Read Patriot Hearts for Free Online

knitting stockings for the men.” He kissed her again. “Baron von Steuben could have used you on the drill-grounds at Valley Forge.”
    “His Lordship would have been less impressed with my talents if he’d ever tried to out-shout my brothers and sisters.” Martha reached up to take his arm. “Mr. Madison is here.”
    She watched his face as she spoke, her voice carefully neutral. Saw how the muscles in his jaw hardened, and how for a moment his eyes took on the faraway look of a man who scans the invisible horizon of the future, for what he hopes he will not see.
    Knowing how he hated to be pressed on matters about which he hadn’t made up his mind, she immediately went on, “I’ve put him in the blue bedroom and his man in the attic, but he says he must ride on at once in the morning, though I did tell him that Doll’s back has been warning her since yesterday of more snow on the way. Why is it that men will believe a barometer, when they mostly have
no
idea how it works—
I
certainly haven’t—and will not believe a perfectly trustworthy human being whose back
always
begins to hurt twenty-four hours before the onset of a storm? Fanny came up with Augustine this morning, and considering how bad the weather has been, would it perhaps not be better if they moved back into the house with us, at least until the baby comes? I’m sure that cottage of theirs isn’t nearly warm enough for an infant.”
    George nodded as they entered the house. Billy had hot water, clean clothes, the powdering-cloth and powder-cone ready in the dressing-room. While George changed, Martha kept up the soft light chatter of the small inconsequences of the day: A letter had come from their lawyer in Port Tobacco. Austin the coachman’s wife was laid up with rheumatism again. Harriot had ruined yet another petticoat and gotten stains of ink and mud on her yellow dress: “Honestly, the way that child destroys everything she touches it’s no wonder your poor brother died insolvent! I’ve put her to mending her own petticoats when she tears them but I’m not sure what to do about the dress…. Oh, and we’ve had a letter from the headmaster in Georgetown. Steptoe is doing a little better but Lawrence is definitely Harriot’s brother, only for him it’s books he demolishes, not dresses! And both boys sneaked away last week to go sailing….”
    And as she spoke she continued to observe his face. He was usually silent while she chattered—he’d once likened her and Anna Maria’s family gossip to the voices of birds in the spring woods—but she could see today his thoughts were only partly on what she said. January was the time for planning next year’s crops, for estimating seed and guessing what the markets in Europe, in New York, in England would bear: an anxious time. Tobacco prices had never been the same since the War, and like many other places in the Tidewater, Mount Vernon’s ability to produce quality tobacco had declined. In addition to the financial disarray left by eight years of absence during the War—not to mention having come within a hair’s breadth of having the house burned to the ground by British warships—they owed considerable money to British tobacco-factors from before the War. All planters did. That was part of the ongoing squabble in Congress.
    Money for farm equipment and carriages. Money for dishes and corsets and paint, for window-glass and paper, medicine and tea. Every book in the library had come from England, and most of George’s guns. Prior to the War, it had been the only way to live. The planter wrote the factor to buy a plow, the factor bought one and billed the planter, and took out the cost of the plow when the next year’s tobacco-crop came in. They’d fought the War, in part, because England’s laws forbade the colonists from seeking cheaper Dutch and French goods: It was the function of colonies to support their Mother Country. And though they’d theoretically won the War,