Free Patriot Hearts by Barbara Hambly Page B

its dying light flickered in his eyes.
    At last he told her: “I must go, Patsie.”
    I could say: You can go without me, then. I’ll remain here and care for my family and our property while you go do what you choose to do.
    I could say: Don’t make me choose to leave my home, to abandon the girls to their mother, and Fanny and her baby to a sickly husband with Death already at his elbow. Don’t make me betray them again.
    Jacky’s death, and Patcy’s, had taught her how swiftly things could disappear, once you turned your back on them even for a little time.
    I could say: You have hurt me as nothing has hurt me in my life, save the death of my darling children. Do not hurt me again.
    But looking into his face she saw that he knew all those things. For eight years, woven like a secret code into every letter he had sent her during those summers of war, had been his deep love for the quiet of Mount Vernon. When he’d write about the new dining-room, or which fields should be planted in wheat and corn, he wrote as a man who had every square foot of his land, every brick and floor-board of his house, engraved on his heart. Sleeping at night, he could walk about his home in his dreams.
    This love—those dreams—were in his voice when he spoke again. “Mr. Madison informs me that last year the Congress wasn’t even able to pay the interest on the loans we took out to buy weapons and feed our soldiers through the War.” The distant tone reminded her of the way the men in the camp hospitals would talk to keep their minds from the pain of having a limb set. “Each state took out loans as well, you know, and are no more able than Congress either to pay in gold or to convince France and Spain to take the paper they’re printing. Congress—and the States—paid many of the soldiers in land. How long do you think it will be before the nations of Europe start thinking it their right to claim
their
payments in our Western lands?”
    It still doesn’t mean YOU have to go.
    Let Mr. Madison be his own authority, if he can.
    She closed her eyes, rested her forehead against the big hand that still clasped her own.
    If you go, this time I must stay behind.
It was a very real threat, for a man already genuinely concerned that men would say
He seeks to make himself a Caesar after all.
As pointed as if she had packed her bags and abandoned his house, a truer supporter of the Republic than he. Maybe more so. People often remembered an action more clearly than any number of words. He couldn’t let himself be seen as less of a Republican than his wife.
    If I say it, will he stay?
    And if he stays, what will it do to him?
    And to us?
    She supposed, if she were as true a supporter of the Republic as all that, she would have added—or thought first
—What will it do to our country?
    But she didn’t.
    Abigail Adams would have, she reflected. And had her heart been less sore, Martha would have smiled at the recollection of that small, sword-slim, beautiful woman who’d come to tea at the Cambridge camp one afternoon, all bundled up in a green wool cloak against the cold. A true New England patriot, that one: a passionate, intellectual Roman matron willing to lay her children, her home—maybe even her beloved little red-faced John—on the altar of her country.
    It needs a heart like hers,
thought Martha sadly,
to follow George where he now must go.
    Heaven only knew what God was thinking of, to have put her hand, not Abigail’s, where now it lay.
    Because she knew that even in the face of the one threat that would truly draw his blood, her husband would not turn aside from the need of his country.
    So she asked only, “When do you leave?”
    “Not until May.”
    “What can I do to help?”
    “What you have always done, Patsie. Be there to guard my back.”
    And felt his kiss press her forehead, his arms gather her close.
    Now make us a king to judge us like all the nations,
the Israelites had cried, when even after soundly