Jefferson (63 page)

Jefferson folded his arms across his chest; his eyes slid to Short.

“Well, as to my own beliefs, of course,” he said carefully, “I keep them private; you must judge of my religion by my actions.”

“Should an atheist be tolerated”—the Frenchman gestured toward the dining room—“in our new constitution? This is another question.”

Short had never known anyone so reluctant to reveal his feelings—
some
feelings; unpolitical feelings. Jefferson turned away almost rudely and began to wrap Isaac Newton in a sheet of waxy green paper. “To my mind,” he said, using his bad wrist to hold down the paper, “it is an easy question. The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as actually injure others. Not to matters of conscience.”

“But to protect the truth—”

Jefferson’s eyes remained on the vanished Newton. “We arrive at truth,” he said, “by trial and error, reason and experiment. That was Bacon’s contribution in my little trinity. Do you gentlemen recall that in France the potato was once forbidden as an article of food, because it wasn’t mentioned in Aristotle? Or that Galileo was sent to the Inquisition for calling the earth a sphere? It is only error that needs the protection of government.”

Lafayette poked his anxious face through the doorway, blinking.

“In fact,” Jefferson said, but so softly that only Short could hear, “I am no atheist.”

At ten o’clock the symposium at last pushed back its chairs and adjourned. In the hallway Short made himself busy gathering coats and directing grooms and coachmen. When he turned to say good night to the first of the statesmen, he saw, not French wigs and ruffles, but James Hemings again, dressed now in a plain cotton jacket, standing rigidly with his hand on the door to Jefferson’s study.

“Excellent pastries, James, excellent meal today.” Short stared at the mulatto’s scowling face. No servant
ever
went into Jefferson’s study uninvited. “Beautifully cooked.”

“Mr. Jefferson through yet?” Sullen, angry.

From the dining room French voices rose and skipped, followed
by Lafayette’s bray. When Short looked again, James Hemings was gone.

“It has been,” Jefferson said, entering the hallway, “a dialogue as fine as any in antiquity, anything by Xenophon or Plato: A feast of logic and chaste eloquence.”

“We have agreed,” Lafayette told Short, as if he had not been present for all six hours of debate, “on a suspensive veto, capable of being overturned by a two-thirds vote.”

“Have you further wise thoughts for us, Monsieur?” The disapproving Frenchman had planted himself squarely before Jefferson. He cocked his head like a belligerent terrier.

Jefferson composed his face into a grave neutrality. “No. No, you have seen everything to perfection, you have penetrated to the mother principle that governments are republican only in proportion as they embody the will of their people.”

“The American Revolution is our Bible,” the Frenchman said.

“Then you will convert me yet,” Jefferson said, suddenly grinning; and laughing, Short pulled open the door.

Forty minutes later, not laughing but scowling, gripping too hard the brass handle behind his back, James Hemings closed the study door with a bang.

At his desk Jefferson put down his pen and looked up. Looked mild. Looked calm. As he always, always did.

“I received your note,” Jefferson said, rising from the desk and making a vague, polite gesture of welcome. “As the guests were leaving.” His long arm went completely out of the circle of light cast by the whale-oil lamp; as he stepped around the desk, his face floated in the shadows like a ghost.

James bumped his way between boxes and stopped at an open black leather trunk that had just arrived the day before, specially built for Jefferson in London.

“Is it about the packing?” Jefferson was invariably polite to everybody, black or white; James had never seen him really lose his temper, though he had often seen him turn ice-cold in an instant,
le roi de glace
.

“If it’s about the packing,” Jefferson said, and he walked idly toward the same black trunk, “as you know, I haven’t received
permission to leave yet. I haven’t even booked our passage to Virginia. So there should be plenty of time to finish”—the right hand appeared in the light—“all this.”

“Not about the packing.” James licked the inside of his front teeth, probing quickly with his tongue for brandy. Two glasses were the limit, his sister had said, and kept the bottle squeezed tight in her lap, right between her thighs.

“Not about the packing,” he repeated.

Jefferson ran his hand along the smooth lid of the trunk and said nothing.

“I can read, you know,” James said. More brandy would have stopped his hands from trembling. “Sir.”

“You have been able to read for many years, I think. My wife saw to it you learned.”

“And here, I can read French too.” James looked at the blank square on the wall where the portrait of Washington had hung. “A little.”

“Something you have read upsets you.”

James had rehearsed his speech for three weeks while he cooked, while he carried armfuls of clothes to boxes, while he skulked up and down the ruined, smoking rue Saint-Antoine, in and out of mobs and soldiers, looking for Le Trouveur. Now, of course, every single word had gone. His eyes shifted to the books glinting on the dark shelves. He took a deep, brandy-laced breath.

“In the French law,” he said, “nobody can be a slave. Under the law I’m a free man as long as I stay here. Sally too. Virginia law don’t matter one bit here.”

