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HER CHRISTMAS AT THE HERMITAGE

COPYRIGHT · 1955
BY LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO., INC.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THE RIGHT TO REPRODUCE THIS BOOK, OR ANY PORTION THEREOF, IN ANY FORM

PUBLISHED SIMULTANEOUSLY IN THE DOMINION OF CANADA BY
LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO., TORONTO

FIRST EDITION

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER 55-9896

Printed in the United States of America

HER CHRISTMAS
AT THE HERMITAGE

1

Hannah was fat and her knees were getting stiff. When she had a chance to rest on the well-polished stool before the fireplace, it was a groaning misery for her to get up again. Her head, wrapped in a starched white turban, thrust forward followed by a lunge of her shoulders till finally her legs could be persuaded to lift her erect. But once on foot she glared at the black women who giggled in corners, and at toothless old Moll. Moll had come all the way from Virginia. She remembered the long terrifying journey down the river to the Cumberland, the Indians, the hardships. She was privileged. She had no work to do now.

“You black trash better stir your stumps,” Hannah snapped, “Heap of company comin’. You, Betty, you put more sage in that dressin’. I raised them turkeys. Ain’t goin’ to have ’em ruint. Mis’ Jackson, she like her turkey seasoned high.”

Betty, narrow-faced and thin-lipped, gave an irritated shrug. But she did not look about for sympathetic support from the others, from the heckling tyranny of old Hannah, knowing that it would be nonexistent. Betty was a pariah on the plantation, holding her place only because she was the best cook in the county. Last year she had been sent back from Pensacola for rebellious behavior. It was whispered that she had been ordered whipped by General Jackson, had escaped that bitter disgrace because the General’s lady had a heart as soft as butter. No other house servant at the Hermitage had ever been ordered whipped and the stigma of her disgrace lay now over Betty’s peaked brows, her bitter mouth. Nobody ever talked to her, they all shied away from her aura of wickedness. All but Emily Donelson, Rachel Jackson’s favorite niece.

“You let Betty alone,” Emily ordered now, looking up from counting out silver on a long table. “Dilsey, you see that Simmy rubs all these spoons with fuller’s earth and soda. Let’s see—I count fifty-two. There’ll be Hutchingses and Hayses, Eastins, Donelsons—we’ll have to set two tables and the children may have to wait. Has Sary got the napkins ironed good and stiff?”

“Sary ironin’ in the washhouse now, Young Miss. She just yelled for Goby fetch her more charcoal to hot her irons up good.”

“Hannah, you come along with me while I ask aunt Rachel to unlock the press. We’ll need all the long tablecloths and they’ll have to be pressed. I’ll need four more spoons. These are those lovely French ones uncle Jackson brought from New Orleans. You tell Simmy to be mighty careful with them, Dilsey. Come along, Hannah. People may begin coming in today. There’s a lot to do.”

“Young Master Jack, he comin’?” asked Hannah boldly, grinning at the bright flush that warmed the young girl’s face.

Emily, fifteen, imperiously lovely, red-haired, shook her head sadly. “Uncle Jackson won’t let him come. I think it’s mean. He’s making Jack stay on in that old law school when he wants to be at home for Christmas.”

“Learnin’,” commented Hannah. “It mighty fine. Do Mis’ Rachel read to me outen her Bible, glory just shine around. And when the General spout big words out of books I gits shivers up my back.”

Emily hurried along the bricked way that set the kitchen apart from the big house. The wind was fresh and keen off the Tennessee hills and she drew her shawl close around her slender shoulders. In the house huge wood fires burned in three fireplaces but the hall where the curving stairs came down was chilly. She opened the dining room door and slipped inside quickly.

Rachel Jackson, with a Negro woman helping and a half-grown boy up on a stool, was getting china down from a high corner cupboard.

Aunt Rachel was getting heavy, Emily noted, and her breath quick and short. She gasped occasionally as she bent over the table, counting the plates the Negress set down, laughing a little as she straightened and drew a long breath.

“Law, I must be getting old, Emily. I get so short-winded every time I exert myself the least bit. I declare these china plates are still the prettiest ones I’ve got. Not a nick in one of them. That’s because I’ve always washed them myself. These came all the way from Pittsburgh by boat. My gracious, that was twenty-seven years ago! Brother Samuel went all the way up into Kentucky some place with the wagon to meet the boat and bring the goods to Nashville to your uncle Jackson’s store. Indians were everywhere too, those days. I was so nervous I couldn’t sleep till Brother Sam got back and my husband too—he was away off to Philadelphia. Sam was gone forty six days and my husband gone for two months.”

