American Saint by Joan Barthel

Author:Joan Barthel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

NINE

Winchester Friday Afternoon

We are so far safe tho’ our progress is so much slower than you expected—your turnpike road is to be sure a very rough one and we were obliged to walk the Horses all the way—and have walked ourselves all except Cecilia nearly half the time—this morning four miles and a half before Breakfast … all the natives astonished as we went before the carriage—the dogs and pigs came out to meet us and the geese stretched their necks in mute demand to know if we were any of their sort to which we gave assent.

Elizabeth wrote this report to Dubourg when she was in a village thirty miles northwest of Baltimore. She wanted to keep him informed, every step of the way. He had supported her when she was persecuted in New York. He had rescued her by bringing her to Baltimore. He had kept his promise to educate her sons at no charge. And he would cause trouble for her almost as soon as they reached Emmitsburg.

* * *

Before the Revolutionary War, English settlers had ventured into the poplar woods in the dense Maryland countryside. Near Toms Creek, the long tributary of the Monocacy River that flowed into the Atlantic, the colony of small farms was called Poplar Fields until a wheat farmer, Samuel Emmit, took out patents for land and began to sell lots to newcomers for two pounds ten shillings. By the time Elizabeth arrived, Emmitsburg had a three-page newspaper, a general store, and more than one tavern—twelve and a half cents for a meal, three cents for a drink. One Catholic priest, John Dubois, served the one Catholic church, St. Joseph’s, as well as Mount St. Mary’s College.

Halfway up the mountainside between Mount St. Mary’s and its chapel, Dubois lived in a two-room log cabin. At the height of the French Revolution, he’d escaped from Paris, in disguise, helped by a classmate, Maximilien Robespierre. With a letter of introduction from the Marquis de Lafayette, Dubois met Patrick Henry, who gave him English lessons. The priest worked as a circuit-riding missionary in central Maryland until 1808, when he founded Mount St. Mary’s, where students called him “Little Napoleon.”

To Elizabeth, Dubois was “an excellent, superexcellent priest.” When the women arrived, their farmhouse in the valley was being made ready, so Dubois loaned them his cabin as their first home. William and Richard had already been accepted at the college, where a classmate was Jerome Bonaparte, nephew of the man whom Elizabeth called “Old Bony.” She met John Hughes, a gardener and groundskeeper there, a man who would one day radically alter the course of her religious community.

Elizabeth loved the cabin on sight, being “half in the sky.” But Harriet was unhappy. Torn between her wish to become a Catholic and the harsh truth that most family doors would then be closed to her, she wore Bayley’s miniature around her neck and told Elizabeth, “If it were not for this engagement, I would remain with you.” In the short time she had been in Baltimore, she had become attached to Pierre Babade.

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