Patriot Hearts (42 page)

She sighed, and turned her head—

—and saw Tom Jefferson standing where the hillside crested beside the kitchen, his shoulder against a poplar tree, outlined by the twilight sky.

Her eyes met his across the distance. She thought about getting up and walking back to her mother’s cabin, but knew already that she wouldn’t.

His shoes swished in the long grass as he came down the hill. Dinner with his family was about the only time of day he wasn’t in riding-boots. Sally found she was holding her breath. Bracing, not only for the bleak chill she’d seen so often in his eyes, but for the sound of Patsy’s voice, calling to him from the house.

“What happened?” he asked when he got close, and nodded in the direction of the stables where Little Tom had disappeared.

For one flash of time, the sound of his voice obliterated the years, and she remembered how it had been, to be friends with this man.

She exhaled, made herself let go of her own dread of another silent battle with Patsy, another wordless round of her anger and his coldness. He sounded like he was forcing himself to speak as he’d used to, but that, at least, was something. She replied, “He put his hand in the corncrib and got bit by a snake. I remembered what you told me about the teeth-marks—” She held out her hand and traced on the mound of her thumb where Little Tom’s wound had been. “It sounds like a king snake. Eddy said it was ten feet long but I suspect that isn’t the case.”

Tom’s eyebrows shot up and his whole face relaxed. “If it is I shall have to trap it and write it up for the benefit of those naturalists who claim American species are smaller and degenerate—though I think I’d prefer it should go on living in the corncrib and eating rats. Is he all right?”

“Scared.”

“Good Lord, I should think so. The first time I was bitten I was convinced I’d swell up and die in agony. My father—”

“Papa?” called Patsy’s voice from the house.

Sally felt her face freeze. She’d known the moment was too good to last. “You’d better go.”

“Do you wish me to?” His voice, too, had gone cold.

“Papa?”

She’d appear over the edge of the hill in a moment. Sally looked up into his eyes.

Tom took her arm and led her into the washhouse, and closed the door.

But having done so he didn’t speak. For some moments they only stood, inches apart, in the big stuffy chamber with its smells of soiled linens and damp stone and soap. Then he asked, “Is it true you’re going to marry Lam Hawkin?”

Her heart raced, as if he had opened a door for her.

But a door to where?

“Who told you that?”

“You know what plantations are like for gossip. Is it true?”

Now is the time. He’ll never be other than he is. I made a wrong choice once….

Slowly, she said, “I ran away from you once, sir. When I came back, you were angry that I hadn’t trusted you. I promised you then that I would always be here. No, I’m not going to marry Lam Hawkin, or anyone else.”

Stillness again, and the chitter of birds as they nested in the eaves for the night. A dog barked: Bergère, or Bagwell the cowman’s one-eyed herd-dog, driving the cows in for milking. The magical peace of Monticello.

Tom asked, in a voice that sounded much more like his own, “Why didn’t you answer my letters?”

Her shock must have showed in her face, for his own eyes widened. To her own astonishment she kept her voice calm. “Did you get mine?”

“I got two. I answered both.”

And the next moment, as fury rose through her like a heat, she saw his own cheekbones darken with the flush of blood as he, too, realized what had happened to his replies.

Of course, she thought, he’d enclosed them in letters to Patsy. Even had he not, any messenger would have laid them on the table in the front hall. It would never have occurred to him to send his messages to her via a slave. Not if Patsy “didn’t know.”

Levelly, knowing that words once spoken can never be taken back, Sally said, “Yours must have gone astray. When I didn’t hear from you, I thought—” She stumbled a little. She took a deep breath, and went on. “I thought you had changed your mind.”

His eyes flickered back to hers, filled with that bleak wariness she’d seen in them these past three years, and she couldn’t keep the edge from her tone as she asked, “What else did you hear about me?”

She didn’t add,
And from whom?
and she didn’t need to. She saw the muscles of his jaw clench and felt the anger that stiffened the whole of his body: anger at her for implying that his daughter knew and had deliberately lied; sick disgust at the impossible position of being trapped between two women; outrage at the circumstance that put him, a white master, in the position of owing an apology to a slave. Wishing—she could see it in his eyes—that he could simply walk away and go back to being what Patsy wanted him to be.

“Nothing to signify. Idle gossip only.”

Sally became aware that she was trembling with anger. Had Tom really believed that having a touch of African blood in her veins, she would casually betray him, as she guessed that Patsy had implied? That she would take a lover—or several lovers—in the quarters, men whom Tom couldn’t even challenge because the subject was not one to be discussed?

Of course he did.
Weren’t blacks more amorous than whites? Didn’t every white man in Virginia—including Tom—keep saying how they were slaves to their own passions? “Born under the sign of Venus” and incapable of anything more than “animal eagerness”?

It wouldn’t have needed more than one or two sidelong comments to put that bleak distaste for her in his eyes. To give Patsy her victory. To “save him from himself.”

If Patsy had been of her own color
—And I am damn near almost of hers!—
Sally would have stormed out of the washhouse and torn out every handful of her rival’s hair. The fact that she couldn’t silenced her, stilled her, and in that stillness she was forced to look at Tom again, and see disgust and outrage ebb and alter, and his chill steely anger shift.

“Next time you hear something, sir,” Sally told him, “ask me yourself.”

