it. Washington left Mason retelling the dumping of the tea, motioned to Pompey for his horse, and looked at his watch. Slow.
“Care to pass me the time?” he said, bowing to the elder Mr. French, watch in hand.
“Your servant, sir. Hmm, a quarter past twelve.”
Washington opened the face of his watch and put an elegant gold key to the fuzee, and then to the hands. French caught the engraving on the key and smiled, closed his case with a sharp snap, and bowed; Washington eased his over the catch to save wear, but his bow was just as neat.
“Thank you, sir.”
“Bought that brig, did you?”
“I hadn’t much choice. I took her in lieu of a debt, you know.”
“Good buy, though. Will you send a cargo north, do ya think?”
“I may. First the Indies with my flour.”
“If she goes north, I’d be happy to help make a cargo.”
“Thankee. That’s something to think on. Good day to you, sir.”
“’Servant.”
He rose from the bow and turned to find his horse to hand, mounted in one athletic movement, nodded to Pompey, and was gone before the next rain cloud opened.
Mount Vernon, Virginia, January 1774
Washington’s library had a more martial character than its master admitted, these days. Charles XII of Sweden, Voltaire’s beau ideal, gazed angrily down from a column that faced his ideological child, Frederick the Great of Prussia. Julius Caesar and Alexander locked gazes in the other corner, an unceasing contest between youth (Alexander and Charles) and age (Caesar and Frederick). Or sometimes the masters of war divided other ways, classical versus modern.
The other furnishings of the room were to the latest taste, if a bit much by native English standards—drapes a little too plum, carpets a little too bright. All together, it was the room of a man of immense wealth, and the books that lined the shelves catalogued all his interests. A 1740 Humphrey Bland on military exercise, as well as a new subscription copy of Stevenson’s Advice to Officers in Command of Detachments, and a shelf of manuals of arms, directions on fortification with plates or without, Muller on artillery. The owner of the library had the most complete interest in war to be found in a library in Virginia.
Farming filled other shelves. The foundation of the collection had come with his wife, being her former husband’s books on the subject. He added to the collection every year, books such as Duhamel’s Practical Treatise of Husbandry and Young’s Annals of Agriculture, Thomas Fairfax on sports and dogs and the preservation of game, Tull on the new English plowing, The Farmer his own Mechanic, and dozens of other titles. The newest were newer than the military volumes, and on the whole more plentiful.
Sport for the sake of sport had its place as well: fishing, shooting, riding and keeping horses. There weren’t many of the classics: some schoolbooks, an uncut Ovid, a muchthumbed Epictetus in English and Latin—much thumbed because the owner knew that Frederick the Great had a copy and praised it. Washington liked Epictetus, because he had been a slave and spoke well of it. When Washington spoke to a slave, he tried to remember the precepts that Epictetus laid down. There was also Homer in translation by Pope—all the volumes save one, which his stepson, Jack, had lost while still in school and never replaced.
They were well kept and their leather gleamed with solid worth; their master read most of them, whether to farm or make war. He had been a soldier, and now he was a farmer—head bent over a careful drawing of a drainage canal in the Great Dismal Swamp as he laboriously traced out his plans for further drainage. The Great Dismal was a watery fortress built by nature on the south coast of Virginia to keep farmers at bay. It would take more slaves, more effort, and more money to drain the swamp and till the ground, but the result would be thousands of acres of prime farmland reclaimed from the wilderness right on the coast, where cargoes would fetch the best price. The plan had started almost ten years before; it had never quite succeeded or failed, and its demands seemed to increase every year, no matter how much effort the original investors expended.
He was a farmer, and yet he planned his assault for the year on the Great Dismal like a soldier: considering each drainage ditch an approach sap on nature’s fortress swamp; marshalling the forces of slaves and pressed labor available to the investors; planning against the day when the scheme would turn a profit and the siege would end.
He was a farmer, and all his thoughts were on the coming planting, on drainage and foaling, water tables and wheat prices, and the extent of the herring run, and yet none of his heroes had ever excelled as farmers. They had all been soldiers, soldiers of the type that won their fame for the glory of their arms and not for the kingdoms that they built; indeed, Charles, Alexander and Frederick shared a failure to build very much at all. But they were his chosen companions in his library, as his pen gradually worked its way into the defenses built by nature to keep the European farms at bay in the Great Dismal Swamp, where ten years of labor had yet to yield a single crop. He looked at his new network of ditches without confidence, laid his pen carefully in a ready holder to avoid inking the map, scattered some sand on it, and rose.
A house slave appeared instantly, looking expectant, but Washington waved him away.
“I’m going out to the dogs, Jack.”
“Yes, suh.”
“Build up the fire, if you please.”
“Yes, suh.”
He walked out through the library hall and around the drive to the kitchen, nodding courteously to the cook, the maid, and the little black girl who helped with the kitchen and was clearly terrified by his appearance so late at night. He paused for a moment and looked at the stars, missing the child streaking by him down toward the deer park, bound for the kennel to warn the young man there that Master was headed that way, so that he was pleasantly surprised to find Caesar up, with a small rushlight in the kennel, sitting with Old Blue.
“She still in a bad way, Caesar?”
“She bin bettah…better, sir.”
Her coat was not as dull as it had been, though, he noted, and she had her head in the boy’s lap, looking at him with some interest.
“She eating?”
“Eats a little, if’n I feed it to her slow.”
“She’s a good dog—used to be the best in the pack.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’d like to shoot tomorrow.”
“How many dogs, sir?”
“Just a pair. You work hard on your speech, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir.”
Washington smiled, though the subject didn’t really please him very much. He had worked hard to sound English when he joined Braddock’s staff; Lord Fairfax had helped him lose the provincial speech that might have marked him. Slaves who spoke too well, though—that was another matter.
“You did a very good job on the hunt. Here’s a crown. That’s a quarter of an English pound. Spend it wisely.”
Delighted smile, deep bow, genuine admiration. “Thank you, suh! Thank you, sir.” The black face beamed with pleasure and willingness to please, but Washington noticed that in his flurry of spirits, Caesar’s pronunciation had slipped, which was to be expected.
“But I desire you to take care, Caesar. You can be overfamiliar. Do you understand me?”
“No, sir.” The light went out. Washington had never been good at admonition; he was too cold, and it always came out as criticism without leniency. It had hurt him with his regiment.
“You should not smile at me, or at Mr. Lee, as if we were your familiar friends.”