Follow the Stars Home

by Diane C. McPhail

Genres: Women's Fiction; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

A captivating reimagining of the intrepid woman who – 8 months pregnant and with a toddler in tow – braved violent earthquakes and treacherous waters on the first steamboat voyage to conquer the Mississippi River and redefine America. 

The acclaimed author of The Seamstress of New Orleans brings to life Lydia Latrobe Roosevelt’s defiant journey of 1811 in this lush, evocative biographical novel for fans of Paula McLain, Gill Paul, Allison Pataki, and stories about extraordinary yet little-known female adventurers…

It’s a journey that most deem an insane impossibility. Yet on October 20th, 1811, Lydia Latrobe Roosevelt—daughter of one of the architects of the United States Capitol—fearlessly boards the steamship New Orleans in Pittsburgh. Eight months pregnant and with a toddler in tow, Lydia is fiercely independent despite her youth. She’s also accustomed to defying convention. Against her father’s wishes, she married his much older business colleague, inventor Nicholas Roosevelt—builder of the New Orleans—and spent her honeymoon on a primitive flatboat. But the stakes for this trip are infinitely higher.

If Nicholas’s untried steamboat reaches New Orleans, it will serve as a profitable packet ship between that city and Natchez, proving the power of steam as it travels up and down the Mississippi. Success in this venture would revolutionize travel and trade, open the west to expansion, and secure the Roosevelts’ future.

Lydia had used her own architectural training to design the flatboat’s interior, including a bedroom, sitting area, and fireplace. The steamship, however, dwarfs the canoes and flatboats on the river. And no amount of power or comfort could shield its passengers from risk. Lydia believes herself ready for all the dangers ahead—growing unrest among native people, disease or injury, and the turbulent Falls of the Ohio, a sixty-foot drop long believed impassable in such a large boat.

But there are other challenges in store, impossible to predict as Lydia boards that fall day. Challenges which—if survived—will haunt and transform her, as surely as the journey will alter the course of a nation . . .
 

Release date: August 20, 2024

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 304

Sample

Memory meanders however it will, in its own directions, serving functions entirely its own. Like this river I so strangely love, it may transport bits and pieces, both large and small for long distances, strange items long submerged bobbing now and then to the surface of awareness. These waters may muddy the clearest of things, may wash others free of collected debris, may deposit precious trifles in hidden coves to surprise some unknown finder down the years. Memory is like that: its flow self-defining through life, singular bits of lost perception surfacing now and then, evaporating sometimes entirely with the passage of time only to reemerge like one evaporated drop of rain, falling, joining others as streams and rivers, becoming the sea, like this river I am waiting to travel.

My memory, my small drop of history, which is about this river, begins with the sea. I was a child, five or so, when my mother died with her baby. That infant lies in the grave beside her, boy or a girl, no name, just Infant Latrobe and a date: its first and only, her last. My father is broken. In my memory, he sits alone by the window in a green velvet chair, silent. I want, need, to sit in his lap, but he waves me off. I know to go no closer. My nursemaid—I remember only that her name is Nanny and that a strand of orange hair is always escaping her cap—comes and takes me away. More than once. Much more. I stand at the door every day in the hope that he may change his mind.

Then one day he isn’t there. I remember how vacant the room feels, how empty his chair. I climb up and sit, hoping to feel the residual warmth of his lap, but the red-haired nursemaid comes to fetch me. She carries a small bag of belongings for Henry and me. Perhaps you can imagine my distress, but only I can know it.

“Where’s Papa?” I cry. I push her hand away.

“Hush, child.” She tries to straighten my dress. “He’s gone.”

“Gone? Papa’s gone where, Nanny? Where?” I am frantic. She makes it sound so final. Gone like my mother? I want her to leave me alone. I’m fighting her hands.

“Across the ocean, child. To the other side of the world,” she says, snatching up a few toys. She repeats herself. Emphatically. “To the other side of the world.”

That’s all I remember until much later. Whatever there is of that lonely time is deeply submerged. It is years before I begin to comprehend his desperate struggle to escape his grief for my mother, for her and the unnamed infant beside her.

