Patriot Hearts by Barbara Hambly Page A

troops.
    Politics and social maneuvering aside, it was Martha’s nature to want people to be comfortable. And she knew that comfort, especially in times of stress, depended to a large degree on things being organized and meals being served hot and on time.
    Thus her Headquarters life felt like a curious extension of what she’d always done without thinking. The routine of a plantation mistress fit weirdly well into the context of war. And as a plantation mistress, Martha was as accustomed to looking out for the common soldiers as she was to smoothing things over between George and his officers. Her days at Cambridge—and on the New Jersey heights above New York the following winter, and at Valley Forge the winter after that—were spent in organizing the women of the district into committees to make clothing and knit stockings, as she did during the summers at home, and in visiting the men in their shelters or in the camp hospital with such small and necessary gifts. Even the men who growled about George’s readiness with the lash came around, at first simply because they needed the stockings, and then when they began to observe for themselves that their General was absolutely consistent in his rules and his punishments. He played no favorites, he listened to both sides of every case, he never held back their pay or sold their rations for his own profit. He had no hidden end beyond keeping the Army together and in the field. He raged and swore as much as they did against the Congress and the States who expected them to fight well-fed professional troops with no food in their bellies and no powder in their guns.
    And eight years passed.

    As Martha stitched the microscopic hems of a shirt-ruffle for Wash, by the glow of the work-candles Frank brought into the West Parlor, she saw in the faces of her granddaughters and niece the reflection of those eight years.
    Wintering in New Jersey and Pennsylvania and New York, not returning to Mount Vernon until summer firmed up the roads. In 1776 that had not been until almost harvest, so she’d still been in Philadelphia in July, to hear the church bells tolling and men shouting in the streets that Congress had proclaimed the colonies’ independence from Britain.
    That was the summer Eliza had been born. The girl’s face, already bearing the promise of a fleshy beauty, was restless and discontented as she bent over her sewing: a neglected child from the outset, trying with tantrums to make herself heard. Eleanor had been ill and depressed after the birth, and Martha, who would naturally have stepped in to care for both her and the child, was still in Philadelphia.
How different would Eliza be now, had she not spent her first three months in the care of a succession of slave nurse-girls not much older than eight?
    On New Year’s Eve of ’77, when Pattie had been born, Martha had been packed already to leave for winter camp. Only a week before Pattie’s birth, in the midst of caring for the bedridden Eleanor at Mount Vernon, word had reached Martha of the death of her sister Anna Maria, her most dear and treasured friend.
    On her deathbed, Anna Maria had asked her family to send word to Martha, that Martha was to take in her daughter Fanny, barely turned eleven. “Raise her as your own,” she had whispered.
    Martha had refused. Three weeks later, she’d gotten into the carriage, to go to the camp in Pennsylvania. Because George needed her, and she needed George.
    Fanny had been sent instead by her grief-stricken, elderly father to the care of whichever relatives could fit an extra girl into their households. Eleanor, withdrawn into her world of shadows and pain, had been left with Jacky, who was completely useless around the sick. Tiny Pattie and sixteen-month-old Eliza were again relegated to the care of such girls as were too young to be employed in the fields.
    Throughout the bitter winter in that awful little stone house at Valley Forge, Martha remembered now, she had