A basket of apples looped over one arm, Dolley glanced at my pregnant belly and chirped, “I should think a baby the very best gift of all! Or so Mr. Madison tells me.”
She’d married him, even though it meant expulsion from her faith. Even though it put a little distance between us because of the estrangement of our husbands. But I didn’t blame her. In marrying Madison, she’d lifted her child from poverty to wealth in one stroke. And, despite the strangeness of the pairing, the Madisons were a love match. “Well then, do you mean to give Mr. Madison the gift he most desires?”
“As soon as I can,” Dolley replied, and then, with a twinkle that proved she really never did have the soul of a Quaker, she added, “I’m certainly making every effort to procure it, all hours of the night.”
Halfway between scandalized and horrified by the image that conjured, I laughed too hard, and a sharp pain knifed through my abdomen. Doubling over, I gasped as the market suddenly spun, assaulting me with the sound of horse hooves on cobblestones, passing wagons, brooms being whacked free of dust in doorways.
The roar of grocers in the market shouting the price of mustard, apples, and sugar . . .
I dropped my purse.
And Dolley Madison was at my elbow. “Let’s get her home,” she was saying to a black man who steadied me. One of her husband’s slaves, I suspected, and in a swirl of half-formed, absurd thoughts, I couldn’t help but wonder, given the Quakers’ strict antislavery position, what she thought of now owning slaves herself.
Next I knew, I was jostling in the carriage beside her, shivering with cold. Then I was being put into bed. “Here, drink this,” Dolley said, bringing hot chocolate that she’d stirred together in my kitchen.
I nodded, starting to come back to myself, the pain easing. “Thank you, Dolley.”
“You poor thing. You must be worried for your husband.”
I blew out a breath, torn, perhaps ridiculously, between worry over my unborn child, and worry over admitting to the wife of a political rival that I was concerned about my husband’s expedition against the whiskey rebels.
“I’m sure everything’s all right,” I said, trying to convince myself on both accounts. For I had now only the slightest of cramps.
I wanted to say more. I wanted to confide my worries to her. And I nearly convinced myself that I should. After all, Dolley and I had been friends before she met Madison. And I did hold a glimmer of hope that she might be a good influence on him politically.
Especially now that Mr. Jefferson had retired into private life. Hamilton feared that this retirement from President Washington’s cabinet was just a ruse, that Jefferson was biding his time until he could run for the presidency himself.
But to me, the important thing was that Jefferson was gone.
In Jefferson’s absence, Madison had supported my husband’s whiskey tax. Jemmy also denounced the insurrection as odious. So maybe there was reason for optimism that fences could be mended with our old friend.
Still, I knew better than to confess anything that might be used against Alexander—even my own fears for his survival. “I think I’ve simply taken a chill,” I added, cautiously.
“Well, then, I shall let you get your rest,” Dolley replied, tucking a shawl around my shoulders. She seemed to sense my caution, and perhaps was as saddened by it as I was. Before she left, she pledged ten dollars to help French distressed persons, but I feared even charity was too feeble a bridge between us.
In the days that followed, I was apt to burst into tears without warning or explanation, at the slightest provocation. Or no provocation at all.
What’s wrong with me?
I worried that like one of those pendulums with which Papa was so fascinated, swinging back and forth, there was a divine balance of happiness afforded to any one person. God had spared us. He had spared Alexander and me from death, divorce, and bitter acrimony.
Will the price for that mercy now be the life of the baby inside me, or the life of my husband at war?
If Angelica had been with me, she would’ve said I was ascribing altogether too much importance to myself in the plans of the deity. And I dared not confess my fears to anyone else lest they think me mad. Certainly, I couldn’t confess them to Lady Washington, or Abigail Adams, or Lucy Knox—all of whom, in warm shawls and dowdy bonnets, mounted an assault upon my household in near military formation even though I protested I was too sick to receive them.
Determined to combat my malaise, Mrs. Knox hovered above my bed and huffed, “Parsley is just the thing.”