Patriot Hearts (43 page)

Her body ached, between her thighs, from the unaccustomed movements of lovemaking, and she had a bruise on her shoulder from the bricks of the washhouse floor. A kind of languid peace filled her, as she pulled off her cap, shook out her hair, and combed it with the silver comb that she kept locked in her chest beneath the bed. Lam had said to her that afternoon that he was coming up tomorrow, with salt and coffee and sugar, and nail-rod iron for the new construction Jefferson planned. She would have to speak to him then.

Tell him there was no chance of her changing her mind, soon or ever.

You foolin’ away your chances,
Jimmy had accused.

But which chances had she been fooling away?

And was she still?

She ran her hands through her long hair, curly and silky as a white woman’s, gathering it back into a wavy knot.
I love you,
Lam had said.

And Tom, as usual, nothing at all. To him words were weapons, and the palette with which he painted dreams.

And in any case words shifted their meanings, depending on the race of the speaker and the one to whom they were said. Does
I need you
really mean
I need someone
?

Was it his heart that needed her, or only his prick?

She knew what any woman on the place would have answered to that, yet in three years, there were easier solutions to
that
problem than the one he chose. Because she was a Hemings, and not, in his eyes, truly black? Because she was familiar, trusted, a friend since childhood—because he knew he could dominate her?

Because she had known him from her childhood, had seen everything that had gone into making him the man he was?

With Tom, one could only speculate—she wondered if Patsy had any clearer idea of her father’s heart than she had. And oddly, she felt a regret that they could not talk as they had when they were children. She would genuinely have liked to compare notes with the one other woman who knew him well.

But in love with him and out of love with him didn’t seem to matter to the deeper attachment of her heart, nor did her awareness of his faults. They were—and would always be—a part of one another’s lives, completely aside from whatever he might tell himself about his feelings for her, if he told himself anything at all.

He might simply tell himself—or his little friend Mr. Madison, who these days seemed closest to his heart—that a man needed an occasional “bout” with a woman for the sake of his health, and a clean, healthy country slave-woman was certainly preferable to whatever was available on the pavements of Philadelphia.

Yet in her heart she knew it was more than that. And she suspected that whatever her mother might say, Tom probably didn’t understand it any more than she did.

Light and sweet, above the crying of the crickets the whisper of a violin drifted down from the house, playing Boccherini in the dark.

DOLLEY

Gray’s Ferry, Pennsylvania

Thursday, October 24, 1793

A
child was crying in her nightmare.

I must wake up,
Dolley thought.
I must wake up and save Payne.

The British are coming and we have to flee to the woods.

No, that’s wrong,
she thought.
It’s Willie who’s crying. Baby Willie.

The infant’s red face returned to her, fever-flushed, the little withered scrap of body that looked so much like that of a newborn kitten.

It’s just a little summer fever,
she told her mother, as she wrung out the damp cloth, over and over again. Sponged the delicate skin that seemed to bag so horribly over bones more fragile than a bird’s.
Just a little summer fever. If we can keep him cool, we’ll be fine.

The stone cottage John had rented on the banks of the Schuylkill had a good, deep well behind it. The water came up so cold, even in the sticky October heat, that she had to settle it out in a pan, so it wouldn’t be too cold for poor little Willie’s flesh.

How could she feel so passionate a love for someone whose face she’d first seen only seven weeks ago?

In her nightmare she sat beside the infant’s cot, in the small chamber her mother had laid claim to when first they’d come to Gray’s Ferry. But the sounds she heard through the window were the sounds of Philadelphia, in those last weeks before Willie’s birth: the endless tolling of the church bells, the jolt of wagons on the cobbles of the street as families hurried from the town to seek refuge from the fever in the countryside. The creak of the dead-carts, and the voices of the black drivers calling, “Bring out yo’ dead!”

Dolley’s eyes snapped open.

Morning light streamed in at the wide-flung window, the hot air already rank with the musky scents of the country.

Would the heat never break?

