Patriot Hearts (4 page)

“Of course,” responded Martha, stifling a grin in spite of herself. At the start of the War, Augustine had been twelve years old.

“—even he will tell you that any plantation will suffer, if its master isn’t on hand to oversee things in person. Uncle knows this.”

Fanny was so earnest, and so anxious that her favorite aunt be reassured, that Martha gave her a smile which she hoped displayed relief, and laid a small, lace-mitted hand to Fanny’s cheek. “Of course you’re right, dearest. And now don’t you
dare
come out to the kitchen again with me: You’ll catch your death. You should be upstairs resting.”

Fanny’s—and Augustine’s—argument could be made, she reflected, for the entity that had been born in Philadelphia, that wretched sweltering summer only eleven years ago. That the so-called United States of America would suffer, if its master wasn’t on hand to oversee things in person.

And Jemmy Madison had determined that the only master all would obey was George.

There was a great deal about the year before the War that Martha simply didn’t remember.

Looking back on it, as she went about her morning routine of doling out kitchen supplies of sugar, tea, coffee, and spices from their locked chests—of checking that the women in the weaving-and-spinning rooms were doing their work quickly and neatly—it seemed to Martha that one day she and George had been happy in the sunny world of family and work, and that the next, George was a self-declared traitor, riding away to war against the King.

It hadn’t been that quick, of course.

In the plantation account-books for 1774 and the later half of 1773, she would still find entries in her own handwriting concerning dinners she had no recollection of giving, dresses she had made with her own hands whose cut and color and construction she remembered nothing of.

What she did remember, as if it were only hours ago, was the muggy June afternoon in ’73 that had followed what turned out to be their last morning of that peaceful happily ever after. George’s younger brother John Augustine (“The only one with a lick of sense,” said George) and his family had journeyed from Bushfield Plantation to stay for a few days, to meet pretty Eleanor Calvert, her son Jacky’s intended bride.

That in itself had been a source of tension. On the eve of being sent away to college the previous winter, Jacky—then nineteen years old and determined to profit as little as possible from a succession of tutors and boarding establishments—had announced to his appalled parents that he was engaged to the fifteen-year-old daughter of a Maryland planter. George had managed to talk his stepson out of immediate matrimony, on the grounds that he needed
some
modicum of education to fit him for the responsibilities due his young bride. And, when Eleanor and her sister Elizabeth had come to visit, the girl turned out to be the sweetest of young ladies, if overly sensitive and rather featherbrained.

Over dinner in the little dining-room—that was long before the big one was built—Martha had mentioned the new sheet-music that had arrived from England for Patcy’s harpsichord. “Oh, do play them for us!” Eleanor cried. “I do so love music and I’m such a fool at it myself. My poor teacher says it’s as if my hands were all thumbs!”

And Patcy had blushed, laughed: “Only if you’ll play with me. I’ll show you how! You’ll have to learn if we’re going to be sisters.” Still smiling she got to her feet—“May I just get my music, Mama?”—took three steps toward the doorway and stopped, her hand going to her throat….

For years Martha dreamed that scene, over and over, as if that fragment of sunny dining-room, of languid June heat and the scents of new-cut hay and baked ham, had somehow become trapped in some secret chamber in her mind into which she wandered, unable to get out. The way her elfin dark-haired daughter stopped in mid-step, thin hand flying up to her throat, and the look of terror and despair that flashed across her face as she understood that another one of her seizures was coming on.

Sometimes in her dreams Martha was able to wake herself up before Patcy fell. Before she began to jerk and spasm like a landed fish dying in air, eyes huge with fright and shame and hands slapping and flinging aimlessly. Before George was on his feet and to her side, his reactions quicker than anyone’s at the table, gathering into his arms the seventeen-year-old stepdaughter who’d always called him “Papa…”

In her dreams Martha screamed. She didn’t remember whether she’d actually done so that afternoon or not.

But in her dreams, when she saw Patcy sag down suddenly limp in George’s arms, her disheveled dark hair tumbling down over his elbow—when she saw George’s face alter from concern to realization and grief—then she would scream, screaming and screaming in the hopes that George would wake her, would hold her against him, would rock her gently while she cried.

Jacky married his Eleanor the following Christmas, of 1773. Martha did not attend the wedding. For many months after Patcy’s death she found even the company of much-loved friends and members of her family more than she could bear. And though Jacky came often to visit her, he had moved to Maryland, to be near his bride’s family. Martha had vague memories of hearing about the ninety thousand dollars’ worth of British-taxed tea that the Massachusetts Sons of Liberty dumped into Boston Harbor, but like many things during that year, it seemed to her no more real than scenes in a play in which a woman named Martha Washington was one of the players.

During the “public times” in Williamsburg that year, when the House of Burgesses was in session, there was great furor over the King’s decision to retaliate upon the port of Boston for the destruction of the tea: Courts were placed under direct British control, local officials would now be appointed by the Crown, and town meetings were outlawed throughout all thirteen colonies.

