Patriot Hearts (59 page)

And if the current condition of Mount Vernon was any indication, Abigail reflected, there wasn’t much to be said about young Wash Custis, either.

Would any of the long-dead Jacky Custis’s children have been different—happier or more capable of finding happiness—had the matriarch of the family chosen to rule the family instead of follow her husband and her heart?

“Men, and women, become what they become.” In the frame of Martha’s cap—black gauze, as all her clothing was of deepest mourning for the General, who had not yet been a year in his brick-lined tomb—her pale plump face and white hair were a pretty echo of the woman Abigail had first met that chaotic winter in Cambridge almost twenty-five years before.

“We can help them—guide them—but their own basic natures
will
emerge. And when all is said, I think we have little to do with it. I wish it weren’t that way,” she added with a sigh, and a glance toward the parlor door. “But I suspect that it is.”

Though it was almost noon, young Wash Custis—it had taken Abigail a moment to recognize the tall young man who’d answered the door—still loitered in the paneled hall, talking horses with Nelly’s cousin-husband. Little as Abigail approved of slave-labor plantations, she’d had enough conversations in Paris with Tom Jefferson to know that unless the planter himself
—not
simply an overseer—rode his acres and checked everyone’s work, work would not get done.

And by the look of it, a great deal of work was not being done at Mount Vernon.

Or had it always been this unkempt?

When her carriage from the Federal City had topped the little rise before Mount Vernon, Abigail’s first thought had been that same sense of completion that she’d experienced on seeing Westminster Abbey for the first time, or Notre Dame de Paris:
So
this
is what it actually looks like.

Martha had described the long white “mansion house” to her many times, as they sat stiffly side by side, smiling as guests were presented, but it was good to see her friend’s home at last.

The place of which President Washington had spoken with such profound love. The place to which he and Martha had so longed to return.

Now, at last, he was finally here to stay.

And, Abigail suspected, Martha as well.

Unscythed grass grew rank in what had to have been the bowling green Martha had spoken about. Weeds choked the little oval of lawn before the door. Even two weeks in the Federal City had served to inform Abigail that in addition to not talking about things they didn’t want to talk about, Southerners as a rule seemed to have far lower standards of tidiness than Abigail was used to. Conditions prevailing in the kitchen of the Presidential mansion—not to mention in the potholed, muddy gravel-dump that surrounded it—made her wonder what Monticello was really like.

Was it as untidy as this, and Jefferson simply hadn’t noticed?

Or were the dilapidated buildings she saw here, the peeling paint and broken window-panes, simply the measure of Martha’s grief?

Wash Custis had answered the door because when Jamey Prince—that same free colored servant to whose education the neighbors had so objected—had knocked, no slave could be found to admit Abigail. “Likely they’re in the kitchen, or playing cards in the tack-room,” Wash had grumbled. “I’ll catch ’em a lick for it!”

Nelly, Abigail had noticed, was the one who’d hurried away to bring more hot water for the tea and meringues from the kitchen.

“Since the General died,” Martha apologized now as Nelly rose again and rustled from the room, “it seems that nothing gets done around here anymore. I know I ought to keep the servants at their work, but it somehow seems more trouble than it’s worth.

“He freed them, you know,” she went on, her dark eyes filling with tears. “
Freed
them! I can’t
imagine
what he was thinking.”

Startled, Abigail said, “He never…I mean, he would not have left you without servants, surely!”

“But he
did
! His will said they were to be freed at my death—his own Negroes, of course, not those belonging to the Custis estate. But Wash thinks—” She lowered her voice, and glanced around her in the way Abigail had seen all slave-owners glance, for fear of eavesdroppers in their own houses. “Well, especially with the rumors of an uprising this past summer. Wash thinks that perhaps it would be…be
safer…
if they were all freed next year.”

Abigail’s eyes widened at the implications of this and she traded a startled glance with Louisa. But Martha’s thoughts had already returned to her friend’s pain, as if it was the most ordinary thing in the world, to fear members of one’s own household.

“Truly,” she said in her gentle voice, “there is nothing for which you need reproach yourself, dear. I’ve never been as dutiful toward our country as you have, but I knew the General needed me, every bit as much as I needed him. And John needs you, not just to know that you’re keeping things safe at home, but by his side. Men—even the strongest men—need someone’s hand to hold in the middle of the night, bless them. We made our choices. And your Charley, poor boy, made his.”

Abigail was silent. Nelly returned, carrying a green-and-cream French tea-pot with more hot water from the spirit-lamp in the pantry. She was clothed like her grandmother in sable crape that left black smudges on the faded blue woodwork of the West Parlor. Though the pretty, dark-haired young woman was married now and a mother herself—and, Abigail guessed with a shrewd glance at her figure, getting ready for a second child sometime next summer—she still seemed very much the precocious schoolgirl who had poured tea at the receptions in the Morris mansion. The favorite granddaughter still, rather than any man’s adult wife.

Nelly, too, it appeared, had made her choice.

“You treated them all alike,” Martha reminded Abigail. “Now Johnny is Minister to Prussia and may be President himself one day. Had your children grown up with a mother whose heart and mind were elsewhere—or in a country that had just
lost
a war with England—would they have been better off?”

Abigail whispered, suddenly wretched, “I don’t know.”

“No one knows, dearest,” said Martha. “We go where our hearts command us, in the faith that it is God who formed our hearts.”

