Barbara Hambly - Patriot Hearts - A Novel of the Founding Mothers

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.