Rachel walked away quickly and they heard the door of her room close. “Andy, how dreadful—on Christmas Eve!” scolded an aunt, “I’ll go—” “No,” urged Emily, “she’ll want to be alone, aunt Mary. But I’m ashamed of Andy.” “Everybody picks on me,” mourned the boy. “Go outside and help your father. And remember that there are things never mentioned in your mother’s presence. One of them is Charles Dickinson and that tragic duel that happened before you were ever born.” “Papa did kill him!” “My boy, I hope that when you are grown a man you will find a woman as fine and faithful as Rachel Jackson,” said the older woman gravely. “If you are so fortunate as to win a wife like that and a man cast slurs on her in public, I think you will be moved to kill him too. Now go on out of here before I get the itch to box your ears, big as you are!” 4 In her room Rachel stood before her tall chest, her hands shaking, her throat cramping with an agonizing pain. Always in spring, when all about was new growth and beauty burgeoning the old terror twenty years past came back for a little to haunt her. Now Andy’s callous taunts had brought it again out of its grave to tear at her tender heart. Always it was the same. She saw herself again sitting in the carriage beside that race track where the General’s fine horse Truxton, and a horse called Ploughboy owned by Charles Dickinson and his father were running a race. Gathered around the course was an enormous concourse of people: the women in carriages and on horseback wearing their new spring bonnets gay with flowers and ribbons, or flowing habits of bright velvet; the men jaunty in tight breeches strapped under their ankles, ruffled shirts and tall beaver hats. An April wind was blowing sweet off the fields. It was all as sharply clear to Rachel, here in her big room dimly lighted by one candle, as it had been on that fateful day when Truxton had gone lame in the third heat of the race. She could even hear again her own voice saying naïvely and more loudly than she had intended, “If Truxton hadn’t gone lame he would have left Ploughboy out of sight.” She could hear too that loud, sneering voice that still crackled in her ears though the young man who had spoken had lain twenty years in his grave. Angry and raucous from a bit too much drink, Charles Dickinson had shouted, “About as far out of sight as Mrs. Jackson left her first husband when she ran off with the General!” It comforted her still to remember that she had not been the one who repeated that jeering insult to Andrew Jackson. But there had been many ready to turn the knife in an old wound, to drag out again and bandy about the old, sordid story of Lewis Robards, who had married Rachel and discarded her, of the aborted divorce that had clouded Rachel Robards Jackson’s second marriage.