Patriot Hearts (54 page)

How long would it be, she wondered, before Payne began asking for a slave of his own?

Tom Jefferson is right, when he speaks of slavery as corrupting all it touches.
And she asked herself, not for the first time, if she had not done Payne a terrible disservice, in marrying a slaveholder. In bringing her son here to Virginia to grow up in an atmosphere that she sensed was dangerous, even to those who meant well.

Yet from the first evening she’d spent in Jemmy’s company she could conceive of living with no one else.

The Great Little Madison, tired and shivering in his scuffed brown velvet wrapper, as he always shivered when he was tired. His long white hair hanging to his shoulders, he paced to the window, where the white rainbow of stars burned above the trees.

“Tom must run for President, Dolley,” said Jemmy wearily. “He is the only one with the stature for it. He is the one whose name everyone knows.”

Just as everyone knew Washington’s name, thirteen years before, Dolley thought. When the country was falling apart and someone had to be found to hold up as a beacon of personal loyalty, to draw men’s approval to the Constitution.

Poor Martha.
She recalled her friend’s reserve when she and Jemmy had driven down to Mount Vernon only a few months ago, on a visit of condolence after the old General’s death. Martha understood—and had known how her husband loved and respected Jemmy’s judgment. But despite Martha’s exquisite manners, the strain had shown through.

“Tom must run against John Adams, and he must win.” In the fire’s sinking glow Jemmy’s pale, wrinkled face was as intent as Dolley had ever seen it. “They will eviscerate the Constitution—Hamilton, and the men around him who think that freedom of speech applies only to speech
they
deem appropriate, and freedom of ideas only to what they consider proper and safe. They have already begun the process.

“Hamilton—and the bankers and merchants who would make up his court—would have this country be like the other nations of Europe, nations ruled by the ‘right sort of men,’ who are ‘right’ because they’re like themselves. But this is a country that isn’t like the nations of Europe, and has never been. It isn’t despotism only that I fear, Dolley. I fear the dissolution of the Union that will inevitably follow. Men like my father—and Jefferson, if you put a pistol to his head—would choose Liberty over unity. And no single state is strong enough to withstand conquest, by England from Canada or France from the Caribbean or Spain from Louisiana and Mexico. We were lucky to have won through the first time.

“This country is more fragile than men think, my beloved. And both its strength and its weakness lie in the hearts of its citizens. Jefferson must win. And if he wins, it is you and I who must go with him—not to Philadelphia, but to this new capital they’ve built—to make certain that the government does not fall victim to a clique of the wealthy again.”

His hands closed over hers, but his gaze turned back to the window, and to the mountain night beyond. In the profound stillness, a hunting owl hooted in the woods, where even in darkness the dogwood shone white, like drifts of snow.

Within a squirrel’s jump of Heaven.

A retirement I dote on,
Jefferson had described his mountaintop world,
living like an antediluvian patriarch among my children and grandchildren, and tilling my soil. I cherish tranquility….

And little enough he hath had lately of that,
Dolley reflected, recalling the things the newspapers had called him. It crossed her mind to hope that Sally took good care of him.

“I had thought I could finish, and come home when Father needed me,” Jemmy said. “I see now that isn’t true. Maybe none of us can finish, ever.”

“Nonsense.” Dolley tightened her grip on his hand, which was smaller than her own, and smiled up into his eyes. “If Mr. Jefferson is correct, and the genius of humankind doth fling forth the truth in its consensus, then the coming generation shall engender minds every bit as great as his or thine. They will take the load of the sky from off thy shoulders, when it shall be time to do so.”

But her heart lifted at the thought of returning to the center of government again, wherever that center would be.

Jemmy chuckled. “Then let us hold up the sky for them, my darling, til they’re grown.”

SALLY

Monticello Plantation

Albemarle County, Virginia

Sunday, June 1, 1800

I
think she’s resting easier.” Sally wrung out the rag with hands aching from the action repeated most of the night, then laid the cloth over tiny Mollie’s brow. Mollie’s mother Jenny watched her anxiously, a sturdily built young woman with round Ibo features: A decade younger than Sally, she looked a decade older, from hard work and childbearing.

“Is it scarlet fever?”

Sally nodded. “See how she’s scratching at herself? Tomorrow she’ll be out in a rash.” After almost three years, Sally could speak of the symptoms dispassionately. “I’ll tell them up at the Big House.” She nodded toward the pallet in the corner where her friend’s older children, aged five and three, watched the activity around the family’s communal bed with solemn eyes. “Mr. Jefferson’s gonna ask you to keep them separate from the other children, but myself, I think it’s too late. They’re all gonna be down with it. He’ll send Aunty Isabel to come look after Mollie when it gets light.”

