Patriot Hearts

by Barbara Hambly

  And the next moment, as fury rose through her like a heat, she saw his own cheekbones darken with the flush of blood as he, too, realized what had happened to his replies.

  Of course, she thought, he’d enclosed them in letters to Patsy. Even had he not, any messenger would have laid them on the table in the front hall. It would never have occurred to him to send his messages to her via a slave. Not if Patsy “didn’t know.”

  Levelly, knowing that words once spoken can never be taken back, Sally said, “Yours must have gone astray. When I didn’t hear from you, I thought—” She stumbled a little. She took a deep breath, and went on. “I thought you had changed your mind.”

  His eyes flickered back to hers, filled with that bleak wariness she’d seen in them these past three years, and she couldn’t keep the edge from her tone as she asked, “What else did you hear about me?”

  She didn’t add, And from whom? and she didn’t need to. She saw the muscles of his jaw clench and felt the anger that stiffened the whole of his body: anger at her for implying that his daughter knew and had deliberately lied; sick disgust at the impossible position of being trapped between two women; outrage at the circumstance that put him, a white master, in the position of owing an apology to a slave. Wishing—she could see it in his eyes—that he could simply walk away and go back to being what Patsy wanted him to be.

  “Nothing to signify. Idle gossip only.”

  Sally became aware that she was trembling with anger. Had Tom really believed that having a touch of African blood in her veins, she would casually betray him, as she guessed that Patsy had implied? That she would take a lover—or several lovers—in the quarters, men whom Tom couldn’t even challenge because the subject was not one to be discussed?

  Of course he did. Weren’t blacks more amorous than whites? Didn’t every white man in Virginia—including Tom—keep saying how they were slaves to their own passions? “Born under the sign of Venus” and incapable of anything more than “animal eagerness”?

  It wouldn’t have needed more than one or two sidelong comments to put that bleak distaste for her in his eyes. To give Patsy her victory. To “save him from himself.”

  If Patsy had been of her own color—And I am damn near almost of hers!— Sally would have stormed out of the washhouse and torn out every handful of her rival’s hair. The fact that she couldn’t silenced her, stilled her, and in that stillness she was forced to look at Tom again, and see disgust and outrage ebb and alter, and his chill steely anger shift.

  “Next time you hear something, sir,” Sally told him, “ask me yourself.”

  “Papa?” They heard Patsy’s skirts swish as she passed the washhouse door on her way down to the half-dug terraces of what would be the new vegetable gardens on the lower slopes of the hill. Tom’s eyes moved a little, as if they followed her. As if, hearing his daughter’s receding steps, he were putting together a thousand fragments of irrefutable and unacceptable truths, to form a conclusion that he could not face.

  Sally added, more quietly, “Ask me and I will tell you the truth, whatever it is.”

  “I know that.” He held out his hands to her. “I will. I promise.”

  After a long moment she reached out and took them.

  “I’ve missed you, Sally.”

  Even when I was right down the hill and you were poking around the gardens with your daughter?

  But she knew that she would never rival Patsy in his heart.

  She sighed, letting go of something within her, although she couldn’t tell whether it was the future or the past. “And I you, Tom. I’m sorry if I did wrong—”

  “It wasn’t your doing. I should not have believed…rumor. I will not do so again. Forgive me.”

  Sally only nodded, and let him draw her against him. The nature of what lay between them, she thought, existed beyond the bounds of words. His kiss was gentle, the kiss of a friend, but the touch of their lips was like flame thrown onto oil, and his arms tightened crushingly around her. It was nearly dark before they spoke again, as they lay together on the damp brick floor of the washhouse, panting in the tangled disorder of half-shed garments. She whispered, “When will you be back?”

  “In January.”

  She sat up, her hair hanging like a dark mermaid’s around her shoulders, her body feeling queerly shaky with the aftermath of passion: aching, exultant, yet longing to weep.