“You’ve been alone so much, aunt Rachel. If ever I get a husband I won’t let him leave me for even one day.”

Rachel let her breath out slowly. There was that little pain again, that came sometimes. She used Magic Sanitive Salve faithfully as her husband directed but it didn’t seem to do much good.

“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.

Rachel shut her lips tight, remembering. All for her, that hot-headed encounter. All for her the bullet Andrew Jackson still carried so dangerously near to his heart that it could not be removed. Jesse Benton’s bullet had shattered the General’s arm too, so that he had carried the arm in a sling through all the Indian war in Alabama. The arm still ached at night when a cold wind blew.

A fighting man whose eyes too quickly kindled to blue lightnings, whose reddish hair seemed to burn with some flame within him that was never cooled. Her own gentle counsel could damper it down now and then, but only briefly. Given the provocation, his temper leaped alive like a drawn sword and he became then, his wife was thinking sadly, as dangerous and unpredictable as one of those wild stallions that snorted and charged about the Hermitage meadows.

The amazing contradiction about him was that in his letters, in their quiet conversations in the big bright bedroom, he voiced only one passionate desire: to be able to live on here quietly for the rest of his days in this home he had built. He yearned, so he had written her so many times, to be free of wars and politics, answerable to no one but the call of his heart. Not to Madison nor Monroe nor any other president. Not to Sam Houston nor Governor Billy Carroll of Tennessee, nor even to Major John Eaton who seemed, in Rachel’s mind, to be forever grooming Andrew Jackson for some job or other, always important, always controversial and inevitably always far from the Hermitage.

She saw them now, riding up the drive from the muddy road, the General and John Eaton. Her husband sat very tall and a little gaunt on the saddle and his gray horse seemed always to sense the mood of his master and hold his head very high. Andrew Jackson’s hair, graying a little now, blew wildly over his ears under his beaver hat. His high collar and stock hid the thinness of his throat.

* * * * * * * *

He had been such a skinny lad, Rachel Jackson remembered, when John Overton had brought him, a stripling lawyer, to her mother’s house on the Cumberland, in that spring of 1789. And now it was 1823! Where had the years gone? The Widow Donelson had taken him in, and there in the house had been Rachel, Rachel Robards then, reconciled briefly to her violent, unpredictable husband, Lewis Robards, after a separation that had seen Rachel vilified, discarded, and abused.

The widow had tried hard to put some meat on that lanky young lawyer’s frame, but now, thirty-four years and four wars later, he was still too thin, still coughed too much and was weakened by digestive distresses from living too long on parched corn and other scanty fare.

Philip, the horse handler, came running out to take the bridles of the mounts and even through the windowpanes Rachel could hear her husband giving Philip orders in his high, arresting voice, the same voice that had commanded the defeat of General Pakenham at New Orleans, shouted defiance at Red Feather at Tohopeka and the Spanish governor at Pensacola.

Now he came shouting into the house. “Mrs. Jackson! Mrs. Jackson! Where are you?”

Never had they called each other by their Christian names. In letters they wrote, “My dearest.” At home he was the General, to her, or simply Husband. She was Mrs. Jackson, the woman he honored, adored, had fought for and would defend fiercely till her last breath.

“Here, Husband!” She hurried out into the hall where the two men were handing their damp cloaks to a servant. “Mr. Eaton, you are welcome as always here. Come in to the fire.”

“Feels like snow.” John Eaton slapped his gloves against his knee, shook moisture from his high-crowned hat. “Misting now, but it’s getting colder. Miss Emily,”—he made a courtly bow as they entered the warm parlor—“you grow more beautiful every day. How any young man can stay away from you is a puzzle in my mind.”

Emily made her curtsy. “You flatter me, sir.”

“All our girls are pretty,” stated the General, moving a chair near to the fire for his wife. “It’s the air here on this hill. We keep ’em here as long as we can, then sometimes we have to let ’em go home to their mothers, but not for long. Be seated, Mrs. Jackson. You look weary, my dear.”

