GOVERNOR WENTWORTH HOUSE, PORTSMOUTH, N. H.
Yet it was in this very house that Martha for seven years served her future lord. There, busy with mop and pail——
"A maid of all work, whether coarse or fine,
A servant who made service seem divine!"
she grew from childhood into the lovely woman whom Governor Wentworth wooed and won.
In the March of 1760 it was that the host at Little Harbour exclaimed abruptly to the good rector of St. John's, who had been dining sumptuously at the manor-house:
"This is my birthday; it shall likewise be my wedding-day, and you shall marry me!" No wonder the listening guests were greatly mystified, as Martha and the portly governor were joined "across the walnuts and the wine" by the Reverend Arthur Brown, of the Established Church.
And now, of course, Martha had her chariot, from which she could look down as disdainfully as did the Earl of Halifax on the humble folk who needs must walk. The sudden elevation seems, indeed, to have gone to my lady's head. For tradition says that very shortly after her marriage Martha dropped her ring and summoned one of her late kitchen colleagues to rescue it from the floor. But the colleague had quickly become shortsighted, and Martha, dismissing her hastily, picked up the circlet herself.
Before the Reverend Arthur Brown was gathered to his fathers, he had another opportunity to marry the fascinating Martha to another Wentworth, a man of real soldierly distinction. Her second husband was redcoated Michael, of England, who had been in the battle of Culloden.
This Colonel Michael Wentworth was the "great buck" of his day, and was wont to fiddle at Stoodley's far into the morning for sheer love of fiddling and revelry. Stoodley's has now fallen indeed! It is the brick building marked "custom-house," and it stands at the corner of Daniel and Penhallow Streets.
To this Lord and Lady Wentworth it was that Washington, in 1789, came as a guest, "rowed by white-jacketed sailors straight to their vine-hung, hospitable door." At this time there was a younger Martha in the house, one who had grown up to play the spinet by the long, low windows, and who later joined her fate to that of still another Wentworth, with whom she passed to France.