Yet the sudden pain of it went far beyond her own affairs. American though she was, she hadn’t lost her love for home. Oh, she could readily summon up the summer heat, the insects, the snakes, the mold that forms when humidity is high, the prideful self-satisfaction of individuals, the arrogance of the men—of whom Henri was an example—but that’s not what the city on the great crescent of the Mississippi meant to her. It meant the soft air in spring and fall, the gentle winters, the explosions of flowers, the gaiety and the
music, the calls of men and sometimes of women in the market place furiously cajoling dice flung across a canvas sheet with an air of challenging the world.
As fresh in her mind as yesterday, she could see, hear, smell the market, all hurly-burly and laughter and sharp dealings and fierce bargaining and half-serious threats. The endless festivities, the cotillions, the Quadroon Ball that drew the men and alarmed the women, the theater, the opera from Paris playing to packed houses, the shrieks of laughter at musical comedy. New Orleans was a tenth the size of Philadelphia, but in such matters it far outstripped the largest city in America and, as for Washington, don’t even attempt comparison. She could see the cool interior gardens, goldfish fat as catfish in the ponds, house fronts flush with the street as anonymous on the outside as ranks of soldiers, while the interiors were all tile and plaster and brilliant colors and burgeoning greenery and lavish ballrooms. The people there boasted they knew how to live, and they were right …
It would all be destroyed, it would not survive as she knew it, what followed would be all different and foreign to her. She knew the Americans—once aroused they would fight to the death and nothing around them would survive. What would happen to her? To Henri? To whatever they meant to each other? Henri was foolish, but it wasn’t really his fault. He was inexperienced. He’d never left New Orleans but to hunt in the swamps. A wave of tenderness overtook her; she saw she was more than half seriously in love with this stirring, invigorating, downright exciting man, who was exasperated her beyond imagining with his demands and insistence and assumptions, preening his feathers of masculinity like some barnyard cock—
Her office door opened a little and Clinch Johnson gave a tentative little knock, looking as if he would flee if she frowned. So she smiled and waved him in and watched him seat himself with his suit encasing him like a sausage and his yellow hair standing up. She told him she was afraid, and soon she was pouring out the whole range of her fears for New Orleans and for her business and for her adopted country
as well, how Pirette had trembled and Louis had looked near tears and Mr. Madison was implacable and friends in New Orleans—Henri really was none of Clinch’s business—showed a mad arrogance that ultimately must work evil on them.
“Well, Miss Danny,” he said, with such easy calm that she instantly felt soothed, and she cried, “Oh, Clinch, just ‘Danny’ will do—we’re friends, aren’t we?”
He smiled with infectious pleasure. “I do hope so, Miss D—ah, that is, Danny. Yes, ma’am.”
“Tell me it’s not as bad as it looks. I need cheering.”
“Couple of things. I do business with some British houses, and I hear tell the French ain’t having that easy a time in Santo Domingo. And the way the British tell it, they’re ready to crank up their war with Napoleon again.”
Britain had struck a truce with the French back in March, which was universally assumed to be merely a momentary cease-fire sure to collapse soon. But meanwhile it made things worse in America, freeing the French as it did to pursue their dreams of empire.
“Way I hear it,” Clinch said, “British ain’t willing to give up Malta, and Napoleon says he must have it. In London they figure the Frenchman wants it as a stepping stone to grabbing Egypt again and maybe going on to India, and they don’t intend to make that easy for him. Rather fight than do that, so they say.”
She liked the sound of that. Santo Domingo, an essential stepping stone—and Malta, an equally essential stepping stone on the other side of the world—both making trouble that could only benefit the little United States. Clinch chatted on about what he’d heard in that easy voice of his, and after a while moved on to business talk and soon they were swapping gossip of the shipping world and laughing over some buffoon’s marvelous faux pas and presently she took a bottle of Madeira from a cabinet and poured two glasses, and altogether, she felt much better.
