The Fourth of July was always boisterous in the Federal City, which was then only beginning to be called after its founder. That year—1803—was quadruply ebullient: President Jefferson had announced, just that morning, that France had sold the United States all its territory of Louisiana.

There would be no fighting over the West, no threat of Spain once again closing the Mississippi to trade. As a Quaker, Dolley’s soul had been deeply satisfied: Fourteen million dollars was less costly than any war she’d ever heard of, and every land-speculator in the country was in ecstasies. Jefferson had held a mammoth levee at the Executive Mansion at noon, and private celebrations were being planned all over the city. Burr had come to the levee alone, and had exchanged no more than a dozen words with Sophie, but turning her head Dolley could pick out her friend Sophie Hallam, in very stylish second mourning, deep in conversation with Hannah Gallatin, the wife of the Secretary of the Treasury.

“More curiously,” Burr went on, following her gaze, “how would she return? Mrs. Hallam’s needlework is unexcelled, naturally—” He lifted his punch-cup in salute to Dolley’s gown of yolk-yellow silk and silver spider-gauze that had been Sophie’s creation. “Yet a woman needs money for materials, to set up as a mantua-maker, much less to purchase a house in Philadelphia—which she did—and another here, which she also did, in excellent parts of both towns. And no one I’ve ever spoken to has heard of a merchant or banker in England by the name of Hallam. A woman can trade on the capital which, God help them, God gives to women—but it generally leaves its mark, on a woman’s soul and on her body also. And I haven’t seen it.”

Her cheeks hot with anger for Sophie, Dolley drew Burr a little further into the relative privacy of the window—the oval drawing-room which the Adamses had used as an entrance-hall was as full as it could hold—and whispered, “I trust thou wilt understand that should I hear a single word of this ever again from any other source, dear as I hold thee, my friend, our friendship will be at an end.”

“I do understand, Mrs. Madison,” replied Burr, inclining his head. “And you will not. I’ve spoken of this to you alone, solely because of all the women in this city, only you and Jefferson’s daughters know the lady well.”

Above him, flanked by the rather faded green curtains that Jefferson had purchased for the oval salon, Washington’s portrait had gazed into space, as if fiercely disapproving still of Burr after all those years. In addition to the usual Congressmen, speculators, and place-servers, the crowd in the oval drawing-room was enlivened by a number of delegates from Western Indian tribes, in full glory of feathers and paint, and representatives from the piratical Barbary States in a gaudy glory of turbans and pearls.

“However,” Burr went on quietly, “those ladies seem to have taken their broods back to Virginia for the foreseeable future. Indeed, it isn’t my business to speak of what I cannot prove and only suspect—fond as I am and continue to be of the lady! But as Vice President of this country, I suppose it is my duty to at least let the wife of the Secretary of State know that the thought has crossed my mind that there may be an agent of Britain in our midst.”

His words returned to Dolley now. Through a haze of dust she watched American militiamen staggering along the dirt road beside the carriage, or straggling in the distance among the trees. Joe kept the horses as close to a gallop as was possible in the ruts of Pennsylvania Avenue: Clinging with one hand to the strap, the other arm fending off boxes, Dolley felt as if her bones would be broken even if they didn’t manage to overturn the vehicle.

Through the windows she could see soldiers as well as civilians driving wagons full of supplies. Others rode horses or mules still in the harness of some abandoned dray or limber. There were others, Dolley saw with sudden anger—rough men both black and white in laborers’ clothes—driving carts or pushing barrows full of silk dresses, of silver services hastily bundled up in sheets or shawls, even small pieces of expensive furniture or elaborate, imported screens.

Sophie had been right. Such men had probably been just waiting for her carriage to leave the Mansion, to begin looting what she could not save.

Would Sophie wait there, too, for the British troops to come?

Burr may have been a schemer—and later, a traitor—but he had a keen judgment of humankind.

And under ordinary circumstances it wouldn’t have mattered what Sophie was in the habit of telling the British Minister. All ministers had informants, who picked up bits of news. It was part of a minister’s job. Dolley acknowledged that Sophie—known to be a friend to both Jefferson and Abigail Adams, whose first successes had been due to her friendship with Martha Washington—would be a logical choice for such work.

But these were not ordinary circumstances.

Her mind circled back to Jemmy, sixty-three years old, riding the Bladensburg battlefield in range of the British guns.

I should not have left.

The carriage jolted, veered around a group of stumbling men, without knapsacks or rifles, whose dust-smeared militia uniforms bore the marks of powder but not of blood.

If Jemmy is taken…

He won’t be, she told herself grimly. He will have had the sense to flee, when his Army dissolved about him.

But Jemmy, in masterminding Jefferson’s election, had read hundreds of scoffing broadsides that mocked Jefferson’s “cowardice” in fleeing Richmond ahead of Benedict Arnold’s forces; in getting out of Monticello minutes before Tarleton’s dragoons emerged from the woods. The jeers had followed Jefferson for twenty years, never mentioning the fact that Tarleton would almost certainly have hanged the author of the Declaration of Independence, had he caught him.

Would the recollection of the mockery keep Jemmy on the field a few fatal minutes beyond his own last chance to flee?

Please, God, no, Dolley whispered. Dearest God, hold him safe in Thy hands.

Horsemen clattered up beside the carriage, the blue of the leader’s militia jacket barely visible through the dust. Joe reined in and Dolley put down the window, her hands trembling so badly they could barely work the catches. One of the men she recognized as John Graham, who had been a clerk with the State Department when Jemmy had taken it over—he was Chief there now.

“Where is he?” She thrust open the door, staggering as she stepped down into the road.

“We don’t know, ma’am. But General Winder was defeated. The whole Army’s in flight—”

He’ll go to the Mansion and be captured. I knew I should not have left.

“Hast heard anything?” Her voice cracked. “Mr. Graham, take me back to the Mansion. I shan’t leave him—”

“Mrs. Madison, your being taken will serve him no good—”

“It will if he be taken as well!” She almost screamed the words at him, the whole weight of the day suddenly falling on her, like a dam giving way all at once before the pressure of a flood. Her whole body shook. “I will not leave him! Take the things on to Georgetown, but let me go back!”

“There is no going back,” said Graham.

Sukey scrambled from the carriage-box and took her other arm, said with surprising gentleness, “Ma’am, he’s right. You can’t—”

Like the rolling boom of thunder, an explosion cut across her words. All of them swung around, looking toward the south. Black smoke rolled toward the storm-blackening sky. Even at this distance, Dolley could see in it flickers of flame.

“It’s the Navy Yard,” said Graham. “Secretary Jones ordered its destruction, to keep our powder and ships out of the hands of the British.”

Dolley stood for a long moment, watching the smoke and the flame, as another explosion echoed across those flat green marshes, the scattered buildings and cut-down stumps that made up the Republic’s capital. Refugees jostled around them, poured like a dirty river along the road to Georgetown.

More quietly, Graham repeated, “Ma’am, there is no going back.”

Dolley let herself be coaxed back into the carriage. Joe whipped up the horses; they clattered on their way.



Sophie Hallam was still at the Executive Mansion when James Madison stumbled up the front steps. French John, with Pol in her cage and a bottle of the Madisons’ best champagne in either coat-pocket, had departed shortly after four, and immediately thereafter looters had broken in, helping themselves to whatever Dolley had left. Sophie had simply retreated to the yellow parlor and seated herself by the window with a pistol and a bottle of champagne—after all, these men and women had presumably paid the taxes that purchased the silver candlesticks and bottles of port and cognac.