Patriot Hearts (57 page)

Sally found herself plotting out routes of flight—plotting out hiding places—suitable not for one woman with a three-year-old, but two women with not only toddlers but a baby. For she understood, almost without conscious decision, that if she got Tom’s grandchildren to safety, she would have to spirit Patsy away as well.

It wasn’t just that Tom would expect nothing less of her.

When faced with the thought of rebelling slaves overrunning Monticello—coming up from Charlottesville or across the river from Edgehill, crazy as the men and women of Paris had been crazy—she simply could not leave Patsy to her own devices.

Any slaves who worked for Tom Randolph, Sally guessed,
would
be crazy with rage if a revolution sparked to life, and out for blood. Though Randolph was careful not to get a reputation in the neighborhood as a harsh master or a cruel one, he had qualities that were almost worse. He was careless with money and in debt—Tom had on several occasions had to lend his son-in-law money—and he was unpredictable.

Sally didn’t know a slave on Monticello who didn’t dread the day when Tom Randolph would become their owner.

As the hot June days of haying and corn-harvest advanced, Randolph came seldom to Monticello. His son Jeff, the only child in the Big House not sick, would sometimes sit on the dismantled pillars of the front porch for hours, waiting for him, and twice had to be stopped from going over to Edgehill, to see if he was there. Sally found herself worrying at the thought of that eight-year-old, son and grandson of slave-owners, walking by himself through the woods along the river’s edge.

It would serve them right,
she told herself again.

And maybe it would.

She cached a length of rope at the back of the cupboard in the little girls’ nursery, knowing that if the house were to be set on fire, the narrow stairway—which Tom claimed was so modern and heat-saving and which every servant who had to carry things up and down it despised—would turn into a lethal chimney.

If it came to flight—if it came to a rebellion—the house, with walls and windows already breached by construction, would be no refuge. They might have only minutes to escape. And as she passed the door of the nursery in the darkness of the night, Sally would look through and see Patsy sitting quietly beside Cornelia’s cradle or little Ellen’s bed. And at the sight of her, she’d feel a sick despair.

Standing in the dark of the upstairs hall, Sally considered her old friend—her old enemy—in the soft glow of the single appleseed of light shed by the
veilleuse
on the nursery dressing-table. Clothed in her wrapper of rust-colored brocade, her red hair braided down her back, Patsy had never looked plainer, her long face lined with weariness and her mouth bracketed by gouges of temper and disappointment too long held in rigid check.

It was the face she never showed her father—never showed anyone. Like Tom, who had molded his daughter into the image of what he thought a woman should be, Patsy was determined to be unfailingly cheerful and polite to all.

She and Randolph had quarreled that morning, over yet another dunning letter from one of his creditors; his shouting could be heard down on Mulberry Row. He had slammed out of the house, ridden off like a madman leaving the overseers in charge of the harvest. He had not returned for dinner.

Now—and it was nearly midnight—Patsy looked as if she had a headache as savage as any that so frequently felled her father. As Sally watched, Patsy reached down to stroke the matted hair from Ellen’s forehead—as Sally herself had stroked Bev’s earlier that evening—and drew back her hand, lest she wake the child. Then her whole body shivered, shaking, as if she were being racked with silent, tearless sobs.

Quietly, Sally withdrew. She descended the narrow twist of stair with the practiced care of one who has studied for years to come and go undetected. She passed like a shadow from the house and down the hill, to her own cabin where Bev dozed fitfully alone, Young Tom having gone to his grandmother’s to sleep. Sally bent over her child, then returned to the hearth and gathered up the ingredients for the “headache tea” she so often made for Tom: catnip, betony, valerian, and rue, which he said the Indians had showed his father.

Well it isn’t forbidden for me to come into her Sacred Presence,
reflected Sally.

The Big House was dark, save for the dim light visible in the nursery window. But as Sally stepped through Tom’s cabinet window, she heard Patsy’s voice downstairs in the high-ceilinged, half-finished room that would one day (Tom said) be the entry hall, low and reasonable as it always was….

“That isn’t what I said—”

“It’s what you thought! It’s what you goddam think every time you see me here! You’d be happy if I took my sorry carcass out of your life so you could turn my children over to Papa for good, like you did before!”

“You know you were ill—”

“I know more than you about it, woman! You
wish
I was ill! You
wish
I was goddam
dead
so you could come back here to Papa!”

From the doorway of Tom’s bedroom Sally could see their shadows in the light of a branch of candles, huge grotesque shapes looming over the half-plastered walls, the unfinished gallery. “That isn’t true—”

Randolph struck her, a backhand blow that knocked her to her knees. Though Patsy was a towering woman, her husband was built like an oak tree. “Don’t you goddam tell me what’s true, you sneaking bitch! All you wanted was to give your precious Papa grandchildren and you didn’t care whose spunk you made ’em with!” He stepped close to her and she cowered—

Patsy,
thought Sally, shocked and sick.
Patsy cowering.

Cowering like a woman who’s been beaten before.

He caught her by the hair so that she cried out, twisted her head to force her to look into his face. For a moment they remained frozen thus, a huge shadow and a crumpled pale shape. Then with a strangled groan he shoved her back against the wall, and disappeared into the passageway. Sally heard him collide with a wall, and then the crash of his body on the floor.

In the nursery, Cornelia and Ellen began to wail.

