1
Hannah was fat and her knees were getting stiff. When she had a chance to rest on the well-polished stool before the fireplace, it was a groaning misery for her to get up again. Her head, wrapped in a starched white turban, thrust forward followed by a lunge of her shoulders till finally her legs could be persuaded to lift her erect. But once on foot she glared at the black women who giggled in corners, and at toothless old Moll. Moll had come all the way from Virginia. She remembered the long terrifying journey down the river to the Cumberland, the Indians, the hardships. She was privileged. She had no work to do now.
“You black trash better stir your stumps,” Hannah snapped, “Heap of company comin’. You, Betty, you put more sage in that dressin’. I raised them turkeys. Ain’t goin’ to have ’em ruint. Mis’ Jackson, she like her turkey seasoned high.”
Betty, narrow-faced and thin-lipped, gave an irritated shrug. But she did not look about for sympathetic support from the others, from the heckling tyranny of old Hannah, knowing that it would be nonexistent. Betty was a pariah on the plantation, holding her place only because she was the best cook in the county. Last year she had been sent back from Pensacola for rebellious behavior. It was whispered that she had been ordered whipped by General Jackson, had escaped that bitter disgrace because the General’s lady had a heart as soft as butter. No other house servant at the Hermitage had ever been ordered whipped and the stigma of her disgrace lay now over Betty’s peaked brows, her bitter mouth. Nobody ever talked to her, they all shied away from her aura of wickedness. All but Emily Donelson, Rachel Jackson’s favorite niece.
“You let Betty alone,” Emily ordered now, looking up from counting out silver on a long table. “Dilsey, you see that Simmy rubs all these spoons with fuller’s earth and soda. Let’s see—I count fifty-two. There’ll be Hutchingses and Hayses, Eastins, Donelsons—we’ll have to set two tables and the children may have to wait. Has Sary got the napkins ironed good and stiff?”
“Sary ironin’ in the washhouse now, Young Miss. She just yelled for Goby fetch her more charcoal to hot her irons up good.”
“Hannah, you come along with me while I ask aunt Rachel to unlock the press. We’ll need all the long tablecloths and they’ll have to be pressed. I’ll need four more spoons. These are those lovely French ones uncle Jackson brought from New Orleans. You tell Simmy to be mighty careful with them, Dilsey. Come along, Hannah. People may begin coming in today. There’s a lot to do.”
“Young Master Jack, he comin’?” asked Hannah boldly, grinning at the bright flush that warmed the young girl’s face.
Emily, fifteen, imperiously lovely, red-haired, shook her head sadly. “Uncle Jackson won’t let him come. I think it’s mean. He’s making Jack stay on in that old law school when he wants to be at home for Christmas.”
“Learnin’,” commented Hannah. “It mighty fine. Do Mis’ Rachel read to me outen her Bible, glory just shine around. And when the General spout big words out of books I gits shivers up my back.”
Emily hurried along the bricked way that set the kitchen apart from the big house. The wind was fresh and keen off the Tennessee hills and she drew her shawl close around her slender shoulders. In the house huge wood fires burned in three fireplaces but the hall where the curving stairs came down was chilly. She opened the dining room door and slipped inside quickly.
Rachel Jackson, with a Negro woman helping and a half-grown boy up on a stool, was getting china down from a high corner cupboard.
Aunt Rachel was getting heavy, Emily noted, and her breath quick and short. She gasped occasionally as she bent over the table, counting the plates the Negress set down, laughing a little as she straightened and drew a long breath.
“Law, I must be getting old, Emily. I get so short-winded every time I exert myself the least bit. I declare these china plates are still the prettiest ones I’ve got. Not a nick in one of them. That’s because I’ve always washed them myself. These came all the way from Pittsburgh by boat. My gracious, that was twenty-seven years ago! Brother Samuel went all the way up into Kentucky some place with the wagon to meet the boat and bring the goods to Nashville to your uncle Jackson’s store. Indians were everywhere too, those days. I was so nervous I couldn’t sleep till Brother Sam got back and my husband too—he was away off to Philadelphia. Sam was gone forty six days and my husband gone for two months.”
