Mount Vernon seemed a hundred thousand miles away.
It had rained that afternoon, and the brick pavement of High Street gave back a dense and humid heat. The whole of the summer had been so, wet and dispiriting. Though that had not stopped the mobs that had roved the city streets and waterfronts, either to cheer the arrival of privateers escorting captured British ships to be auctioned off, or to demand that their President declare war on England on behalf of Revolutionary France.
Since April, Martha had dreamed of being locked in a room watching a gunpowder-trail burn toward piled kegs of explosives, helpless to stop it. The situation—not only in Philadelphia, but in all the cities of the United States—was turning George’s hair white. Even the War, she thought, had not been this bad.
And the man behind it—bumptious, obnoxious, and dangerous “Citizen” Édouard Genêt—would almost certainly be at her reception tonight.
He was the Minister of France; she couldn’t very well have the servants throw Genêt out. Much as she’d like to do so.
Dinner was over. In the front of the house—Robert Morris’s house, which both Benedict Arnold and the British General Howe had occupied in turn—the footmen were clearing up the family dining-room. In the kitchen Uncle Hercules, Mr. Hyde, and Mrs. Hyde were in the process of getting coffee, tea, and Martha’s special plum-cake ready for the guests who would begin arriving at eight. Fidas and Austin were putting fresh candles into the sconces and chandelier of the green drawing-room, while Moll made sure twelve-year-old Wash was clean, powdered, and presentable. It was astonishing how disarrayed the boy could get between six and eight o’clock.
In the office next door, Martha could hear George’s light tread as he crossed from desk to window, then back again. Wary and alert as he had been at Cambridge or Valley Forge. Watching the street, over the wall of the garden. Listening for the too-familiar shouting of half-drunken sailors, singing French songs about hanging aristocrats from the nearest lamp-post. The Americans were singing them by rote, she presumed, since most of them didn’t know enough French to ask for water in that language if they were dying. Not that America had many aristocrats to hang, but anybody to whom the singers owed money would do.
But added to the mobs now were the sailors from the French fleet, in port to refit after an attempt to suppress the slave revolts that for two years had been raging in the Caribbean. Citizen Genêt had started his career as Minister Plenipotentiary by coming, not to Philadelphia to present his credentials, but to Charleston, South Carolina. There he had fitted up privateers to prey on British ships, under the French flag. They’d bring the captured ships back to Charleston and auction the cargoes to Americans, who knew no better than to fuel the growing fire of England’s wrath.
For this appalling piece of meddling, Édouard Genêt had been taken to the unwashed bosoms of the working-class political clubs, the so-called “Democratic-Republican Societies” that had sprouted up in every major city, since the start, four years ago, of the Revolution in France.
Tom Jefferson—George’s Secretary of State these days—insisted the clubs were necessary to educate men in the business of making decisions for themselves. Hammy Hamilton—now Secretary of the Treasury—called them “Jacobin clubs,” after the most radical faction of the French National Convention. But they not only discussed politics. More and more, they noisily espoused “fraternal assistance which would expand the Empire of Liberty” (and incidentally bail France out of the dire financial effects of having declared war simultaneously on Britain, Holland, and Spain when her treasury was empty in the first place).
“Fraternal assistance” meant declaring war on Britain again, which even Martha knew the United States simply could not afford to do. When George had issued a Proclamation of Neutrality, the Republicans had followed the French pattern and begun to demonstrate. They demanded that the Proclamation—and, if necessary, the authority of the President—be set aside for the benefit of their beloved France. Genêt’s presence had only served to fan the flames. Upon the arrival of the French fleet in Philadelphia, the Revolutionary Minister had invited its sailors ashore to join the demonstrators.
The sailors had come armed.
Martha might have been completely apolitical, but she knew the situation was a bad one.
She realized she had been listening, too.
No sound from the streets, at least not of shouting or “La Marseillaise.” In the long summer evenings the din of wagons hauling goods in from the docks and of the voices of passersby didn’t quiet down until nearly nine. But she heard her maid’s light tread in the hall outside her door, then the soft tap on the panels and the heavy rustle of velvet and silk that would be her dress for the evening: “Lady Washington?”