In Boston, John Quincy Adams agreed to stand for Congress—and he lost! It was devastating. The Democratic incumbent, likeable Dr. Eustis, squeaked through by scarcely fifty votes.
The blow was made worse by his family’s elation. Since his father’s defeat, his mother felt politics was an evil field beneath an Adams. She wanted John Quincy to be pure, whereas he saw the world turning and wanted to be part of it. Dutifully he said, and sometimes even half-believed, that being spared a political future relieved him. But then Jonathan Mason and Benjamin Foster of the U.S. Senate said they were quitting. Both Massachusetts Senate seats open!
John Quincy stopped talking to his family and started talking to State House leaders, where new senators would be elected. Timothy Pickering, leader of the Essex Junto with its plans to make New England and New York into a separate nation, demanded the first seat. It would serve six years; the second was for two years. Pickering haunted the General Assembly. Mr. Adams couldn’t bring himself actually to politic, but he was available day and night to the members. Pickering, glaring often at Mr. Adams, kept his loud voice ringing in the halls.
Shouting, gesticulating, spittle flying, he denounced the Adamses for traitors, the old man for his craven failure to fight France, the son for seducing the old devil into seeking a peace as dishonorable as it was disgraceful! And the outcome today—now we have a lascivious whoremaster in command, a man so pitifully in thrall to Parisian doctrines of revolution and murder that he sounds no alarm as the French prepare to make us their slaves. On the eve of invasion that can sweep our entire nation under the rug of history and make us a mere satellite to the French empire, he fears even now to confess to the Congress. But lo!—at this moment a French army is subduing the blacks of Santo Domingo and preparing to invade Louisiana! But does this lecherous master of lewdness raise the alarm? No … He raises not even his voice. What is the State of the Union in the face of the
most serious crisis the nation has ever faced? Why, it’s just fine, just what he wanted, as he planned it. You read that message, all of you read it! Don’t you see? We are doomed with this lecher in command. We must fight and fight even to the last ditch to hold on against him long enough for our citizenry to wake and see the clear path and understand the danger and hold to the true faith. Oh, my friends, I implore you, send a man to the Senate who will fight the evil conspiracy to his last breath! Don’t saddle us with one whose pretense of fairness covers the nature of an arrant coward! The truth is before us all and to that we must hew. Give us a man who will fight the good fight under the nose of the whoremaster!
It flirted with the stuff of challenges, though of course John Quincy would never so lower himself. But he was very receptive when Dock Bartlett herded him into a corner of the lobby. Dock was short and heavy, soup stains usually on his waistcoat, hank of gray hair tousled awry, but he was a party kingmaker, his power unquestioned.
“Tim spits all over you when he gets really excited,” Dock said. He talked around a toothpick in his mouth. “Makes it a little hard to take him seriously. And then, him and his Essex bunch, they want to split off from the rest of the country and go it alone. Cozy up to Britain. But that talk’s too easy; I don’t trust it. Yes, it might come to that someday—national Democrats keep on this mad submission to the French—but I think we need a calmer voice in Washington than ol’ Tim will give us.”
Dock was a good Federalist, as John Quincy knew himself to be, but he wasn’t a mad dog. He removed the toothpick to fire a gout of brown juice into a shiny brass spittoon and moved closer, voice sinking to a confidential whisper. “But Tim, now, he’s right on this French invasion business. I read that State of the Union message in the Boston
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, I wanted to puke. This is serious—I need to be sure you’re right on it. You’re an independent cuss, all right, I admire that; but on this one you ain’t getting my vote, nor nobody else’s, if you’re not right on that.”
John Quincy swallowed. This was gut politics. His mother’s image flashed in his mind; but then, she wasn’t here. He weighed his answer. He wouldn’t stand supinely while the administration gave away Louisiana, but he remembered his talk with Madison and felt confident that neither he nor Mr. Jefferson would do any such thing. Indeed, he had the feeling that we were much closer to war than Dock, let along Pickering, understood. The French must give up their mad scheme or we soon would be fighting with whatever weight we could muster.
