Martha had long ago given up wondering whether she would have been different, had she, Martha, been able to raise all four of her grandchildren instead of the younger two when Jacky died.
Now Eliza declared, “I have heard that rather than endure seeing his foe made President, Mr. Adams sneaked out of the city in the dark before dawn on the day of the inauguration.”
“If one is going to catch the public stage from Baltimore to Massachusetts,” said Nelly reasonably, returning, “one had better sneak out of the city in the dark before dawn. Did Mr. Jefferson even think to invite Mr. Adams?”
Sophie said, “I understand Mr. Jefferson—whose inaugural address was perfectly inaudible, by the way—is still in residence at Conrad and McMunn’s Tavern, taking his meals in the ordinary with the other guests.” She leaned to scratch the ears of Nelly’s elderly lapdog Puff, who had come around to sit at Nelly’s feet again in hopes of a tea-cake. “Since I’ve never known him to occupy any building without tearing it down and putting it back together again to suit his fancy, I expect there will be changes in that dreadful Mansion.”
“Will he live in it?” asked Pattie.
“Oh, he’ll live in it,” prophesied Nelly wisely. “It’s all very well to proclaim one’s Republican principles by living in a cottage, but one can’t do one’s work properly in one’s sitting-room. You know how Grandpapa was driven distracted by people coming to see him. Mr. Jefferson shall want offices and some kind of state rooms to receive Ambassadors in. And once he’s got those, whatever he’d replace the current Mansion with would have to be almost as large. And we certainly haven’t seen him building a humble little dwelling at Monticello, have we? The question is, who will receive for him? Mr. Jefferson’s a widower, and I think both of his daughters have too many small children to come here from Albemarle County to look after things. Will it be Mr. Burr’s daughter, then, since he, too, has no wife?”
She glanced at Martha, and Eliza added in her booming voice, “Yes, Grandmama, what would be proper? You were, after all, the first Presidentress. You remain the ultimate arbiter of what is proper in a Republic.”
Martha couldn’t keep from smiling. Mr. Madison and Mr. Jefferson, and Mr. Hamilton, had all labored to bring forth the principles of a Republic. But to the best of her knowledge, only she and George had considered what the actual practices would be. Rather like playwrights who didn’t give a thought to how the scene would be set or performed, as Dolley would have put it, Martha had long suspected that her dinners at Valley Forge had done more to convince the French that they were dealing with civilized reformers rather than wild-eyed King-haters than had any amount of rhetoric.
“Mr. Burr’s daughter was married in February, just before the voting in the Senate began,” said Sophie. “To a rice-planter, from South Carolina, a very wealthy man. So I expect Mr. Jefferson’s hostess will be Dolley Madison, won’t it?”
Martha smiled. “It will indeed.”
Dinner was served at three, as always in Mount Vernon in winter and spring. Nelly saw to it at least that the reduced kitchen staff turned out a respectable meal. To Martha’s disappointed shock, during their last return-journey from Philadelphia to Mount Vernon in March of 1797—in that crowded carriage with Nelly and Puff and Nelly’s parrot, and young George Lafayette and his tutor and Martha couldn’t recall who-all else—their faithful and excellent cook had run away, disappearing into Philadelphia’s community of free colored without so much as a backward glance at the masters who’d been so good to him the whole of his life. His replacement wasn’t nearly as good. Moreover, bills in the kitchen had risen appreciably since he’d taken over, despite all Nelly’s watchfulness.
After dinner Sophie departed in her chaise, and the girls all piled into Eliza’s husband’s extremely elegant open landaulet, with nursemaids and children. It had been a delight, to visit not only with Pattie and Eliza, but to see five-year-old “Toad,” as Nelly called Pattie’s bouncy daughter Elinor, and three-year-old Columbia and Little Eliza, playing and tumbling on the brown winter lawn under charge of their nursemaids, with Nelly’s toddler Parke.
Jacky’s granddaughters.
The heiresses of the Custis estate, which Martha had guarded and husbanded all those decades.
