Patriot Hearts: A Novel of the Founding Mothers

MARTHA

Mount Vernon Plantation

Fairfax County, Virginia

Thursday, January 25, 1787

The Negroes always said a barking dog was the sign of ill luck on its way.

Martha Washington’s father, London born and educated there til the age of fifteen, might scoff at this superstition, but her childhood fifty years ago in the isolated little plantation of Chestnut Grove had taught her its wisdom. A barking dog meant a stranger coming onto the place.

And a stranger could mean anything.

A visitor with ill news.

A letter with a request that could not be denied.

Dread flared behind her breastbone like the spark struck from steel and flint, but the fire that blossomed there was the flame of pure rage.

Not again.

I will not let him do this to me twice.

The bedroom windows looked more or less south, toward the river and the wharf past the lane of outbuildings: smokehouse, washhouse, coach-house, and stables. That way, too, lay the river road that wound south along the Potomac, half-hidden by the slope of the ground and the gray lacework of winter trees. But the windows of the two small dressing-rooms adjoining the bedroom commanded the drive where it circled up to the gate.

A girl’s trick, she thought, annoyed with herself as she rose from her chair and crossed the room. Like a child impatient to grab at a future that was, good or ill, inevitably on its way.

What would be, would be.

But at least I can ready my heart.

The dressing-room was icily cold. As the familiar scents of well-worn wool, herb sachets, and hair-powder drifted around her, the wish flitted through her mind that she might have a nice Kentucky long-rifle, of the sort the men at the camps at Cambridge and Valley Forge had borne, a foot longer than her own diminutive height and deadly at a distance of two hundred yards. From this window she could pick off the rider the instant he appeared between the gate-posts.

She guessed who it would be.

She dismissed the wish briskly—Don’t be silly, Patsie, what an appalling example to set for the children!—but wasn’t shocked at it. She had long believed God never blamed you for your first thought, only your second.

Please, God, don’t let it be James Madison. She changed her wish to a prayer.

It might, of course, be someone else. Since the end of the War it seemed that everyone in the thirteen States felt entitled to come to Mount Vernon to see the man who had led the Continental Army to victory. In addition to assorted Dandridges and Bassetts—her own family—and the General’s brother Jack and sister Betty and their adult offspring, men arrived whom Martha had known from her winters in the Army camps with the General. Not only the officers like stout Harry Knox and dour-faced disapproving Timothy Pickering, but common soldiers, men from all walks of life whom she’d nursed in camp hospitals or knitted stockings for. Martha had grown accustomed to the constant stream of visitors, and to never really knowing how many to tell Uncle Hercules would be sitting down to dinner, to say nothing of the expense.

But since October, the bark of dogs and the crunch of hooves on the drive had filled her with foreboding that sometimes turned her cold with fear, and sometimes hot with rage.

A child’s voice sliced the air. Half a dozen small figures milled excitedly into sight from the curved walkway that led to the kitchen, trampling last week’s muddy snow. The little ones who helped with chores in the shops and, in summer, in the wide vegetable gardens near the wharf were always on hand to take messages to the house, and could dash up the steep hill from the river long before horses could take the drive. Shivering in the raw cold by the dressing-room window, Martha heard her niece Fanny’s gentle exclamations from the walkway. At nineteen, as the wife of the General’s nephew Augustine, Fanny had stepped into the role of auxiliary hostess at Mount Vernon.

Martha caught the words, “…Mr. Madison,” and her small firm jaw clenched until it ached. The General’s niece Harriot—one of several family members now dwelling under the Mount Vernon roof—cried, “Let’s go tell Aunt!” and Fanny murmured something in reply and, Martha hoped, an admonition about how ladies didn’t shout.

What am I ever going to do with that girl?

The thought of Harriot—of Fanny with her first baby on the way, of the two children of her dead son Jacky whom Martha had taken in as her own, and of the older sisters of those two, who’d journeyed down from Alexandria to have some relief from their mother’s constant illnesses and pregnancies—the thought of Harriot’s older brothers who’d have to be provided for and looked after—suddenly weighed on Martha’s thoughts, and she closed the window without even waiting to see who was arriving at Mount Vernon that morning.

But her knees shook as she returned to her chair by the fire. Her breath was coming fast.

He promised.

Promised not only me, but the Congress and every one of his officers, every one of his soldiers.

I will not become a dictator, he had promised her. A Cincinnatus, not a Caesar. We have not spent eight years ridding ourselves of one despot, to exchange for another. My own vine and fig tree, shared in peace with you, are more precious to me than any palace, any crown.

Martha closed her eyes. She felt thankful beyond measure for her own long-standing rule that the hour after breakfast, when the General rode out to supervise the work on Mount Vernon’s outlying farms, was inviolate. Even Fanny whom she loved like a daughter, even her treasured granddaughter Nelly, knew enough not to knock at her bedroom door during that hour of solitude. When the French clock on the mantel-piece spoke its small sweet note at ten, that would be time enough to take up her weapons and learn what battle it was that she would have to fight.

But her instincts told her that in this inclement season, with Congress reconvening soon, the visitor had to be James Madison. And for a bleak silent moment Martha Dandridge Custis Washington wished the little man dead.

Eight years.

In the fairy-tales of which her daughter—her beautiful Patcy—had been so fond, days of trial and testing for hero and heroine concluded with “happily ever after” and were presumably followed by a lifetime of peace (although, reflected Martha, Heaven only knew what one would talk about with a man who’d spent his youth hopping from lily-pad to lily-pad in the guise of a frog). She’d never read one in which the deserving couple had their years of peace first, their trials and tribulations afterwards, and no end to them in sight.

Her first marriage, at nineteen, to Daniel Custis could certainly not be counted a tribulation, once his frightful father was dead. Plump, middle-aged Daniel had adored her and had showered her with gifts. The only trials she’d passed through had been the deaths of two of their four beautiful children before they reached the age of four…and the appalling legal mess of his Parke grandmother’s legacy, which had fallen upon her, ensnarled in the vast Custis fortune, when Daniel had suddenly died.

