Patriot Hearts: A Novel of the Founding Mothers Read online

  “I don’t imagine it was Marie de Medici. It was a hand-mirror, the kind they make for travelers’ toiletry-sets—it was originally part of one, you know. You’ve seen the sort of thing: brushes and combs, pins in a fancy box, night-light, candles, mirrors, sometimes nightcaps and a nightgown. This one was in gold, with blue enamel and diamonds, and the Queen’s portrait in miniature on the back, and the words—”

  “Liberté—Amitié,” Dolley finished, a little breathless. “I know. Mrs. Washington gave it to me, almost the last time I saw her.” Her throat tightened, remembering plump small competent hands in their lace mitts, the bright squirrel-brown eyes. How white her old friend’s skin had seemed against the black of mourning.

  “Did she indeed?” Sophie raised her brows. “I’m surprised she let it go again, after all the hands it passed through, to come to her. It was lost, you know, on its way to her. The War was still going on, and the ship the Queen sent it on was captured by British privateers.”

  “Martha said it had a story to it, that she’d tell me one day. But after that she was ill. And she never was the same, after the General died. I suppose she’d rather the mirror were saved, than the coffee-set. People were always sending General Washington gifts after the War—I think the coffee-set came from one of the French generals—but the mirror was special, she insisted.” Dolley led the way toward the stairs again, trying to picture in her mind where she had seen that exquisite little looking-glass last. The curio cabinet in the yellow parlor? In among Mr. Jefferson’s seashells and fossils on the glass-fronted shelves in the dining-room that had once been his office?

  “The coffee-set was the one she used to serve all the members of that first Congress, after the General’s inauguration as President,” Dolley went on as they descended, into the heavy stillness of the great house. Would Martha have fled? she wondered.

  She didn’t think so.

  “She told me she could scarcely stand to look at it. Had it not been a gift, she said, she would have taken it out into the yard and broken every piece of it to bits with a poker, and thrown them all down the privy.”

  “Good Lord, why?”

  “Because of what befell her and her family, when her General became President.” The windows of the great dining-room—formerly Jefferson’s office—faced north onto Pennsylvania Avenue; even with the casements closed, she could hear the voices of the men before the house, the rattle of the carriage-traces and the creak of more wheelbarrows and handcarts being pushed along. A reminder of her peril. Like the Devil constantly whispering, Thou’lt never see Jemmy again.

  Would Martha have whispered, And serve him right?

  As she opened the cabinet between the windows, swiftly scanned its contents, she went on softly, “ ’Twas Jemmy who brought him—them—out of retirement, after the General swore to Martha and to all the nation no more to meddle in public affairs. It was the end, Martha told me once, of her happiness, and her family’s…and of the General’s as well.”

  Out on the Avenue a man detached himself from one of the knots of idlers watching the face of the house, stopped one of the barrow-men. There was a brief dumb-show, arms gesturing, hands pointing back to the gap in the hills, the Bladensburg road.

  Dolley’s heart froze. Then the man turned and ran off up the Avenue. The barrow-pusher spat on his hands, picked up the handles of his load again. Two more men from the watching idlers raced away, toward their own houses, their own families, perhaps.

  To gather their possessions and flee.

  1787

  MARTHA

  Mount Vernon Plantation

  Fairfax County, Virginia

  Thursday, January 25, 1787

  The Negroes always said a barking dog was the sign of ill luck on its way.

  Martha Washington’s father, London born and educated there til the age of fifteen, might scoff at this superstition, but her childhood fifty years ago in the isolated little plantation of Chestnut Grove had taught her its wisdom. A barking dog meant a stranger coming onto the place.

  And a stranger could mean anything.

  A visitor with ill news.

  A letter with a request that could not be denied.

  Dread flared behind her breastbone like the spark struck from steel and flint, but the fire that blossomed there was the flame of pure rage.

  Not again.

  I will not let him do this to me twice.

