by Max Byrd
“Slave to strong drink,” the old man repeated. “Have this.”
James raised the cup to his mouth. A year of cooking lessons had given him a nose that could separate ten different smells in a single dish. Have this, the teacher would say, handing him a bare wooden spoon from the bowl, and James could sniff and lick his way through a whole recipe of ingredients—ginger, yeast, saffron, two kinds of dill. The old man’s coffee had a strong taste of caramel, like most French coffee; the warm grounds stuck to his teeth like sugar.
“You remember Jean-Claude?”
James nodded. The third man in the room was Le Trouveur’s particular friend, another old tramp who made his living off the streets. Why the hell did he come here instead of staying in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, where people washed their cups and had carpets instead of straw down on the floor? James opened his eyes and offered a little mock bow to Jean-Claude across the room.
“It’s too late for Jean-Claude to go home,” Le Trouveur said, earnest as always. “Les espions, vous savez.”
James looked at Jean-Claude without interest. One of the stranger things about Paris was that outside the Fauborg Saint-Marcel, the streets were genuinely safe, you could go anywhere (almost anywhere) anytime day or night without fear of bandits or thugs; but from nightfall on the police had spies hard at work, tracking suspicious characters, informers, prostitutes, gamblers, foreigners, occasionally demanding papers, usually content just to have their presence felt. Jefferson hated the spies; he called them the king’s black angels.
“Got a load of posters, right?” James forced a little grin. Jean-Claude lived by pulling down posters. Paris was covered with them, of course; batlike, they flapped on every street corner in the city. What the old tramp did was go out by night with hid lantern and strip a place bare, then sell the posters to butchers and grocers who used them for wrapping or to one of the box-makers on the Quai Tournelle who turned them into crude packages. He also burned them for heat in the winter and used them himself for blankets and shoes. He could read, so he had a little system. Posters that advertised books and medicine he left up; but he took down anything that advertised puppet shows, circuses, theatrical performances, anything he disapproved of. Since posters were theoretically illegal, the police paid no attention whatever to Jean-Claude, who was nevertheless convinced that their spies followed him everywhere. The strongest single drive in human nature, Jefferson had told Short, was the need to feel important.
“You remember what I told you, James?”
Le Trouveur sat down beside him and refilled the cup. James squinted at the old man’s skylight; overhead was not black, not blue, somewhere in between, meaning he still had time to go outside, walk to the Grille de Chaillot, fall asleep in his own bed.
“You remember? I read it to you right out of the Mercure de France. Slavery does not exist in France. You could be a free man, just go and tell him. You have brothers and sisters?”
“I have my sister. Sally.”
“She’s here?”
“She’s coming. Maybe she’s coming. He sent for his little daughter, and Sally’s coming with her, as the maid. If the boat ever leaves.”
“How old is Sally?”
“Fourteen. Fifteen.” At Monticello the date of a slave’s birth was not necessarily recorded in Jefferson’s book.
“She could be free; you both could be free.”
James sneered. “Free like you? Sniff around the street on all fours, poor? Free like him, nothing to worry about but food and money and jail?”
Earnestness was an impenetrable defense. In the gloom of his bleak little room Le Trouveur came up with sheets of paper, some kind of pamphlet. James heard the word petition. Le Trouveur pressed the pamphlet into his jacket pocket. It was written by somebody named Condorcet; it told how a slave, even a diplomat’s slave, could submit a paper to the courts and be free.
“Free to starve,” James spat, struggling to his feet. But he held on to the pamphlet, and outside, in the cool September night, he gripped it fiercely in both hands as he walked, like a club.
Like a brighter, silkier club, Jefferson held up Maria Cosway’s pink parasol twelve hours later and pointed it into the wind.
“Such a wind, such a wind,” she said, using one hand to grip the edge of her straw bonnet, the other to press down her fluttering skirt. “Such a warm wind.”