As for the General…

George had his trials and his tribulations, reflected Martha. But he was a soldier. Of course there had been times when he’d lain in the hand of Death. Ambushed by the French and Indians in the days before the French had been driven out of Canada, he had brought a division of confused and panicky English soldiers out of the wilderness to safety. When first she’d seen him, stepping out into the sunlight of the Palace Green in Williamsburg in his blue-and-scarlet militia uniform, that was what Daniel had said of him: That’s Colonel Washington, the man who saved Braddock’s troops.

Two years after that they’d been formally introduced, at a ball to celebrate her sister Anna Maria’s wedding to Burwell Bassett of Eltham Plantation: Fanny’s mother. He’d asked her to dance—quite properly soliciting her husband’s permission—and led her out to the floor, a very tall man who seemed taller yet because of the straightness of his carriage, and because of the Indian-like litheness with which he moved. Only a month before that she had lost her daughter, sweet four-year-old Frances. She had almost declined to attend the wedding or the dance.

But when George bowed over her hand, and looked down at her with those remarkable eyes, pale chilly blue like spring sky when the clouds first break, she would no more have refused a request to dance—or a request that he carry her out of the ballroom and away from Williamsburg over the crupper of his horse, for that matter—than she’d have turned away from the warmth of a fire on a freezing night.

She later learned that George had that effect on most women.

As it was, the impact of his presence confused her, because she still did quite sincerely love Daniel….

But this was different. When she thought about it later, she realized this must be what people meant when they spoke of charisma, the potent magic that some people had that made you want to be near them, that made you want to do as they asked.

When he thanked her for the dance—and he danced with the leashed power of a well-schooled hunting-horse going over jumps—his voice was like brown velvet, but she saw that his teeth were very bad. The reason, she understood at once, for his tight-lipped expression, and his snorting, close-mouthed laugh.

He was self-conscious.

And though she continued to love Daniel til he died, the memory of that dance was like a little piece of warmed amber, tucked away in a pocket, that she could touch, in the months that followed, when her hands or her heart felt cold.

Some eight months after Daniel’s death, George came to call on her at the home of mutual friends. During those months she’d been wrestling with the maddening difficulties of keeping the overseers of four plantations from either stealing her blind or half-killing the slaves in order to get work out of them, and with the legal complications of finding a guardian for four-year-old Jacky and two-year-old Patcy, since Daniel had died intestate. In George, she had recognized at once both great strength and great patience, and an intelligence similar to her own. Neither of them was bookish, nor could either be called a philosophical genius. But George, like herself, had a keen understanding of how things worked, and a sharp vision of what was most important in any situation.

And, they laughed at the same things.

The fact that he was twenty-five years old and the most breath-taking man she’d ever seen didn’t hurt matters either.

Happily ever after.

The woods below the house wore their winter-dress of gray, brown, and white; in the mornings the water in the bedroom ewer would be skinned with ice. With the dressing-room windows shut Martha couldn’t hear whether it was a single horse’s hooves that crunched the gravel by the mansion house’s western door, or the creak of harness and the grind of carriage-wheels. But through the shut door of her room the sounds of the house came to her, comforting and familiar as a heartbeat.

Sal’s measured footfalls in Nelly’s bedroom on the other side of the wall, and the scratch of her broom on the bare pine floors. The faint clinking as Caro gathered up chamber-pots to bear down the backstairs and out to the scullery. The creak of bedropes and the dawdling tread of the young girls—Sinah and Annie—as they passed and repassed, making up the beds. Taking their time: From childhood Martha had understood that it was useless to expect any slave, from the lowest field-hand up to house-servants like George’s valet Billy and her own dear Nan, to hurry. It drove the General frantic. He’d take his watch out to the fields and time the men at their tasks, trying to arrive at new methods to make the work go more efficiently. The men in the fields, the women in the weaving-rooms, would merely look at him when he’d explain how they could actually accomplish twice as much in the same amount of time, increasing the productivity of the plantation…

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—”

“Of course,” responded Martha, stifling a grin in spite of herself. At the start of the War, Augustine had been twelve years old.

“—even he will tell you that any plantation will suffer, if its master isn’t on hand to oversee things in person. Uncle knows this.”

Fanny was so earnest, and so anxious that her favorite aunt be reassured, that Martha gave her a smile which she hoped displayed relief, and laid a small, lace-mitted hand to Fanny’s cheek. “Of course you’re right, dearest. And now don’t you dare come out to the kitchen again with me: You’ll catch your death. You should be upstairs resting.”

Fanny’s—and Augustine’s—argument could be made, she reflected, for the entity that had been born in Philadelphia, that wretched sweltering summer only eleven years ago. That the so-called United States of America would suffer, if its master wasn’t on hand to oversee things in person.

And Jemmy Madison had determined that the only master all would obey was George.

There was a great deal about the year before the War that Martha simply didn’t remember.

Looking back on it, as she went about her morning routine of doling out kitchen supplies of sugar, tea, coffee, and spices from their locked chests—of checking that the women in the weaving-and-spinning rooms were doing their work quickly and neatly—it seemed to Martha that one day she and George had been happy in the sunny world of family and work, and that the next, George was a self-declared traitor, riding away to war against the King.

It hadn’t been that quick, of course.

In the plantation account-books for 1774 and the later half of 1773, she would still find entries in her own handwriting concerning dinners she had no recollection of giving, dresses she had made with her own hands whose cut and color and construction she remembered nothing of.

What she did remember, as if it were only hours ago, was the muggy June afternoon in ’73 that had followed what turned out to be their last morning of that peaceful happily ever after. George’s younger brother John Augustine (“The only one with a lick of sense,” said George) and his family had journeyed from Bushfield Plantation to stay for a few days, to meet pretty Eleanor Calvert, her son Jacky’s intended bride.

That in itself had been a source of tension. On the eve of being sent away to college the previous winter, Jacky—then nineteen years old and determined to profit as little as possible from a succession of tutors and boarding establishments—had announced to his appalled parents that he was engaged to the fifteen-year-old daughter of a Maryland planter. George had managed to talk his stepson out of immediate matrimony, on the grounds that he needed some modicum of education to fit him for the responsibilities due his young bride. And, when Eleanor and her sister Elizabeth had come to visit, the girl turned out to be the sweetest of young ladies, if overly sensitive and rather featherbrained.

Over dinner in the little dining-room—that was long before the big one was built—Martha had mentioned the new sheet-music that had arrived from England for Patcy’s harpsichord. “Oh, do play them for us!” Eleanor cried. “I do so love music and I’m such a fool at it myself. My poor teacher says it’s as if my hands were all thumbs!”

