Martha Washington by Patricia Brady Read Free Book Online Page B

that weddings take place in the morning, most Virginia marriages took place in the afternoon or evening, a local adaptation to allow their many guests time to travel several miles by horseback, wagon, or coach. The ceremony was followed by dinner and dancing. At some point, the newlyweds would slip off to the room reserved for them, but the rest of the guests would continue to frolic long into the night.
    The next morning, the bride and groom endured a good deal of covert observation, giggling, and sly nudges; in letters to their friends, guests often commented on whether or not the lady looked happy after her (presumably) first sexual experience. The festivities might continue for several days, with walks, games, card playing, flirting, eating, drinking, and yet more dancing. Like most plantation houses in 1750, Chestnut Grove was rather small. At house parties and weddings, women slept four or five to a bed, with the overflow occupying trundle beds or pallets. Men dropped off wherever they could—on chairs, cots in the hall, rugs, haystacks in the stable. But Virginians never minded a crowd as long as the entertainment was lively.
    After a week or so, the newlyweds usually moved directly into their own homes. A honeymoon trip was unknown in the colonies. Where would they have gone if they had thought of such a thing? Hotels were nonexistent, and taverns were rough and dirty at best, places of drunken masculine bonhomie, with beds often shared with strangers as well as bedbugs and fleas. Home was really the only place where they could spend time together, fully enjoying their new closeness. At White House, the Custis plantation, Patsy and Daniel settled into the home where they would live throughout their marriage. It was only four miles from Chestnut Grove, but light-years away in the wealth and power it embodied.

CHAPTER THREE
    Young Mrs. Custis
    I t was quite a Cinderella story: Patsy Dandridge was now a wealthy woman with social position. Daniel Custis had inherited nearly eighteen thousand acres of prime farmland, houses in Williamsburg and Jamestown, nearly three hundred slaves, and several thousand pounds in English treasury notes and cash. But Patsy brought her husband an equally valuable gift—happiness. Motherless since he was a toddler, frustrated and humiliated by his father throughout his life, he was almost thirty-nine when he married and at last found an emotional haven.
    Reaching from beyond the grave, John Custis had left a provision in his will for a tombstone inscription as wounding as anything he had shouted in a lifetime of rages:
    Under this Marble Tomb lies the Body
of the HONORABLE JOHN CUSTIS Esq.
of the City of Wiliamsburgh and Parish of Bruton
Formerly of Hungars Parish on the Eastern Shore of Virginia and
County of Northampton the Place of His Nativity
Aged 71 Years and yet liv’d but Seven Years
Which was the space of time He kept
A Bachelors house at Arlington.
This inscription carved at his express orders.
    This final barb thrown at his hated wife, thirty-five years dead and presumably beyond insults, must have been enormously hurtful to his son. The many years Daniel had lived with his domineering father and the succeeding years at his beck and call were dismissed contemptuously—his very existence of no importance in John Custis’s bitter summation of his life.
    No wonder Daniel reveled in living with a charming young woman who raised emotional support to an art form. Throughout their marriage, they remained at White House, a two-story frame house downriver from Chestnut Grove. Though no larger than the Dandridges’ home, it was distinguished by the beauty of its setting. The house sat on a slight rise, its broad lawn sloping down to the wide, curving Pamunkey, opening to a serene view of golden marsh grasses and meadows on the far side of the river. There Daniel could enjoy the loving smile, kind eyes, and soft voice of his new wife. It must have seemed like