Patriot Hearts: A Novel of the Founding Mothers

MARTHA

Mount Vernon Plantation

Saturday, March 6, 1801

On the thirty-sixth ballot, Vermont and Maryland switched their support to Mr. Jefferson,” Sophie Hallam reported. “Delaware and South Carolina cast blank ballots, withdrawing their votes from Mr. Burr. I understand that rumor is rife that Mr. Jefferson indeed reached an understanding with the Federalists, though he has been protesting to everyone who’ll listen that he did nothing of the kind. I assume that his first act upon taking office will be to propose an Amendment to the Constitution making sure such a situation never arises again.”

“After all that ink wasted slandering poor Mr. Adams.” Martha sighed, and rang the bell for Christopher, for the third time.

Nelly said, “I’ll get it, Grandmama.” She collected the empty tea-pot, and rustled away in quest of more hot water. Her footfalls echoed in the shabby emptiness of the hall.

“After all that ink wasted slandering poor Mr. Adams, and Mr. Jefferson’s real foe was there at his elbow the whole time.” Sophie dipped a final shard of bread and butter into the dregs of her tea. “A pity, really. Those frightful newspapermen wouldn’t have had to make up scandals about Mr. Burr’s personal life.”

“Did you hear the story the Republicans tried to put about,” put in Pattie, “about Mr. Adams sending Mr. Pinckney to France with instructions to bring back four beautiful opera-dancers, two apiece, as mistresses for them? When Mr. Adams heard it, he only said, ‘I declare, Pinckney’s cheated me, for I never got my two!’ ”

If the absence of her undivided guidance and care had pressed hard on her elder granddaughters, Martha reflected as they all laughed, at least Pattie seemed to have surmounted its effects. While Eliza still wore dramatic mourning for the General, Pattie had returned to ordinary dress, if one could call “ordinary” the high-waisted, narrow-cut gowns that more and more women seemed to be wearing nowadays.

Martha had long ago given up wondering whether she would have been different, had she, Martha, been able to raise all four of her grandchildren instead of the younger two when Jacky died.

Now Eliza declared, “I have heard that rather than endure seeing his foe made President, Mr. Adams sneaked out of the city in the dark before dawn on the day of the inauguration.”

“If one is going to catch the public stage from Baltimore to Massachusetts,” said Nelly reasonably, returning, “one had better sneak out of the city in the dark before dawn. Did Mr. Jefferson even think to invite Mr. Adams?”

Sophie said, “I understand Mr. Jefferson—whose inaugural address was perfectly inaudible, by the way—is still in residence at Conrad and McMunn’s Tavern, taking his meals in the ordinary with the other guests.” She leaned to scratch the ears of Nelly’s elderly lapdog Puff, who had come around to sit at Nelly’s feet again in hopes of a tea-cake. “Since I’ve never known him to occupy any building without tearing it down and putting it back together again to suit his fancy, I expect there will be changes in that dreadful Mansion.”

“Will he live in it?” asked Pattie.

“Oh, he’ll live in it,” prophesied Nelly wisely. “It’s all very well to proclaim one’s Republican principles by living in a cottage, but one can’t do one’s work properly in one’s sitting-room. You know how Grandpapa was driven distracted by people coming to see him. Mr. Jefferson shall want offices and some kind of state rooms to receive Ambassadors in. And once he’s got those, whatever he’d replace the current Mansion with would have to be almost as large. And we certainly haven’t seen him building a humble little dwelling at Monticello, have we? The question is, who will receive for him? Mr. Jefferson’s a widower, and I think both of his daughters have too many small children to come here from Albemarle County to look after things. Will it be Mr. Burr’s daughter, then, since he, too, has no wife?”

She glanced at Martha, and Eliza added in her booming voice, “Yes, Grandmama, what would be proper? You were, after all, the first Presidentress. You remain the ultimate arbiter of what is proper in a Republic.”

Martha couldn’t keep from smiling. Mr. Madison and Mr. Jefferson, and Mr. Hamilton, had all labored to bring forth the principles of a Republic. But to the best of her knowledge, only she and George had considered what the actual practices would be. Rather like playwrights who didn’t give a thought to how the scene would be set or performed, as Dolley would have put it, Martha had long suspected that her dinners at Valley Forge had done more to convince the French that they were dealing with civilized reformers rather than wild-eyed King-haters than had any amount of rhetoric.

“Mr. Burr’s daughter was married in February, just before the voting in the Senate began,” said Sophie. “To a rice-planter, from South Carolina, a very wealthy man. So I expect Mr. Jefferson’s hostess will be Dolley Madison, won’t it?”

Martha smiled. “It will indeed.”

