Patriot Hearts: A Novel of the Founding Mothers

by Barbara Hambly

  And because he looked weary from his journey, she added impulsively, “Thank you for writing to me, sir. It was good to get your letters.”

  “There were a thousand things more on that journey that I wish you could have seen.” He seemed about to say something else, but then fell silent, and in silence seemed to study her face. In silence she returned his look, aware, for the first time since her childhood, of the straightness of his carriage, and the fine long-boned hands permanently stained about the fingers with ink.

  He was the first to turn away. Sally walked, rather than scampered, down the back stairs to the kitchen, and through that day and the night she found her mind returning to small details of his voice and the sharp points of his shoulder-bones under the white linen of his shirt.

  This awareness of Mr. Jefferson as a man, this new fascination that drew her eyes and her thoughts back to him, strengthened through the summer of ’88. Sometimes she could be friends with him as she’d used to be, when on an occasional quiet evening in the library they’d talk about the canals in the Rhineland or the emissary of the pirate-monarch of Tripoli whom Jefferson had met in London. Then unexpectedly, it seemed, she would be fiercely conscious of him and of herself, and the blood would rush to her face, smothering her in confusion and heat. There were times when she felt that he must be aware of this, because he took to avoiding her. When he would return late, without Mr. Short, those hot summer nights, to find her reading in the library, he would not get the chessboard or settle down to talk, but would say only, “I think it’s time you went to bed.”

  It grieved her, that feelings she could not help were causing him to send her away.

  That summer, as the bankrupt French Treasury issued promissory notes that no one would accept and freak hailstorms lashed the countryside destroying most of the wheat-crop, another Virginian visited Paris. Thomas Mann Randolph, twenty-two, swarthy, and tall, was newly come from four years at the University of Edinburgh and Mr. Jefferson’s cousin. The servants were accustomed to friends of the American Minister coming to stay for days or weeks at a time—the artist John Trumbull had remained for months. Sally’s first encounter with young Mr. Randolph consisted of being seized from behind as she emerged from the back stairs into the upstairs hall, shoved against the wall, and ruthlessly kissed.

  She slithered free and fled, hearing behind her Mr. Short call out jovially, where had Randolph taken himself off to? She reached the kitchen trembling, and helped herself to some of the coffee there to take the taste of the man’s liquor-sodden tongue out of her mouth. “What is it, little cabbage?” inquired Mme. Dupré, and Sally only shook her head. On any number of occasions the seamstress had expressed her contempt for masters who took advantage of their female staff, white or black. Sally knew she’d take the matter to the master of the house.

  She might be a free woman now, but she’d learned in childhood that a black girl’s word wouldn’t be taken against a white man’s in the matter of anything from stolen kisses on up to forcible rape. Mr. Jefferson was a Virginian, and Tom Randolph was his cousin, the son of one of his oldest friends. There were things that Virginians, white and black, knew about other Virginians: what they would and would not do, what they would and would not and almost could not speak of.

  When all was said and done, it was only a kiss.

  So Sally said nothing.

  She was glad of her silence, seeing how Mr. Jefferson welcomed his handsome cousin, and introduced him to the salons and societies that made up his own circle of friends. When not in liquor, Tom Randolph was a quiet young man, charming and intelligent, and shared Mr. Jefferson’s love of books and agriculture. When Patsy and Polly came home from the convent that Sunday, Randolph bowed over Patsy’s hand and joked with her about their childhood back in Virginia, and Jefferson beamed with fatherly joy.

  At sixteen, Patsy was taller than most Frenchmen—nearly six feet—and as nearly pretty as she would ever get. Her delicate complexion had been subdued to freckle-less alabaster by the convent’s dimness, her square face surrounded by fine ringlets of the red-gold color Sally remembered Mr. Jefferson’s being. Randolph spoke to her about horses and dogs, and asked about her music. Back in the kitchen, Sally commented to Jimmy that of course Randolph was attentive: Mr. Jefferson had some eight thousand acres of Virginia land, upwards of a hundred and fifty slaves, and no son. Patsy and Polly were his only heirs.

