Sal’s measured footfalls in Nelly’s bedroom on the other side of the wall, and the scratch of her broom on the bare pine floors. The faint clinking as Caro gathered up chamber-pots to bear down the backstairs and out to the scullery. The creak of bedropes and the dawdling tread of the young girls—Sinah and Annie—as they passed and repassed, making up the beds. Taking their time: From childhood Martha had understood that it was useless to expect any slave, from the lowest field-hand up to house-servants like George’s valet Billy and her own dear Nan, to hurry. It drove the General frantic. He’d take his watch out to the fields and time the men at their tasks, trying to arrive at new methods to make the work go more efficiently. The men in the fields, the women in the weaving-rooms, would merely look at him when he’d explain how they could actually accomplish twice as much in the same amount of time, increasing the productivity of the plantation…

And would then go back to doing as they’d always done.

Their voices came to Martha in snatches, since they spoke quietly, respecting her hour of peace. She heard Mr. Madison’s name, and the phrase, “…the blue bedroom.” Had their visitor been only a messenger, the man would have been accommodated in the attic room next to that of the children’s tutor, young Mr. Lear. Harriot’s footsteps galloped wildly up the main stair, vibrating the house, with Nelly’s a swift-pattering echo.

“Is Uncle going to Philadelphia?” demanded Harriot. “Do you think he’ll take us? We never get to go anywhere, and I’m so bored with Mr. Lear’s lessons I could scream!”

“Well, don’t scream in the house,” responded Nelly, two years younger and sounding like the elder by several years. “Sal, I’m sorry, did you see Harriot’s copybook up here? It’s not down in the parlor.”

“I ain’t seen it, child—”

“I told you, Wash took it! Wash is always taking and hiding things!”

Seven-year-old George Washington Parke Custis was Nelly’s brother, known throughout the family as Mr. Tub. The footsteps retreated, out of the bedroom and down the stairs; Martha reflected that more probably Harriot herself was the culprit. Her own son—Daniel’s son—Jacky would do the same thing, many years ago in those peaceful days when he and Patcy were schoolchildren, “losing” his copybook or hiding it and blaming poor Patcy for its theft, with no other purpose than to delay or disrupt unwanted lessons. Of course, Wash was more than ready to pilfer copybooks on his own, or do whatever was necessary to disrupt lessons, being no more of a scholar than his father Jacky had been.

Martha smiled to herself even as she sighed with exasperation at her child, her grandchildren, George’s obstreperous niece.

THIS is my world. Family and home, children growing up and bearing children of their own. Fanny’s first was due in March, and Eleanor, Jacky’s widow, was expecting yet again by her second husband Dr. Stuart…. Something would have to be done about introducing Jacky’s oldest daughter Eliza into society when the time came, if Eleanor continued to be so preoccupied with her second family. Though there was plenty of time to think of that.

This was the world Martha would have chosen, if offered every fairy-tale realm from Camelot to the Moon and the splendors of Egypt and Rome. Mount Vernon in the quiet of winter, with the fields bare and the woods and lawn patched with snow. George riding out wrapped in his Army coat to survey the fields for next spring’s plowing, his dapple gelding puffing smoke through its nostrils like a dragon.

A world of mending and knitting, of black icy mornings rank with the smell of wood smoke from the kitchen. Of the soft chatter of the women in the weaving-room by candle-glow and firelight, of counting out bulbs and seeds and planning next year’s garden.

A world where in earlier years her sister Anna Maria or her brother Bart or George’s brothers or sister or the Fairfaxes or the Masons from across the river would ride over for dinner and a few days’ stay or a few weeks’. A world where she’d be waked in the dark of predawn by George’s soft-footed rising and the soft clank of the poker as he stirred up the fire, so that the bedroom would be warm for her.

That world had been theirs for seventeen years, all the “happily ever after” she’d ever wanted. There had been the recurring worry about her daughter Patcy’s seizures, which the shy, beautiful girl had suffered from childhood. But somewhere, Martha had always felt—perhaps in England—there must exist a cure. At the time it had seemed to her that these days of happiness would go on forever, until she and George were old.

But they had lasted only seventeen years.



The mantel-clock struck ten. It was time to get up, and go downstairs, and ask Fanny in the most natural-sounding voice she could contrive, “Who was that, whose horse I heard in the drive?”