She sat up, and was at once swamped by a wave of dizzy weakness. She clutched at the bedpost.
Don’t lie down,
she told herself.
If you lie down, you’ll fall asleep again, and Willie needs you. Payne needs you.

She took deep breaths.

As she’d dreamed, she saw she was indeed in the stone house at Gray’s Ferry that John had rented for them when the fever began to spread beyond the waterfront.

So that part at least hadn’t been a dream. Birds twittered in the trees outside the window. Somewhere close a dog barked, clear as a bell in the stillness of the morning. Dolley’s head ached from too little sleep, but the autumn scent of turning leaves and clear water revived her. It woke in her heart the echo of pleasure-parties when all the young people of the Meeting would drive here to walk in these green woods by the river, away from Philadelphia’s oppressive heat. In those days she’d strolled past this house a hundred times with barely a glance.

She wondered now, a little superstitiously, how she could not have felt a shudder of dread.

By the time the fever spread inland, Dolley had been too close to her time to be moved. John had rented the cottage at Gray’s Ferry to take her and the children to the moment she could travel.

For some minutes Dolley sat, trying to recruit her strength. Listening to the birds and hearing in her mind, as if it spilled through from her dreams, the tolling bells and the creak of the carts collecting the dead. In her nostrils the spice of autumn leaves, the swoony sweetness of hay, turned to the sulfur reek of the barrels of tar that had been burned in yards and on street corners to cleanse the fever miasma said to hang like an unseen vapor in the air. When, in her final week of pregnancy, Sarah Parker and Lizzie Collins came calling, they carried lengths of tarred rope in their hands, believing that some quality of the tar itself, rather than the smoke of its burning, would keep the fever at bay.

Aaron Burr—completely unrepentant about slipping love-notes from Steptoe to Lucy—wrote her from Germantown,
I have entertained myself in the Senate Chamber by devising a catalogue of the talismans clutched by my colleagues in the hope of frightening the Grim Reaper: six lengths of tarred rope, eight handkerchiefs soaked with camphor and four with vinegar, and one peeled onion. The smell is as you may imagine.

He also sent her a copy of
Tom Jones,
which made the concluding days of August easier to bear, though she had to hide the book from her mother. “Libertine” or not (as John disapprovingly described Burr), it was hard to stay angry at the diminutive Colonel for long, particularly after the joy she read between the lines of Lucy’s first letter from Harewood Plantation.

And as September brought the death-count to sixty and more a day, even John had to agree with her that it was better that Lucy was somewhere safe, even if it did mean she was married to an Outsider.

“We shall leave just as soon as Dr. Kuhn says thou’rt strong enough after the baby’s birth,” John had promised, gripping Dolley’s hand. “The air is better, up in the hills. There is no fever there.”

Listening hard, Dolley heard the murmur of voices elsewhere in the house, and the creak of her mother’s stride on the planks of the hall. Then Anna’s voice saying something about water. Anna and Mary, and her eleven-year-old brother Johnnie had all come out with them to Gray’s Ferry. Dolley closed her eyes, thanking God again that like Lucy, they were away from the horrors of the plague-stricken town.

Though she’d been hale and lively while carrying Payne, eighteen months ago, Dolley had been exhausted by the final weeks of her second pregnancy. Willie’s birth had seemed endless, draining every atom of strength from her as she clung to her husband’s hands. As that night wore on she had wept with weakness, pain, and a fear that she had never known while birthing Payne. Then in the long nightmare of the ordeal’s aftermath, suffocating in the heat and listening to her child’s feeble cries, she had whispered to her mother to leave her, to go out to Gray’s Ferry and not to wait for her. To save themselves, save Payne, save little Willie who was clearly sickly himself.

Before she was even well, she recalled, she had crept from bed to sit holding her frail tiny son in her arms. Nights and afternoons blurred into one long half-dream. Willie had seemed a little better when they removed to Gray’s Ferry, for the family cow could get good fresh grass out here and her milk was better: To Dolley’s mingled sadness and relief, her own milk had dried.

