Patriot Hearts (63 page)

“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.

Mist hung over the river, blurred the moon. Martha was fighting for air as Nelly led her out onto the piazza and from there down the lawn to the river, where old Moll already stood with Parke, wrapped in a quilt, in her arms, and Puff running worriedly back and forth around her feet like an agitated milkweed.

“It ain’t got a good hold yet,” predicted the old woman, nodding up at the red glare that now shone behind the mansion house. “That new cook couldn’t bank a fire right if the instructions to do so was written on the chimney-breast. That’s the second fire we’ve had in a year.”

That was true, Martha reflected. But it was also true that the first kitchen fire, back in June, had almost certainly been the work of arson—and it had been at that point that George’s nephew Bushrod, Lawrence, and Wash had met to discuss freeing George’s slaves at the end of the year, rather than waiting for her death.

Hours later, Lawrence finished checking the buildings nearest the kitchen and let Martha, Nelly, and Parke go back upstairs. Charlotte, the headwoman of the plantation, very sensibly boiled water in the little hearth of the room where the sewing-women worked, so that Nelly could make tea, which they drank sitting in the Little Parlor. Parke was already making determined little forays to see what was left of the kitchen: “Cookies,” she said worriedly, knowing the kitchen was the place they came from.

“Are you all right?” Nelly asked Martha, when she finally was allowed to lead her upstairs again. “Would you like me to stay here with you for a little while?”

“I’ll be quite all right, dear, thank you.” Martha sat on the edge of the narrow bed, breathless and a little dizzy from the long ascent. “I should imagine Mr. Jefferson’s supporters are lighting bonfires in the streets of the Federal City tonight in celebration, so why should we be any different?”

But after Nelly left, Martha sat up in bed for a time, listening to the house grow quiet again around her. The house she had known, as intimately as she had known George, like a beloved body against whom she had slept for all those many years. Instead of her breath returning, it grew more stifled, until she was panting, as if she had run a mile instead of simply walked down the slope of the lawn. She felt a kind of soft, pushing sensation in the left side of her chest, as if someone were pressing a heavy hand around the muscle of her heart. Dizziness grayed the light of the single candle, until she lay back, gasping, against the pillows.

Then the sensations faded as swiftly as they’d come, like taking off a garment. Except for the dizziness, and the sensation of not being quite able to get her breath.

It was the climb,
she decided.
The climb up the stairs.

She leaned up on her elbow long enough to pinch out the candle. Even that small effort dropped her back limp.

When she dreamed again, it was of George sitting in the latticed shade of the summerhouse, waiting for that sweet blazing light to return again, and with it the invisible presence, who would lead her back to him.

Mount Vernon

Wednesday, May 5, 1801

“It hath been a most difficult spring for everyone, I see.” Dolley Madison sighed, removing her black kid gloves to accept the tea-cup Martha handed her. “Poor Mr. Madison’s father passed away at the end of February, and Mr. Madison was much taken in settling the estate—and with it, that of his brother Francis, who died this October past. Then he himself took sick—and who could blame him, poor lamb?—with a rheumatism so bad even flannels and temperance could not cure it. And all the while poor Mr. Jefferson like a fly in a tar-box, to have him come and ‘set up the shop.’ Is there aught that I or Jemmy can do, to speed things here or help with the cooking, until the kitchen is restored?”

“It’s good of you to ask, dearest, but no. My granddaughters have the matter in hand.” Martha smiled. “That’s the advantage of an old-fashioned kitchen, you know. If one is cooking over an open hearth, one can do it almost anywhere and get an edible result. I suspect that those English cooks who’ve become completely accustomed to closed stoves and Rumford Roasters would find themselves at a loss if they suddenly had to go back to pot-chains and Dutch ovens.”

She glanced across the Blue Parlor at Nelly and Dolley’s young sister Anna, who had taken it upon themselves to entertain the three Congressmen, a former colonel of the Continental Army and his wife whom Martha barely remembered, and two complete strangers—a married couple from New York City bearing a letter of introduction from Gouverneur Morris—who had turned up at the door of Mount Vernon to “pay their respects” and gape at Washington’s house, Washington’s tomb, and Washington’s widow.

Though Jemmy and Dolley had paid a visit of condolence just after George’s death—in the dead of winter—she had herself been in a state of eerie numbness. It was good to see, among the gawking strangers, a friend she wanted to see.

“Mr. Jefferson intends to have a cooking-stove put in, at any rate,” said Dolley. “Not to speak of modern water-closets, so that dreadful little privy can be torn down, that stands in full view of Pennsylvania Avenue, for all the world to see. Mr. Madison and I are staying with him, until we can find a house of our own.”