Patriot Hearts (39 page)

Halfway up the slope from Mulberry Row to the hilltop, the door of the kitchen opened in the bottom floor of the little brick pavilion that had been the first dwelling on top of the mountain, the tiny house to which Tom Jefferson, in the long-ago days before the War, had brought Miss Patty as his bride. Pip stepped out, looking harassed. Jimmy must be sliding from idly talkative to argumentative.

“You better go, Mama. I’ll get these done before dark.” She patted the folded stack of garments.

She was a fool, Sally thought, as she began to work an eyelet, not to take Lam up on his offer. Lam had been free for ten years, and owned his own livery stable in Charlottesville. He’d been making it his business to seek her out, to talk with her, every time he came up to the mountain since Jefferson had departed last September, presumably when word got around that Jefferson hadn’t lain with Sally on that home visit, either. At thirty-five he was steady, gentle, no genius but reasonably well educated, didn’t drink, and—a big plus, though Sally was a little embarrassed to put it in so many words—had good teeth and sweet breath.

I’m twenty years old,
she thought, looking in the direction of the stable, where her son and his friends had vanished.
What am I waiting for?

But the answer to that question was a shadow at which she did not wish to look.

Patsy Jefferson had chosen the day Sally bore her child, to run hand in hand with Tom Randolph to her father and announce that they were engaged.

“I could not ask a better husband for my girl,” Jefferson had said, sitting on the foot of Sally’s bed in her mother’s cabin beside the washhouse, on a snowy January day in 1790, less than two months after the
Clermont
had deposited them on American shores. “I suppose every father rejoices to see his child happily wed. Yet I shall miss her desperately. Patsy tells me their attraction is of long standing, though I confess that wasn’t my impression in Paris.”

A frown briefly pulled together his reddish eyebrows—at remembered kitchen-rumor about Randolph’s expeditions to the Palais Royale?—but with a slight shake of his head he dismissed the thought, and leaned across to tweak back the wrappings from the face of the infant in Sally’s arms. “I am—glad of her happiness, though,” he added, as if forcing himself to speak the sentiment he knew he should feel. “She’s denied it, but I have felt that Patsy was…unhappy. At leaving France, perhaps.”

So that was where he’d been all day, reflected Sally. Drinking toasts and making plans with old Tom Randolph in the parlor, while Sally clung grimly to her mother’s hands, tried to breathe her way through the waves of labor-pains. While the child she’d carried in her womb back across the Atlantic struggled to be born.

The one thing that Patsy would have known absolutely would keep her father from Sally’s side.

The Randolphs were neighbors as well as cousins. Tom had grown up with old Tom Randolph, whose plantation of Edgehill lay an hour’s brisk walk from Monticello along the river road. The Randolphs had been among the first to visit when the family had returned to Monticello, two days before Christmas after a leisurely journey from Norfolk via Eppington, Richmond, and Charlottesville.

After all her years away Sally had nearly wept with joy to see the mountain again, that magical, beautiful world of her childhood. The slaves with whom she’d grown up, her family and Aunty Isabel, Tom’s groom Jupiter and Mose the Blacksmith and all the others, had rejoiced just as much at their master’s return, for the simple reason that Jefferson was one of the better masters in the state and no plantation runs well under an overseer’s hand. They’d unhitched the team and dragged the carriage up the mountain themselves, laughing in the frigid twilight.

The following day Tom Randolph had ridden over and begun to court the girl he’d played with as a child, the girl he’d met again in France two summers before. The girl who would be heiress to several thousand acres and the slaves to work them.

And though Patsy had bubbled to everyone about how glad she was to be back in Virginia, Sally knew, from weeks of living in the close confines of ship and coach, that beneath her cheerfulness the older girl was still as furious, as jealous, as hurt as she’d been when she’d announced she was going to become a nun. (
And I notice,
Sally remembered Sophie Sparling commenting back in Paris,
Patsy seems to have recovered from her yearning for Catholicism quite quickly—Have you ever seen her pray the Rosary? Or eschew worldly dresses?
In spite of her hurt, Sally had laughed.)

Taking the first husband who asked her, Sally supposed, was as effective a way of leaving her father’s house as taking the veil.

You left me for a designing black wench—now I’ll leave YOU. See how you like THAT
.

The goal was the same: the pain in Tom’s eyes, at the thought of losing his daughter.

Sally could have slapped Patsy—if it hadn’t been unthinkable to do so—for hurting him. For sliding a poisoned knife into his most vulnerable spot, his unhealed dread of losing those he loved.

