The Family Greene (7 page)

Patsy grabbed on to a corner of her skirt, gave her older sister a shy look, and said that most likely he would.

"Go ask him, then," Nathanael ordered, and Patsy curtsied and left the room.

I thought,
Why, it isn't much different from a family, the way they speak with each other and giggle. And my Nathanael has made it that way.

We sat on plain wooden chairs around a Queen Anne's table and partook of our tea and cakes, and I thought,
A boy—mayhap it will be a boy.

Then came a knock on the door and an aide with a note for Nathanael.

Nathanael read the note, a faint smile on his face. "We are invited to dinner," he said, "given by Moses Brown and his delegation, who have recently come to visit Washington to ask permission to deliver relief to the citizens trapped in Boston, who are running low on food and fuel."

"Why do I know that name, Moses Brown?" I asked.

"Because he was head of the committee that ran me out of the Quaker Meeting in East Greenwich."

"Ohhh." My hand went to my mouth. "And now he invites you to dinner?"

"No, not exactly. He expected to have George Washington at his table. Washington referred him to you and me. He's heard all about your beauty, you see, and your social gifts."

"You jest, Nathanael. Washington isn't even aware of my presence in camp."

"Darling, you had best be apprised of things. Washington knew within minutes of your arrival that you were here. And"—he waved the note in the air, a smile on his face—"he is giving us the honor of appearing in his presence this evening, at nine, after an early dinner with the Quakers."

"Oh! Meet the general! Oh, I must be better dressed! Oh, what shall I do? My hair is all mussed from the trip."

Nathanael smiled, enjoying the moment. He nodded to Eulinda as she came into the room, and with a hand under my elbow, she guided me toward the room that was Nathanael's and mine.

Nathanael followed us into the bedchamber. There, he stood for just a moment. "Caty," he said, "I want you to wear the blue dress. The one with all the ruffles."

I gasped. "But Nathanael, isn't that a bit
daring
to sit at table with Quakers?"

His smile was as the smile of a child who has gotten his own way. "I would say so, yes." Then he turned and started out the door. "Yes, I would say it was a bit daring," he said again. "But I just wanted them to see the beautiful young woman I wed."

T
HE TABLE
in the dining room of the elegant house assigned to us for the meeting with the Quaker delegation was set in keeping with the American principles and not those of the Quakers. In other words, it was not plain.

The most elegant silverware and crystal sparkled. The finest wine was served, and if the Quakers chose not to drink, so be it. The best cuts of meat were set out by the most well-trained servants.

"Act yourself," Nathanael told me as we entered the house. "Don't try to be something you are not."

Before we sat, both men and women stood around the great fireplace, sipping hot cider. I did my duty and circulated among the plainly clad women, feeling at least like a countess in my blue silk with the scooped neck in front.

"Welcome," I said. "We're glad to have you. I haven't met General Washington yet, but I'm told he's a great man. We're so glad he's on our side."

As formidable a face as that of my hated sister-in-law, Peggy, stared down at me. "That is all fine and dandy, young woman, but does thou know the Lord?"

My mouth fell shut. She was talking about the Lord as if He lived across the street. As if He just moved in and I should bring Him an apple pie.

But I wouldn't be bested. "Yes," I lied.

"Art thou sure thee knows Him sufficiently to someday dine at His table?"

"He hasn't invited me yet," I wanted to say, sassily. But, of course, I did not. Instead, I said, "Excuse me," and started toward the next group of women. I gave them a greeting much like I'd given the others.

"But does thee know the Lord, child," the eldest said to me. "If not, all this"—and she gave a sweeping gesture that included the table and the whole room—"all this means nothing. And thy General Washington is as nothing."

Well, to insult me was one thing, but to insult General Washington was another. I didn't feel that I had the mettle to defend him. I looked across the room to where Nathanael was standing, talking to a group of men. My look was appealing.
Help me,
it said.

Nathanael recognized only too well that I was in trouble. "Ladies and gentlemen," he announced loudly, "what say we sit at table and eat?"