“She is tired,” Emily said. “She’s been putting out dishes and silver all day, attending to the Christmas dinner. Uncle Jackson,” she began timidly, “if Jack should ride home for Christmas—”

“He won’t,” declared the General testily, getting down his long clay pipe from the mantelpiece. “He won’t because I wrote and gave him his orders not to come. I told him that the important thing for him now is to finish his schooling and get admitted to the bar. I’ve raised that boy.” He filled the pipe and handed it to Eaton. “You smoke that, John. I like my old corncob best. I raised that boy, Andrew Jackson Donelson. Going to make a gentleman and a scholar out of him. He’ll have the chance I never had, he and young Andy.”

“Jack Donelson is your nephew, Mrs. Jackson?” Eaton drew on the pipe to which Emily held a spill she had lighted at the fire.

“My brother’s son. But we’ve had him here with us since he was four years old. Andy, our adopted son, is my brother Severn’s boy. We took him four days after he was born.”

“Twins,” remarked the General. “Severn’s wife was mighty frail and one baby was all she could nurse. So we took Andy off her hands. All named after me,” he grinned, “a whole covey of ’em, Donelsons, Hutchingses and Hayeses.”

“I must see about supper, Mr. Jackson. You gentlemen will excuse me?” Rachel got up too quickly and the little pain caught at her and she put a quick hand to her breast.

“I’ll go, aunt Rachel, you sit still and rest,” Emily volunteered quickly.

“I want her to sit here and listen to my news,” said the General, thumbing down his pipe. “You too, Emily. Let the women attend to the supper. About a dozen of ’em around, ought to be able to manage to feed us.”

Rachel had turned pale. “Oh, no!” she cried. “Not Pensacola again! Not another war. I can’t bear it. You said we’d stay at home. Mr. Jackson, you swore we’d live here in peace in our new Hermitage.” Distress sharpened her voice, her eyes dimmed, and she dabbed at them nervously with a corner of her white shawl.

“Compose yourself, my dear,” comforted her husband. “This news I’ve brought is exciting. You’ll be pleased. You’re being offered an opportunity to go where few women have ever gone—American women, anyway.”

“But I don’t want to go anywhere,” Rachel almost wailed. “I’ve been to Kentucky and Florida and Washington and Natchez and New Orleans and I hated all those places. I just want to stay in my home and I want you to stay in it with me. Mr. Eaton, we’ve been separated more than we have been together all these years we’ve been married, Mr. Jackson and I, and now were both getting old.”

“Old? You call yourself old, dear lady?” protested Eaton. “Why, the best part of your life is ahead of you.”

“It could be,” she sighed, pressing her hands together, strong, sun-browned hands that had helped to steer a heavy boat down the Ohio River, that had gripped the rein on many a weary ride through the wilderness, poured lead into bullet molds when savage enemies howled outside the stockades, spun thread, planted rosebushes, tenderly comforted many a child. “It could be,” she repeated, “if only I could have those years in my home with my husband.”

The General’s eyes twinkled. He rapped out his pipe on an andiron, brushed tobacco from his tight, snuff-colored trousers.

“I’m disappointed in you, my dear,” he bantered. “Here I bring you news that you could have a chance to cross an ocean and see a new, strange, fascinating world, and you don’t even want to hear about it.”

“The ocean?” gasped Emily. “Oh, no, uncle Jackson!”

Rachel’s face had drained gray. She pressed both hands hard on her chest where the pain sprang alive, shutting off her breath, making her ears throb. Eaton half rose from his chair, looking at her uneasily.

“Stop teasing her, General,” he warned. “Tell her about President Monroe’s magnificent offer—which you don’t mean to accept.”

Andrew Jackson took a pose on the hearth, a boyish grin lightening his long face. Emily drew a breath of relief, laid her hand against Rachel’s cold cheek.

“It’s all right. Uncle Jackson is just having one of his jokes.”

Rachel relaxed a little. “I don’t like jokes,” she sighed. “Not when they scare me half to death.”

“But this is a splendid joke, my dear,” insisted her husband. “John and I laughed about it all the way home—especially we laughed at what Secretary Adams said about it. President Monroe has offered to send me as ambassador to Russia.”

“Russia!” both women cried at once.

“But you aren’t going, uncle Jackson?” Emily asked when the silence had stretched too long. “Why, it’s thousands and thousands of miles away! They have wolves there and snow all the year—I read it in a book.”

Rachel had never had time to read many books. There had always been too much to do. Russia was as vague, as far, and as uncivilized as China or Africa in her gentle mind. She sat rigidly waiting.

“I am not going to Russia,” announced the General finally.

“What was it Secretary Adams said?” Emily asked.