Nanny takes us to stay with some cousins; at least I think that’s who they are. They are some sort of family, at any rate. I am too young to sort it all out, and later I don’t care. There are children. Lots of them. I don’t remember how many—six perhaps, some older, some younger. Henry and I tag along. Well, I tag along and drag him with me. I want so to belong. No one pays attention to us unless we misbehave, which we try not to do, in case we get sent away. That fear hangs heavy inside me. No one seems to think of us as another part of all of them, so we assume that we are not. Yet there are hard times when the difference is apparent. Times when I see one of those children cuddled in her mother’s lap or lifted high on his father’s shoulders. Such things don’t happen for either of us, although both parents are kind in a nonchalant way, on those few occasons when they pay attention to us. No one comes when I cry in the night. We are afterthoughts to that family, Henry and I.

I remember the day someone takes Henry’s hand and mine, leads us onto a massive ship. Named Eliza, I think. That feminine name seems strange for such a huge vessel, its towering masts, sails flying against the clouds. Truth is, that might be the name of the ship my father sailed on when he first left without me. He’s told me his story a hundred times since we reunited, and I’ve long since mixed it all up with mine—or forgotten. So many things forgotten.

Awash in memories, floating somewhere in the past, when in truth I am right here. Here on this dock, waiting. Living my own story. Whatever the name of the ship, I remember that crossing as one long nightmare of dark and light, of nausea and vomiting, of someone cleaning up my mess and chiding me bitterly. Then hunger. So sick I could not have eaten had food been available. I wanted my mother. She would feed me, stroke my hair, and whisper in my ear. One day I sneak my way up to the deck, hunting for something I can’t even name. I remember the sudden light and the blue of the sky as I climb out, the sound of sails flapping, air free of vile odors. I remember it well. Everything so wide, with no boundaries. The lapping sound of the water against the sides of the ship. And the wind, oh, the wind. I put my arms in the air and allow it to hold me.

I’m drifting again. Like the water, the sea, the river. Ah, the river. Begin with the river, this treacherous assemblage of untold drops of rain or dew or snow, collecting and seeking its way to the sea, the most major river of this new world, barely explored, waiting to be conquered.

Nicholas and I are prepared to do just that.

There has been no calm water since the day we met, Nicholas and I. He is a close colleague of my father, nearly my father’s age. So the problem was obvious from the start—he was too old for me by far, even in an era when men commonly were older than their wives. The larger problem, perhaps, was that I was too young, even in an era when it was common for brides to walk down the aisle to marry at only eighteen or younger. I was an emerging adolescent when he first knocked at the door of our house. He had come to propose some business to Father.

Since I happened to be passing through the front hall on my way to the library for an architectural reference I needed, I let him in. Yes, I opened that wide oak door as he stood with his hand raised, about to knock again. So handsome, he was and is: tall and angular, with narrow features and a thick head of wavy dark hair. Just the sort of man to capture a young girl’s fancy.

“Miss Latrobe, I presume.” There was a lilt to his voice as he tipped his hat and introduced himself. “I’m Nicholas Roosevelt. Here to see your father, please.”

“Won’t you come in, sir?” I watched him swipe his boots clean before entering.

He threw out some tidbit of humor for me to catch. I don’t remember what. I tossed one back, which caught his attention. At least he laughed.

I gestured to Father’s study and watched him walk with purpose down the hall. With each rhythmic step, his shoulders shifted as in an unfamiliar dance step. Something in me quickened. Something new and unexpected brought my body taut and urgent. I heard the enthusiasm of my father’s greeting as he closed the door to his study. I stood there, looking at that door, holding those unfamiliar, imperative urgings within me until there was nothing to do but continue to the library and search for my architectural book. I had a drawing to complete, a drawing of a home we never had.

Yet in that moment, I knew in the core of my being that this man would be my life. And so he is. And has been. And will be until I die.

Ah, I’m adrift again. Time is almost irrelevant: the past and this present moment flowing together, as my own life flows here now into these turbulent Western Waters, this riverine network that forms the western boundaries of this new country. So, I’ll begin, finally. You were wondering? Yes, I’ll begin—here at the dock in Pittsburgh, waiting to embark on a journey that will alter history. At least we believe so, Nicholas and I, assuming that we are successful. There is every reason to believe that we should be. We have spent the last three years preparing for every challenge these waters may present to us. I am impatient to see my husband’s face. The moment is approaching for our venture to begin. Along with the brave task it will involve.

Speaking of brave tasks, I am paying entirely too little attention to this unruly crowd amassing outside our doors, on the dock of the Monongahela River. “Falling banks,” I’m told the name means. An alarming name for a river. Fortunately, our journey begins at the juncture where that river ends, where it flows into the Allegheny and becomes the Ohio. Our launch here, I presume, is well beyond the danger of falling banks.