Before they left, Abigail took from her pocket, and pressed into Martha’s hand, the small box that had been waiting for her at the President’s House when she had arrived the day before yesterday: “What is it?” Martha asked, astonished. And then, “Oh, how beautiful!” as she took from the wrappings the small bright circle of a gold-framed mirror, and the cold, tiny fire of diamonds winked in the pale sunlight.

“It’s something that belongs to you,” replied Abigail, smiling at the pleasure in her friend’s eyes. “And has rightfully belonged to you for eighteen years now.”

Martha looked up, surprised, from trying to read the engraving traced on the rim. Abigail’s eyes hadn’t been good enough to decipher it without her spectacles, either, but she knew it said
Liberté—Amitié.
“Dear Heavens, not the Queen’s gift, after all this time?” And she turned it over, to look at the ostrich-plumed portrait on the back.

“A part of it, I believe—Sophie believes,” Abigail added. “She sent it to me, to ask what should be done with it: Did it rightly belong to you, or to the nation? She came by it from a New York friend—” Privately, Abigail suspected Aaron Burr…and suspected that he and Mrs. Hallam were rather more than friends. “—and would have thought nothing of it, she says. But when she was in Paris she was friends with that little slave nursemaid of Mr. Jefferson’s—a dear good-hearted girl but never about when you needed her—and they still correspond.”

For a moment Martha looked as if she had something to say on the subject of anyone so foolish as to teach a slave to read, but then, as if recalling Mr. Jefferson’s known eccentricity, did not.

Which was just as well, thought Abigail. She went on, “Apparently the girl reminded her that they’d seen
nécessaires de voyage
of the kind at a shop in the Palais Royale—with night-lights, combs, that sort of thing—and that the proprietor had boasted of crafting the one the poor Queen sent to you in some kind of lavish casket in 1782. She ordered it set with her portrait surrounded by diamonds, he said, and engraved:
Liberté—Amitié.
And I do think this must have come from it, wherever the other bits have gone.”

Martha turned it again, the gold sparkling in the firelight. In a moment, thought Abigail, she’d call Nelly and Louisa over to admire it. But for an instant longer the old woman held it to herself, looking into its depths as if within them she could see 1782 again: the General alive, her niece Fanny alive, the French Queen herself and so many others still alive. Charley safely home from Europe and happy again with his family. The bloody consequences of Revolution and the bitter exhaustion of dreams shattered still wool unspun on Fate’s distaff. A year when “happily ever after” was still in sight.

“As you weren’t the Presidentress in 1782,” Abigail went on, “I don’t see how this can belong to the nation. It was simply a gift from one woman to another.”

From the last Queen of a kingdom that no longer existed, she thought, to the first hostess—the first consort—of a nation that, in 1782, had yet to be born.

“So all things do come in time to where they’re meant to be,” Martha murmured. “No matter what happens to us in the meantime. Thank you, dear. I’ll keep this, and look at it whenever I need to remember.”

“Is she all right?” Abigail asked Sophie, as the widow’s black driver helped her into Abigail’s carriage.

“As well as can be expected.” Years, matrimony, and bereavement didn’t seem to have changed Sophie much. She appeared little altered from her days of advising Abigail on the purchase of inexpensive ambassadorial china in Paris. Those cool eyes still regarded the world—or at least the United States—with amused derision. “She took the General’s death very hard. And since those years when the capital was in New York she’s never been really well.”

“Who among us has?” Abigail drew her own thick collection of black shawls and cloaks more tightly about her narrow shoulders. “I swear there was something in the air of that city that gave everyone who lived there an ague. I’ve certainly never gotten over it.”

For a moment an elusive expression flickered on Sophie’s face: Abigail almost had the impression she was about to say,
Served the traitors right.
But she said instead, “I doubt this new ‘Federal City’ will prove more healthily situated. My father always said these Potomac lowlands bred fevers. I suppose it’s well enough now, when every house is at least half a mile from its nearest neighbor and there’s room for air to circulate. But how it will answer in the future, to have built a city for the enrichment of Southern land-speculators, remains to be seen.”

“Had they not,” replied Abigail, “the government would even yet be at a standstill while they squabbled over payment of the Virginians’ debts to the English—I think that’s how the deal was worked.”

“It is how all such deals are worked,” answered Sophie, with her sidelong cynical smile. “I suppose the placement of the Parthenon in Athens had something to do with which Archon’s brother-in-law owned the land it was to stand on.”

As they crossed the ferry to Georgetown the wind blew up with a bitter chill, though the day remained clear and bright. Abigail shivered, and Louisa pulled up the lap-robe more closely around her. The gray stone houses of the little tobacco-port looked bleak among the bare trees. Beyond the new wooden bridge the woods closed in, the carriage-team floundering in the soupy ruts. “On our way here we were lost for two days, trying to find our nation’s capital,” remarked Abigail drily. “I shall suggest to Mr. Adams that funds be asked from Congress for signposts.”

“One must admit, though, it’s a beautiful situation for a city.” Louisa folded her gloved hands. “And it is indeed a new thing in the history of the world, to have a capital city purpose-built for a new nation, instead of taking history’s hand-me-downs. There is much to be said for that. I expect,” she added, as the carriage emerged from the brown-and-silver shadows of the woods, “it will be beautiful in spring.”