Dinner was served at three, as always in Mount Vernon in winter and spring. Nelly saw to it at least that the reduced kitchen staff turned out a respectable meal. To Martha’s disappointed shock, during their last return-journey from Philadelphia to Mount Vernon in March of 1797—in that crowded carriage with Nelly and Puff and Nelly’s parrot, and young George Lafayette and his tutor and Martha couldn’t recall who-all else—their faithful and excellent cook had run away, disappearing into Philadelphia’s community of free colored without so much as a backward glance at the masters who’d been so good to him the whole of his life. His replacement wasn’t nearly as good. Moreover, bills in the kitchen had risen appreciably since he’d taken over, despite all Nelly’s watchfulness.

After dinner Sophie departed in her chaise, and the girls all piled into Eliza’s husband’s extremely elegant open landaulet, with nursemaids and children. It had been a delight, to visit not only with Pattie and Eliza, but to see five-year-old “Toad,” as Nelly called Pattie’s bouncy daughter Elinor, and three-year-old Columbia and Little Eliza, playing and tumbling on the brown winter lawn under charge of their nursemaids, with Nelly’s toddler Parke.

Jacky’s granddaughters.

The heiresses of the Custis estate, which Martha had guarded and husbanded all those decades.

When the carriages were out of sight down the drive, she slipped out of the house, and followed the path worn through the grass of the unscythed lawn, past the smokehouse and the washhouse, the coach-house and the stables, down the steep hill beside the vegetable garden, and so to the brick tomb overlooking the river.

It comforted her beyond measure, to know that he was there.

To know that he wasn’t going to be off to Philadelphia, or Cambridge, or the heights above New York. To know that he wasn’t going to be shot at by the British or hanged for a traitor or exposed to the filthy miasmas that seemed to hang over cities, like angels with burning swords.

He was home.

Mount Vernon was very quiet without him.

With the freeing of his slaves in December, of course, there was almost no work getting done. All George had ever had to do was look at a slave, and they’d hasten to obey. There were more whippings, she thought, and many more threats to sell them to men bound for the richer soils of the western part of the state. Perhaps last summer’s abortive uprising was to blame, but the atmosphere felt ugly around Mount Vernon, and dangerous, even with the early release of those who had previously been scheduled for manumission on her death. Resentment was a stink in her house, like some dead thing, rotting under the floor.

When she walked past the stable-yard, past the clerk’s house—past the place where she’d met George that January afternoon in ’87, when Jemmy Madison had come to talk him into attending the Convention that had blasted all her hopes of peace—she felt the silence and the tension. As she moved about the house in the late afternoons when the light softened and shadows pooled in the corners of the hall, she found herself listening, convinced that the servants were whispering in the gloom. She had not realized how protected she had felt in his presence.

Only out here, on the brick bench beside his tomb, did she feel safe.

Such a silly thought, “safe,” she reflected, blinking at the last shimmer of evening that gilded the treetops on the Maryland shore. Even when she’d genuinely feared that those slaves of George’s who saw her as the obstacle to their freedom would find a way to poison her, she’d kept returning to the thought that it probably wouldn’t be so bad. Then she’d be with George.

And Jacky, and her beautiful Patcy, after all those years.

But mostly what she looked forward to was seeing George again.

She remained where she was, watching the sun go down above the mountains. Remembering all the sweet days of unremarkable peace here, after they’d returned from Philadelphia for that last time in ’97. Crowded years, so that George had been hard-pressed to find time to put his land in order, much less sort through his papers on the Revolution and the years of his Presidency.

For a time Lafayette’s son had lived with them, and his tutor—both of whom had shown signs of falling in love with Nelly. Also living with them was George’s nephew Lawrence Lewis, his sister Betty’s boy, handsome in the strong, quiet way that George had been in his prime. Perhaps because he reminded Nelly of her grandfather—because beneath his air of strength he also had a touching vulnerability—when he, too, fell in love with Nelly, she returned his love.

To further complicate matters, Wash was back with them, too, having dropped out of college. Like his father, he’d gotten engaged to a girl of fifteen, though fortunately nothing came of it. When poor Fanny had finally succumbed to consumption, after less than two years of marriage to Tobias Lear, there had been talk of their four children—Fanny’s three by her first husband Augustine, and Lear’s first wife Pollie’s little Lincoln—joining the household, but Martha had simply refused. George contributed to their support in various boarding-schools, and that had to be enough.

To add to all that, everyone in the country still wanted to simply come and see him. While still President, George had overseen the laying-out of the Federal City on the other side of the river. There was constant coming and going of men engaged in building the President’s House, and the Capitol, and laying out those vast avenues, and of course George could no more resist talking architecture than a drunkard could turn his face from the bottle. When in 1798 it had appeared that the country would go to war with France, an army was called up, and George became once again its Commander in Chief. He was too old to take the field, but he trusted Hamilton and forced Congress to make him second in command, and had spent a good deal of that year in Philadelphia and in the Headquarters at Cambridge.