And Patcy had blushed, laughed: “Only if you’ll play with me. I’ll show you how! You’ll have to learn if we’re going to be sisters.” Still smiling she got to her feet—“May I just get my music, Mama?”—took three steps toward the doorway and stopped, her hand going to her throat….

For years Martha dreamed that scene, over and over, as if that fragment of sunny dining-room, of languid June heat and the scents of new-cut hay and baked ham, had somehow become trapped in some secret chamber in her mind into which she wandered, unable to get out. The way her elfin dark-haired daughter stopped in mid-step, thin hand flying up to her throat, and the look of terror and despair that flashed across her face as she understood that another one of her seizures was coming on.

Sometimes in her dreams Martha was able to wake herself up before Patcy fell. Before she began to jerk and spasm like a landed fish dying in air, eyes huge with fright and shame and hands slapping and flinging aimlessly. Before George was on his feet and to her side, his reactions quicker than anyone’s at the table, gathering into his arms the seventeen-year-old stepdaughter who’d always called him “Papa…”

In her dreams Martha screamed. She didn’t remember whether she’d actually done so that afternoon or not.

But in her dreams, when she saw Patcy sag down suddenly limp in George’s arms, her disheveled dark hair tumbling down over his elbow—when she saw George’s face alter from concern to realization and grief—then she would scream, screaming and screaming in the hopes that George would wake her, would hold her against him, would rock her gently while she cried.

Jacky married his Eleanor the following Christmas, of 1773. Martha did not attend the wedding. For many months after Patcy’s death she found even the company of much-loved friends and members of her family more than she could bear. And though Jacky came often to visit her, he had moved to Maryland, to be near his bride’s family. Martha had vague memories of hearing about the ninety thousand dollars’ worth of British-taxed tea that the Massachusetts Sons of Liberty dumped into Boston Harbor, but like many things during that year, it seemed to her no more real than scenes in a play in which a woman named Martha Washington was one of the players.

During the “public times” in Williamsburg that year, when the House of Burgesses was in session, there was great furor over the King’s decision to retaliate upon the port of Boston for the destruction of the tea: Courts were placed under direct British control, local officials would now be appointed by the Crown, and town meetings were outlawed throughout all thirteen colonies.

“What on earth had we to do with it?” Martha protested to George’s fellow Burgess, lanky red-haired Tom Jefferson, one evening. “Why punish Virginians for something those people up in Massachusetts did?”

In July of ’74 there was a general Congress of the thirteen colonies in Philadelphia, and as a war hero of unquestioned honesty and probity—not to mention being the man who’d married the wealthiest widow in the colony—George was elected one of Virginia’s seven delegates. Martha remembered being worried, because in the climate of royal vengefulness there was no telling who might get punished for what, but even then she had no real sense that their lives had changed.

Like a boat in a squall, even after Patcy’s death she had expected things to right themselves eventually. Even though she knew that George was helping to drill the State militia, and that weapons, ammunition, cartridge-paper, spades, and food were being stockpiled, she thought of the matter as a passing “flap,” as her father used to call such alarms. Certainly less critical than the ever-present whispered threat of slave insurrection, a fear that had run like a dark undercurrent through the whole of her childhood.

Then in April of ’75, as George was preparing to leave for a second Congress in Philadelphia, Royal Governor Dunmore ordered the marines from a warship in the James River off of Williamsburg to seize the powder that was traditionally kept in the Williamsburg Magazine against the threat of an uprising among the slaves. The local patriots protested, triggering a near-riot on the Palace green.

And at almost the same time, General Gage, in charge of occupied Boston, sent eight hundred of his men to destroy a patriot cache of arms in the town of Concord.

And instead of a concerned magistrate riding to a conference on the subject of finding some means to redress colonial grievances, when George rode away down Mount Vernon’s shallow hill in his new blue-and-buff uniform, he was a man who placed himself in the camp of those who had taken up arms against their King.

A traitor, who would face sentence of death.

George returned a little before three. Martha was in the kitchen, putting the finishing dashes of cinnamon into a custard that she knew was her granddaughter’s favorite—not that Uncle Hercules couldn’t make equally marvelous desserts, but it gave her great pleasure to make the treats for her grandchildren herself. There was always a commotion when the General rode into the stable-yard, audible from the kitchen. Martha raised her head sharply, and with a smile the big, handsome cook took the spice-caddy from her hand.

“If her Ladyship’ll trust a poor ignorant savage to finish pepperin’ up that custard, I promise you I won’t poison them poor children.”

In spite of her apprehension, Martha smiled up at Uncle Hercules. From the walkway that led to the house, Harriot’s voice shrilled, “I’m going to kill you, Tub!” Footsteps pounded.

Uncle Hercules widened his eyes at Martha and added conspiratorially, “Not unless you want me to, that is, ma’am.”

“Get along with you.” Martha’s heart beat quickly as she dried her hands on her apron, picked up her shawl, and stepped through the door into the brittle cold of the open walkway.

Saw him striding up the row of outbuildings through the slush, coat flapping about his calves and dogs caracoling ecstatically around his boots. Saw him turn his head to greet Doll and Sal where steam billowed out the door of the laundry, and old Bristol as the gardener crossed the path with an armload of fresh-cut stakes.

She’d been married to him for almost thirty years, and he still took her breath away. She’d seen him laid low by intestinal flux and reading in bed without his teeth in, and it didn’t matter. He was still the handsomest man she’d ever seen.

Her husband.

Her George.

He took her hands, bent down to kiss her. Even wearing the tallest of her collection of bouffant lace caps, the top of her head didn’t reach his broad shoulder, and her small hands were lost in a grip powerful enough to crack walnuts. “Bounce, down,” she ordered, in the voice that invariably silenced the loudest quarrels in the kitchen. “Fang, York, sit.”

The hounds abased themselves instantly in the half-frozen mud. George’s eyes danced above his tight-closed smile.

“I always said you were wasted, knitting stockings for the men.” He kissed her again. “Baron von Steuben could have used you on the drill-grounds at Valley Forge.”

“His Lordship would have been less impressed with my talents if he’d ever tried to out-shout my brothers and sisters.” Martha reached up to take his arm. “Mr. Madison is here.”

