Patriot Hearts (22 page)

Poor little Mr. Madison. He so clearly intended for precisely that reason to keep the whole of the powerful Virginia delegation together under his eye. Now he’d been left to wait at Mrs. House’s boardinghouse, out-jockeyed by the Philadelphia merchant.

It was going to be a long, hot summer for everyone in Philadelphia.

Washington City

August 24, 1814

Light footfalls under the cold high hanging lamps of the hall: Dolley turned her head. “Didst find it?” she asked, a little surprised, seeing Sophie holding something small, cupped in the palm of one hand. In the other she held a slender bundle of letters.

“These weren’t in the sewing-table,” Sophie replied as she approached. “They were shoved in behind the cabinet—when was that cabinet last moved?—They’re unsigned.”

She held them out, after the briefest pause. Dolley saw the top one was in English, though it started out,
Ma mie—My little one—
written in a clear strong hand. The superscription was “Rotterdam.” “Dost know the hand?” she asked, and Sophie replied without hesitation.

“Of course not. This was with them,” she added, and held out three broken fragments of ivory, and a few bits of ornamental gold. Put together, Dolley could see that it had once been a miniature: a beautiful girl in the simple white costume so popular in France in the 1780s. A girl with clear eyes of bright turquoise-green, and long dark curly hair hanging down her back.

She looked up, and met Sophie’s eyes for a long moment; then turned the pieces over again in her hand. On the back of the miniature was written only,
Paris 1788.
The delicate paint was scratched and smudged, as if the girl’s painted image had been shattered by being stomped again and again beneath a furious heel.

SALLY

Paris

Friday, July 27, 1787

D
o you remember my mama, Sally?”

Polly Jefferson had been quiet for so long that Sally Hemings had thought the little girl asleep. The woods through which the post-chaise drove did little to mitigate the heat of the day; the vehicle’s swaying was like the rocking of a cradle. At the beginning of the journey from Le Havre, Polly had been as wildly excited as Sally by every new glimpse of farmhouses, trees, and distant châteaus; after four days, she had grown accustomed enough to doze.

Sally could have looked forever, marveling at each half-seen roof or unfamiliar shrub. But she heard the wistfulness in her charge’s voice, and tore her eyes from the green shadows of what M’sieu Petit had told them was the forest of St.-Germain—or at least that’s what Sally thought he’d said. After the tricked parting from Captain Ramsay, Polly had become quieter than she’d been on the
Arundel.
Mrs. Adams at least hadn’t tricked or lied to the girl, to get her to leave the house at Grosvenor Square with the dapper little Frenchman Mr. Jefferson had sent. Still, Sally was aware of long silences where there had been nonstop, childish chatter before.

It was the first time Sally had heard her ask about her mother.

“That I do, sugarbaby.” She put her arm around Polly’s thin shoulders. “I think your mother was about the most beautiful lady I’ve ever seen in my life.” Because of the longing in the little girl’s face, Sally probably would have said so even had it not been true, but in fact Mrs. Jefferson—Miss Patty, she’d been called in the quarters—had been truly lovely.

“Did she look like Aunt Eppes?” Polly sat up a little straighter, tugged at the brim of her sunbonnet, as if still worried about her father’s admonition not to let herself get freckled. “Jack says Aunt Eppes was Mama’s sister.”

Jack was Aunt Eppes’s fourteen-year-old son, and the idol of Polly’s young life. On the voyage from Virginia, snuggled together in the curtained bunk she and Sally shared, Polly had asked to hear almost as many stories about Cousin Jack as about her father and her sister Patsy. In addition to listening to Sally’s recollections, Polly would make up tales herself, some of them quite fantastic, involving the slaughter of dragons or the defeat of the armies of the King of Spain. Back at Eppington Plantation, Aunt Eppes used to frown at Polly’s tales and scold primly,
Now you know that isn’t so….

Sally knew she ought to do the same. But it was more fun to pitch in and add magical birds and the Platt-Eye Devil to the mix.

Besides, Polly knew perfectly well that their stories were only stories.

“You look more like her than your Aunt Eppes does,” said Sally. She did not add that she herself looked more like the long-dead Patty Jefferson than either Miss Patty’s white half-sister or younger daughter did.

