Patriot Hearts: A Novel of the Founding Mothers Read online

  A world where in earlier years her sister Anna Maria or her brother Bart or George’s brothers or sister or the Fairfaxes or the Masons from across the river would ride over for dinner and a few days’ stay or a few weeks’. A world where she’d be waked in the dark of predawn by George’s soft-footed rising and the soft clank of the poker as he stirred up the fire, so that the bedroom would be warm for her.

  That world had been theirs for seventeen years, all the “happily ever after” she’d ever wanted. There had been the recurring worry about her daughter Patcy’s seizures, which the shy, beautiful girl had suffered from childhood. But somewhere, Martha had always felt—perhaps in England—there must exist a cure. At the time it had seemed to her that these days of happiness would go on forever, until she and George were old.

  But they had lasted only seventeen years.

  The mantel-clock struck ten. It was time to get up, and go downstairs, and ask Fanny in the most natural-sounding voice she could contrive, “Who was that, whose horse I heard in the drive?”

  So it seemed to her, Martha thought, that in 1774 a clock had struck somewhere and it was time to get up from their quiet life of family and home and watching the river flow past the foot of the hill, and step out the door and into the War.

  The War had ended four years ago. But as she shook out the folds of her dark skirts, and glanced at her looking-glass to make sure her cap was straight, it seemed to Martha that the War was once again waiting downstairs, as alive as it ever had been. Ready to sink its claws into George and drag him away from her.

  Drag them both away, never to return.

  Never, she vowed in her heart. I saw what it did to them—to Fanny, to Jacky, to those children whom I most love.

  He promised, and I will hold him to that promise. Nothing—nothing—will take us again from this place, and from these people who need us.

  As she came down the stairs into the paneled shadows of the hall, Martha heard James Madison’s voice in the West Parlor. Barely a murmur from that small slight man, like a mouse nibbling in a wainscot. A wet, rasping cough told her Madison was talking with George’s nephew Augustine—Fanny’s husband, about whose health Martha was increasingly worried.

  “In the States that have paper money, it’s worth half what specie is, if that,” she heard as she came nearer. “But the States make laws that this paper must be accepted, and those who’ve lent in good faith are being driven to bankruptcy. In the States that don’t have it, you can’t lay hands on a shilling and creditors are calling in their debts by taking a man’s land. They’re saying in New York that if it weren’t for the western counties rising in rebellion, Massachusetts would have gone to war with Connecticut over trade between them.”

  “Madness,” said Augustine, and coughed again. Augustine had been part of the General’s staff during the closing years of the War, a slender young man whose succession of feverish chest-colds had kept him a wanderer in search of that elusive “change of air” that all doctors prescribed. He’d come to Mount Vernon last year to take up again his position as the General’s secretary, and in so doing, had met once more his childhood sweetheart, Fanny.

  His usual task at this hour was to be in the General’s study copying letters. But since, unlike Fanny, Augustine wasn’t six and a half months gone with child, the task of entertaining the visitor until Martha came downstairs fell to him.

  “It is more than madness; it is the death-knell of all we have fought for,” said Madison. “In Richmond they talk of a moratorium on taxes, because no one will or can pay them. How we’re to deal with the British—”

  He broke off, set down his glass of Madeira, and got to his feet as Martha appeared in the doorway. “Lady Washington.”

  “Mr. Madison, I’m so pleased to see you!” It was a complete lie, of course. But in Virginia, where everyone was related to everyone else and everyone’s welfare depended on that cat’s cradle of friendships, alliances, and marriage, there was no point in expressing personal animosities about which one could do nothing. “And how is the Colonel?”

  “My father is well, ma’am, thank you for asking.” Madison bowed. Though only three years older than Martha’s son Jacky would have been, had he lived, James Madison—small, thin, prematurely wrinkled, and with gray already thick in his brown hair—had the look of a little old man. And in fact, Martha quite liked him, or would have done so, she told herself, had he kept to his own business of the Virginia Assembly and the Continental Congress, and not tried to drag George back into it, to fix the mess they’d made.

  Back in October, Madison and his friend James Monroe had stopped at Mount Vernon on their way back from the Congress, and after dinner the two men had sat in the dining-room, talking to George far into the night. Martha knew Monroe, as she knew Madison, from the War: While Madison’s health had been too frail to sustain the rigors of camp-life, Monroe had been part of the force that George had taken across the ice-filled Delaware River on Christmas night, 1776, to counterattack the Hessian mercenaries. The Hessians had been so incapacitated by holiday cheer that they’d managed only to get off a handful of shots before surrendering: One of those shots had hit Jim Monroe.

  That was the kind of person Jim Monroe was.

  After that dinner in October, George had been very quiet.

  In her heart, Martha had always known Madison would try again.

  Still, her own fears and her own rage—rage at men who shouted and waved their arms and complained of taxation without representation, and then when they got representation didn’t want to be taxed anyway—were no excuse for incivility. “My dear sir, you must be frozen! Augustine, I trust Frank is having a good fire made up in the blue bedroom for our guest? The General has ridden over to Dogue Run Farm this morning, to see what condition the fields are in, but he shall be back for dinner. Please do make yourself at home here, Mr. Madison—Surely you aren’t riding on to New York tomorrow? All the Negroes are saying there is another storm on its way.”

  “I fear I must, ma’am, thank you. There are matters pending in Congress that cannot wait. I have not even been home, on my way from Richmond—a night is all I can stop.”

  More time than enough, thought Martha grimly, to convince George to go to Philadelphia with you once the spring crops are in the ground. More time than enough to destroy what we have here, the peace that we have earned.

  She had learned, to her cost, how quickly—in three minutes or less—the whole of the world could change.

  “All shall be well, Aunt Patsie.”

  Fanny slipped an arm around Martha’s waist as she emerged from the parlor and gathered up her heaviest shawl to walk to the kitchen. In the shadows of the hall, for a moment it was as if Martha’s sister Anna Maria, and not Anna Maria’s daughter, stood beside her: Anna Maria come to life again, with her brown curls slightly tumbled, her hazel eyes kind. Despite the exhaustion of her pregnancy, Fanny had been in the kitchen, making sure dinner would include in its inevitable bounty items suitable for Mr. Madison’s delicate digestion. Her clothing held the scents of wood smoke, cinnamon, and baking meats.

  “Even though Uncle’s retired, you know he’s still interested in politics. You know how he’s been following all this talk about another convention to straighten things out between the States. Even if he doesn’t go to Philadelphia, he was elected as part of the delegation. Of course he’ll want to tell Mr. Madison what to say.”

  Fanny gathered up her own shawl from its peg on the wall as she followed Martha into the little hallway at the south end of the house that ran next to the General’s study; even with a fire burning in the study, the hall was brutally cold. In the little parlor behind them, the voices of the children could be heard, reciting their lessons with the stocky young New Englander George had taken on as tutor: Jacky’s children, and restless, noisy Harriot.

  Martha’s responsibility, and George’s. With no one to look after them, if they did not.

  “Uncle knows how much he’s needed he
re.” Fanny took her hands, the way Anna Maria used to, when she wanted to coax Martha into letting her do something. “Augustine has told me how deeply in debt we are, because of Uncle being away all those years. And though of course if Augustine had been manager during the War instead of poor Cousin Lund the place would have made money hand over fist—”

  “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.