Come now, Lydia. Pay attention. You must focus. It’s almost time. I fix my gaze out through the dirty glass doors of the Mississippi Steamboat Navigation Company. A jostling crowd made up of every sort of person, from well-dressed Pittsburgh elite to rough-clad dockworkers, is forming. All waiting for me to join my husband—yes, my Nicholas—on his steamboat. More importantly, to see his remarkable vessel launched—the one the world deems an impossible folly. I am aware of many out there who actually wish to see us fail, if only to boast how righteous they are in their predictions of this venture’s failure. More than a few even dare to make that plain to Nicholas’s face.

Only yesterday a well-attired gentleman approached us on the dock. I thought he must be curious about our remarkable boat. Instead, he accosted my husband with loud, belittling insults.

“Foolhardy!” He tapped his cane at Nicholas’s toes, almost striking him. “It cannot be done.”

So rude!

He continued, looking about to see how much of an audience he’d garnered. He thwacked his cane, again barely missing Nicholas’s foot. “And you are just the man to prove its folly.” He laughed disparagingly. “Trying to prove you’re a man, are you, Roosevelt?”

“Indeed, sir,” Nicholas responded, his demeanor one of exceptional dignified calm. “And you are right, sir. I am the man to prove it! To prove it can be done.” He paused. “To prove not only that it can be done, but also that it will be done. A simple matter of removing the not.”

Nicholas took my arm, smiling down at me. We turned away, as if the man’s comments were nothing. Which is indeed what they were.

It seems only those who understand the powerful workings of steam comprehend how possible this venture is—enough to invest heavily in our endeavor, though the number of those who think toward the future is small. The steamboat New Orleans, built according to Nicholas’s design, is funded by the two “Roberts”—Fulton and Chancellor Livingston. Its construction was based on information we garnered on our previous momentous, if disastrous, flatboat journey. Our honeymoon, that was—six months spent on a primitive flatboat, charting the river, with me at Nicholas’s side. I believed in him then. That voyage is evidence. And I believe in him now. This steamboat journey with him, a feat never attempted before by anyone, will prove my husband’s pluck and intellect and will confirm my confidence in him. Well, and if I must confess, I am seduced by the sheer adventure of it. I cannot resist this voyage any more than I could have passed up that ill-starred six-month honeymoon expedition.

Our honeymoon on the flatboat was an adventure like no other, in spite of my carefully designed living quarters, for which Nicholas gave me free hand. My simple training in architectural drawing with my father was brought to fruition, if only in a minor way. What pure delight it was to design my own parlor and fireplace on a boat that was otherwise equivalent to a cigar box turned upside down on top of a larger cigar box!

I could miss this embarkment, thinking back on that voyage! The night we woke in terror to a pair of Indians invading our sleeping quarters, demanding whiskey. Nicholas rose in trepidation and handed over a bottle to get them off the boat. In a matter of days, Nicholas, plus all three of the crew—Billy and Samuel, who are again on this voyage, along with my handmaid, Sarah—succumbed to the fever, leaving only me, pregnant and nauseated, to tend to the sick, the cooking, and the boat.

By the time we reached Natchez, all of them had recovered except Nicholas. The barely recuperated men dashed ashore for a boisterous night in that dingy settlement, notorious for its brothels and gambling halls along the shore. Natchez-Under-the-Hill, the locals have dubbed this district for the high bluffs that rise above and the obvious difference in lifestyle between the two levels. Sarah and I sat on deck, close enough to hear Nicholas in case he called. We amused ourselves in attention to the rowdy carousing in town and relished the cool night air which refreshed us. From nowhere came a deafening crack, and we were slammed from our seats with a violent drop in the river. Scrambling for footing, we sloshed through the water surging round our feet. Our hull had been punctured! We had landed on a snag. Water flooded in like the river itself. We clambered for buckets or pails. For hours we bailed, Sarah and I, bending, lurching, filling, sloshing, pouring, but to no avail. Exhausted, our backs and limbs aching and without further hope, we dragged my sick husband from his bed, clambered up the steep bank to dry land with Nicholas propped unsteadily between us. Unable to shut out the reverberations of the town’s wild revelry behind us, we watched our boat sink. At dawn, I heard the men return, their low laughter halting as they caught sight of the three of us sprawled on the bank in the early light.