She watched his face as she spoke, her voice carefully neutral. Saw how the muscles in his jaw hardened, and how for a moment his eyes took on the faraway look of a man who scans the invisible horizon of the future, for what he hopes he will not see.

Knowing how he hated to be pressed on matters about which he hadn’t made up his mind, she immediately went on, “I’ve put him in the blue bedroom and his man in the attic, but he says he must ride on at once in the morning, though I did tell him that Doll’s back has been warning her since yesterday of more snow on the way. Why is it that men will believe a barometer, when they mostly have no idea how it works—I certainly haven’t—and will not believe a perfectly trustworthy human being whose back always begins to hurt twenty-four hours before the onset of a storm? Fanny came up with Augustine this morning, and considering how bad the weather has been, would it perhaps not be better if they moved back into the house with us, at least until the baby comes? I’m sure that cottage of theirs isn’t nearly warm enough for an infant.”

George nodded as they entered the house. Billy had hot water, clean clothes, the powdering-cloth and powder-cone ready in the dressing-room. While George changed, Martha kept up the soft light chatter of the small inconsequences of the day: A letter had come from their lawyer in Port Tobacco. Austin the coachman’s wife was laid up with rheumatism again. Harriot had ruined yet another petticoat and gotten stains of ink and mud on her yellow dress: “Honestly, the way that child destroys everything she touches it’s no wonder your poor brother died insolvent! I’ve put her to mending her own petticoats when she tears them but I’m not sure what to do about the dress…. Oh, and we’ve had a letter from the headmaster in Georgetown. Steptoe is doing a little better but Lawrence is definitely Harriot’s brother, only for him it’s books he demolishes, not dresses! And both boys sneaked away last week to go sailing….”

And as she spoke she continued to observe his face. He was usually silent while she chattered—he’d once likened her and Anna Maria’s family gossip to the voices of birds in the spring woods—but she could see today his thoughts were only partly on what she said. January was the time for planning next year’s crops, for estimating seed and guessing what the markets in Europe, in New York, in England would bear: an anxious time. Tobacco prices had never been the same since the War, and like many other places in the Tidewater, Mount Vernon’s ability to produce quality tobacco had declined. In addition to the financial disarray left by eight years of absence during the War—not to mention having come within a hair’s breadth of having the house burned to the ground by British warships—they owed considerable money to British tobacco-factors from before the War. All planters did. That was part of the ongoing squabble in Congress.

Money for farm equipment and carriages. Money for dishes and corsets and paint, for window-glass and paper, medicine and tea. Every book in the library had come from England, and most of George’s guns. Prior to the War, it had been the only way to live. The planter wrote the factor to buy a plow, the factor bought one and billed the planter, and took out the cost of the plow when the next year’s tobacco-crop came in. They’d fought the War, in part, because England’s laws forbade the colonists from seeking cheaper Dutch and French goods: It was the function of colonies to support their Mother Country. And though they’d theoretically won the War, everyone still owed money to their factors and everyone still mostly bought British goods because that’s what they’d always done.

Only now everything cost more and the British factors refused to take anything but “hard” coin, gold or silver, of which almost no one had any. George had always been a conscientious farmer, keeping up with every advance in agriculture and inventing some of his own, like a new type of threshing-floor (which the Negroes refused to use, preferring to do things their own way); Martha knew he wouldn’t truly relax until the harvest was safely in.

She knew, too, that the chaos and dissension between the States made trade all the harder, a situation that drove him wild. Maryland was currently claiming that it owned not only the north bank of the Potomac, but the south bank as well. According to the Maryland legislature, the Virginia legislature would have to petition them for navigation rights—which struck Martha as exactly the sort of imbecilic quarrel that had used to be solved by the King.

Above all else, George hated waste and inefficiency. Watching him clean his guns after shooting, or supervise the repair of the grinding-wheels at the grist-mill, or construct a pinwheel for little Wash, Martha was well aware of that aspect of his character: that he liked to build things, to fix things. To make things run better, for the benefit of all.

James Madison was a clever man. He, too, knew this.

They said the Devil called you in the voices of your loved ones. What he offered you in trade for your soul was whatever you wanted most.

Nan came in, the pretty mulatto girl who’d been Martha’s servant from her girlhood—who was, Martha knew (everybody knew, though no one talked about such things, of course), her own father’s daughter by one of the Chestnut Grove housemaids. She took Martha into the other dressing-room and perched her on the stool there, removed her fichu and lace cap, draped her with the powdering-cloth and gave her the powder-cone to cover her face. Hair-powder was another thing that came from England, though one could use flour; except that by the time one had sifted it repeatedly through a dozen bolting-cloths to get out fragments of hulls and speckles of grit, it was easier just to buy it—not to mention the issue of bugs. Martha came from a generation that wouldn’t dream of sitting down to dinner unpowdered, even if one’s only company was a man one didn’t want to see.

James Madison had powdered for dinner, too.

Though at thirty-six Madison was a confirmed bachelor, it was clear to Martha that he was the uncle of a vast number of nieces and nephews, up there in Orange County. He listened gravely to eleven-year-old Eliza’s declamation, in accents of throbbing horror, of how Wash had put a baby mouse in her shoe (“Wherever did you get one at this season, Master Wash?”); gently drew out the timid Pattie on the subject of hair-ribbons; and coaxed Harriot from her care-for-nothing brashness with a query about the latest litter of puppies in the stables.

One did not, of course, discuss politics at table.

Martha could feel herself waiting for the meal to end, as the men were waiting, too.

Dinner at Mount Vernon.

Martha scanned the length of the table as Frank and Austin, resplendent now in their white liveries trimmed in scarlet, brought in the platters: smoked ham, mashed potatoes, the pigeon pie that was the staple of winter fare, spoon bread, yams. It was always difficult to put on a decent meal at this season of the year, without lettuces or spinach or any fresh greens, but Uncle Hercules had worked his usual miracles with dried peas, dried apples, and Martha’s justly famous fruit conserves.

