Wintering in New Jersey and Pennsylvania and New York, not returning to Mount Vernon until summer firmed up the roads. In 1776 that had not been until almost harvest, so she’d still been in Philadelphia in July, to hear the church bells tolling and men shouting in the streets that Congress had proclaimed the colonies’ independence from Britain.

That was the summer Eliza had been born. The girl’s face, already bearing the promise of a fleshy beauty, was restless and discontented as she bent over her sewing: a neglected child from the outset, trying with tantrums to make herself heard. Eleanor had been ill and depressed after the birth, and Martha, who would naturally have stepped in to care for both her and the child, was still in Philadelphia. How different would Eliza be now, had she not spent her first three months in the care of a succession of slave nurse-girls not much older than eight?

On New Year’s Eve of ’77, when Pattie had been born, Martha had been packed already to leave for winter camp. Only a week before Pattie’s birth, in the midst of caring for the bedridden Eleanor at Mount Vernon, word had reached Martha of the death of her sister Anna Maria, her most dear and treasured friend.

On her deathbed, Anna Maria had asked her family to send word to Martha, that Martha was to take in her daughter Fanny, barely turned eleven. “Raise her as your own,” she had whispered.

Martha had refused. Three weeks later, she’d gotten into the carriage, to go to the camp in Pennsylvania. Because George needed her, and she needed George.

Fanny had been sent instead by her grief-stricken, elderly father to the care of whichever relatives could fit an extra girl into their households. Eleanor, withdrawn into her world of shadows and pain, had been left with Jacky, who was completely useless around the sick. Tiny Pattie and sixteen-month-old Eliza were again relegated to the care of such girls as were too young to be employed in the fields.

Throughout the bitter winter in that awful little stone house at Valley Forge, Martha remembered now, she had dreamed about them. Or, worse, had dreamed about Patcy. Dreamed that she’d left a baby girl somewhere—set her down in the woods or the stable or the house and wandered away—and was searching for her, frantically trying to get her back before night fell.

From that dream Martha would wake to freezing blackness, to the drums of reveille in the camp and the clack of flint and steel as George knelt by the hearth: it never took George more than one or two strikes to get a fire going. Aaron Burr, General Putnam’s dapper young aide, used to say that all George had to do was look at the kindling, for flame to spring to life. It wouldn’t dare do otherwise.



Across the parlor now she considered them, in the comforting glow of candles and firelight and happily ever after. Fanny so exactly like Anna Maria, smiling at Nelly’s grave plans to find a sweetheart for her tutor. Eliza stitching away on an extravagantly embroidered crimson petticoat and detailing to her sister her plans for a career on the stage, while Pattie more prosaically knitted stockings. Harriot, stitching on the other side of the fire as far from Eliza as she could get, looked scornful but knew better than to get in a quarrel with her cousin when Martha was in the room.