Jackson’s laughter pealed. “When the idea was talked about in Washington and Monroe proposed to the cabinet to send me over there—to get me out of the country, my love. That’s his motive and I’m not at all deceived by the flattering language of the letter of invitation. I know what James Monroe had in mind. Your husband is a disturbing influence in these United States. Mrs. Jackson,”—he leaned over and gave her a tweak on her soft arm—“your husband stirs up fights.”

“Marches an army in Florida and sets the governor back on his haunches,” put in Eaton. “Beats a British army with a little handful of farmers and hunters. And pirates! A dangerous man, Mrs. Jackson. He licked the Creeks and the Cherokee and made this southwest safe to live in. And there are some people who are talking around among themselves that Andrew Jackson ought to be President of the United States.”

“Well, he can’t be!” said Rachel firmly. “I won’t hear of it. He’s not strong nor well, you know that, John Eaton. He can’t even eat plain victuals half the time, and he coughs at night no matter how much salve I rub on his chest. Besides,”—she got to her feet, smoothing out her black silk skirt—“I don’t want to live in any palace—anywhere! Not in Russia. Not in Washington. I’d rather be a doorkeeper in the house of the Lord than to live in the finest palace ever was.”

“You haven’t told us what Secretary Adams said,” persisted Emily.

“It was really a compliment,” Eaton told them, “though I doubt if Adams intended it that way. He listened to the president’s proposal and snorted. He snorts very eloquently, the little man. ‘Send Andrew Jackson to represent this country in the court of the Czar,’ said he, ‘and that would be the end of peace with Russia!’”

The girl’s laughter rippled. She flew across the room and kissed the General’s chin. “You quarrelsome old thing! What a pity they don’t know you as we know you, that soft heart you carry around under all those medals—and bristles!”

He kissed her, then pushed her away, his mouth set firmly. “Flattery will get you nothing, young woman! I am not going to let Jack Donelson come home for Christmas. A long trip for a few days’ visit. He spends too much now, the young rascal. All these youngsters,” he told Eaton, “think the old man is made of money. Thirteen-cent cotton and shippers take more than half of that. Sell a fine colt and you get less than the worth of the hay to raise him.”

“You shouldn’t have bought all that expensive furniture, Mr. Jackson,” worried Rachel. “We could have got along with what we had.”

“We lived in a log blockhouse then. Haven’t you earned a decent bed to sleep in, my dear, after thirty-two years of putting up with me?”

“But if the children need the money—” Rachel always spoke of her numerous nieces and nephews who considered the Hermitage their part-time home as “the children.”

“They just think they need it. Including you, my spoiled pet.” He gave Emily a pinch, ignoring her downcast face. “All spoiled, the whole pack of you. Young Andy worst of all. Where is that scalawag, anyway? And where’s supper? Are we supposed to fast till Christmas? I’ve smelled cakes baking around this place for days and get set down to boiled meat and hominy. Right now I could eat a hog, tail, squeal, and all.”

“I’ll see if it’s ready, Uncle.” Emily hurried out.

The General looked sharply at his wife. “Don’t encourage this foolishness, my dear! That boy has got to buckle down to his law. Andy too, as soon as he’s old enough.”

“Those two—Miss Emily and your nephew—are in love?” asked Eaton.

“I hope not. After all, they are first cousins.”

Rachel said nothing. Her gentle face, with the round, firm chin, the dark eyes that held too often a brooding look under arched brows, grew thoughtful. Young love could be so beautiful! Oh, she knew! She knew! Never through all these years of struggle and anxiety and separation had her own love faltered for this stormy, dynamic, explosive man who was her husband. His word was law, but even a just law could be harsh when it bruised what was young and sweet and trusting.

She went quietly out of the room and John Eaton watched her go, saw a troubled look darken the General’s long face. A face hewn from a hickory log, General Coffee had said once, at New Orleans. Only the eyes could tolerate pain and now they darkened with hurt, following Rachel.

“A sorrow—a great sorrow that she has no children of her own,” he said. “All her family—prolific all of them. Her mother bore ten children but her daughter has none. So she has to mother a whole tribe and suffer every small disappointment with them. These lads—Andrew Jackson Donelson, young Andy and Andrew Hutchings are sons to her—to me too. The problem is that I have to hurt her with my firmness to make men out of them. Too much softness in the Donelson strain. I have been blessed by it, but now I must fight against it and defeat it in those boys. It’s not easy to do, John, not for a man who loves his wife as I love Rachel Jackson.”

