Jefferson (26 page)

Jefferson had turned with her. Over their backs Short and Trumbull could see the odd three-story column they had passed before. Cosway was already walking forward, thumbing his book, bouncing on his wiry black legs.

“What do you think of them?” Trumbull whispered.

“Beauty and the Beast,” Short said. “Venus and her monkey.”

Jefferson and Maria Cosway had already pulled ahead of them, walking side by side. The two men hurried to catch up, and then with much lifting of hems and twisting sideways to balance, the whole party advanced between parked wagons and horses, over a dirty curb, over a gutter clogged with golden mud.

“ ‘Constructed in 1572,’ ” Cosway announced, reading from his book as they gathered around him. A foppish grimace aimed directly at Short. “The architect was the celebrated Jean Bulant, whoever
that
was. Intended first for the grounds of the Hôtel de Soissons, for Catherine de Médicis, who liked to go up the little stairs in the center and consult the stars with her astrologer.”

Maria clapped her hands. “Italian—I knew it!”

“My wife is Italian,” Cosway said to Jefferson. The two men
were roughly the same age, Short calculated, in their middle forties, but next to each other, the spidery Englishman and the tall, sharp-faced Virginian, they looked like members of different species. “Or rather Anglo-Italian. Née Hadfield, but her father was an English merchant in Rome.”

“Florence,” Maria said. She was no more than twenty-seven or -eight, Short thought; a good two decades younger than her husband. Automatically he began to compare her to other women—she was far prettier than Madame de Lafayette; smaller, more delicate than the Ace of Spades; but coarse and flirtatious, a mere shopgirl-coquette, if one thought of the shy, dark-haired, exquisite wife of the Duc de La Rochefoucauld.

“Well.” Cosway shrugged.

Jefferson was smiling with a boyish animation that Short had never seen on his face before. What had happened? Where had the black mood of impatience and boredom gone? In the space of ten minutes the Roman had vanished, the Rebel had stalked off the stage. Jefferson was bending and pointing out to little Mrs. Cosway the geometric pattern of the windows. With a sense of foreboding, Short reached in his pocket for his watch.

“Sir?” He extended the watch apologetically. “I should remind you of the other appointments today.”

Jefferson frowned.

“Mais non, Monsieur Short,” Maria said, smiling, pouting, shaking her head. “
Jamais—
this is my first day out in Paris, away from business. Sir”—her white hand was a feather, a dove, lighting on Jefferson’s great one. “Be independent! Declare your independence! The famous author of independence—you see, we know who you are; stay with us, take us all to Saint-Cloud or Versailles in your carriage—for the ‘coolth’!”

“The old duchesse,” Short began, but Jefferson had turned to Trumbull.

“Do you think—?”

“Why not? Ten days of work, one day of pleasure?”

“Un jour heureux
,” Maria said. “That’s correct in French?”

“Perfect,
un jour heureux
. A happy day. Mr. Short can carry a message.” He stopped, rubbed his chin. With a kind of eerie detachment Short observed his hand bring the watch stiffly back to his pocket like an automaton, deposit it, disappear. Jefferson
was the most scrupulous man he had ever known about truth. Two days ago, he had dictated a moralizing letter to his nephew in Virginia: “There is no vice so mean, so pitiful, so contemptible as a lie; he who permits himself to tell a lié once, finds it much easier to do it a second and a third time.” What could he possibly tell the old duchesse?

“Dispatches,” Maria said firmly.

Jefferson nodded. “A diplomatic dispatch has arrived at the embassy,” he told Short. “An urgent letter from John Jay requires my immediate attention. You can stay for the dinner, of course, William, but say that I am unable.”

In the corner of his eye Short could see Cosway’s wrinkled brown face, Trumbull’s smirk.

“Tell the duchesse,” Jefferson said with a face of smiling impenetrability, “that it was irresistible.”

R
oman; Rebel. What else? Romeo? Machiavel?

In the broad, rational light of morning Short deposited his armload of rolled papers and drawings on the table and looked up, prepared to be wary.