It was one reason, Sally suspected, Aunt Eppes had been just as happy to get her out of the house. There were many white Virginia ladies who simply accepted the fact that their fathers took slave-women into their beds—sometimes for a night or two, sometimes, in the case of Sally’s mother Betty and old Jack Wayles, for years. Patty Wayles Jefferson had treated Betty’s “bright” children—Sally’s brothers and sisters—if not as members of the immediate family, at least as a privileged sub-branch, and after her father’s death Sally’s mother had been Miss Patty’s maid and confidante.

For Elizabeth Wayles Eppes, this had not been the case, perhaps because Sally
did
so much resemble their mutual half-sister. Once when Polly was five she’d asked Sally, “Ranney says you’re kin to me—” Ranney being one of the kitchenmaids. Even at age ten, Sally had known enough to reply, “You go way back in the Bible, back to Noah and the Ark, and you’ll see we’re all kin to each other.” Whether the little girl had pursued enquiries with her aunt, Sally didn’t know.

Now she went on, “Your mama had curly hair like yours, dark red like yours, not bright like your papa and sister. And her eyes were sort of green that looked gold in some lights, like your papa, or M’sieu Petit.” And she nodded through the windows toward the trim Frenchman who rode beside the chaise, just far enough behind so that the hooves of his mount would not kick extra dust to drift in through the open windows.

M’sieu Petit was Mr. Jefferson’s valet, and Sally had to smile to herself at the very evident fact that white French valets seemed to stand just as high in their own self-importance as the high-yellow “fancies” generally picked for the job in Virginia. That reflection made her wonder how her brother Jimmy was getting along, among all those French servants.

Her heart twitched with joy at the thought of seeing him again.

“Your mama and papa used to play together, her on the harpsichord, him on his fiddle.” She stroked Polly’s hair, tucked the stray locks back under the linen cap she wore beneath her bonnet. “When they’d sing together in Italian, all the mockingbirds in the trees would stop singing and line up on the windowsill to listen, it was so beautiful. And if the sun had gone down, all the flowers in the garden would open up again just a little wee bit—” She demonstrated with her fingers, to make Polly laugh, “—just to hear one more verse before they had to go to sleep.”

“Silly.” Polly tried to look prim. “Flowers don’t do that.”

“For your mama they did.”

Polly giggled, and settled her head comfortably on Sally’s shoulder, blinking out at the green-and-gold dapple of the sunlight, the soft haze of the dust.

Were it not for Polly Jefferson—nobody ever called the child Mary—Sally thought she would have broken her heart with loneliness, these past two months. Of course, if it weren’t for Polly she’d still be back in Virginia, and not in a coach on the way to Paris, that storybook capital of a storybook, magical land. She wouldn’t be on the verge of seeing her brother again, for the first time in four years.

Every time Polly wrote a letter to her aunt Carr at Monticello, on shipboard and in London at Mrs. Adams’s marvelous house, Sally had enclosed a short note to be read to her friends and family at the mountaintop plantation. She wished she might do the same for the friends she’d made at Eppington, but though Mr. Eppes was on the whole a kindly master, he didn’t hold with slaves knowing how to read and write. She had merely asked Polly to write at the end of her letters,
Sally asks to be remembered with love to you all.
That way they would know at least that she was alive and well.

It was Mr. Jefferson who’d first taught Sally her letters. He loved to teach, and had instructed dozens of the slave-children on Monticello, though most of them—especially the ones who ended up out in the tobacco fields—let the skill go rusty. Destined from childhood to be a house-servant, Sally had kept it up. Because Sally had been reared as much by Miss Patty as by her own mother, she’d spent most of her time in the family house, whether it was at Monticello or one of the other Jefferson plantations, Shadwell or Poplar Grove, or for one astonishing season in the big governor’s palace in Williamsburg. Mr. Jefferson’s older daughter Patsy—only a year older than Sally—had delighted in passing along her own lessons to the younger girl. When Patsy grew old enough to be trusted in her father’s library, she’d often bring Sally along with her: a paradise of histories, stories, poems.

And at the center of it, like a wizard in an enchanted garden, was Mr. Jefferson himself.

A ripple of something—not quite heat and not quite the shivers, neither truly anger nor sadness—went through her at the thought of Mr. Jefferson.

