Patriot Hearts (3 page)

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.

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 here.” 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—”