  “I’m going to risk sounding like those ladies in the Palais Royale and ask, would you have time before you go to ask Mr. Randolph to get another cabin built for me, while you’re away? I wanted to ask you before—”

  “It’s my fault.” He put his palm to her cheek, then stood, and helped her to her feet. “And I am sorry, Sally, more than I can say. I will see to your cabin myself.” He straightened his clothes, looked around for the black velvet ribbon with which his long hair had been tied. Sally found it for him, gathered up her own disheveled curls under her cap again.

  “I’m coming back to stay, Sally,” he said softly, and looking around at him, startled, she saw in his eyes a bitter and beaten weariness. It was as if, she realized, the prospect of returning to Philadelphia even for two more months was more than he could endure.

  “I can’t—” He almost visibly stopped himself from the admission, I can’t take it anymore. “I can’t sleep at night. I find I’m barely able to take pleasure in reading, nor in conversation, since everything in Philadelphia concerns politics these days, and half of everything men speak is lies, or half-truths twisted by ignorance or malice.”

  He hesitated on the words, as if at the reminder of gossip and lies closer to home, then shook his head.

  “I’ve done everything I can to keep this country from being dragged back into despotism stronger and more subtle than the King’s. I feel as if I’m shouting into a windstorm. And in return I’ve been reviled, and betrayed by all in whom I’ve placed my trust.” He fell silent a moment, then added quietly, “All except you, it seems.

  “I’ve never been good at brangling and quarreling, and it seems to me that there is only that, twenty-four hours out of every day. I’m not that strong, Sally. For three years now I’ve been tilting at windmills, and have been well and truly beaten by them. I don’t know what else to do.”

  She touched his hand. “Does your family know?”

  “I told them this afternoon, at dinner. I only want to come home, Sally. To be with those I love, to wake each morning with nothing more important to occupy me than the progress of my garden, and the observation of the clouds.”

  Don’t we all? thought Sally wearily. Don’t we all. She knew it was Patsy, Maria, his sister, and his granddaughter he was thinking about, when he said, those I love.

  “There’s a lot of knights out there in the world,” she said after a time. “Enough to keep the windmills at bay. I’m glad you’ll be home.”

  “And I,” he answered softly, “that you’ll be here to come back to.”

  Sally’s mother gave her a long look when she joined her family, gathered in the candle-glow of the cabin steps. Little Tom clung to her skirts and wanted to know where she’d been, for it was the first time she hadn’t been at supper, or somewhere that he could find her, in the evening.

  Jimmy watched her narrowly, but after supper Betty Hemings sent her sons on their way before Jimmy could corner Sally with questions. “Too many people in this family pokin’ into what don’t concern ’em,” she said.

  What Betty Hemings didn’t know about other people trying to manipulate a woman’s relationship for their own profit, Sally reflected, could probably be written on the back of a button and still leave room there for the Lord’s Prayer.

  All she said to Sally was, “You want me to tell Lam?”

  It would be all over the quarters by midnight, thought Sally with a sigh, and up to the Big House with breakfast in the morning—unless Patsy’s maid Lacey thought twice about mentioning to her mistress who was tupping whom in that household.

  “No.�
�� She dipped the cups into the bucket of hot scrub-water on the hearth, mopped them briskly with the rag. Like other things in the Hemings household, they were finer than the gourds or hand-fashioned clay used by the field-hands: salt-glaze stoneware that had been the original dishes up at the Big House. “There’s too many people as it is, not saying what they need to say to the person they need to say it to.”

  She tucked Little Tom into his low truckle-bed and told him a story about Mr. King Snake in the corncrib, and how he’d bit the Giant Hand that came busting into his house whilst he was taking a nap. The night was warm, but fall had definitely come to the mountain. When she went out to sit on the step again, there was only the crying of crickets in the woods, and the hoot of hunting owls.

  Her body ached, between her thighs, from the unaccustomed movements of lovemaking, and she had a bruise on her shoulder from the bricks of the washhouse floor. A kind of languid peace filled her, as she pulled off her cap, shook out her hair, and combed it with the silver comb that she kept locked in her chest beneath the bed. Lam had said to her that afternoon that he was coming up tomorrow, with salt and coffee and sugar, and nail-rod iron for the new construction Jefferson planned. She would have to speak to him then.

