Patriot Hearts: A Novel of the Founding Mothers

by Barbara Hambly

  With the other arm, Charley’s wife held a child on her hip, a black-haired girl of two. A four-year-old in a dress made up from the fabric of one of Nabby’s London gowns clung to her skirt, looking from her mother to Abigail with brown eyes heartbreakingly like Charley’s. The mother’s eyes had the wrung-out look of someone who has been weeping, on and off, for weeks.

  Abigail was familiar with it. She had only to turn her head, and see its echo in Nabby’s tired face.

  “Sarah,” she greeted her daughter-in-law, and mentally thanked God she’d remembered to bring the highest pair of shoe-pattens she possessed. As she got out of the coach, the tall iron cleats sank in the mud like stilts.

  “Thank you for coming,” Sarah whispered, and tears began to track from her eyes. She led Abigail through the farmhouse, to the small lean-to built off the kitchen.

  The lean-to was bitterly cold. In a way it was a fortunate circumstance, reflected that critical little voice in the back of Abigail’s mind that never left her, not even in her worst moments of shock, of pity, of grief. Had the room been warm, the stink would have knocked one down.

  Sarah had clearly done her best to keep Charley clean, and it was a task clearly beyond her.

  Oh, my beautiful boy.

  Abigail pressed her hand briefly to her mouth, then went to Charley’s bedside while Nabby gently led the two little girls from the room.

  How did it come to this? How could it come to this?

  Charley’s face was so swollen she hardly recognized him. His puffy hands groped and picked at the stained coverlet. She remembered Nabby writing her—that summer when she and the Colonel had been living like royalty in New York on the proceeds of the Colonel’s “investments”—that Charley and Sarah were wildly happy together, and that she thought that marriage to her husband’s young sister would settle her brother down.

  Apparently that had lasted about as long as the Colonel’s latest fortune. By December of that year—1794—Nabby had been alone again, pregnant again, and frantically trying to find money to live on. Again.

  And Charley…

  “Ma?” he whispered, and fumbled for her hand. His breath almost made her gag.

  “I’m here, Son.”

  “I’m sorry.” Alcohol—recent and abused for years—slurred his words. “ ’S the las’ time, I swear you ’s the las’ time. I’ll sober up now, I’ll…pull myself together. Not fair to Sarah…”

  Abigail had to bite back the urge to snap at him that it wasn’t fair to his daughters, either, not to mention his father. Her jaw ached with the unsaid words and she managed, “I know you will, dear.” Hypocrisy, she thought, furious at herself. You tell him a lie, forgive him, and he’ll only go on getting himself like this….

  But no words of hers—no tears, no pleas of Sarah or Nabby or anyone else—had ever kept him from drinking.

  And she knew, looking down into his face, that it no longer mattered. She knew she was seeing her son for the last time.

  It occurred to her that she hadn’t seen the real Charley, that smiling boy who only wanted to be with his friends in his own home with his family around him, for many years.

  He was crying now, a drunkard’s easy tears. “I’ll make you proud, Ma. Make Pa proud. He wasn’t ever proud of me.”

  “Now, that’s not true!” protested Abigail sharply. “When you went to Harvard—”

  “Got thrown out,” sobbed Charley bitterly—for dashing nude across the snowy Yard, to be exact, Abigail recalled, with a flash of exasperation. An exercise neither he nor his friends could possibly have performed sober. “Couldn’t finish,” he went on tearfully. “Couldn’t stay in Holland with Pa. Johnny stayed. Pa’s so proud of Johnny, goin’ to Russia an’ Berlin an’ Spain.”

  And while Johnny had been making John proud, Charley had borrowed, invested, and lost all of Johnny’s savings: just in time for Johnny to be a pauper when he married, in London, a girl Abigail feared was spoilt and pampered.

  “I remember what you tol’ me, Ma, how it was the chance for us to learn French an’ meet important people. An’ I wasted it.”