Sally couldn’t remember back before she’d loved him, though the day she’d quit doing so was vivid as yesterday in her mind. It still filled her with sadness, and a sense of confusion for which she had no name. She’d seen them so often together, Mr. Jefferson and Miss Patty. Had been aware of how deeply they loved one another, like the red rose and the briar in the old ballad, inextricably twined.

She had seen, too, the grief, loneliness, and—once the War began—the constant quiet terror in which her mistress lived, each time Mr. Jefferson went away.

Miss Patty was all things beautiful, lovely as the dogwood blossoms, sweet-scented, filled with music. Mr. Jefferson, with his tales of ancient Kings and Indian lore and the secret lives of every bird and grass-blade, was wise and quirkily marvelous. Kind, too. He was firm and reasonable with his slaves, both field-hands and house-servants: he would threaten whippings, but in fact the worst that would happen was that he’d sell an offender away. This was bad enough, and not simply because it meant losing every friend and relative you had. Everyone in the quarters along Mulberry Row knew that pretty much anywhere in the State would be worse than Monticello. At the time, it had seemed to Sally that she’d loved Mr. Jefferson merely for the fact that he didn’t assume she was simpleminded, just because she was a little girl and a slave. Though she was always being scolded by her mother and Miss Patty for wandering off into the garden to look at plants when she should have been practicing her stitching, Mr. Jefferson always took her side. “It’s rare enough to find any child, black or white, who will read Nature’s textbooks so avidly,” he’d tell them. He’d joked with her, and laughed when she gave him back clever answers. Like a good father he’d always been happy to answer her endless questions, to explain the clouds and the winds—and the War.

In the snowy January of 1781, when Sally was eight, the family had been in Richmond, where Mr. Jefferson was Governor of the state. He had come back from the Congress, Sally’s mother had said, because Miss Patty had begged him to, because she could not live with him gone all the time. Sally guessed her mistress feared that if the British took the Congress prisoner, Mr. Jefferson would be hanged. So he’d come back to Virginia, first to Williamsburg and then to Richmond, and the British invaded the state anyway. They’d seized Richmond, and the family barely got away; Sally remembered clinging to her mother’s skirt as the servants huddled around the wagons, and hearing baby Lucie Elizabeth, who’d only been born the previous November, wailing thinly in the cold.

Three days later the British riddled the house with bullets at point-blank range, then rounded up the servants who’d remained there, and sold them off for cash. Both Miss Patty and baby Lucie Elizabeth came down sick as a result of the flight through the freezing countryside. In April, Lucie Elizabeth died.

Eighteen months later, just after Mr. Jefferson’s term as Governor was ended and he returned to Monticello, a militia captain came tearing up the mountain one June morning at dawn, shouting that the British were but three hours behind him and had already taken Charlottesville. Mr. Jefferson woke his wife and daughters and got them into the carriage, carrying Polly down the stairs wrapped in a blanket. Aunt Carr, Mr. Jefferson’s sister who had lived with him since the death of her husband, wailed prophecies of doom as her older boys Peter and Sam struggled to keep the younger ones calm, and Miss Patty’s parrot Shadwell shrieked and swore.

Sally and her older sister Critta, and their sixteen-year-old brother Jimmy, helped load the farm wagon with food, blankets, clothing. Mr. Jefferson lifted her and Critta into the wagon, but their mother went in the carriage with Miss Patty, to quiet their mistress’s terror as the vehicles went jolting down the breakneck, rutted road. Sally later heard from her oldest brother—Martin, the butler—that Mr. Jefferson had tried to pack up some of his papers and had gotten away from the house only minutes before the first red-coated dragoons emerged from the woods.

After the first flight from Richmond, Miss Patty had never been well. By the time they’d escaped from Monticello, the bones of her cheeks stood out through the sunken skin and her hands were like dead leaves.

Yet when Mr. Jefferson was there, Miss Patty would laugh and twine ribbons in her beautiful dark red hair, and insist she was much better; that there was really nothing wrong. Even as a child, Sally had sensed how desperately they both needed to believe this was true. By the fall of 1782 Miss Patty was with child again, her seventh, according to Sally’s mother, counting the little boy she had borne to her first husband. She’d put on weight for the baby’s birth—the second little Lucie Elizabeth—but even Sally could see it was unhealthy bloat, not the smoothness of returning health.