  The bedroom windows looked more or less south, toward the river and the wharf past the lane of outbuildings: smokehouse, washhouse, coach-house, and stables. That way, too, lay the river road that wound south along the Potomac, half-hidden by the slope of the ground and the gray lacework of winter trees. But the windows of the two small dressing-rooms adjoining the bedroom commanded the drive where it circled up to the gate.

  A girl’s trick, she thought, annoyed with herself as she rose from her chair and crossed the room. Like a child impatient to grab at a future that was, good or ill, inevitably on its way.

  What would be, would be.

  But at least I can ready my heart.

  The dressing-room was icily cold. As the familiar scents of well-worn wool, herb sachets, and hair-powder drifted around her, the wish flitted through her mind that she might have a nice Kentucky long-rifle, of the sort the men at the camps at Cambridge and Valley Forge had borne, a foot longer than her own diminutive height and deadly at a distance of two hundred yards. From this window she could pick off the rider the instant he appeared between the gate-posts.

  She guessed who it would be.

  She dismissed the wish briskly—Don’t be silly, Patsie, what an appalling example to set for the children!—but wasn’t shocked at it. She had long believed God never blamed you for your first thought, only your second.

  Please, God, don’t let it be James Madison. She changed her wish to a prayer.

  It might, of course, be someone else. Since the end of the War it seemed that everyone in the thirteen States felt entitled to come to Mount Vernon to see the man who had led the Continental Army to victory. In addition to assorted Dandridges and Bassetts—her own family—and the General’s brother Jack and sister Betty and their adult offspring, men arrived whom Martha had known from her winters in the Army camps with the General. Not only the officers like stout Harry Knox and dour-faced disapproving Timothy Pickering, but common soldiers, men from all walks of life whom she’d nursed in camp hospitals or knitted stockings for. Martha had grown accustomed to the constant stream of visitors, and to never really knowing how many to tell Uncle Hercules would be sitting down to dinner, to say nothing of the expense.

  But since October, the bark of dogs and the crunch of hooves on the drive had filled her with foreboding that sometimes turned her cold with fear, and sometimes hot with rage.

  A child’s voice sliced the air. Half a dozen small figures milled excitedly into sight from the curved walkway that led to the kitchen, trampling last week’s muddy snow. The little ones who helped with chores in the shops and, in summer, in the wide vegetable gardens near the wharf were always on hand to take messages to the house, and could dash up the steep hill from the river long before horses could take the drive. Shivering in the raw cold by the dressing-room window, Martha heard her niece Fanny’s gentle exclamations from the walkway. At nineteen, as the wife of the General’s nephew Augustine, Fanny had stepped into the role of auxiliary hostess at Mount Vernon.

  Martha caught the words, “…Mr. Madison,” and her small firm jaw clenched until it ached. The General’s niece Harriot—one of several family members now dwelling under the Mount Vernon roof—cried, “Let’s go tell Aunt!” and Fanny murmured something in reply and, Martha hoped, an admonition about how ladies didn’t shout.

  What am I ever going to do with that girl?

  The thought of Harriot—of Fanny with her first baby on the way, of the two children of her dead son Jacky whom Martha had taken in as her own, and of the older sisters of those two, who’d journeyed down from Alexandria
to have some relief from their mother’s constant illnesses and pregnancies—the thought of Harriot’s older brothers who’d have to be provided for and looked after—suddenly weighed on Martha’s thoughts, and she closed the window without even waiting to see who was arriving at Mount Vernon that morning.

  But her knees shook as she returned to her chair by the fire. Her breath was coming fast.

  He promised.

  Promised not only me, but the Congress and every one of his officers, every one of his soldiers.

  I will not become a dictator, he had promised her. A Cincinnatus, not a Caesar. We have not spent eight years ridding ourselves of one despot, to exchange for another. My own vine and fig tree, shared in peace with you, are more precious to me than any palace, any crown.