  Tears flooded Abigail’s eyes at the recollection of the inn-yard in the gray port-town of Beverly, where poor little Charley had fetched up after five months on the high seas. Too exquisite a sensibility for Europe, John had said in his letter, and had consigned his eleven-year-old son to home-bound American friends. It was all he could have done at the time—there was no question of John abandoning negotiations for the Dutch loan that had kept Washington’s troops in powder—and Charley hadn’t seemed a penny the worse at the time. He’d spoken of being stranded in Spain, and of finding himself stuck on a ship whose drunkard of a captain couldn’t find his way out of the North Sea, as a sort of astonishing lark.

  But the fact remained that John had sent him away, while Johnny had done his duty and stayed.

  And Johnny, after a wretched attempt to set himself up as a lawyer in the already lawyer-infested Boston, had gone back to Europe as George Washington’s Minister to Holland only weeks before Charley had married Sarah.

  “I wasted it all,” Charley mumbled, his bloated fingers slacking, picking at the coverlet. “Nuthin’ I could do, could make him proud. Forgive me, Ma. Forgive me.”

  Forgive me, Ma. The words sliced at Abigail’s heart. Her brother Will had always pleaded for forgiveness after his binges, or when he’d come back to Braintree during the War, penniless and with rumors of counterfeiting and swindling trailing him like flies after stale meat. And their mother always had forgiven him, and always had given him money, even during that last year of her life, when the British had been bottled up in Boston and their raiding-parties were burning farms, and prices were so high that there was no sugar or coffee or medicine to be had in the town.

  Dying, that dreadful autumn of ’75, Abigail’s mother had neither smiled nor wept, but she had whispered her son’s name again and again, with love and sorrow in her voice. She had had three daughters, but only one son, and he the youngest, her baby boy. And he, of course, had been nowhere around.

  Had Will looked as Charley did now, before he died?

  But somehow the memory of her anger at her mother, like a cold stone dropped into boiling water, turned her own anger to pity as she finally understood. Whatever she’d felt about Charley’s sins—against her and John, against his wife and daughters in their patched dresses—he was dying now. And he was her son. The child who’d played on the sanded floor of their kitchen back on Queen Street in Boston, listening to the British drums on the Common. The child who’d chirped up gamely in the face of a British raid, “We’ll kill ’em, Ma!”

  She put her arms around his shoulders, laid her face against his chest. “My darling, what’s done is done. I love you. I, and your father, have always loved you.”

  He was just thirty years old.

  She knew that later she’d be angry at him again, furious at the weakness that had led him to throw away everything she and John, Sarah and Johnny and Tommy and Nabby, had given him. Knew that before she left this place—and she planned to flee as soon as she could—she’d be back to pacing, to demanding of Nabby and Louisa, How could he? But the tears she shed were tears of love and of untainted grief.

  She knew when she journeyed south again, to that brand-new Federal City on the Potomac that people were already starting to call Washington City, she’d be taking Charley’s little Susie with her as well as Nabby’s red-haired Caroline. Permanently, she hoped, the way she’d taken Louisa.

  The world was cruel to the daughters of wastrels.

  Mount Vernon Plantation

  Wednesday, December 3, 1800

  “I have tried not to—to take blame upon myself,” she said, some weeks later, to Martha Washington. “My brother—Louisa’s father…” And she lowered her voice with a glance across the Blue Parlor at the little group on the sofa near the fireplace, “…was—was weak that way.”

  Louisa, now twenty-seven, was relating to the othe
r two women beside her how Abigail had dealt with the Quincy neighbors who’d objected to Jamey Prince, their free black servant, attending school with their precious sons. Martha’s dear Nelly—who could not possibly, Abigail reflected, be twenty-one years old and a mother herself now!—was laughing and shaking her head. On Louisa’s other side Sophie Sparling—now the Widow Hallam—merely looked amused, as if such hypocrisy were to be expected of those who’d rebelled against the King.

  “And I’ve often wondered,” she went on quietly, turning back to meet Martha’s troubled gaze. “Was there something amiss in the way my parents raised my brother? Was there something they could have done, or failed to do, to turn him from drink and ill company?”