Jenny nodded, and whispered her thanks. With haying starting there was no chance she’d be released to stay with her children, and her husband had been hired off down to Charlottesville to do carpentry. Both women knew the old nurse could be trusted to look after the sick baby as if Mollie were her own.

Scarlet fever. Sally’s jaw tightened at the recollection as she stepped from the cabin’s dim glow into the chilly dark outside. It had been two and a half years since the death of her daughter from the disease. It still felt like yesterday.

She stopped in the blackness among the trees, fighting tears as she always did when tiny Harriet’s face returned to her mind, and that saved her. The next instant she heard a man whisper, “That you?” and from the shadows another reply, “ ’s me.”

And Sally froze. She saw the flickers of tiny flame—burning sticks of pitch-pine that were the candles of the poor—coming from half a dozen directions.

The chestnut trees were a meeting-point because they stood on the back-side of the mountain, out of sight of the Big House but close to the slave-cabins that dotted the wooded slope. Mostly it was lovers who’d meet there, or children out on midnight expeditions to charm away warts or hunt for buried treasure. The trees were a part of the complex geography of trails and landmarks invisible to the whites, even to Tom, who was sharper than most at woodcraft. They were also the meeting-point for the kind of illicit trade that went on at every plantation, where backwoods traders would creep close to exchange rum or bird-shot or fish-hooks for such small items as could be “lifted” from the laundry or the pantry: cured tobacco-leaves, iron from the nail-factory, one of the master’s fine linen shirts. Her brother Jimmy had excelled at this: Jefferson property appropriating Jefferson property.

For an instant, seeing the tiny flames assembling by the trees, Sally wondered if Jimmy had come back. If, for all his great talk of seeking his fortune in Europe, after four years of freedom he’d come down to this: being a trader in pilfered goods.

The next instant she knew it couldn’t be so. There were too many assembling, for it to be merely a secret transaction.

A preacher?

But if a preacher had been expected, Sally knew she, or her mother, would have been told. And a preacher would have come earlier in the evening, not in this dead hour between midnight and cockcrow.

The voices were too quiet, the rhythm wrong. A single voice would murmur, barely audible under the rattle of june-beetles and cicadas in the trees. Then men would reply, and fall quickly silent. And that single voice would go on.

Sally stood like a startled animal, invisible within the shadows, until the men dispersed. Then she remained where she’d been, concealed in the thickets until she was sure every one of those men was safely in his cabin again, and not likely to see her slipping through the trees. And when she moved on, she was trembling.

She didn’t know what was going on, but she had her suspicions. And those suspicions kept her lying awake in her cabin, listening to the soft breathing of her two sleeping sons, until every bird upon the mountain started up their morning song, and the sky grew light.

When she heard the voices of the carpenters on the way up to the Big House, Sally rose and waked Young Tom. The boy was beginning his apprenticeship to David in the plantation carpentry shop. He had his father’s manual deftness, and a young man riding into some small settlement in western New York or Pennsylvania with a carpenter’s skills would always be able to make a living. Both Young Tom and his two-year-old brother Beverly had the fair skin and Caucasian features that would let them pass easily for white, no questions asked.

Little Harriet had been the same. Tom had agreed with Sally that great care would be taken, to teach the little girl proper manners and speech. When she was old enough, Harriet would leave Monticello. She would enter the home of one of the many families of French émigrés whom Tom knew in Philadelphia, to be introduced to the town as a white young lady. These days there were hundreds such, many of them Tom’s friends from his days in Paris who would be delighted to adopt and educate their distinguished friend’s “orphaned ward.”

Then one icy December morning in 1797, little Harriet had waked up crying with a sore throat and a crimson flush to her skin that faded under the pressure of a thumb, and immediately flooded back. Tom couldn’t linger, if he was to reach the capital in time to open Congress—he was Vice President to Mr. Adams by that time, and fighting to keep the United States from being completely reabsorbed by the political power of England. Not long after his departure, Harriet died.

Knowing that Bev played with Jenny’s children, Sally scooped her younger son out of his cot while Young Tom was washing, carried him to the light of the door. As she’d feared, he looked flushed and feverish, and complained that his throat hurt. She put the toddler back to bed and poked up the fire, filled the kettle with water for a willow-bark tisane, struggling to keep the panic out of her heart. Everyone had been sick in the quarters, that winter Harriet had taken the fever. The little girl’s health had never been good, even before she took sick.

Sally stopped at her mother’s cabin, and told her of Bev’s sickness, on her way up to the Big House to tidy Tom’s quarters while the family was at breakfast. Her mind was full of the boy as she climbed the hill. Tom was leaving tomorrow for Richmond for James Callendar’s trial, and as usual hadn’t even begun to pack. Callendar’s arrest under the Sedition Act, charged with speaking against the President, made her profoundly uneasy, as if she’d felt the ground shift beneath her feet.