  Tom Randolph stayed for weeks, and during that time, when Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Short were away in the daytime, Sally stuck close to the kitchen. From the footmen she knew Randolph spent a number of his days sampling the prostitutes at the Palais Royale; she didn’t need the other servants to tell her of the man’s foul temper and occasional drunkenness. One Thursday evening in August, when Mr. Jefferson was away dining with one of his philosophical societies and, she thought, Randolph was absent also, Randolph waited in the darkness of Polly’s bedroom, for Sally to pass its door. When she bit him he struck her, hard, the way a man would strike a man; tearing out of his pawing grip, she slashed at him with the candle-scissors from the bedside table, and felt the sharp upper blade rip flesh.

  “Nigger bitch!” he gasped, and stumbled away from her, a black bulk huge against the shadows. “You lead me on, you give me that bitch-eyes come-hither—”

  Sally said nothing, kneeling in the tangled sheets with her dress torn open to the waist, panting, praying he wouldn’t come at her again for she knew his strength was too much for a second struggle. But he only spat at her and lurched out the door. Only then did she begin to shake, her weapon almost dropping from her hand. She clutched at the bedpost, then sank against it: I mustn’t faint, she thought, and I mustn’t cry…

  Had he gone upstairs to his own room? Is he waiting by the stairs? Waiting to follow me up to the attic when I leave this room? Is there no place now within this house that I’ll be safe? Her breath came in a ragged sob. You lead me on, he’d said—something every white man said about every slave-woman he bedded.

  The creak of the doorsill and the flare of candlelight alerted her too late and she swung around, scrambled up, fumbling at the scissors.

  Mr. Jefferson stood in the doorway.

  It was the only time she’d seen him truly angry—

  “Who did this?” He set the candle down and caught her shoulders in his strong hands, then the next second—drew her torn dress over her breasts. “Are you hurt? Sally?”

  “No, sir. I—I didn’t see.” No Virginian, she well knew, ever believed true ill of a family member. That was just something about Virginians. You lead me on….

  Would any Virginia gentleman truly believe there was any harm in “stealing a kiss” from a black servant-girl?

  “Are you sure? Because I promise you, whoever it was will be dismissed from my service.”

  Not the smallest thought that it was the only other Virginia gentleman in the house.

  “No, sir,” she whispered. “I truly didn’t see.” Her eyes held his unflinching. It was even the truth. She’d known her attacker by his voice, and by the stink of the liquor on his breath.

  He moved his hand as if he would touch the bruise on her face. She heard him draw in his breath. Then his eyes turned aside. “I am most sorry—and most angry—that this has happened, Sally. And I will speak to Mr. Petit, to let it be known among the servants that I will not tolerate members of my household being abused. You are here under my protection. I promise you, this will not happen again.” He hesitated, his eyes still on her in the candlelight, in her torn dress with her hair streaming down her shoulders. “Shall I send for Mme. Dupré? She’s gone home, but I will send a note….”

  Sally shook her head. She wanted only that the incident be over. Only that she could go to him like the child she’d once been, cling to him for comfort. “No, sir. Thank you, sir.”

  He left the room with swift abruptness. She heard his steps retreat down the hall, the opening and closing of his door. Later that night, lying awake, she heard, hesita
nt and stiff, the music of the violin.

  I mustn’t think about that.

  Sally stopped in her tracks where the long soot-black wall of the old Louvre Palace stood above the stone embankment and the river. In the tangle of filthy streets on the other side of the Louvre, she could hear voices muttering, a man’s occasional angry shout. Already? A sick qualm turned her cold—fright? she wondered. The stink of the river in the hot dawn? Or some other cause?

  Men strode along the embankment, not the clerks and hairdressers you’d usually see this time of the morning going to work—certainly not the bakers, coming in from Gonesse, for there hadn’t been bread sold in the city for weeks.

  Dirty men, ragged and angry, armed as the mob had been armed yesterday, with clubs and butcher-knives. Somewhere a church bell began to ring, a wild alarm-note, waking the city to another day of fear.