But it was the faces around the board, she decided, that were the true treasure of Mount Vernon, the real fruit of the Biblical “vine and fig tree” that George spoke of with such longing and love. Pale, too-thin Augustine leaned across to describe to Nelly the hurricanes that swept the island of Bermuda, where he had gone in quest of elusive health, while at the foot of the table, the tutor Tobias Lear was explaining some aspect of fortress-building to Wash. Fanny, pale and lovely in the voluminous flowered shawl that concealed her pregnancy, put in the observation that battlements were all very well, but what were the defenders going to do if the attackers managed to enlist a dragon or an evil wizard on their side?

Her family. Hers and George’s. All that was left to them of the children they had so dearly loved.

He had abandoned them once, to go and do his duty as men must do in troubled times.

The guilt that pierced her heart was that she had abandoned them, too; her only regret was the price they’d paid. The price she’d let these children pay, for her love of George.

George’s letter had reached her just before her departure in October of 1775 for Eltham Plantation, to visit Anna Maria. Eltham was where the War really started, for her. All the way down from Mount Vernon to Eltham, six days’ jolting by coach, Martha’s heart had turned and twisted like a fish fighting a hook, trying to determine in which direction her duty lay.

…I ask whether it will be convenient to you, to join me at the camp in Cambridge this winter….

The words had had the exact effect upon her as a glass of brandy: shock, elation, warmth that rose from her toes to the ends of her hair.

To the surprise of no one except those who’d thought themselves more qualified for the position—a largish group which included the Washingtons’ neighbor Colonel Horatio Gates and the head of the Massachusetts Sons of Liberty, John Hancock—George had been made Commander in Chief of the new Continental Army. General Charles Lee—no relation to the Virginia Lees—had sneered that this had had much to do with the fact that George had attended every Congressional session wearing his militia uniform, the only man there to do so.

Having met General Lee, a former mercenary whose mouth was as filthy as his shirt, Martha could only suppose that this was what the man would have done himself, had anyone elected him to Congress or to anything else.

And knowing George, Martha guessed that in a way Lee was right. George had worn his uniform for the same reasons that he would have worn his best clothing and hair-powder to an assembly of men empowered to elect him to the House of Burgesses: because he knew that what a man is given depends largely on what he looks like he can handle. He had worn his uniform precisely to underscore in every delegate’s mind that he had field experience in commanding men in battle, something John Hancock and a significant number of other contenders lacked.

The New Englanders couldn’t really object, because he’d been nominated by a tubby little Massachusetts lawyer named John Adams.

Since the debacle at Lexington and Concord, the British army had been bottled up in Boston by the ever-growing bands of militiamen camped on the Boston Neck. An island town, Boston was connected with the mainland by a single narrow track of dry land that stretched between acres of salt-marshes. Some fifteen thousand patriots were camped in a ragged semicircle centered in the little towns of Cambridge and Roxbury, where the Neck debouched onto the mainland. Just before George went up to take command in June, the British made an attempt to break out by sea, crossing the harbor to a place called Charles Town below Breed’s Hill. After savage fighting, they drove the militiamen from their makeshift emplacements on the hill, but were left too shattered to pursue their advantage. Which was just as well, Martha later gathered, because the militiamen had almost no ammunition. A further assault would have crushed them.

At about this same time, Royal Governor Dunmore retreated with his wife and children to the British man-of-war that was still sitting in the river off Williamsburg, and issued a call to Virginia Loyalists to form an army of his own. Along with this summons came the Governor’s promise that any slave who escaped a patriot master would be enlisted, armed, and given his freedom.

All their lives, everyone Martha knew had lived in dread of slave insurrections. Hand in hand with fear of organized rebellion—and in some ways more deadly—went the threat of troublemaking by individual slaves, subtle and silent protests against bondage in general, or an unloved master in particular, that could involve anything from breaking tools and hamstringing plow-oxen to burning houses and poisoning their masters…or their masters’ children. Fury and outrage swept not only the patriot planters, but men—not all of them slaveholders themselves—who felt no particular conviction about freedom from England one way or the other.

Dunmore was denounced in parlors and pulpits as a fomenter of slave insurrection. Hundreds of slaves decamped, from patriot and loyalist alike, to flock to the British standard.

At Dunmore’s proclamation, George’s brother John Augustine wrote Martha in a panic with schemes to carry her at once to safety, should Dunmore attack Mount Vernon. Martha wrote back that she considered herself perfectly safe where she was. Before leaving for Eltham in October, Martha packed up all George’s papers and the account books, not only of Mount Vernon but of the much larger Custis estate that had been left in trust for Jacky’s children, so that Cousin Lund, who’d been left in charge, could easily get them out of there.

“I cannot imagine Governor Dunmore besieging Mount Vernon with a troop of marines in order to capture one middle-aged lady knitting in her own drawing-room,” remarked Martha, when she produced George’s note for Anna Maria’s perusal their first morning at Eltham. Jacky and his pretty Eleanor were still sleeping—Eleanor had borne, and lost, her first child in September, and was still in delicate health—and Jacky because it was never possible to get Jacky out of bed before nine in the morning. Anna Maria’s two sons were at their lessons with their tutor, but eight-year-old Fanny had remained at the breakfast table while one of the housemaids brought in a basin of hot water and a towel, for Anna Maria to wash up the cups.

“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.

For this reason, almost the first thing Martha did was to establish a rota of entertaining officers and their wives to dinner, and set about making the house of the Commander in Chief the social as well as the command center of the camp.

As a Virginia planter’s daughter—as a Virginia planter’s wife—Martha had spent far too much time listening to the power politics of the House of Burgesses not to be aware that a man’s power over others depended almost as much on his appearance of competent strength as on strength, or competence, itself, particularly in an emergency. This was an understanding she shared with George, on a level more profound than words could begin to fathom—something she wasn’t sure that anyone else in the camp, or in the Congress for that matter, completely comprehended.

She felt, sometimes, presiding over those dinners with dour Massachusetts colonels and frivolous South Carolinians—and later French and German and Spanish officers who came to observe and aid anyone who was willing to make trouble for the British—the curious sensation of her marrow-deep unity with George. It was as if they were dancing a dance long practiced together, or, like twins, could read one another’s thoughts.

In making him Commander in Chief of the Continental Army, Congress had authorized George to flog and hang. Knowing what would become of the Army if the countryside turned against them, George disciplined without mercy. A veteran of battle himself, he knew that under combat conditions, only discipline can stand against panic. The men were accustomed to the idea that they could disobey any command they didn’t like, so the potential for discontented officers stirring up trouble could not be ignored.

