“She was afraid, if she put him out of her bed, that he’d start lyin’ with Iris or Jenny,” Sally’s mother had said, naming the light-skinned housemaid, and the young wife of the plantation cobbler. Both had shown Mr. Jefferson—and a number of his guests at one time or another—their willingness. Being the master’s woman was a good way to get extra food and gifts, and to pass along to any offspring the inestimable gift of preference in an unfair world.
“Why you think she always smiled, and made herself pretty the way she did?” her mother asked. “It’s not just so he wouldn’t fret. It was to draw him back to her, to bind him. To keep him from going away. She’d rather risk death than lose him.”
Sally still thought Mr. Jefferson should have known better. And maybe, she reflected, recalling not only despair but horror in his eyes as fevers, weakness, infections ravaged the beautiful woman he had loved—maybe he had guessed at last what he had so frantically told himself wasn’t true.
On that last morning, on the threshold of autumn of 1782, nine-year-old Sally had been in the room when Miss Patty reached for Mr. Jefferson’s hand and whispered, “Swear to me that you will never give my girls a stepmother.” Miss Patty had had two stepmothers in succession. From what her mother had told her of them, Sally wasn’t surprised that the young woman had been grateful to Betty Hemings for her kindness and for the fact that she’d kept old Jack Wayles from needing to marry a third.
Mr. Jefferson had fainted from grief, and had been carried into the library next to Miss Patty’s room. Everyone went back into the sickroom—Mrs. Eppes and Aunt Carr and Miss Sparling, the young nurse that the doctor from Yorktown had left to care for Miss Patty—but Sally had lingered. She’d looked down at the ravaged unshaven face, the straight red eyelashes like gold against the discolored bruises of sleeplessness. He knows it’s true. He knows that it’s he who killed her by possessing her.
Later she’d overheard some of his friends remark on the excessiveness of his pain, that in those first few weeks he could not even look at his own children without collapsing, and she knew why he couldn’t look at them.
Those things she’d remembered in her days at Eppington, even when her hunger for her family had been at its worst. She’d hated him, when she felt herself going half crazy with longing to be able to read again and when Mrs. Eppes came up with extra tasks and duties in the kitchen and the scullery to “un-spoil” a slave she considered inattentive and uppity. Yet she never could hate him with the whole of her heart.
In time her anger had altered, changed to a kind of slow-burning frustrated grief. For she knew that all things were the way all things were.
She had come to love Polly, and sunny-hearted baby Lucie, as if they were her own sisters. Mrs. Eppes had a baby daughter named Lucie as well: Polly would braid ribbons of identical color into both toddlers’ hair, and say the Lucies were her own twin babies.
Then in early October of 1784, shortly after Mr. Jefferson left for France with Patsy, whooping cough swept over Eppington Plantation.
Both little Lucies died.
“Mesdemoiselles, les voilà!” M’sieu Petit nudged his horse up close to the chaise window, bent from the saddle, and pointed through the trees with his quirt. “Les murailles de Paris. How you say…?” He mislaid the English word, and shook his head with a wry smile, but pride and happiness sparkled in his eyes. Then he simply explained, “Paris.”
For the past mile, Sally had seen through the trees the tall walls of houses—palaces—set back from the road at the end of aisles of trees. Now ahead of them she saw the gray stone wall Mrs. Adams had told them about, which the French King had let his friends build so they could charge every farmer and merchant a fee to bring goods into Paris. Sure enough, a knot of carts and donkeys and wagons was clumped in front of the small gatehouse, while uniformed officials pawed through their contents.
And beyond the wall, distant over yet more trees, could be glimpsed rooftops, chimneys, church steeples. It looked like a fairy-tale, but it was a city, no mistake. The stench was too real for it to be a dream.
Polly’s face contorted with disgust. “Pew!”
And M’sieu Petit’s eyes twinkled. “Ah, la puanteur de Paris! Ça te fait forte!” He thumped his chest. “It make strong!”
Stench, movement, shouting as if everyone at the Tower of Babel were being slaughtered at once all rolled in with the braying of asses, the bleating of sheep, the barking of a thousand dogs…
Paris.
