Rachel Jackson liked to be proud of her table, and this was Christmas, the first Christmas that she had had her husband at home with her for more years than she liked to remember. She walked through the rooms of her beautiful, new brick house trying not to feel too sinfully proud. Her new, lovely Hermitage, built under the huge trees exactly where she had wished it to be looked out upon the fields of the plantation through windows that in the parlors were curtained with lace. Upstairs and in her own big bedroom below were the fine French beds the General had bought in New Orleans. Seven crates of beautiful furniture on which the freight bill alone had been two hundred and seventy-three dollars. Her own bed was elegantly fluted, of mahogany, with high posts, a mosquito canopy of the finest muslin and a knotted Marseilles counterpane. There was the new sideboard in the dining room too, and in the cellar gallons of the best brandy, old Madeira, claret and porter, bottles of bitters in green glass and boxes of candied fruit. The turkeys and chickens old Hannah had raised so faithfully were fat, and five turkeys were being readied for roasting now in the kitchen. Rachel paused at a south window and looked out across the wide lawn, a bit bleak now that the trees were bare and all the flowers of her garden brown and dead from frost. The pillared portico made her heart expand with pride. A far cry, this palace of a house from the old log blockhouse in which they had lived for so many years, where she had lain alone for so many desolate nights, thinking of that audacious firebrand of a man she had married, that Andrew Jackson who had spent so much of a long life fighting enemies, red and white. Fighting the Creek and the Cherokee, fighting the British. Fighting Jesse Benton and young Charles Dickinson, who had died after that grim, dreadful duel in Kentucky. Rachel shut her lips tight, remembering. All for her, that hot-headed encounter. All for her the bullet Andrew Jackson still carried so dangerously near to his heart that it could not be removed. Jesse Benton’s bullet had shattered the General’s arm too, so that he had carried the arm in a sling through all the Indian war in Alabama. The arm still ached at night when a cold wind blew. A fighting man whose eyes too quickly kindled to blue lightnings, whose reddish hair seemed to burn with some flame within him that was never cooled. Her own gentle counsel could damper it down now and then, but only briefly. Given the provocation, his temper leaped alive like a drawn sword and he became then, his wife was thinking sadly, as dangerous and unpredictable as one of those wild stallions that snorted and charged about the Hermitage meadows.