At the very least, Martha thought, even if her dinners didn’t completely defuse the poisonous atmosphere, they would give everyone something to look forward to. In addition, the dinners let people see George in some other context than when he was giving orders or swearing at the troops.

Politics and social maneuvering aside, it was Martha’s nature to want people to be comfortable. And she knew that comfort, especially in times of stress, depended to a large degree on things being organized and meals being served hot and on time.

Thus her Headquarters life felt like a curious extension of what she’d always done without thinking. The routine of a plantation mistress fit weirdly well into the context of war. And as a plantation mistress, Martha was as accustomed to looking out for the common soldiers as she was to smoothing things over between George and his officers. Her days at Cambridge—and on the New Jersey heights above New York the following winter, and at Valley Forge the winter after that—were spent in organizing the women of the district into committees to make clothing and knit stockings, as she did during the summers at home, and in visiting the men in their shelters or in the camp hospital with such small and necessary gifts. Even the men who growled about George’s readiness with the lash came around, at first simply because they needed the stockings, and then when they began to observe for themselves that their General was absolutely consistent in his rules and his punishments. He played no favorites, he listened to both sides of every case, he never held back their pay or sold their rations for his own profit. He had no hidden end beyond keeping the Army together and in the field. He raged and swore as much as they did against the Congress and the States who expected them to fight well-fed professional troops with no food in their bellies and no powder in their guns.

And eight years passed.

As Martha stitched the microscopic hems of a shirt-ruffle for Wash, by the glow of the work-candles Frank brought into the West Parlor, she saw in the faces of her granddaughters and niece the reflection of those eight years.

Wintering in New Jersey and Pennsylvania and New York, not returning to Mount Vernon until summer firmed up the roads. In 1776 that had not been until almost harvest, so she’d still been in Philadelphia in July, to hear the church bells tolling and men shouting in the streets that Congress had proclaimed the colonies’ independence from Britain.

That was the summer Eliza had been born. The girl’s face, already bearing the promise of a fleshy beauty, was restless and discontented as she bent over her sewing: a neglected child from the outset, trying with tantrums to make herself heard. Eleanor had been ill and depressed after the birth, and Martha, who would naturally have stepped in to care for both her and the child, was still in Philadelphia. How different would Eliza be now, had she not spent her first three months in the care of a succession of slave nurse-girls not much older than eight?

On New Year’s Eve of ’77, when Pattie had been born, Martha had been packed already to leave for winter camp. Only a week before Pattie’s birth, in the midst of caring for the bedridden Eleanor at Mount Vernon, word had reached Martha of the death of her sister Anna Maria, her most dear and treasured friend.

On her deathbed, Anna Maria had asked her family to send word to Martha, that Martha was to take in her daughter Fanny, barely turned eleven. “Raise her as your own,” she had whispered.

Martha had refused. Three weeks later, she’d gotten into the carriage, to go to the camp in Pennsylvania. Because George needed her, and she needed George.

Fanny had been sent instead by her grief-stricken, elderly father to the care of whichever relatives could fit an extra girl into their households. Eleanor, withdrawn into her world of shadows and pain, had been left with Jacky, who was completely useless around the sick. Tiny Pattie and sixteen-month-old Eliza were again relegated to the care of such girls as were too young to be employed in the fields.

Throughout the bitter winter in that awful little stone house at Valley Forge, Martha remembered now, she had dreamed about them. Or, worse, had dreamed about Patcy. Dreamed that she’d left a baby girl somewhere—set her down in the woods or the stable or the house and wandered away—and was searching for her, frantically trying to get her back before night fell.

From that dream Martha would wake to freezing blackness, to the drums of reveille in the camp and the clack of flint and steel as George knelt by the hearth: it never took George more than one or two strikes to get a fire going. Aaron Burr, General Putnam’s dapper young aide, used to say that all George had to do was look at the kindling, for flame to spring to life. It wouldn’t dare do otherwise.

Across the parlor now she considered them, in the comforting glow of candles and firelight and happily ever after. Fanny so exactly like Anna Maria, smiling at Nelly’s grave plans to find a sweetheart for her tutor. Eliza stitching away on an extravagantly embroidered crimson petticoat and detailing to her sister her plans for a career on the stage, while Pattie more prosaically knitted stockings. Harriot, stitching on the other side of the fire as far from Eliza as she could get, looked scornful but knew better than to get in a quarrel with her cousin when Martha was in the room.

How I wronged them. They needed me, and I wasn’t there.

She’d been gone from home when Nelly was born, too.

She remembered her maid Sal, telling her what she’d heard from the maids in Jacky’s household: that when Jacky’s friends in Alexandria—and any convivial strangers who happened through the town—came for dinner, her son would lift the three-year-old Eliza up onto the dinner-table, and encourage her to sing bawdy songs at the top of her voice for the edification of the men as they drank. Eleanor, so frequently confined to her room, either didn’t know or didn’t have the energy to care.

Jacky was a good boy, Martha told herself sadly. Sweet-natured, though his judgment wasn’t good.

But she knew that, too, was a lie.

She remembered how she had returned from the winter camp at Morristown in 1780 to find her beloved sewing-maid Nan with child. A white man, Nan had stammered, a white man came upon her in the woods beyond the grist-mill. The maid disclaimed all knowledge of who the man was, but had looked away from Martha with fear in her eyes. She would say only, “He said he’d make sure I never saw my family again, if I told.”

When the child was born—Willy, seven now and learning to be a houseboy—he had looked like Jacky. He looked even more like him now.

I should have been here.

But it wasn’t that easy.

In the months before Martha went to Valley Forge, leaving Fanny and Pattie, her own ailing mother, Eliza and Nan and Eleanor all to their fates, word had reached her that the Continental Army had been defeated in battles along the Delaware River. Congress had been driven out of Philadelphia only a day before the British took the city, and the British came within a hair’s-breadth of capturing the Army—and George—after the disastrous counterattack in the fog at Germantown. The year before, they had barely escaped through the streets of New York City as the British were landing on the Battery.

The last she had seen of him, as he’d handed her into the carriage at Morristown and had stood watching her out of sight, might have been indeed the last time she would see him, ever. The good-bye kiss he gave her could have been the final adieu. Even more than the knowledge that he needed her support, what she could not bear was the awareness that she might never see him again.