An official strolled over to let them through the gate, M’sieu Petit slipping him a coin to let them through without being searched. The farmers to whom the man had been speaking—or who’d been shouting at him—followed, still shouting, filthy barefoot men, unshaven and carrying sticks. The official in his blue uniform ignored them, like a white overseer brushing off the impotent anger of field-hands. Sally couldn’t tell what the problem was, but as the chaise went through the gate she saw their eyes: like the eyes of slaves who’re burning to torch the kitchen some night.
But on the plantations around Charlottesville, a slave with such anger in him generally worked alone. She’d never seen that many men—that many sets of smoldering eyes—together.
She was house-servant enough to be frightened.
Whatever was going on, somebody was going to catch it bad.
On the other side of the gate lay a great circular open space, surrounded by rows of trees, with streets radiating in all directions. Among the milling farm-carts and gaggles of sheep, elegant carriages maneuvered. The long avenue beyond was almost like a country road, lined with trees and kitchen-gardens. Here, too, were both market-carts and fancy carriages, strollers in bright silks and farmers in faded rags. Less than a mile along, the coachman drew rein at the first courtyard wall. M’sieu Petit sprang from his horse as the porter ran from the lodge to open the gates.
With a breathless start, Sally realized, We’re here.
Polly understood at the same moment, sat up very straight, her eyes huge with panic, her hands pressing guiltily to her freckled nose.
The gate opened. The courtyard was cobbled. Servants in white shirtsleeves came out of the tall gray house.
M’sieu Petit opened the carriage door, helped Sally down first, then Polly. Polly’s hand was cold on Sally’s, like a frantic little claw. “He’s going to hate me—”
A man emerged onto the house’s front steps. Not as big as Sally remembered him from her childhood, though still a tall man. Either she’d remembered his hair being redder or it had faded, and though the gouges of grief and sleeplessness were gone from his sharp quizzical features, she saw where their echoes lingered still.
He wore a brown coat, and had one arm in a sling, wrist tightly bandaged. Yet he slipped it out to reach down and steady Polly as he scooped her up effortlessly in his strong arms.
The next second another pair of arms went around Sally’s waist from behind and Jimmy’s voice said in her ear, “Who’s this gorgeous lady? Can’t be my sister Sally! Sally’s skinny and got knock-knees—”
“I do not have knock-knees!” She whirled, striking at him as if they were children again together, laughing up into his eyes. Dark eyes—of all their mother’s children, only Sally had inherited her ship-captain grandfather’s turquoise-blue eyes. “You still as ugly as I remember, so you got to be Jimmy.” Which was a lie. Jimmy was good-looking and he knew it.
Then Jimmy looked past her and dropped back a step, and she turned, as Mr. Jefferson came up to her, holding out his left, unbroken hand. “Sally.” The soft, husky timbre of his voice brought back to her in a rush all the memories of Monticello, all the tales he’d once told her of ancient Kings. “You’ve grown.”
You sent me away. Like a dog or a bird. But four years had passed. She’d learned that it was something all white men did.
So like the child she’d been, she peeped at him from under her eyelashes and responded meekly, “You’d have to write me up in your philosophical journals if I hadn
’t, Mr. Jefferson.”
Something in the way his shoulders relaxed, in the old answering sparkle of his eyes, made her realize that, white man and adult though he was, he’d been as homesick as she.
He set Polly on her feet again and put his unbroken hand on his daughter’s shoulder, drawing her close. “Thank you, Sally,” he said. “Thank you for keeping such care of Polly, and for bringing her safely here to me.”
Behind them, servants were unloading trunks from the back of the chaise: Polly’s big one, and the small wicker box of Sally’s few possessions. Sally was only a little conscious of her brother’s glance going from her face to their master’s, of the speculation in his eyes. Mostly she was aware of Mr. Jefferson, the god of her childhood, the master who wrote of freedom but kept his slaves, the ravaged face of the man unconscious in the library and the retreating beat of hooves in fog, fleeing the place he loved but could no longer endure.
With Polly’s hand in his he ascended the few steps to the door of the house, and Jimmy and Sally followed him into its shadows. Beyond the gatehouse in the avenue, someone was shouting, “We will not forever be slaves!”
