Patriot Hearts: A Novel of the Founding Mothers

by Barbara Hambly

  Pulled back to reality, Martha turned with a smile to meet Fanny’s eyes, as bright as they’d been when she’d asked if Governor Dunmore would really lock up her aunt Patsie and make her sew sheets.

  Mr. Madison responded gravely, “I take it you intend to live in Philadelphia or New York, then, Miss Custis? Or Charleston—I believe there’s a theater in Charleston.”

  “Philadelphia,” Eliza drawled grandly. “The heat in South Carolina does not agree with my constitution.” She put a weary hand to her forehead, not that, at age eleven, she’d ever been to South Carolina in her life. “I shall have the grandest house in Philadelphia: forty rooms, and every one with a black marble fireplace and looking-glasses on the walls.”

  “You’ll bankrupt your husband trying to heat it,” remarked Nelly, and set aside her custard-spoon with the last morsel of the dessert uneaten, as good manners dictated.

  Pattie, Eleanor’s daughter, put down her spoon and slipped her hand into Martha’s. “When I’m grown-up I’d like to have a house just like Aunt Patsie’s.” Her voice was wistful.

  Martha put an arm around her and thought, So would I, dearest. So would I.

  She looked along the board to make sure everyone was finished—little Wash had left a polite final morsel about half the size of a pixie’s fingernail—then rose smiling. In her breast her heart was a nugget of slag. “If you’ll excuse us, gentlemen?”

  The men stood, moved back chairs for them. Had there been more company the children would have been relegated to a table of their own in the little dining-room, but Mr. Madison only bowed, and gave the four young girls a wink as they filed into the parlor where Sal had already built up the fire, and set out the sewing-boxes.

  As she left the dining-room, Martha heard George ask, “What’s the news from Massachusetts?”

  “Not good,” answered Madison quietly. “The whole of the western counties are rising in rebellion, and claiming their right to separate and form a state of their own. The legislature in Boston speaks of sending in troops, and hanging the leaders for treason.”

  “Treason?” George’s deep voice was troubled. “That’s a hard word, coming from men who were but lately called traitors themselves.”

  Frank shut the door. It was not done, for a woman to listen in on the talk of the men once dinner was over, and Martha would never have dreamed of setting so scandalous an example for her granddaughters and Harriot—who had, God knew, poor enough examples of behavior in their own homes. But if they hadn’t been there she wasn’t sure that she wouldn’t have snatched up a water-glass from the pantry sideboard and pressed it to the door to amplify to her ear the voices on the other side.

  Tom Jefferson had taught her that trick.

  For eight years she had waited to hear that her husband had, indeed, been taken prisoner and sent to England to be tried for treason.

  For eight years she’d waited to hear that he’d been killed, without the slightest idea of what she would do, or how she would live, if he were gone.

  It took her, Jacky, and Eleanor over three weeks to get to Cambridge in the winter of ’75. They’d stopped for nearly a week in Philadelphia because both the horses and her daughter-in-law badly needed the rest. Snow lay thick on the ground when they finally joggled through the Army camp at dusk, hard powdery northern snow that squeaked underfoot, not like the wet soft snow of Virginia. Campfires glowed amber against the last lilac ghost of twilight, the dark shapes of huts and men standing out bare and black. The shelters seemed to be constructed, like Robinson Crusoe’s, out of flotsam and salvage: boards of unequal shape and length, sailcloth, raw logs chinked with mud, discarded shutters, branches, brush. The men resembled their dwellings: grandpas who should have been dozing at their family hearths, boys who looked scarcely older than Anna Maria’s eleven-year-old Burwell junior. Farmers in homespun, clerks huddled in thin town jackets, hairy gimlet-eyed men from over the western mountains, swilling rum from round-bellied bottles. Women with petticoats tucked up to their knees and their hair straggling loose. Battalions of dogs. There were Indians among them, too, and black men who Martha earnestly hoped were freedmen and not runaways.

  The sight of blacks with rifles in their hands was a new one to her, and profoundly unnerving.

