Patriot Hearts: A Novel of the Founding Mothers

SALLY

Paris

Friday, July 27, 1787

Do you remember my mama, Sally?”

Polly Jefferson had been quiet for so long that Sally Hemings had thought the little girl asleep. The woods through which the post-chaise drove did little to mitigate the heat of the day; the vehicle’s swaying was like the rocking of a cradle. At the beginning of the journey from Le Havre, Polly had been as wildly excited as Sally by every new glimpse of farmhouses, trees, and distant châteaus; after four days, she had grown accustomed enough to doze.

Sally could have looked forever, marveling at each half-seen roof or unfamiliar shrub. But she heard the wistfulness in her charge’s voice, and tore her eyes from the green shadows of what M’sieu Petit had told them was the forest of St.-Germain—or at least that’s what Sally thought he’d said. After the tricked parting from Captain Ramsay, Polly had become quieter than she’d been on the Arundel. Mrs. Adams at least hadn’t tricked or lied to the girl, to get her to leave the house at Grosvenor Square with the dapper little Frenchman Mr. Jefferson had sent. Still, Sally was aware of long silences where there had been nonstop, childish chatter before.

It was the first time Sally had heard her ask about her mother.

“That I do, sugarbaby.” She put her arm around Polly’s thin shoulders. “I think your mother was about the most beautiful lady I’ve ever seen in my life.” Because of the longing in the little girl’s face, Sally probably would have said so even had it not been true, but in fact Mrs. Jefferson—Miss Patty, she’d been called in the quarters—had been truly lovely.

“Did she look like Aunt Eppes?” Polly sat up a little straighter, tugged at the brim of her sunbonnet, as if still worried about her father’s admonition not to let herself get freckled. “Jack says Aunt Eppes was Mama’s sister.”

Jack was Aunt Eppes’s fourteen-year-old son, and the idol of Polly’s young life. On the voyage from Virginia, snuggled together in the curtained bunk she and Sally shared, Polly had asked to hear almost as many stories about Cousin Jack as about her father and her sister Patsy. In addition to listening to Sally’s recollections, Polly would make up tales herself, some of them quite fantastic, involving the slaughter of dragons or the defeat of the armies of the King of Spain. Back at Eppington Plantation, Aunt Eppes used to frown at Polly’s tales and scold primly, Now you know that isn’t so….

Sally knew she ought to do the same. But it was more fun to pitch in and add magical birds and the Platt-Eye Devil to the mix.

Besides, Polly knew perfectly well that their stories were only stories.

“You look more like her than your Aunt Eppes does,” said Sally. She did not add that she herself looked more like the long-dead Patty Jefferson than either Miss Patty’s white half-sister or younger daughter did.

It was one reason, Sally suspected, Aunt Eppes had been just as happy to get her out of the house. There were many white Virginia ladies who simply accepted the fact that their fathers took slave-women into their beds—sometimes for a night or two, sometimes, in the case of Sally’s mother Betty and old Jack Wayles, for years. Patty Wayles Jefferson had treated Betty’s “bright” children—Sally’s brothers and sisters—if not as members of the immediate family, at least as a privileged sub-branch, and after her father’s death Sally’s mother had been Miss Patty’s maid and confidante.

For Elizabeth Wayles Eppes, this had not been the case, perhaps because Sally did so much resemble their mutual half-sister. Once when Polly was five she’d asked Sally, “Ranney says you’re kin to me—” Ranney being one of the kitchenmaids. Even at age ten, Sally had known enough to reply, “You go way back in the Bible, back to Noah and the Ark, and you’ll see we’re all kin to each other.” Whether the little girl had pursued enquiries with her aunt, Sally didn’t know.

Now she went on, “Your mama had curly hair like yours, dark red like yours, not bright like your papa and sister. And her eyes were sort of green that looked gold in some lights, like your papa, or M’sieu Petit.” And she nodded through the windows toward the trim Frenchman who rode beside the chaise, just far enough behind so that the hooves of his mount would not kick extra dust to drift in through the open windows.

M’sieu Petit was Mr. Jefferson’s valet, and Sally had to smile to herself at the very evident fact that white French valets seemed to stand just as high in their own self-importance as the high-yellow “fancies” generally picked for the job in Virginia. That reflection made her wonder how her brother Jimmy was getting along, among all those French servants.

Her heart twitched with joy at the thought of seeing him again.