  Martha closed her eyes. She felt thankful beyond measure for her own long-standing rule that the hour after breakfast, when the General rode out to supervise the work on Mount Vernon’s outlying farms, was inviolate. Even Fanny whom she loved like a daughter, even her treasured granddaughter Nelly, knew enough not to knock at her bedroom door during that hour of solitude. When the French clock on the mantel-piece spoke its small sweet note at ten, that would be time enough to take up her weapons and learn what battle it was that she would have to fight.

  But her instincts told her that in this inclement season, with Congress reconvening soon, the visitor had to be James Madison. And for a bleak silent moment Martha Dandridge Custis Washington wished the little man dead.

  Eight years.

  In the fairy-tales of which her daughter—her beautiful Patcy—had been so fond, days of trial and testing for hero and heroine concluded with “happily ever after” and were presumably followed by a lifetime of peace (although, reflected Martha, Heaven only knew what one would talk about with a man who’d spent his youth hopping from lily-pad to lily-pad in the guise of a frog). She’d never read one in which the deserving couple had their years of peace first, their trials and tribulations afterwards, and no end to them in sight.

  Her first marriage, at nineteen, to Daniel Custis could certainly not be counted a tribulation, once his frightful father was dead. Plump, middle-aged Daniel had adored her and had showered her with gifts. The only trials she’d passed through had been the deaths of two of their four beautiful children before they reached the age of four…and the appalling legal mess of his Parke grandmother’s legacy, which had fallen upon her, ensnarled in the vast Custis fortune, when Daniel had suddenly died.

  As for the General…

  George had his trials and his tribulations, reflected Martha. But he was a soldier. Of course there had been times when he’d lain in the hand of Death. Ambushed by the French and Indians in the days before the French had been driven out of Canada, he had brought a division of confused and panicky English soldiers out of the wilderness to safety. When first she’d seen him, stepping out into the sunlight of the Palace Green in Williamsburg in his blue-and-scarlet militia uniform, that was what Daniel had said of him: That’s Colonel Washington, the man who saved Braddock’s troops.

  Two years after that they’d been formally introduced, at a ball to celebrate her sister Anna Maria’s wedding to Burwell Bassett of Eltham Plantation: Fanny’s mother. He’d asked her to dance—quite properly soliciting her husband’s permission—and led her out to the floor, a very tall man who seemed taller yet because of the straightness of his carriage, and because of the Indian-like litheness with which he moved. Only a month before that she had lost her daughter, sweet four-year-old Frances. She had almost declined to attend the wedding or the dance.

  But when George bowed over her hand, and looked down at her with those remarkable eyes, pale chilly blue like spring sky when the clouds first break, she would no more have refused a request to dance—or a request that he carry her out of the ballroom and away from Williamsburg over the crupper of his horse, for that matter—than she’d have turned away from the warmth of a fire on a freezing night.

  She later learned that George had that effect on most women.

  As it was, the impact of his presence confused her, because she still did quite sincerely love Daniel….

  But this was different. When she thought about it later, she realized this must be what people meant when they spoke of charisma, the potent magic that some people had that made you want to be near them, that made you want to do as they asked.

  When he thanked her for the dance—and he danced with the leashed power of a well-schooled hunting-horse going over jumps—his voice was like brown velvet, but she saw that his teeth were very bad. The reason, she understood at once, for his tight-lipped expression, and his snorting, close-mouthed laugh.

  He was self-conscious.

  And though she continued to love Daniel til he died, the memory of that dance was like a little piece of warmed amber, tucked away in a pocket, that she could touch, in the months that followed, when her hands or her heart felt cold.

  Some eight months after Daniel’s death, George came to call on her at the home of mutual friends. During those months she’d been wrestling with the maddening difficulties of keeping the overseers of four plantations from either stealing her blind or half-killing the slaves in order to get work out of them, and with the legal complications of finding a guardian for four-year-old Jacky and two-year-old Patcy, since Daniel had died intestate. In George, she had recognized at once both great strength and great patience, and an intelligence similar to her own. Neither of them was bookish, nor could either be called a philosophical genius. But George, like herself, had a keen understanding of how things worked, and a sharp vision of what was most important in any situation.

