How I wronged them. They needed me, and I wasn’t there.

She’d been gone from home when Nelly was born, too.

She remembered her maid Sal, telling her what she’d heard from the maids in Jacky’s household: that when Jacky’s friends in Alexandria—and any convivial strangers who happened through the town—came for dinner, her son would lift the three-year-old Eliza up onto the dinner-table, and encourage her to sing bawdy songs at the top of her voice for the edification of the men as they drank. Eleanor, so frequently confined to her room, either didn’t know or didn’t have the energy to care.

Jacky was a good boy, Martha told herself sadly. Sweet-natured, though his judgment wasn’t good.

But she knew that, too, was a lie.

She remembered how she had returned from the winter camp at Morristown in 1780 to find her beloved sewing-maid Nan with child. A white man, Nan had stammered, a white man came upon her in the woods beyond the grist-mill. The maid disclaimed all knowledge of who the man was, but had looked away from Martha with fear in her eyes. She would say only, “He said he’d make sure I never saw my family again, if I told.”

When the child was born—Willy, seven now and learning to be a houseboy—he had looked like Jacky. He looked even more like him now.

I should have been here.

But it wasn’t that easy.

In the months before Martha went to Valley Forge, leaving Fanny and Pattie, her own ailing mother, Eliza and Nan and Eleanor all to their fates, word had reached her that the Continental Army had been defeated in battles along the Delaware River. Congress had been driven out of Philadelphia only a day before the British took the city, and the British came within a hair’s-breadth of capturing the Army—and George—after the disastrous counterattack in the fog at Germantown. The year before, they had barely escaped through the streets of New York City as the British were landing on the Battery.

The last she had seen of him, as he’d handed her into the carriage at Morristown and had stood watching her out of sight, might have been indeed the last time she would see him, ever. The good-bye kiss he gave her could have been the final adieu. Even more than the knowledge that he needed her support, what she could not bear was the awareness that she might never see him again.

Each winter that she took from Eliza, and Pattie, and Fanny, was a treasure that she was laying up within her own heart. The treasure of being with him, for what might be the final time.

I could not be two places at once!

Each winter she had chosen. And those winters glimmered back to her now through Eliza’s operatic angers, in Pattie’s wistful clinginess and the note in Fanny’s voice when she would speak of “having a home of our own.” To say nothing, reflected Martha’s more practical side, of the badly kept tangle of plantation records that George was still trying to sort out four years after war’s end, and the terrifying tally of debts.

As the evening grew later, and the men remained talking in the dining-room, the anger congealed to a point of heat behind her heart.

I followed him for eight years. I left behind those who had reason to expect my help.

Does he really need me to remind him, that he laid down the sword of power with the understanding that he would not take it up again?

A Cincinnatus, not a Caesar, he had promised. A farmer and not a ruler of men.



By the end of the War, he could have become a Caesar. The charisma that drew her—and every woman who encountered George—combined with his good sense and calm integrity, to unite, at last, New York men who’d grown up despising Pennsylvanians, Massachusers to whom every Rhode Islander was a thief, South Carolinians who held their noses at the mention of Vermont boys. He had made of them one fighting force. Year by year, she saw how he became the embodiment of the cause that held them together, the cause for which more and more of them risked their lives simply because he was willing to risk his.