“You’ve been alone so much, aunt Rachel. If ever I get a husband I won’t let him leave me for even one day.”
Rachel let her breath out slowly. There was that little pain again, that came sometimes. She used Magic Sanitive Salve faithfully as her husband directed but it didn’t seem to do much good.
“When you get a husband he’ll go where duty calls him and you won’t be able to hold him back any more than any other woman. But it does look as though duty called Andrew Jackson more than most men and into more dangerous places. I declare I still like these old plates best of all. Maybe it’s because they were the first nice things ever I owned.”
“Uncle Jackson likes the dangerous places,” Emily said. “He wouldn’t have missed all that Indian fighting and defeating the British at New Orleans for anything.”
Rachel pursed her lips. “He didn’t like that business of being governor of Florida any better than I did. Thank the Lord we got away from that place! So hot there in Pensacola and all that babble-gabble around you, all Spanish so you couldn’t tell if they were calling you names or not. I was mighty thankful to turn my face back towards Tennessee and poor little Andy was sick every minute we were there.”
“It was the mosquitoes,” declared Andrew Jackson, Junior, from his high perch on the stool. “They poisoned me. I can’t help it if my hide is thin. And all that pepper in the victuals—onions too, and I never could bear onions. What else do you want from up here, Mama? Nothing left but soup tureens and teapots.”
“We’ll need two tureens. Your Papa thinks he hasn’t had anything to eat unless he has soup. Count those plates again, will you, Emily? My head’s all in a swivet. As many crowds of people as I’ve fed on this place you’d think I’d get used to it but I always forget something.”
Hannah came in then for the tablecloths that Sary would press. Little Negroes would hold the corners and edges high so that they would not touch the floor and when the five-yard lengths of damask were glistening smooth they would be carried in ceremoniously and spread over a spare bed till Christmas morning.
Rachel Jackson liked to be proud of her table, and this was Christmas, the first Christmas that she had had her husband at home with her for more years than she liked to remember. She walked through the rooms of her beautiful, new brick house trying not to feel too sinfully proud. Her new, lovely Hermitage, built under the huge trees exactly where she had wished it to be looked out upon the fields of the plantation through windows that in the parlors were curtained with lace.
Upstairs and in her own big bedroom below were the fine French beds the General had bought in New Orleans. Seven crates of beautiful furniture on which the freight bill alone had been two hundred and seventy-three dollars. Her own bed was elegantly fluted, of mahogany, with high posts, a mosquito canopy of the finest muslin and a knotted Marseilles counterpane.
There was the new sideboard in the dining room too, and in the cellar gallons of the best brandy, old Madeira, claret and porter, bottles of bitters in green glass and boxes of candied fruit. The turkeys and chickens old Hannah had raised so faithfully were fat, and five turkeys were being readied for roasting now in the kitchen. Rachel paused at a south window and looked out across the wide lawn, a bit bleak now that the trees were bare and all the flowers of her garden brown and dead from frost. The pillared portico made her heart expand with pride.
A far cry, this palace of a house from the old log blockhouse in which they had lived for so many years, where she had lain alone for so many desolate nights, thinking of that audacious firebrand of a man she had married, that Andrew Jackson who had spent so much of a long life fighting enemies, red and white. Fighting the Creek and the Cherokee, fighting the British. Fighting Jesse Benton and young Charles Dickinson, who had died after that grim, dreadful duel in Kentucky.
Rachel shut her lips tight, remembering. All for her, that hot-headed encounter. All for her the bullet Andrew Jackson still carried so dangerously near to his heart that it could not be removed. Jesse Benton’s bullet had shattered the General’s arm too, so that he had carried the arm in a sling through all the Indian war in Alabama. The arm still ached at night when a cold wind blew.
A fighting man whose eyes too quickly kindled to blue lightnings, whose reddish hair seemed to burn with some flame within him that was never cooled. Her own gentle counsel could damper it down now and then, but only briefly. Given the provocation, his temper leaped alive like a drawn sword and he became then, his wife was thinking sadly, as dangerous and unpredictable as one of those wild stallions that snorted and charged about the Hermitage meadows.