“You did not tell all your news, General.”

Andrew Jackson shook his head. “Let her enjoy her Christmas. We’ve had mighty few of them together.”

A bell rang outside, and the General looked in dismay at his hands. “Supper’s ready and I forgot to wash. Come along with me, John. You, George!” He raised his voice in a shout. “Come here and mend this fire. Feels like snow!”

2

Her room under the eaves of the Hermitage was big and bright. The walls were covered with paper in a small, gay design; there were ruffled curtains at the windows. They looked down on the meadow where even on this chilly morning Andrew Jackson’s mares and colts picked at the frosty grass, lifting their heads now and then to watch for Philip to come trudging down from the stables to pour buckets of water and grain into the feeding troughs.

Later, Emily knew, every animal would be led back to the barns to be brushed and polished ready to meet the General’s critical eye.

The room was chilly. She had not bothered to light the fire laid on the hearth. She had delayed too long sitting up in her warm feather bed, a shawl around her shoulders, reading and rereading the letter. It made her heart beat quickly and her cheeks burn to read it, and when she pressed it against her heart it seemed to glow there, warming her all over.

He loved her! In stiff, formal, slightly legal language he had written it, plain to see, and the words danced before her eyes and got into her blood and did pirouettes there like little live things with silver bells on their feet. Lovely words! She kissed the letter now and then hid it inside her Bible that lay on the table beside the bed. What a pity that so much that was beautiful and wonderful must be hidden or face the chilly breath of adult disapproval!

“If you marry your own cousin all your children will be idiots,” the older people said, looking sombre, so desperately certain that they were right. They were the elders and knew the truth as young people could not be assumed to know it, not having lived long enough for experience to lay its cold blight upon them.

“I gave Andrew Jackson Donelson orders not to come home,” her uncle Jackson had said. The thrill in Emily’s heart was touched by panic now as she hurried into her clothes. Her chemise, chilly and crisp, the cramping stays, the long white ruffled drawers and petticoats. Her fingers were clumsy with cold and dread as she struggled with the fastenings. For Jack was coming! Already he was on the way. He must be riding southward on that road from Kentucky this minute, school left behind him—forever, the letter said.

He knew where he was needed, he had written. Aunt Jackson needed him. So would the General.

“Circumstances have arisen that will make it needful for our uncle to have assistance,” ran the letter. “So I shall return to offer my aid and I hope at that time that it will be proper for me to make my addresses to your family, my dear Emily, and request your hand in marriage. Farewell, then, my love, till I enter the gate at the Hermitage.”

There would be some kind of furious explosion of displeasure from uncle Jackson, she knew. He would be wrathy at being disobeyed, but her experience with the tempestuous old warrior led Emily to hope faintly that eventually he would give in. Especially if aunt Rachel should shed a few tears. That was his history, storming, shouting orders and blasting somebody with angry words, then softening instantly if he saw a look of hurt in Rachel Jackson’s eyes.

Breakfast, when the General was away, was usually a quiet meal at the Hermitage. Rachel never slept very well and rose, still and determined, setting about the multitude of tasks before her, level-eyed and grave. But when Andrew Jackson was at home there was hubbub. He was always noisy and impatient in the mornings, eating rapidly, summoning one servant after another to give orders about the cattle, the horses, the winter plowing. Negroes hurried in, stood hat in hand listening obediently. There was bedlam in the dining room when Emily went down on this morning of Christmas Eve.

“Mix some bran with the oats for those nursing mares,” uncle Jackson was barking at Philip.

“Yes, sah, Mista Jackson. That Truxton filly, she got sore foots. You want me to put tar and grease on her foots, sah?”

“Don’t get it too hot. You blistered all the hair off last time. Here!” Jackson slapped a piece of ham between the halves of a huge biscuit and handed it to the slave. “Eat that and get moving.”

“Yes, sah. Thank you, sah.”

“I need somebody around this place to take some of these chores off me,” grumbled the General. “You, boy!” He glared at Andrew, Junior, who was wolfing down a plateful of egg. “You go see to that filly’s feet. Got to learn. Got to learn some time.”

Young Andrew’s sensitive mouth jerked and his great eyes looked uneasy. “It’s raining, Papa,” he protested.

“It may turn to snow. It felt very raw to me when I went out to the dairy this morning,” Rachel put in gently.