Nelly and Lawrence had married on George’s sixty-seventh birthday—February 22, 1799—and George wore his old Continental uniform to escort her down the staircase to the wedding in the dining-room.

Good years, Martha reflected, flexing her hands, which lately had shown a distressing tendency to swell so that her wedding-ring cut into her flesh. What there had been of them. Her feet, too, were swollen, and she found that even the short walk down to the tomb brought her breath up short.

She hadn’t told Nelly or Wash about this. If they knew, they’d only discourage her from coming, to this one place in the world where she wanted to be.

Nelly came looking for her, when the last of the daylight faded. Martha found she needed the support of her granddaughter’s arm, going up the steep path to the house. The whitewashed bulk of it seemed to glimmer in the twilight before them, the ground-floor windows gently glowing. It was still hard to remember that he wouldn’t be there when she came inside. She still flinched a little as she passed the shut door of George’s study on the first floor.

She had not crossed the threshold of that room, or of their blue-and-white bedroom above it, for fifteen months, since the night George died.

“I suppose it’s something,” remarked Nelly after supper, “that the country’s passed another election safely—and one with so much ill-feeling and slander.” She shook her head as she picked up Martha’s candlestick, and her own, from the table in the Little Parlor. “I’m sorry Mr. Jefferson won. He’s turned his back on so much of what Grandpapa tried to accomplish. I don’t expect any of us will get many invitations to balls in the Federal City.”

“With Dolley Madison writing the invitations?” Martha raised her brows. “Don’t you think it, dearest.”

They passed in silence through the nursery, where Parke’s old nursemaid Moll dozed in her chair beside the toddler’s bed. At the top of two long flights of stairs, Martha’s maid Caroline waited for them outside the door of the little garret bedroom where Martha slept nowadays. Not as good a maid as Oney had been, Martha thought, with the slight surge of resentful anger at the girl’s brazen escape their last year in Philadelphia—and George had scarcely lifted a finger to get her back even when she was known to be living, bold as paint, in Newburyport!

But then, thought Martha wearily, as Nelly helped her into her nightgown and brushed her long gray hair, so many of their people had been spoiled, living in Philadelphia where they could associate with the free colored of that city. And it had been while they lived in Philadelphia that George himself had started to speak of slavery itself as being unjust, though how he thought he’d get his acres tilled without it she couldn’t imagine.

Another thing that never would have happened, had he remained where he belonged, at home.

Jemmy Madison had a lot to answer for.

“Yes, I’m glad it all worked out, dear,” sighed Martha, as Nelly helped her to bed. “But from everything I hear, the world sounds like it’s growing very strange, and stranger by the day. Goodness knows what will become of the country in four years—or, God forbid, eight—of rule by Mr. Jefferson.”

Sleeping, Martha dreamed of waking on a warm midsummer morning eighteen months ago and going to the dressing-table for her prayer-book, to read by the window’s first glimmer of light. From the bed she heard the sudden creak of the ropes beneath the mattress as George turned over, and then his voice, “Patsie?” And in it, a note that was almost fear.

“What is it?” She hurried back to his side, saw him turn, lay his hand on her pillow as if seeking her. Then he sat up, and under the open throat of his nightshirt she saw him breathing hard, as though he’d been shocked awake, the way his eyes would snap open, panting and alert for years after the War, still listening for the British guns.

He caught her hand in his.

“I am—well,” he said hesitantly. “I think. But I dreamed…” He shook his head, and she could tell, looking into his lined face, that he still saw the images that had burned their way into his sleep.

“It was vivid, as clear as we sit here. We were in the summerhouse, talking—I remember saying to you how happy we are here, and how I look forward now to many more years with you. Then a light came, brilliant, as if the sun had come down to the earth, and through it I saw a figure, beautiful but dim, an angel I thought, standing at your side. It leaned down to whisper in your ear and you turned pale at its words. And then you began to fade away, like a mist dissolving with the coming of day. Then you were gone…and I was alone.”

His stricken eyes met hers. God knew, Martha thought in her dream—as she had thought that morning in 1799—each had seen people die, friends and family: Patcy, Jacky, Fanny, Pollie. Griefs that wrenched the soul and crippled one’s trust in life.

But she saw in his face that the mere concept of living without her was unthinkable to him. His hand clung to hers as if he truly expected that nearly invisible angel shape to enter the bedroom in its numinous cloud of light, to whisper into her ear that he and she would have to part.