There was a murmuring of joyous assent. Apparently, the table and all it held did amount to something after all.

It turned out that a smallpox epidemic had broken out in Boston, and Nathanael told our guests he had real fears that it might affect the colonial soldiers surrounding the city.

"You should get yourselves inoculated," he told the Quakers who dined with us.

"The Lord will care for us," Moses Brown said.

"Inoculation near brings on the sickness. It is toying with the work of the Lord," said another. And the subject was dropped.

"You have visited Washington, asking permission to bring relief to the people of Boston with food and fuel," Nathanael told them carefully. "Here is my advice to you. Five years ago you ran me out of your Meeting for having been seen watching a military parade in Connecticut. Now my life is devoted to the military and independence. Now I tell you this. Abide by your own principles, though I have abandoned them. Since you believe in them so much, they will see you through this fight. And though you threw me out of your Meeting years ago, I do not want to see you suffer."

A murmur of approval went through the room for Nathanael, and Moses Brown said he would pray for him.

We parted friends. I stayed close to Nathanael for the rest of the meeting, so none of the women pressed the matter of my knowing the Lord. They seemed afraid of Nathanael. But their eyes went over me in contempt as they left. One or two said they would pray for me, too.

"Do I need praying for?" I asked Nathanael.

"Right now we all do," he said.

***

I
COULD NOT
help but be both delighted and afraid for being presented to General Washington.

General Washington!
I had always thought that my family was of some eminence in its own right, and I had been trained to be proud of their achievements, but never in all the world did I expect to be in a position in which I would meet someone like General Washington. Or in which my husband would be able to introduce me to him.

"Nathanael," I said, and my voice gave way.

"What is it, love? You aren't frightened of meeting the general, are you? You are." And he hugged me. "You will delight him. Just as you delight me. He loves to have pretty things around him. Oh, and you are not just pretty—you can hold your own, just as you did tonight with the Quakers."

"That's it, Nathanael ... Did they make me look stupid? I didn't know what to say when they asked me if I knew the Lord."

"Say no, that you haven't been around as long as they have, but that the Lord knows you. Come, smooth your hair. We mustn't keep Washington waiting."

***

G
UARDS STEPPED
aside so we could go in to His Excellency's office.

He was a presence. What more can be said of him? General Washington rose from the chair behind his desk in the paneled, book-lined, and map-filled office, and his height was greater than that of any man I'd ever met. His uniform, also, was impressive. Only a few scars from a past case of smallpox marked his face.

As Nathanael introduced me, the general took my hand and kissed it. Then, noting the spread of my dress in front, he congratulated us and asked when the baby was due.

We both answered at once. "Late December."

"Will you go home for the birth or have it here, where we have doctors and you are surrounded by an army for protection?"

We said we didn't know yet.

"My wife has had children," he said. "She comes in early December. When she does, stay close to her. She can advise you."

Then he looked at Nathanael, smiling. "How did you get on with your Quaker friends? Did they invite you back to Meeting?" He was enjoying the joke.

"You set them on me this night," Nathanael accused, "but no, they did not invite me back to Meeting. Only said they would pray for me. Apparently they thought I needed it. But I had their respect. I was in charge of myself."

"You are always in charge of yourself, my boy, which is why you were put in charge of the army of Rhode Island. I would say the General Assembly of Rhode Island made an excellent choice."

Nathanael blushed. "General, may I have your permission to name our babe George Washington Greene if it is a boy?" he asked.

Washington put his arm around Nathanael's shoulder and walked us out of the room. "You may, and I am honored," he said.

I
BECAME
a dear friend of Lady Washington's when she came to camp in December, and, in a short time, I became a belle of the camp. We dined frequently at the John Vassal house, where the Washingtons made their home.

There were other guests, of course. The Horatio Gateses, the Thomas Mifflins, he still a Quaker, and most important, General Israel Putnam, near sixty now and a hero of Bunker Hill, and with a scar on his face that bespoke his Indian-fighting days. I begged tales of his escapades from him, and although others had heard them before, they were still intent on listening.

