Read Online Martha Washington by Patricia Brady - Free Book Online

dirt, mud, and barnyard filth tracked into the house; and soot and ashes from smoky chimneys.
    Breakfast, tea, and supper were rather small meals, usually including breads, cakes, and some combination of leftovers. But dinner was the meal where a housewife showed what she and her staff were made of. Dinner was served in midafternoon, about three o’clock, after the planter returned from riding over his fields and his wife had completed her domestic duties. Patsy and Daniel would have cleaned up, arranged their hair, and donned dressier clothes. At White House, dinner was served by two slave menservants, Breechy and Mulatto Jack, outfitted in livery of dark cloth trimmed with silver lace and horn buttons, replaced a few years later by scarlet suits trimmed with mohair braid. The meal was a little theater piece.
    Guests—often a number of guests—arrived unexpectedly or by invitation several days a week. In the early years of the colony, the amount of food at dinner had corresponded roughly to the number of people eating. Now fashion demanded a very large array of foods every day, arranged on the sideboard and table in formally balanced patterns. Two full courses with wine throughout—the tablecloth removed after each course—would include soup; several meats, fricassees, great meat pies, fowls, and fish; gravies and sauces; fresh and pickled vegetables; bread, rolls, biscuits, and butter; pies, cakes, jellies, creams, tarts, and fruit compotes. The meal would end with the polished wood of the table exposed as the servants offered sugared fruit, crackers, pieces of Gloucester or Cheshire cheese cut from eight- or ten-pound imported wheels, and nuts, accompanied by still more wine and toasts to old King George II, absent friends, all the ladies, and any number of variations on these popular themes.
    Besides the abundant foodstuffs from garden, pasture, river, and woods, Patsy added imported delicacies to her cuisine. Fine wines (their favorites were the white Rhenish and Canary wines and red Port, all of them rather sweet), beer, green tea, capers, olives, almonds, spices, raisins, currants, sugar, and anchovies were ordered regularly from England. So too were six pounds each of brown and white sugar candy to satisfy her sweet tooth. Good manners didn’t require that diners stuff themselves, but it must have been difficult to resist such profusion.
    Patsy was soon pregnant. Pregnancy, especially the first, was an exciting and hopeful time, the happy news quickly imparted to friends and relatives in person or by letter. There was no nonsense about expectant mothers secluding themselves: as long as she felt well, Patsy would have continued her household duties, and she and Daniel would have attended social functions. Special pregnancy stays helped maintain her erect posture without interfering with her swollen belly.
    Joyful as pregnancy was, it was also shadowed by fear for the life of the mother, especially for a woman as tiny as Patsy. Childbirth was one of the leading causes of death among colonial women. The danger was particularly grave for first-time mothers, who sometimes died in labor, after hours or even days of futilely attempting to bring forth a very large or breech baby. Even if the mothers survived, their first babies often died from the trauma of their births.
    Birthing was women’s work, the husband firmly but kindly excluded from their bedchamber. When her time came, Patsy would have “called her women together”: the midwife, her mother, aunts, friends, and maids. The women clustered around the laboring woman, soothing and encouraging her, mopping her sweating forehead, holding her hands, providing cloths for her to clench in her teeth to stifle shrieks of pain. She would have remained partially upright during most of her labor, squatting on a low midwife’s stool, sitting at the edge of a chair, standing from time to time, sitting on the lap of one of her helpers. What a