“What on earth had
we
to do with it?” Martha protested to George’s fellow Burgess, lanky red-haired Tom Jefferson, one evening. “Why punish Virginians for something those people up in Massachusetts did?”

In July of ’74 there was a general Congress of the thirteen colonies in Philadelphia, and as a war hero of unquestioned honesty and probity—not to mention being the man who’d married the wealthiest widow in the colony—George was elected one of Virginia’s seven delegates. Martha remembered being worried, because in the climate of royal vengefulness there was no telling who might get punished for what, but even then she had no real sense that their lives had changed.

Like a boat in a squall, even after Patcy’s death she had expected things to right themselves eventually. Even though she knew that George was helping to drill the State militia, and that weapons, ammunition, cartridge-paper, spades, and food were being stockpiled, she thought of the matter as a passing “flap,” as her father used to call such alarms. Certainly less critical than the ever-present whispered threat of slave insurrection, a fear that had run like a dark undercurrent through the whole of her childhood.

Then in April of ’75, as George was preparing to leave for a second Congress in Philadelphia, Royal Governor Dunmore ordered the marines from a warship in the James River off of Williamsburg to seize the powder that was traditionally kept in the Williamsburg Magazine against the threat of an uprising among the slaves. The local patriots protested, triggering a near-riot on the Palace green.

And at almost the same time, General Gage, in charge of occupied Boston, sent eight hundred of his men to destroy a patriot cache of arms in the town of Concord.

And instead of a concerned magistrate riding to a conference on the subject of finding some means to redress colonial grievances, when George rode away down Mount Vernon’s shallow hill in his new blue-and-buff uniform, he was a man who placed himself in the camp of those who had taken up arms against their King.

A traitor, who would face sentence of death.

George returned a little before three. Martha was in the kitchen, putting the finishing dashes of cinnamon into a custard that she knew was her granddaughter’s favorite—not that Uncle Hercules couldn’t make equally marvelous desserts, but it gave her great pleasure to make the treats for her grandchildren herself. There was always a commotion when the General rode into the stable-yard, audible from the kitchen. Martha raised her head sharply, and with a smile the big, handsome cook took the spice-caddy from her hand.

“If her Ladyship’ll trust a poor ignorant savage to finish pepperin’ up that custard, I promise you I won’t poison them poor children.”

In spite of her apprehension, Martha smiled up at Uncle Hercules. From the walkway that led to the house, Harriot’s voice shrilled, “I’m going to
kill
you, Tub!” Footsteps pounded.

Uncle Hercules widened his eyes at Martha and added conspiratorially, “Not unless you want me to, that is, ma’am.”

“Get along with you.” Martha’s heart beat quickly as she dried her hands on her apron, picked up her shawl, and stepped through the door into the brittle cold of the open walkway.

Saw him striding up the row of outbuildings through the slush, coat flapping about his calves and dogs caracoling ecstatically around his boots. Saw him turn his head to greet Doll and Sal where steam billowed out the door of the laundry, and old Bristol as the gardener crossed the path with an armload of fresh-cut stakes.

She’d been married to him for almost thirty years, and he still took her breath away. She’d seen him laid low by intestinal flux and reading in bed without his teeth in, and it didn’t matter. He was still the handsomest man she’d ever seen.

Her husband.

Her George.

He took her hands, bent down to kiss her. Even wearing the tallest of her collection of bouffant lace caps, the top of her head didn’t reach his broad shoulder, and her small hands were lost in a grip powerful enough to crack walnuts. “Bounce,
down,
” she ordered, in the voice that invariably silenced the loudest quarrels in the kitchen. “Fang, York,
sit.
”

The hounds abased themselves instantly in the half-frozen mud. George’s eyes danced above his tight-closed smile.

“I always said you were wasted, knitting stockings for the men.” He kissed her again. “Baron von Steuben could have used you on the drill-grounds at Valley Forge.”

“His Lordship would have been less impressed with my talents if he’d ever tried to out-shout my brothers and sisters.” Martha reached up to take his arm. “Mr. Madison is here.”

She watched his face as she spoke, her voice carefully neutral. Saw how the muscles in his jaw hardened, and how for a moment his eyes took on the faraway look of a man who scans the invisible horizon of the future, for what he hopes he will not see.

Knowing how he hated to be pressed on matters about which he hadn’t made up his mind, she immediately went on, “I’ve put him in the blue bedroom and his man in the attic, but he says he must ride on at once in the morning, though I did tell him that Doll’s back has been warning her since yesterday of more snow on the way. Why is it that men will believe a barometer, when they mostly have
no
idea how it works—
I
certainly haven’t—and will not believe a perfectly trustworthy human being whose back
always
begins to hurt twenty-four hours before the onset of a storm? Fanny came up with Augustine this morning, and considering how bad the weather has been, would it perhaps not be better if they moved back into the house with us, at least until the baby comes? I’m sure that cottage of theirs isn’t nearly warm enough for an infant.”