“Papa?” They heard Patsy’s skirts swish as she passed the washhouse door on her way down to the half-dug terraces of what would be the new vegetable gardens on the lower slopes of the hill. Tom’s eyes moved a little, as if they followed her. As if, hearing his daughter’s receding steps, he were putting together a thousand fragments of irrefutable and unacceptable truths, to form a conclusion that he could not face.

Sally added, more quietly, “Ask me and I will tell you the truth, whatever it is.”

“I know that.” He held out his hands to her. “I will. I promise.”

After a long moment she reached out and took them.

“I’ve missed you, Sally.”

Even when I was right down the hill and you were poking around the gardens with your daughter?

But she knew that she would never rival Patsy in his heart.

She sighed, letting go of something within her, although she couldn’t tell whether it was the future or the past. “And I you, Tom. I’m sorry if I did wrong—”

“It wasn’t your doing. I should not have believed…rumor. I will not do so again. Forgive me.”

Sally only nodded, and let him draw her against him. The nature of what lay between them, she thought, existed beyond the bounds of words. His kiss was gentle, the kiss of a friend, but the touch of their lips was like flame thrown onto oil, and his arms tightened crushingly around her. It was nearly dark before they spoke again, as they lay together on the damp brick floor of the washhouse, panting in the tangled disorder of half-shed garments. She whispered, “When will you be back?”

“In January.”

She sat up, her hair hanging like a dark mermaid’s around her shoulders, her body feeling queerly shaky with the aftermath of passion: aching, exultant, yet longing to weep.

“I’m going to risk sounding like those ladies in the Palais Royale and ask, would you have time before you go to ask Mr. Randolph to get another cabin built for me, while you’re away? I wanted to ask you before—”

“It’s my fault.” He put his palm to her cheek, then stood, and helped her to her feet. “And I am sorry, Sally, more than I can say. I will see to your cabin myself.” He straightened his clothes, looked around for the black velvet ribbon with which his long hair had been tied. Sally found it for him, gathered up her own disheveled curls under her cap again.

“I’m coming back to stay, Sally,” he said softly, and looking around at him, startled, she saw in his eyes a bitter and beaten weariness. It was as if, she realized, the prospect of returning to Philadelphia even for two more months was more than he could endure.

“I can’t—” He almost visibly stopped himself from the admission,
I can’t take it anymore.
“I can’t sleep at night. I find I’m barely able to take pleasure in reading, nor in conversation, since everything in Philadelphia concerns politics these days, and half of everything men speak is lies, or half-truths twisted by ignorance or malice.”

He hesitated on the words, as if at the reminder of gossip and lies closer to home, then shook his head.

“I’ve done everything I can to keep this country from being dragged back into despotism stronger and more subtle than the King’s. I feel as if I’m shouting into a windstorm. And in return I’ve been reviled, and betrayed by all in whom I’ve placed my trust.” He fell silent a moment, then added quietly, “All except you, it seems.

“I’ve never been good at brangling and quarreling, and it seems to me that there is only that, twenty-four hours out of every day. I’m not that strong, Sally. For three years now I’ve been tilting at windmills, and have been well and truly beaten by them. I don’t know what else to do.”

She touched his hand. “Does your family know?”

“I told them this afternoon, at dinner. I only want to come home, Sally. To be with those I love, to wake each morning with nothing more important to occupy me than the progress of my garden, and the observation of the clouds.”

Don’t we all?
thought Sally wearily.
Don’t we all.
She knew it was Patsy, Maria, his sister, and his granddaughter he was thinking about, when he said,
those I love.

“There’s a lot of knights out there in the world,” she said after a time. “Enough to keep the windmills at bay. I’m glad you’ll be home.”

“And I,” he answered softly, “that you’ll be here to come back to.”

Sally’s mother gave her a long look when she joined her family, gathered in the candle-glow of the cabin steps. Little Tom clung to her skirts and wanted to know where she’d been, for it was the first time she hadn’t been at supper, or somewhere that he could find her, in the evening.

Jimmy watched her narrowly, but after supper Betty Hemings sent her sons on their way before Jimmy could corner Sally with questions. “Too many people in this family pokin’ into what don’t concern ’em,” she said.

What Betty Hemings didn’t know about other people trying to manipulate a woman’s relationship for their own profit, Sally reflected, could probably be written on the back of a button and still leave room there for the Lord’s Prayer.

All she said to Sally was, “You want me to tell Lam?”

It would be all over the quarters by midnight, thought Sally with a sigh, and up to the Big House with breakfast in the morning—unless Patsy’s maid Lacey thought twice about mentioning to her mistress who was tupping whom in that household.

“No.” She dipped the cups into the bucket of hot scrub-water on the hearth, mopped them briskly with the rag. Like other things in the Hemings household, they were finer than the gourds or hand-fashioned clay used by the field-hands: salt-glaze stoneware that had been the original dishes up at the Big House. “There’s too many people as it is, not saying what they need to say to the person they need to say it to.”

She tucked Little Tom into his low truckle-bed and told him a story about Mr. King Snake in the corncrib, and how he’d bit the Giant Hand that came busting into his house whilst he was taking a nap. The night was warm, but fall had definitely come to the mountain. When she went out to sit on the step again, there was only the crying of crickets in the woods, and the hoot of hunting owls.