“Wait for me, if you would, please, Oney,” she replied, and slipped Fanny’s letter out of sight into a drawer and turned the key on it. “I’m just going to go up and see how Pollie is doing.”
Three years ago, her granddaughters’ plans to marry off their tutor Mr. Lear had finally borne fruit with the arrival of his childhood sweetheart, Pollie Long from New Hampshire. As Tobias Lear had slipped into the role of George’s secretary, so the pretty fair-haired Pollie had become Martha’s. When the capital had moved from New York to Philadelphia the following year—1791—it was Tobias and Pollie who’d come ahead to make sure the Morris mansion on High Street was ready for Presidential occupancy (it hadn’t been), and it was frequently the tactful, gentle Pollie who made sure that Nelly did her lessons and that bread-and-butter letters went out to the Philadelphia hostesses who entertained the President and his family at dinner.
As Martha ascended the back stair that led from the family rooms on the second floor to the offices and bedchambers of George’s secretaries on the third, she heard Tobias’s voice: “…the way the trick riders used to do in ancient Rome, I believe. He rides without saddle, standing on the horse’s back, a lovely gray named Cornplanter…”
By the sound of it, Tobias was keeping Pollie’s spirits up—and her mind off the shouting in the streets—with an account of Mr. Ricketts’s celebrated circus. Pollie had fallen ill three days before, and when her fever was high, the noise of the mobs terrified her. She’d seemed a little better this afternoon, but long experience nursing the sick had taught Martha that fevers frequently shot up as evening drew on.
Her fear was confirmed when she came into the large, light bedroom, and saw Tobias’s face. Pollie turned her head weakly on the pillows. “Lady Washington?”
“How are you feeling, dearest?” Though it was clear by her young friend’s flushed face and restless movements that she was in pain and barely conscious of what was going on around her.
“Lincoln—?” she murmured her little son’s name, and Martha took her hand reassuringly.
“Moll has taken Lincoln down to help her get Mr. Tub ready for the reception, so I imagine he’ll take some dusting off before he can come up to bid you good-night.” Eighteen-month-old Benjamin Lincoln Lear was a general favorite of the household. Since Pollie had taken sick, the boy’d been sleeping in Wash’s room, and Wash had confided to Martha that he was glad to have a little brother to show things to.
“I’ll be up after the reception, to tell you how it all went,” she promised. “In the meantime, I’ll send Moll up with some cool water. I imagine that will make you feel a little better, poor sweet.” Martha had already seen the dishes of rice-pudding and coddled egg, on the tray on the dresser-top, barely touched. “Mr. Lear, I’m sure the General won’t need three secretaries at his side during the reception, so if you’d like to stay here and read to Pollie for a little…You’ll be missed, of course, but it’s entirely up to you to choose. If you want to take a little time at the reception, or just to rest, of course I’ll have Oney come up.”
“I’ll stay here, thank you, Lady Washington.” Tobias got to his feet, to walk her to the door. As they reached it he went on in a softer voice, “She ate nothing of her dinner, and when she uses t
he chamber-pot there are black streaks in her urine. I know that can’t be right.”
“I shall send Fidas with a note now, asking Dr. Rush to come first thing in the morning.”
Tobias pressed her hand gratefully, and Martha hurried down the stairs in a rustle of silk dressing-gown, cursing again the necessity of appearing at a reception—and having to be polite to Citizen Genêt of all people!—when her place was with her family. With Tobias and Pollie, and poor little Lincoln; with Fanny in the house they owned in Alexandria, coping as well as she could with shaky health and new widowhood. It was no surprise poor Fanny was not doing well: Augustine’s death in February had come barely six weeks after that of Fanny’s father.
Those are the people who need me. Those dear ones, and poor Jacky’s girls—she could hear Eliza’s strident voice crying, “Thief, am I? It is you who seek to rob me, of any chance to achieve my happiness in the world!” and knew she’d be called upon to arbitrate who was going to wear Nelly’s garnets to the reception.