Because she couldn’t say any of this—because in her weaker moments she told herself such spiteful malice couldn’t be true—Sally said only, “She had many friends in France.” As she pressed her cheek against her infant son’s, past Jefferson’s shoulder she met her mother’s eyes. Saw Betty Hemings’s mouth twist in a soundless commentary of exasperation at her master’s naïveté.

Looking back on the scene from three and a half years later—sitting in comfort beneath a tree, stitching at the hem of Maria’s chemise less than ten yards from the bed where she’d lain that night—Sally could only shake her head at the fierce love she’d felt then for Tom.

He deserves all the pain Patsy or anyone else can hand him.

But her own pain at the memory was so great that her needle stilled and she had to close her eyes again, willing herself not to cry.

“They’ll be married in February,” Jefferson went on, and wonderingly brushed Little Tom’s hand, where the baby lay wrapped at Sally’s side. “I shall have to leave soon after that, if I’m to be in New York for the opening of Congress. Will you be all right here?”

And his eyes, from being focused beyond her upon what he perceived as his daughter’s joy, suddenly returned to the present, to her, and to his newborn son. Most white gentlemen, Sally was very well aware, didn’t think of their sons by slave-women in even remotely the same terms as they thought of even their white bastards, let alone the true-born children of their wedded wives.

She searched Tom’s face, Tom’s eyes—the eyes whose shape was already printed in Little Tom’s bone structure—for some clue to his thoughts. It wasn’t for her to say,
This is our son; child of our mingled flesh. Child of our love.

They were in Virginia now. He was her master again. Even in two months, she’d seen how it had changed him, to be back in a land where slavery was accepted as normal and where blacks were calmly regarded as being lazy, malicious, and slightly dim-witted.

What had seemed possible in France now stood revealed to her as a naïve and preposterous dream. The simple friendship of a child with the clever and kindly philosopher who was master of the house had dissolved into the unnerving complexities of black and white, slave and master, woman and man.

Would it change him still further in the years to come, to be surrounded by all his neighbors who tupped their slave-women as casually as they pissed?

Her mother, she knew, would have told her, he’d never been
un
changed. He’d always been just like his neighbors. That was how white men were. His nephew Peter Carr was regularly towsing her sister Critta and at least two other girls in the quarters: Critta had already borne his child. Peter’s brother Sam was acquiring the same reputation.

And why did it bother her anyway? She had Tom’s promise that their son would be free.

“I’ll be well,” she told him softly. “Shall I write you in cipher, and tell you how he is? ‘The tree you planted grows tall.’ ”

And he’d smiled. “I’d like that.”

Because her mother was there, he didn’t kiss her. Only cupped Little Tom’s tiny head in his white hand, and smiled down at Sally. His expression was impossible to read in the firelight. “I’ll be back tomorrow,” he said. “Now I must leave; they’re waiting for me up at the house.”

Cold air bellied into the little cabin as he slipped out the door. She heard him singing in Italian as he climbed the top of the hill, and the crunch of his boots in the snow.

He hadn’t come back, of course. Stitching in the autumn sunlight, Sally shook her head at herself. How could she have been so stupid as to believe a white man’s word?

And those few moments when she did encounter him again, “they” were
always
“waiting for me up at the house.”

Once news of Patsy’s engagement got out, friends, neighbors, and relatives had poured into Monticello for the wedding, which had been held a month later. Even before that, from the moment Jefferson had realized there was going to
be
a wedding at Monticello, there’d been a thousand things to do, completely aside from the new crop of tobacco-seedlings to be prepared. Typically—a situation so thoroughly Tom-like—when they’d arrived at Monticello, half the rooms had been in the same unfinished state in which he’d left them, six years before.

Sally had grown up watching her master continually start building and remodeling and redecorating projects that either misfired or were suspended due to lack of money or Jefferson leaving for Philadelphia or Richmond. Poor Miss Patty—and Aunt Carr who had succeeded her as housekeeper—had been driven half crazy by having furniture shifted around to make room for this or that change in the walls or the floor, and in two years at the Hôtel Langeac Sally had seen doors plastered over and cut in more efficient places in the walls, round windows put in, and ordinary beds replaced by space-saving beds in wall-niches.

So of course, faced with the prospect of all the Randolphs and Carrs and Eppeses in Virginia arriving, rooms that had been roughly finished off with a coat of paint so the girls could be moved in suddenly had to be emptied, replastered, new curtains made…