“Where’s the boat?” Billy asked, almost as if it were an ordinary question.

I pointed at the vague outline of the rails under the waves of dark water. The awning I had installed on the roof of the cabin was ripped and flapped about in the varying current. Nicholas tried to raise his head, but he was still too weak.

An astonished silence ensued. Then chaotic noise: feet scraping down the bank, splashing into shallow water; slamming and banging as Billy righted the rowboat and landed it on the roof of the flatboat, where the now barely attached awning wrapped around him in the current.

“It’s scuttled,” he announced, defeat in his voice. “Ain’t no way to get this thing off that snag.” Wet boots sloshing, he heaved the rowboat to shore, and then the two men dragged it onto the bank. “At least we got a sturdy rowboat to handle this wicked river to New Orleans.”

And we did. But that’s another story altogether.

Wandering around in my head, caught in the past again. Focus now, Lydia.

I’m impatient, tired of waiting to board my husband’s new vessel. I need this voyage. Need to be part of it. And Nicholas needs me to be. Like my husband, I ignore snide remarks as to our foolishness, especially mine, since I am a full eight months with child. With Rosetta, our toddler, in tow. This boat is assuredly safer than the flatboat that sank or the rowboat that brought us all finally from Natchez to New Orleans. I do not listen to the criticism. Nor does Nicholas. What would be the point?

Nicholas’s keen mind has attended to every consideration in the design of this boat, including the side paddle wheels, which he suggested to Robert Livingston a good ten years ago, only to have his idea scoffed at and rejected, then subsequently appropriated and presented to Fulton as if the design were Livingston’s own—Chancellor Livingston, who administered the oath of office to this country’s first president. Now it is Fulton who gets all the credit associated with steamboats. But Fulton’s boats handle only calm waters. The New Orleans is a different invention altogether, designed to conquer waters no one else would dare to defy. All the credit for this achievement will be my husband’s.

This waiting! Time is stretching out. Discomfort gnaws at my legs. I shift from foot to foot, wiggle my toes in my boots to relieve the distress. At least they are dry. Standing is more and more difficult with my growing belly and a nagging pain in my low back. Only the windowed entrance to the offices separates me from the rambunctious crowd gathering on the dock. In a moment I must negotiate that crush. The glass doors, on which the company name is prominently painted, are smudged with handprints, despite being cleaned yesterday. No matter. I have a reasonable view. I am just awaiting the boarding whistle of the New Orleans. Though I am anticipating that jarring sound any moment, I fear I will jump at the whistle’s explosive blast.

At the water’s edge, heavy cinder-laden smoke from the boat’s tall stack trails black across the murky sky, darker yet more alive with its embers than the gloomy industrial air of Pittsburgh, which we have been breathing for almost two years. I will welcome clearer air out on the river. Our boat is schooner rigged, with masts and sails, in case the engine should somehow fail—which it will not, as we will not. Here among keelboats and flatboats, our vessel’s appearance is massive and unusual, its masts and smokestack like the offspring of a union between sailing ship and river barge.

My fingers are at work in the soft fur at the neck of Tiger, my great black Newfoundland dog, who will accompany us on our voyage. Another detail that elicits insults. I am trying to stave off anxiety. Close beside me, my friend Margarite—yes, I actually have a few friends from our long stay—seems to recognize the unease I am so attempting to conceal. She touches my arm, comforts me with a knowing smile. Rosetta clutches tightly at my knee. She’s holding my leg and sucking her thumb, her little face hidden in the folds of my skirts. I lean down to reassure her, but she shakes her head and buries her face deeper into the white muslin of my dress. I’m hoping she won’t leave it smudged before we walk to the boat.

I am considering the mud of Water Street and wondering how to hold my hem and Rosetta both when Bessie, our pretty young nursemaid, appears and scoops her up. Rosetta’s little bonnet tumbles as she snugs her face into Bessie’s neck. Quick as always, Sarah reaches to catch it. The friends who’ve come to bid me farewell smile at this simple domesticity. There is nothing either familiar or domestic in what is about to come. In a moment we will open these doors and make our way to the deck of the New Orleans—an untried vessel unlike any before it.

