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.”

Another small silence fell. Just for a moment, Jefferson’s eyes avoided hers. “On behalf of the men who supported me,” he said at last, “I do apologize, for causing you pain. Of which, this year, you have had enough.”

It was all he would say, concerning politics, concerning the election, concerning his supporters who were still in jail for trying to whip up hatred against the President. Concerning all the blood spilled in France, all the lies told and trust violated, only to put a dictator on its throne.

Jefferson is a dreamer, thought Abigail. Who had said that to her once? And his dream today was, before she took her leave, to reestablish something of the friendship they had lost. To pretend that all was actually well.

Briesler brought fresh tea, and candles, and another log for the fire. They drank together and Abigail pretended, for the sake of the man she’d once called her friend.

As she listened to his footfalls retreat down the echoing hall, she realized there was little likelihood that she would ever see Thomas Jefferson again.

The Federal City

Friday, February 13, 1801

As dreams went, Abigail reflected—as fairy-tales went—“happily ever after” was not, as Martha Washington had often said, “all it was cracked up to be.”

She stood in the long French window of the downstairs entrance-hall, waiting for the carriage in the gray chill of dawn. The furniture was gone. Louisa sat by one of the fireplaces cradling a bored and sleepy Susie in her arms.

We fought our war—we won our freedom…Journeys did end in lovers meeting.

Only the lover Nabby met turned out to be a good-for-nothing, and the freedom we fought for turned out to be freedom for dirty-minded newspapers to call John names while he battled to keep the country out of a war it couldn’t win.

And the prize for all our striving was the privilege of living in a world that we do not understand.

And along the way we lost our daughter’s hope and happiness, as surely as we lost poor Charley. As surely as John and I lost our dear friend Jefferson.

Abigail pulled her cloak tighter around her shoulders, watching the black-cloaked, slender figure that had to be Sophie Hallam walking toward her along Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol.

“They just finished ballot twenty-three,” she reported, as she arrived. “Still nothing. Some of the Federalists talk of asking the President Pro Tempore of the Senate to take over the position of Chief Executive if the deadlock cannot be resolved; or possibly Chief Justice Marshall…In which case, Mr. Jefferson says, he will call for another Convention to rewrite the Constitution again—presumably more to his liking.”

“Which is precisely what they did in France,” said Abigail bleakly. “Over, and over again. Whenever one faction didn’t like what was going on.”

“I understand militia is gathering in Virginia.”

Abigail shook her head, and for a long while was unable to speak. Unable to frame into words the anger and sickened pain in her heart. At last she said, “It’s just that I sat on Penn’s Hill and watched the fighting before Boston. And now, after all our struggle, it seems I’m going to see the Republic break into pieces within my lifetime, after seeing it born.”

“Mrs. Adams…” Sophie’s expression of sardonic amusement was gone. “You know Hammy isn’t going to let it happen. He wrote the Federalist Papers, for Heaven’s sake, if for no other reason than his pride won’t let him stand by and watch the Constitution he championed be swept away, completely aside from the fact that without General Washington to dote on him he has less control now over what the Republicans might come up with on a second try. He’ll back down, and give the election to Jefferson.”

“So that’s what we have come to,” asked Abigail bitterly, “in so short a time? To be thankful that one man’s vanity truckles to another man’s pride?”

“At least as things stand there is little likelihood that anyone is going to come posting up to Quincy to demand Mr. Adams return to public life the way they did to poor General Washington.”

Surprised into a cackle of laughter, Abigail responded, “Poor my grandmother’s lumbago! He delighted in being called back to the colors, when it looked as if we were to go to war with France. Poor Martha, to have waited for happiness for sixteen years, only to have it end in two—”

She broke off. Remembering that plump, black-clothed figure in the dilapidated parlor of Mount Vernon. The dreadful silence of slaves waiting for her death to bring them freedom. The footworn track that led from the house to the brick tomb overlooking the river. Where thy treasure is, there will your heart be also.

Wondering how many years of happiness were left to her and John, when they returned to the stony acres of their farm.

“Only, she didn’t wait for happiness, you know,” mused Sophie. “I think she was happy every day, just to be with him.”

Abigail thought about that. Balancing those grievous winter evenings by the kitchen fire in Braintree against the sparkle of sunrise on the jeweled sea, that first day she woke up on the Active and wasn’t seasick. Balancing the terror of waiting for British assault, against the salons of Paris in the last days of the Kings. The amazement of Handel’s “Messiah” sung in Westminster Abbey. Her garden in Auteuil and the wind in her hair, as she and John climbed hand in hand up the short green turf of the English downs…

Being John’s partner, all these years. As if she’d gone along to some vast war with him to stand at his elbow and load his gun. Even were their work to be swept away tomorrow, the fact that they had done it would remain in God’s heart, where all things were eternal.

And perhaps, too, in the minds of both women and men.

“I haven’t been happy every day,” she told Sophie. “But you know, I wouldn’t have traded a single one of them for anything.”

With a rattle of harness the carriage came around the corner of the drive, the wagon behind it heavy with furniture, trunks, servants bound for home. The inner door of the huge cold room opened and John came in. “The barometer’s holding steady,” he reported, as Sophie faded tactfully through the French window and down the wooden stair. “I pray you’ll be comfortable—”

“If I made it in safety across the ocean,” Abigail assured him, “I’m sure I’ll reach Quincy in one piece, and have the house snug for you on your return.”

“My return.” John sighed. “God knows what will happen here in the meantime…. And Jefferson, of course, is still refusing to tell anyone athing about his intentions—” He shook his head, like a horse enraged by a horse-fly. “He could be plotting to abolish religion entirely in this country, the way they did in France—he’s completely capable of it—or turn the states loose to do as they please, and undo everything the Convention labored to—”

Abigail put her hands on his shoulders: “It will be all right, John,” she said, as she had said to Nabby, when her daughter had clung to her in the blackness of storm at sea, their lives in balance between the world they’d known and a future unforeseen. She wasn’t entirely sure she believed it, but Martha’s words came back to her mind. We go where our hearts command us, in the faith that it is God who formed our hearts. Which included Mr. Jefferson, as well as John. Whether Mr. Jefferson believed it or not.

Perhaps all things did return at last, to where they were meant to be.

She said again, more firmly, “It will be all right.”

As John walked her down the steps to the carriage, Abigail looked from the dreary, bare expanse of stumps and trees back to the house: enormous, unfinished inside, still smelling of newness, like the country itself. Waiting for what would come.

But that was out of her hands now. And out of John’s.

“God willing, I shall see you in a month,” John said, and kissed her gloved hands, then her mouth. “And God willing, from that point on, ‘I’ll go no more a-rovin’ with you, fair maid.’ ”

The carriage started off; Abigail hummed the old song a little, to the creak of the wheels on the icy road.

A-rovin’, a-rovin’, since rovin’s been my ru-i-in,

I’ll go no more a-rovin’ with you, fair maid….

Looking back, she saw his stumpy black figure, standing on the steps of the great raw half-finished Mansion, in the muddy wilderness that civilization had barely scratched. Her John. A stout balding patriot who had seen everything of one of the most astonishing events of History—and who had seen it at her side. She sighed and settled back, and hoped they’d make Baltimore by nightfall.

MARTHA

Mount Vernon Plantation