When the carriages were out of sight down the drive, she slipped out of the house, and followed the path worn through the grass of the unscythed lawn, past the smokehouse and the washhouse, the coach-house and the stables, down the steep hill beside the vegetable garden, and so to the brick tomb overlooking the river.
It comforted her beyond measure, to know that he was there.
To know that he wasn’t going to be off to Philadelphia, or Cambridge, or the heights above New York. To know that he wasn’t going to be shot at by the British or hanged for a traitor or exposed to the filthy miasmas that seemed to hang over cities, like angels with burning swords.
He was home.
Mount Vernon was very quiet without him.
With the freeing of his slaves in December, of course, there was almost no work getting done. All George had ever had to do was look at a slave, and they’d hasten to obey. There were more whippings, she thought, and many more threats to sell them to men bound for the richer soils of the western part of the state. Perhaps last summer’s abortive uprising was to blame, but the atmosphere felt ugly around Mount Vernon, and dangerous, even with the early release of those who had previously been scheduled for manumission on her death. Resentment was a stink in her house, like some dead thing, rotting under the floor.
When she walked past the stable-yard, past the clerk’s house—past the place where she’d met George that January afternoon in ’87, when Jemmy Madison had come to talk him into attending the Convention that had blasted all her hopes of peace—she felt the silence and the tension. As she moved about the house in the late afternoons when the light softened and shadows pooled in the corners of the hall, she found herself listening, convinced that the servants were whispering in the gloom. She had not realized how protected she had felt in his presence.
Only out here, on the brick bench beside his tomb, did she feel safe.
Such a silly thought, “safe,” she reflected, blinking at the last shimmer of evening that gilded the treetops on the Maryland shore. Even when she’d genuinely feared that those slaves of George’s who saw her as the obstacle to their freedom would find a way to poison her, she’d kept returning to the thought that it probably wouldn’t be so bad. Then she’d be with George.
And Jacky, and her beautiful Patcy, after all those years.
But mostly what she looked forward to was seeing George again.
She remained where she was, watching the sun go down above the mountains. Remembering all the sweet days of unremarkable peace here, after they’d returned from Philadelphia for that last time in ’97. Crowded years, so that George had been hard-pressed to find time to put his land in order, much less sort through his papers on the Revolution and the years of his Presidency.
For a time Lafayette’s son had lived with them, and his tutor—both of whom had shown signs of falling in love with Nelly. Also living with them was George’s nephew Lawrence Lewis, his sister Betty’s boy, handsome in the strong, quiet way that George had been in his prime. Perhaps because he reminded Nelly of her grandfather—because beneath his air of strength he also had a touching vulnerability—when he, too, fell in love with Nelly, she returned his love.
To further complicate matters, Wash was back with them, too, having dropped out of college. Like his father, he’d gotten engaged to a girl of fifteen, though fortunately nothing came of it. When poor Fanny had finally succumbed to consumption, after less than two years of marriage to Tobias Lear, there had been talk of their four children—Fanny’s three by her first husband Augustine, and Lear’s first wife Pollie’s little Lincoln—joining the household, but Martha had simply refused. George contributed to their support in various boarding-schools, and that had to be enough.
To add to all that, everyone in the country still wanted to simply come and see him. While still President, George had overseen the laying-out of the Federal City on the other side of the river. There was constant coming and going of men engaged in building the President’s House, and the Capitol, and laying out those vast avenues, and of course George could no more resist talking architecture than a drunkard could turn his face from the bottle. When in 1798 it had appeared that the country would go to war with France, an army was called up, and George became once again its Commander in Chief. He was too old to take the field, but he trusted Hamilton and forced Congress to make him second in command, and had spent a good deal of that year in Philadelphia and in the Headquarters at Cambridge.
Nelly and Lawrence had married on George’s sixty-seventh birthday—February 22, 1799—and George wore his old Continental uniform to escort her down the staircase to the wedding in the dining-room.