Each winter that she took from Eliza, and Pattie, and Fanny, was a treasure that she was laying up within her own heart. The treasure of being with him, for what might be the final time.

I could not be two places at once!

Each winter she had chosen. And those winters glimmered back to her now through Eliza’s operatic angers, in Pattie’s wistful clinginess and the note in Fanny’s voice when she would speak of “having a home of our own.” To say nothing, reflected Martha’s more practical side, of the badly kept tangle of plantation records that George was still trying to sort out four years after war’s end, and the terrifying tally of debts.

As the evening grew later, and the men remained talking in the dining-room, the anger congealed to a point of heat behind her heart.

I followed him for eight years. I left behind those who had reason to expect my help.

Does he really need me to remind him, that he laid down the sword of power with the understanding that he would not take it up again?

A Cincinnatus, not a Caesar, he had promised. A farmer and not a ruler of men.

By the end of the War, he could have become a Caesar. The charisma that drew her—and every woman who encountered George—combined with his good sense and calm integrity, to unite, at last, New York men who’d grown up despising Pennsylvanians, Massachusers to whom every Rhode Islander was a thief, South Carolinians who held their noses at the mention of Vermont boys. He had made of them one fighting force. Year by year, she saw how he became the embodiment of the cause that held them together, the cause for which more and more of them risked their lives simply because he was willing to risk his.

In September of 1781, word reached her at Mount Vernon that George was coming. On the way to join with the French fleet in a maneuver to trap the British army at Yorktown, he would have the chance to visit the home he had not seen in six years. The previous winter, one of George’s most trusted generals, Benedict Arnold, had turned his coat and gone over to the British side, and had led their armies in raids on Virginia. Arnold had occupied the new capital, Richmond, and barely missed capturing Tom Jefferson, whose fragile baby daughter died as a result of the hardships of the family’s escape. Martha had been with George at the winter camp in New Windsor at that time, frantic with worry about her own little granddaughters; about her mother, ill at Chestnut Grove; about Fanny.

That spring, moreover, Martha herself was ill, first at Headquarters and later in Philadelphia. She was still not feeling herself by the time she returned to Mount Vernon in June—having missed the birth of little George Washington Parke Custis—and had barely recovered her strength when George wrote in September that he would indeed be able to cross his own threshold for the first time since May of 1775.

He arrived on the ninth of September after everyone was in bed. Martha, for a week too excited to sleep, heard the dogs barking, and then hooves in the driveway. It’s one of his aides coming to announce his arrival tomorrow….

But from downstairs she heard a familiar deep voice say, “If she’s asleep, for God’s sake let her sleep! That’s an order, Breechy. Just to see the roof-line and smell the gardens is worth the ride….”

“General Washington—” Martha appeared at the top of the stairs, her braid hanging forgotten over the embroidered homespun of her dressing-gown and hairpins still in her hand. “If you dared let me go six hours til dawn not knowing you were in the house, I should—I should write a letter to the Times in London saying that such conduct proved you to be no gentleman.”

He grinned wide—something he almost never did because of his teeth—and reached the bottom of the stairs in two strides, in time to catch Martha in his arms.

He had ridden sixty miles from Baltimore that day, to sleep beneath his own roof at her side.

The French did arrive the following day, General Rochambeau handsome and courtly and a little too suave in his gorgeous uniform—George had written to her that he was too hard on his men, which was something, coming from George. The day after that—the eleventh of September—the rest of the French officers appeared, and on their heels, Jacky, Eleanor, and the grandchildren whom George had never seen. The French Comtes and Chevaliers in their gold-embroidered uniforms all smiled to see the tall, stern General scoop up five-year-old Eliza and hold her like a kitten above his head.

Throughout dinner, Jacky hovered around the Generals like a smitten schoolgirl. He asked breathless questions about battles, gazed in rapture at the swords they wore and the gold of their epaulets.

Martha still remembered the men coming into the parlor—this same parlor where they now sat—after dinner that day, Jacky with his features radiant: “Papa’s going to take me with him to Yorktown! I’ve been commissioned as one of his aides!”

Eleanor’s gentle eyes flared with alarm, and her face paled. Jacky might towse the servant-girls, and waste his late father’s fortune on imbecilic land-deals for currency that wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on, but he was her husband. Without him to run Abingdon Plantation, neither Eleanor nor her four tiny children could survive.

Martha’s first reaction to this announcement—that he was going to war, but only in the safest possible position, behind the combined French and Continental armies—was to roll her eyes. She longed to reassure her daughter-in-law that Jacky might go to war—and she was willing to bet his first act in the service of his country would be to purchase a dozen uniforms that put General Rochambeau’s to shame—but she couldn’t imagine her son actually doing anything to put himself into harm’s way.

But he did. Martha had become so used to the sicknesses that ravaged the Army camps—at Morristown, at Valley Forge, at Trenton—that she seldom thought of them anymore. Her own illness had been more inconvenient than dangerous. The Knox and Greene babies whom her friends Lucy and Kitty now brought regularly to winter quarters seemed to thrive. George’s favorite aide Alec Hamilton, goldenly handsome and a few years younger than Jacky, had never had so much as a cold (or the French pox, which was even more surprising).

By the seventeenth of October, however, when General Cornwallis sent an aide out of his fortress to surrender his sword to Washington, Jacky was so sick with camp-fever that he could only watch the capture of the British army from a carriage in the road. The same letter that brought Martha news of the British surrender urged her, and Eleanor, to come at once.

Through six years of war, she had often lain awake in terror at the thought of losing George. She had never dreamed that she would lose Jacky. But at Eltham Plantation, where six years previously Martha had made her choice to follow George to war, less than three weeks after the defeat of Britain by her American colonists, Jacky Custis died.

Pattie dozed over her knitting; Nelly had fallen asleep. Outside the wind had begun to moan, puffing threads of smoke back down the chimney. On the side closer to the windows, Martha felt the air of the room growing cold. The rumble of the men’s voices continued behind the dining-room door. Fanny gathered her shawl about her: “I’ll get these little sleepyheads off to bed,” and Eliza piped up immediately that she wasn’t the least bit sleepy—

“My nerves are too delicate to let me sleep, Aunt Patsie.”