Jefferson floated almost entirely into shadow; outside the study window the clop of passing horses echoed on the pavement, soldiers going somewhere; free.

“That’s what I read. And I know a man, a Frenchman, who can make a petition, and if I give it to the government, I am free.”

Jefferson had moved all the way to the other window, next to Short’s desk. From where he stood by the black trunk, James could see the faint crescent of red in the lamplight that would be his hair. It was too dark to tell, but James knew for a certainty that his arms were folded across his chest and his face and his eyes looked like ice.

But when he finally spoke, Jefferson’s voice was as mild as it had been at the start. “This time of year, this time of night,” he said, “it would still be hot at Monticello. You and I would be in our shirt-sleeves instead of these heavy French coats.” He paused. The last of the horses passed by and faded into the distance. “When we arrive, it will be early November probably, still time to see the leaves turning color and bring in the last vegetables from the garden. I’m looking forward to being home,” Jefferson said. “Virginia is home.” His sleeve rustled in the shadows. “If you file your petition, James, you can never go home.”

“I can get a piece of paper that says I’m free.”

“It will do you no good in Virginia. In Virginia you will be a slave again, but you will have a family, a home. Here you will have nothing.”

“I can get along.”

Jefferson was back in the light, shaking his head. “James. You’ve been in nothing but fights and trouble and drunken brawls ever since you got here. Last year I paid your French teacher extra money because you lost your temper and ripped his coat to pieces. I’ve paid for your quarrels at the cooking school and stopped the owner who wanted to sue you. I’ve taken care of you. And your sister.”

James looked down and saw that he too had folded his arms across his chest.

“Your sister’s no more than a child.”

“She wants to be free.”

For a long moment the two men were silent. In the flickering shadows they seemed to be posing, standing face to face, mirror images of each other. Jefferson started to speak again—“In this revolution and unrest,” he said, “your chance of finding employment”—then, as if giving up the argument, he simply stopped.

James felt the brandy fading out of his blood; the tips of his fingers and toes were ice-cold. He shifted on his feet. Jefferson moved slowly to the desk and sat down.

“Let me think on this,” he said at last.

Now the whale-oil lamp was just to Jefferson’s left, so that while half his face was sharply illuminated, half was still in shadow. James Hemings had known Jefferson all his life. Automatically
he recognized in the narrowed eyes and red furrowed skin the first stage of one of his famous headaches. There were worse things than headaches.

“I mean to be free,” James said.

Wearily, Jefferson looked up. The light bisected his face. “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate,” he said, then stopped once more. “I will think on it.”

“
I
n London,” said Gouverneur Morris, settling back into the carriage seat, “I made the acquaintance of the divine, enchanting, splendidly golden-haired Maria Cosway.” He snapped the window shade and peered out. “You were extremely good to meet me at the gate, my dear Short. But Paris looks serene tonight. Not a mob in sight.”

“You called on her?” Short crossed his legs and spoke (he told himself) with Parisian serenity. But his mind had jumped with apprehension—Morris and Maria Cosway?

“I carried a letter to her from Jefferson. I entered into the bosom of her household. She told me, in all innocence, that she was in love with me, as she is in love with all American men. For some days I was afraid that her husband, in his own special way, would repeat the compliment.”

“And you saw her often?”

“We had many a tête-à-tête. One day she told me a very funny story about your leader.”

“I would not take seriously any story,” Short began, shaping his face into a judicious frown.

Morris glanced back from the window, amused. “Evidently they met for the first time at the Halle aux Bleds.”

“Trumbull introduced them.”

“Yes, the blind painter, and subsequently—this is the story—Maria tried to introduce Jefferson to her particular English friend in Paris, the celebrated Miss Perdita Robinson, and Jefferson quite mysteriously, quite stubbornly, refused.”

Short focused on a wine-yellow streetlamp, refined his frown, and said nothing.

“Because you see, as it turned out, Perdita Robinson, once the mistress of the Prince of Wales, had come to Paris with her new lover, and if Jefferson met her, he would also, perforce, meet the lover.”

The streetlamp bounced away like a burning ball.

“Whose name,” Morris continued gleefully, “was Colonel Banastre Tarleton, late of his British Majesty’s army in America. Now Perdita, as you may know, is occasionally an author, and she was here helping the good colonel to write his memoirs of his American campaign, about which poor Maria was at the time completely ignorant.”

“Colonel Tarleton was in Virginia.”

“Colonel Tarleton was in Virginia and, according to himself, chased Governor Jefferson off the top of his hill like a scared rabbit.”

“There are two versions to that story,” Short said stiffly.

“As there are two versions to every story I have ever heard about Jefferson. But what I liked was the amazing coincidence of rabbit and hound turning up ten years later, on the arms of two such charmers. Imagine the scene if they
had
met—Jefferson frigid as a monk, Tarleton suave and bloody British. ‘How is your fine house at Monticello, sir?’ They both have red hair.”