Looking back on it, as she went about her morning routine of doling out kitchen supplies of sugar, tea, coffee, and spices from their locked chests—of checking that the women in the weaving-and-spinning rooms were doing their work quickly and neatly—it seemed to Martha that one day she and George had been happy in the sunny world of family and work, and that the next, George was a self-declared traitor, riding away to war against the King.

It hadn’t been that quick, of course.

In the plantation account-books for 1774 and the later half of 1773, she would still find entries in her own handwriting concerning dinners she had no recollection of giving, dresses she had made with her own hands whose cut and color and construction she remembered nothing of.

What she did remember, as if it were only hours ago, was the muggy June afternoon in ’73 that had followed what turned out to be their last morning of that peaceful happily ever after. George’s younger brother John Augustine (“The only one with a lick of sense,” said George) and his family had journeyed from Bushfield Plantation to stay for a few days, to meet pretty Eleanor Calvert, her son Jacky’s intended bride.

That in itself had been a source of tension. On the eve of being sent away to college the previous winter, Jacky—then nineteen years old and determined to profit as little as possible from a succession of tutors and boarding establishments—had announced to his appalled parents that he was engaged to the fifteen-year-old daughter of a Maryland planter. George had managed to talk his stepson out of immediate matrimony, on the grounds that he needed some modicum of education to fit him for the responsibilities due his young bride. And, when Eleanor and her sister Elizabeth had come to visit, the girl turned out to be the sweetest of young ladies, if overly sensitive and rather featherbrained.

Over dinner in the little dining-room—that was long before the big one was built—Martha had mentioned the new sheet-music that had arrived from England for Patcy’s harpsichord. “Oh, do play them for us!” Eleanor cried. “I do so love music and I’m such a fool at it myself. My poor teacher says it’s as if my hands were all thumbs!”

And Patcy had blushed, laughed: “Only if you’ll play with me. I’ll show you how! You’ll have to learn if we’re going to be sisters.” Still smiling she got to her feet—“May I just get my music, Mama?”—took three steps toward the doorway and stopped, her hand going to her throat….

For years Martha dreamed that scene, over and over, as if that fragment of sunny dining-room, of languid June heat and the scents of new-cut hay and baked ham, had somehow become trapped in some secret chamber in her mind into which she wandered, unable to get out. The way her elfin dark-haired daughter stopped in mid-step, thin hand flying up to her throat, and the look of terror and despair that flashed across her face as she understood that another one of her seizures was coming on.

Sometimes in her dreams Martha was able to wake herself up before Patcy fell. Before she began to jerk and spasm like a landed fish dying in air, eyes huge with fright and shame and hands slapping and flinging aimlessly. Before George was on his feet and to her side, his reactions quicker than anyone’s at the table, gathering into his arms the seventeen-year-old stepdaughter who’d always called him “Papa…”

In her dreams Martha screamed. She didn’t remember whether she’d actually done so that afternoon or not.

But in her dreams, when she saw Patcy sag down suddenly limp in George’s arms, her disheveled dark hair tumbling down over his elbow—when she saw George’s face alter from concern to realization and grief—then she would scream, screaming and screaming in the hopes that George would wake her, would hold her against him, would rock her gently while she cried.



Jacky married his Eleanor the following Christmas, of 1773. Martha did not attend the wedding. For many months after Patcy’s death she found even the company of much-loved friends and members of her family more than she could bear. And though Jacky came often to visit her, he had moved to Maryland, to be near his bride’s family. Martha had vague memories of hearing about the ninety thousand dollars’ worth of British-taxed tea that the Massachusetts Sons of Liberty dumped into Boston Harbor, but like many things during that year, it seemed to her no more real than scenes in a play in which a woman named Martha Washington was one of the players.