Jefferson's Sons (18 page)

In November Burwell painted the landau with six coats of paint until it was as shiny as a new coin. The first day Burwell started painting, Eston, Maddy, James, James's sisters, and Burwell's children all wanted to help. Burwell wouldn't let them. He said he didn't need a bunch of paint-covered children putting fingerprints on the new landau, and did they all need something to do? James and Maddy laughed as they ran away.

By the start of December, the landau was ready for its first trip, to Poplar Forest, Master Jefferson's other big farm. Master Jefferson went there whenever he was tired of visitors, because nobody ever visited him there. Davy Hern harnessed the carriage horses to the landau and drove up to the great house. Maddy watched them get ready to leave.

Miss Ellen and Miss Cornelia, who were accompanying Master Jefferson, came out with carpetbags and workbags. Miss Ellen struggled under a big box of books. Maddy grinned. He bet Miss Ellen would read the entire time she was gone. Burwell handed Davy Hern a cheese, and what looked like a wrapped ham, and Davy tucked them beneath the driver's seat. Gill and Israel, two of Fanny Hern's brothers, climbed bareback onto the horses that pulled the landau. They looked excited, but Maddy thought it would be tiring to ride those horses for three full days. Wormley handed Burwell the reins to Master Jefferson's saddle horse, which Burwell would ride.

Miss Martha stood on the house steps, watching, while Master Jefferson settled the girls and piled fur lap robes over them. The wind whipped her shawl around her great big belly. She was expecting another baby soon. She didn't live with her husband, but he visited often. “Papa, you bring them back before Christmas, do you hear me?” she called, into the wind. “I want them home for Christmas!”

Mama came up behind Maddy, and put her arm around him. “Will they be back by Christmas?” he asked.

“They will,” she said.

The landau pulled away. A sort of emptiness settled over the mountain. Miss Martha sighed and went into the house. Mama followed her quietly, and Maddy followed Mama.

“Sally,” Miss Martha said, “should any visitors knock in the next two weeks, you tell them Mr. Jefferson is gone away, and you shut the door. We aren't feeding them, we aren't housing them, and we aren't even showing them the farm.”

“Yes, ma'am,” Mama said.

“And bring a cup of tea to my room. I'm going to go lie down.”

Master Jefferson came back two days before Christmas. On the third of January, 1814, Miss Martha had another baby girl. A few days later Mama gave Maddy the job of keeping up the fire in Miss Martha's bedroom, on the second floor. “She's feeling poorly and the house is cold,” Mama said. “You make sure that one room stays warm.”

When Maddy went into the room, Miss Martha didn't speak. She lay motionless in the alcove bed, which was a bed built into a little cave in the wall. Master Jefferson loved alcove beds. He put them in every bedroom in Monticello. It was a gray day, so the alcove lay in shadow. A mound of blankets covered the bed. Maddy couldn't tell whether Miss Martha was awake or asleep.

He set his armful of wood on the hearth as gently as he could. He took the poker and began to make up the fire. A log crackled as it fell apart.

“Who's that?” Miss Martha asked. Her voice was soft, hoarse, worn-out like the rest of her.

“Ma'am?” Maddy asked.

“Oh. It's you.”

“Are you warm enough? Mama told me to ask.” Miss Martha's bedroom was a lot colder than Maddy's family's room in the dependency row. The wind rattled the windows.

“I'm fine.”

“You need some water or anything? Something to eat?” Much as he disliked Miss Martha, Maddy couldn't help feeling sorry for her. She looked old and tired and awfully alone.

“No. I don't need anything.”

The baby gave a sudden cry. Maddy jumped. He'd almost forgotten about the baby. She settled into wailing, and Miss Martha sighed. “Hand her to me, will you? She'll be hungry.”

Maddy looked at the cradle near the bed. He could hardly see the new baby beneath the blankets she was wrapped in and the wool bonnet she was wearing.

“Careful,” Miss Martha said. “Put a hand under her head.”

