by Mark J Rose
Thomas Jefferson detested conforming to anyone else’s schedule; he liked solitude once it was time for bed. The last time he visited, he slept in an unfinished guest bedroom in the new Miller house, which they now called Miller Grange. Since Matthew was away, his sleeping quarters were removed from the women and children. Etiquette aside, Grace knew it was best to keep Jefferson at arm’s length, so she housed him in the Taylors’ white farmhouse, where he enjoyed the company of her mother, Mary, and her brothers, Jonathan and Jeb.
Dabney Carr, who was Jefferson’s best friend, Edmund Pendleton, George Wythe, George Fleming, and Governor Murray and their wives had comfortable lodgings in Will’s home. The Murrays traveled with a squad of soldiers who happily occupied the shacks in front of Uncle David’s house where they could cook and gather around the fire pit. The soldiers would be coming and going as they took watch and would probably stay up late, though Uncle David would try to keep things under control. Overall, despite the complications, everyone seemed to be pleased with their housing arrangements.
Matthew always found at least ten reasons to think of canceling these parties, but Dr. Franklin insisted that members of the House of Burgesses must socialize. Grace had been insisting long before that. Societal intrigue and statecraft would never be among Matthew’s strengths. Deep down, he didn’t understand that his desire to be left alone to go about his business would never be respected by high-ranking bureaucrats. Grace knew his hopes to stand by while conspirators lurked all around was naïve, so here they were, hosting another party, even in his absence.
Grace was standing in front of a large looking glass in her bedroom while her maid fastened her gown. It was understated, silver, with ruffled sleeves and a white petticoat.
“’Tis an exquisite dress, madam,” Patricia said.
“A curious cloth,” Grace replied. “’Tis both fancy and simple.”
“As are Virginians, madam,” Patricia said with a grin. “I suspect Mr. Jefferson’s suit will be the same.”
“This is our first audience with the governor and Lady Murray,” Grace said. “I’m sure they’ll be resplendent.”
“They say the countess is captivating.”
“Make sure the staff understands that they are our honored guests tonight. The countess, especially, should be used with care.”
“I will convey your message to the staff.”
“That is not to say that all the ladies shouldn’t be used like royalty,” Grace replied.
Patricia’s face filled with a broad smile. “I’m sure Mr. Jefferson will provide flattery enough,” she said.
“We will not depend on Mr. Jefferson in this regard.”
Patricia turned serious. “Of course, madam. All of the staff know too well the expectations of the great families.”
“The ladies have much sway on their husbands. I will defer to all this evening. We are new to this world and can afford to let the matrons lead.”
“Yes, madam,” Patricia said, then asked lightly, “Are you glad to have your brother home?”
Grace looked at Patricia suspiciously. The question broke right to the heart of the matter. “He may not behave as I’d want,” she admitted, “but I believe he will take this time to further our interests. Robert Martin has affected my brother in an astounding fashion.” Grace sucked in so Patricia could fasten the last buttons and pull the dress tightly onto her shoulders.
“Anything else, madam?”
Grace shook her head. Patricia curtsied and excused herself. Grace watched her walk away, appreciating her husband’s ability to hire good people. He’d insisted on certain qualities and argued strongly with her when he rejected servants she selected.
“They should have wit,” Matthew had said, “and I want trust, and I’m willing to pay for it.”
“These are my servants,” Grace had protested. “You know nothing about the duties of a lady’s maid.”
“I don’t see this one standing with us through tough times,” he’d replied. “Scout doesn’t like her.”
Grace didn’t know what he meant by “tough times,” and she wasn’t sure if he was joking about the dog. She had seen her husband change over the past few years, and she thought it might be because of the children. He talked about how important it was to “walk with God” and the implications of “preparing for the flood.” It irritated her because nothing about her family, which she had built on the rocks, was weak. They were close to building a financial wall around their family that few could breach.
Despite her annoyance with his idiosyncrasies, Grace allowed that Matthew had been right about the people they employed. Everyone on the farm was loyal to the Taylors or to Dr. Franklin, or was among Matthew’s old Philadelphia business associates. In many cases, husbands, wives, and children from the same family worked together at the Taylor-Miller complex caring for animals or manufacturing medicines. Matthew sent people packing at the slightest hint of ambivalence, but he advanced them, too, when he saw loyalty and ambition. Grace smiled in frustration, thinking she’d soon have to replace Patricia. After all, the dog liked her.
Grace studied herself in the glass and began to work at a braid that was too low. She pulled a string of rubies around her neck and admired how they shone above her silver dress. She smoothed her bodice again, pooched up the folds of her skirt, and walked out of the room satisfied that she was dressed appropriately to chase her ambition.
Chapter 18
John Turner
“Got you!” John yelled. Matt had thought the pain in his shoulder was part of dying, but it was John Turner’s firm grasp pulling him to the surface. The mayhem of crashing water and cannon fire replaced the relative quiet of Matt’s drowning. He coughed saltwater and took his first breath in what had been an eternity. He felt helpless against the overwhelming strength of the sea as he tried to orient himself.