“Let me be clear,” Adams said. “If you elect me, I’ll disagree with you at times and I’ll follow my own counsel. But on this question of Louisiana, we’re agreed.”
Dock gave him a long, level look. “Betray me on this,” he said, “and I’ll never forget it. And neither will you.”
“Fair enough.”
“All right. Now, Pickering got to the boys early and some of ’em pledged. But pledges are only good for a couple of votes. After that, he don’t make it, they’ll swing to you.”
Adams nodded. It was an arrangement and arrangements were keys to politics. But he saw Dock wasn’t finished.
“Now, Pickering has friends. He can’t just be whupped and tossed aside. He loses the first seat, he’ll want the second. I want your agreement you’ll support him in that.”
Deals didn’t get any more crass and direct. Pickering was an enemy. Henchman to Alexander Hamilton in trying to destroy President Adams, he had undermined everything John Quincy’s father had done. He would be an awful senator. But supporting him was the price of victory. “I understand,” Adams said.
A slow smile settled on Dock’s face. “You’ll do, Mr. Adams, he said softly.”You’ll do.”
Montane … Felix Montane, the card said. Could it be
General
Montane?
“One and the same,” Johnny Graham said. “In civilian clothes, clean shaven, but the same man all right.”
Yes, there was no mistaking the general with his pale, icy eyes, though now he wore a well-cut suit with snowy hose and wide lapels, doubtless the fashion in Paris. His slender form was neat and trim, and there was assurance and, indeed, authority, in the very way in which he took the unadorned wooden chair to which Madison gestured him. Yet he seemed different too, and it was not just that his manner was absent the old arrogance and suggested he wanted something. Slowly Madison concluded that the difference spoke of sadness and pain and perhaps even a new understanding of how hard the world could be, an insight that was prerequisite to wisdom.
He drummed his fingers on the plain table that served him as desk. “Well, General, what brings you now?”
“‘Monsieur’ will do very well now, Mr. Secretary. I am no longer a general. But I am here, sir, to offer my services. To put my sword at the service of my new country.”
Madison allowed his surprise to show.
“I wish to be an American,” the general said. “This is the land of people from elsewhere, is it not? People who come for freedom, to escape oppression?”
Madison studied him, something liquid in his eyes. Yes, a man in pain. Could he be a spy? Possible, of course, though there was little to learn about the government that wasn’t already in the papers. He put his chin on his hand. “Why don’t you explain yourself, sir.”
The story that emerged was surprising, Madison supposed, but only superficially. It was full of the muddled thinking, the maneuvering of power, the failure of heart and honor, the betrayal that marred so many human enterprises. It seemed that Leclerc blamed Montane for failing to force aid from America. Eventually Napoleon had choked up enough gold to feed the men, but by then they were in trouble and Leclerc needed a scapegoat. He broke Montane from general to captain and denounced him to Paris. Napoleon replied personally. For destroying the French campaign in Santo Domingo, Montane was to be cashiered, and if Leclerc chose, placed before a firing squad.
Hope fluttered in Madison’s heart. “The campaign destroyed, you said?”
“Certainly, sir. And for that someone must pay, and I was chosen.”
He fell into a silence that he somehow made dramatic. Then a bitter little smile flickered and disappeared as he said that Leclerc had been his idol and had turned worship to hate. Of course the first consul loved Leclerc, they were peas from the same pod, hard, ruthless, cruel, supremely confident, ready to crush all who stood in their way. Once he had admired that …
With this verdict from on high came impassioned letters from Montane’s family in France. His perfidy had brought them under suspicion, and they were being watched. If he returned they would be destroyed, and he would be a marked man. Stay away …
So the man’s pain was genuine. While Madison could sympathize and so forth and so on, what stirred him was that magical phrase, “destroyed campaign.”
Montane, after a suitable pause, for effect or to regain control, Madison didn’t much care which, said in softened voice, “So, sir, with humility, I wish to be an American. I proffer my sword because I believe you will have need of it before long.”