  The men got up from around their fires and followed the coach to a handsome brick house not far from the Cambridge common, with white pilasters to its porch and a double staircase down to what had been a lawn and was now a wasteland of trampled snow. The carriage stopped, and one of George’s Lewis nephews—handsome in the blue uniform of a Headquarters aide—helped her down.

  Then she looked up, and the house door opened, yellow lamplight spilling out onto the snow around the tall black silhouetted shape.

  For eight years after that, it seemed to Martha that she led two lives. They alternated like dream and waking, summer and winter: her actual self and a sort of simulacrum who was waiting only to return to “real life.”

  But it was the summers at Mount Vernon that felt like the dream. She carried on her duties as mistress of the plantation, tried to adjudicate between the overseers’ harshness and the exasperating passive contrariness of the slaves, managed the finances of the Custis estate as if George were simply away at Williamsburg. She had looms set up and put the female slaves to weaving for the Army, and organized the women of the neighborhood into a Society to knit stockings and sew clothing for the soldiers, since Congress couldn’t seem to figure out who was supposed to pay for equipping the Army and the separate States all howled about their individual poverty. She did what she could to rally support at home, using hospitality to settle political differences the way all the landowners did, visiting and entertaining everyone whose support might conceivably be of use to George and George’s cause.

  Yet it was only during the winters—in unfamiliar borrowed houses, surrounded by soldiers and secretaries and military aides, waiting for news of disaster and trying to achieve some kind of normalcy under the most bizarre conditions—that she felt truly like herself, at George’s side.

  Every autumn, she would load up a wagon with the produce of the plantation—smoked hams, preserved fruits, sacks of potatoes, yams, corn—and with whatever medicines she could obtain, before journeying off to wherever the Army was camped that year. There was never enough food at Headquarters and it was seldom good. That first winter in Cambridge, Martha heard from her friends in camp—the outspoken Lucy Knox, wife of George’s trusted artillery general Henry, and General Greene’s lovely, featherheaded wife Kitty—about the backbiting that had already begun to envenom the upper levels of command. In winter camp, men who thought they should have been put in charge of the Army had little to do but pick holes in George’s methods of discipline, and find fault with all he did.

  And many of the Generals’ wives were as ambitious, or more so, than their men.

  For this reason, almost the first thing Martha did was to establish a rota of entertaining officers and their wives to dinner, and set about making the house of the Commander in Chief the social as well as the command center of the camp.

  As a Virginia planter’s daughter—as a Virginia planter’s wife—Martha had spent far too much time listening to the power politics of the House of Burgesses not to be aware that a man’s power over others depended almost as much on his appearance of competent strength as on strength, or competence, itself, particularly in an emergency. This was an understanding she shared with George, on a level more profound than words could begin to fathom—something she wasn’t sure that anyone else in the camp, or in the Congress for that matter, completely comprehended.

  She felt, sometimes, presiding over those dinners with dour Massachusetts colonels and frivolous South Carolinians—and later French and German and Spanish officers who came to observe and aid anyone who was willing to make trouble for the British—the curious sensation of her marrow-deep unity with George. It was as if they were dancing a dance long practiced together, or, like twins, could read
one another’s thoughts.

  In making him Commander in Chief of the Continental Army, Congress had authorized George to flog and hang. Knowing what would become of the Army if the countryside turned against them, George disciplined without mercy. A veteran of battle himself, he knew that under combat conditions, only discipline can stand against panic. The men were accustomed to the idea that they could disobey any command they didn’t like, so the potential for discontented officers stirring up trouble could not be ignored.

  At the very least, Martha thought, even if her dinners didn’t completely defuse the poisonous atmosphere, they would give everyone something to look forward to. In addition, the dinners let people see George in some other context than when he was giving orders or swearing at the troops.

  Politics and social maneuvering aside, it was Martha’s nature to want people to be comfortable. And she knew that comfort, especially in times of stress, depended to a large degree on things being organized and meals being served hot and on time.