“I’ll make it,” Matt gasped. Matt struggled to cough the water from his lungs and be able to take a full breath. John held Matt with one hand and hung onto the rope that tethered them to the Norfolk by the other. Matt poked his head from the water enough to see the flashes of the Norfolk’s stern cannons. She had come about and was halfway through a broadside of her ten guns firing at the pirate ship. The Norfolk was still pulling John and Matt through the water, but it had slowed enough to enable them to keep their heads high enough to breathe.
The cannons went silent, but a white cloud of black powder smoke still shrouded the bow of the pirate ship. It was turning in the water to aim its starboard battery. Matt ducked at the beelike hissing of musket balls biting into the water around them. “Keep low,” John cautioned. “We gotta pull ourselves in.”
Matt coughed again and nodded. The Norfolk seemed miles away. John squeezed his hands around Matt’s to position them on the rope and then pushed him towards their ship. Matt’s arms burned from fatigue, but he did his best to move one hand in front of the other as John helped. He was pushing Matt forward every time he reached for another handhold.
Knowing how hard the kid was working to save him, Matt redoubled his effort, and he put all temptation out of his mind to let go and rest his arms. Releasing the rope meant losing any progress they had made to pull themselves closer. Matt was reaching forward again with his free palm when the shock wave from two subsequent explosions thundered across the surface of the ocean and walloped them. Matt turned in time to see the remains of a single geyser, off the pirate ship’s starboard, drop back into the sea. The cloud of white smoke was too thick for Matt to determine if they had done any damage.
“A hit!” John yelled.
“Can’t tell,” Matt called. He scrutinized the pirate ship again. John pointed back at the Norfolk. All her sails were going up again as she tried to make her escape. John looped the rope around himself then checked that Matt was secure. “Keep your head out of the water,” he yelled against the crashing waves. Matt took a deep breath before the Norfolk shot forward under full sail and dragged them under the sea...again.<
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Chapter 19
Dry
The breeze was strong and cool, and the sun was shining onboard the deck of the Norfolk. Matt was sitting in the shade writing in the journal he had been keeping since the first day they had left Virginia. He looked away from his diary to watch a young seaman, David Sutton, ritualistically observe the workings of his right arm. Sutton would bend his arm, turn it and then flex all his fingers through their complete motion, front and back. He’d relax, lean against the railing to look out to the sea, and then he’d renew the inspection of his right arm.
Matt closed his journal and tucked it under his jacket lying there on the wooden bench. He stood and walked to the young sailor. “How’s it healing,” Matt asked.
Sutton turned, surprised, and maybe embarrassed to be caught marveling at his arm. “Only a fleabite, Mr. Miller,” he said. “Magic…no doubt.”
Matt gave him a proud smile. “It works like magic,” Matt replied. “But it’s pure philosophy.” Matt was using “philosophy” in its eighteenth context to describe the natural sciences.
“I know you spoke such, sir,” Sutton replied, “but everyone who gets a ball in the arm gets the saw.” Sutton was slightly shorter than Matt, had straight teeth and a fresh and curious grin. His skin was smooth showing that he’d never had smallpox. The intelligence on Sutton’s face was not surprising to Matt after seeing the scientific way Sutton had been observing the motions of his arm. There looked to be some ambition there too, which made Matt feel a special comradery; David reminded Matt of himself when he was the same age.
“You don’t get the saw if you take the right medicine,” Matt finally replied.
“Sick as a horse, I was.”
“I haven’t figured out how to prevent the stomachache.”
Matt had done experiments for half a decade trying to purify the penicillin powder. He had used different molds growing on any number of fruits. Matt had even attempted bread mold again, which gave a purer mix of compounds but with a yield so paltry as to be useless. He had tried chromatographic columns, long tubes filled with diatomaceous earth, to separate out the brown color from the active penicillin. In the end, the only setup that worked was mostly the one he had started with, which was mold grown on cantaloupes, extracted into ethanol and isolated as a brown powder. It worked over seven days to prevent or cure the infection, but it made people tragically nauseous, and there was always vomiting.
Sutton pulled up his sleeve to show Matt his injury. The bullet hole was thick and red, but the surgeon had done a skillful job of sewing it closed, and it was healing.
“Careful with that,” Matt said. “I don’t have more powder if you tear it open.”
Sutton nodded and looked at his hand again to flex his fingers. “Why did God make a hand thus?” he asked. “Is this in your philosophy?”
Matt nodded. “Some say that the hand is one of the things that separate men from beasts.”
Sutton now inspected his raised fingers and then flexed them up and down. “I set my mind to it, and my fingers move. Yet, there are times when they move together for some task, and I have not commanded them to move at all.”
“Have you asked Mr. Callaway if you could learn about such things?” Matt asked. “Maybe even assist him in his surgeries.”
“That old loblolly,” Sutton said. “He’d be on thorns to have me there.”
“I’ll speak to him on your behalf.”
“I could apprentice to be a ship’s surgeon?” Sutton asked surprised.
“I think he’d welcome someone who shared his curiosity.”
“I’d be much in your debt, sir.”
