Martha had described the long white “mansion house” to her many times, as they sat stiffly side by side, smiling as guests were presented, but it was good to see her friend’s home at last.

The place of which President Washington had spoken with such profound love. The place to which he and Martha had so longed to return.

Now, at last, he was finally here to stay.

And, Abigail suspected, Martha as well.

Unscythed grass grew rank in what had to have been the bowling green Martha had spoken about. Weeds choked the little oval of lawn before the door. Even two weeks in the Federal City had served to inform Abigail that in addition to not talking about things they didn’t want to talk about, Southerners as a rule seemed to have far lower standards of tidiness than Abigail was used to. Conditions prevailing in the kitchen of the Presidential mansion—not to mention in the potholed, muddy gravel-dump that surrounded it—made her wonder what Monticello was really like.

Was it as untidy as this, and Jefferson simply hadn’t noticed?

Or were the dilapidated buildings she saw here, the peeling paint and broken window-panes, simply the measure of Martha’s grief?

Wash Custis had answered the door because when Jamey Prince—that same free colored servant to whose education the neighbors had so objected—had knocked, no slave could be found to admit Abigail. “Likely they’re in the kitchen, or playing cards in the tack-room,” Wash had grumbled. “I’ll catch ’em a lick for it!”

Nelly, Abigail had noticed, was the one who’d hurried away to bring more hot water for the tea and meringues from the kitchen.

“Since the General died,” Martha apologized now as Nelly rose again and rustled from the room, “it seems that nothing gets done around here anymore. I know I ought to keep the servants at their work, but it somehow seems more trouble than it’s worth.

“He freed them, you know,” she went on, her dark eyes filling with tears. “Freed them! I can’t imagine what he was thinking.”

Startled, Abigail said, “He never…I mean, he would not have left you without servants, surely!”

“But he did! His will said they were to be freed at my death—his own Negroes, of course, not those belonging to the Custis estate. But Wash thinks—” She lowered her voice, and glanced around her in the way Abigail had seen all slave-owners glance, for fear of eavesdroppers in their own houses. “Well, especially with the rumors of an uprising this past summer. Wash thinks that perhaps it would be…be safer… if they were all freed next year.”

Abigail’s eyes widened at the implications of this and she traded a startled glance with Louisa. But Martha’s thoughts had already returned to her friend’s pain, as if it was the most ordinary thing in the world, to fear members of one’s own household.

“Truly,” she said in her gentle voice, “there is nothing for which you need reproach yourself, dear. I’ve never been as dutiful toward our country as you have, but I knew the General needed me, every bit as much as I needed him. And John needs you, not just to know that you’re keeping things safe at home, but by his side. Men—even the strongest men—need someone’s hand to hold in the middle of the night, bless them. We made our choices. And your Charley, poor boy, made his.”

Abigail was silent. Nelly returned, carrying a green-and-cream French tea-pot with more hot water from the spirit-lamp in the pantry. She was clothed like her grandmother in sable crape that left black smudges on the faded blue woodwork of the West Parlor. Though the pretty, dark-haired young woman was married now and a mother herself—and, Abigail guessed with a shrewd glance at her figure, getting ready for a second child sometime next summer—she still seemed very much the precocious schoolgirl who had poured tea at the receptions in the Morris mansion. The favorite granddaughter still, rather than any man’s adult wife.

Nelly, too, it appeared, had made her choice.

“You treated them all alike,” Martha reminded Abigail. “Now Johnny is Minister to Prussia and may be President himself one day. Had your children grown up with a mother whose heart and mind were elsewhere—or in a country that had just lost a war with England—would they have been better off?”

Abigail whispered, suddenly wretched, “I don’t know.”

“No one knows, dearest,” said Martha. “We go where our hearts command us, in the faith that it is God who formed our hearts.”



Before they left, Abigail took from her pocket, and pressed into Martha’s hand, the small box that had been waiting for her at the President’s House when she had arrived the day before yesterday: “What is it?” Martha asked, astonished. And then, “Oh, how beautiful!” as she took from the wrappings the small bright circle of a gold-framed mirror, and the cold, tiny fire of diamonds winked in the pale sunlight.