The following day his younger daughter Maria had arrived from Eppington. A few hours behind her had appeared Aunt Marks, Tom’s silly younger sister, and after her the withered little Mr. Madison, and then two touring Frenchmen with letters of introduction from the Philosophical Society in Paris.
For six weeks, during the height of the tobacco harvest, there had been no moment for the master to find a few spare minutes to walk down to Mulberry Row unaccompanied or unwaited-for. Nor had he made the attempt. She had waited for a word from him, for even an enquiry as to how Little Tom did. None had come. It must be tiredness, she told herself, or the press of business, that made him leave the room, on those rare instances when she’d stolen a minute to try to speak to him alone. That brought that withdrawn expression in his face, when their eyes fleetingly met.
Through forty long evenings, when he returned late from the tobacco-fields to find his company still sitting outdoors taking the coolness in the starry dark, he would sit up and talk with them, sometimes past midnight—Sally would hear their voices drifting down the hill. Afterwards no sound of the violin sang from the dark of the Big House.
What had happened to change his mind?
And after that, he was gone for another year.
He’ll be gone again on Friday.
If I want to marry Lam Hawkin—if I want to ask for my freedom before he goes back to Philadelphia—now is the time.
“I don’t see why Mr. Hamilton’s opinions should make any difference anymore,” came young Jack Eppes’s voice, as Sally returned from Maria’s room. “He’s retired, hasn’t he?”
In the parlor, Miss Patty’s old parrot Shadwell screeched at one of the maids.
China and cutlery clinked as the dining-room dumbwaiter lifted dishes up from the pantry below. Jimmy liked to impress the other servants by telling how the dumbwaiter had been invented by the lascivious old King Louis XV so that servants couldn’t spy on his orgies where all the rich old nobles and their gorgeous mistresses sat naked around the table, but Sally knew that the only true part of that tale was “so that servants couldn’t spy.”
“And a good thing, too,” put in kindly Aunt Carr. “You never speak to that man when he doesn’t give you a headache, dearest. Honestly, when you arrived in September I was truly worried for you, Tom.”
Betty’s remark about the age at which Tom’s father had died flitted again through Sally’s mind as she stepped through the rear door of the house and hurried down the hill to the sanctuary of Mulberry Row. Upon his return to Monticello, Tom had indeed looked ill, too thin. His hair had definitely begun to gray, and he did not sing as he rode out or walked about the house. He looked like he’d had a headache for months.
Sally could guess why.
At the same time the newspapers began to write of the yellow fever in Philadelphia, news had reached them, even here at Monticello, of what was happening to the French Revolution that Tom had hailed with such triumph shining in his eyes. The guillotine had been set up near the gates of the Tuileries gardens: It would have been visible from the front gate of the Hôtel Langeac.
Tom had come to Monticello for two months last year, and six weeks the year before, and on those visits he’d looked tired beyond computation, but healthy. Now he had the look of a man being torn to pieces inside.
The memory returned, of the letters she’d taken such pains to send him secretly, to which he had never replied; of the chilly politeness with which he turned away even her glance, much less any chance at speech; of Patsy’s remarks to guests that Sally had gotten herself with child by one of the French grooms in Paris. Let him die of it, Sally thought. He is not the only one who has been betrayed.
But he would not speak to her. Nor could she bring up that or any other subject to him.
He will never be other than he is. She carried soiled garments from the bedchambers back into the square stone washhouse, with its two big iron cauldrons, its smell of ashes and soap. And things will never be other than they are.
Her mother was right. She could do nothing to remove Little Tom from Monticello—certainly not to a town where everyone would recognize him as Jefferson’s son. But she could get away herself, from a situation that was intolerable.
Last week Jimmy had cornered Sally in the cabin she shared with their mother. “What you up to, girl?” he’d demanded roughly. “You foolin’ away your chances, and gonna end up with nuthin’.”
