America's First Daughter: A Novel(127)
He didn’t say it like a man who intended to cross paths with me. But he leaned forward to press two quick, chaste kisses upon my cheek in the French style. Then we stood awkwardly together while I reeled.
Our bitter parting in France had weighed upon me all these years. I couldn’t bear to part bitterly again, so I was grateful that he’d asked for my friendship. I wanted to clasp his hands tightly and show him the full measure of my feelings, but our situation was already more irregular than I ought to allow. So I said, “Be well, Mr. Short. Be happy.”
Then I turned to go.
“Mrs. Randolph?”
I turned to see him looking very wistful. “Your friend Mr. Madison once wrote that if men were angels there’d be no need for government. Remember, when you go to Washington City, that there’s no place for an angel in the capital.”
Chapter Twenty-eight
To Thomas Jefferson from “A Friend to the Constitution”
This comes from a stranger but a friend. Know there is a plot formed to murder you before the next election. A band of hardy fellows are to have ten thousand dollars if they succeed in the attempt. They are to carry daggers and pistols. I have been invited to join them but would rather suffer death. I advise you to take care and be cautious how you walk about as some of the assassins are already in Washington.
WE HEARD WHISPERS—sometimes dangerous whispers—even before our carriage rolled into Washington City, which was, at the time, neither a town nor a village, but more a cluster of brick and wooden houses connected by unpaved roads.
Dusky Sally. Black Sal. African Venus.
Salacious gossip about Papa’s preference for dark wenches was just another line of attack . . . though an enduring one, because it aroused carnal curiosity. But not everyone gossiped about my father’s mistress with malicious glee. The capital was still a southern place, built by slaves and filled with people who understood our ways. But it was also—at the moment—filled to the brim with Federalists eager to seize upon any reason to criticize my father.
Some of them were still threatening his life, which led Polly and me to fret that he slept alone upstairs in the presidential mansion. The solitude seemed unsafe, for the Federalists resented my father’s presence in the largely unfurnished Georgian manor, which housed a mammoth and indecorous wheel of cheese—a gift from admirers for Papa’s commitment to the separation of church and state. The Federalists didn’t like the way Papa showed his defiance to the British crown by greeting their ambassador informally, in slippers. And they were appalled by my father’s insistence upon pell-mell seating arrangements that eliminated the status of rank and privilege.
“We’re going with Papa to a religious service,” I told my sister before our bags were even unpacked. Dolley advised we do so to dispel the notion that Papa was a godless man who meant to overrun the capital with mixed-race bastard children. And I was happy to take her advice, because my skills in the public arena were rusty, and because Dolley was more naturally attuned to politics than any woman I’d ever met.
She dressed us in the right colors and most appropriate fashions, introduced us to the right people, and made certain we knew whom we should shun. In truth, with Dolley, I sometimes felt as if a canny and persistent sheepdog was herding us, nipping gently at our heels.
But I had my own political instincts. I was accustomed to royal courts, but my father’s court wasn’t a royal one. Dolley had clearly given great thought to what an American court should be . . . and I began to do the same. So I set out quite deliberately to befriend the wives of newspapermen. And at dinner parties amongst hostile Federalists, I always singled out the most belligerent man for my attentions and kept him so busy in conversation that he couldn’t make mischief.
A thing that much impressed Dolley Madison. “How is it that you manage to sniff out malice before the troublemakers say a word?”
“I listen to what they do not say,” I told her.
Papa used these dinners to enforce collegiality by never mixing Federalists and Republicans, limiting the guest list to twelve at a round table, and by keeping ladies present at all times. “Your father is very sociable,” a man said to me with a wry smile. “For a Republican.”
It was John Quincy Adams, son of the former president. And though he was a Federalist, it wasn’t hard to smile at him, given I still harbored affection for his family. To that point, he’d seemed very much ill at ease at my father’s table, paying little attention to the chef’s creations, but staring longingly at the tray of dried fruit just out of his reach. And because he was the son of Abigail Adams, I was determined to put him at ease. Taking the liberty of slipping an apricot to him, I said, “Mr. Adams, I’m afraid I’m old enough to remember a time when there weren’t any Federalists or Republicans. A time when we were all simply Americans. Why it was your very own mother who helped choose my first real dress in Paris. You would’ve laughed to see the chaos of it!”
“Do tell,” he said, and we laughed together the rest of the evening as I happily reminisced. I smoothed ruffled feathers when I could, most notably at a public function when my father gave accidental offense by overlooking an Irish poet.
No one else seemed to have noticed the reddening face of the little man, but I quickly stepped forward to say, “Why, Mr. Moore, I’m afraid you’re so young and handsome that my father mistook you for a page boy!”