Patriot Hearts (27 page)

Those days at Mme. Dupré’s, those days of walking about the city with Sophie, seemed to her now like the last time that her life had been normal: that she had been herself, her
real
self. When Sophie could get away from her employer, which was seldom—Mrs. Luckton was worse than any plantation mistress—they would rove together through the gardens of the Luxembourg and the Tuileries, or wander among the exceedingly expensive shops of the Palais Royale. They’d pretended to shop for silks of the most newly fashionable hues—“flea’s thigh” and “goose-turd green”—and admired the jeweled rings and watches—or whole coffee-sets or sewing-kits or travelers’ writing desks of enamel and gold—at Le Petit Dunkerque.

At the cafés beneath Palais Royale’s arcades, street-corner orators had denounced the King, the Austrian Queen, and the horrifying thing called The Deficit which France owed to everyone. In the evenings at Mme. Dupré’s, Sally would read, sometimes the books she’d buy at the booksellers along the narrow streets, sometimes the newspapers and pamphlets that Mme. Dupré always had about the house—political, filthily scurrilous, and occasionally fascinating. On other evenings, she’d read and reread the letters Mr. Jefferson would send her, from Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Strasbourg.

Brief notes, but full of canal-locks, churches, what was being said, and worn. He knew she was eager to hear such things, of a world even wider than the one she now knew.

On the evening of the twenty-third of April he returned, and Sally walked back with Mme. Dupré on the morning of the twenty-fourth. She ran up to her attic room with her little satchel of clothes, her long hair loose upon her shoulders as it was the fashion to wear it in Paris, and had just emerged from the back stairs on her way down to the kitchen to see Jimmy, when she came face-to-face with Mr. Jefferson in the hall.

He was in his shirtsleeves, stepping from the door of his own room, and stopped as she cannoned into him. She backed away laughing, and dropped him a curtsey. He said, “Sally,” as if for just a moment he was making sure that it
was
Sally, and not someone else who looked like her. A little hesitantly, he added, “It’s good to see you again. I missed you.”

“And I you, sir.” Though he might still own her mother and her brothers and sisters as if they were so many stallions and mares, she understood, from her friendship with Sophie, what kind of life the daughters of a planter would have to look forward to, if their father were to simply free his slaves.

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, hesitant 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?