“It rained on me at Fort Mimms and Chalmette,” snapped Andrew Jackson. “You have ridden miles in the rain, my love—so has this fellow! What are you, son, a lump of salt that a little rain can dissolve you? Or are you a paper man cut out to dance on a string while somebody picks a banjo?”

“No, Papa, I’ll go.” The boy hastily wiped his lips. “But Philip won’t pay any attention to me. He’ll just tell me to keep out of the way of that mare’s heels.”

“Make him obey you! How are you going to be master of this place when I’m gone if you can’t win the respect of the people? I may not be here much longer. I never thought to live long enough to sleep under this roof. Put that stuff on your wrist and be sure it’s not too hot.”

“You’ve been going to die before spring ever since I can remember, uncle Jackson,” teased Emily, when the boy had gone out.

“It’s that cold he gets in his chest every time he gets wet,” Rachel said. “And you get it too and so does Andy.”

“Let him get toughened up then,” growled the General. “You spoil all these young ones, my dear. Andy will have heavy responsibilities when I’m gone. He has to be trained to meet them. I’ve done fairly well with Andrew Jackson Donelson for all you women trying continually to soften him up. He’ll make a man.”

Emily’s heart was a bit happier. Uncle Jackson did need someone to help him, as Jack had written. She hoped that when Jack arrived, when the storm of her uncle’s ire had subsided, that the General would welcome young Jack’s assistance. Inevitably, it was certain, the General would be off again on some public service or other. He protested, he fumed, but always, when he was convinced that the call came from the people, he obeyed, and Rachel would be left alone again with the burden of this big plantation.

The slaves were willing but aunt Rachel was too soft with them, as she was too gentle, by the General’s standards, with the young people who surrounded her. She was continually protesting the overseer’s decisions, protecting shirkers and malcontents from punishment. She was too indulgent with young Andy—a spoiled boy already who, his cousin was convinced, was never going to learn the value of money.

Rachel excused herself now and hurried out—to see that the boy was adequately protected from the weather, Emily suspected. She would wrap him in coats and scarfs and when he returned from the pasture or the stable he would be put to bed, his feet soaked in hot mustard water and a plaster of goose grease and pepper on his chest if he so much as sneezed. Jack would be out there, seeing to the mares, without being told, his sweetheart believed worshipfully. Jack would be a great help to aunt Rachel.

“I’ll do my own room, aunt Rachel,” she called, as she went back through the house. “The girls have so much to do today.”

In the big buttery Rachel turned the keys in her hands anxiously. “I declare I keep forgetting how many people you counted, Emily.”

“I counted fifty-two, but with the weather so bad some of them might not get here. You know how awful the roads get when it rains very long. I wish it hadn’t rained today. I was going to have the boys cut some greens for me and decorate the house. There’s a big holly tree out there beyond the tulip grove covered with red berries.”

“Send George,” her aunt suggested. “Mr. Jackson gave George his old oilskin coat and a pair of boots. You could put holly on the mantelpieces. It would look right pretty but it would dry out mighty quick, I’m afraid. Emily, do you reckon Mr. Jackson has any idea of going to Russia? My patience, that would be a terrible place to go!”

“He said he had refused the appointment, aunt Rachel.”

“I know. But he refused to be governor of Florida too, and first thing I knew here I was packing to go to Pensacola. Emily, all I ask is so little—just to be allowed to stay in my home with my husband and my family. I don’t suit proud places. Sometimes I feel that Mr. Jackson must be ashamed of me.”

“Nonsense, aunt Rachel!” Emily gave the quivering figure a quick hug. “Uncle Jackson thinks you are perfect.”

“I wish I wasn’t getting so fat! It shortens my breath so.”

In her own room Emily quickly made her bed and hung her clothes away in the big wardrobe. Then she sat at the window again to read her letter. Words she had passed over lightly before in her happy daze now leaped out to trouble her. “Circumstances that have arisen,” Jack had written. A cold kind of prescience oppressed the girl, shot through with a breathless excitement, as though she had heard a trumpet blow.

It had come to her that there was always about Andrew Jackson that atmosphere of great events impending. Always when he seemed most intimate, familiar and dear, there was a cloak of aloofness shutting him in, a remote and dedicated sort of mystery. As though even when he was thinking homely thoughts—a lame mare, a fire that needed replenishing—he was listening to some far, calling drum. As though never could he belong entirely to this Hermitage, this woman that he loved, the young people he scolded and indulged impartially. Emily was very young and a trifle naïve, but there was a wisdom deep in her that recognized the destiny that cloaked this man she loved like a garment of silver, and her young mind dreaded it even while it thrilled her.

