Patriot Hearts (6 page)

“And what would he do with me if he took me?” pursued Martha. “Chop off my fingers one by one, like a Turk, and send one to the General every day until he surrenders with all his army? Of course he wouldn’t.” She gave Fanny, round-eyed with horror, a reassuring smile. “One doesn’t do such things to people who’ve had you and your family to dinner.”

“The Governor might put you in a dungeon,” suggested the child.

“He might,” agreed Anna Maria, setting the cups to dry on the towel. Eltham was a larger house than the six-room wooden structure in which the Dandridge girls—and their five brothers and sisters—had grown up at Chestnut Grove. But though the china and silver lacked the elegance of those at Mount Vernon, still there were things that the lady of the house would not entrust to any slave. “He’d put your aunt Martha to mending sheets, and then your uncle George would have to send his army down to get her out.”

And Martha smiled, at the thought of being rescued by George on a white horse at the head of a gaggle of the hairy-eared backwoods toss-pots she’d heard described in letters from Boston.

“I don’t suppose you’d be much safer in Cambridge,” her sister added, picking up the note again. It was without superscription or address, delivered by one of George’s Lewis in-laws. Already communications were being lost or, worse, intercepted by the British and published, with scurrilous additions, in London newspapers.

“From what I’ve been told, those so-called patriot soldiers haven’t the sense to stay awake—or sober—on sentry-duty, and wander in and out of the camps as they choose. Relieve themselves where they choose, too: God forbid a Pennsylvanian would permit a New York officer to tell him where to piss. I understand smallpox is everywhere in Boston.” Anna Maria’s bright brown eyes, when Martha glanced up to meet them, regarded her older sister with a close and worried concern.

As if she heard in Martha’s voice, or felt like an aura radiating from her flesh, the urgency of her desire to go to Cambridge, to fly like a girl in a ballad to be with her soldier.

As if she, not Martha, were the elder, puzzled at this wildness in one who had all their lives been the sober sister, the businesslike one who kept the household running and made sure everyone had a hot meal and clean socks.

She had never seen this side of Martha before.

Neither had Martha.

“It’s a long way to Cambridge,” Martha said slowly. “And it’s late in the year. It will certainly be snowing by the time we arrive. Jacky says he’ll escort me, and Eleanor, too, has offered to bear me company. I shouldn’t, of course. Not just because Eleanor has been so ill, but I know how difficult it will be for Lund to run the plantation with both of us away. It would probably be better if I—”

“Mama,” piped up Fanny, “why would Governor Dunmore and the Tories lock up Aunt Patsie anyway? Aunt Patsie’s a Tory herself.”

“I most certainly am
not
!” Martha bristled with indignant shock.

Anna Maria put in hastily, “Now, you know that isn’t true, dearest.”

“It’s what Scilly Randolph said. And Francine Chamberlayne. And Neddy Giviens.”

Anna Maria’s cheeks reddened with vexation at the mention of her daughter’s closest playmates. “Well, it isn’t true. It’s just those roughnecks in the local militia, who don’t understand that just because your aunt Patsie is looking after things for her friends the Fairfaxes while they’re in England, that doesn’t make her a Tory, too.”

“But it
is
being said?” Martha asked.

The younger woman hesitated. Then she nodded.

Martha leaned across the table and plucked the note out of her hand, just as Eleanor and a rumpled and sleepy-looking Jacky appeared in the doorway. “That does it,” Martha announced firmly. “Jacky, please let Austin know we’re returning to Mount Vernon tomorrow, and then going on to Cambridge.”

“When I am married, and have a house of my own,” Eliza announced to her end of the dining-table, “I shall have a ballroom large enough to dance fifty couples,
and
a private theater, so that all my friends may put on plays at Christmastime. Proper ones, with music and elegant costumes.
And
I shall go to the theater every night.”

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.