Patriot Hearts: A Novel of the Founding Mothers

by Barbara Hambly

  That spring, moreover, Martha herself was ill, first at Headquarters and later in Philadelphia. She was still not feeling herself by the time she returned to Mount Vernon in June—having missed the birth of little George Washington Parke Custis—and had barely recovered her strength when George wrote in September that he would indeed be able to cross his own threshold for the first time since May of 1775.

  He arrived on the ninth of September after everyone was in bed. Martha, for a week too excited to sleep, heard the dogs barking, and then hooves in the driveway. It’s one of his aides coming to announce his arrival tomorrow….

  But from downstairs she heard a familiar deep voice say, “If she’s asleep, for God’s sake let her sleep! That’s an order, Breechy. Just to see the roof-line and smell the gardens is worth the ride….”

  “General Washington—” Martha appeared at the top of the stairs, her braid hanging forgotten over the embroidered homespun of her dressing-gown and hairpins still in her hand. “If you dared let me go six hours til dawn not knowing you were in the house, I should—I should write a letter to the Times in London saying that such conduct proved you to be no gentleman.”

  He grinned wide—something he almost never did because of his teeth—and reached the bottom of the stairs in two strides, in time to catch Martha in his arms.

  He had ridden sixty miles from Baltimore that day, to sleep beneath his own roof at her side.

  The French did arrive the following day, General Rochambeau handsome and courtly and a little too suave in his gorgeous uniform—George had written to her that he was too hard on his men, which was something, coming from George. The day after that—the eleventh of September—the rest of the French officers appeared, and on their heels, Jacky, Eleanor, and the grandchildren whom George had never seen. The French Comtes and Chevaliers in their gold-embroidered uniforms all smiled to see the tall, stern General scoop up five-year-old Eliza and hold her like a kitten above his head.

  Throughout dinner, Jacky hovered around the Generals like a smitten schoolgirl. He asked breathless questions about battles, gazed in rapture at the swords they wore and the gold of their epaulets.

  Martha still remembered the men coming into the parlor—this same parlor where they now sat—after dinner that day, Jacky with his features radiant: “Papa’s going to take me with him to Yorktown! I’ve been commissioned as one of his aides!”

  Eleanor’s gentle eyes flared with alarm, and her face paled. Jacky might towse the servant-girls, and waste his late father’s fortune on imbecilic land-deals for currency that wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on, but he was her husband. Without him to run Abingdon Plantation, neither Eleanor nor her four tiny children could survive.

  Martha’s first reaction to this announcement—that he was going to war, but only in the safest possible position, behind the combined French and Continental armies—was to roll her eyes. She longed to reassure her daughter-in-law that Jacky might go to war—and she was willing to bet his first act in the service of his country would be to purchase a dozen uniforms that put General Rochambeau’s to shame—but she couldn’t imagine her son actually doing anything to put himself into harm’s way.

  But he did. Martha had become so used to the sicknesses that ravaged the Army camps—at Morristown, at Valley Forge, at Trenton—that she seldom thought of them anymore. Her own illness had been more inconvenient than dangerous. The Knox and Greene babies whom her friends Lucy and Kitty now brought regularly to winter quarters seemed to thrive. George’s favorite aide Alec Hamilton, goldenly handsome and a few years younger than Jacky, had never had so much as a cold (or the French pox, which was even more surprising).

  By the seventeenth of October, however, when General Cornwallis sent an aide out of his fortress to surrender his sword to Washington, Jacky was so sick with camp-fever that he could only watch the capture of the British army from a carriage in the road. The same letter that brought Martha news of the British surrender urged her, and Eleanor, to come at once.

  Through six years of war, she had often lain awake in terror at the thought of losing George. She had never dreamed that she would lose Jacky. But at Eltham Plantation, where six years previously Martha had made her choice to follow George to war, less than three weeks after the defeat of Britain by her American colonists, Jacky Custis died.

  Pattie dozed over her knitting; Nelly had fallen asleep. Outside the wind had begun to moan, puffing threads of smoke back down the chimney. On the side closer to the windows, Martha felt the air of the room growing cold. The rumble of the men’s voices continued behind the dining-room door. Fanny gathered her shawl about her: “I’ll get these little sleepyheads off to bed,” and Eliza piped up immediately that she wasn’t the least bit sleepy—

  “My nerves are too delicate to let me sleep, Aunt Patsie.”

  And Harriot: “Why do men take so long over their wine?”

  “It isn’t polite to make observations about how long anyone lingers after dinner,” replied Fanny gently, and herded the girls from the room.

  Why indeed?

  Martha’s breath felt stifled in her chest. They would come out soon.

  The last time George had lingered so long over dinner had been the night last October, with Madison and Monroe.

  Warily, Martha had watched them then, as she had watched Madison tonight. Too fragile to go to war, he had spent the years from 1775 to 1783 in the Virginia legislature; he knew the ins and outs of local politics with the brilliance of an Alexander viewing a battlefield. Last October, she had heard him speak of the relationship of Congress to the various States, and the States to each other, like a physician observing a dissection, pointing with a needle: a cancer here, a lesion there, a muscular weakness there, and here gangrene is setting in…The patient will die.