“A marvelous man, absolutely marvelous,” Maria Cosway said from the other end of the room, skirt swinging like a bell as she walked. She stopped in front of the empty fireplace and placed her hands on her hips. “All these books, all these
books
—and he’s read them all, yes? Every one of them?” Unlike most visitors, Short noticed Maria didn’t actually look at the books she was admiring—and there must have been two or three hundred just in the salon alone, not even a proper library setting, but an overflow space for Jefferson’s recent purchases.

“Books,” she repeated, stopping now under the sunburst painting on the ceiling and looking in fact the other way, toward the great windows and the summer garden below.

“Le Comte de Buffon was in this very room six months ago,” Short told her, certain she had never heard of Buffon, “and Mr. Jefferson showed him those volumes of engravings under the
Encyclopédie
.” He inclined his head in the general direction of the bookcase, where twenty or thirty gilt-edged volumes seemed to march up and down the shelves like little leather soldiers.

“And now you’ve brought
another
book.” As Maria advanced, she came into clearer focus. The golden curls sprang into relief, the deep violet eyes (definitely violet this morning), the tiny waist, full yellow skirt, two exquisite dainty blue slippers poking like mice from under the hem. Her breasts—Short lowered his head and pulled out the long folio volume of
Antiquités de France
that was sitting beneath the papers. A book of extraordinarily detailed engravings that Jefferson had just that week purchased from Clérisseau, as a delicate way of thanking him for the plaster model.

“This is a kind of travel book of the past,” he murmured. He disliked Maria’s husband enormously—what other words?
Thoroughly, completely, totally;
as one dislikes a bug or a bit of nastiness stuck to one’s heel. Too strong, but let it stand. The husband was a fool; the wife was … a beautiful coquette, Pope’s addle-brained Belinda in
The Rape of the Lock
brought to life; but a Virginian was sworn to politeness the way a Frenchman was sworn to fashion. He opened the book at a marker and showed her the famous Roman aqueduct at Arles, another of Jefferson’s interests.

“I’m too tired for books.” Maria dropped abruptly into one of the soft chairs next to the table. “Fatiguée, épuisée.”

As if on cue the far door of the salon opened, and James Hemings entered, followed by Adrien Petit, who appeared more than usually stimulated by the presence of the Cosways, Maria in the salon, Richard downstairs with Jefferson and Trumbull going over plans, papers, itineraries—Short had no idea. Jefferson and Trumbull had returned long after midnight and risen early, huddling after breakfast in the study until the Cosways’ carriage had arrived.

“Dit-on ‘épuisée,’ Monsieur?” Maria asked Petit, who had come to attention and started to beam at her first words. “C’est vraiment français? Correct French?” James gave a sullen look and slid his tray of teacups and dishes onto the table. James and I, thought Short; immune. Behind them two more servants were bringing hot water, biscuits, a small bright wheel of butter.

“C’est correct, absolument, Madame,” Petit assured her. “Mais
vous êtes trop jeune, trop charmante d’être ‘épuisée,’ et de si bonne heure du matin—”

“Sugar.” James thumped the bowl onto the table.

“We stayed up—do you know how late we stayed up, Mr. Short?”

“On your
jour heureux
? No.”

“First.” Maria held up a small, perfect finger. “We left the Halle aux Bleds a little after you did, and we took Mr. Jefferson’s carriage all the way to the Parc Saint-Cloud, straight across the river, right into the country.”

“For the ‘coolth.’ ”

She paused to give him a smile. “You remember. You’re just like him. We went to Saint-Cloud and toured a gallery of paintings and dined at a little inn near that. Then we came back to Paris and went to the Faubourg Montmartre, where we saw fireworks, amazing, wonderful fireworks—like a war!”

Short closed the volume of engravings and accepted the cup James handed him. The fireworks were a specialty of the famous Ruggieri brothers, off the rue Saint-Lazare, who orchestrated what they called “lyric pantomimes” in rockets, colored flares, and exploding candles. Two weeks ago, Short had joined Clérisseau and others for an evening portraying “The Combat of Mars” and “The Forge of Vulcan,” with an afterpiece entirely in red rockets, “The Salamander.”

“Absolutely wonderful,” Maria said. She paused to watch the retreating backs of the servants. “We would never have known about it if not for Mr. Jefferson—the Duc d’Orléans, I can assure you, does not
condescend
to fireworks.”

