The Ambitious Madame Bonaparte Read Free Page A

gain $150. What was the trick? Her father never set her such an obvious task, preferring to see if he could catch her in mistaken thinking.
    Betsy shed her cloak and sat cross-legged on the wooden floor. Bending over the slate, she carefully did the multiplication for the first year. As she had suspected, the answer was $50. Dutifully, she added that amount to the original $1,000, and as she formed the last zero, she realized the flaw in her thinking. For the second year, she had to take five percent of the new total of $1,050, so the interest would be larger that year and still larger in the third.
    She worked with mounting excitement, and after a few minutes, handed her father the slate with her careful calculations and a final total of $1,157.625. Betsy could not keep the triumphant grin off her face as he nodded his way through her figures. “This is almost correct,” he said, raising his eyes from the slate.
    Betsy’s smile faded. “What did I do wrong?”
    Patterson’s expression softened, and he beckoned for her to lean against his arm. Gesturing to the slate, he said, “You did your calculations correctly. If the money remains invested in the security, the interest will grow each year as this shows. Where you failed was in listening carefully as I instructed. I said that the annuity was to be paid out. That means that you would receive an income of $50 each year, and the principle would hold steady at $1,000 no matter how long it was invested.”
    “Oh,” she said in a small voice, crushed by disappointment that even though she had expected a trick, she failed to detect it.
    Her father squeezed her shoulder. “Never mind, lass. You did better than Johnny. The first time I set this problem for him, he thought the investment would earn $50 every year even if it accumulated.” Patterson laughed indulgently and put the slate and pencil back in his desk.
    “You have an unusual head for figures for a girl, which may keep you from trouble one day. Life does not always turn out the way we plan, Betsy. Many a widow has ended in the poor house because she did not know the first thing about investments.”
    “Yes sir,” Betsy said, but she frowned at the thought of someday being poor and alone. Surely that would never happen to her, whom everyone said was so pretty and clever.
    Patterson removed his arm from her shoulder and opened a ledger book on his desk. “Go back home now like a good girl and help your mother.”
    OVER THE NEXT year and a half, Betsy worked hard at the lessons her mother and Aunt Nancy set her. Her parents gave her books for every birthday, so when she did not have to look after the younger children or do schoolwork, she curled up in the drawing room to read.
    One Sunday in September 1795, her mother’s older sister Margaret Smith and her family came for an afternoon visit. Ten-year-old Betsy sat on the double-chair-backed settee near the front windows with her older cousin Elizabeth, who was showing off her latest drawings. Betsy gazed at the pencil sketches with only partial attention because she was listening to the conversation between their mothers at the nearby drawing room table.
    “Dorcas, you look unwell,” Aunt Margaret said. “You are as white as my linen shift.”
    “I am quite all right.”
    Betsy saw her aunt glance toward her husband and brother-in-law, who sat on the teal damask sofa facing the fireplace at the center of the room. She lowered her voice. “Are you with child again?”
    Instead of answering, Dorcas shook her head, and Betsy thought she saw tears in her eyes.
    Biting her lip, Betsy murmured half-hearted words of approval about her cousin’s artwork as she wondered why her mother was so pale and listless. Was she ill or still plagued with melancholy?
    The arrival of the housekeeper, a thin, thirty-year-old widow named Mrs. Ford, cut short the women’s conversation. After Mrs. Ford set down the tray with the tea service and departed, Dorcas picked up her