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hurricanes that swept the island of Bermuda, where he had gone in quest of elusive health, while at the foot of the table, the tutor Tobias Lear was explaining some aspect of fortress-building to Wash. Fanny, pale and lovely in the voluminous flowered shawl that concealed her pregnancy, put in the observation that battlements were all very well, but what were the defenders going to do if the attackers managed to enlist a dragon or an evil wizard on their side?
    Her family. Hers and George’s. All that was left to them of the children they had so dearly loved.
    He had abandoned them once, to go and do his duty as men must do in troubled times.
    The guilt that pierced her heart was that she had abandoned them, too; her only regret was the price they’d paid. The price she’d let these children pay, for her love of George.

    George’s letter had reached her just before her departure in October of 1775 for Eltham Plantation, to visit Anna Maria. Eltham was where the War really started, for her. All the way down from Mount Vernon to Eltham, six days’ jolting by coach, Martha’s heart had turned and twisted like a fish fighting a hook, trying to determine in which direction her duty lay.
    …I ask whether it will be convenient to you, to join me at the camp in Cambridge this winter….
    The words had had the exact effect upon her as a glass of brandy: shock, elation, warmth that rose from her toes to the ends of her hair.
    To the surprise of no one except those who’d thought themselves more qualified for the position—a largish group which included the Washingtons’ neighbor Colonel Horatio Gates and the head of the Massachusetts Sons of Liberty, John Hancock—George had been made Commander in Chief of the new Continental Army. General Charles Lee
—no
relation to the Virginia Lees—had sneered that this had had much to do with the fact that George had attended every Congressional session wearing his militia uniform, the only man there to do so.
    Having met General Lee, a former mercenary whose mouth was as filthy as his shirt, Martha could only suppose that this was what the man would have done himself, had anyone elected him to Congress or to anything else.
    And knowing George, Martha guessed that in a way Lee was right. George had worn his uniform for the same reasons that he would have worn his best clothing and hair-powder to an assembly of men empowered to elect him to the House of Burgesses: because he knew that what a man is given depends largely on what he looks like he can handle. He had worn his uniform precisely to underscore in every delegate’s mind that he had field experience in commanding men in battle, something John Hancock and a significant number of other contenders lacked.
    The New Englanders couldn’t really object, because he’d been nominated by a tubby little Massachusetts lawyer named John Adams.
    Since the debacle at Lexington and Concord, the British army had been bottled up in Boston by the ever-growing bands of militiamen camped on the Boston Neck. An island town, Boston was connected with the mainland by a single narrow track of dry land that stretched between acres of salt-marshes. Some fifteen thousand patriots were camped in a ragged semicircle centered in the little towns of Cambridge and Roxbury, where the Neck debouched onto the mainland. Just before George went up to take command in June, the British made an attempt to break out by sea, crossing the harbor to a place called Charles Town below Breed’s Hill. After savage fighting, they drove the militiamen from their makeshift emplacements on the hill, but were left too shattered to pursue their advantage. Which was just as well, Martha later gathered, because the militiamen had almost no ammunition. A further assault would have crushed them.
    At about this same time, Royal Governor Dunmore retreated with his wife and children to the British man-of-war that was still sitting in the river off Williamsburg, and issued a call to