“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.