Maddy put one hand under the baby's head and one under the wad of blankets. He heaved up, the way he would if he were picking up Eston, or James Fossett's baby sister Elizabeth Ann, but this baby was so much lighter than both of them that he nearly flung her into the air. He pulled her back, and sort of hugged her for a moment, in case he'd frightened her, and then he handed her to Miss Martha. The baby wailed nonstop. Her face was bright red and bumpy, and her nose and mouth and eyes were all scrunched together. She was the ugliest baby Maddy ever saw.

Miss Martha didn't say another word, just messed with the front of her gown and put the baby to nurse. The wailing stopped short. One of the baby's hands came out of the blankets and waved in the air, tiny fingers opening and closing like a chicken claw.

Miss Martha said, “Get me a glass of water.”

Maddy looked, but there wasn't any water in the pitcher in her room, nor any glass. He took the empty pitcher and went down two sets of stairs to the basement, then over to the side where the well was. He hauled up a bucket of water, filled the pitcher, and set it by the stairs. Then he went across to the kitchen. “Miss Martha needs a drinking glass,” he said. “She maybe ought to have something to eat too. She looks poorly.”

Miss Edith made up a plate of food, and put it and a glass into a basket so he could carry them easily. Maddy took the basket and the pitcher up to Miss Martha's room. He poured her a glass of water. He took the glass from her when she'd finished drinking, and put the plate where she could reach it. “Miss Edith says, she hopes you're feeling better,” he said.

“Go find Priscilla,” Miss Martha said. “Septimia needs her clout changed.”

“Septimia?” Maddy said before he could stop himself.

Miss Martha narrowed her eyes. “That's her name. Septimia.”

Maddy felt sorry for the baby, a scrunched face and a name like Septimia. Sounded like something you could die from.
I got a bad case of septimia,
Maddy thought,
I think I'm going to be sick
. He never expected Miss Martha to thank him for anything, but it might have been nice, he thought, if she'd noticed that he had brought her something to eat without being asked.

Maddy went to find Priscilla, Uncle John's wife, who cared for all Miss Martha's children. She was up on the third floor with the little boys, Benjamin and Lewis. She came right away when Maddy beckoned. “I was listening,” she said. “I didn't hear the baby cry.”

“I picked her up quick,” Maddy said. “Aunt 'Cilla, what's the matter with that baby?”

Priscilla looked worried. “Nothing I know of. Why?”

“Her face is all mashed. Something's wrong with her face.”

She laughed. “Babies all look like that when they're first born. She'll be pretty in a few weeks, you'll see.”

“And why's she got such a stupid name?”

Priscilla waved him away. “Can't help you there. Bring some wood up for the nursery, will you? We can't get the house warm today.”

 

Maddy puzzled over that name.
I've got a patch of septimia on my skin
. Finally he asked Miss Ellen. He had been looking for an excuse to speak to her.

Miss Ellen made a face. “It means ‘seventh,' ” she explained. “Because she's Mama's seventh girl.”

Maddy counted quick in his head, but by his reckoning the baby made six, after Misses Anne, Ellen, Cornelia, Virginia, and Mary, plus the four boys, Jeff, James, Ben, and Lewis, which if you added them together made ten.

“There were two of us named Ellen,” Miss Ellen explained. “I'm the second. The first one died.”

Maddy nodded. “We had two Harriets.”

“I'm not calling her Septimia,” Miss Ellen said. “I'm going to call her Tim.”

Maddy nodded again. After a pause he said, “My reading's coming right along.”

Miss Ellen didn't look at him. “That's good.”

“Lots of fine words in the back of that primer,” he said. “
Glorification, academician, supposition
. 'Course, we don't know what all of them mean, but they're fine words. Beverly likes them.”

“That's good,” Miss Ellen said again.

“If we had another book—something you all were finished with, maybe—”

Miss Ellen shook her head, the tiniest bit.

“If someone was to drop a book in the kitchen,” Maddy persisted, “maybe someone who comes to help supervise the work, if a book just sort of fell out of that person's hands, I reckon it would get to me. Any old book.”

Miss Ellen still didn't look at Maddy, but the edge of her mouth lifted slightly. Maddy took that to be a smile.

