The Ambitious Madame Bonaparte Read Free

weeks after Betsy’s ninth birthday, a blizzard struck Baltimore. The sight of thick-falling snow outside the front windows proved to be too much for Betsy to resist, especially since her mother was talking to the housekeeper in the back building, which housed the kitchen, pantry, and servants’ quarters. Betsy hurried into the front entryway, donned her cardinal-red winter cloak, pulled up the lined hood, and crept outside.
    When her father first came to Baltimore as a wealthy trader in 1778, he built three-story, red brick houses side-by-side on South Street, one to serve as his residence and the other as his place of business. Each had a front building approximately thirty feet wide and fifty feet deep, connected by a passage to a narrower back building that was not visible from the street. Because of the way the façades were constructed, the two buildings looked like one very wide mansion with two center doors beneath a classical portico. The first floor was raised slightly above street level, so a stoop of five steps—made of the local white marble so characteristic of Baltimore—climbed to the entrance. Betsy crouched by the side of those steps, concealed from her brothers as they returned home from school. As she waited, she formed a snowball and packed it tightly.
    Soon she heard the shouts of boys coming toward her. She lifted her head just enough to peer through the iron railing at the side of the stoop and saw Robert approaching the counting house next door.
    Rushing from her hiding place, Betsy flung the snowball, which missed her brother widely. He spotted her and shouted, “You little minx!”
    Betsy shrieked as an unexpected snowball hit her left ear. Her hood had fallen back, so icy snow slithered down her neck. She whirled in the direction of the missile and saw Johnny slip in the snow as he ran, while William Jr. stood yelling for them to stop.
    All four children fell silent as their father opened the black-painted door of his counting house. “Boys! Come inside.” Patterson stepped backwards. “You too, Betsy.”
    He led them into the large front room where his clerks sat on stools before high slant-top desks, and the dusty ledger books of years past lined the shelves above their heads. Patterson set the boys to doing their daily bookkeeping exercises under the supervision of his senior clerk. Then he motioned for Betsy to follow him into his private office, which was furnished with a glass-fronted bookcase and a wide Sheraton writing desk that had raised cubbyholes along either side edge. A pair of framed etchings of company ships hung above the plain brick fireplace.
    After closing the door, Patterson stood before his desk and gazed down at his daughter in silence. Betsy felt miserable. Her cheeks grew hot beneath his severe stare, while her feet were cold and clammy because she had run into the snow wearing flimsy shoes.
    After a long moment, he said, “You know that I do not approve of my children running wild in the streets. Especially you, Betsy. You are getting to be a young lady.”
    “Yes, Father. I am sorry.”
    Patterson walked behind his desk and, from a side drawer, took out the slate he used when he wanted to test Betsy in arithmetic. “Your aunt Nancy says you are making such good progress at multiplication that she has started you on simple percentages. Can you do a problem for me?”
    Betsy bit her lip and nodded. She still felt unsure of her skill with percentages, but if she could do the problem correctly, perhaps her father would smile and forget her roughhousing.
    He handed her the slate and a pencil. “Listen carefully. You invest a thousand dollars in a security that pays out an income of five percent per annum. How much money will you have after three years?”
    As Betsy took the writing implements, her mind raced. The question seemed too easy; even without doing a calculation, she knew that five percent of a thousand would be $50. After three years, the investment would