For Love of Country (31 page)

“By ‘dirty linen' I assume you mean attacking our commerce to destroy competition,” Richard said, echoing the words of Captain Dickerson in Algiers.

“Exactly. I admit I may have been naïve in my choice of words,” Jefferson went on, his voice rising, his inborn southern gentility giving way to steely resolve, “but I stand by my conviction that negotiating with pirates and paying them tribute is not only foolish, it is counterproductive. I realize that not everyone agrees with me. Mr. Jay does not. Nor do Mr. Adams and Mr. Hamilton. They maintain it is cheaper to pay tribute than to build a strong navy. God's mercy, Mr. Cutler, how naïve is
that
? You ask for my position as secretary of state? Here it is: I may uphold the rights of the individual states, but America, as a nation of states, must build a navy that can and will confront any nation that seeks to meddle in our affairs. A single broadside of cannon will do more to protect our interests than millions of dollars in tribute. I apologize if your brother has suffered as a result of what I said. But I submit to you that your brother and your commerce and your country will prosper far more, in the long haul, if governments will stop mollycoddling these pirates and start fighting them!”

Richard was astonished to hear Jefferson espouse a view that could just as well have been advanced by his father-in-law, as crusty and ornery a hard-liner as the Royal Navy ever loosed upon the sea. During the war with England, when prices charged to England for ship's stores began to skyrocket, Captain Hardcastle's solution was to dispatch a fleet of battle cruisers to Stockholm and blast the Swedish capital to kingdom come. Such action, he thundered, would bring down prices, by God, and quickly.

“No apologies required, sir,” Richard said, realizing that he had been put roundly in his place; realizing also that President Washington had selected the right man to manage America's foreign affairs.

The conversation veered to more practical matters regarding Algiers. As it continued over a supper of chicken fricassee, greens, and two bottles of claret, the turmoil and despair of Paris just outside the door seemed a world apart. Jefferson and Morris were keen to learn about Richard's voyage to North Africa via Gibraltar, and thence to Toulon, especially the details of the sea battle with the two Arab xebecs, an account that sent a servant scurrying down to the wine cellar for a third
bottle. Richard related as much as he could remember to his hosts that evening, as he had months ago to Captain Mercier in Toulon, and as he would tomorrow to Captain Jones.

 

LATER THAT EVENING, his mind besotted with fatigue and wine, Richard excused himself for the night and climbed the stairways winding up to his lodgings on the third floor of the consulate. It was a snug room with a high ceiling to mitigate the effects of summer heat and humidity. The twin windows had been pushed outward, allowing the moist breeze to ruffle the yellow lace curtains and circulate the muggy air within. Richard walked to a window and listened. His senses came alert at what he first took to be cannon fire but which turned out to be a distant roll of thunder. On this night, at least, Paris seemed at peace.

On the oaken dresser table next to his bed, three candles burned brightly, revealing the large leather satchel Thomas Jefferson had told him would be there, thick and heavy with letters from home. Richard opened the satchel, removed the letters, and placed them on the bed in appropriate piles according to recipient. Every member of his crew had at least two letters, even those, Richard noted with remorse, who were no longer alive to read them. The dates inscribed on them indicated that some of the letters had been written almost a year ago.

The largest pile belonged to Agreen. Each of the letters in his stack was written in the familiar cursive of Lizzy Cutler and carefully numbered, one to twenty-two, each number circled in red. Richard almost laughed as he counted them. “Think she'll have you, Agee?” he asked out loud. He waved the pile of letters back and forth in the air. “Here's your answer, my friend.”

He flipped through his own pile of letters. Most were from Katherine, and he ached to read them. But he opened first a letter from his father dated 15 May, just two months ago.

“Dear Richard,”
it began,
“your letter written from Toulon arrived yesterday. Your mother and I feel your remorse in every word. There are no words to send you that will ease your sorrow and frustration. I wish there were. I can only assure you that no one here blames you for what happened, least of all your parents. It was the will of God. You did everything you could.”
The letter went on to say that everyone was well at home except for Richard's mother, who had endured another round of physical suffering over the winter. She was better now, as she normally was come spring, though her health remained fragile.
“Lavinia and Anne ask me to send their love to you and will be writing
letters of their own. Please send our family's respects to Mr. Jefferson and to Captain Jones, and sail home to us when you are able. God in His mercy will watch over us all.”