The amazing contradiction about him was that in his letters, in their quiet conversations in the big bright bedroom, he voiced only one passionate desire: to be able to live on here quietly for the rest of his days in this home he had built. He yearned, so he had written her so many times, to be free of wars and politics, answerable to no one but the call of his heart. Not to Madison nor Monroe nor any other president. Not to Sam Houston nor Governor Billy Carroll of Tennessee, nor even to Major John Eaton who seemed, in Rachel’s mind, to be forever grooming Andrew Jackson for some job or other, always important, always controversial and inevitably always far from the Hermitage.
She saw them now, riding up the drive from the muddy road, the General and John Eaton. Her husband sat very tall and a little gaunt on the saddle and his gray horse seemed always to sense the mood of his master and hold his head very high. Andrew Jackson’s hair, graying a little now, blew wildly over his ears under his beaver hat. His high collar and stock hid the thinness of his throat.
* * * * * * * *
He had been such a skinny lad, Rachel Jackson remembered, when John Overton had brought him, a stripling lawyer, to her mother’s house on the Cumberland, in that spring of 1789. And now it was 1823! Where had the years gone? The Widow Donelson had taken him in, and there in the house had been Rachel, Rachel Robards then, reconciled briefly to her violent, unpredictable husband, Lewis Robards, after a separation that had seen Rachel vilified, discarded, and abused.
The widow had tried hard to put some meat on that lanky young lawyer’s frame, but now, thirty-four years and four wars later, he was still too thin, still coughed too much and was weakened by digestive distresses from living too long on parched corn and other scanty fare.
Philip, the horse handler, came running out to take the bridles of the mounts and even through the windowpanes Rachel could hear her husband giving Philip orders in his high, arresting voice, the same voice that had commanded the defeat of General Pakenham at New Orleans, shouted defiance at Red Feather at Tohopeka and the Spanish governor at Pensacola.
Now he came shouting into the house. “Mrs. Jackson! Mrs. Jackson! Where are you?”
Never had they called each other by their Christian names. In letters they wrote, “My dearest.” At home he was the General, to her, or simply Husband. She was Mrs. Jackson, the woman he honored, adored, had fought for and would defend fiercely till her last breath.
“Here, Husband!” She hurried out into the hall where the two men were handing their damp cloaks to a servant. “Mr. Eaton, you are welcome as always here. Come in to the fire.”
“Feels like snow.” John Eaton slapped his gloves against his knee, shook moisture from his high-crowned hat. “Misting now, but it’s getting colder. Miss Emily,”—he made a courtly bow as they entered the warm parlor—“you grow more beautiful every day. How any young man can stay away from you is a puzzle in my mind.”
Emily made her curtsy. “You flatter me, sir.”
“All our girls are pretty,” stated the General, moving a chair near to the fire for his wife. “It’s the air here on this hill. We keep ’em here as long as we can, then sometimes we have to let ’em go home to their mothers, but not for long. Be seated, Mrs. Jackson. You look weary, my dear.”
“She is tired,” Emily said. “She’s been putting out dishes and silver all day, attending to the Christmas dinner. Uncle Jackson,” she began timidly, “if Jack should ride home for Christmas—”
“He won’t,” declared the General testily, getting down his long clay pipe from the mantelpiece. “He won’t because I wrote and gave him his orders not to come. I told him that the important thing for him now is to finish his schooling and get admitted to the bar. I’ve raised that boy.” He filled the pipe and handed it to Eaton. “You smoke that, John. I like my old corncob best. I raised that boy, Andrew Jackson Donelson. Going to make a gentleman and a scholar out of him. He’ll have the chance I never had, he and young Andy.”
“Jack Donelson is your nephew, Mrs. Jackson?” Eaton drew on the pipe to which Emily held a spill she had lighted at the fire.
“My brother’s son. But we’ve had him here with us since he was four years old. Andy, our adopted son, is my brother Severn’s boy. We took him four days after he was born.”
“Twins,” remarked the General. “Severn’s wife was mighty frail and one baby was all she could nurse. So we took Andy off her hands. All named after me,” he grinned, “a whole covey of ’em, Donelsons, Hutchingses and Hayeses.”