“It won’t last,” Jefferson said, smiling. Every tree in the Tuileries seemed to sway and toss under the wind, like so many huge green balls bouncing. “In half an hour it should all be calm as a baby’s cradle.”
Maria looked down; looked away; looked at the long, sad river that ran next to the gardens.
At the same moment, a mile farther up the Champs-Élysées, James Hemings dropped into his chair and braced his elbows on the kitchen table. He was used to brandy, he thought glumly. He drank wine or brandy by the bottle six days out of seven, and the only price he ever paid was a bad temper that his mother said he had been born with anyway. But this morning he craved coffee, hot coffee to soothe his brandy-soaked brain, and fresh, cool air to replace the heat of the kitchen.
He grunted at one of the kitchen maids and sat back in his chair while she brought his cup. Then he fumbled in his pocket and brought out a slip of paper.
It was one of Jefferson’s peculiarities that he liked to collect recipes. He was known to ask anybody, even one of his elegant French hostesses, to write down the recipe for something they served him, or else he would copy recipes himself from books, adding annotations in English and little unreadable drawings, and then pass them along for James to try.
James rubbed his forehead and unfolded the newest acquisition. They had progressed a long way since the earliest instructions for heating the oven just right, to avoid burning a crust. This recipe—James sipped the scalding coffee and blinked—this recipe, which Jefferson said he was going to send to everybody in Albemarle County, was for a new dessert called ice cream. James smoothed the paper on the table. A cold dessert. You made a mixture of custard and vanilla flavoring and ice and salt in a wooden container, then when it was frozen, you scraped it out with a spatula and put it in tin molds packed with more ice-salt, pounds and pounds of it.
He shook his head, regretted it, looked up.
At the fireplace the old woman who did most of Jefferson’s ordinary cooking was down on her knees stoking the fire. To her right the turnspit dog sat on his treadmill watching. She was cooking beef, James noticed, which meant company today, since Jefferson and Short ate practically no meat themselves; which meant that in another hour the kitchen would be a furnace. Which meant that making ice cream there was a near impossibility.
Overhead in Petit’s office the floorboards creaked. James fingered a bit of raw meat from the cutting board and chewed it. When the old woman slid farther along the grate, he flicked another bit of meat to the dog. Crazy dog. Sat all day on its dirty blanket till the cook gave the command, then it walked and walked and turned the treadmill that in turn rotated the spit and cooked the meat over the fire. Half a side of good dripping beef close enough to grab and run with, if the dumb black dog ever had the courage. Call the dog James.
He licked his fingers and thought of yesterday’s dying steer.
He wanted more coffee. He wanted to sit outside on the steps with his cup of coffee and hold his aching head in his hands and figure out how you roasted meat and made cold ice cream both in the same red-hot kitchen.
“Fait chaud, chaud, chaud.” Petit came into the kitchen suddenly, sniffing the air, wiping sweat from his face.
“Dans une heure fait chaud,” James said, just to contradict him.
“Hot, hot,” Petit said, stopping in front of him. “You were late last night, mon chat.”
“I’m here this morning.”
“Monsieur will dine at three.” Petit pretended to consult his notebook but in fact stared over it at James’s sullen face. “Six guests. Madame Cosway. Short. De Corny, three others. Dessert yo
u know about.”
The brandy had made him quarrelsome. James stretched to his full height, giving him a head’s advantage over the Frenchman, and began to object; it was too hot to make ice cream and cook beef. He would make pastry instead, the hell with the guests. They could eat macaroons, or else brandied peaches and cake; he would go ask Jefferson for permission to alter the menu.
Petit only shrugged and turned a page in his notebook. Jefferson was out, he said, walking with Madame Cosway, but not very far away; they had set out for the Cours la Reine ten minutes ago. Spoken sardonically: James was a privileged person. James the black could do as he liked.
