Free Louisa by Louisa Thomas Page B

wished; he was her authority. Later, she would wish she had resisted. She would struggle with her desire to submit and her desire to revolt for the rest of her life. “A man can take care of himself:—And if he abandons one part of his family he soon learns that he might as well leave them all,” she wrote in 1840, as she furiously raked over John Quincy’s decision not to bring her sons to Russia. Immediately, she pulled back. “I do not mean to suggest the smallest reproach.”
    In 1840, she would know what she could not have known at the time—that she would not see her sons for six years, and that she would lose them well before their time. In retrospect, she was certain that it was wrong to be separated from her sons. “Oh this agony of agonies!” Louisa wrote in “Adventures.” “Can ambition repay such sacrifices? never!!”

PART FOUR
The
GILDED
DARKNESS
St. Petersburg , 1809–1815

1
    T HE VOYAGE TOOK eighty days. Aboard ship, the single room, shared by seven adults and a boy who turned two on the voyage, was rife with tension. Everyone became seasick. Charles was “fractious,” wrote his frustrated father, and the three young men working for John Quincy immediately formed rivalries. Kitty, unwillingly or not, put herself at the center of them. There was no escape, nothing to do but endure. “I found the power of self-abstraction fails,” John Quincy wrote in his diary, a mild hint of his hot temper. Louisa watched it all unfolding and felt despair, “miserable,
alone
in every feeling.” And she was afraid. The
Horace
sailed past blockades and privateers, British warships and Danish gunboats. The Napoleonic Wars made every whisper of low white cloud seem like the apparition of a vessel on the horizon, and every vessel was a potential threat. The
Horace
was halted eleven times, boarded by armed men who questioned the sailors and scrutinized their papers. Near Copenhagen, three ships manned their guns and opened fire. The threat of an enemy was actually the least of the dangers, though. The weather was lethal. The storms grew more severe with each passing week; winter was coming on too fast. The waves rose like walls pulled up by ropes, and the ship slid terrifyingly down theirsides. One gale snapped two of the ship’s three anchors. By mid-October, in the middle of the squally Baltic, the captain of the
Horace
wanted to turn back to Copenhagen and wait until spring to sail. Louisa heard what the captain said about their chances of making it safely. “I had no hope,” she would remember. “I knew that Mr. Adams would never give up.” She was right. John Quincy overruled the captain’s decision, and they sailed on.
    The ship clawed into the Gulf of Finland, curved north toward Stockholm, and then cut east, passing barren gray shores, moving through empty waters. Finally, on October 22, the thin boundary between sea and sky became land: Russia.
    They sailed into Kronstadt first, an island fortress of granite ramparts at the entrance to the harbor of St. Petersburg. Invited to a salon at an officer’s house, Louisa and Kitty donned enormous brown beaver-fur bonnets that they had bought in Copenhagen, assured they were the fashion in St. Petersburg. When they entered the room, the other women, wearing stiff silk dresses and dazzling with diamonds, turned and stared at the Americans, “aghast.” In the horror on their faces, Louisa saw the image of herself reflected back. It was “too ridiculous.” She couldn’t help but want to laugh.
    Their situation was less funny in the morning. While the group had slept on the island, a storm had blown the
Horace
off its moorings and out to sea, with their trunks on board. Louisa had only the thin white cambric wrapper she wore and that ridiculous fur hat. Still, they had to board the small boat that would carry them into the city. It was a long day, a rough