At the end of the salon Petit and James stepped aside to allow Trumbull in, carrying awkwardly under his arm a large canvas wrapped in tissue. Behind him, looking just as ill-matched as Short had remembered, came Cosway and Jefferson. Cosway wore the same lavender-red coat as before, but sky-blue trousers today, ornately buckled shoes, and a wig much too big for his tiny brown face. Monkey or bug? The ornamental sword stuck out from his coat like a sting.

“And after
that
,” Maria said, turning her head in a lazy, thoroughly captivating manner toward the three men, “we stopped for a concert.”

“A beautiful concert,” Trumbull said. He nodded at Short and began to pile biscuits onto a dish for himself. “We should have sent you a dispatch.”

“We went to the Krumpholtz house,” Jefferson said, either indifferent to Trumbull or not hearing. “Julie Krumpholtz played the harpsichord for us and sang, hours and hours of music.”

“In London,” Cosway said, likewise serving himself with tea and biscuits, “my wife arranges every week what the press have graciously named Great Concerts. The Prince of Wales comes, Lady Duncan, General Paoli, Lord Sands, Mr. Boswell, the Countess of Aylesbury.” At every name a smile—grimace—a sharp, energetic chop of the silver wig. The Roman wouldn’t last an hour in the company of such an insect; the Rebel would have turned away in disgust. The third Jefferson, however, the new Romeo …

“And she herself composes for the harp,” Cosway finished.

“
And
plays it too.” Trumbull had Yankee manners, fingers sticky with frosting in his mouth.

Jefferson handed Maria a second cup of tea (where had the first one gone? Short wondered, glancing about). Now he sat down beside her, knees almost touching the fluffed yellow skirt and its plump hint of thigh and hip. He wore the glassy-eyed look of a man utterly captivated, utterly—Short changed his image: the look of a hooked fish. Jefferson bent his red hair solicitously toward her blond. Meanwhile Cosway was speaking pompously again, another spate of aristocratic names; Trumbull, impressively virile, barrel-chested in his tight gray coat and open collar, was simultaneously recounting a story about David the painter and the canvas he was about to unwrap for them. Abruptly Short thought he could take no more. He replaced his cup on the table, waved one hand in a vague, unreadable gesture learned from Clérisseau, and headed for the door. “Urgent dispatches,” he murmured over his shoulder to Jefferson, knowing it was feeble, even impudent, smiling to placate the Roman, hurrying to outrun their voices.

An enemy, Maria Cosway decided, watching him leave. In a company of men, however hard she tried to please, there was always one like Short who made her feel useless and foolish. A stupid girl.
Una puttana
.

“So, wake up—what do you think of it, Maria? Be frank, tell me the truth.”

Trumbull had pulled the tissue wrapping away from his canvas. He propped the painting against the leg of a chair, just out of the sunlight. He stood behind it with his arms folded like a gladiator and bared his teeth in a grim masculine smile.

“Oh,” she said, stalling for time. She broke into admiring, meaningless Italian phrases, not bothering at all with what she said, certain that Trumbull didn’t understand a word, nor Richard of course, but she suddenly broke off as she caught sight of Jefferson’s curious face. He spoke French badly but doggedly; she had never been in the presence of a man who seemed so entirely, from head to toe, every moment—she searched her head for the English word:
intellectual
.

“Not fair to take refuge in your native language, Maria.” Trumbull had been in the army, she thought, and could produce a disagreeable note of command when he wanted.

“I like the colors then,” she said, guessing that he had worked hardest on that. “I like the colors very much—they clash, they explode!”

“ ‘Battle of Bunker’s Hill,’ ” Richard read on the bottom of the frame.

“And the expressions.” She rose and pointed toward the head of an American soldier apparently shielding or protecting his black servant. Above him a British officer had fallen back, dying, another American lay under the point of a bayonet, and down the brown hillside to the right a city she took to be Boston grew in sharp angles like a brown crystal. She thought she should be patriotic and resent the obvious British defeat in progress, but she didn’t care, she had never cared. “You were there, Mr. Jefferson, no?”