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.