Louisa Read Free Page B

Quincy had friends in London who did business with Joshua and may have heard something from one of them, or he may have merely surmised. Joshua was open about his struggles with his former partners in Maryland and his need to wrap up matters in person. One of his letters to John Quincy contained a disconcerting line: “I am in hourly expectations of letters from my late partners, they will be interesting, and as then rec[eive]d, I will cometo a decided resolution will then communicate to you my planns without guile or reserve.” John Quincy read guile and reserve straight into his words, guessing at a plan to leave Louisa in Holland so that he would have to fix the wedding date.
    Maybe that really was the plan. Maybe Joshua knew, too, that if his financial situation grew much worse, it would be that much harder for him to marry his daughter off. He had once been a young man with a cavalier attitude toward marriage himself. Perhaps he saw John Quincy’s reluctance and decided to apply some pressure himself.
    Whatever the truth , John Quincy responded to Louisa in the worst possible way. “You will be sensible what an appearance in the eyes of the world, your coming here would have; an appearance consistent neither with your dignity, nor my delicacy,” he wrote to Louisa, accusing her of conspiring with her father. Impugning a young woman’s “dignity” and “delicacy”—which she rightly read as
her
modesty, not his—was as bad an insult as he could have made to a young woman. Her suggestion that a betrothed couple facing a long separation might welcome a reunion was treated as disgraceful. He tried to soften it by saying, “Let us my lovely friend rather submit with cheerfulness to the laws of necessity than resort to unbecoming remedies for relief,” but that just made matters worse. John Quincy was calling her virtue into question.
    She recoiled from his response. “Believe me I should be sorry to put it in your power, or in that of the world, to say I wished to force myself upon any man or into any family,” Louisa retorted, as angry at his innuendo as she deserved to be. She had done nothing, she added, to deserve such “mortification” as his letters brought. So began a period of angry, passionate attacks. While couching their words in claims of total devotion and love, they hurtled shots across the Channel fast and thick. She criticized his excessive attachment to his books. With careless cruelty, he scorned her choice of reading—and so the quality of her mind. She was, she could easily infer, no match for him.
    In truth, his insult had a liberating effect. She wrote, for the first time, without the help of the governess. She would not let herself be so easily dismissed, so rudely pushed around. Her writing grew in confidence, style, and wit. It is remarkable that, in so short a time after writing such cringing, pathetic letters, she started to find a voice. It was immature, and not as strong and vivid as the one she would later develop, but it was her voice nonetheless.
    They engaged in a series of small skirmishes—feinting with this one, pulling back with the next—that led to passion and flirtation, and also to anger and misunderstanding. It was a charged correspondence, in which the heat emanated from both their attraction and their fury. She used sarcasm. He found her tone unattractive. “Let us understand one another, Louisa,” John Quincy wrote to her (on her birthday, no less). “I never thought your disposition deficient in
spirit
, and that I am fully convinced you have as much of it as can be consistent with an amiable temper, but let me earnestly entreat you never to employ it in discussion with me, and to remember that it is in its nature a
repellent
quality.”
    She found his peremptory style offensive. He detected “suspicion and distrust” within her.
    He accused her of “childish weakness or