Patriot Hearts (61 page)

But a part of her wondered,
Should John step down? Or should he make a stand against what is clearly the beginning of ruin for this country?

The voting in the House of Representatives took place on Wednesday, the eleventh of February; Abigail was already packing to leave. After weeks of pounding rains, the sky had cleared. Though the cold remained arctic, the northward roads were drying. Whoever won the House vote, Abigail knew, it would not be John. The thought of staying on in the Federal City—in a hotel? As a guest of one of Martha Washington’s granddaughters?—was more than John, or she, could bear.

If John had ever entertained the thought of not stepping down, of not leaving the country to the mercies of a Jacobin demagogue, he never spoke of it. And since John spoke to her of whatever entered his mind, it was safe to believe that it hadn’t. At one point he had considered resigning in protest a few days before the inauguration, but Abigail had talked him out of it. It would not do, she said, for him to appear a bad loser.

“I
am
a bad loser,” he’d replied. “Tom…Well, Burr would be worse. Tom may be a Deist, and a Jacobin, but Burr is…Burr is nothing.”

He’d come down to the great East Room where Abigail was taking down the laundry, which took two days to dry in the clammy cold.
Only politicians could have designed this house,
Abigail reflected, flexing her aching shoulders. It had no service courtyard, nor even a fence around it, and the stables were nearly a mile away. Going back and forth to the Presidential Necessary-House was bad enough. Weeks of rain aside, she wasn’t about to hang the Presidential linen out in full view of the likes of James T. Callendar’s spiritual brethren.

“Burr is all technique.” John’s breath puffed white in the silvery window-light. “All slick cleverness. He’s the kind of lawyer I used to hate coming up against in court because he’s half an actor. He has all the facts but moves them around like chess-pieces, to whatever angle will look best to the jury. Tom, at least, there’s a real man inside. A good man. But whether that man’s decisions can be trusted…”

His breath blew out in a sigh. “Well,” he said after a moment, “I’ve done what I can. And will do what I can.” At the far side of the great chamber, Charley’s tiny daughter Susie ran giggling among the clothes-ropes, hotly pursued by little Caro Smith. It was a relief, to see how John’s eyes brightened at the sight of the girls.

He went on, “At least the Senate approved the treaty with France. Jefferson can’t tamper with that, though the Good Lord only knows what other tricks Bonaparte has up his sleeve. And, thank God, they passed my proposal to increase the number of circuit courts, so at least there’ll be responsible Federalist judges to interpret whatever laws the Republicans dream up. Including,” he added, with the grim ghost of a smile, “John Marshall as Chief Justice, now that Ellsworth has resigned.”

“John Marshall?”
Abigail stood for a moment, sheet over her arms, startled out of her depression. She remembered how the handsome Virginian had bent his head to listen to John at the New Year’s levee—how furiously Tom Jefferson had protested when his enemy (and third cousin) had been named one of the chief negotiators of the French treaty. A slow smile spread over her face. “Well. There’s one Mr. Jefferson won’t be able to talk his way around.”

“Nor,” said John, handing her the laundry-basket, “without dismantling the Constitution—the very thing he accused
us
of wanting to do—will he be able to get rid of him.”

Now, as she folded the crisply ironed petticoats into her trunk, Abigail heard hooves on the hard-frozen gravel of the drive. Looking out, she glimpsed her nephew Billy Shaw—Betsey’s boy, hired as John’s secretary and assistant—limping up the makeshift stair.
So it’s done,
she thought, and whispered a prayer, because John was perfectly right about Burr. Was an honest Jacobin more to be desired than a man who’d sell his support to the highest bidder?

Footfalls on the stairs. Billy’s halting, John’s firmer tread.

Abigail looked up.

“It’s a deadlock,” said John.

Abigail had been braced for any news but that. “I thought the House vote was supposed to
break
the deadlock.”
Honestly, couldn’t they even get THAT right?

“The Federalists still control the House,” said John grimly. “The new Congress hasn’t been seated yet. This is the
last
session that’s voting. And the Federalists who aren’t under Hamilton’s control trust Burr. Tom has eight states—” He ticked them off on his chubby, chilblained fingers. “Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Georgia, Virginia, New Jersey, New York, and North Carolina. That’s one short of a majority. Burr has six, and Vermont and Maryland are both deadlocked. They’ve cast six ballots already. Nobody’s moving.”