“Thank you, Father,” Richard whispered, his words catching in his throat. He glanced at his letters strewn out atop the bed. True to his father's prediction, Lavinia and Anne had both written him—to add their support to their father's words, Richard was certain: he knew his sisters that well. But it was the fourteen letters from Katherine that he opened next. He read them in chronological order, starting with the letter dated the day after
Falcon
sailed from Boston.

Each of the long letters—five, six, seven pages—was written in the form of a diary, the events or impressions of one group of days added on to those that preceded it. Clearly it was her intent to keep her husband informed of what she was doing and, more important, what his sons and daughter were doing, on a daily basis, as though he were there with them in Hingham and she was simply recounting for his benefit those often mundane events of a child's life that have meaning only to a parent, and those character-defining decisions that only a parent can make.

Richard smiled longingly, grateful for the love of a woman who after nearly a decade of marriage took such care keeping him involved in the daily lives of his children, even with him half a world away.
“You are in Paris as you read this,”
she concluded in her last letter, dated May 18.
“You will meet with Captain Jones and then, God willing, you will be returning home to us. Will, Jamie, and Diana send their dearest love, as do I, my darling husband. You are forever in my thoughts, forever in my prayers, forever in my heart. Katherine”

Thirteen

Paris, France, July 1789

R
ICHARD HAD TO WALK the nearly two miles from the American consulate to the building where John Paul Jones lived on the Left Bank. Public conveyance was not available. The hackney coaches that had once graced the Champs-Élysées and rue de Rivoli no longer conveyed better-off Parisians to the Tuilleries Gardens for a stroll or to the open-air food stalls at Les Halles. The élite these days did not rendezvous at the Palais-Royal, a festive hub of restaurants, gambling dens, and theaters opened to the public not long ago by its royal proprietor, the duc d'Orléans, in a desperate attempt to stave off financial ruin. Today its cafés and private clubs sat deserted, as forlorn and cheerless as the once-bustling boulevards where jugglers, drink peddlers, illusion-show aficionados, and animal-fight hawkers had regaled the crowds while hurdy-gurdy players cranked out their jangling tunes.

Adding to the gloom of the day was a heavy mist, the aftermath of a summer storm that had rumbled through Paris during the night, spreading in its wake a muggy shroud of gray over the buildings and bridges, the public bathhouses along the banks of the river, even the stained-glass magnificence of Notre Dame. By the time Richard had crossed over the Seine, the white cotton shirt he was wearing under his coat clung to his skin and sweat oozed from under his black felt tricorne hat. He dared not doff the hat. That morning, before allowing him to leave the consulate, Thomas Jefferson had pinned a rosette on the front of Richard's hat with a warning to keep it visible at all times.
That simple clump of blue, white, and red ribbons identified him as
un partisan
of the National Assembly; without it, Gouverneur Morris had added his own warning, the knife and small pistol Richard had concealed on his person would hardly be sufficient to keep the human wolves at bay.

Jones' residence was located east of the Luxembourg Palace, a grand Florentine establishment that served as the Left Bank's equivalent of the Right's Tuilleries Palace. On another day, in another era, Richard would have enjoyed walking through these cramped city neighborhoods that, he suspected, had changed little since the early Middle Ages. There was no spring to his step this morning, however. Not with the eyes of Paris upon him. Those eyes were everywhere—in bread lines, in windows, in the dark shadows of doorways—scrutinizing everyone who appeared different or well-to-do. People did not shout at him or taunt him; that sort of innocuous human behavior he could have tolerated with equanimity. What unnerved him was their ominous silence, their menacing glares transmitting incomprehensible depths of hatred, resentment, and anger. For the first time ever in Paris, Richard felt panic niggling at his gut, and he had to force himself to slow down, to appear nonchalant, to deny the wolves the smell of fear. When finally he rounded onto the rue de Tournon, it was with considerable relief that he climbed the short flight of steps leading up to number 52, and thence upstairs to the
premier étage
where he knocked on a door on the left side.

