“Esther seems to think so.” Abigail was lacing up her boots.

“Esther has no more brain in her head than your finches do.”

As if to confirm his opinion of them, Beatrice and Benedick went into a chirping flurry of self-induced hysteria in their gilt cage beside the window. Abigail made a shushing gesture to her husband, fearful that Esther might come up the stairs and hear this remark. John was probably the least diplomatic diplomat since the Goths had sent their emissaries to ancient Rome, and didn’t confine himself to referring to one of his fellow delegates as “a demon of discord” whose life was “one continued insult to good manners and to decency.” He’d gotten better over the years, but when enraged or annoyed he would still say pretty much anything to and about anyone, and had more than once had the servant-girl—who really did sometimes seem to have a brain the size of a grain of bird-shot—in tears.

But the servant who appeared behind John wasn’t Esther, but prim Mr. Spiller the butler. “Shall I have Ned harness the carriage, ma’am?”

“Don’t be silly,” retorted Abigail. “It’s five minutes’ walk to Wimpole Street.” It took most people ten.

“It’s also coming over cloudy again,” John told her. “You’ve been ill most of the winter—”

“Nonsense,” said Abigail, though it was perfectly true that since October she’d been racked by the worst bouts of rheumatism since the voyage from Boston. “I shall have Esther bring along an umbrella. You may need the carriage.”

John shook his head. “Surely the mere concerns of hearth and home haven’t driven it from your mind that we’re dining with Lord Carmarthen today? To give me one last chance at getting some satisfaction about those articles of the treaty that the Crown hasn’t honored and shows not the slightest intention of honoring….”

“Drat it!” Abigail had forgotten, though she’d been writing to her sister Mary about dining with the Foreign Secretary moments before Esther and Briesler had come in with the news. “You might as well stop at home, for all the good talking to Carmarthen is going to do. What good is negotiating a treaty, and having even the King sign it, if they refuse to comply with it? They’re still keeping troops along our frontiers, they’re still seizing our shipping and claiming it’s smuggled, and still forcing American sailors into their navy.” She finished lacing her other boot, straightened up to face her husband. “And if they’ve honored a single one of the claims of Americans here in London that you’ve petitioned for—”

She broke off, seeing Esther come up the stairs again, cloaked and hooded for a walk in the harsh spring chill and carrying the oiled-silk umbrella that Abigail had purchased in Paris rather than condemn herself to forever doling out shillings and sous for sedan-chairs when it came on to rain.

Nabby needed her. In Nabby’s position, she herself would have been content to bear a child alone in an enemy land, if doing so would allow her mother to attend a gathering so potentially vital to the cause of the young Republic, always supposing her gentle mother would have done any such thing in her life. But Nabby, Abigail suspected, did not have her strength. She firmly pushed aside her disappointment at not being able to be in two places at once, and said, “Please tender my regrets, and Nabby’s, to Lady Carmarthen. I shall send a note from Nabby’s this afternoon.” She wrapped the thicker India shawl around her shoulders, over the one she’d been wearing that morning already. Though she’d put on weight since coming to England, Abigail still felt the damp cold profoundly. There were weeks on end when it seemed to her that she never got warm.

“Would it help if I came?” John—and his maniacally inquisitive friend Tom Jefferson—were the only men Abigail had ever met who would actually volunteer to be present at a childbirth.

“It will help most, dear sir,” said Abigail, laying a hand to his cheek, “if you do precisely as a minister should: Dine with Lord Carmarthen, and impress upon him the dishonor that he does to his country, and his country to itself, by disregarding the treaty. And let me deal with the mere concerns of hearth and home. I shall send word to you at once if there is…” She hesitated, unwilling even to say it. Instead, she finished with, “if there is anything you need to know.”

For all her fine-boned thinness Abigail had birthed five children without trouble, but for a fleeting instant she saw the shadow in John’s eyes. She knew exactly what was in his mind: the haunted look in Tom Jefferson’s eyes, when anyone spoke of the beloved wife whose childbearing had taken her life. They descended the stairs in silence, to the hall where Briesler waited with heavy cloaks, broad-brimmed hats, tall iron shoe-pattens, stout gloves, and the basket of linen rags, lint, soap, spirits of wine, thread, and fine-honed scissors. Abigail had made sure the best midwife in London had been engaged but never left anything to chance.

On the way downstairs she added her Bible, a copy of Richardson’s Pamela (which she knew to be one of Nabby’s favorites), and Buchan’s Domestic Medicine. John opened the door for the little party onto the chilly sparkle of the cloudy April day, and she turned back and put her hand to John’s cheek again. “All will be well, dear sir,” she promised.

Like her, she thought as she descended the front steps, John, too, wished to be in two places at once, both doing his duty to his country and sitting at his daughter’s side.



London.