“I must see about supper, Mr. Jackson. You gentlemen will excuse me?” Rachel got up too quickly and the little pain caught at her and she put a quick hand to her breast.
“I’ll go, aunt Rachel, you sit still and rest,” Emily volunteered quickly.
“I want her to sit here and listen to my news,” said the General, thumbing down his pipe. “You too, Emily. Let the women attend to the supper. About a dozen of ’em around, ought to be able to manage to feed us.”
Rachel had turned pale. “Oh, no!” she cried. “Not Pensacola again! Not another war. I can’t bear it. You said we’d stay at home. Mr. Jackson, you swore we’d live here in peace in our new Hermitage.” Distress sharpened her voice, her eyes dimmed, and she dabbed at them nervously with a corner of her white shawl.
“Compose yourself, my dear,” comforted her husband. “This news I’ve brought is exciting. You’ll be pleased. You’re being offered an opportunity to go where few women have ever gone—American women, anyway.”
“But I don’t want to go anywhere,” Rachel almost wailed. “I’ve been to Kentucky and Florida and Washington and Natchez and New Orleans and I hated all those places. I just want to stay in my home and I want you to stay in it with me. Mr. Eaton, we’ve been separated more than we have been together all these years we’ve been married, Mr. Jackson and I, and now were both getting old.”
“Old? You call yourself old, dear lady?” protested Eaton. “Why, the best part of your life is ahead of you.”
“It could be,” she sighed, pressing her hands together, strong, sun-browned hands that had helped to steer a heavy boat down the Ohio River, that had gripped the rein on many a weary ride through the wilderness, poured lead into bullet molds when savage enemies howled outside the stockades, spun thread, planted rosebushes, tenderly comforted many a child. “It could be,” she repeated, “if only I could have those years in my home with my husband.”
The General’s eyes twinkled. He rapped out his pipe on an andiron, brushed tobacco from his tight, snuff-colored trousers.
“I’m disappointed in you, my dear,” he bantered. “Here I bring you news that you could have a chance to cross an ocean and see a new, strange, fascinating world, and you don’t even want to hear about it.”
“The ocean?” gasped Emily. “Oh, no, uncle Jackson!”
Rachel’s face had drained gray. She pressed both hands hard on her chest where the pain sprang alive, shutting off her breath, making her ears throb. Eaton half rose from his chair, looking at her uneasily.
“Stop teasing her, General,” he warned. “Tell her about President Monroe’s magnificent offer—which you don’t mean to accept.”
Andrew Jackson took a pose on the hearth, a boyish grin lightening his long face. Emily drew a breath of relief, laid her hand against Rachel’s cold cheek.
“It’s all right. Uncle Jackson is just having one of his jokes.”
Rachel relaxed a little. “I don’t like jokes,” she sighed. “Not when they scare me half to death.”
“But this is a splendid joke, my dear,” insisted her husband. “John and I laughed about it all the way home—especially we laughed at what Secretary Adams said about it. President Monroe has offered to send me as ambassador to Russia.”
“Russia!” both women cried at once.
“But you aren’t going, uncle Jackson?” Emily asked when the silence had stretched too long. “Why, it’s thousands and thousands of miles away! They have wolves there and snow all the year—I read it in a book.”
Rachel had never had time to read many books. There had always been too much to do. Russia was as vague, as far, and as uncivilized as China or Africa in her gentle mind. She sat rigidly waiting.
“I am not going to Russia,” announced the General finally.
“What was it Secretary Adams said?” Emily asked.
Jackson’s laughter pealed. “When the idea was talked about in Washington and Monroe proposed to the cabinet to send me over there—to get me out of the country, my love. That’s his motive and I’m not at all deceived by the flattering language of the letter of invitation. I know what James Monroe had in mind. Your husband is a disturbing influence in these United States. Mrs. Jackson,”—he leaned over and gave her a tweak on her soft arm—“your husband stirs up fights.”
“Marches an army in Florida and sets the governor back on his haunches,” put in Eaton. “Beats a British army with a little handful of farmers and hunters. And pirates! A dangerous man, Mrs. Jackson. He licked the Creeks and the Cherokee and made this southwest safe to live in. And there are some people who are talking around among themselves that Andrew Jackson ought to be President of the United States.”