  Martha set down her cup, and laid one plump black-mitted hand on Abigail’s. “You cannot think that, dearest,” she said softly. In her eyes Abigail saw pain that was the twin of her own, perfect comprehension of shared grief and shared doubt. In the footsore aftermath of innumerable teas and levees in Philadelphia when they’d shared the duty of sociable small-talk with each and every guest, Martha had spoken often of her own concerns about the disordered household in which her granddaughters were growing up: a pattern that clearly seemed to be repeating itself now in Eliza’s.

  And if the current condition of Mount Vernon was any indication, Abigail reflected, there wasn’t much to be said about young Wash Custis, either.

  Would any of the long-dead Jacky Custis’s children have been different—happier or more capable of finding happiness—had the matriarch of the family chosen to rule the family instead of follow her husband and her heart?

  “Men, and women, become what they become.” In the frame of Martha’s cap—black gauze, as all her clothing was of deepest mourning for the General, who had not yet been a year in his brick-lined tomb—her pale plump face and white hair were a pretty echo of the woman Abigail had first met that chaotic winter in Cambridge almost twenty-five years before.

  “We can help them—guide them—but their own basic natures will emerge. And when all is said, I think we have little to do with it. I wish it weren’t that way,” she added with a sigh, and a glance toward the parlor door. “But I suspect that it is.”

  Though it was almost noon, young Wash Custis—it had taken Abigail a moment to recognize the tall young man who’d answered the door—still loitered in the paneled hall, talking horses with Nelly’s cousin-husband. Little as Abigail approved of slave-labor plantations, she’d had enough conversations in Paris with Tom Jefferson to know that unless the planter himself—not simply an overseer—rode his acres and checked everyone’s work, work would not get done.

  And by the look of it, a great deal of work was not being done at Mount Vernon.

  Or had it always been this unkempt?

  When her carriage from the Federal City had topped the little rise before Mount Vernon, Abigail’s first thought had been that same sense of completion that she’d experienced on seeing Westminster Abbey for the first time, or Notre Dame de Paris: So this is what it actually looks like.

  Martha had described the long white “mansion house” to her many times, as they sat stiffly side by side, smiling as guests were presented, but it was good to see her friend’s home at last.

  The place of which President Washington had spoken with such profound love. The place to which he and Martha had so longed to return.

  Now, at last, he was finally here to stay.

  And, Abigail suspected, Martha as well.

  Unscythed grass grew rank in what had to have been the bowling green Martha had spoken about. Weeds choked the little oval of lawn before the door. Even two weeks in the Federal City had served to inform Abigail that in addition to not talking about things they didn’t want to talk about, Southerners as a rule seemed to have far lower standards of tidiness than Abigail was used to. Conditions prevailing in the kitchen of the Presidential mansion—not to mention in the potholed, muddy gravel-dump that surrounded it—made her wonder what Monticello was really like.

  Was it as untidy as this, and Jefferson simply hadn’t noticed?

  Or were the dilapidated buildings she saw here, the peeling paint and broken window-panes, simply the measure of Martha’s grief?

  Wash Custis had answered the door because when Jamey Prince—that same free colored servant to whose education the neighbors had so objected—had knocked, no slave could be found to admit Abigail. “Likely they’re in the kitchen, or playing cards in the tack-room,” Wash had grumbled. “I’ll catch ’em a lick for it!”

  Nelly, Abigail had noticed, was the one who’d hurried away to bring more hot water for the tea and meringues from the kitchen.

  “Since the General died,” Martha apologized now as Nelly rose again and rustled from the room, “it seems that nothing gets done around here anymore. I know I ought to keep the servants at their work, but it somehow seems more trouble than it’s worth.

  “He freed them, you know,” she went on, her dark eyes filling with tears. “Freed them! I can’t imagine what he was thinking.”

  Startled, Abigail said, “He never…I mean, he would not have left you without servants, surely!”

  “But he did! His will said they were to be freed at my death—his own Negroes, of course, not those belonging to the Custis estate. But Wash thinks—” She lowered her voice, and glanced around her in the way Abigail had seen all slave-owners glance, for fear of eavesdroppers in their own houses. “Well, especially with the rumors of an uprising this past summer. Wash thinks that perhaps it would be…be safer… if they were all freed next year.”

