Patriot Hearts (55 page)

He made the motions of sorting through the books piled on the bed, but Sally could see his eyes were absent, his mind barely registering the titles, his thoughts bitter and far away.

On Mr. Adams? The friend with whom he’d worked and laughed and conversed? By whose Sedition Act Tom could very well be convicted as a traitor?

On the election in November, and his hopes to wrest control of the central government away from those who would make its rule negate the local right of each State to determine its own needs?

On the galling failure of France’s Revolution? He had been ill during the last months of the Terror in France, had barely glanced at the newspapers that spoke of bloody mob-rule and a corrupt Directorate. For three years after that, while he quietly watched the trees and the clouds on his mountaintop, the French had gulped one another down like Roman triumvirs until the last man standing had conspired to hand the country over to Bonaparte.

She remembered his face in the candlelight of the Hôtel Langeac:
It is a glorious time to be alive.

Then he sighed, and shook himself out of his reverie. “Well, if they want to crush Callendar, they’ll find themselves publicly turning their backs upon the Constitution before the whole of the country. Richmond is as full as it can hold, of men from all over Virginia. Prominent men, men of property and power. If we cannot win, we can at least hold Hamilton and his party up for all to see, and force them to admit that their aim is to ignore the fundamental right of every man to say what he wishes, to print what his conscience dictates. With the election coming, it could not be better timed. I only regret that it’s Callendar who will suffer.”

“He’s dangerous,” cautioned Sally softly, and Tom looked surprised and a little hurt.

“Am I a despot, too, now, to go about distrusting my own supporters? Were I President, I would have to defend James Callendar’s Constitutional right to print about me whatever he chose.
Whatever
it might be,” he added more gently, smiling down into her eyes. “Mrs. Madison gave me your warning—it
was
you, was it not?—and I thank you for your concern for me. But Mr. Callendar, though the man is personally reprehensible, is a friend of Liberty. He will not turn against us.”

Sally heard in that phrase,
friend of Liberty,
the kind of self-evident magic that seemed to have such power over people’s minds, and knew better than to press the issue. In many ways, Tom had no sense at all.

“Patsy and Mr. Randolph will be here in my absence,” he went on. “Will you be all right?” Meaning,
Is there anything in that area that I need to know about?
Though there seldom was, and Sally was well aware that Tom didn’t really want to know.

“Thank you, yes,” she replied, as she always did.

Her sister Critta had recently said to her, with a touch of exasperation in her voice,
Why don’t you just tell her you’re layin’ with Peter Carr instead of her daddy? That’s all she really wants to hear. Make your eyes all soft an’ ask, kind of breathless, “Miss Patsy, do you know when…when
Mr. Carr
gonna be back here next?”
Critta had put on her most simpleminded expression and crooned the name of Tom’s nephew—the father of her own son and the source of innumerable trinkets and presents—with exaggerated adoration.
Is that so difficult?

Sally felt her back-teeth clench at the memory.
I may be a concubine,
she thought,
but I’m not a whore.

Instead she told Tom, “Please tell Mrs. Randolph that some of the children have come down with scarlet fever—”

Tom startled, eyes widening with concern.

“I think Bev may be sickening for it, but it doesn’t look to be bad just yet. I’m going to let Aunty Isabel know. I’ll write and let you know, how Bev goes on.”

She left him to his packing, and returned to her son, whose face was already beginning to show the flush of fever. Through the remainder of the day she had little thought to spare, either for Callendar, or for the election that had become the focus for Tom’s considerable energy for the past eighteen months, or for the curious, ambient tension that she could feel slowly coiling its way like a poisoned mist among the cabins that dotted Monticello’s hillside.

After dinner Tom slipped away from the house and came down to the quarters, to sit for a time beside Bev’s bed, holding his son’s hand and anxiously studying his face. When the children were well, Sally reflected, as she tied up bundles of herbs to dry, Tom treated them with the same friendly affection with which he treated all the children in the quarters. Plantation gossip being what it was, he could do nothing else. But Harriet’s death had shaken him, more than he would ever express. In his face tonight she saw his anxiety, and when he spoke to her—the soft-voiced commonplaces of treatment, of herbs and symptoms—she thought she heard sadness and guilt there as well.

They had been united as partners for a dozen years—as long as his marriage to Miss Patty. If the desperation of her first love for him had not survived the years, it had settled into an acceptance of him, and a deep-rooted affection.

He would never be other than he was. He would never understand the rage she’d felt, four years ago, when M’sieu Petit quietly informed her that Tom had mortgaged all his slaves to obtain money to rebuild the Big House along modern architectural principles: “I’ll be able to purchase the mortgages back within a few years, with profits from the new nail-factory,” Tom had assured her when she’d confronted him. “In any case I would not include you, or any of your family. It is only a business-man’s way of raising money. It’s done all the time.”

Did Patsy know her father had just promised her patrimony to someone else if he couldn’t pay his debts? If he broke his neck taking old Silveret over a fence some day on the mountain, Patsy and Maria would be left with nothing.

But Sally knew, that even without that mortgage, if he broke his neck some afternoon on the mountain, it would make little difference whether her family went to Tom Randolph or to some bank in Richmond. They’d all end up sold and scattered.

By the same token, Tom would never believe that Patsy knew that he was the father of Sally’s children. He would always need to know that he stood first in Patsy’s heart—as she stood first in his. And though he was aware of the many afternoons Tom Randolph spent drinking himself quarrelsome in the Eagle Tavern in Charlottesville, was aware of the young man’s black moods and mercurial temper, he persisted in thinking well of his son-in-law, or at least saying that he did.