There were times, Martha had confessed to Abigail Adams, when she felt herself to be a State prisoner, forced to watch the sufferings of her loved ones through the bars of her jail.
But George needed her, even more than they. He was a man of iron, but Martha had seen what iron looks like, after four years at the mercy of the sea. At least, in her relatively comfortable cell, she didn’t have to be constantly making decisions of peace or war with a gun held to her head.
George was sixty-one years old. In eight years of leading the Continental Army to war, he had been ill only once. In his first eighteen months in the office of President he had nearly died twice, once when the capital was still in New York, of an abscess whose effects he would simply have shaken off back at Mount Vernon, when he was getting enough rest, and then of pneumonia. And despite that, Mr. Hamilton and Mr. Jefferson—whose vicious bickering in the Cabinet had made poor George’s life a living Hell for four years—had both begged George to stand for a second term as President, probably because neither of them could endure the thought of the other possibly coming to power. Martha would cheerfully have assassinated them both and had the servants throw their bodies in the river.
And Jemmy Madison, too, for getting George into this mess in the first place.
And yet as she took her husband’s arm, as muscular in its sheath of black velvet as that of the twenty-six-year-old militia Colonel who had led her to the preacher, thirty-four years ago, Martha had to admit to herself that for the country’s sake, she was glad George had accepted a second term.
She liked John Adams, and the company of his fragile, outspoken, intimidating Abigail had been the only thing that had gotten her through any number of previous receptions. Yet she suspected that the irascible little New Englander would simply have been unable to cope with Citizen Genêt.
“They’re insane! To think that with a single-house legislature the government wouldn’t be torn apart by factions! These political clubs and salons they have—Girondists and Jacobins and Feuillants—all they do is keep the people in a fever—”
“—aristocrats brought it upon themselves, you know—”
“Their treasury is bankrupt! Of course they want the whole of what we owe them paid in a lump—”
Though Martha discouraged politics as a topic of conversation at her receptions, within the first twenty minutes the crowd that gathered in the green drawing-room separated along factional lines like a badly made sauce. The Senators and Congressmen who favored a French alliance and immediate war against Britain—mostly Southerners who mistrusted the strength of the new Federal government and didn’t want to be taxed to pay Massachusetts’s debts—clumped around Thomas Jefferson, who had been Genêt’s champion from the first.
Even in the face of the news in April that the French had killed their King—with a new scientific head-chopping machine, no less!—and had auctioned off locks of his hair from the scaffold, Jefferson would hear no word against the revolutionists in France. The Spirit of Liberty must be served.
“I’ve seen besotted boys less obsessed with their first mistresses, than he with the French,” remarked Alexander Hamilton, eyeing the tall Virginian with loathing across the double parlor. The cocky, golden-haired Headquarters aide whom George loved like a son had put on a little weight since the War, but his dazzling good looks remained. He had gone on to marry one of New York’s richest heiresses, but his interest in money was more than pragmatic. Alex Hamilton was one of the few men Martha had ever met who understood how national finances actually worked. It was his proposals for a National Bank that had put the new nation on the road to solvency.
Jefferson detested him, the Bank, and the powerful central government that was required to make Hamilton’s financial proposals work. Possibly, Martha sometimes thought, this was because Thomas Jefferson was incapable of balancing so much as a household account-book.
“Tom is a man obsessed with Liberty,” said John Adams. “Wherever it may take root.”
“Obsession in any form is deadly,” Hamilton retorted. “It blinds its victims. And personally, I would rather not have a member of our President’s Cabinet listening blindly to the representative of a foreign government that has been trying since 1775 to gain a foothold in our nation’s territory.”
“Hammy,” said Martha firmly, “this is a social occasion, and a man who enters into a political discussion out of season runs the risk of having charges of obsession leveled against himself.” She tapped his elbow with her fan, and gave him her most twinkling smile.