Good years, Martha reflected, flexing her hands, which lately had shown a distressing tendency to swell so that her wedding-ring cut into her flesh. What there had been of them. Her feet, too, were swollen, and she found that even the short walk down to the tomb brought her breath up short.
She hadn’t told Nelly or Wash about this. If they knew, they’d only discourage her from coming, to this one place in the world where she wanted to be.
Nelly came looking for her, when the last of the daylight faded. Martha found she needed the support of her granddaughter’s arm, going up the steep path to the house. The whitewashed bulk of it seemed to glimmer in the twilight before them, the ground-floor windows gently glowing. It was still hard to remember that he wouldn’t be there when she came inside. She still flinched a little as she passed the shut door of George’s study on the first floor.
She had not crossed the threshold of that room, or of their blue-and-white bedroom above it, for fifteen months, since the night George died.
“I suppose it’s something,” remarked Nelly after supper, “that the country’s passed another election safely—and one with so much ill-feeling and slander.” She shook her head as she picked up Martha’s candlestick, and her own, from the table in the Little Parlor. “I’m sorry Mr. Jefferson won. He’s turned his back on so much of what Grandpapa tried to accomplish. I don’t expect any of us will get many invitations to balls in the Federal City.”
“With Dolley Madison writing the invitations?” Martha raised her brows. “Don’t you think it, dearest.”
They passed in silence through the nursery, where Parke’s old nursemaid Moll dozed in her chair beside the toddler’s bed. At the top of two long flights of stairs, Martha’s maid Caroline waited for them outside the door of the little garret bedroom where Martha slept nowadays. Not as good a maid as Oney had been, Martha thought, with the slight surge of resentful anger at the girl’s brazen escape their last year in Philadelphia—and George had scarcely lifted a finger to get her back even when she was known to be living, bold as paint, in Newburyport!
But then, thought Martha wearily, as Nelly helped her into her nightgown and brushed her long gray hair, so many of their people had been spoiled, living in Philadelphia where they could associate with the free colored of that city. And it had been while they lived in Philadelphia that George himself had started to speak of slavery itself as being unjust, though how he thought he’d get his acres tilled without it she couldn’t imagine.
Another thing that never would have happened, had he remained where he belonged, at home.
Jemmy Madison had a lot to answer for.
“Yes, I’m glad it all worked out, dear,” sighed Martha, as Nelly helped her to bed. “But from everything I hear, the world sounds like it’s growing very strange, and stranger by the day. Goodness knows what will become of the country in four years—or, God forbid, eight—of rule by Mr. Jefferson.”
Sleeping, Martha dreamed of waking on a warm midsummer morning eighteen months ago and going to the dressing-table for her prayer-book, to read by the window’s first glimmer of light. From the bed she heard the sudden creak of the ropes beneath the mattress as George turned over, and then his voice, “Patsie?” And in it, a note that was almost fear.
“What is it?” She hurried back to his side, saw him turn, lay his hand on her pillow as if seeking her. Then he sat up, and under the open throat of his nightshirt she saw him breathing hard, as though he’d been shocked awake, the way his eyes would snap open, panting and alert for years after the War, still listening for the British guns.
He caught her hand in his.
“I am—well,” he said hesitantly. “I think. But I dreamed…” He shook his head, and she could tell, looking into his lined face, that he still saw the images that had burned their way into his sleep.
“It was vivid, as clear as we sit here. We were in the summerhouse, talking—I remember saying to you how happy we are here, and how I look forward now to many more years with you. Then a light came, brilliant, as if the sun had come down to the earth, and through it I saw a figure, beautiful but dim, an angel I thought, standing at your side. It leaned down to whisper in your ear and you turned pale at its words. And then you began to fade away, like a mist dissolving with the coming of day. Then you were gone…and I was alone.”
His stricken eyes met hers. God knew, Martha thought in her dream—as she had thought that morning in 1799—each had seen people die, friends and family: Patcy, Jacky, Fanny, Pollie. Griefs that wrenched the soul and crippled one’s trust in life.