He was who he was. He never said he loved her and probably, she reflected wryly, never even thought of their relationship in those terms. But she knew he needed her. As much as the physical desire that was still as warm between them as ever, was his need to know, when he was away, that she would be there when he returned to his home.

He needed to know that he was loved.

He kept even yet the slim bundle of his letters to her, that he’d written on his travels to Rotterdam and The Hague. Sometimes she’d find them slipped behind a clock or under a book, hidden when Patsy interrupted him. He treasured those memories still.

He rose now from where he sat at the side of the cot, went to clasp Sally’s hands briefly—briefly, because Young Tom was there, sitting beside the hearth-fire with a copy of the
Richmond Enquirer
angled to the glow. Even before their own son they kept a distance, lest talk go around that couldn’t be denied. Very softly he asked, “Shall I send Ursula or Isabel down to help you tonight? He doesn’t seem badly off—”

“It’s early days yet.”

“I shall leave it to your judgment, then, Sally. As we pass through Charlottesville tomorrow I’ll ask Dr. Burns to come see Bev and Mollie. Patsy will be sending me messages—please, you write me, too.”

As they stepped outside into the darkness he kissed her: “Get some sleep if you can. I’m afraid you’ll need it.” Then he strode away up the hill toward the Big House, too preoccupied by his thoughts—of Bev? Of Alexander Hamilton’s plots and machinations? Of James Callendar? Of the election?—to whistle or sing.

If he becomes President,
thought Sally,
he will be in Philadelphia more—or in that new Federal City on the Potomac.
As Mr. Adams’s Vice President, he’d spent as little time in the capital as he could, and Patsy and Randolph had lived a good part of the time on their own plantation at Varina.
If he becomes President, will they be back here as they used to, ten months of the year?

The thought, though annoying, didn’t bother her as it once had.

She had done as she’d meant to do: had guaranteed freedom for her children, which was more than her mother had been able to accomplish.

Surely, she thought as she turned back into the dim warm glow of her cabin, that should be enough.

Tom left as soon as it was light enough to see the road down the mountain. He’d knelt in his riding-clothes to kiss bright-haired Annie and burly Jeff, and Sam and Peter Carr hugged their mother breathless and pretended they hadn’t had two of the younger spinning-maids up to their room last night. Patsy held baby Cornelia in her arms, and stood alone half-hidden in the dark of the scaffolding that covered the front of the house; three-year-old Ellen was sickening for a cold, and had remained indoors. Tom Randolph seemed silent and awkward as his father-in-law shook his hand.

Then Tom swung into Silveret’s saddle—he never took the carriage when he could ride—and rode out at a frisky hand-gallop, raising his hat to his family. As he passed Sally, in the misty twilight where the road curved down the mountain, he touched the brim again, in salute.

Then he was gone.

Along Mulberry Row, and in the cabins that dotted the woods on the back-side of the mountain, all the cocks had commenced their second crowing. In less than an hour the carpenters would be starting their hammering, the white craftsmen Tom had hired commencing the more exacting labor of plastering the new rooms. The whole mountain smelled of the smoke of breakfast-fires. As Sally descended to her cabin she saw that the door of the joiner’s shed stood open.

Her first thought was
Mr. Dinsmore’s up early….
Which was totally uncharacteristic of the young Irishman who’d come to do the fine carpentry within the house.

Her second,
Why is there no lantern-light inside?
was still half-formed in her head when a shadow appeared in the doorway, a huge hand reached out and caught her wrist. Sally’s hand was coming back to claw, her breath dragging into her lungs to scream, when she saw in the chilly dawn light that it was Lam Hawkin.

He swept her into the joiner’s shed with a violence that pulled her off her feet, shut the door, not with a kick, but with soundless swift care.

“I can’t stay.” His fingers were already pressed to her lips. “And I can’t be seen here—”

“You’re a free man, Lam.” Sally pushed his hand away. “Who you runnin’ from?”

“I don’t know. And what I tell you, you must swear to keep to yourself, for your own sake and your boys’. Or they’ll be after you, too, Sally, to keep you silent.”

In his eyes she saw everything: the lights bobbing through the darkness to the trees, the way the carpenters had looked at her yesterday. The strange black man disappearing fast in the direction of the woods.

Who?
died on her lips and even her breath felt stilled for a moment, as if she’d been slammed against a wall.

Then she whispered, “Is it a revolt?”

Lam nodded.

And she remembered: It was what the French King had asked, when someone told him about the rioters seizing the Bastille.
Is it a revolt?
The messenger had replied,
No, sire, a revolution.

A terrible complex shiver went through her, born of a thousand memories. She felt cold, as if, the grannies said, a goose had walked across her grave.
A revolution.

She whispered, “Sam and Peter Carr were down in Richmond two days ago, they hadn’t heard—”

“It ain’t started yet. I don’t know when it will start. Soon, I think, before the tobacco harvest. It’s big, Sally, and it’s organized like an army, with scouts and spies and recruiters. And it’s spreadin’. They got lieutenants workin’ in secret, in Henrico County, an’ Hanover, an’ Caroline, an’ Louisa Counties. They got secret workshops makin’ bullets, hammerin’ plow-iron into pikes. They gonna take Richmond, they say, an’ make a kingdom of black men, where none are slaves to none. Just like Toussaint did in Saint-Domingue, nine years ago.”