Among the papers on Tom’s desk, she had seen a few days ago the rough-printed proof-sheets of the book for which Callendar had been arrested,
The Prospect Before Us: That strange compound of ignorance and ferocity, of deceit and weakness,
the pamphlet had called that ferocious red-faced little New Englander whose gruff kindness Sally still recalled with gratitude.
A hideous hermaphroditical character which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman…The reign of Mr. Adams has hitherto been one continued tempest of malignant passions…The historian…will ask why the United States degrades themselves to the choice of a wretch whose soul came blasted from the hand of nature….

More than enough, she guessed, to be used as evidence of conspiracy, should the proof-sheets be found in Jefferson’s possession. Particularly with men already suspicious of Tom’s involvement in the attempts of the States to strike down the Sedition Act. Somewhere in his room, she knew, was the newly printed book itself.

Since Patsy and her family were visiting that week, Sally slipped quietly up the hill and through the tangle of scaffolding that enclosed the front of the house, to enter as usual through the cabinet’s long window. As she did so, she noticed the workmen, who should have been sliding floor-planks through the unfinished windows of what would be Mr. Jefferson’s new first-floor library, grouped quietly talking with a black man whom Sally vaguely recognized—one of Mr. Crinn’s yardmen from Charlottesville?

Before she came near enough to hear, or even to see clearly who the stranger might be, the men broke apart.

But watching the stranger stroll off down the hill to the stables, Sally saw that as soon as he thought he was out of sight of the house, he turned aside, and broke into a trot toward the woods.

Sally felt the workmen’s eyes on her, as she ducked under the scaffolding and into the house.

Because they’d been idling in talk with the stranger?

She didn’t think so.

This was something different.

Her hair prickled a little on her scalp.

The cabinet, and the bedroom beyond, were jammed with boxes, crates, trunks, and piles of books removed from the library three years ago when the roof had been torn off to alter the second floor. Tom had plans to raise a dome, like a Roman temple: Betting in the quarters on the completion-date ran all the way from next summer to the first notes of the Final Trumpet. The new library would be an extension of the cabinet, enlarging the island of privacy that was Tom’s
sanctum sanctorum.
Here, no one was permitted without an express invitation—except Sally herself.

Sally noted, as she entered, that the floor was filmed with construction dust and sawdust yet again; she’d been sweeping four times a day for months. Tom’s trunk and portmanteau lay beside the bed, and on top of the inevitable stack of books to be packed lay Callendar’s proof-sheets. As she removed them to the desk, the words caught her eye in the slatted light of the window jalousies:
Repulsive pedant. Gross hypocrite. One of the most egregious fools upon the continent.

Was that truly what Mr. Jefferson wanted to have said, about the man who had once been his friend?

The bedroom door opened. “It’s outrageous,” said Tom, sliding his shoulders out of his coat and crossing the bedroom to the cabinet where Sally knelt before a stack of books. “Peter’s just ridden in with word from Richmond. They’re going to try Callendar before Sam Chase, of all people. Why don’t they just send him to stand before Parliament in England while they’re about it? Sam Chase would have made Washington King, if he could have.”

Sally drew the printed book of
The Prospect Before Us
from the stack, rose to her feet, and held it out. “It’ll be easier to explain than proof-sheets, if one of the inn servants takes it into his head to see what you’ve got in your luggage.”

Tom’s eyes widened, then narrowed and turned cold: “You have a good point, I regret to say. I’ll be staying with Mr. Monroe, but that doesn’t make it less likely that we’ll be spied upon, if word gets about that I’m in town.” He laid the book down on the bed. The lines of strain that had faded during the three quiet years of his retirement were back, deeply and permanently, around his eyes and mouth.

“Will you speak on his behalf?” She kept her voice neutral: The mere thought of Callendar made her skin crawl.

Tom shook his head. “It’s unlikely I shall even show myself in the courtroom. I just don’t want to be three days’ journey away, should anything
…untoward…
develop at the trial.” He went to his desk, picked up the little bran-stuffed pillow he would rest his elbow on when he read, and the small iron dumbbell that he still had to use, to exercise the stiffened tendons of his right wrist. Even after thirteen years, there were nights when he could not sleep from the pain.

“Are you expecting something
untoward
?” Sally asked quietly.

“I don’t know.” He tucked dumbbell, pillow, and seditious book into a corner of the trunk. “Despite Mr. Adams’s orders that it disband, there is still a standing army of ten thousand men in New England. And Hamilton’s still in command of it. He’s up there now.”

“I thought that was all finished last year.”

“It is.” His voice had a grim edge. “He’s now offered to take
his
army and use it to conquer Mexico, so that we should have New Orleans as an American city—and so that Alex Hamilton should have a hero’s glory and a path back to power, now that Washington is gone.”