Waiting to ambush Jemmy, as he rode to Salona, thinking to join her?

But when she thought of Sophie, and of the roving bands of British soldiers, she pushed her doubts aside and breathed a prayer for the safety of her friend. It was said that British stragglers had stripped the countryside between their landing-point at Benedict and the city itself. The half-dozen men and boys in the house, including her host, were grouped in the downstairs hall, but in the event of a determined incursion by the enemy their collection of dueling-pistols and hunting-arms could only serve to trigger deadly violence.

Sooner than that, she thought, as torches and lanterns began to gather again on the road beyond the trees, I will give myself up. The thought turned her sick with dread.

Even flight out the back door and into the surrounding woods might not serve to save her hosts or their dwelling. And in the woods would be looters, and runaway slaves.

She strained her eyes at the glass, to penetrate the wild darkness. On the road she could only guess at a confusion of movement, but it seemed to her there was a large force there. The roaring of the trees carried away any sound. For interminable minutes Dolley watched, heart pounding, before the flickering spots of fire retreated back into the darkness, in the direction from which they’d come.

A single speck of flame detached itself from the woods. Bobbed through the wind-whirled blackness toward the house.

Dolley took a deep breath, and went downstairs.

Joe the coachman was just opening the front door when Dolley reached the hall. Sophie Hallam stood on the threshold with a lantern in her hand. “Who was that?” Dolley asked, breathless, and Sophie replied with a shrug, “Merely some gentlemen who’d missed their way. I sent them back toward Georgetown.” Sophie’s eyes met Dolley’s for a silent moment, tired and bitterly sad. Then Dolley stepped forward and took her in her arms.

“That was good of thee,” she said softly, and led her to the stairs.

“Are you all right?” whispered Sophie, as they entered the silent bedroom above.

Dolley nodded. “I’ve seen Jemmy.” Hesitantly, she added, “Hast thou been to Salona?” and Sophie raised a brow, as if she knew exactly what was in Dolley’s mind. Through the open window spits of rain had begun to fall. The wild air outside was suddenly thick with the breath of the storm.

“I have—alone—and Mr. Madison is not there yet, though I suspect he’s safe. The men have marched thirteen miles in the heat from Bladensburg today, and fought a battle,” she added. There was anger in her voice for the frustrated weariness of the British soldiers—Dolley knew instinctively whom she meant by the men—faced once again with the conquest of cities in a hostile countryside far too big to subdue.

They were, when all was said, back exactly where they had been in 1776. And they knew it.

“Now the rain’s begun, even the stragglers will turn back.” Sophie gazed into the night. Flames flickered through the trees.

“Did they burn the house?”

“Of course. And the Capitol. And more tomorrow, I think.”

Dolley closed her eyes, too tired even to think. Remembering Martha, faithfully journeying to all those winter camps. The British had held the cities and the ragged colonial Army had all they could do to keep them bottled up there, in a grueling eight-year stalemate that only France had broken, for reasons of France’s own. Remembering Mr. Adams’s after-dinner stories of Abigail, trying to keep house and household together in the face of British raids and what the War had done to the country—

We were young then, and the country was young.

“Must we do it all again?” She wasn’t even aware she’d spoken her thought aloud, until Sophie replied, “Would you not want to?”

In her mind, Dolley saw the red coats of Banastre Tarleton’s dragoons, like splashed blood against the brown Virginia woods, on their way to sack Monticello. Saw the children and the families that had been left behind when Abigail, or Martha—or she herself—had made the choice to follow a man, and give to their offspring only what was left over, of their hearts, their energy, their too-finite time.

“I am not sure that I could,” she answered at last. “I don’t mean the fighting. Ye shall hear of wars, and rumors of war: these things shall come to pass. But what it costs, to forge a new world. For it doth take the life of a man, and more of his life than he hath in him to give: constant labor and for the most part unthanked. We have both seen this. And if we go with him—whether to wash his shirt and load his rifle, or to preside over a thousand ill-matched dinners, or only to make sure that he hath a safe place at night to lay his head—do we not betray our children, by giving to the new world what should rightly have been theirs?”

“Are you thinking of Eliza Custis and her sisters?” asked Sophie quietly. “Or poor Charley Adams—and even poorer Nabby and Johnny?”

Or the slave-born boy everybody at Monticello except Patsy called President Tom, and his brothers and sister?

Or—and Dolley flinched from the thought—Payne Todd, Virginia planter’s son, currently living a life of extremely expensive dissipation in Ghent?

Far-off thunder boomed. Rain whirled in at the window, pounding hard now, and the two women struggled to close the casement against it. The candle flame on its table leaned drunkenly, then straightened; water poured down the panes as if from a bucket.

“It seems now that it all hath been for nothing,” Dolley murmured. “The country we have tried to build with our dear friends hath all but torn itself to pieces, not only with lies but with different truths. The Revolution in France that split us apart hath ended in Napoleon, and now he, too, is gone down in defeat. A King sits on France’s throne and the English Army is once again on our shores. After all we have given, we stand where we stood before, having robbed our children to no purpose.”

“Had I faith in God,” replied Sophie, folding her arms, “I would remark that nothing in this world lies outside His purpose. As I don’t, I will only point out that they—those children—are the new world. And bear in themselves all the treasure, good and bad, of the old. Payne would be Payne, however he was raised. His sins might take a different form, but he would still sin them, and bring down your heart in sorrow to the grave—if you let him. Abigail’s brother was a drunkard, in spite of loving, intelligent parents who didn’t deposit him with relatives and go running off to play politics in France. I don’t think there was a thing she could have done to save either him or Charley, or Nabby and Nabby’s children. Maybe there never is.”

“No,” Dolley whispered tiredly. “No, thou art right. It needs no revolution for sons and daughters both to make foolish choices that lead them to unhappiness. We only think there should have been something that we could have done.”

“But you’ll never get Abigail to admit it,” said Sophie briskly. “Do you think we could open the window again a little? The rain seems to be slacking and it’s like an oven in here.”

Only a trace of the stench of smoke remained in the green sweet magic that filled the room with the opening of the window again. The magic of a summer night in Virginia. Dolley leaned her forehead against the wet window-jamb, breathing in the scent of it, and with it the childhood she’d shared with Sophie in Hanover County, while Jemmy was off studying law and reading Tom Paine and going to Princeton and falling in love with that dreadful Fulton girl who broke his heart, all unbeknownst to her.

The past and the dreams she’d felt, an hour ago, to have been lost with a Queen’s mirror in a burning Mansion, suffused the air around her with their living presence, as close as the patter of rain on the trees.

“They may have taken the city,” said Dolley, looking out through the blackness where lightning still flickered, but where now no trace of flame could be seen. “Yet Mr. Madison will rally the militia, and the tide will turn. We will drive them out as we did before. And make our new world, in their despite.”

A half-smile touched the corner of Sophie’s mouth, just before the guttering candle puffed itself out in a whisper of smoke. “Do you know,” she replied softly, “I think we will.”

EPILOGUE

McKeowin’s Hotel, Washington City