Martha laughed, uncertainly but gently, as she would have laughed to soothe a child’s nightmare fear. “ ’Twas only a dream,” she told George. “How many dreams do we dream, that never come to pass? At least I hope I shall never find myself back at the ballroom in Williamsburg wearing only my nightgown, as I dreamed I did the other night!”

“And very stylish I’m sure you were.” He touched her cheek with his palm. The grief did not leave his eyes. “You know how often the outcome of dreams is contrary to what we dream. I fear that it is I who will be obliged to leave you.”

“Well, to be truly contrary, sweetheart, it would be that instead of leaving you in a cloud of light, I shall simply stay,” Martha pointed out in her most reasonable voice. “A dream is a dream, General. It is absurd to make a piece of work over a phantom.”

But it seemed to her now that, without transition, for one moment she was standing in that same place in the blue-and-white bedroom, looking down at him less than six months later, as the doctors carried away the bleeding-bowls from his bed. The slaves’ overseer had bled him at daybreak, that first morning he’d woken with a throat so sore and swollen he could barely breathe or swallow. At nine, when the doctor came, he’d been bled again, and then a third time by another doctor mid-afternoon. In her dream the room stank of blood. Martha didn’t think that in real life the bedchamber had ever been without people in it, but in her dream she stood there alone. Looking down at George’s still face, wax-pale against the blood-daubed linen of the bed.

Whether it was the dream that woke her, or the noise, or the light, Martha didn’t know, but she was abruptly awake in the low-roofed garret room, heart hammering. In the flickering orange reflection that came through the window she could make out the corner of the Franklin stove, the angle of the ceiling, the curved shoulders of the plain wooden chairs.

Orange reflection!?!

Martha scrambled from her bed, flung herself at the garret window. The roof of the covered walkway lay below her, and beyond that the kitchen, flames licking out of its windows.

Dear God, if the walkway goes it will spread to the house!

Scooping up her wrapper, Martha stumbled into the attic’s central hall. Caroline sat up at once in her nest of pallet and blankets on the floor—“What—?”

But Martha was already across the hall, hammering on the door. “Wash? Wash! Caro, wake Mr. Lewis, the kitchen’s on fire—”

Caro said, “Lord God!” and was down the attic stairs like a hare. Wash emerged from his room a moment later, hair hanging in his eyes.

“The kitchen’s on fire!” Martha panted, and hurried back into her bedroom and to the window, to see the nightgowned shape of their overseer, Mr. Rawlins, and half a dozen other shadows come running from the darkness toward the quarters…

And what she could almost, but not quite, swear was that another shape darted out of the kitchen and vanished into the night.

Mr. Rawlins was shouting in a voice like a bronze gong. Martha could see the slaves forming up a bucket-line from the well behind the washhouse, and downstairs she could hear Puff barking wildly, Parke wailing in terror. Lawrence’s valet cried somewhere, “Come on, Mr. Lewis, just another step,” as he tried to coax his half-stupefied master down the stairs.

Nelly almost fell through the door, dark braids flying behind her and giving her the look of the schoolgirl she’d once been. “Grandmama, come on. If it spreads—”

“How bad is it?”

Nelly shook her head. She must have just been waked herself, thought Martha, as she let her granddaughter lead her to the stair. Had the fleeing figure been just her imagination? Or would morning reveal there’d been runaways under cover of the confusion, runaways whose parents or brothers or sisters or sweethearts had been freed by the General’s will, and forced to leave?

Outside, the stench of the smoke was overpowering, as buckets of water were hurled into the burning kitchen and onto the near end of the walkway’s roof. Though the mansion house was painted and cut to look like stone, it was wood: If wind-carried sparks ignited the roof, the blaze would be almost impossible to put out.

Mist hung over the river, blurred the moon. Martha was fighting for air as Nelly led her out onto the piazza and from there down the lawn to the river, where old Moll already stood with Parke, wrapped in a quilt, in her arms, and Puff running worriedly back and forth around her feet like an agitated milkweed.

“It ain’t got a good hold yet,” predicted the old woman, nodding up at the red glare that now shone behind the mansion house. “That new cook couldn’t bank a fire right if the instructions to do so was written on the chimney-breast. That’s the second fire we’ve had in a year.”

That was true, Martha reflected. But it was also true that the first kitchen fire, back in June, had almost certainly been the work of arson—and it had been at that point that George’s nephew Bushrod, Lawrence, and Wash had met to discuss freeing George’s slaves at the end of the year, rather than waiting for her death.

Hours later, Lawrence finished checking the buildings nearest the kitchen and let Martha, Nelly, and Parke go back upstairs. Charlotte, the headwoman of the plantation, very sensibly boiled water in the little hearth of the room where the sewing-women worked, so that Nelly could make tea, which they drank sitting in the Little Parlor. Parke was already making determined little forays to see what was left of the kitchen: “Cookies,” she said worriedly, knowing the kitchen was the place they came from.

