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

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 Eleanor, withdrawn into her world of shadows and pain, had been left with Jacky, who was completely useless around the sick.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.