The Devil's Own Dilemma

Silesia seemed dark, silent, mysterious and far away. In the year 1800 the American Ambassador to the Prussian Court at Berlin set out with his English-born wife to explore this veiled land. He was John Quincy Adams and his father was the sitting President of the United States. Twenty five years later he himself would become the Sixth President of the United States and his wife, Louisa, the only First Lady not born in America. They intended the trip as a recreation to mend their troubled marriage. Instead John Quincy Adams found himself exploring the nature of evil, and Louisa, found herself investigating a murder. Their destination was Europe's oldest spa, and no place, Adams wrote, "was more calculated to preserve or restore health than Landeck." But they were inevitably drawn to the labyrinth of Schloss Angelpunkt, known as the hinge of good and evil, and there the trouble began. The author was sitting in a tub of bubbling mineral water in Europe's oldest spa in the sequestered little town of Ladek Zdròj, a place where Poland meets the Czech Republic. For centuries kings and tsars as well as many others seeking the balm of these famous healing waters had soaked themselves here. Gazing down from a mural was the face of John Quincy Adams, Sixth President of the United States. What had he been doing here? So began the author's inquiry into the lives of John Quincy Adams and his wife Louisa. They had been here a quarter century before he became President, he then 33 years old, she 25, nursing a marriage fractured by psychological depression, four miscarriages, a vanished dowry, and conflicting views of the world. Archibald Patterson is also author of "Between Hitler and Stalin," a biography of Poland's Marshal Edward Smigły-Rydz.