Patriot Hearts (9 page)

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.

I could say: You have hurt me as nothing has hurt me in my life, save the death of my darling children. Do not hurt me again.

But looking into his face she saw that he knew all those things. For eight years, woven like a secret code into every letter he had sent her during those summers of war, had been his deep love for the quiet of Mount Vernon. When he’d write about the new dining-room, or which fields should be planted in wheat and corn, he wrote as a man who had every square foot of his land, every brick and floor-board of his house, engraved on his heart. Sleeping at night, he could walk about his home in his dreams.

This love—those dreams—were in his voice when he spoke again. “Mr. Madison informs me that last year the Congress wasn’t even able to pay the interest on the loans we took out to buy weapons and feed our soldiers through the War.” The distant tone reminded her of the way the men in the camp hospitals would talk to keep their minds from the pain of having a limb set. “Each state took out loans as well, you know, and are no more able than Congress either to pay in gold or to convince France and Spain to take the paper they’re printing. Congress—and the States—paid many of the soldiers in land. How long do you think it will be before the nations of Europe start thinking it their right to claim
their
payments in our Western lands?”

It still doesn’t mean YOU have to go.

Let Mr. Madison be his own authority, if he can.

She closed her eyes, rested her forehead against the big hand that still clasped her own.

If you go, this time I must stay behind.
It was a very real threat, for a man already genuinely concerned that men would say
He seeks to make himself a Caesar after all.
As pointed as if she had packed her bags and abandoned his house, a truer supporter of the Republic than he. Maybe more so. People often remembered an action more clearly than any number of words. He couldn’t let himself be seen as less of a Republican than his wife.

If I say it, will he stay?

And if he stays, what will it do to him?

And to us?

She supposed, if she were as true a supporter of the Republic as all that, she would have added—or thought first
—What will it do to our country?

But she didn’t.

Abigail Adams would have, she reflected. And had her heart been less sore, Martha would have smiled at the recollection of that small, sword-slim, beautiful woman who’d come to tea at the Cambridge camp one afternoon, all bundled up in a green wool cloak against the cold. A true New England patriot, that one: a passionate, intellectual Roman matron willing to lay her children, her home—maybe even her beloved little red-faced John—on the altar of her country.

It needs a heart like hers,
thought Martha sadly,
to follow George where he now must go.

Heaven only knew what God was thinking of, to have put her hand, not Abigail’s, where now it lay.

Because she knew that even in the face of the one threat that would truly draw his blood, her husband would not turn aside from the need of his country.

So she asked only, “When do you leave?”

“Not until May.”

“What can I do to help?”

“What you have always done, Patsie. Be there to guard my back.”

And felt his kiss press her forehead, his arms gather her close.

Now make us a king to judge us like all the nations,
the Israelites had cried, when even after soundly trouncing the Philistines and the Hittites and the who-all-else they were still disunited and living in tents.

And the prophet Samuel had gone and picked on poor Saul, who only wanted to get on with his farming but who was the most impressive-looking man in the countryside, and made him be King.
(Had Samuel been a withered little gentleman in black, with prematurely whitening hair?)

And look what had happened to Saul.

Washington City

August 24, 1814

“It was just after Jacky died, that the Queen of France sent her ‘elegant gift,’ as it was called, to Martha.” Sophie shook her head over the wampum-belt, the fossilized mastodon-tooth, and the tiny bronze mechanism for calculating the appearances of comets that were all that the lowest drawer of the dining-room cabinet contained; Dolley closed the drawer again. “It ended up auctioned off on the docks at New York—which was still in British hands until the treaty was signed two years later—but I doubt poor Martha would have been much aware of it if it
had
made it safely to the American forces. Jacky was the last of her children.”

“Then just before the General rode away to Philadelphia for the Convention in ’87, Fanny’s baby was born and died.” Still empty-handed, Dolley passed between the tables, the dressmaker like a shadow at her heels. “I know it seemed to her even then that the world she treasured was already coming to pieces.”

Sophie looked as if she would have made some remark about Martha Washington not being the only one to have lost her peace and her home, but held her tongue. As they crossed the hall, the butler came down the stairs, carrying the smallest of the trunks. He stood aside to let the ladies precede him into the yellow parlor. Throughout the house Dolley could feel, rather than hear, the tension stirring among the servants. Would any of them take the opportunity to flee?

“It was only weeks after Fanny’s baby was born that Abigail’s first grandchild arrived as well,” Sophie said, as Dolley opened the curio cabinet by the parlor’s sunny window. “Her daughter Nabby’s baby—We should probably take this,” she added, and crossed to the fireplace. Beside it hung a slightly faded drawing, carefully framed in gilt. Dolley had always liked it, though despite its elaborate frame it was plainly an amateur’s work: a rather overgrown garden in autumn, with leaves scattering its paths and bright Chinese tubs filled with marigolds.

“Dost know who drew it?” she asked, surprised. “I’ve always wondered.”

“Nabby Adams did,” Sophie replied. “It was their garden, the year the family lived in Paris.”

“Didst know them there?”

For an instant her friend’s gray eyes filled with the memory of years she’d never spoken of to Dolley, the years between her own flight with her mother in Cornwallis’s retreating ships, and her somewhat inexplicable return. Then she replied, “Oh, yes. Mr. Jefferson introduced us, because I had helped nurse his wife in her illness. Nabby and I used to sit on the bench by the old fountain, where that picture was drawn. I recognize the view. After they left Paris for London, Mrs. Adams and I corresponded. And of course I sewed for her when she returned to Philadelphia. I did not see this in her parlor in those days.” Sophie’s long fingers traced the little drawing. “I think Abigail must have given it to Mr. Jefferson, in the days when they were friends.”

There was no sign of the little golden hand-mirror in the cabinet drawer. Dolley felt a stab of frustration, and a sort of panicky anger: It
had
to be here somewhere. It suddenly seemed critical to her to find the mirror, one of the few mementos she had, she realized, of the woman who had been her friend. To lose it would be like losing Martha all over again: not only Martha, but Martha’s memories, of the War, and of the world as it had been.

“I’ve always wondered which was worse,” she said softly. “To be perpetually living half normally, half in exile as Martha did all those years, or to live as Abigail did, for years at home without her John and then for years away from the rest of her family and everyone she knew and loved.”

Sophie tucked the drawing carefully between two large books and wedged it into a corner of the trunk. “I suppose that depends on how one feels about New England in the dead of winter. But if you think Abigail suffered for her family when she left them to follow John across the sea, you don’t know her well.”

“In fact, I never met her.” But Dolley smiled in her heart at the recollection of tubby, short-tempered little Mr. Adams, holding forth at the dinner-table of that house in Philadelphia that she and Jemmy had rented from Jim Monroe. “She was ill and remained in Massachusetts when the government was in Philadelphia. Then Jemmy and I left Philadelphia two months before she arrived after Mr. Adams’s election. I have always regretted that. Everyone said Mrs. Adams was so formidable. But from what Mr. Adams said of her, I think we would have gotten on well.”

Sophie considered her friend for a moment, then smiled. “I suspect you’re right. When one grew to know Abigail, behind the politics she was a great deal kinder than she seemed.”

“Politics or not, I cannot imagine any woman not feeling pain when separated from her children, especially when they’re young.”