  Tell him there was no chance of her changing her mind, soon or ever.

  You foolin’ away your chances, Jimmy had accused.

  But which chances had she been fooling away?

  And was she still?

  She ran her hands through her long hair, curly and silky as a white woman’s, gathering it back into a wavy knot. I love you, Lam had said.

  And Tom, as usual, nothing at all. To him words were weapons, and the palette with which he painted dreams.

  And in any case words shifted their meanings, depending on the race of the speaker and the one to whom they were said. Does I need you really mean I need someone?

  Was it his heart that needed her, or only his prick?

  She knew what any woman on the place would have answered to that, yet in three years, there were easier solutions to that problem than the one he chose. Because she was a Hemings, and not, in his eyes, truly black? Because she was familiar, trusted, a friend since childhood—because he knew he could dominate her?

  Because she had known him from her childhood, had seen everything that had gone into making him the man he was?

  With Tom, one could only speculate—she wondered if Patsy had any clearer idea of her father’s heart than she had. And oddly, she felt a regret that they could not talk as they had when they were children. She would genuinely have liked to compare notes with the one other woman who knew him well.

  But in love with him and out of love with him didn’t seem to matter to the deeper attachment of her heart, nor did her awareness of his faults. They were—and would always be—a part of one another’s lives, completely aside from whatever he might tell himself about his feelings for her, if he told himself anything at all.

  He might simply tell himself—or his little friend Mr. Madison, who these days seemed closest to his heart—that a man needed an occasional “bout” with a woman for the sake of his health, and a clean, healthy country slave-woman was certainly preferable to whatever was available on the pavements of Philadelphia.

  Yet in her heart she knew it was more than that. And she suspected that whatever her mother might say, Tom probably didn’t understand it any more than she did.

  Light and sweet, above the crying of the crickets the whisper of a violin drifted down from the house, playing Boccherini in the dark.

  DOLLEY

  Gray’s Ferry, Pennsylvania

  Thursday, October 24, 1793

  A child was crying in her nightmare.

  I must wake up, Dolley thought. I must wake up and save Payne.

  The British are coming and we have to flee to the woods.

  No, that’s wrong, she thought. It’s Willie who’s crying. Baby Willie.

  The infant’s red face returned to her, fever-flushed, the little withered scrap of body that looked so much like that of a newborn kitten.

  It’s just a little summer fever, she told her mother, as she wrung out the damp cloth, over and over again. Sponged the delicate skin that seemed to bag so horribly over bones more fragile than a bird’s. Just a little summer fever. If we can keep him cool, we’ll be fine.

  The stone cottage John had rented on the banks of the Schuylkill had a good, deep well behind it. The water came up so cold, even in the sticky October heat, that she had to settle it out in a pan, so it wouldn’t be too cold for poor little Willie’s flesh.

  How could she feel so passionate a love for someone whose face she’d first seen only seven weeks ago?

  In her nightmare she sat beside the infant’s cot, in the small chamber her mother had laid claim to when first they’d come to Gray’s Ferry. But the sounds she heard through the window were the sounds of Philadelphia, in those last weeks before Willie’s birth: the endless tolling of the church bells, the jolt of wagons on the cobbles of the street as families hurried from the town to seek refuge from the fever in the countryside. The creak of the dead-carts, and the voices of the black drivers calling, “Bring out yo’ dead!”

  Dolley’s eyes snapped open.

  Morning light streamed in at the wide-flung window, the hot air already rank with the musky scents of the country.

  Would the heat never break?

  She sat up, and was at once swamped by a wave of dizzy weakness. She clutched at the bedpost. Don’t lie down, she told herself. If you lie down, you’ll fall asleep again, and Willie needs you. Payne needs you.

  She took deep breaths.

  As she’d dreamed, she saw she was indeed in the stone house at Gray’s Ferry that John had rented for them when the fever began to spread beyond the waterfront.