James could. Muttering to himself, he stamped up the stairs, slammed a door, and emerged by the wall on the rue de Berri. For half an instant the sharp, hot wind made him think about turning around and going back; then, still muttering, head throbbing, he set off down the Champs-Élysées.
On the map of Paris he kept pinned to his wall, the public gardens of the Cours la Reine stretched along the river from the Tuileries almost to the Grille de Chaillot, but in fact, with their mania for building, the Parisians had started to erect rows of houses at the western end, in sight of Jefferson’s door. James pushed between two slow-moving wagons and crossed the dusty road.
Closer to the city you had to pay to enter the Cours—you had to pay to enter anything in Paris—but by the customs wall and the Grille, for no good reason that he knew, there were still a few unmanned gates and turnstiles. He bent his head against the wind and followed the first gravel path down through a series of blowing hedges and onto a bare terrace.
He spotted them practically at once, off to the right, by a circular bed of red and white flowers. He squinted and guessed: a quarter of a mile away, but he’d have to take a zigzag path twice as long to reach them, just like a maze.
He rubbed his eyes and thought. Jefferson, of course, would know exactly, down to the inch, how far away they were. On Judgment Day Jefferson would be writing down the temperature of fire and brimstone, counting the number of steps it took to walk up to the Judgment Throne, down to Hell.
Virginia was Hell, James thought.
Jefferson and the woman disappeared behind a bush and came out by a series of waist-high wooden fences. Even at this distance—whatever it was—James could see the pink ribbons on the woman’s bonnet blowing back behind her. Jefferson carried a rolled-up parasol in front of him like a stick.
Foutre, James thought, using the foulest French word he knew. He would go back and make the fucking ice cream. Why walk all that way and whine?
But he stood for a moment longer. Jefferson’s way of moving today, his way of walking, was like a boy’s. At this distance, with her bonnet and curls, and Jefferson with his red hair and lively step, they looked like a young couple. They looked like Jefferson ten years ago and his wife Martha.
At the first fence Jefferson evidently said something. The lady shook her head. Jefferson took a step, extended his right arm toward the fence rail, leaned into the wind, and jumped.
Even where he stood James could hear the knock of his shoe against the wood, then an instant later the snap of Jefferson’s wrist as the bone broke and he fell.
James had already run fifty yards down the path toward them before he remembered the exact same sound of the steer’s skull hitting the ground.
It sounded, Short thought, as if the man were drunk.
“You get the other surgeon too,” he said furiously, “and you get him now, before I slap you sober!”
Short spun on his heel and opened the door to Jefferson’s bedroom. His cheeks still burned with anger. One part of his mind told him that if you spoke to James that way, you guaranteed he would slouch and sulk and do the job nigger-speed if at all; but Jefferson was in actual, visible pain, and his wrist had already swollen the size of a melon, and the idiot French doctor standing by the bed was smiling and scratching his wig and doing nothing.
“William—”
“Sir. I’ve sent for another surgeon. I think the bone is broken.” Short approached the bed and stooped to examine Jefferson’s wrist, which lay like a detached object on a white silk cushion (the surgeon’s sole useful contribution), while Jefferson himself stretched full-length on his bed.
“I must have told you,” Jefferson said softly in English, “that whenever I see two or three doctors together, I always look up in the sky for a buzzard.”
“Sir, the swelling is even worse.”
The surgeon began to rattle in French, a French so pompous and Latinate that Short couldn’t stand to hear it. He cut him off with a wave of his hand.
“Sir—”
“Mrs. Cosway is still here?” Jefferson had lifted his head.
“Downstairs.”
“You really must take her home, William. And cancel the dinner. And tell Petit to bring up my letter file. Next week, you know, Thursday—”
“Sir”—it was a measure of his anxiety that Short let himself intefrupt—“I’ll speak to her now. But Petit, the letters, all that can wait; you need to rest.”
“I’m thinking of the bust of Lafayette.” Jefferson glanced at the doctor, who still stood, thumbs hooked in his vest, studying the swollen wrist. “Does he speak English?”
