Louisa by Louisa Thomas Page A

was never far from her mind. She thought of her sons constantly, and of her siblings and mother. It was all the harder because so little communication was possible. In May, when the first letters arrived from the United States since the previous fall, they brought terrible news. She walked into John Quincy’s study one day and learned that her eldest sister, Nancy Hellen, had died in childbirth. “My heart collapsed in agony,” Louisa wrote in her diary, and, pregnant herself, she fell in a “dead fainting fit.” Unsurprisingly, she thought she was beginning to miscarry; she had already miscarried once in Russia. Only laudanum, “freely” used, calmed her down.
    There was so much riding on this unborn child. In the spring, John Quincy had learned from an old British newspaper that President Madison had nominated him to the U.S. Supreme Court, and Congress had confirmed it. His parents sent ecstatic letters about the prospect of the office and his return, and formal notice soon followed. John Quincy would be freed from the ruinous expenses in Russia. He would be able to serve his country, and in a job that would allow him to rise above partisan politics. He would come home.
    But John Quincy declined the appointment. He justified his decision by explaining that the choice was out of his hands: his wife was pregnant, and by the time she would be able to travel with an infant, ice would have trapped them. This was an excuse. He disliked practicing law and suspected he would be a bad judge. Privately, he admitted he might have declined the position even if Louisa were not pregnant. Still, it relieved him to be able to say that she was.
    So she tried to relax, to distract herself from her fears. She took achair to the banks of the river outside the house and went fishing with her young son Charles. She liked this “indolent sort of amusement,” she wrote, “for I
do not think.
” Thinking made her “tremble.”
    But, for once, the birth went smoothly. On August 11, at half past seven, Louisa gave birth to a daughter. A month later, at the English Factory Church, the Anglican minister baptized the girl as Louisa Catherine Adams. There was a small celebration at the Adamses’ house on Apothecary Island afterward—a collection of counts, ambassadors, Americans. The tsar had offered to stand as godfather, which John Quincy declined, though the child’s parents thought the baby did merit extraordinary attention. They studied the child’s soft, small body with startled wonder. “Such a pair of eyes!” Louisa wrote. “I fear I love her too well!”
    â€œWe are daily seeking for resemblances in her countenance, and associate her in fancy with all our dearest friends,” John Quincy wrote to Abigail. “She has the eyes of one; the nose of another, the mouth of a third and the forehead of a fourth, but her chin is absolutely and exclusively her own.”
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    W INTER DROVE the Adamses off the island, back into the city, into a cramped apartment with leaky windows. The dacha was left to the wolves. Crises were coming, in both the United States and Russia. By spring, Russia and France faced a conflict over Poland. The tsar already had troops massed along the border. “Thus it ends,” Alexander told John Quincy on the cold quay in March, not long before he left to join his armies. Great Britain continued to kidnap the United States’ sailors and dismiss its maritime rights. War hawks and Anglophiles worked against one another in Congress, and Madison wobbled toward war. There were crises of a domestic sort, meanwhile, in the Adamses’ household. John Quincy’s nephew William Smith and Kitty had some sort of romantic relationship, and Kitty was ill—possiblypregnant. For whatever reason, John Quincy forced William to marry her, which he did in a small ceremony in the Adamses’ apartment. (There is