Washington City
August 24, 1814
“Mrs. Madison, I cannot allow you to remain here!” Red-faced and covered with dust, Dr. Blake—Washington’s stocky mayor—gestured furiously toward the parlor windows, though Dolley assumed he meant to point northeast at the Bladensburg road. “I have been in Bladensburg since dawn, digging earthworks, and I know what will happen there!”
“Have the British attacked, then?”
“That is not the issue, Mrs. Madison. They are on their way. Last night they took Upper Marlborough. The men in Bladensburg are exhausted. Their rations were lost, they’d been marching all night—”
“And the President?”
Blake shook his head. “He’s there somewhere. I didn’t see him. Armstrong’s an imbecile—you’d make a better Secretary of War than he does!—giving orders now to retreat, now to advance…The men are untrained and there isn’t a horse in the Army that’s smelled blood and battle-smoke before. They’ll break and run, if the men don’t.”
“I shall stay until Mr. Madison comes.” Dolley folded her hands as if the dusty, exhausted man before her were any morning caller come to pay polite respects, not a messenger from the edge of battle. “I appreciate thy concern, sir, but I will not abandon the capital to an enemy, particularly one who hath not yet fired a shot at me. And I will never abandon my husband. I have a Tunisian saber on the wall of my dining-room and I am perfectly prepared to use it.”
“Do you really?” inquired Sophie, coming in from the hall after Dr. Blake had left, bewildered by the obstinacy of the President’s lady. “Have a Tunisian saber?”
Dolley nodded. “Patsy Jefferson gave it to me; her father got it for her in Paris.” She plucked a fragment of the tea-cake Paul had brought with the refreshments for Dr. Blake and carried it to the window, where Polly had been roving back and forth on her perch for the past hour, cursing under her breath in Italian. “If thou didst know the Adamses in Paris, thou must have known Patsy and her sister there as well.”
“I did, but not well. We were not intimates. To raise the money Mother and I knew we’d need in England, I worked for a time as a sick-nurse for a doctor in Yorktown. Mr. Jefferson had him up to Monticello, when Mrs. Jefferson did not seem to be recovering from her last childbirth; I stayed on to look after her. I think in her heart Patsy Jefferson always considered me a servant. And in Paris I was a paid companion to one of those disreputable old Englishwomen who hung on the fringes of salon society. Patsy was kind, of course. To those who don’t get between her and her father she has great natural kindness of heart.”
Dolley was silent, knowing of whom she spoke. Polly sidled over to her and curled one huge gray claw around Dolley’s wrist, and with the other took the tea-cake.
“Thank you, darling,” the parrot croaked.
And because Polly expected it, Dolley replied gravely, “Thou’rt welcome, Pol.” Plumes of dust were rising now not just along Pennsylvania Avenue, but throughout the muddy, weedy wasteland of scattered groves and still more scattered buildings. Dr. Blake is right, Dolley thought, fighting against the panic that scratched within her breast like a rat behind a door. He and I both know what will happen there, if it has not already begun. The British were on their way. It was insanity to think that the exhausted, disorganized, starving men could stop them.
It was insanity to stay.
Sophie stepped to her side, her dark clothing like a shadow against the room’s bright color, and a blinding round of light flashed from her palm as she held out her hand.
Dolley’s breath caught.
She should have known, when Martha gave it to her, that it came from the French Queen. The miniature on the reverse wasn’t a good one—it could have been any Frenchwoman with high-piled hair and a fantasia of ostrich-plumes—but who other than Marie Antoinette would have given a hand-mirror whose rim was studded with diamonds?
She regarded the painted face on the ivory, the long chin and sweet, pouting mouth. In 1782, this frivolous, softhearted woman couldn’t have known that the powder-trail ignited at Concord Bridge was going to bring down the Bastille’s walls. In 1782, Martha Washington hadn’t even been the wife of the head of state: just a woman whose husband—and whose husband’s cause—was the dernier cri of fashion in the salons of Paris.
