-nosed Caesar dashing happy circles around their feet. It was dark as a grave in the hall and all Abigail could see of John for that first moment was the blur of shirtsleeve, stockings, and face; she knew she must have been no more than a silhouette.

It didn’t matter. They would have known each other in the darkness of Death.

“Is Tommy with you?” Louisa asked, something Abigail realized she should have asked as well, and surely would, when the incandescent wave of gratitude for John released its grip.

“I hoped to find him here.” John’s voice was grave. Abigail stepped back, cold sickness clutching again at her heart. “He was to leave Philadelphia the same day I left Germantown, and meet me on the road. When I didn’t encounter him, I didn’t know whether to wait a day at Trenton, or hasten my horse.”

“If anything had happened to him,” Louisa pointed out, leading the way down the hall to Abigail’s parlor, “someone would have written us here, you know.”

Another man would have spared his wife’s fears by agreeing, whatever he knew or privately thought. John being John, he only shook his head and said, “You don’t know how it is in Philadelphia, Louisa—or at least how it was when I left there two weeks ago. The corpse-gatherers sometimes don’t even stay to identify those they find. I doubt now I could even write to enquire at his lodgings, for there is no one who would take the letter to that accursed town. Nor anyone there alive to receive it.”

Her dearest Tommy.

Long after John drifted to sleep at her side, Abigail lay in the darkness, listening to the singing of the night-birds.

Thinking about her son. Her gentle, affable Tommy.

He hadn’t seemed any the worse for being left behind when they had departed for England, under the charge of her sister Betsey. Although perhaps too fond of a third glass of wine, of all her sons he seemed the steadiest, without Johnny’s tormented air of being unable to fit in anywhere, and without Charley’s—Her mind ducked away from her suspicion of what might be at the root of Charley’s problems, and substituted,
Without Charley’s lightness of mind, as well as of heart.

Though now that Charley was practicing law he seemed much steadier and more mature. So everything might very well be all right.

But as the thought went through her mind she couldn’t put aside the recollection of her brother Will, handsome like Charley and with Charley’s questing intelligence.

They deserved more of us.

Yet another thing that hadn’t turned out as planned.

Five years of entertaining on a scale that even approximated that of the noblemen who comprised most of the diplomatic corps in England and France had driven John into debt. Five years abroad had been five years that neither John nor Abigail had been able to work the farm into a paying proposition. Like the Smith side of the family, Tommy had wanted to be a merchant when he’d emerged from Harvard. But John had simply been unable to provide his youngest son the money to make his start.

In law, at least, a man could get a start with no tools but his mind and his books.

Would Charley have found a vocation that called to his quick mind and restless heart, had there been some other one available?

On his way through New York to Philadelphia last April, John had visited Charley in the city, and had called on Nabby and Colonel Smith in that isolated stone house in the woods of Long Island. At least Colonel Smith appeared, at long last, to be solvent, to such a degree that John had worried about what Jefferson’s tame newspapers would say of him if his daughter and her husband continued to swan about the city in brand-new finery and a coach-and-four. Abigail agreed that it looked bad, with the country on the verge of war, for the daughter and son-in-law of the Vice President to be so obviously rich, but her heart couldn’t avoid a whisper of relief.