“Not a word,” Short said, straightening and turning to go; and under his breath, foutre.
In the downstairs salon, under the painted ceiling, he found Maria Cosway holding open one of the French doors and looking into the garden. Her dress and ribbons today were pink. Her face was paler and more stricken than Jefferson’s.
“You really ought to leave,” Short said bluntly. “I’ve canceled dinner.”
“And he—?”
“The bone is broken, he’s in great, great pain.”
“He wanted, you know—” She fluttered her hands in a gesture that Short thought of as purely Italian. “There was a little fence, and too much wind. He was vaulting on one hand, jumping.”
He had been showing off like a schoolboy, Short thought, like a damned schoolboy; the least impulsive man in Paris jumping a fence to show off for a girl.
At the street he handed Maria into her carriage and bowed without another word. The new surgeon arrived at virtually the same moment, following James and Petit into the house. As he hurried after them, Short made a mental list: With a crippled right wrist, leaving aside the unthinkable questions of gangrene or permanent deformation, there would still be no playing of the violin for months, if ever; no tinkering with watches and tools, no riding on horseback—he stopped on the stairway landing, watched the surgeon go through the door, and finished the list. Without his wrist Jefferson could not write a word.
Jefferson passed the night in sleeplessness and pain. From time to time, when the swelling appeared to subside, the two surgeons probed the bones with their fingers and consulted each other (Short thought) in thick oleaginous French. Toward morning they attempted to straighten the hand and forearm with wooden splints, but they went about it so clumsily that even their stoic patient cried out in protest. By noon the next day, they had only strapped the wrist in a tight leather bandage, and Jefferson could walk, gingerly, holding his arm to one side like a broken wing.
To Short’s amazement, on the day after the accident, Maria Cosway neither came nor wrote. On the evening of the second day, as he sat at his desk in the study contemplating the bust of Lafayette that Jefferson was to present to the city in a week, a Savoyard brought him a small blue envelope tied with a feminine ribbon.
Short stood up, covered the bust with a cloth (let us have no prying eyes), and paced to the center of the carpet.
Like other diplomats, Jefferson kept a journal in which he recorded, with a brief summary of contents, every letter that he sent or received, even the most trivial inquiry or invitation. But this … this was, by ribbon alone, no official letter. Short tapped the envelope on the side of the desk. If it were his letter or his journal, would he want it recorded?
He turned the envelope in hi
s hand. Thought of Maria’s pale, strangely unresponsive face in the salon, her spider-legged husband. What could she possibly have to say now?
When he turned the envelope over again, he saw that the ribbon had come untied.
Parigi Mercoledì Sera
I hope you dont always judge by appearances or it would be Much to My disadvantage this day, without my deserving it; it has been the day of contradiction, I meant to have had the pleasure of seeing you Twice, and I have appeard a Monster for not having sent to know how you was, the whole day. I have been More uneasy, Than I can express. This Morning My Husband kill’d My project, I had proposed to him, by burying himself among Pictures and forgetting the hours, though we were Near your House coming to see you, we were obliged to turn back, the time being much past that we were to be at Saint-Cloud to dine with the Duchess of Kingston; Nothing was to hinder us from Coming in the Evening, but Alas! My good intention prov’d only a disturbance to your Neighbours, and just late enough to break the rest of all your servants and perhaps yourself. I came home with the disappointment of not having been able to Make My apologies in propria Persona.
Short folded the letter once but held it clear of the envelope. No one had come to the house last night, late or otherwise. And obviously Cosway had scotched completely the scheme of coming to visit that morning, if the scheme had ever existed. Why should a husband carry his wife to her—? He stopped himself and glanced at the back of the letter. A final paragraph in Italian. Short frowned and translated the first few words. She wrote so badly in English, she said; she was his obliged servant, obligatissima, and true, true friend.