But he hadn’t put on weight as a baby should. And last week, his bouts of fever had returned. Dolley had sat up with him last night and the night before, til the hot lamplight swam before her eyes and the whine of the single mosquito in the room had seemed like the drawn-out note of a hellish violin. She didn’t know what time it had been, when her mother had forced her to go to bed.

Her hands trembled as she reached across to where her wrapper lay on the bed. Just standing up made her pant.
Has John come back?
she wondered, as she gathered up her long black braid into a loose knot at her nape.
And is Willie silent because he’s sleeping at last, or because…?

She pushed the terror away and crossed to the door, only to have it open as she reached it: Anna, her gray dress and white apron water-spotted, a pitcher in her hands. “Sister—!” She was clearly as startled as Dolley had been. “Art well?”

Dolley nodded. “Willie—?”

“Sleeps.” Anna’s voice cracked a little on the word.

A truth, but not the whole truth.

Without a word Dolley brushed past her, hastened down the hall.

The house at Gray’s Ferry was a simple one, built of stone, its plastered walls whitewashed rather than painted. The large room on the east was hers and John’s, with a truckle-bed for Payne. At her mother’s insistence, they’d set up Willie’s cradle in her mother’s cubicle next door, so that Dolley could rest—as if anyone could rest, reflected Dolley, too weary even to feel annoyed, with the sound of her child crying, and the constant frightening shuffle of comings and goings that brought her out of bed a hundred times a day to ask,
Doth he better?

The cradle stood near the window, where the light was best. Her mother sat on the edge of the bed beside it, a basin near her feet and on a tray a pile of rags. Molly Payne was working steadily, mechanically, as she and Dolley had worked all last night and the nights before, wringing the rags out in the water, and gently laying them on the little body. From the doorway Dolley could hear what she had not, in her own room next door: the faint, sobbing whimper of an infant too exhausted to make any other sound.

Molly looked up. She was crying as she worked, without breaking the movement of what she did and without making a noise. Dolley came to her side. From downstairs in the parlor she heard Payne’s shrill voice, insisting, “Mama!” and Mary, with artificial brightness, “Now, sugarplum, thy mama is laid down on her bed. Dost not want the hobbyhorse?”

“Want Mama
now
!”

Payne had made no secret that the acquisition of a tiny brother—and one who did nothing but cry—was not an acceptable exchange for a mother who no longer had the time to play with, fuss over, or sing to him. Through her illness and fatigue, Dolley had always made time in the evenings to play with Payne before she slept. It was not her son’s fault that his world had turned topsy-turvy.

Molly got to her feet, crossed to close the bedroom door against the high-pitched insistent protests. Dolley lifted tiny William Temple Todd from the damp mattress on which he lay, sat with him on the edge of her mother’s bed. She didn’t need to touch him to know he was burning with fever. He was bone-thin, unable since yesterday to swallow either gruel or milk. She wrapped him in the crib’s sheet and held him against her shoulder, rocking him gently, knowing in her heart that it was time to say good-bye to her son.

“No word yet from John?”

“Nothing. Mrs. Ridgley tells me that none come or go from Philadelphia now, and that it is like a city of the dead.”

Dolley shivered, trying to imagine any situation worse than the one she had seen there nearly four weeks ago. At John’s request she had returned briefly to Philadelphia, to witness his ailing father’s will. She shivered at the recollection of the empty streets, of the choking miasma of burning tar, sulfur smudges, waste and garbage left in streets because there was no one to cart them away. She had never warmed to her father-in-law, whom she considered too quick with his schoolmaster’s rod—one reason, she suspected, for John’s profound gentleness with Payne. But she carried enough of the love she had felt for her own father to understand John’s deep love for the stern Todd senior, and his stubborn loyalty when the old man had fallen ill.

After the will was signed, both she and John had tried to talk John’s mother into taking refuge with them in Gray’s Ferry. She would not leave her sick husband’s side. Nor would John desert his father, despite Dolley’s pleas. As her closely shrouded carriage had rolled through the streets once more, the rattle of its wheels in the deathly silence had sounded to her like the echo of pursuit.