“Lady Washington—” Hammy pointed his toe and made a profound leg. “Your wish as usual is as the Holy Writ to me.” He had a voice like the god Apollo’s would sound, if the deity were trying to talk a woman into bed or a man into the purchase of Bank of New York stock. “Let us confine ourselves rather to a discussion of the new Minister’s utterly deplorable coat. What is it about the Rule of the People that seems to unravel all sense of sartorial propriety?”
“You shall not entrap me into slandering M. Genêt on the grounds of his taste. For all we know, coats such as he wears may be perfectly acceptable in France, as breechclouts are among the savages of the Pacific Islands. Rather, Mr. Adams, tell me how it goes with dear Mrs. Adams. Is she feeling better? Will she be able to return to Philadelphia next year? We have sorely missed her.”
And as Mr. Adams—who despite years as a diplomat had not the smallest talent for social banter—recounted the news and opinions that the always-entertaining Abigail had sent from Massachusetts, Martha let her eye rove over the rest of the drawing-room, as a hostess must. She picked out at once George’s nephew Steptoe, the obstreperous Harriot’s older brother, a handsome boy of twenty-three who’d studied enough law—barely—to get a job with the lean and rather frayed-looking Edmund Randolph, George’s Attorney General.
It was due to his employment with Randolph, Martha presumed, that Steptoe was on the pro-French side of the room. Her nephew’s very proper black velvet suit and powdered hair stood out among the unpowdered locks and less-formal blues and browns favored by that faction. The only other man clothed with perfect formality on that side of the room was little Aaron Burr, newly elected Senator from New York and reputedly the best trial lawyer in that city (though Hamilton also claimed that title). Martha remembered Colonel Burr from Valley Forge. He’d been one of George’s aides for about ten days at Cambridge, before she’d arrived, but had left the General’s household after George came into his tent one day and found the young man calmly reading the papers on George’s desk.
Looking up at her towering nephew, Burr gave the impression that if he took his shoes off he’d have cloven hooves underneath. Martha saw Steptoe hand him something—a note?—which the little man slipped into an inner pocket with a nod and a conspiratorial smile.
Martha sighed. A love-note, no doubt, from some lady of one or the other’s acquaintance. Burr adored his ailing wife, but that apparently didn’t stop him from bedding almost as many w
omen as Hammy did. Steptoe took his meals at the same boardinghouse as Colonel Burr, and Martha earnestly hoped the boy would have better sense than to be led into either vice or those Jacobin clubs whose views the Colonel was said to favor.
On the other hand, she was pleased to see Jefferson had arrived accompanied, not by Citizen Genêt, but by his younger daughter Maria—Mary, the girl had been christened, and only her father still called her Polly these days. A week shy of her fifteenth birthday and delicately pretty, Maria hurried across the drawing-room to clasp Nelly’s hands—they’d been schoolmates in New York and here in Philadelphia—and exchange kisses of greeting, French-fashion, with Eliza and Pattie. In her wake came her cousin Jack Eppes, who was part of Jefferson’s household and acted as a secretary to him.
Indeed, reflected Martha, there were a number of young people here of the next generation: Steptoe, Maria, fourteen-year-old Nelly and her sisters (Eliza still visibly smoldering over Nelly’s claim on the garnets—goodness knew what had become of the pearls that Martha had bought for her at the same time), and Mr. Adams’s youngest son, twenty-one-year-old Tommy, plumpish and amiable and newly fledged as a lawyer. All following in the footsteps of their errant parents, making their lives the best way they could.
It is the next generation, thought Martha, who’ll have to pick up the pieces if we go to war, either with England or, God help us, with France on England’s behalf. It was for them that George had issued his Proclamation of Neutrality, and neither England nor France seemed to understand the meaning of the word: He who is not with me is against me.
“But don’t you see, the French will help us clear the British out of the Great Lakes forts!” Pennsylvania Governor Mifflin’s voice carried over the subdued chatter as footmen, liveried in white and scarlet, came in to light the candles. “They’ve refused for years to live up to the treaty terms that demand them to leave—”
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