“It’s something that belongs to you,” replied Abigail, smiling at the pleasure in her friend’s eyes. “And has rightfully belonged to you for eighteen years now.”

Martha looked up, surprised, from trying to read the engraving traced on the rim. Abigail’s eyes hadn’t been good enough to decipher it without her spectacles, either, but she knew it said Liberté—Amitié. “Dear Heavens, not the Queen’s gift, after all this time?” And she turned it over, to look at the ostrich-plumed portrait on the back.

“A part of it, I believe—Sophie believes,” Abigail added. “She sent it to me, to ask what should be done with it: Did it rightly belong to you, or to the nation? She came by it from a New York friend—” Privately, Abigail suspected Aaron Burr…and suspected that he and Mrs. Hallam were rather more than friends. “—and would have thought nothing of it, she says. But when she was in Paris she was friends with that little slave nursemaid of Mr. Jefferson’s—a dear good-hearted girl but never about when you needed her—and they still correspond.”

For a moment Martha looked as if she had something to say on the subject of anyone so foolish as to teach a slave to read, but then, as if recalling Mr. Jefferson’s known eccentricity, did not.

Which was just as well, thought Abigail. She went on, “Apparently the girl reminded her that they’d seen nécessaires de voyage of the kind at a shop in the Palais Royale—with night-lights, combs, that sort of thing—and that the proprietor had boasted of crafting the one the poor Queen sent to you in some kind of lavish casket in 1782. She ordered it set with her portrait surrounded by diamonds, he said, and engraved: Liberté—Amitié. And I do think this must have come from it, wherever the other bits have gone.”

Martha turned it again, the gold sparkling in the firelight. In a moment, thought Abigail, she’d call Nelly and Louisa over to admire it. But for an instant longer the old woman held it to herself, looking into its depths as if within them she could see 1782 again: the General alive, her niece Fanny alive, the French Queen herself and so many others still alive. Charley safely home from Europe and happy again with his family. The bloody consequences of Revolution and the bitter exhaustion of dreams shattered still wool unspun on Fate’s distaff. A year when “happily ever after” was still in sight.

“As you weren’t the Presidentress in 1782,” Abigail went on, “I don’t see how this can belong to the nation. It was simply a gift from one woman to another.”

From the last Queen of a kingdom that no longer existed, she thought, to the first hostess—the first consort—of a nation that, in 1782, had yet to be born.

“So all things do come in time to where they’re meant to be,” Martha murmured. “No matter what happens to us in the meantime. Thank you, dear. I’ll keep this, and look at it whenever I need to remember.”



“Is she all right?” Abigail asked Sophie, as the widow’s black driver helped her into Abigail’s carriage.