“Enter,” a familiar voice commanded from within. Richard might have been entering the after cabin of
Bonhomme Richard
to report to his captain as officer of the watch, except that here there was no steward puttering in the pantry, no green-coated marine standing at ramrod attention outside with a musket held at his side.

Richard clicked open the door, and there sat John Paul Jones on a high-backed chair of pastel blue and yellow, turned partly toward the entryway. Nearby was a second chair of similar pattern and design, and, between the chairs, a rectangular library table. Richard's gaze quickly took in Jones and a room reminiscent of the one where they had first met back in '77 in the Hingham residence of Benjamin Lincoln. It had the same crowded bookshelves, the same sort of rug and couch and hearth and writing desk, the same snug feeling of home. So sharp was the remembrance that Richard half-expected Lincoln's faithful servant, Caleb, in whose honor Richard's brother had been named, to materialize behind him to take his coat and hat.

“Richard, my boy!” Jones boomed. Instantly he was assailed by a hacking cough. When the coughing subsided he said, in a voice much subdued and raspy, “It gives me great joy to see you this day.”

As Jones struggled to rise, Richard noted with concern the swelling in his legs and the yellow hue of his skin. Such signs of affliction would have seemed foreign to the intrepid sea captain who had saluted him farewell from the quarterdeck of the captured British frigate
Serapis,
hove to in enemy waters off the cliffs of Dover until Richard had been delivered ashore. Yet evidence of the officer and gentleman remained: his reddish brown hair might be streaked with gray, but it was neatly combed back and tied at the nape with a perfectly formed black bow. And he was impeccably dressed, from the white silk of his neck stock to the dark green cotton of his waistcoat and knee-breeches to the finely polished silver buckles on his black leather shoes. He still appeared to Richard every bit the naval officer he had known those many years ago: a man born to command wherever duty and destiny required it of him.

“It brings me greater joy, Captain.” Without hesitation he walked up to Jones and embraced him as a son would his father, an act of open affection that took Jones momentarily aback. “Or should I address you as ‘Admiral'?”

He was referring to the rank of rear admiral bestowed upon Jones by Her Most Catholic Majesty Catherine the Second, Tsarina of Russia. Three years ago, fed up with the U.S. government's reluctance to invest in a navy, Jones had accepted the invitation from Empress Catherine to join her Black Sea fleet in an attack against the crumbling Ottoman Empire. That fleet, under the titular command of a Romanov prince, Admiral Potemkin, was vested with wresting Constantinople away from the Muslim Turks who had occupied the city for three centuries. Having liberated the Christians there, the empress expected to receive, as just compensation for doing God's work, a warm-water port for her navy and an outlet to the Mediterranean Sea.

Once aboard the Russian flagship, Jones had quickly concluded that Potemkin had no future as a naval commander. It took considerable effort and tact to convince Potemkin that Russia would be better served were he to hand over the reins of commander in chief to Jones, advice the reluctant prince finally accepted. At the Battle of Liman, having secretly reconnoitered the enemy fleet the night before from a rowboat, Jones destroyed fifteen enemy warships while killing three thousand Turks and taking sixteen hundred prisoners—all at the cost of one Russian
frigate and eighteen Russian sailors. When reports of the stunning victory reached the capital, all Russia rejoiced except for one man, Prince Potemkin, who, stung by what he deemed a usurpation of glory rightfully his, publicly accused Jones of molesting a ten-year-old girl in Saint Petersburg. Disgusted and disillusioned, Jones left Russia as soon as the charges were dropped and returned to Paris, where details of his heroic adventures were widely published.

Jones shot Richard a mock frown. “Then it would be Kontradmiral Pavel Ivanovich Jones, if you please, Lieutenant.”

As Richard bowed low in mock deference to such grandeur, Jones slapped him on the shoulder and laughed out loud, an act that set off another round of harsh coughing. He groped for the arms of his wingback chair and sat down, motioning to Richard to do the same. He removed a white handkerchief from a waistcoat pocket and held it against his mouth until the coughing had quieted.