Free Martha Washington by Patricia Brady Page A

but the entire colony was in an uproar, and war became the center of everyone’s attention.
    Great Britain responded in 1755 by sending a force of British regulars under the command of General Edward Braddock. In one of the classic tales of American history, Braddock led his army out to meet the French again, only to be ambushed. This costly loss with its heavy casualties, including his own death, led colonists to discount unduly the effectiveness of the British army in American warfare. Braddock’s aide George Washington led the surviving soldiers to safety. All of a sudden, at twenty-three, Lieutenant Colonel Washington was a somebody in Virginia.
    The Custises no doubt discussed the colony’s rising military star. If they knew him personally, it was not very well. A younger son of a middling planter near Fredericksburg, he had never had the money or the occasion to spend much time in Williamsburg, where they would have met. They did have an interesting connection through Washington’s half-brother, Lawrence, and Patsy’s uncle William Dandridge, who had served together as officers in the ill-fated British attack on Spanish colonial Cartagena fifteen years earlier. And, of course, there were the gentry intermarriages of acquaintances and cousins of cousins that kept everybody informed about who was who.
    Political clamor and military alarms aside, life in the Tidewater continued to revolve around tobacco growing and family matters. In 1756, Patsy gave birth to another daughter, Martha Parke Custis, who had the Parke family’s dark good looks—large brown eyes and curly black hair. At about the same time, Patsy’s mother, Fanny Dandridge, age forty-six, produced her last child, a change-of-life daughter. That August, proud papa John Dandridge went to Fredericksburg, where he dropped dead of apoplexy, as a stroke was then called. The weather was so scorchingly hot that his body had to be buried immediately in the town cemetery; there was no time to take him home or to summon the family before the body decomposed. His loss was felt deeply by both families along the Pamunkey. Patsy’s oldest surviving brother (John Jr. had died as a teenager), twenty-two-year-old William, took over the management of Chestnut Grove for his mother and younger siblings.
    Daniel’s orders to Britain now included items for the Dandridges, such as silk pumps of a color appropriate “for Second Mourning,” probably either purple or gray, for his mother-in-law. He proudly ordered for the three fine Custis children as well—fashionable hats, leather and silk shoes, a quilted cap, stays, an expensive “Dolly,” necklaces, kid gloves, ten shillings’ worth of toys, ribbons for the girls, and a saddle and bridle for Jacky. Running about in her pretty red shoes, Fanny was old enough to begin learning her letters, so he sent for a slate and pencils. Alas for such plans. In April 1757, Fanny died just before her fourth birthday, joining her brother in the family plot at Queen’s Creek.
    Death was too common a visitor in colonial homes to allow grieving parents to withdraw from their daily lives. Patsy and Daniel had to continue about their regular routines, attend to the needs of their surviving children, and receive guests at White House. Within the three months following Fanny’s death, a traveling portraitist, an Englishman named John Wollaston, came to stay with the Custis family. In the eight years since his arrival in America, he had made the rounds of New York, Maryland, and Virginia, painting more than three hundred three-quarter-length portraits of everyone who was anyone in the colonies. Reflecting the tastes of his elite clientele, he bestowed special attention on the “rich fabrics touched with subtle highlights” of their finest outfits.
    At White House, Jacky and little Patsy, two and a half and one, posed together in all their adult finery, he with a pet redbird