  So that part at least hadn’t been a dream. Birds twittered in the trees outside the window. Somewhere close a dog barked, clear as a bell in the stillness of the morning. Dolley’s head ached from too little sleep, but the autumn scent of turning leaves and clear water revived her. It woke in her heart the echo of pleasure-parties when all the young people of the Meeting would drive here to walk in these green woods by the river, away from Philadelphia’s oppressive heat. In those days she’d strolled past this house a hundred times with barely a glance.

  She wondered now, a little superstitiously, how she could not have felt a shudder of dread.

  By the time the fever spread inland, Dolley had been too close to her time to be moved. John had rented the cottage at Gray’s Ferry to take her and the children to the moment she could travel.

  For some minutes Dolley sat, trying to recruit her strength. Listening to the birds and hearing in her mind, as if it spilled through from her dreams, the tolling bells and the creak of the carts collecting the dead. In her nostrils the spice of autumn leaves, the swoony sweetness of hay, turned to the sulfur reek of the barrels of tar that had been burned in yards and on street corners to cleanse the fever miasma said to hang like an unseen vapor in the air. When, in her final week of pregnancy, Sarah Parker and Lizzie Collins came calling, they carried lengths of tarred rope in their hands, believing that some quality of the tar itself, rather than the smoke of its burning, would keep the fever at bay.

  Aaron Burr—completely unrepentant about slipping love-notes from Steptoe to Lucy—wrote her from Germantown, I have entertained myself in the Senate Chamber by devising a catalogue of the talismans clutched by my colleagues in the hope of frightening the Grim Reaper: six lengths of tarred rope, eight handkerchiefs soaked with camphor and four with vinegar, and one peeled onion. The smell is as you may imagine.

  He also sent her a copy of Tom Jones, which made the concluding days of August easier to bear, though she had to hide the book from her mother. “Libertine” or not (as John disapprovingly described Burr), it was hard to stay angry at the diminutive Colonel for long, particularly after the joy she read between the lines of Lucy’s first letter from Harewood Plantation.


  And as September brought the death-count to sixty and more a day, even John had to agree with her that it was better that Lucy was somewhere safe, even if it did mean she was married to an Outsider.

  “We shall leave just as soon as Dr. Kuhn says thou’rt strong enough after the baby’s birth,” John had promised, gripping Dolley’s hand. “The air is better, up in the hills. There is no fever there.”

  Listening hard, Dolley heard the murmur of voices elsewhere in the house, and the creak of her mother’s stride on the planks of the hall. Then Anna’s voice saying something about water. Anna and Mary, and her eleven-year-old brother Johnnie had all come out with them to Gray’s Ferry. Dolley closed her eyes, thanking God again that like Lucy, they were away from the horrors of the plague-stricken town.

  Though she’d been hale and lively while carrying Payne, eighteen months ago, Dolley had been exhausted by the final weeks of her second pregnancy. Willie’s birth had seemed endless, draining every atom of strength from her as she clung to her husband’s hands. As that night wore on she had wept with weakness, pain, and a fear that she had never known while birthing Payne. Then in the long nightmare of the ordeal’s aftermath, suffocating in the heat and listening to her child’s feeble cries, she had whispered to her mother to leave her, to go out to Gray’s Ferry and not to wait for her. To save themselves, save Payne, save little Willie who was clearly sickly himself.

  Before she was even well, she recalled, she had crept from bed to sit holding her frail tiny son in her arms. Nights and afternoons blurred into one long half-dream. Willie had seemed a little better when they removed to Gray’s Ferry, for the family cow could get good fresh grass out here and her milk was better: To Dolley’s mingled sadness and relief, her own milk had dried.

  But he hadn’t put on weight as a baby should. And last week, his bouts of fever had returned. Dolley had sat up with him last night and the night before, til the hot lamplight swam before her eyes and the whine of the single mosquito in the room had seemed like the drawn-out note of a hellish violin. She didn’t know what time it had been, when her mother had forced her to go to bed.