“Even if Mr. Callaway doesn’t have the wherewithal, there are a few men that I know who might appreciate someone who is curious and motivated.”
“Thank you, sir,” Sutton replied happily. “I’d welcome any effort.”
Matt was now looking at his own hand, flexing his fingers. “It is a remarkable invention.”
**********
By Creighton’s calculations, they had less than a week until landfall. There was a fair wind, and they’d been traveling near ten knots for the last couple of days. Matt’s back of the envelope conversion put them somewhere at a pace of two hundred and fifty miles per day. The carpenters repaired almost every hole that the pirate ship had put in the Norfolk, and other crewmen crawled about the riggings and masts to replace or patch all the sails. She was starting to feel like the sleek sailing vessel that had left Hampton Roads, save for the unpainted patches of fresh wood everywhere that gave her the look of a kid who had lost a fight on the playground. The patches were flush though, so once painted, the visual damage of their ocean battle would disappear.
Their sorrow at the loss of their comrades was harder to fix. Matt had stepped forward to speak when they had slid Daniel Jay and Ebenezer Grey into the sea, both men having succumbed to cannon fire after they’d finished dropping the exploding barrels into the water. Matt spent a day writing their epitaphs to do justice to the heroism they had shown.
Along with Sutton, three other sailors had survived musket ball wounds due to Matt’s penicillin. One had a shoulder wound, one a leg and another caught a ball in his lower arm. It had taken Matt hours to convince Callaway to remove the balls, clean and sew the wounds, and not amputate. The amputee candidate’s arguments had weighed heavily in the decision to forego the bone saw. Because of infection, men rarely survived small arms injuries without amputation. All four were recovering.
Matt was recovering too. The surgeon put five stitches in his forehead to close the gash from the rolling barrel. The cut was healing and had shown no hint of infection, which was fortunate since he had already needed to stretch his penicillin powder across four musket injuries. His head wound had caused more painful headaches than he’d experienced in a long time and he was randomly losing his vision again. Vivid dreams were waking him every night, now.
During his first years in the colonies, the headaches and the flashing pictures overloaded his vision, and he’d go blind, sometimes for hours. When this happened, his head became a camera taking rapid time-lapse photographs of future events. Often, the pictures flashed so briefly that he’d only see bits and pieces that spanned years. At different times, usually when he was under stress, he’d been able to anticipate the immediate future. He’d go physically blind, but the pictures in his mind allowed him to predict each footstep, cross a busy street, or even duck to avoid a punch thrown microseconds before.
Matt’s dreams at night were another phenomenon entirely. Sometimes they could be hard to interpret, but other times they gave him a narrative of a future that was days, weeks, or years away. There was no scientific explanation. A wormhole had formed during a reactor accident and propelled him two hundred and fifty years into the past. It defied anything he knew about the human brain that it could have retained a complete timeline of the events it encountered on the journey.
Did a human mind have enough storage capacity to retain all the details from a journey across time? Matt knew it was possible for a human brain to record a lifetime of memories, from a paper he had read about brain surgery. Doctors had performed experiments where they were able to electrically stimulate sections of the brain during an operation and have patients relive forgotten moments in their lives. These people didn’t just vaguely remember the days but experienced them again with every sight, sound, and smell.
Matt had thought little about this in the last couple of years, insomuch as his dreams and visions had diminished. He had ignored the potential tragedy that lay ahead, hoping that he had been wrong or that the future that he had seen had changed. Matt allowed himself a warm smile as he thought of the slight bump in Grace’s belly as they made love on his last night in Richmond. Matt hoped that he would be home in time to see their sixth child be born.
Early in their courting, he had joked with Grace that he wanted ten children and she had countered that it would only happen if they lived on a prosperous horse f
arm with brilliant stables. Through their combined efforts to grow their farm and Matt’s pharmaceutical business, they had become successful by any standard. In Grace’s mind, there was no reason not to have the large family they had joked about almost a decade ago. Matt smiled again thinking of how irrational the ten-child plan had sounded, but they couldn’t keep their hands off each other. Grace was the kind of woman Matt had sought his whole life. Her air of superiority from her role as a mother made his love even stronger. From her perspective, she felt sorry for all men who could only participate “briefly” in what she said was “God’s greatest gift.”
Matt’s brain had spent most of a decade walling up his memories of the future, and now a wooden barrel had brought that wall crashing down. The visions had often been debilitating after an accident or a fight, and now that Matt was part of the gentry, accidents and fights were rare. His ocean voyage had certainly changed that. He felt a cringe of regret as he looked out across the sea. Why am I here?
Franklin had been adamant that Matt join him in England to counter the imminent threat he saw to the “natural course of humanity.” His close friend needed his help and Matt had come without question, even though he had trouble explaining to Grace why he was leaving on a mission that could take the greater part of a year. Any trip across the Atlantic came fraught with peril, as they had just demonstrated. Franklin, he knew, was doing everything he could to bring the American colonies and England together. It seemed that even Franklin was blurring the lines, but really, who knew what the natural course of humanity was supposed to be?
