The amazing contradiction about him was that in his letters, in their quiet conversations in the big bright bedroom, he voiced only one passionate desire: to be able to live on here quietly for the rest of his days in this home he had built. He yearned, so he had written her so many times, to be free of wars and politics, answerable to no one but the call of his heart. Not to Madison nor Monroe nor any other president. Not to Sam Houston nor Governor Billy Carroll of Tennessee, nor even to Major John Eaton who seemed, in Rachel’s mind, to be forever grooming Andrew Jackson for some job or other, always important, always controversial and inevitably always far from the Hermitage. She saw them now, riding up the drive from the muddy road, the General and John Eaton. Her husband sat very tall and a little gaunt on the saddle and his gray horse seemed always to sense the mood of his master and hold his head very high. Andrew Jackson’s hair, graying a little now, blew wildly over his ears under his beaver hat. His high collar and stock hid the thinness of his throat. * * * * * * * * He had been such a skinny lad, Rachel Jackson remembered, when John Overton had brought him, a stripling lawyer, to her mother’s house on the Cumberland, in that spring of 1789. And now it was 1823! Where had the years gone? The Widow Donelson had taken him in, and there in the house had been Rachel, Rachel Robards then, reconciled briefly to her violent, unpredictable husband, Lewis Robards, after a separation that had seen Rachel vilified, discarded, and abused. The widow had tried hard to put some meat on that lanky young lawyer’s frame, but now, thirty-four years and four wars later, he was still too thin, still coughed too much and was weakened by digestive distresses from living too long on parched corn and other scanty fare. Philip, the horse handler, came running out to take the bridles of the mounts and even through the windowpanes Rachel could hear her husband giving Philip orders in his high, arresting voice, the same voice that had commanded the defeat of General Pakenham at New Orleans, shouted defiance at Red Feather at Tohopeka and the Spanish governor at Pensacola. Now he came shouting into the house. “Mrs. Jackson! Mrs. Jackson! Where are you?” Never had they called each other by their Christian names. In letters they wrote, “My dearest.” At home he was the General, to her, or simply Husband. She was Mrs. Jackson, the woman he honored, adored, had fought for and would defend fiercely till her last breath. “Here, Husband!” She hurried out into the hall where the two men were handing their damp cloaks to a servant. “Mr. Eaton, you are welcome as always here. Come in to the fire.”