4
In her room Rachel stood before her tall chest, her hands shaking, her throat cramping with an agonizing pain. Always in spring, when all about was new growth and beauty burgeoning the old terror twenty years past came back for a little to haunt her. Now Andy’s callous taunts had brought it again out of its grave to tear at her tender heart.
Always it was the same. She saw herself again sitting in the carriage beside that race track where the General’s fine horse Truxton, and a horse called Ploughboy owned by Charles Dickinson and his father were running a race. Gathered around the course was an enormous concourse of people: the women in carriages and on horseback wearing their new spring bonnets gay with flowers and ribbons, or flowing habits of bright velvet; the men jaunty in tight breeches strapped under their ankles, ruffled shirts and tall beaver hats. An April wind was blowing sweet off the fields.
It was all as sharply clear to Rachel, here in her big room dimly lighted by one candle, as it had been on that fateful day when Truxton had gone lame in the third heat of the race.
She could even hear again her own voice saying naïvely and more loudly than she had intended, “If Truxton hadn’t gone lame he would have left Ploughboy out of sight.”
She could hear too that loud, sneering voice that still crackled in her ears though the young man who had spoken had lain twenty years in his grave. Angry and raucous from a bit too much drink, Charles Dickinson had shouted, “About as far out of sight as Mrs. Jackson left her first husband when she ran off with the General!”
It comforted her still to remember that she had not been the one who repeated that jeering insult to Andrew Jackson. But there had been many ready to turn the knife in an old wound, to drag out again and bandy about the old, sordid story of Lewis Robards, who had married Rachel and discarded her, of the aborted divorce that had clouded Rachel Robards Jackson’s second marriage.
A chill ran over her body now as she remembered the furious, insulting letters that had been written, the General’s cold terrible rage, the town and county taking sides, eventually the irrevocable challenge. Her hands shook as she opened a drawer in the chest. Well hidden there under lavender-scented linen lay the browning copy of a paper that Andrew Jackson would have destroyed instantly, had he known that she still hoarded it. It was dated on the 23rd of May, 1806, and the lines that were hastily scrawled upon it were burned on Rachel Jackson’s heart.
On Friday, the 30th. Inst, we agree to meet at Harrison’s Mills, in Red River County, State of Kentucky for the Purpose of settling an Affair of Honor, between Andrew Jackson and Charles Dickinson, Esq. Further arrangements to be made. It is understood that the Meeting will be held at seven o’clock in the morning.
It was signed with the General’s familiar scrawl and the neater hand of young Dickinson.
Charles Dickinson had been so young! Rachel ached now with remembering the anguish of dread for her own beloved and for the young wife and baby of the youth Andrew Jackson had set out across the Kentucky line that May morning to kill, if he could—if he were not himself slain by a youth known to be one of the most famous shots in Tennessee.
Duels were illegal in Tennessee so Jackson had started the day before with his friend, John Overton, for the long ride into Kentucky. He had tried to slip away without Rachel’s knowledge, tried to belittle the danger. And he had come home with a bullet close to his heart, too near to be safely removed by the surgeons, and that bullet he carried yet. But Charles Dickinson had been brought home dead and for a year the town had seethed with furious criticism of the man who had survived that duel, Andrew Jackson. The affair had almost ended his public career. Rachel had known some moments when she wished that the tragedy had made it impossible for Andrew Jackson ever to be chosen for any high emprise again.
It had weighed heavily on her heart for years that the affair had been on her account, and there had been a long, unspoken family pact that the duel was never to be mentioned. She had nursed her husband for weeks through that hot summer, and he had hated the inactivity while Rachel was grateful that the spring ran cool and deep and the great trees gave comforting shade, and that she had her husband, wounded and restless as he was, by her side. He had not desired that tragic engagement, she knew. Faced with no honorable means of evading it, he had fought fairly according to the rules and borne his wound without capitalizing upon it.
She put away the old agreement, smoothed her hair and the lace of her collar, rubbed a bit of cotton dipped in rice powder over her swollen eyelids. This was Christmas Eve, the past was past, though Truxton’s colts still ambled over the meadows, some of them growing old as the Jacksons were growing old. Perhaps they would have no more Christmas Eves under this roof, this proud house that they loved. Nothing must mar this holiday. She would hurry out and tell Andy that he was forgiven. The boy was impulsive and thoughtless. He had not meant to wound her.
The house was full of voices; children being led upstairs to bed reluctant and protesting, but outside were voices too, the songs of the black people gathered to sing to their master and mistress. Rachel snatched up a shawl, wrapped her head and shoulders in it and went out to stand and listen.
“Christmas is a-comin’, the goose is getting fat.