“Well, he can’t be!” said Rachel firmly. “I won’t hear of it. He’s not strong nor well, you know that, John Eaton. He can’t even eat plain victuals half the time, and he coughs at night no matter how much salve I rub on his chest. Besides,”—she got to her feet, smoothing out her black silk skirt—“I don’t want to live in any palace—anywhere! Not in Russia. Not in Washington. I’d rather be a doorkeeper in the house of the Lord than to live in the finest palace ever was.”
“You haven’t told us what Secretary Adams said,” persisted Emily.
“It was really a compliment,” Eaton told them, “though I doubt if Adams intended it that way. He listened to the president’s proposal and snorted. He snorts very eloquently, the little man. ‘Send Andrew Jackson to represent this country in the court of the Czar,’ said he, ‘and that would be the end of peace with Russia!’”
The girl’s laughter rippled. She flew across the room and kissed the General’s chin. “You quarrelsome old thing! What a pity they don’t know you as we know you, that soft heart you carry around under all those medals—and bristles!”
He kissed her, then pushed her away, his mouth set firmly. “Flattery will get you nothing, young woman! I am not going to let Jack Donelson come home for Christmas. A long trip for a few days’ visit. He spends too much now, the young rascal. All these youngsters,” he told Eaton, “think the old man is made of money. Thirteen-cent cotton and shippers take more than half of that. Sell a fine colt and you get less than the worth of the hay to raise him.”
“You shouldn’t have bought all that expensive furniture, Mr. Jackson,” worried Rachel. “We could have got along with what we had.”
“We lived in a log blockhouse then. Haven’t you earned a decent bed to sleep in, my dear, after thirty-two years of putting up with me?”
“But if the children need the money—” Rachel always spoke of her numerous nieces and nephews who considered the Hermitage their part-time home as “the children.”
“They just think they need it. Including you, my spoiled pet.” He gave Emily a pinch, ignoring her downcast face. “All spoiled, the whole pack of you. Young Andy worst of all. Where is that scalawag, anyway? And where’s supper? Are we supposed to fast till Christmas? I’ve smelled cakes baking around this place for days and get set down to boiled meat and hominy. Right now I could eat a hog, tail, squeal, and all.”
“I’ll see if it’s ready, Uncle.” Emily hurried out.
The General looked sharply at his wife. “Don’t encourage this foolishness, my dear! That boy has got to buckle down to his law. Andy too, as soon as he’s old enough.”
“Those two—Miss Emily and your nephew—are in love?” asked Eaton.
“I hope not. After all, they are first cousins.”
Rachel said nothing. Her gentle face, with the round, firm chin, the dark eyes that held too often a brooding look under arched brows, grew thoughtful. Young love could be so beautiful! Oh, she knew! She knew! Never through all these years of struggle and anxiety and separation had her own love faltered for this stormy, dynamic, explosive man who was her husband. His word was law, but even a just law could be harsh when it bruised what was young and sweet and trusting.
She went quietly out of the room and John Eaton watched her go, saw a troubled look darken the General’s long face. A face hewn from a hickory log, General Coffee had said once, at New Orleans. Only the eyes could tolerate pain and now they darkened with hurt, following Rachel.
“A sorrow—a great sorrow that she has no children of her own,” he said. “All her family—prolific all of them. Her mother bore ten children but her daughter has none. So she has to mother a whole tribe and suffer every small disappointment with them. These lads—Andrew Jackson Donelson, young Andy and Andrew Hutchings are sons to her—to me too. The problem is that I have to hurt her with my firmness to make men out of them. Too much softness in the Donelson strain. I have been blessed by it, but now I must fight against it and defeat it in those boys. It’s not easy to do, John, not for a man who loves his wife as I love Rachel Jackson.”
“You did not tell all your news, General.”
Andrew Jackson shook his head. “Let her enjoy her Christmas. We’ve had mighty few of them together.”
A bell rang outside, and the General looked in dismay at his hands. “Supper’s ready and I forgot to wash. Come along with me, John. You, George!” He raised his voice in a shout. “Come here and mend this fire. Feels like snow!”