  Abigail’s eyes widened at the implications of this and she traded a startled glance with Louisa. But Martha’s thoughts had already returned to her friend’s pain, as if it was the most ordinary thing in the world, to fear members of one’s own household.

  “Truly,” she said in her gentle voice, “there is nothing for which you need reproach yourself, dear. I’ve never been as dutiful toward our country as you have, but I knew the General needed me, every bit as much as I needed him. And John needs you, not just to know that you’re keeping things safe at home, but by his side. Men—even the strongest men—need someone’s hand to hold in the middle of the night, bless them. We made our choices. And your Charley, poor boy, made his.”

  Abigail was silent. Nelly returned, carrying a green-and-cream French tea-pot with more hot water from the spirit-lamp in the pantry. She was clothed like her grandmother in sable crape that left black smudges on the faded blue woodwork of the West Parlor. Though the pretty, dark-haired young woman was married now and a mother herself—and, Abigail guessed with a shrewd glance at her figure, getting ready for a second child sometime next summer—she still seemed very much the precocious schoolgirl who had poured tea at the receptions in the Morris mansion. The favorite granddaughter still, rather than any man’s adult wife.

  Nelly, too, it appeared, had made her choice.

  “You treated them all alike,” Martha reminded Abigail. “Now Johnny is Minister to Prussia and may be President himself one day. Had your children grown up with a mother whose heart and mind were elsewhere—or in a country that had just lost a war with England—would they have been better off?”

  Abigail whispered, suddenly wretched, “I don’t know.”

  “No one knows, dearest,” said Martha. “We go where our hearts command us, in the faith that it is God who formed our hearts.”

  Before they left, Abigail took from her pocket, and pressed into Martha’s hand, the small box that had been waiting for her at the President’s House when she had arrived the day before yesterday: “What is it?” Martha asked, astonished. And then, “Oh, how beautiful!” as she took from the wrappings the small bright circle of a gold-framed mirror, and the cold, tiny fire of diamonds winked in the pale sunlight.

  “It’s something that belongs to you,” replied Abigail, smiling at the pleasure in her friend’s eyes. “And has rightfully belonged to you for eighteen years now.”

&nb
sp; Martha looked up, surprised, from trying to read the engraving traced on the rim. Abigail’s eyes hadn’t been good enough to decipher it without her spectacles, either, but she knew it said Liberté—Amitié. “Dear Heavens, not the Queen’s gift, after all this time?” And she turned it over, to look at the ostrich-plumed portrait on the back.

  “A part of it, I believe—Sophie believes,” Abigail added. “She sent it to me, to ask what should be done with it: Did it rightly belong to you, or to the nation? She came by it from a New York friend—” Privately, Abigail suspected Aaron Burr…and suspected that he and Mrs. Hallam were rather more than friends. “—and would have thought nothing of it, she says. But when she was in Paris she was friends with that little slave nursemaid of Mr. Jefferson’s—a dear good-hearted girl but never about when you needed her—and they still correspond.”

  For a moment Martha looked as if she had something to say on the subject of anyone so foolish as to teach a slave to read, but then, as if recalling Mr. Jefferson’s known eccentricity, did not.

  Which was just as well, thought Abigail. She went on, “Apparently the girl reminded her that they’d seen nécessaires de voyage of the kind at a shop in the Palais Royale—with night-lights, combs, that sort of thing—and that the proprietor had boasted of crafting the one the poor Queen sent to you in some kind of lavish casket in 1782. She ordered it set with her portrait surrounded by diamonds, he said, and engraved: Liberté—Amitié. And I do think this must have come from it, wherever the other bits have gone.”

  Martha turned it again, the gold sparkling in the firelight. In a moment, thought Abigail, she’d call Nelly and Louisa over to admire it. But for an instant longer the old woman held it to herself, looking into its depths as if within them she could see 1782 again: the General alive, her niece Fanny alive, the French Queen herself and so many others still alive. Charley safely home from Europe and happy again with his family. The bloody consequences of Revolution and the bitter exhaustion of dreams shattered still wool unspun on Fate’s distaff. A year when “happily ever after” was still in sight.