“Please to put a penny in the ole man’s hat,” caroled the slaves.
She saw her husband standing bareheaded near the fire, his hair blowing in the winter wind, the firelight casting deep shadows under his eyes. He had a hand on Andy’s shoulder, an arm around Emily. No one heeded the mist that blew on the wind. Some of the older women were already picking their chickens on the lee side of the smokehouse.
“Go down, Moses, ’way down in Egypt’s lan’,” trilled a high voice, Becky’s. The humming chorus swelled, burst into tremendous melody. “Tell ole Phar’oh,—let my people go!”
Go down, Moses! Go down, Andrew Jackson! To Tohopeka, to Mobile, to New Orleans, to Pensacola. Go down, Andrew Jackson, and set a people free! No, no, moaned the heart of Rachel. Never any more. This was home, this was their Hermitage, this was Christmas Eve. Her eyes searched the air, challenged the air, the Heavens, as though somewhere out there in the murky dark lurked fate in wait for them, a prescience that would not lift.
Was it a charm or a curse that invested her man on horseback? What dark Nemesis had hovered over that little cabin back in the North Carolina sandhills where he had been born? What strange power had preserved him when all his family succumbed to the hardships of that time of bitter war? What power of destiny had brought him up, an orphaned waif, led him through so many conflicts, made him a firebrand and a leader whom men would follow as they followed a flag?
Sick and coughing, his frail health her constant anxiety, he inspired strong men. Something was brewing now. Rachel felt it, but she must hold her tongue and quiet her unease with the drug of hope.
A horse came trotting up the drive and Rachel saw Emily start forward eagerly. Then the girl stopped as a slim figure in oilskin slid from the saddle.
“It’s Ralph!” Rachel hurried forward to greet the young artist, Ralph Earl. Off and on, for many years, the portrait painter had made his home at the Hermitage. He had done a fine portrait of the General, wooed and won Jane Caffrey, Rachel’s niece. There had been a fine wedding in the old log house that still stood there in the yard, but gentle Jane had lived only a year. Now Earl was a saddened and lonely man and Rachel mothered him after her habit with all young, unmothered creatures. “How fine that you got back from the East for Christmas, Ralph!” she cried, taking his hand.
“I came to paint your picture,” he said. “The General will never give me any peace till I do your portrait, aunt Rachel.”
“Fiddlesticks!” She led him into the house. “You come get warm and dry this minute before you take a ptisic. I’ll make a hot toddy for you, myself. And you don’t want to paint a picture of a fat old woman like me. Nobody would look at it. We’d have to hang it in the wash-house.”
“A portrait of you might be hung on the walls of some very splendid place, aunt Rachel,” Earl argued, handing his damp garments to a servant.
She looked at him in sudden alarm. “Now whatever do you mean by that?”
“Oh—just an idea I had,” he soothed, seeing her perturbation. “People keep getting notions about what Andrew Jackson could do for this country. I hear about them—traveling around.”
She clutched at his arm. “No, Ralph—whatever their notions are, he’s not going to go dashing off again on some wild adventure or other. He’s not strong, you know that. He’ll get that lung fever again and it almost caused his death last winter. And besides,”—her eyes misted and her voice croaked—“he’d have to leave our home! Our Hermitage!”
“But think of what great things could happen to you, aunt Rachel! Someday you might be one of the greatest ladies in the land.”
“I don’t want to be a great lady.” She held tight to the cold hand he had laid upon her cheek. “I want to stay here and raise young Andy and Andrew Hutchings. I want to see Emily well married and all our people taken care of. I never want to have to go dragging out again to make calls and leave cards and smile till my face aches. I have had enough of that.”
“Just the same I’m going to paint your portrait,” he insisted.
“You paint Emily. She’s filling out, she’s going to be a beauty. The General’s got that little picture of me that Anna Peale painted the year of that New Orleans battle. He carries it around with him all the time, though he wrote to me once and said he didn’t need it, that he had my picture engraved on his heart. Nobody could ask for anything more beautiful than that, Ralph, no woman alive. He wouldn’t engrave a picture of me as I am now, on his heart—an old lady getting fat and out of breath!”
“I think he would,” said Earl. “I think he would prize any picture of you, aunt Rachel, more than his life.”
“He’s coming in,” she whispered. “I must get his bed warm so he won’t cough all night. You’ll have to sleep with Andy tonight. We’ve got a houseful already and more coming. And Ralph, don’t you let the General get notions about rushing off to be somebody important. It’s time he took care of himself.”
“I’ll tell him, aunt Rachel. But you know Andrew Jackson. If any call came from the people to serve anywhere, no one could hold him.”
“No,” she said sadly. “Not even I!”