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

Dolley forced herself away from the window: Watching the road all the day shalt make him no safer… “The coffee-set was Lady Washington’s.”

“So it was.” The triangular, thin-lipped mouth relaxed into a smile of genuine kindness. “I remember now. When I came back to this country eighteen years ago she served me coffee from it on my first visit to her. As mementos go, it’s rather bulky. Did she keep the mirror, I wonder? The one the Queen of France sent her?”

“The Queen of France?” Movement on the road caught Dolley’s eye and she swung the spyglass back, her heart in her throat. It couldn’t be soldiers, couldn’t be the British already, those deadly lines of marching men whose coats had flashed like blood among the brown Virginia woods…

It wasn’t. Through the thin young trees and across the whitewashed railings on the unpaved track grandiosely named Pennsylvania Avenue, Dolley could see two carriages. Their roofs were heaped with roped parcels and their teams were laboring as if the vehicles were jammed with people and goods. Behind them, three men pushed laden wheelbarrows through the dust.

Her hands trembled as she turned back to meet Sophie’s enigmatic gaze. She drew a deep breath, asked, “Marie Antoinette, Queen of France?”

“I don’t imagine it was Marie de Medici. It was a hand-mirror, the kind they make for travelers’ toiletry-sets—it was originally part of one, you know. You’ve seen the sort of thing: brushes and combs, pins in a fancy box, night-light, candles, mirrors, sometimes nightcaps and a nightgown. This one was in gold, with blue enamel and diamonds, and the Queen’s portrait in miniature on the back, and the words—”

“Liberté—Amitié,” Dolley finished, a little breathless. “I know. Mrs. Washington gave it to me, almost the last time I saw her.” Her throat tightened, remembering plump small competent hands in their lace mitts, the bright squirrel-brown eyes. How white her old friend’s skin had seemed against the black of mourning.

“Did she indeed?” Sophie raised her brows. “I’m surprised she let it go again, after all the hands it passed through, to come to her. It was lost, you know, on its way to her. The War was still going on, and the ship the Queen sent it on was captured by British privateers.”

“Martha said it had a story to it, that she’d tell me one day. But after that she was ill. And she never was the same, after the General died. I suppose she’d rather the mirror were saved, than the coffee-set. People were always sending General Washington gifts after the War—I think the coffee-set came from one of the French generals—but the mirror was special, she insisted.” Dolley led the way toward the stairs again, trying to picture in her mind where she had seen that exquisite little looking-glass last. The curio cabinet in the yellow parlor? In among Mr. Jefferson’s seashells and fossils on the glass-fronted shelves in the dining-room that had once been his office?

“The coffee-set was the one she used to serve all the members of that first Congress, after the General’s inauguration as President,” Dolley went on as they descended, into the heavy stillness of the great house. Would Martha have fled? she wondered.

She didn’t think so.

“She told me she could scarcely stand to look at it. Had it not been a gift, she said, she would have taken it out into the yard and broken every piece of it to bits with a poker, and thrown them all down the privy.”

“Good Lord, why?”

“Because of what befell her and her family, when her General became President.” The windows of the great dining-room—formerly Jefferson’s office—faced north onto Pennsylvania Avenue; even with the casements closed, she could hear the voices of the men before the house, the rattle of the carriage-traces and the creak of more wheelbarrows and handcarts being pushed along. A reminder of her peril. Like the Devil constantly whispering, Thou’lt never see Jemmy again.

Would Martha have whispered, And serve him right?

As she opened the cabinet between the windows, swiftly scanned its contents, she went on softly, “ ’Twas Jemmy who brought him —them— out of retirement, after the General swore to Martha and to all the nation no more to meddle in public affairs. It was the end, Martha told me once, of her happiness, and her family’s…and of the General’s as well.”

Out on the Avenue a man detached himself from one of the knots of idlers watching the face of the house, stopped one of the barrow-men. There was a brief dumb-show, arms gesturing, hands pointing back to the gap in the hills, the Bladensburg road.

Dolley’s heart froze. Then the man turned and ran off up the Avenue. The barrow-pusher spat on his hands, picked up the handles of his load again. Two more men from the watching idlers raced away, toward their own houses, their own families, perhaps.

To gather their possessions and flee.

1787

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.