She remembered John Eaton’s words, that people were saying that Andrew Jackson should be President of the United States. She remembered, too, aunt Rachel’s positive declaration that this he could not be! No palaces for her, she had announced—but had there been a tinge of desperation in that declaration? Did aunt Rachel feel the pressure of destiny too, that remote glory that invested her man on horseback?

It would be exciting, Emily was thinking, to live in that new president’s palace in Washington. The British had burned it in retaliation for the sack of Toronto by the American forces, but it had been rebuilt, finer than ever, she had heard, and now it was as important as Buckingham Palace. Aunt Rachel had no wish to be a queen in a palace. Only too well Emily knew that aunt Rachel would be an unhappy queen.

“But I would love it!” she said suddenly aloud.

Silks and satins, servants bowing, diplomats with medals and ribbons on their gleaming shirt bosoms, sentries and bands playing, her thoughts raced and thrilled.

If only she and Jack could be guests in that palace! It was wonderful even to think about. She sat in a roseate dream for a chilly half hour, while her own fate hovered near, unfathomed. The fate that would make her, Emily Donelson, a young queen in a palace—and an unhappy queen!

3

On Christmas Eve the servants all grew tense and garrulous with excitement. The field workers, freed from toil for three days, were in and out of their cabins, hanging around the kitchen door till Betty’s sharp tongue sent them packing. The rain had ended but the day was bleak and cloudy with the air bringing a threat of snow. But a wind rose and though it whined in the great chimneys and sent whorls of smoke and ashes drifting out into the rooms, Rachel was grateful for the wind.

At least it would dry up the mud so that the rutted, marshy road out to the Hermitage would be passable for the carriages and wagons of the Christmas guests. Some who had a long way to come would arrive before night, and there was a frantic activity of black women airing blankets, ironing the stored dampness out of bed linen, making down pallets in the upper rooms and even in the hall. George lugged in ticks freshly stuffed with hay and these were beaten flat with whacking brooms before feather beds and quilts were spread over them.

The long tables in the dining room were set with the second-best linen and china. The ceremonial draping with the finest cloths would wait for Christmas morning. In the cellar the General and black Joey counted bottles of Madeira, of good Jamaica rum and peach brandy, broached charred kegs of whisky pounding in spigots, filling jugs that would be set out for the holiday “dram” for every slave on the plantation.

In the smokehouse Rachel directed the slicing of the heavy slabs of fat middling that would go, one to every cabin. There would be a chicken for each family too, and this year every hand on the place would be measured for a new pair of shoes. The shoemaker would come and stay for weeks and the smell of the cured hides would be heavy on the air, but at least every one of the more than a hundred black feet would be shod. That was the big worry for Rachel, shoes. In summer the field hands preferred to trudge behind a plow or drag a cotton sack barefooted, but in winter the frosty ground brought chills and lung fevers and there was an endless sound of coughing in the quarters and inevitably some of the people died.

A fearful responsibility, all these black souls, but today they were all happy and noisy, adding to the confusion in the house by their laughter and singing—singing hushed whenever the voice of the master was heard belowstairs but begun again as soon as a door slammed on him.

In her room Emily lovingly folded the Christmas gift she had knitted for Jack Donelson. A crimson muffler with stripes and a fringe of bright blue at either end. It narrowed a little in the middle where she had knitted a bit too tight, but she stretched it to make it even before she wrapped it in a square of white paper and tied it with a ribbon bow, sticking a tiny bunch of holly jauntily on top. She had gifts for aunt Rachel and uncle Jackson too, linen handkerchiefs she had hemstitched with neat, tiny stitches, then washed and bleached and ironed, with Sary standing around to keep the irons hot. She wrapped these too, along with the gifts for her own family, aware of the curious eyes of the two girls who were making an extra bed in the corner of the room. Some of the cousins would sleep in here, likely enough two of them with her in her own bed.

They would giggle and whisper about their beaus half the night and ply her with questions that she would evade, quite certain that she was fooling no one. She and Jack were a family anxiety, she knew. It was all part of that silly old superstition that cousins should not marry. Jack had more brains than all his relatives put together, she was fiercely certain; he was the cleverest and steadiest of all the Donelson clan; he was almost as smart as uncle Jackson. How could a brilliant young man like Jack have children that were idiots?