“I haven’t been offered a chance so far to fool away,” Sally had retorted, “in case you ain’t been watching.” The encounter had been late in the evening. Jimmy’s shirt smelled of cheap rum under the sweat.
Jimmy grabbed her by the arm and shook her, his voice hoarse with the fury that seemed never to have left him, since they’d sailed for home. “You waitin’ for him to send you a bouquet? Write you a love-letter in French maybe?” Up to the night before departure he’d spoken of staying in France, had tried to talk Sally into remaining with him. What would have become of them—of Little Tom—if she had? “You be waitin’ for him in his bed when he quit jabberin’ with his folks some night, he give you all the chances you want.”
“I’m not his whore!” Sally jerked at her arm and her brother’s hand tightened hard. “You think I’m like those girls in the Palais Royale, the ones who’d stand on chairs with their skirts pulled up to their waists, showin’ what they got to passersby?”
Jimmy dragged her face close to his, so that she could see the gleam of the dying hearth like streaks of gold in his eyes. “You his slave, girl. You was a free woman in France and you came back here to be his slave. You his whore.”
If she slapped him, Sally knew he’d strike her back. Drunk, he’d struck her before. So she twisted her arm and turned her body, the way she’d learned to do when the footmen in Paris would grab for her, and slithered free of his grip. Her arm smarted so she knew already it would bruise up bad. She had to bite back the words on her lips: If I’m his whore, what does that make you?
But she knew they were the words that Jimmy would have said to himself, if he hadn’t drowned them in rum.
So she only whispered, “Go to bed, Jimmy.” And retreated into the hot dark of the cabin.
I was a free woman in France. She emerged from the washhouse, to the speckled afternoon shade. The bruise left by Jimmy’s hand still hurt. And I came back here with him, knowing I’d be his slave.
But even if he had changed his mind about wanting her, he was a man who wouldn’t let go.
Who would never let any man have what had once been his.
But I’m not his whore.
If what she wanted was his body between her thighs and those little sums of money he’d used to leave for her in his desk drawer—the money Jimmy wanted to get his hands on—then yes, she could simply slip through his cabinet window and be waiting for him, naked, on his bed tonight. And she was sure he’d be delighted to bull her and send her on her way with a friendly slap on the flank and a little present in the morning, because—no matter what they said to their friends and in public print about the amalgamation of whites with blacks—men didn’t turn anything down when offered.
But it wasn’t what she wanted.
She knew that what she wanted was no longer possible: to read in his library, to talk far into the night, to play backgammon and chess after he’d come back late from one of his dinners, to drive out with him to the old palace at Marly or to walk under the trees of the forest at St.-Cloud. It wasn’t possible in Virginia. It wasn’t possible with an adult Patsy. It wasn’t possible with Little Tom.
If she wanted sex and upkeep, there was Lam—and safety, too. And she wouldn’t have to deal with Patsy.
Or with the satisfied pity in her sister Critta’s eyes.
But there was a word for trading sex for upkeep, even with Little Tom’s safety thrown in. Those girls standing on the chairs in the Palais Royale with their skirts pulled up to their waists probably had children to feed, too.
Outside the washhous
e, children’s voices called her name. Not joyful now but scared—badly scared. She stepped quickly to the door as they swarmed around her, Eddy and Aggy, Bart and Cannda, all those children too young to be put to work yet: round faces, wide frantic eyes, brown legs sticking out under faded calico shirttails. Danny, the oldest at nine, carried Little Tom on his hip like a baby, Little Tom clutching his right hand in his left, his face ashy with shock.
“Tom got snake-bit,” Eddy whispered, terrified, and four-year-old Aggy wailed, “He ain’t gonna die, is he?”
Panic struck Sally like a single cold arrow going into her heart. Dear God, not Tom and Little Tom, too! But to say so would only scare them worse, so Sally took a deep breath and said, “No, he isn’t gonna die,” and held out her arms. “What’d the snake look like? Did he have any red on him?”