“And not any Greek books,” he said. “Only plain old English, none of that fancy educated stuff, no sir.”

This time he was sure he saw her smile.

The next evening, when Maddy went to the kitchen for dinner, Miss Edith gave him the eye. “Go fetch me that bushel of sweet potatoes,” she said. When Maddy brought it over, Miss Edith put her hand down into it. “Why, look here! This is a funny sort of sweet potato. Where do you suppose it grew?” She pulled a book from the basket and handed it to Maddy. “Better not be more of these funny potatoes,” she warned him. “We don't need trouble, no, we don't. Not in my kitchen.”

It was a book of stories, written by a man named Aesop. They were all about foxes, and crows, and greedy boys and trickery. Maddy loved them. Harriet loved them even more. She read them until she knew them by heart, and then she told them to all the children up and down Mulberry Row.

For years people around the mountain heard rumors that Master Jefferson was running out of money, but no one ever knew whether or not they were true. Now suddenly the rumors intensified.

Times were hard all over, after the war. The price of Virginia farmland had dropped to almost nothing, though Beverly said that didn't matter because Master Jefferson would never sell any of his land. Miss Martha's grown son, Jeff, who ran the farms, looked tight and worried all the time, and Joe Fossett heard one of the white overseers complain that he hadn't been paid. But the very next week a wagon drove up the mountain loaded with wooden casks full of French wine. The grapes had been grown in France, made into wine, put into oak casks, and shipped first in a ship across the ocean and then in a wagon to Monticello, and all that cost a bundle, you'd better believe. Burwell shook his head and said the wine wouldn't last three months, the way the visitors drank like they were parched and dying.

Master Jefferson wrote letters in the mornings with his mockingbird on his shoulder. He whistled while he rode his horse around the farm. At night, in the crowded dining room, he laughed and talked and poured wine with a generous hand. Miss Martha seemed anxious, but Master Jefferson never did. Nobody knew what to think.

“Will it matter, Mama?” Maddy asked. “If the money runs out?”

Mama shook her head. “I don't know,” she said. “You're safe, Maddy, I have his promise on that.”

Maddy knew what she meant: the big promise, the freedom promise.

Mama continued, “I think, while he's alive, it won't matter. He was a president, and a great patriot, and nobody's going to fuss at him if he can't pay all he owes. When he dies it might be a problem, if there are still debts to pay. Miss Martha would have to pay them, or Mister Jeff.”

Maddy hadn't known you could inherit debts. “Oh, yes,” Mama assured him. “Master Jefferson took on a whole bunch of debt after his wife's father—my father too—Master Wayles—died. He inherited everything, land and people and debt.”

“How long will Master Jefferson live, Mama?” Eston asked.

“A long time,” Mama said. “He's a very healthy man.”

“A very
old
healthy man,” Harriet said. “He could die tomorrow.”

“He could,” Mama said. “I don't think he will.”

 

In May Harriet turned thirteen. She wasn't quite a woman yet, but she was getting close. She was tall and light-stepping, and even prettier than Mama, and when she was dressed up, which wasn't often, people thought she was one of Miss Martha's girls.

Harriet never put on airs; she was smarter than that. Miss Cornelia and Miss Virginia were just a year on each side of her in age. They'd never liked Harriet. Mama told her to keep her head down around them, and Harriet did, and when she worked in the great house Mama made her wear a scarf over her head to hide her hair, her straight, flowing, white-person's hair.

Next year Maddy would be apprenticed to Uncle John, like Beverly, but for now he was still an errand boy, fetching wood and water and whatever else Mama, Burwell, or Miss Martha needed. He was passing through the front hallway one morning when he heard Miss Cornelia ask Miss Martha if Harriet could be her personal maid.

Maddy stopped short. Miss Cornelia and Miss Martha were in the schoolroom, and the schoolroom door was open wide. Maddy could hear them plain as anything.

Miss Martha said, “Cornelia, what would you do with a maid? You're not old enough.”

“Please, Mama,” Miss Cornelia said. “My cousins have maids, and they're younger than me.”

“Their circumstances are different from ours. You know that. You're not out in society, you don't need a chaperone.”