“And I’m not a stupid fool either!” she said suddenly, aloud.

The women, shaking out quilts, broke into delighted laughter. “No, Miss Emily, you sho’ ain’t no fool,” cried the older one, “You about the smartest white Miss we got, savin’ Mis’ Rachel herself.”

“Thank you, ’Relia. Don’t use that pillowcase. It’s got a rip in the seam.”

“Hit the very las’ one, Miss Emily. Done use every pillowcase Mis’ Jackson got.”

“Give it to me then. I’ll mend it. We can’t have guests sleeping on rags.”

“Not Miss Mary Eastin, no ways. She want everything mighty fine. Best we got ain’t none too good for Miss Mary.”

“Oh, Mary will sleep with me. She always does.”

“Her hair mighty pretty. Smooth and shiny as a new colt. Got a nice long nose too.”

“We’ve all got long noses. It’s the Donelson curse. Mine’s longest of all. All of us but aunt Rachel. Somehow it passed her by,” sighed Emily, threading a needle.

“Ain’t flat like mine, anyhow,” ’Relia echoed the sigh. “If the good Lord was to give me my dearest wish it would be to have a nice long nose like you got, Miss Emily.”

“Ain’t nobody satisfy,” stated Becky, the other maid. “White folks all wantin’ hair be curly. Colored folks all putting grease on they hair, make it straight. You reckon we be white when we git to Heaven, Miss Emily?”

“Law, we be angels with big white wings,” declared ’Relia. “Lord don’t want no black angels around, he got to make us white. I wants me a pyure white robe, white as Mis’ Rachel’s tablecloth. I goin’ put on my robe and sing praises to the Throne, day and night.”

“Are you going to sing tonight, Becky—all of you? It wouldn’t be Christmas if you people didn’t build a big fire out there behind the smokehouse and all gather round and sing.”

“Look a little like snow,” said Becky, peering out the window. Becky hated the cold. She burned more wood in her cabin than any other servant on the place, Emily had heard her aunt complain. From the window now she could see the wagon coming down the lane loaded with firewood, George walking beside the team, cracking his whip and shouting. Great fires would roar in every fireplace in the house, over the holidays. Rachel Jackson was nervous about fire. Someday the General was going to burn the Hermitage to the ground, she was always prophesying.[1]

A carriageload of cousins and aunts arrived shortly after the family had finished dinner, and there was a confusion of greetings, band boxes and parcels to be carried in, shawls, bonnets and cloaks laid off to be hung up by maids, cold hands and feet to be warmed by the fires, the scurry of excited children. Then all the food had to be warmed up and brought in again and the guests fed.

Emily hurried about, setting out plates, getting down glasses for the General, who insisted that everyone must have a tot of hot spiced rum to ward off a chill. She had little chance to slip to the front of the house to watch the drive from the windows, but while the company were eating, with Rachel hovering around and the General being the affable host, she did steal away to stand behind the long curtains, searching the approaching avenue anxiously.

Dusk was beginning to gather under the great trees. The smoke from the many chimneys eddied and settled to the ground. A few thin snowflakes drifted by on the wind, then drops of rain spattered the windowpanes. Bad weather for a young man riding alone. So many things could happen on a long journey. A horse stumbling at a ford, footpads on the road lying in wait for a solitary traveler, even the danger from Indians was not ended.

She was growing more tense with anxiety by the minute but she must not betray her unease, must keep her demeanor calm and be most surprised of all when Jack came riding in, or her uncle would never forgive her for hiding her letter. She had let the curtains fall when Andrew, Junior, came up behind her.

“Who you watching for, Emmy?”

She managed a light laugh. “Anybody! I hope if more are coming tonight they’ll get here before dark. We’d better light the candles. It’s going to be a gloomy night.”

“George is getting his fire going,” Andy looked from the window. “I suppose I’ll have to go out and help Papa dole out the Christmas Eve gifts all around. Looky yonder, the people are coming out with their cups and mugs and sacks already! You’ll have to light the candles, Emily. I’ve got to go out and be Young Marse Jackson.”

“It’s an honor, Andy. There are a lot of Donelson boys. You were the one chosen.”

“I know. It’s hard to live up to sometimes, ’specially when Jack’s around. I know he’s smarter than I am and Jack’s a fool for work and duty as I get reminded all the time.”

“You mustn’t be jealous. After all, they did pick you to be their son and heir. You’ll have everything, being Andrew Jackson’s son.”