inevitable bounty items suitable for Mr. Madison’s delicate digestion. Her clothing held the scents of wood smoke, cinnamon, and baking meats.
“Even though Uncle’s retired, you know he’s still interested in politics. You know how he’s been following all this talk about another convention to straighten things out between the States. Even if he doesn’t go to Philadelphia, he
was
elected as part of the delegation. Of course he’ll want to tell Mr. Madison what to say.”
Fanny gathered up her own shawl from its peg on the wall as she followed Martha into the little hallway at the south end of the house that ran next to the General’s study; even with a fire burning in the study, the hall was brutally cold. In the little parlor behind them, the voices of the children could be heard, reciting their lessons with the stocky young New Englander George had taken on as tutor: Jacky’s children, and restless, noisy Harriot.
Martha’s responsibility, and George’s. With no one to look after them, if they did not.
“Uncle knows how much he’s needed here.” Fanny took her hands, the way Anna Maria used to, when she wanted to coax Martha into letting her do something. “Augustine has told me how deeply in debt we are, because of Uncle being away all those years. And though of course if Augustine had been manager during the War instead of poor Cousin Lund the place would have made money hand over fist—”
“Of course,” responded Martha, stifling a grin in spite of herself. At the start of the War, Augustine had been twelve years old.
“—even he will tell you that any plantation will suffer, if its master isn’t on hand to oversee things in person. Uncle knows this.”
Fanny was so earnest, and so anxious that her favorite aunt be reassured, that Martha gave her a smile which she hoped displayed relief, and laid a small, lace-mitted hand to Fanny’s cheek. “Of course you’re right, dearest. And now don’t you
dare
come out to the kitchen again with me: You’ll catch your death. You should be upstairs resting.”
Fanny’s—and Augustine’s—argument could be made, she reflected, for the entity that had been born in Philadelphia, that wretched sweltering summer only eleven years ago. That the so-called United States of America would suffer, if its master wasn’t on hand to oversee things in person.
And Jemmy Madison had determined that the only master all would obey was George.
There was a great deal about the year before the War that Martha simply didn’t remember.
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
R. C. Farrington, Jason Farrington