But she saw in his face that the mere concept of living without her was unthinkable to him. His hand clung to hers as if he truly expected that nearly invisible angel shape to enter the bedroom in its numinous cloud of light, to whisper into her ear that he and she would have to part.
Martha laughed, uncertainly but gently, as she would have laughed to soothe a child’s nightmare fear. “ ’Twas only a dream,” she told George. “How many dreams do we dream, that never come to pass? At least I hope I shall never find myself back at the ballroom in Williamsburg wearing only my nightgown, as I dreamed I did the other night!”
“And very stylish I’m sure you were.” He touched her cheek with his palm. The grief did not leave his eyes. “You know how often the outcome of dreams is contrary to what we dream. I fear that it is I who will be obliged to leave you.”
“Well, to be truly contrary, sweetheart, it would be that instead of leaving you in a cloud of light, I shall simply stay,” Martha pointed out in her most reasonable voice. “A dream is a dream, General. It is absurd to make a piece of work over a phantom.”
But it seemed to her now that, without transition, for one moment she was standing in that same place in the blue-and-white bedroom, looking down at him less than six months later, as the doctors carried away the bleeding-bowls from his bed. The slaves’ overseer had bled him at daybreak, that first morning he’d woken with a throat so sore and swollen he could barely breathe or swallow. At nine, when the doctor came, he’d been bled again, and then a third time by another doctor mid-afternoon. In her dream the room stank of blood. Martha didn’t think that in real life the bedchamber had ever been without people in it, but in her dream she stood there alone. Looking down at George’s still face, wax-pale against the blood-daubed linen of the bed.
Whether it was the dream that woke her, or the noise, or the light, Martha didn’t know, but she was abruptly awake in the low-roofed garret room, heart hammering. In the flickering orange reflection that came through the window she could make out the corner of the Franklin stove, the angle of the ceiling, the curved shoulders of the plain wooden chairs.
Orange reflection!?!
Martha scrambled from her bed, flung herself at the garret window. The roof of the covered walkway lay below her, and beyond that the kitchen, flames licking out of its windows.
Dear God, if the walkway goes it will spread to the house!
Scooping up her wrapper, Martha stumbled into the attic’s central hall. Caroline sat up at once in her nest of
pallet and blankets on the floor—“What—?”
But Martha was already across the hall, hammering on the door. “Wash? Wash! Caro, wake Mr. Lewis, the kitchen’s on fire—”
Caro said, “Lord God!” and was down the attic stairs like a hare. Wash emerged from his room a moment later, hair hanging in his eyes.
“The kitchen’s on fire!” Martha panted, and hurried back into her bedroom and to the window, to see the nightgowned shape of their overseer, Mr. Rawlins, and half a dozen other shadows come running from the darkness toward the quarters…
And what she could almost, but not quite, swear was that another shape darted out of the kitchen and vanished into the night.
Mr. Rawlins was shouting in a voice like a bronze gong. Martha could see the slaves forming up a bucket-line from the well behind the washhouse, and downstairs she could hear Puff barking wildly, Parke wailing in terror. Lawrence’s valet cried somewhere, “Come on, Mr. Lewis, just another step,” as he tried to coax his half-stupefied master down the stairs.
Nelly almost fell through the door, dark braids flying behind her and giving her the look of the schoolgirl she’d once been. “Grandmama, come on. If it spreads—”
“How bad is it?”
Nelly shook her head. She must have just been waked herself, thought Martha, as she let her granddaughter lead her to the stair. Had the fleeing figure been just her imagination? Or would morning reveal there’d been runaways under cover of the confusion, runaways whose parents or brothers or sisters or sweethearts had been freed by the General’s will, and forced to leave?
Outside, the stench of the smoke was overpowering, as buckets of water were hurled into the burning kitchen and onto the near end of the walkway’s roof. Though the mansion house was painted and cut to look like stone, it was wood: If wind-carried sparks ignited the roof, the blaze would be almost impossible to put out.
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