She sat on the bench beside the door where she’d been sewing, Little Tom clinging to her, face buried in her bosom. Davy said, “No red, ma’am,” and looked around at the others for confirmation. “It was black and shiny like oil.”
“And ten feet long!”
“And he had yellow on his belly, and black spots.”
“And I bet he bit you by the corncrib, when you went stickin’ your hand in through the slats.” Almost faint with relief, Sally turned Little Tom’s hand to the light, to show up the small horseshoe of tiny punctures in the creamy skin. As a child, she’d explored every foot of the woods on the mountain, and between them her mother and Mr. Jefferson had conveyed to her all their considerable woodcraft.
“See that?” she went on, gesturing the children close. “When it looks like that, it means the snake wasn’t poison, and there’s nothing to fret about—except that you, little man, are damn lucky it wasn’t a rat that bit you, instead of a king snake who was just tryin’ to catch up on his sleep. A poison snake’ll leave two marks, like that—” And she pressed with the tip of her little scissors, not breaking the skin but leaving two pink indentations on the back of her son’s wrist.
The children gazed, fascinated, logging the information for further use. Little Tom’s tears vanished, and he turned his wrist over, studying it.
“Then do we got to cut a X with a knife,” asked Bart excitedly, “and suck out his blood?”
“Then you got to come to me,” replied Sally firmly, “and I’ll do whatever cuttin’ an’ suckin’s to be done around here—after I wear the lot of you out with a cornstalk for goin’ playin’ where you got no business to be. You hear?”
They all murmured, “Yes’m,” but they knew Sally was just as bad as they were, for wandering among the trees and seeing what she could see under every rock and hollow stump.
As the other children dashed off, Sally led her son into the washhouse, and scrubbed the wound with a fingerful of soft-soap and a little rainwater dippered from the barrel. Monticello’s breath-taking prospect and mountaintop magic meant that there was no well and no spring convenient to the house. Another oversight, smiled Sally wryly, blindingly typical of Tom.
He would always strive for what ought to be, and then scurry around trying to make it work, like championing the Rights of Man in a world where no one could afford to give up owning slaves.
“That wasn’t a poison snake?” asked Little Tom softly, his hazel eyes still worried. “Eddy said I was going to die.”
“Well, Eddy was scared.” Sally led her son out to the bench and held him against her. “You can’t believe everything people say, ’specially when they get scared. Then people say things they don’t mean, and sometimes they try to scare other people, to make themselves feel better.”
Like Jimmy, she thought: bitter with being still back in Virginia and obliged to do work before he could leave. For all his talk, he hadn’t had the nerve to simply disappear into the terrifying Paris of ’89, either.
Like Patsy, in the face of her husband’s sullen mutterings about how she’d betrayed his family honor. In the face of her own choice to wed, and her need to have her father be what she thought he should be.
Sally held the boy against her, feeling those small shoulders, like the shoulders of a kitten. Marveling in the compact warmth of him, and the silkiness of his red hair against her cheek.
Whenever Patsy handed a chemise or a tucker back to her with a tart remark about paying a little more attention to the work she was supposed to be doing—whenever Tom Randolph would stroke her arm and whisper that he knew how much she wanted “it”—Sally would remember the ragged shouting of the mob, and the blood spattered on the cobblestones of the rue St.-Antoine. At least I kept him out of that.
Only last week she’d come on Maria weeping over a letter that told of the death of Sister Himmisdal, the nun who’d taught her Christian doctrine at the convent-school. The old woman had been guillotined in front of a howling mob. Sally wondered what Tom had had to say to his daughters about that.
She pressed her cheek to Little Tom’s hair, and tightened her hug.
“You all right?” she asked, letting him go.
The boy nodded. “Eddy threw Aggy’s dolly in the corncrib,” he explained. “Aggy was scared to get it.”