All through this I'd minded General Washington, of course, when he didn't know I was watching him. He'd lean back in his chair and his eyes would sparkle and his face would settle into a small smile as if he himself were remembering his days in the French and Indian War. And he'd sip his wine or his coffee and crack nuts and enjoy himself.

Nathanael and I were invited to every party, every dance. Word got around that I was a "joyous and frolicsome creature," and some of the young aides became downright smitten with me.

"Do you mind," I asked Nathanael, "that people speak of me this way?"

"When I mind, I'll tell you, love. How can anyone mind you, all of nine months with child, joking and smiling and cheering up the homesick men and making them joke and smile. You are the promise of a glorious future to them. You are what they will be fighting for."

And he kissed me.

"Where will I be having the baby?" I asked.

"That is up to you, my girl. Do you want to go home?"

"To what? Your sour-faced sister-in-law? I have friends here in the officers' wives. Might I stay and have the baby here, Nathanael?"

Again he kissed me. "It might be nice someday to tell the young man that he was born in Washington's encampment in Cambridge, while the British guns fired away in Boston."

Just then a shell from a thirteen-inch gun exploded and the very windows rattled. It was, at first, unnerving. And then, on second thought, it was as if God himself had given an answer to my question.

***

O
UR BABY BOY
, George Washington Greene, was born in the camp at Cambridge in late December. On the first day of January in 1776, I was up and about for a special event, the unfurling of a new flag of the American union at Cambridge.

Everyone gathered on the parade ground to see thirteen red and white stripes snapping in the wind, with united crosses of St. George and St. Thomas on a dark blue canton. Certainly it could be seen by the British garrisons in Boston and Charlestown as our cannon roared.

In early February, Nathanael was brought low by a sickness the camp doctors named as jaundice.

"I'm as yellow as saffron," he told me from his bed. "I am so weak, I can scarce walk across the room. I am grievously mortified by my confinement, as this is the critical period of the war. Should Boston fall, I intend to be there if I am able to sit on horseback."

"They will have to do without you for now, love," I told him.

But he recovered rapidly, in time to renew his friendship with Colonel Henry Knox, who had just arrived at camp.

Knox was a hero. And we had a party for him. He was the man who'd once been the bookseller in Boston whose shop Nathanael would frequently tarry at to talk of military tactics and, of course, politics.

In a feat of bravado that had people enraptured, Knox had gone on a three-hundred-mile wintertime trip to the captured forts of Crown Point and Ticonderoga, New York. He and his men had traveled over frozen lakes, the Berkshire Mountains, and impossibly high snows to bring back for the American army more than fifty cannon, mortars, and howitzers, and supplies of shells and powder.

Doing all this in late January had been a monumental task and had made it possible for Washington to fortify Dorchester Heights, surrounding British-occupied Boston. Now Washington's guns towered over Boston, bombarding it. The British would either have to be killed or get out.

At the party, I studied the Knoxes. Henry had recently wed.

He was portly. No, he was downright fat.

And she was as fat as he was. But there was something so sad about her that I immediately felt sorry, and I wound my way through the crowd until I found myself next to her, to start up a conversation.

"Aren't you proud of your husband?" I asked. "He's a hero."

Over a plate piled with food, she looked at me with lovely blue eyes filled, but not overflowing, with tears.
How can she keep the tears from falling?
I wondered.
How does she do that? Oh, if only I could learn to do that!

"Yes, I'm proud," she said. "But my mother and father are inside the city of Boston, which is even now being bombarded by the guns that my husband brought back for Washington."

For a moment her words made no sense to me. And I had none of my own to respond to them. Only a question, which I knew was intrusive.

"Why are your parents inside the city?"

"Because they are Tories," she answered straightforwardly. "My father is royal secretary to the province of Massachusetts. He never gave his approval to my courtship with Henry, because Henry was a patriot. When we wed, my father disowned me."