Like his love for his daughter and his love—if love it be—for his Sally?

Like two separate fossil bones, stored in different drawers in different rooms.

Dolley sighed. “But the world is real, Anna. And speeches in Congress tell only half the story, and that not the most important half. Nowadays no man of intelligence believes Congressional speech in any case. ’Tis what is said in private that counts.”

The two carriages behind them turned off down the tree-shaded streets of Georgetown. The gold light of sunset illuminated the woods around them, but already the evening chill gathered under the trees, the peculiarly damp, miasmal cold that seemed to seep out of the ground in this place. Abigail Adams, Sophie had written her, had lived last winter in an agony of rheumatism. And even after only a few days in these marshy lowlands, Dolley was wondering what the effect would be on poor Jemmy.

And indeed, she thought, on Payne. In Philadelphia’s muggy summers and damp winters, her son had shown her own tendency to colds and chest complaints. In the mountains at Montpelier he’d been as healthy as a pony. Moreover, she’d already ascertained that there was no such thing as a decent school in the Federal City, and it was getting more and more difficult to get the boy to pay the slightest attention to his tutor. Try as she would not to become one of those fondly doting mamas she had always gently mocked, the thought of losing him filled her with such dread.

She would have to ask some of the older inhabitants of the vicinity—not that there were many “old inhabitants” in the city itself!—what they intended for the education of their sons.

The trees broke to the left of the road, and Dolley contemplated in passing the six red-brick buildings that stood isolated among them. Like nearly every building within the boundaries of the Federal City, they were surrounded by piles of building debris and a latticework of water-filled wagon-ruts that reflected the limpid gold of the evening sky. The State Department had shut up shop hours ago, its six clerks slogging their way back along the muck of Pennsylvania Avenue to the cluster of boardinghouses, taverns, and small shops that huddled behind the unfinished Capitol, over three miles away.

The house next to the State Department, Dolley knew, would be hers. The headquarters from which she would begin setting up the network of calling and being called upon—the country distances would be a challenge in winter—that cemented the foundations of political support.

She took from her reticule the gold hand-mirror Martha had given her and turned it over in her gloved fingers, admiring the flash of the jewels on the frame—not real, surely?—and the ivory miniature of the sweet-faced lady with old-fashioned ostrich-plumes in her hair. A tale, Martha had said. And, Keep it safe… Which she’d do without being asked, for her dear friend’s sake.

In the distance Dolley saw the whitewashed walls of the President’s House.

“A State prisoner,” Martha had called herself, and had dreaded the Federal City that she had herself never seen.

Abigail, Sophie had written to her, had hated the place—Understandably, reflected Dolley, with a pang of pity in her heart for that indomitable Yankee lady who had come to this place only to learn of the death of her younger son.

Yet seeing the white walls, she felt her heart lift, the way it did when she dreamed of flying.

A new city and a new world. A city like none other that the world had known—though she could imagine Mrs. Adams’s horrified expression as she agreed with that statement. A city of tulip trees and wild roses, of streams rank with wild grapevines, of open countryside free of the stinking miasmas of Philadelphia’s alleys. A city unbuilt, with all the promise of things still within the realm of dreams.

A new city for the new world of Washington’s hopes and Jefferson’s visions, Mr. Adams’s stubborn courage and her own Jemmy’s wisdom.

More than Philadelphia, more than the sleepy beauty of Montpelier, Dolley understood that in coming to this place, she had finally come home.



Washington City