“Look, look!” Papa cried, elbowing a space for me at the front of the crowd.
I clapped my hands in excitement. How beautiful the queen’s garments and how regal the king looked at her side! And yet, they were too far away to judge if they looked like their portraits in Philadelphia. “Why do some in the crowd boo the queen, Papa?”
“Because King Louis is too much governed by his queen,” Papa replied.
That hardly seemed like a thing she ought to be faulted for, but I held my tongue, for we were having a grand time. When the entourage disappeared, Papa and I walked hand in hand to the convent. I was a giddy girl the whole way, and didn’t want the feeling to end. “I should like to come out into society with you more often, Papa. Perhaps go with you to concerts and the theater.”
Papa smiled and pressed a quick kiss to my cheek. “You’re turning into my little lady, aren’t you?” The compliment lit me up inside and I stroked my hands over the fine silk of my beautiful green skirt. In truth, I was thirteen, no longer a child, nor even a girl, but, according to the nuns at the convent, a spring flower on the cusp of blooming. I’d just experienced my first woman’s blood, and I felt all the more like a woman when, with great adult satisfaction, I learned on my next visit home that Mr. Williamos had been sent packing.
Papa would say nothing of why his boon companion had been so unceremoniously ejected from our embassy. So, while he changed out of his formal waistcoat and powdered wig to take an evening brandy, I went to Mr. Short.
I suspected he would tell me the truth about such matters, and I was right.
Closeted with an array of ink pots and quill pens scattered upon his desk, my father’s secretary explained, “Mr. Williamos was ‘sent packing’ because he had his tailoring billed to your father’s account. What’s more, he had the temerity to lay the bill of receipt on my desk!”
I dared a glance up at Mr. Short in the light of a flickering candle. “Did he?”
An eyebrow lifted at my interest. “Indeed. Of course, he accused me of ransacking his belongings to find it. Can you imagine the nerve?”
Mr. Short must’ve suspected that I was the one who ransacked Mr. Williamos’s belongings. But he didn’t scold me for my misadventure. Indeed, I saw a hint of admiration in his eyes. That emboldened me to venture, “Surely a tailoring expense isn’t the whole reason Mr. Williamos was banished. Papa is very generous with his guests.”
Short nodded. “That’s true. Your saintly father thinks too well of other men, whereas I’m a sinner with a rather peculiar talent for prying into facts.”
I tried valiantly not to imagine what sort of sins Mr. Short may have committed, but my efforts did not prevent a flutter in my belly. “Did you pry into the facts of this matter, Mr. Short?”
His smile was thin and conspiratorial. “I made inquiries and got word from a certain Frenchwoman that Charles Williamos is a British spy.”
I gasped. A spy!
Pleasure brimmed up inside me at the thought that I had some part in flushing out an enemy, and any guilt I still felt for my sneakiness disappeared on the spot. The rightness of my instincts justified my actions and perhaps saved my father from embarrassment or harm. It was all very well for me to study music and Latin, but I was now decided that it would be much better for our fathers and husbands—for the country itself—if all American women learned to study the manners of people and warn against the bad ones.
It is a belief in which I have never wavered since.
BY LATE SUMMER, all anyone could talk about was Queen Marie-Antoinette. The fascination owed mainly to the accusation that she’d somehow persuaded the Cardinal de Rohan to secretly purchase for her an exquisite diamond necklace. Kitty Church’s bold and irreverent opinion was, “The audacious woman wanted an expensive bauble, but didn’t dare buy it openly while her subjects go hungry. Then, when the bill came due, she couldn’t even pay!”
It was patently false, and the nuns ought to have been embarrassed by the cardinal’s gullibility to be fooled by a woman impersonating the queen, but many of them seemed to blame the queen anyway. “How can the people believe her guilty?” I asked Papa. “The imposter signed her letter Marie-Antoinette de France. Even I know that’s not how sovereigns sign letters.”
Directing the servants as to where to place his favorite mirror in our new embassy, Papa replied, “The people believe it, because the queen of France has a reputation for callous imprudence. It sounds in keeping with her character.” He paused, to give me his full attention. “You may take a lesson from this, Patsy. Reputation is everything. A soiled reputation in an ordinary person may reduce them to impoverishment, but a soiled reputation in someone like the queen may take down a government.”