“Are you all right?” Nelly asked Martha, when she finally was allowed to lead her upstairs again. “Would you like me to stay here with you for a little while?”

“I’ll be quite all right, dear, thank you.” Martha sat on the edge of the narrow bed, breathless and a little dizzy from the long ascent. “I should imagine Mr. Jefferson’s supporters are lighting bonfires in the streets of the Federal City tonight in celebration, so why should we be any different?”

But after Nelly left, Martha sat up in bed for a time, listening to the house grow quiet again around her. The house she had known, as intimately as she had known George, like a beloved body against whom she had slept for all those many years. Instead of her breath returning, it grew more stifled, until she was panting, as if she had run a mile instead of simply walked down the slope of the lawn. She felt a kind of soft, pushing sensation in the left side of her chest, as if someone were pressing a heavy hand around the muscle of her heart. Dizziness grayed the light of the single candle, until she lay back, gasping, against the pillows.

Then the sensations faded as swiftly as they’d come, like taking off a garment. Except for the dizziness, and the sensation of not being quite able to get her breath.

It was the climb, she decided. The climb up the stairs.

She leaned up on her elbow long enough to pinch out the candle. Even that small effort dropped her back limp.

When she dreamed again, it was of George sitting in the latticed shade of the summerhouse, waiting for that sweet blazing light to return again, and with it the invisible presence, who would lead her back to him.

Mount Vernon

Wednesday, May 5, 1801

“It hath been a most difficult spring for everyone, I see.” Dolley Madison sighed, removing her black kid gloves to accept the tea-cup Martha handed her. “Poor Mr. Madison’s father passed away at the end of February, and Mr. Madison was much taken in settling the estate—and with it, that of his brother Francis, who died this October past. Then he himself took sick—and who could blame him, poor lamb?—with a rheumatism so bad even flannels and temperance could not cure it. And all the while poor Mr. Jefferson like a fly in a tar-box, to have him come and ‘set up the shop.’ Is there aught that I or Jemmy can do, to speed things here or help with the cooking, until the kitchen is restored?”

“It’s good of you to ask, dearest, but no. My granddaughters have the matter in hand.” Martha smiled. “That’s the advantage of an old-fashioned kitchen, you know. If one is cooking over an open hearth, one can do it almost anywhere and get an edible result. I suspect that those English cooks who’ve become completely accustomed to closed stoves and Rumford Roasters would find themselves at a loss if they suddenly had to go back to pot-chains and Dutch ovens.”

She glanced across the Blue Parlor at Nelly and Dolley’s young sister Anna, who had taken it upon themselves to entertain the three Congressmen, a former colonel of the Continental Army and his wife whom Martha barely remembered, and two complete strangers—a married couple from New York City bearing a letter of introduction from Gouverneur Morris—who had turned up at the door of Mount Vernon to “pay their respects” and gape at Washington’s house, Washington’s tomb, and Washington’s widow.

Though Jemmy and Dolley had paid a visit of condolence just after George’s death—in the dead of winter—she had herself been in a state of eerie numbness. It was good to see, among the gawking strangers, a friend she wanted to see.

“Mr. Jefferson intends to have a cooking-stove put in, at any rate,” said Dolley. “Not to speak of modern water-closets, so that dreadful little privy can be torn down, that stands in full view of Pennsylvania Avenue, for all the world to see. Mr. Madison and I are staying with him, until we can find a house of our own.”

“Are there houses available?” Martha’s own single view of the Federal City had been of marsh and pastureland, carpenters’ sheds and heaps of rubble: a world of cattle, birds, and roving swine through which those sixty-foot-wide avenues cut forlorn swathes leading nowhere.

“Indeed. And more being built every day.”

“I own I’m astonished. Of course Eliza’s husband speculates in land there, but it appears that’s quite a different thing from actually building houses for people to live in.” She tried to keep the tartness out of her voice and didn’t succeed: Mr. Thomas Law was a sore spot in the family. The middle-aged Englishman had arrived in the Federal City five years ago—when it really was only a few sheds and a brick-pit—with a dark-eyed half-caste son in tow, who was now at Harvard. Rumor credited him with two more, and Martha could not rid herself of the suspicion that he’d proposed to Eliza only because he knew she was the President’s granddaughter…

And that Eliza had accepted only because Pattie was on the brink of getting married before her.

Dolley went on, “We shall probably take one of the houses in the same row as the State Department, on the Georgetown road, though Mr. Jefferson would have us stay in the Mansion with him through the whole of his term. I think he doth miss the company of his family. He likes to know there is someone in the house with him.”