Martha had probably sent the French Queen a letter of congratulation on the birth of her son—Dolley recalled Martha speaking of the celebrations in the new Dauphin’s honor, held by the American troops at the tail-end of the winter camp on the Hudson. Martha, who at that time had just lost her own son. And because Martha’s famous husband had just defeated France’s enemy—or was it simply out of fellow-feeling for a woman who followed her husband to the dirt and hardship of war? Marie Antoinette had sent a gift in reply.
She’s adorned / Amply that in her husband’s eye looks lovely, someone had written somewhere. The truest mirror that an honest wife / Can see her beauty in.
Dolley turned the mirror over in her hand. Liberté—Amitié, the graven letters said, that most ancient of riddles: Freedom and Friendship. Though her faith in a truly omnipotent God precluded superstition, the echo of old beliefs still whispered in her heart, that those who’d looked into mirrors left some fragment of themselves, some echo behind within the glass. It seemed to her that she should be able to catch a glimpse of the pretty French Queen, in her diamonds and her ostrich-plumes and her fatal nimbus of impenetrable naïveté, kindheartedly sending off this gift to the woman whose cause would transform itself into the monster that would devour the giver.
Certainly she should be able to see in it Martha’s face, pale within the black of her final mourning. Or to meet within its depths Abigail’s indomitable gaze.
Half to herself, she murmured, “I don’t suppose either Martha or Abigail would have fled.”
“No,” Sophie replied. “But then, neither did the Queen who sent Martha that mirror, and these days no one calls her brave for not getting out when she had the chance.”
Dolley looked up quickly, to meet her friend’s implacable eyes.
A horse rushed by on the Avenue, appearing, then vanishing, through the dust. Voices shouted incoherently. Another gunshot cracked, followed by the frenzied barking of dogs.
Into the silence that followed, Dolley said shakily, “I don’t expect even this is as bad as Paris was, in the summer of ’89.”
“No,” said Sophie softly. “No—Even if the British sacked this city and burned it to the ground, it could not be as bad as it was in Paris, that summer of ’89.”
Paris
Monday, July 14, 1789
Sally woke and lay for a long time, listening in the darkness.
All was silent, but the smell of burning hung thick in the air.
Yesterday a mob had torn down and burned the wooden palisades on either side of the customs
pavilions that flanked the city gate up in the Étoile, had stormed and sacked the pavilions themselves and routed the inspectors there. The Champs-Elysées had been jammed with carts, wagons, carriages, and terrified horses, people fleeing the town or people rushing in from the faubourgs to join in the fray. Furious, filthy men and women had rampaged among them, waving butcher-knives, clubs, makeshift pikes. Mr. Jefferson had been away at Versailles, where the newly formed National Assembly was meeting. At the first sign of trouble, M’sieu Petit had closed and barred the courtyard gates. When he’d reopened them in the evening, at Mr. Jefferson’s return, the stink had been horrific, because of course every member of the mob on the way to and from the Étoile had used the gateways of every house on the avenue as a toilet.
Mr. Jefferson had called a meeting of the whole household in the candle-lit dining-room: servants, stableboys, his daughters, and his secretary Mr. Short. “The King’s troops have surrounded the city,” he said in that soft voice that everyone had to strain to hear. “But the King has pledged to General Lafayette and the National Assembly that he will not attack his own people. These are but the birth-pangs of a new government, the fire that will release the phoenix. We have no call to fear.”
Sally wasn’t so sure about that.
“There’s every kind of rumor coming in through the kitchen, Tom,” she had said to him, softly, much later in the night when he went up to bed. There was a signal between them, a Boccherini piece he would play on his violin, when all the house fell silent. Then Sally would wrap herself in a faded old brocade gown, and move like a ghost barefoot down the dark attic stair.
“Most of ’em you wonder how anyone could believe—that the King’s bringing in Austrian troops, that he’s going to send them in to burn the suburbs where the National Assembly has support, that he’s had explosives put under the hall where the Assembly’s meeting and he’s going to blow the whole lot of you sky-high…How would he get that much powder down into the cellar with you meeting overhead?” She sat cross-legged on the end of his bed as he set aside the violin. “But all over town, people are breaking into gunsmith shops for weapons. I looked out the gate today, and a lot of those men out there had muskets.”
Patriot Hearts: A Novel of the Founding Mothers Page 17