Beneath my fingertips, Tiger emits an unexpected low growl. Outside someone shouts in the crowd, and then another, then more. I stare through the dirty window as a chorus of bellowed insults rises dark as the smoke from the stack, insults turning into chants of mockery and worse. No wonder my sweet Rosetta is afraid. So am I. I want to cover her ears. My heart is racing. My fingers hidden in Tiger’s fur are trembling. This jeering crowd is more frightening than any part of the river Nicholas and I traveled by flatboat—even with all the mishaps.

Here I am, surrounded not only by my few friends but also by an inelegant gathering of otherwise elegant women, almost all in fine white muslin dresses. Mine is a necessity for the show of our departure. Not theirs, which are nothing more than a show of ostentation, barely covered by short spencer jackets or fur-lined tippets hanging to their knees. A few wear less elegant redingotes, like mine, if they prefer warmth to fashion, which I do. More than a few are still intent on dissuading me from going, some from genuine concern, I’ll admit, the rest out of their not-so-private sense of judgmental propriety.

Two of the women, with whom I have frequently dined, are whispering behind gloved hands with no shame whatever; they stop when they notice me watching. Another pair have the temerity to approach me point-blank, the feathers on their tall bonnets quivering. I straighten myself, pat Rosetta’s back to hide my trembling hands. Ah, yes, I know them and wish I didn’t. Mrs. Bellingham, if I remember her name correctly, seems to be the chosen spokeswoman.

“Out of great concern, I feel compelled to speak before it becomes too late to save you from yourself.”

“What is it you wish to say?” I ask. I look her straight in the eye. I wonder if there is anyone to save her from herself.

She pauses, flips the corner of her lace handkerchief. “No lady, certainly no self-respecting lady, would consider such a voyage as you are about to embark upon, especially so heavy with child and with a defenseless toddler in tow. You should be at home. What sort of mother are you?”

My mind is blank for one second. Then flooded: One who knows what it is to be a child without a mother.

As for childbirth, I know too well its dangers; my own mother was buried back in England with her unnamed infant, dead in spite of the best care possible. If, like my mother, I could die at home despite excellent care, why should I not risk this daring adventure? All the contentions against my going mean nothing to me. Being with my husband is home and safety enough.

The other woman elbows her way forward. “And that dangerous Tecumseh stirring up violence among the Indians all along the west bank of the river. How can you dare put yourself and your family in that terrible danger?”

I do not bother to remind her that General Harrison marched out in late September with fourteen hundred troops to settle the Tecumseh problem.

Brashly, the woman at the rear of the group asks, “If you have no shame, what of your husband? Has your husband none himself that he would permit such behavior from his wife?”

I face them, holding Tiger tight—in truth, trying to hold on to myself. I take a moment, withhold my words, working to arrange them just so. I fix the first of the two women with my eyes before I speak.

“Ah, well, ladies!” Do I honestly call them that? “You must indeed count yourselves fortunate not to have adventurous husbands who desire to have you beside them.”

I swivel a bit to address the woman in back.

“You pose an interesting question, Mrs., umm . . .” I hesitate, then continue. “Indeed, an excellent question. No shame?” I wait. I wait long enough to gauge her discomfort. “Ah, yes, madam, a very good question. Have you no shame?”

A small woman steps forward, inserting herself between us. It is Mrs. Melton, a lady of middle age, with whom we have recently spent a delightful evening discussing preparations for our voyage.

“We only wish you well, Lydia. This is quite an adventure you are undertaking. As you see, there is no little concern for your well-being.” She speaks in a moderate tone. “For my own part, yes, genuine concern, along with the sincerest wishes for your well-being, but far more than that, an immense admiration for your spirit and courage to stand by your husband in this historic endeavor.”

She touches my sleeve with light gloved fingers. I nod, take Rosetta’s bonnet from Sarah’s hand, and adjust it off-kilter on her little head. The baby shifts inside me as I tilt forward.

A bolt of noise, the jarring whistle blows a loud hissing that rises to a shrill hoot before falling and rounding out low. Blows again. I do not jump. I surprise myself, pleased to be composed. Perhaps the ordeal with these women has steeled me for the blast.

The door is open now. The chill air of Pittsburgh rushes in. My nostrils fill with the acrid smells of smoke and industry, mixed with the odor of the unwashed in the swarm of spectators outside. I long for a clean breath. It is time to make our way to the boat. I eye the dock ahead of me, seeking my best route through this deafening crowd.

Bessie looks me in the eye. “Would you like her to walk with you, Mrs. Roosevelt?” She sets Rosetta down beside me.

I nod. Rosetta does no. . .