  “No,” George had said quietly that night, and had raised his eyes from the Madeira into whose golden depths he had been gazing as Madison talked. “We did not fight, and men did not die, that we should become the laughingstock of the world for our inability to hold what we won.”

  His eyes met Madison’s, and Madison had made no reply. Martha had watched her husband’s jaw harden, and the muscle in his temple twitch, as it did when he was holding hard to his temper. She had felt in his silence, that October night, the eight years of seeing his men starve because Congress had no power to raise money to feed them; eight years of maneuvering the logistics of fighting battles with only a few rounds of ammunition per man; eight years of keeping his temper as he explained to Congress yet one more time why he didn’t storm into battle more often or why men who put their lives on the line for their country really ought to be recompensed for their pain.

  Now, like a debtor’s child, the new confederation calling itself the United States of America came into being owing a hundred and seventy million dollars to France, Russia, Spain, and the Netherlands—twenty-seven million of that payable only in gold. Without the threat of the British guns in the background, the Congress’s financial pigeons all came home to roost. As a “firm league of friendship,” not an actual government, Congress still had no power to tax, and no means of paying off those loans any more than they’d been able to pay the Continental troops.

  The Convention of States’ representatives in Annapolis had signally failed to resolve the trade differences separating them.

  Another Convention, Madison had said in October, was being planned. It would meet in Philadelphia come May, to further discuss the issues that threatened to lay the divided States open to piecemeal conquest as soon as Britain or France or Spain or Russia thought it safe to do so.

  “We cannot let it go for nothing,” George had said, and Madison had folded his thin hands, wrinkled face alert in the candle-glow.

  “Nor will we, sir,” he said. “But we cannot go on as we have. And to bring the States together, we must have someone whose authority all will trust.”

  “Lady Washington…”

  So profoundly had she been in her
reverie that the opening of the dining-room door took her by surprise. Mr. Madison bowed deeply. “I abase myself, ma’am, for keeping your husband talking so long.”

  “What, has my wife given up and gone home?” Augustine coughed, and in the candlelight his face had the pallor that Martha didn’t like, as if he were sickening for another of the colds that sometimes laid him up for months.

  “I fear poor Fanny has the right of it.” The corner of George’s mouth tugged in a smile, but his eyes were gentle behind the shadow of infinite weariness. “Poor Patsie. I fear we’ve trespassed on your good nature, and will do so no more this evening.” His big hands were warm, completely enfolding hers. “Frank—” He turned to the butler, who’d materialized to take the green Sèvres coffee-pot back to the kitchen to be refreshed. “Please show Mr. Madison to his room. Are you sure you will not remain, sir, at least until the weather promises better?”

  Spits of sleet had begun to spatter the windows, and the shutters rattled sullenly on their hinges. Madison shook his head. “I cannot linger.”

  “Then I shall instruct Austin to have your horse ready after breakfast, that you may reach Georgetown easily by dinner-time.”

  Fanny returned from the nursery and she and Augustine kissed; it was agreed they would stay tonight, rather than walk back down to their own newly built little house in the bitter cold. All as if everything were normal, as if the little man in black bidding Fanny a courteous good-night now had not brought word that the nation George had risked his life on the battlefield to free was already falling apart.

  Martha watched her niece and George’s nephew, and then their guest, leave the parlor on the heels of candle-bearing servants. She shivered and was conscious of her hand trembling on her husband’s arm.

  Looking up at his profile in the candlelight, she found herself regarding him, as well as their diminutive guest, as an enemy. I will not let you take me away from my family.

  I will not let you take me away from my home.

  They went into the dark and freezing cold hall to bid everyone good-night, but when the flickering dabs of light disappeared around the turn of the stairs, George guided Martha back into the parlor, to wait for him by the fire’s sinking warmth while he made his final patrol of the lower floor of the house, checking shutters, locking doors. Making sure all was safe, as was his invariable habit.

  Just as, she recalled, he had walked around the camp every night, wrapped in as many cloaks as he could obtain and scarfed up to the eyes, to make certain the sentries were sober and the black woods beyond the picket-lines silent in the starlight.

  How many nights, wondered Martha, had she waited up for him, knitting by the fires in those icy little bedrooms? How many nights had she studied the walls of some other woman’s chamber in the dying light? She still recalled the silhouettes of a boy and girl that had decorated the house in Morristown: She had asked, but had never found out whose they were. In another place—Valley Forge?—a child’s laborious cross-stitch had spelled out “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.”

  Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me.

  From the dining-room beyond the parlor came the creak of quiet footsteps, Frank, Sal, and Caro clearing up. A moment later Caro’s shadow passed through the dark hall with a tray of glasses and a basket of broken nut-shells and cheese-rinds. In the kitchen the fire would be sinking low in the great chimney, Uncle Hercules waiting to bank it before going to bed himself. Abovestairs the girls and young Wash were sleeping under featherbeds, trusting there was someone in the world who would look after them and love them. Someone who wouldn’t leave them with the servants yet one more time.