Across the parlor, Mr. Waln of Pennsylvania said impatiently, “Yes, yes, General Washington was a great believer in the principles of liberty. But he can never have countenanced the license that would result, were girls educated as boys are! We have all seen what comes of that, in France.”

“He certainly educated the slaves that he released,” pointed out Mrs. Colonel Harris self-righteously.

“That’s not the same thing at all! He didn’t believe in their general education…”

“I shall ask Mr. Lear, when next I’m in Georgetown,” declared Congressman Waln. “He corresponded a good deal with the President, and should know.”

“And I shall write to Judge Washington…”

“Of course that ‘row’ is just six little houses standing in the midst of a marsh,” added Dolley thoughtfully, calling Martha’s worried attention back. “But while I’m under Mr. Jefferson’s roof, I shall attempt to convince him that it is not aristocratical to observe diplomatic protocol, which I gather he came to hate in France. I rather think he feels he owes it to the Democratic-Republicans who voted for him, to have it known that seating at his dinners is pêle-mêle and without regard to rules of precedence. But he needlessly sets back his own cause by offending those who are used to it.”

“It is a great pity,” said Martha, “that he never married again.”

An indefinable expression flitted across Dolley’s blue eyes. “Perhaps he never found a woman of his own station, who could endure to be his wife.” For a moment Martha had the impression that Dolley was thinking of someone specific—surely not that artist’s wife in Paris she’d heard rumor of from Abigail? “And whoever she might be,” Dolley went on briskly, “I think she would have a struggle of it, to supplant Patsy in his heart.”

“Of course,” agreed Martha, recalling what she had gathered of the older daughter’s fierce protectiveness toward her father. “And understandable, of course…But it is a pity that Mr. Jefferson hasn’t someone to temper his Republican ideals with a little social common sense.”

Her eyes met Dolley’s, and Dolley smiled, knowing exactly what Martha meant.

“Mr. Madison doesn’t understand either, of course,” Dolley said softly. “Though I think, neither doth he understand why Mr. Jefferson is so determined to answer his own front door himself in his bedroom-slippers. I have heard Mr. Jefferson speak many times against women trying to influence politics—having seen how the ladies of the French salons could make or disgrace the King’s ministers there. But men will build society wherever they are, and be influenced by it for good or ill. And even a Philosopher King surely hath need of a hostess, not only to make calls on the wives of those who shall be useful to his policies, but to make sure that none who come to his door feel slighted.”

“Well,” agreed Martha, “it is the women who actually run things, you know, whether Mr. Jefferson likes it or not.”

Dolley chuckled. “Think what influence Citizen Genêt might have wielded, had he brought with him an amiable wife!”

They both laughed at that, and at the first natural break in the conversation on the other side of the parlor, Dolley invited an opinion of Mrs. Harris, to draw the talk into a general group. Watching Dolley charm the Honorable Representatives from New York and Pennsylvania, Martha reflected again that pro-French or pro-English—and she had certainly entertained enough Frenchmen around the ill-lit dining-tables at Valley Forge and the Hudson Heights—or whatever one felt about alliances and treaties and the National Bank, it took more than a man to govern the country.

There almost had to be a woman beside him and only half a pace behind, to make sure things were run smoothly. Whatever Mr. Jefferson liked to think, politics did not exist in a vacuum. They were a part of men’s hearts, and as such, they existed side by side with the other things men kept in their hearts, like the desire for friendship and good company in the evening.

She smiled at the thought of her young friend welcoming diplomats in the blaze of candlelight, and presiding over dinners that were more than simply dinners. Invisibly setting the stage upon which the nation’s leader would be seen to speak his lines.

Guard my back, George had said to her, long ago in this parlor: through the soft birdsong of the May morning she could almost hear the sob of that January wind around the eaves. And guarding a general’s back—and a ruler’s—was a hero’s task in itself.

Abigail had guarded her John’s, admirably.

And Patsy Jefferson having given over the position in favor of a husband and children of her own, Dolley would, Martha thought, do an admirable labor of guarding Mr. Jefferson’s. Or rather, the pair of them, Dolley and Mr. Madison working as a team, Dolley socially and Mr. Madison—that crafty little kingmaker—politically.

As she bade Dolley and the other company good-bye after dinner, Martha reflected she would never have believed she’d welcome into her heart the wife of the man who had stolen her peace.

Which only went to show that one never knew what “happily ever after” was going to consist of.