And Harriot: “Why do men take so long over their wine?”

“It isn’t polite to make observations about how long anyone lingers after dinner,” replied Fanny gently, and herded the girls from the room.

Why indeed?

Martha’s breath felt stifled in her chest. They would come out soon.

The last time George had lingered so long over dinner had been the night last October, with Madison and Monroe.

Warily, Martha had watched them then, as she had watched Madison tonight. Too fragile to go to war, he had spent the years from 1775 to 1783 in the Virginia legislature; he knew the ins and outs of local politics with the brilliance of an Alexander viewing a battlefield. Last October, she had heard him speak of the relationship of Congress to the various States, and the States to each other, like a physician observing a dissection, pointing with a needle: a cancer here, a lesion there, a muscular weakness there, and here gangrene is setting in…The patient will die.

“No,” George had said quietly that night, and had raised his eyes from the Madeira into whose golden depths he had been gazing as Madison talked. “We did not fight, and men did not die, that we should become the laughingstock of the world for our inability to hold what we won.”

His eyes met Madison’s, and Madison had made no reply. Martha had watched her husband’s jaw harden, and the muscle in his temple twitch, as it did when he was holding hard to his temper. She had felt in his silence, that October night, the eight years of seeing his men starve because Congress had no power to raise money to feed them; eight years of maneuvering the logistics of fighting battles with only a few rounds of ammunition per man; eight years of keeping his temper as he explained to Congress yet one more time why he didn’t storm into battle more often or why men who put their lives on the line for their country really ought to be recompensed for their pain.

Now, like a debtor’s child, the new confederation calling itself the United States of America came into being owing a hundred and seventy million dollars to France, Russia, Spain, and the Netherlands—twenty-seven million of that payable only in gold. Without the threat of the British guns in the background, the Congress’s financial pigeons all came home to roost. As a “firm league of friendship,” not an actual government, Congress still had no power to tax, and no means of paying off those loans any more than they’d been able to pay the Continental troops.

The Convention of States’ representatives in Annapolis had signally failed to resolve the trade differences separating them.

Another Convention, Madison had said in October, was being planned. It would meet in Philadelphia come May, to further discuss the issues that threatened to lay the divided States open to piecemeal conquest as soon as Britain or France or Spain or Russia thought it safe to do so.

“We cannot let it go for nothing,” George had said, and Madison had folded his thin hands, wrinkled face alert in the candle-glow.

“Nor will we, sir,” he said. “But we cannot go on as we have. And to bring the States together, we must have someone whose authority all will trust.”

“Lady Washington…”

So profoundly had she been in her reverie that the opening of the dining-room door took her by surprise. Mr. Madison bowed deeply. “I abase myself, ma’am, for keeping your husband talking so long.”

“What, has my wife given up and gone home?” Augustine coughed, and in the candlelight his face had the pallor that Martha didn’t like, as if he were sickening for another of the colds that sometimes laid him up for months.

“I fear poor Fanny has the right of it.” The corner of George’s mouth tugged in a smile, but his eyes were gentle behind the shadow of infinite weariness. “Poor Patsie. I fear we’ve trespassed on your good nature, and will do so no more this evening.” His big hands were warm, completely enfolding hers. “Frank—” He turned to the butler, who’d materialized to take the green Sèvres coffee-pot back to the kitchen to be refreshed. “Please show Mr. Madison to his room. Are you sure you will not remain, sir, at least until the weather promises better?”

Spits of sleet had begun to spatter the windows, and the shutters rattled sullenly on their hinges. Madison shook his head. “I cannot linger.”

“Then I shall instruct Austin to have your horse ready after breakfast, that you may reach Georgetown easily by dinner-time.”

Fanny returned from the nursery and she and Augustine kissed; it was agreed they would stay tonight, rather than walk back down to their own newly built little house in the bitter cold. All as if everything were normal, as if the little man in black bidding Fanny a courteous good-night now had not brought word that the nation George had risked his life on the battlefield to free was already falling apart.

Martha watched her niece and George’s nephew, and then their guest, leave the parlor on the heels of candle-bearing servants. She shivered and was conscious of her hand trembling on her husband’s arm.

Looking up at his profile in the candlelight, she found herself regarding him, as well as their diminutive guest, as an enemy. I will not let you take me away from my family.

I will not let you take me away from my home.

They went into the dark and freezing cold hall to bid everyone good-night, but when the flickering dabs of light disappeared around the turn of the stairs, George guided Martha back into the parlor, to wait for him by the fire’s sinking warmth while he made his final patrol of the lower floor of the house, checking shutters, locking doors. Making sure all was safe, as was his invariable habit.

Just as, she recalled, he had walked around the camp every night, wrapped in as many cloaks as he could obtain and scarfed up to the eyes, to make certain the sentries were sober and the black woods beyond the picket-lines silent in the starlight.

How many nights, wondered Martha, had she waited up for him, knitting by the fires in those icy little bedrooms? How many nights had she studied the walls of some other woman’s chamber in the dying light? She still recalled the silhouettes of a boy and girl that had decorated the house in Morristown: She had asked, but had never found out whose they were. In another place—Valley Forge?—a child’s laborious cross-stitch had spelled out “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.”

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me.

From the dining-room beyond the parlor came the creak of quiet footsteps, Frank, Sal, and Caro clearing up. A moment later Caro’s shadow passed through the dark hall with a tray of glasses and a basket of broken nut-shells and cheese-rinds. In the kitchen the fire would be sinking low in the great chimney, Uncle Hercules waiting to bank it before going to bed himself. Abovestairs the girls and young Wash were sleeping under featherbeds, trusting there was someone in the world who would look after them and love them. Someone who wouldn’t leave them with the servants yet one more time.

She heard George’s step in the hall, light as an Indian’s on a forest track.

He closed the parlor door, a reflex any white Virginian developed from earliest childhood: His valet Billy would be waiting for them outside their bedroom door, with her new little maid, Oney. The house, like any in Virginia, was always filled with listening ears. For a moment he stood with his back to the door, only looking at her in the deep shadows of the parlor, while the wind wept around the eaves.

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.”

“I think she felt pain,” Sophie replied. “But pain was never a thing that affected Abigail’s judgment, when her principles were at stake. Her sins against her children were different sins. She—and they—paid a different price, Dolley.”