  She heard George’s step in the hall, light as an Indian’s on a forest track.

  He closed the parlor door, a reflex any white Virginian developed from earliest childhood: His valet Billy would be waiting for them outside their bedroom door, with her new little maid, Oney. The house, like any in Virginia, was always filled with listening ears. For a moment he stood with his back to the door, only looking at her in the deep shadows of the parlor, while the wind wept around the eaves.

  All those years of working together with the Army had opened a passageway between their hearts. It was as if they had been talking of Mr. Madison’s news all day. When Martha said, “You have done enough,” there was no need for him to ask her what she meant. And no possibility to pretend that he did not know.

  “I agree.”

  “What more does he want of you? That you should go back on your word? On the promise that you spoke before all your officers when you bade them good-bye, that you would retire from public life?” Her voice shook, but she knew exactly what troubled him most. The prospect of turning into a Caesar would not have weighed on his mind, had he not seen sword and crown hovering invisible before him, like Macbeth’s dagger: promise and doom at once. “That wretched little kingmaker has said it himself. He wants you there because they all trust your authority.” She added bitterly, “I thought it was Congress that had the authority, not you.”

  “Congress is losing that authority.” George’s voice was quiet. The powder in his hair glimmered in the gloom. It was as if face and hair were becoming only a marble memory of the man she loved. “The States despise it. In their turn, the counties of the West despise the States. If Congress hangs the Western rebels it may only bring on greater revolts.”

  “Massachusetts—”

  “You know it isn’t only Massachusetts we’re talking about.” He didn’t raise his voice, but there was inexorability in his tone. “At the second Congress in Philadelphia, just before I left to take command, Dr. Franklin jested that ‘we must all hang together, for if we do not we shall verily all hang separately.’ That is as true today as it was eleven years ago, Patsie. Only this time it is we who are putting the noose around our own necks.”

  “And just what, exactly, do you think is going to happen if you go to this Convention to wield the…the authority Mr. Madison is asking you to wield?” she retorted. “You’ve talked about it before as if they’re just going to make a few little changes in these famous Articles of theirs, to make things run better. If Mr. Madison needs your authority, it sounds like he has something up his sleeve other than a few little changes.”

  “I think he does,” said George. “Mr. Madison—and others, including Alec Hamilton, who as you know is no fool—want to entirely scrap the old Articles under which the States are united, and forge a central government. As a confederation, each state holds the sovereign power to go its own way. We must become a single nation, a united nation that will not be the laughingstock—or the blind victim—of every nation of Europe.”

  “And what then?” The edge of sarcasm in her own voice cut her heart like glass but she couldn’t stop the words. “If you go to Philadelphia and lend your authority to the Congress—which I assume means telling those fools to shut up when they start squabbling—you know they’ll elect you to preside. They might have declared us free, but you’re the one who actually did the job of throwing the British out, while the rest of them sat on their chairs and called each other names. And then what? Who does Mr. Madison propose will rule that central government of his? Whose authority does he propose to keep it all together? Who will be King, do you think, with him and Hammy Hamilton standing behind the throne?”

  He was silent. I’ve hurt him, she realized, and her first sensation was a bitter pleasure. Now maybe he’ll listen.

  For years, most of their visitors to Mount Vernon had been strangers, both American and European, who had come simply to marvel at the man who would not be King. Knowing that he could have made himself King in the wake of the War, he was deeply sensitive to the public declaration that he had repeatedly made, “never more to meddle in public matters.” The declaration had been made not only to Congress, but to numerous gazettes and newspapers in the thirteen States.

  “You know me better than that, Patsie.�
�� He sounded sad, rather than hurt. As if he understood that it was her fear that spoke. “I did not fight the King’s troops for eight years in order to take his place on a throne. And if I did, there would be only one person standing behind it, and it wouldn’t be Mr. Madison.” He took her hand, and raised it to his lips. “It would be you.”

  “I don’t want to stand behind your throne,” she whispered. “I want to sit in a rocking-chair at your side, on our own piazza, watching the sun on the river in peace. Thrones kill the men who sit on them, George. All crowns are crowns of thorns. I don’t think I could sit still and watch that happen to you.”

  He at least did not say, It wouldn’t. Still holding her hand, still looking into her eyes, she could tell from his face that he knew that it would.

  In the lengthening silence the fire sighed, with a kind of silky crumbling, and flares of its dying light flickered in his eyes.

  At last he told her: “I must go, Patsie.”

  I could say: You can go without me, then. I’ll remain here and care for my family and our property while you go do what you choose to do.

  I could say: Don’t make me choose to leave my home, to abandon the girls to their mother, and Fanny and her baby to a sickly husband with Death already at his elbow. Don’t make me betray them again.

  Jacky’s death, and Patcy’s, had taught her how swiftly things could disappear, once you turned your back on them even for a little time.