Free Martha Washington by Patricia Brady Page B

perched on his wrist, she with a rose in her lap, pearls and ribbon in her wispy baby hair, the tip of a red shoe peeking out from beneath her gown. Wollaston painted separate portraits of Daniel and Patsy attired in their best, she in a silver lace and beribboned blue gown with a yellow petticoat and stomacher, her dark hair combed straight back and entwined with pearls, picking a white blossom edged with pink from a flowering bush. The price for all three works was a costly fifty-six pistoles, a Spanish gold coin that circulated in the British colonies; Wollaston’s high prices reflected his popularity among the gentry.
    The Custises’ return to normality was brief. Three months after Fanny’s death, both Jacky and the robust Daniel fell ill on July 4. Patsy immediately sent to Williamsburg for medicine, and when there was no improvement the next day, Dr. James Carter, one of the capital’s leading physicians, came out to attend the patients. For three days, he administered a course of medications that suggests some sort of virulent throat infection—scarlet fever, a streptococcal infection, diphtheria, quinsy. Rather than dosing his terribly ill patients with the usual purges and emetics that formed colonial doctors’ stock practice, Carter concocted medicinal pastes with honey to be smeared on their gums and tongues. These pastes were absorbed slowly rather than swallowed straight down. If Daniel and Jacky were suffering from severely ulcerated or swollen throats, they would have been unable to swallow.
    Jacky survived, but Daniel died on July 8, after only seven years of married happiness. It was a terrible way to die, slowly suffocating as his throat closed up, and Patsy must have been with her husband and son throughout those awful days. The day of Daniel’s death, she sent to the carpenter to build a black walnut coffin for his speedy interment. Oddly enough, in a time of hovering illness and swift death, many people waited until they were on their deathbeds to make a will and frequently left it too late. Daniel Custis was one of that number, dying intestate and leaving the inheritance of his family to fall under the rules of English common law. He was buried alongside his mother and his two children at Queen’s Creek.
    Patsy had little time to express her grief, other than in action. A local seamstress was called in to alter a gown and make mourning dresses for her; a tailor came to make black mourning suits for Jacky and the male house servants. In Daniel’s account book, the date of his last memorandum was 1757, shortly before he died. Turning the page, the reader suddenly sees Patsy Custis’s neat and well-formed handwriting as she took up her husband’s responsibilities two weeks after his death, listing the items the plantations needed from England. She plunged straight in, ordering two seines, or large nets, for shad fishing in the Pamunkey. Her description of the desired nets is carefully detailed—thirty-five fathoms long and twenty feet deep, made of “the best three Thread laid Twine,” well fixed with leads and corks, “the slack Lines made of the best Hemp and full large,” along with spare slack lines. She went on to other mundane items such as starch, cotton for the slaves’ clothing, pins, thread, and castile soap.
    Then she turned to “One handsome Tombstone of the best durable Marble to cost about £100 [very expensive]—with the following Inscription and the Arms sent in a Piece of Paper on it, to wit ‘Here Lies the Body of Daniel Parke Custis Esquire who was born the 15th Day of Oct. of 1711 & departed this Life the 8th Day of July 1757. Aged 45 Years.’ ” In her letter to Robert Cary, her English factor, she included two locks of hair for the jeweler, probably in a separate sealed piece of paper. She ordered two gold mourning rings in honor of Daniel and little Fanny, their tresses to be covered by clear