  Thus her Headquarters life felt like a curious extension of what she’d always done without thinking. The routine of a plantation mistress fit weirdly well into the context of war. And as a plantation mistress, Martha was as accustomed to looking out for the common soldiers as she was to smoothing things over between George and his officers. Her days at Cambridge—and on the New Jersey heights above New York the following winter, and at Valley Forge the winter after that—were spent in organizing the women of the district into committees to make clothing and knit stockings, as she did during the summers at home, and in visiting the men in their shelters or in the camp hospital with such small and necessary gifts. Even the men who growled about George’s readiness with the lash came around, at first simply because they needed the stockings, and then when they began to observe for themselves that their General was absolutely consistent in his rules and his punishments. He played no favorites, he listened to both sides of every case, he never held back their pay or sold their rations for his own profit. He had no hidden end beyond keeping the Army together and in the field. He raged and swore as much as they did against the Congress and the States who expected them to fight well-fed professional troops with no food in their bellies and no powder in their guns.

  And eight years passed.

  As Martha stitched the microscopic hems of a shirt-ruffle for Wash, by the glow of the work-candles Frank brought into the West Parlor, she saw in the faces of her granddaughters and niece the reflection of those eight years.

  Wintering in New Jersey and Pennsylvania and New York, not returning to Mount Vernon until summer firmed up the roads. In 1776 that had not been until almost harvest, so she’d still been in Philadelphia in July, to hear the church bells tolling and men shouting in the streets that Congress had proclaimed the colonies’ independence from Britain.

  That was the summer Eliza had been born. The girl’s face, already bearing the promise of a fleshy beauty, was restless and discontented as she bent over her sewing: a neglected child from the outset, trying with tantrums to make herself heard. Eleanor had been ill and depressed after the birth, and Martha, who would naturally have stepped in to care for both her and the child, was still in Philadelphia. How different would Eliza be now, had she not spent her first three months in the care of a succession of slave nurse-girls not much older than eight?

  On New Year’s Eve of ’77, when Pattie had been born, Martha had been packed already to leave for winter camp. Only a week before Pattie’s birth, in the midst of caring for the bedridden Eleanor at Mount Vernon, word had reached Martha of the death of her sister Anna Maria, her most dear and treasured friend.

  On her deathbed, Anna Maria had asked her family to send word to Martha, that Martha was to take in her daughter Fanny, barely turned eleven. “Raise her as your own,” she had whispered.

  Martha had refused. Three weeks later, she’d gotten into the carriage, to go to the camp in Pennsylvania. Because George needed her, and she needed George.

  Fanny had been sent instead by her grief-stricken, elderly father to the care of whichever relatives could fit an extra girl into their households. Eleanor, withdrawn into her world of shadows and pain, had been left with Jacky, who was completely useless around the sick. Tiny Pattie and sixteen-month-old Eliza were again relegated to the care of such girls as were too young to be employed in the fields.

  Throughout the bitter winter in that awful little stone house at Valley Forge, Martha remembered now, she had dreamed about them. Or, worse, had dreamed about Patcy. Dreamed that she’d left a baby girl somewhere—set her down in the woods or the stable or the house and wandered away—and was searching for her, frantically trying to get her back before night fell.

  From that dream Martha would wake to freezing blackness, to the drums of reveille in the camp and the clack of flint and steel as George knelt by the hearth: it never took George more than one or two strikes to get a fire going. Aaron Burr, General Putnam’s dapper young aide, used to say that all George had to do was look at the kindling, for flame to spring to life. It wouldn’t dare do otherwise.

  Across the parlor now she considered them, in the comforting glow of candles and firelight and happily ever after. Fanny so exactly like Anna Maria, smiling at Nelly’s grave plans to find a sweetheart for her tutor. Eliza stitching away on an extravagantly embroidered crimson petticoat and detailing to her sister her plans for a career on the stage, while Pattie more prosaically knitted stockings. Harriot, stitching on the other side of the fire as far from Eliza as she could get, looked scornful but knew better than to get in a quarrel with her cousin when Martha was in the room.