Patsy lay where she’d fallen, trembling with soundless sobs as she had before, but Sally knew in her bones that the only thing needed to complete the wretched agony of her humiliation, would be the knowledge that Sally had seen it.

The only dignity she had left was secrecy.

Like a swift shadow, Sally ascended the stair, set the tea-pot down on the nursery table, went to the cradle, and gathered Cornelia in her arms. “It’s all right, sugarbaby,” she murmured. “Nothing to be afraid of.” Holding the baby with one arm, she brushed Ellen’s cheek with the backs of her fingers.

“Mama,” Ellen whispered.

Grizzle the dog crept to Sally’s feet, glad that a human had come to take charge.

“Your mama be up soon, or your aunt Carr.” Not that Aunt Carr, who didn’t believe in getting involved in “unpleasantness,” would emerge from her room before morning.

On the other side of the little room Annie turned her face on her pillow, whispered, “What happened, Sally?”

“Your papa got mad at one of the grooms, that didn’t put his horse away right,” Sally replied. “That’s all, sweetheart.” She gently laid Cornelia back down, wrung out another rag and wiped the baby’s face with it. It was impossible to distinguish much about the rash in the nursery’s near-dark, but she thought Cornelia’s fever seemed less, no more than what Bev’s had been yesterday. The little girl had grown quiet with the touch of careful hands.

Tom’s granddaughters. Her own kin.
And if they weren’t,
thought Sally despairingly,
could I really stand aside and watch even the children of total strangers killed, for what their parents did?

Ellen whimpered, “Mama,” again, and Sally said, “Your mama’s on her way, baby.” She thought she heard the creak of a footfall in the hall, and Grizzle raised her head and thumped her tail eagerly. But looking toward the door, Sally saw only darkness. It was ten minutes before Grizzle thumped her tail again, and this time Sally saw the moving fire-fly of a candle there, and a moment later, materializing in its glow, Patsy’s haggard face. She’d re-braided her hair and her eyes looked swollen, as if she’d been crying.

Sally got at once to her feet, curtseyed, said, “Ma’am,” and made to go. Patsy stepped in front of her, her face cold and hard as carved bone. Weary, as if Sally were one more rock in the load of rocks that she was forced to carry to her grave.

Yet she made her voice low and pleasant as she said, “Thank you, Sally. I appreciate your taking over.”

“Ma’am.” Sally curtseyed again, as if she’d never played with this person when they both were children; as if Patsy had never taught her to read, or let her into her father’s library in quest of books. Then, because of that unspoken past: “I made you some tea, ma’am; a tisane I should say, that’s supposed to be good for headaches.”

Patsy’s breath drew in, blew out in a sigh like the sigh of the dying. She whispered again, “Thank you,” in a voice that made it very clear that the tea was going to be poured out the window the minute Sally was out of the room.

“Ma’am,” said Sally quietly, “if you’d like, I’ll stay with them tonight, so you can get some sleep. I think Miss Cornelia’s fever’s less.”

Patsy turned immediately to feel her daughter’s forehead; Sally saw her wide, flat shoulders relax. “I think you’re right. Thank God.” She closed her eyes for an instant, though her hand pressed briefly to her mouth as if she would hide from Sally even its momentary tremor. “Thank you very much for your concern, Sally, but I shall be all right here.” And as she turned back her eyes said,
Anything, rather than accept a favor from the hand of my father’s whore.

Sally wanted to shake her. Wanted to shout at her,
Can’t you see that you and I can’t go on living this way?

He needs us both.

Why don’t you admit the truth? We’re both going to be in his life for a long time.

But Sally knew, as surely as she knew her own name, that if she said those words, even now alone in the deep of the night, Patsy would simply gaze at her with those chilly eyes and change the subject, exquisitely polite and stone-deaf.

Like her father, when there was something he didn’t want to hear.

Sally curtseyed again, and turned away with a sense of despair. She was the betrayer, the seductress. The succubus who had lured the father Patsy adored away from his true nature, into the disgrace of being a man who bedded his slaves.

And beyond that, Patsy could not see and would not look.

Sally thought,
Dammit.
Took a deep breath, and turned back in the doorway. “Miss Patsy?”

Patsy straightened up from Ellen’s bed, face stiff with distaste. “What is it now?”

“Miss Patsy.” Sally injected a note of what she hoped sounded like shyness into her voice. “You wouldn’t know whether—whether Mr. Peter is coming back with Mr. Jefferson, would you?”

As disgusted as she was at herself for this piece of play-acting, Sally was astonished to see that it worked exactly as Critta had said it would. For one moment Patsy regarded her with a startlement—an expression of enlightenment—that was almost comical. “Mr. Peter
Carr
?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Sally dropped her eyes, and for good measure twisted her apron a little in her hands. And as she lifted her gaze again to the other woman’s face, she saw there a look of such dawning relief that it struck her to the heart with a sense of shock and pain.

Did she truly need the illusion
that much
?

Had her spite, her cold talebearing, come from pain that desperate?

Critta had been right. The only thing in the world Patsy had wanted to hear was that her father was not the father of Sally’s children.

“I—I had no idea—”

Whether she simply didn’t want to think about the issue of Young Tom, or whether she clutched at the belief that Tom’s Casanova nephew had succeeded his uncle in Sally’s life, Sally didn’t know and never afterwards found out. But the frozen enmity in Patsy’s voice dissolved like mist in the sunlight.