The Honorable Congressman Waln was still squabbling with Colonel Harris and his wife about whether or not George would have advocated education for young ladies—he’d certainly paid for Harriot’s—as they were climbing into their own carriages, each of them quoting examples as if every word George had spoken had been holy writ. The Pennsylvania Congressman’s insistence that he was going to ask Tobias Lear about it—the former tutor had spent most of the past year sorting through George’s correspondence—brought back to Martha the ugly memory of the private letter Jefferson had sent a friend, in which he’d expressed his opinion of George’s support of the British constitution, likening him to Samson having his head shorn by the “harlot England.” The friend, good Democratic-Republican that he was, had published it, to score a political point. Completely aside from George’s hurt feelings—the matter had very nearly come to a duel—the political implications had been horrific.

The recollection of some of the things George had called various Congressmen over the years in letters to her brought home to her what had to be done…

And why.

“Lady Washington?”

She looked up, to see Dolley watching her with concern in her lovely blue eyes. Colonel Harris’s chaise, and Mr. Thompkins’s rented vehicle, stood already a little way off on the potholed circle of the drive—which Lawrence had sworn he’d given orders weeks ago to be repaired. Dolley’s carriage waited, with young Anna, and the other two ladies, invited to share the ride as far as Georgetown, already inside.

“Is all well with thee, madame?”

Martha made herself smile, though in fact she felt crushed by the fathoms-deep weariness that had come on her first the day after the kitchen fire. “Quite all right, dearest. But I have something for you.”

And from her pocket she brought out the small golden mirror. She pressed it into Dolley’s gloved hand.

Dolley turned it to the light, openmouthed. “ ’Tis beautiful! Art thou sure? What—?”

“I’m sure. And I’ll explain another time.” She closed her friend’s fingers around it again, and patted her hand gently. “I think this needs to be yours now. Keep it safe. It has a…a rather interesting tale. Yes, I should like it to belong to you.”

She lifted her hand to them, as the carriages jolted and rattled away.

Guard my back.

There was one thing left to do.

She hated to do it, though she had long known she must. She remembered, as she passed the door of the Little Dining-Room, how much joy she’d always derived from opening the black wooden chest beneath her bed and reading George’s letters. Her own as well, for George—who was not sentimental—always returned them to her when she arrived in winter quarters, or when he got back from Philadelphia to Mount Vernon again. The letters made a sort of diary, a recollection of cares that had seemed colossal at the time, like Harriot completely ruining that straw-yellow muslin dress trying to catch the stable cat, or George’s grim despair at trying to extract ammunition from Congress when Congress kept telling him to stop drawing away from the British and attack them.

He’d trusted her, with everything that had been in his heart.

He trusted her still.

And she’d be with George soon, she reminded herself, pausing halfway up the first flight of stairs to catch her breath. Very soon, she thought.

Then she’d be able to talk to him about all that had happened, and to remember it all, good and bad, in its true context.

And nobody else would be able to go prying through their words to one another: what they had thought, what they had feared, how they had loved.

But I can’t let myself read even a word of them now, she told herself, as she reached her attic room at last. If I do I’ll be drawn back into that world—of Cambridge, of Valley Forge, of Philadelphia—and Nelly or someone will stop me.

So she lit a fire in the Franklin stove and gently fed the letters into it, unopened, one by one. Kissing each good-bye and then releasing the past to ashes and smoke: his occasional despair and the anger she’d sometimes felt at him, forty years of love and misunderstandings. The secrets of his heart that he knew she would keep.

The burning took longer than she’d thought. The heat seared the backs of her fingers painfully as she fed and poked, fed and poked, breaking up the fragments until all were consumed: as Prospero had said of his phantoms, leaving not a wrack behind.

The stuff that dreams were made of.

When it was done, and the floor around the stove and her chair littered with the faded ribbons in which she’d had the packets tied, she was so tired that she couldn’t even rise to walk to the bed.

She bowed her head and wept silently, the furnace-blaze of burning paper slowly fading in the stuffy room. Wept because what she’d done was, like all events in time—Patcy’s death or the hesitant smile in George’s eyes when first he’d walked into Mrs. Chamberlayne’s parlor to meet her—irrevocable.

When she at last raised her head, she saw that there was still daylight in the garret bedroom. Going to the window, she saw the evening’s golden brightness beyond the shadow of the house.

Time enough to go down and sit a little with George, before night came on.

The Federal City

Wednesday, May 5, 1801

“Is it really the women who actually run things?” Anna, quiet for much of the drive back to the city, turned to Dolley as Mrs. Harris and Mrs. Thompkins waved farewell from the windows of their husbands’ carriages and those vehicles pulled away. Both of those ladies had clearly subscribed to their husbands’ view—and that of Congressmen Platt and Waln—that men made politics and the womenfolk merely made them comfortable when they got home from more important work.