  And, they laughed at the same things.

  The fact that he was twenty-five years old and the most breath-taking man she’d ever seen didn’t hurt matters either.

  Happily ever after.

  The woods below the house wore their winter-dress of gray, brown, and white; in the mornings the water in the bedroom ewer would be skinned with ice. With the dressing-room windows shut Martha couldn’t hear whether it was a single horse’s hooves that crunched the gravel by the mansion house’s western door, or the creak of harness and the grind of carriage-wheels. But through the shut door of her room the sounds of the house came to her, comforting and familiar as a heartbeat.

  Sal’s measured footfalls in Nelly’s bedroom on the other side of the wall, and the scratch of her broom on the bare pine floors. The faint clinking as Caro gathered up chamber-pots to bear down the backstairs and out to the scullery. The creak of bedropes and the dawdling tread of the young girls—Sinah and Annie—as they passed and repassed, making up the beds. Taking their time: From childhood Martha had understood that it was useless to expect any slave, from the lowest field-hand up to house-servants like George’s valet Billy and her own dear Nan, to hurry. It drove the General frantic. He’d take his watch out to the fields and time the men at their tasks, trying to arrive at new methods to make the work go more efficiently. The men in the fields, the women in the weaving-rooms, would merely look at him when he’d explain how they could actually accomplish twice as much in the same amount of time, increasing the productivity of the plantation…

  And would then go back to doing as they’d always done.

  Their voices came to Martha in snatches, since they spoke quietly, respecting her hour of peace. She heard Mr. Madison’s name, and the phrase, “…the blue bedroom.” Had their visitor been only a messenger, the man would have been accommodated in the attic room next to that of the children’s tutor, young Mr. Lear. Harriot’s footsteps galloped wildly up the main stair, vibrating the house, with Nelly’s a swift-pattering echo.

  “Is Uncle going to Philadelphia?” demanded Harriot. “Do you think he’ll take us? We never get to go anywhere, and I’m so bored with Mr. Lear’s lessons I could scream!”

  “Well, don’t scream in the house,” responded Nelly, two years younger and sounding like the elder by several years. “Sal, I’m sorry, did
you see Harriot’s copybook up here? It’s not down in the parlor.”

  “I ain’t seen it, child—”

  “I told you, Wash took it! Wash is always taking and hiding things!”

  Seven-year-old George Washington Parke Custis was Nelly’s brother, known throughout the family as Mr. Tub. The footsteps retreated, out of the bedroom and down the stairs; Martha reflected that more probably Harriot herself was the culprit. Her own son—Daniel’s son—Jacky would do the same thing, many years ago in those peaceful days when he and Patcy were schoolchildren, “losing” his copybook or hiding it and blaming poor Patcy for its theft, with no other purpose than to delay or disrupt unwanted lessons. Of course, Wash was more than ready to pilfer copybooks on his own, or do whatever was necessary to disrupt lessons, being no more of a scholar than his father Jacky had been.

  Martha smiled to herself even as she sighed with exasperation at her child, her grandchildren, George’s obstreperous niece.

  THIS is my world. Family and home, children growing up and bearing children of their own. Fanny’s first was due in March, and Eleanor, Jacky’s widow, was expecting yet again by her second husband Dr. Stuart…. Something would have to be done about introducing Jacky’s oldest daughter Eliza into society when the time came, if Eleanor continued to be so preoccupied with her second family. Though there was plenty of time to think of that.

  This was the world Martha would have chosen, if offered every fairy-tale realm from Camelot to the Moon and the splendors of Egypt and Rome. Mount Vernon in the quiet of winter, with the fields bare and the woods and lawn patched with snow. George riding out wrapped in his Army coat to survey the fields for next spring’s plowing, his dapple gelding puffing smoke through its nostrils like a dragon.

  A world of mending and knitting, of black icy mornings rank with the smell of wood smoke from the kitchen. Of the soft chatter of the women in the weaving-room by candle-glow and firelight, of counting out bulbs and seeds and planning next year’s garden.