  If I go back to the Hôtel now, someone will have noticed I’m gone. When he comes home, he’ll ask me where I was. And why I fled.

  She knew instinctively he’d find some way not to let her leave. Beneath that gentle exterior he had a steely will and an iron determination to get what he wanted—to hold what he had. She’d seen that with Jimmy.

  It was even worse because she couldn’t imagine living without him, any more than the ocean could imagine not yearning toward the Moon. The thought of never hearing his voice again, never feeling on her flesh the touch of his hands, never tasting his mouth, turned her sick with grief.

  She pushed the thoughts from her mind, and quickened her pace.

  For the week between Randolph’s assault and the young man’s departure, Jefferson barely spoke to her. But she felt his eyes on her, whenever they were in a room together. A dozen times she felt him on the verge of speaking, of putting his hand on her shoulder. He’d be out late, most nights, but still, hours after she heard him return—heard Mr. Short go to bed, footsteps palpable through the floor of her little attic in the still of the night—she’d hear him playing. More than once she heard him open his door, but though she listened for his step on the attic’s narrow stair she heard nothing. It was as if he were simply standing at its foot, looking up into the dark.

  And she knew that one night he would come to her.

  She saw it as clearly as if it had already happened, as if it were a memory or a dream. Almost it seemed to her she could look through the walls and see him, standing in the dark of the hall, barefoot in his nightshirt, his hair unqueued on his shoulders. On one of those dense summer nights when all the city lay waiting for the cleansing war-drums of thunder, she thought, If I tell him No, he will go away. But then he’ll send me away—back to Virginia. Not to punish her, but so that things would not be, in his own mind, messy and awkward. How could a Virginia gentleman go on living under the same roof with a servant-girl he had tried—and failed—to bed?

  Even asking her would change what lay between them, forever.

  Much as he strove to transform the world, and alter how men lived their lives, in his own life he feared and hated change.

  But their friendship had already changed, beyond the point where it could be pressed back into its earlier form.

  He wanted her, when all his life he had despised slave-owners like his father-in-law, men who took concubines from among their bondswomen.

  I am a free woman here. Back at Monticello or Eppington, Sally would already be wed, or as wed as slaves ever got. She’d be living with a man and undoubtedly carrying his child. In the markets here she’d seen girls her own age, round-bellied under the short corsets of pregnancy, and one of Mme. Dupré’s sons-in-law was every bit of Mr. Jefferson’s forty-six years.

  And so she waited in the darkness. Not knowing what to expect, not knowing what she would say, if and when he were to come into her room, and stretch out on the narrow bed at her side.

  And one night, when summer rain poured down the steep slate roofs and lightning flashed over the river, she heard the creak of his door opening below her, and the stealthy pad of naked feet on the attic stair.

  The previous winter—the coldest within living memory, when the river froze solid so that food supplies couldn’t come into the city and hundreds of the poor died nightly in the snow-choked streets—Sophie Sparling had parted company from her employer, owing to the Luckton equivalent of Mr. Randolph, in this case Mrs. Luckton’s son. She shared a garret with three other women in rue de Vieille Monnaie, close to the Cemetery of the Holy Innocents. When Sally reached the place, the door of the old town house stood open and breathed out a stink like the halitus of Hell. Even at this hour men clustered in the wine-shop in the building’s ground floor; someone inside was shouting, “It will be today, brothers! They’ll march in and put the lot of us to the sword—yes, and our wives and our children, too!—because we’ve refused to accept one more day of being fucked in the arse by the King’s ministers and the Bitch-Queen’s hell-begotten friends! On the lamp-post with them, I say! Because we have cried out against them they will murder us in our beds!”

  Sally took a deep breath and ducked inside. The stair was still black with night, slippery with feces and garbage.

  Sophie must still be here. She can’t have gone.

  She had no idea where she would go or what she would do if Sophie wasn’t there.