“Aggy was smart,” said Sally, and kissed him. “But that was very brave of you, and very good to help her. Next time use a stick, though, all right?”
His face brightened. “All right.”
She took the bitten hand, kissed the little horseshoe of harmless pinpricks that were already beginning to fade. “All better, sugarbaby?”
“All better, Mama.”
She smiled after him, watching him run through the long grass after his friends. He was almost old enough to begin teaching him his letters, she thought, settling back on the bench. His memory was good. He could repeat back any of the hundreds of stories that got told every night in the quarters, when the work was done for the day: tales of wise rabbits and ugly stupid foxes, and of High John the Conqueror who always was able to outsmart the whites, and of little boys who went on magical journeys with their talking dogs.
Yet another reason to remain at Monticello—not, she knew, that she’d have a choice. To make sure Little Tom did get some instruction. It was a good bet Patsy wouldn’t give him any.
She sighed, and turned her head—
—and saw Tom Jefferson standing where the hillside crested beside the kitchen, his shoulder against a poplar tree, outlined by the twilight sky.
Her eyes met his across the distance. She thought about getting up and walking back to her mother’s cabin, but knew already that she wouldn’t.
His shoes swished in the long grass as he came down the hill. Dinner with his family was about the only time of day he wasn’t in riding-boots. Sally found she was holding her breath. Bracing, not only for the bleak chill she’d seen so often in his eyes, but for the sound of Patsy’s voice, calling to him from the house.
“What happened?” he asked when he got close, and nodded in the direction of the stables where Little Tom had disappeared.
For one flash of time, the sound of his voice obliterated the years, and she remembered how it had been, to be friends with this man.
She exhaled, made herself let go of her own dread of another silent battle with Patsy, another wordless round of her anger and his coldness. He sounded like he was forcing himself to speak as he’d used to, but that, at least, was something. She replied, “He put his hand in the corncrib and got bit by a snake. I remembered what you told me about the teeth-marks—” She held out her hand and traced on the mound of her thumb where Little Tom’s wound had been. “It sounds like a king snake. Eddy said it was ten feet long but I suspect that isn’t the case.”
Tom’s eyebrows shot up and his whole face relaxed. “If it is I shall have to trap it and write it up for the benefit of those naturalists who claim American species are smaller and degenerate—though I think I’d prefer it should go on living in the corncrib and eating rats. Is he all right?”
“Scared.”
“Good Lord, I should think so. The first time I
was bitten I was convinced I’d swell up and die in agony. My father—”
“Papa?” called Patsy’s voice from the house.
Sally felt her face freeze. She’d known the moment was too good to last. “You’d better go.”
“Do you wish me to?” His voice, too, had gone cold.
“Papa?”
She’d appear over the edge of the hill in a moment. Sally looked up into his eyes.
Tom took her arm and led her into the washhouse, and closed the door.
But having done so he didn’t speak. For some moments they only stood, inches apart, in the big stuffy chamber with its smells of soiled linens and damp stone and soap. Then he asked, “Is it true you’re going to marry Lam Hawkin?”
Her heart raced, as if he had opened a door for her.
But a door to where?
“Who told you that?”
“You know what plantations are like for gossip. Is it true?”
Now is the time. He’ll never be other than he is. I made a wrong choice once….
Slowly, she said, “I ran away from you once, sir. When I came back, you were angry that I hadn’t trusted you. I promised you then that I would always be here. No, I’m not going to marry Lam Hawkin, or anyone else.”
Stillness again, and the chitter of birds as they nested in the eaves for the night. A dog barked: Bergère, or Bagwell the cowman’s one-eyed herd-dog, driving the cows in for milking. The magical peace of Monticello.
Tom asked, in a voice that sounded much more like his own, “Why didn’t you answer my letters?”
Her shock must have showed in her face, for his own eyes widened. To her own astonishment she kept her voice calm. “Did you get mine?”
“I got two. I answered both.”
Patriot Hearts Page 29