By eleven o’clock that night, when the Representatives were starting in on their eighteenth or nineteenth ballot, the situation was still the same.

And still the same when Billy Shaw came back in the morning from the all-night session. Men were sending out for food, he said, and for coffee and some for clean linen.

And the vote was still tied. The sky was still clear. The road home still open.

“Fools!” John shoved his breakfast porridge from him, struck the table with the flat of his hand so that all the glasses jumped. “Don’t they see what they’re doing? Weren’t any of them paying
attention
to what happened in France?”

His face suffused with anger, the “ungovernable temper” that all his life his foes had exaggerated, though Abigail had never found it ungovernable at all. One just had to let him shout himself breathless, and later he’d be perfectly sensible.

“It was divisiveness that brought France to ruin, every man pulling his own way! Stabbing one another in the back! Hamilton’s still holding on to the votes of the men who support his party. He won’t back Burr under any circumstances and he won’t back Tom unless Tom will give him assurances of what to expect, which I don’t think is an unreasonable request. Just the assurance that he’s not an outright advocate of anarchy would do!”

“They’ll all feel very silly,” remarked Sophie Hallam, when she came by later in the day with word that on the twenty-first ballot the House was still split, eight to six to two, “with all the flags put up for the inauguration, if they don’t know who to inaugurate.” She sounded pleased.

The short winter day was drawing to a close and the last of Abigail’s few callers had departed, when Jack Briesler tapped at the upstairs parlor door. “Mr. Jefferson to see you, ma’am.”

Jefferson looked as if he had not slept last night. Spots of pink showed high on the Virginian’s elegant cheekbones, and on the end of his long nose. In a year or two his faded hair would all be silver. Abigail had sat next to him at dinner just after the New Year, but this was the first time they had seen one another alone since…

She tried to calculate, running the years back in her mind.

Since London. They’d gone to the theater together, on a night when John had been obliged at the last minute to meet with the Portuguese Ambassador. They’d walked home through the chilly March mists, talking of fossil bones and Indians and mesmerism and the education of women…What one always talked about with Tom.

Everything except what he truly thought on any subject, or the contents of his heart.

That was the evening she’d given him Nabby’s sketch of the garden of the Paris house.

You will be welcome in our home,
she had said to him that evening,
as often as you care to come, as long as you care to remain, at whatever hour you make your appearance.

Like so many last times, she had been unaware that it would be the last.

She had not realized how much she had missed her friend.

Tears filled her eyes and she blinked them away.
Weak,
she thought, furiously.
Losing Charley has made me weak—

“Mrs. Adams.” He bowed over the hand she held out to him. “Is there any service I can offer you, before you take your leave?”

Not urging your journalist friends to call my husband a fat dotard before all the nation? Not lying about him behind his back to the President he served?

Perhaps giving him support he could trust?

Or had these acts been only Tom’s view of how politics should be conducted? Part and parcel of his inability to see any inconsistency in hating slavery and giving his daughter twelve families of living human beings as a wedding-present?

For a moment silence hung between them in the shadowy parlor, chilly with the sinking of the fire. Only her own chair remained unsheeted near the hearth.

They had met in a crowded room, she recalled, looking across at the tall man before her. Life and promise glinting like the diamonds on the frame of Martha’s French mirror. The War over, the world of sea-voyages and new romances ahead.
Journeys end in lovers meeting….

Now there was nothing but stillness, and shadow, and years that could never be recovered.

She sighed, and said, “None that I can think of, sir. We’ve been living here like a couple of vagabonds, John and I. It only remains to bundle our tooth-brushes up in our spare shirts and be on our way….”

And Jefferson laughed. Slipping easily into the banter of friendship, as if the more recent past had not existed. “Perhaps I could offer you a cow to take along, as you did to France?” He looked around him at the oval parlor. A beautiful room, Abigail thought, with its gold-starred wallpapers, but like everything in the house, too big to be really comfortable. “To tell you the truth, this house has always appalled me,” he remarked. “It’s a palace—it would swallow Versailles and have room left for the Dalai Lama. My heart bled for you, trying to heat it.”

“I always wished,” said Abigail quietly, meeting his eye, “that those wretches who called us ‘monarchial’ could have seen how we actually lived here. With six servants and no way to get wood, in spite of the fact that there were trees whichever way we looked. Of all the accusations, that was the most unjust.”