  The garret was a long bare room with half a dozen smaller leading off it. Three families lived there, the women pounding at a half-loaf of mold-gray bread with hammers, to break off pieces for the gaggle of children. One of Sophie’s roommates had just come up with a jug of what was supposed to be coffee. “…puttin’ up barricades, to slow ’em down,” she was saying to the others, in her slurry Parisian French. “There’s one already by the Filles de la Visitation and another in the rue du Temple. They’re sayin’ we’re gonna march on the Invalides. There’s weapons there—”

  “Sally!”

  Sophie Sparling stood in the doorway, holding aside the curtain that served for a door. She didn’t ask what Sally was doing here, at this hour of the morning. Only held out her hand, drew her into her own tiny room, where two girls and a whiskery man slept on the sagging bed. Light leaked in from a single window, broken and stuffed with rags. The angry ringing of the alarm-bells, the tocsins, penetrated even here.

  Sally said, “I think I’m with child.”

  Sally took a deep breath. “I haven’t had my monthly course since May; I’m going to start showing soon. I don’t want him to know.”

  Sophie had worked with her surgeon father, and had been a midwife’s assistant, while she and her mother were taking refuge with Cornwallis’s troops, after her father’s death. There wasn’t much about the relations between men and women that wasn’t written in those cold gray eyes. “What do you want to do?” she asked.

  “You told me, last time we talked, about your friend Mme. de Blancheville, that’s willing to help girls who’re willing to work. Mr. Jefferson’s asked the Congress for leave to take Patsy and Polly home. Then he’ll come back, he says. But that doesn’t mean he’d bring me back, for all what he says. And he wouldn’t bring a baby, not on a ship.” Her jaw tightened, at the almost physical agony of the choice she had made. “In Virginia my baby’d be a slave.”

  “As would you.” Sophie pointed it out bluntly.

  Sally breathed a tiny snort of rueful laughter. “You’re gonna think me crazy, Sophie—I know you do already. But to tell you God’s truth, I really don’t care whether I’m slave or I’m free, as long as I can be with him.”

  “You’ll care when he gets tired of you.”

  “If you mean he’d sell me off, he won’t. I know him and he won’t.”

  “You don’t know him.” An abyss of bitterness echoed in Sophie’s voice. “Right now he may even believe he loves you. Has he said so? I understand they generally do. At least if they’re talking to white women.”

  “I don’t know all of him, no,” Sally replied quietly. “I don’t think anybody does. And that doesn’t matter now because I’m not goi
ng back. Not to Virginia, not to his house today or ever. I don’t know the difference between thinking you love someone and really loving them, and no, he hasn’t said it. I just know he won’t let me stay here.”

  Sophie’s expression was a silent reminder of Sally’s legal freedom in the Kingdom of France.

  Sally shook her head. “He doesn’t let go, Sophie. Not of what he sees as his. He was furious when Jimmy said he’d leave him. When poor Polly didn’t want to come here, after her little sister died, he had her kidnapped, just about; tricked onto the ship. In all these years, he’s never really let go of Miss Patty. It tears him up inside,” she added, more quietly. “If it was just me, it would be different. But if it was just me, it wouldn’t be such a problem, because he’d bring me back here next year—”

  “If he still cared.”

  She whispered, “He’ll still care. But it isn’t just me.”

  And she knew herself well enough to know that when she was with him, she couldn’t think clearly. Any more than a moth can think clearly about the amber glory of flame.

  “Will you take me to your Mme. de Blancheville? And ask her to take me in?”

  The din in the outer attic had grown louder, men’s voices shouting now, and children crying. Then jostle and clatter as everyone left and went down the stairs. The man in the bed sat up with a grunt, ambled out into the outer room to piss in the bucket there—the few windows being too high for the purpose. “Have you eaten?” Sophie asked, and unearthed a tin box from beneath her pallet on the floor, then led Sally out to the now-empty outer attic to share her bread and what was left of the coffee.

  This stuff was like eating a rock, the flour so adulterated that even soaked in coffee, it gritted on Sally’s teeth. Jefferson had told Sally that the bread being sold in Paris was nearly inedible, but as American Minister—and a plantation-owner used to buying in bulk—he at least had a store of flour laid by from last summer.