“Of course it is.” Dolley smiled. “Look at Montpelier. Jemmy’s father owned the land, and made all the decisions about how much wheat to plant and how much tobacco, and should they buy another mule, but thou knows ’twas Mother Madison who’d say to him in their bedroom at night, ‘You’ve got to do something about getting the kitchen rebuilt,’ or, ‘ ’Tis time to buy new cloth for the slaves’ winter things.’ And for all Jemmy wrote to the newspapers and to everyone he knew about Mr. Jefferson being elected, nothing would have happened had not Jemmy made sure he knew every one of those Congressmen whilst we lived in Philadelphia. Had we not had them to our house there, and later up to Montpelier, to discuss things informally instead of listening to each other’s speeches in Congress.

“Mr. Jefferson would rather it were not so, naturally,” Dolley went on, shaking her head in kindly affection at the thought of their friend. “Meg Smith told me yesterday that Mr. Jefferson did away with the levees and at-homes Mrs. Adams used to hold. And all the ladies of good society in the city called upon him in a body one morning last week, to force him back into the custom. He, however, went downstairs to them in his riding-clothes, and expressed astonishment at the coincidence of them all calling together like that, at once—and then went right round the room and charmed each one of them individually.”

Anna laughed. “He was lucky to get out of the room alive!”

“Mr. Jefferson is an idealist. He would have things be as he likes to think they are, kept separate and pure, like the principles of Liberty or honor, like politics and law, untouched by the realities of the world.”

Like his love for his daughter and his love—if love it be—for his Sally?

Like two separate fossil bones, stored in different drawers in different rooms.

Dolley sighed. “But the world is real, Anna. And speeches in Congress tell only half the story, and that not the most important half. Nowadays no man of intelligence believes Congressional speech in any case. ’Tis what is said in private that counts.”

The two carriages behind them turned off down the tree-shaded streets of Georgetown. The gold light of sunset illuminated the woods around them, but already the evening chill gathered under the trees, the peculiarly damp, miasmal cold that seemed to seep out of the ground in this place. Abigail Adams, Sophie had written her, had lived last winter in an agony of rheumatism. And even after only a few days in these marshy lowlands, Dolley was wondering what the effect would be on poor Jemmy.

And indeed, she thought, on Payne. In Philadelphia’s muggy summers and damp winters, her son had shown her own tendency to colds and chest complaints. In the mountains at Montpelier he’d been as healthy as a pony. Moreover, she’d already ascertained that there was no such thing as a decent school in the Federal City, and it was getting more and more difficult to get the boy to pay the slightest attention to his tutor. Try as she would not to become one of those fondly doting mamas she had always gently mocked, the thought of losing him filled her with such dread.

She would have to ask some of the older inhabitants of the vicinity—not that there were many “old inhabitants” in the city itself!—what they intended for the education of their sons.

The trees broke to the left of the road, and Dolley contemplated in passing the six red-brick buildings that stood isolated among them. Like nearly every building within the boundaries of the Federal City, they were surrounded by piles of building debris and a latticework of water-filled wagon-ruts that reflected the limpid gold of the evening sky. The State Department had shut up shop hours ago, its six clerks slogging their way back along the muck of Pennsylvania Avenue to the cluster of boardinghouses, taverns, and small shops that huddled behind the unfinished Capitol, over three miles away.

The house next to the State Department, Dolley knew, would be hers. The headquarters from which she would begin setting up the network of calling and being called upon—the country distances would be a challenge in winter—that cemented the foundations of political support.

She took from her reticule the gold hand-mirror Martha had given her and turned it over in her gloved fingers, admiring the flash of the jewels on the frame—not real, surely?—and the ivory miniature of the sweet-faced lady with old-fashioned ostrich-plumes in her hair. A tale, Martha had said. And, Keep it safe… Which she’d do without being asked, for her dear friend’s sake.

In the distance Dolley saw the whitewashed walls of the President’s House.

“A State prisoner,” Martha had called herself, and had dreaded the Federal City that she had herself never seen.

Abigail, Sophie had written to her, had hated the place—Understandably, reflected Dolley, with a pang of pity in her heart for that indomitable Yankee lady who had come to this place only to learn of the death of her younger son.

Yet seeing the white walls, she felt her heart lift, the way it did when she dreamed of flying.

A new city and a new world. A city like none other that the world had known—though she could imagine Mrs. Adams’s horrified expression as she agreed with that statement. A city of tulip trees and wild roses, of streams rank with wild grapevines, of open countryside free of the stinking miasmas of Philadelphia’s alleys. A city unbuilt, with all the promise of things still within the realm of dreams.

A new city for the new world of Washington’s hopes and Jefferson’s visions, Mr. Adams’s stubborn courage and her own Jemmy’s wisdom.

More than Philadelphia, more than the sleepy beauty of Montpelier, Dolley understood that in coming to this place, she had finally come home.