After dinner Sophie departed in her chaise, and the girls all piled into Eliza’s husband’s extremely elegant open landaulet, with nursemaids and children. It had been a delight, to visit not only with Pattie and Eliza, but to see five-year-old “Toad,” as Nelly called Pattie’s bouncy daughter Elinor, and three-year-old Columbia and Little Eliza, playing and tumbling on the brown winter lawn under charge of their nursemaids, with Nelly’s toddler Parke.

Jacky’s granddaughters.

The heiresses of the Custis estate, which Martha had guarded and husbanded all those decades.

When the carriages were out of sight down the drive, she slipped out of the house, and followed the path worn through the grass of the unscythed lawn, past the smokehouse and the washhouse, the coach-house and the stables, down the steep hill beside the vegetable garden, and so to the brick tomb overlooking the river.

It comforted her beyond measure, to know that he was there.

To know that he wasn’t going to be off to Philadelphia, or Cambridge, or the heights above New York. To know that he wasn’t going to be shot at by the British or hanged for a traitor or exposed to the filthy miasmas that seemed to hang over cities, like angels with burning swords.

He was home.

Mount Vernon was very quiet without him.

With the freeing of his slaves in December, of course, there was almost no work getting done. All George had ever had to do was look at a slave, and they’d hasten to obey. There were more whippings, she thought, and many more threats to sell them to men bound for the richer soils of the western part of the state. Perhaps last summer’s abortive uprising was to blame, but the atmosphere felt ugly around Mount Vernon, and dangerous, even with the early release of those who had previously been scheduled for manumission on her death. Resentment was a stink in her house, like some dead thing, rotting under the floor.

When she walked past the stable-yard, past the clerk’s house—past the place where she’d met George that January afternoon in ’87, when Jemmy Madison had come to talk him into attending the Convention that had blasted all her hopes of peace—she felt the silence and the tension. As she moved about the house in the late afternoons when the light softened and shadows pooled in the corners of the hall, she found herself listening, convinced that the servants were whispering in the gloom. She had not realized how protected she had felt in his presence.

Only out here, on the brick bench beside his tomb, did she feel safe.

Such a silly thought, “safe,” she reflected, blinking at the last shimmer of evening that gilded the treetops on the Maryland shore. Even when she’d genuinely feared that those slaves of George’s who saw her as the obstacle to their freedom would find a way to poison her, she’d kept returning to the thought that it probably wouldn’t be so bad. Then she’d be with George.

And Jacky, and her beautiful Patcy, after all those years.

But mostly what she looked forward to was seeing George again.

She remained where she was, watching the sun go down above the mountains. Remembering all the sweet days of unremarkable peace here, after they’d returned from Philadelphia for that last time in ’97. Crowded years, so that George had been hard-pressed to find time to put his land in order, much less sort through his papers on the Revolution and the years of his Presidency.

For a time Lafayette’s son had lived with them, and his tutor—both of whom had shown signs of falling in love with Nelly. Also living with them was George’s nephew Lawrence Lewis, his sister Betty’s boy, handsome in the strong, quiet way that George had been in his prime. Perhaps because he reminded Nelly of her grandfather—because beneath his air of strength he also had a touching vulnerability—when he, too, fell in love with Nelly, she returned his love.

To further complicate matters, Wash was back with them, too, having dropped out of college. Like his father, he’d gotten engaged to a girl of fifteen, though fortunately nothing came of it. When poor Fanny had finally succumbed to consumption, after less than two years of marriage to Tobias Lear, there had been talk of their four children—Fanny’s three by her first husband Augustine, and Lear’s first wife Pollie’s little Lincoln—joining the household, but Martha had simply refused. George contributed to their support in various boarding-schools, and that had to be enough.

To add to all that, everyone in the country still wanted to simply come and see him. While still President, George had overseen the laying-out of the Federal City on the other side of the river. There was constant coming and going of men engaged in building the President’s House, and the Capitol, and laying out those vast avenues, and of course George could no more resist talking architecture than a drunkard could turn his face from the bottle. When in 1798 it had appeared that the country would go to war with France, an army was called up, and George became once again its Commander in Chief. He was too old to take the field, but he trusted Hamilton and forced Congress to make him second in command, and had spent a good deal of that year in Philadelphia and in the Headquarters at Cambridge.

Nelly and Lawrence had married on George’s sixty-seventh birthday—February 22, 1799—and George wore his old Continental uniform to escort her down the staircase to the wedding in the dining-room.

Good years, Martha reflected, flexing her hands, which lately had shown a distressing tendency to swell so that her wedding-ring cut into her flesh. What there had been of them. Her feet, too, were swollen, and she found that even the short walk down to the tomb brought her breath up short.

She hadn’t told Nelly or Wash about this. If they knew, they’d only discourage her from coming, to this one place in the world where she wanted to be.

Nelly came looking for her, when the last of the daylight faded. Martha found she needed the support of her granddaughter’s arm, going up the steep path to the house. The whitewashed bulk of it seemed to glimmer in the twilight before them, the ground-floor windows gently glowing. It was still hard to remember that he wouldn’t be there when she came inside. She still flinched a little as she passed the shut door of George’s study on the first floor.

She had not crossed the threshold of that room, or of their blue-and-white bedroom above it, for fifteen months, since the night George died.



“I suppose it’s something,” remarked Nelly after supper, “that the country’s passed another election safely—and one with so much ill-feeling and slander.” She shook her head as she picked up Martha’s candlestick, and her own, from the table in the Little Parlor. “I’m sorry Mr. Jefferson won. He’s turned his back on so much of what Grandpapa tried to accomplish. I don’t expect any of us will get many invitations to balls in the Federal City.”