  How I wronged them. They needed me, and I wasn’t there.

  She’d been gone from home when Nelly was born, too.

  She remembered her maid Sal, telling her what she’d heard from the maids in Jacky’s household: that when Jacky’s friends in Alexandria—and any convivial strangers who happened through the town—came for dinner, her son would lift the three-year-old Eliza up onto the dinner-table, and encourage her to sing bawdy songs at the top of her voice for the edification of the men as they drank. Eleanor, so frequently confined to her room, either didn’t know or didn’t have the energy to care.

  Jacky was a good boy, Martha told herself sadly. Sweet-natured, though his judgment wasn’t good.

  But she knew that, too, was a lie.

  She remembered how she had returned from the winter camp at Morristown in 1780 to find her beloved sewing-maid Nan with child. A white man, Nan had stammered, a white man came upon her in the woods beyond the grist-mill. The maid disclaimed all knowledge of who the man was, but had looked away from Martha with fear in her eyes. She would say only, “He said he’d make sure I never saw my family again, if I told.”

  When the child was born—Willy, seven now and learning to be a houseboy—he had looked like Jacky. He looked even more like him now.

  I should have been here.

  But it wasn’t that easy.

  In the months before Martha went to Valley Forge, leaving Fanny and Pattie, her own ailing mother, Eliza and Nan and Eleanor all to their fates, word had reached her that the Continental Army had been defeated in battles along the Delaware River. Congress had been driven out of Philadelphia only a day before the British took the city, and the British came within a hair’s-breadth of capturing the Army—and George—after the disastrous counterattack in the fog at Germantown. The year before, they had barely escaped through the streets of New York City as the British were landing on the Battery.

  The last she had seen of him, as he’d handed her into the carriage at Morristown and had stood watching her out of sight, might have been indeed the last time she would see him, ever. The good-bye kiss he gave her could have been the final adieu. Even more than the knowledge that he needed her support, what she could not bear was the awareness that she might never see him again.

  Each winter that she took from Eliza, and Pattie, and Fanny, was a treasure that she was layi
ng up within her own heart. The treasure of being with him, for what might be the final time.

  I could not be two places at once!

  Each winter she had chosen. And those winters glimmered back to her now through Eliza’s operatic angers, in Pattie’s wistful clinginess and the note in Fanny’s voice when she would speak of “having a home of our own.” To say nothing, reflected Martha’s more practical side, of the badly kept tangle of plantation records that George was still trying to sort out four years after war’s end, and the terrifying tally of debts.

  As the evening grew later, and the men remained talking in the dining-room, the anger congealed to a point of heat behind her heart.

  I followed him for eight years. I left behind those who had reason to expect my help.

  Does he really need me to remind him, that he laid down the sword of power with the understanding that he would not take it up again?

  A Cincinnatus, not a Caesar, he had promised. A farmer and not a ruler of men.

  By the end of the War, he could have become a Caesar. The charisma that drew her—and every woman who encountered George—combined with his good sense and calm integrity, to unite, at last, New York men who’d grown up despising Pennsylvanians, Massachusers to whom every Rhode Islander was a thief, South Carolinians who held their noses at the mention of Vermont boys. He had made of them one fighting force. Year by year, she saw how he became the embodiment of the cause that held them together, the cause for which more and more of them risked their lives simply because he was willing to risk his.

  In September of 1781, word reached her at Mount Vernon that George was coming. On the way to join with the French fleet in a maneuver to trap the British army at Yorktown, he would have the chance to visit the home he had not seen in six years. The previous winter, one of George’s most trusted generals, Benedict Arnold, had turned his coat and gone over to the British side, and had led their armies in raids on Virginia. Arnold had occupied the new capital, Richmond, and barely missed capturing Tom Jefferson, whose fragile baby daughter died as a result of the hardships of the family’s escape. Martha had been with George at the winter camp in New Windsor at that time, frantic with worry about her own little granddaughters; about her mother, ill at Chestnut Grove; about Fanny.