“Your mama and papa used to play together, her on the harpsichord, him on his fiddle.” She stroked Polly’s hair, tucked the stray locks back under the linen cap she wore beneath her bonnet. “When they’d sing together in Italian, all the mockingbirds in the trees would stop singing and line up on the windowsill to listen, it was so beautiful. And if the sun had gone down, all the flowers in the garden would open up again just a little wee bit—” She demonstrated with her fingers, to make Polly laugh, “—just to hear one more verse before they had to go to sleep.”

“Silly.” Polly tried to look prim. “Flowers don’t do that.”

“For your mama they did.”

Polly giggled, and settled her head comfortably on Sally’s shoulder, blinking out at the green-and-gold dapple of the sunlight, the soft haze of the dust.

Were it not for Polly Jefferson—nobody ever called the child Mary—Sally thought she would have broken her heart with loneliness, these past two months. Of course, if it weren’t for Polly she’d still be back in Virginia, and not in a coach on the way to Paris, that storybook capital of a storybook, magical land. She wouldn’t be on the verge of seeing her brother again, for the first time in four years.

Every time Polly wrote a letter to her aunt Carr at Monticello, on shipboard and in London at Mrs. Adams’s marvelous house, Sally had enclosed a short note to be read to her friends and family at the mountaintop plantation. She wished she might do the same for the friends she’d made at Eppington, but though Mr. Eppes was on the whole a kindly master, he didn’t hold with slaves knowing how to read and write. She had merely asked Polly to write at the end of her letters, Sally asks to be remembered with love to you all. That way they would know at least that she was alive and well.

It was Mr. Jefferson who’d first taught Sally her letters. He loved to teach, and had instructed dozens of the slave-children on Monticello, though most of them—especially the ones who ended up out in the tobacco fields—let the skill go rusty. Destined from childhood to be a house-servant, Sally had kept it up. Because Sally had been reared as much by Miss Patty as by her own mother, she’d spent most of her time in the family house, whether it was at Monticello or one of the other Jefferson plantations, Shadwell or Poplar Grove, or for one astonishing season in the big governor’s palace in Williamsburg. Mr. Jefferson’s older daughter Patsy—only a year older than Sally—had delighted in passing along her own lessons to the younger girl. When Patsy grew old enough to be trusted in her father’s library, she’d often bring Sally along with her: a paradise of histories, stories, poems.

And at the center of it, like a wizard in an enchanted garden, was Mr. Jefferson himself.

A ripple of something—not quite heat and not quite the shivers, neither truly anger nor sadness—went through her at the thought of Mr. Jefferson.

Sally couldn’t remember back before she’d loved him, though the day she’d quit doing so was vivid as yesterday in her mind. It still filled her with sadness, and a sense of confusion for which she had no name. She’d seen them so often together, Mr. Jefferson and Miss Patty. Had been aware of how deeply they loved one another, like the red rose and the briar in the old ballad, inextricably twined.

She had seen, too, the grief, loneliness, and—once the War began—the constant quiet terror in which her mistress lived, each time Mr. Jefferson went away.

Miss Patty was all things beautiful, lovely as the dogwood blossoms, sweet-scented, filled with music. Mr. Jefferson, with his tales of ancient Kings and Indian lore and the secret lives of every bird and grass-blade, was wise and quirkily marvelous. Kind, too. He was firm and reasonable with his slaves, both field-hands and house-servants: he would threaten whippings, but in fact the worst that would happen was that he’d sell an offender away. This was bad enough, and not simply because it meant losing every friend and relative you had. Everyone in the quarters along Mulberry Row knew that pretty much anywhere in the State would be worse than Monticello. At the time, it had seemed to Sally that she’d loved Mr. Jefferson merely for the fact that he didn’t assume she was simpleminded, just because she was a little girl and a slave. Though she was always being scolded by her mother and Miss Patty for wandering off into the garden to look at plants when she should have been practicing her stitching, Mr. Jefferson always took her side. “It’s rare enough to find any child, black or white, who will read Nature’s textbooks so avidly,” he’d tell them. He’d joked with her, and laughed when she gave him back clever answers. Like a good father he’d always been happy to answer her endless questions, to explain the clouds and the winds—and the War.

In the snowy January of 1781, when Sally was eight, the family had been in Richmond, where Mr. Jefferson was Governor of the state. He had come back from the Congress, Sally’s mother had said, because Miss Patty had begged him to, because she could not live with him gone all the time. Sally guessed her mistress feared that if the British took the Congress prisoner, Mr. Jefferson would be hanged. So he’d come back to Virginia, first to Williamsburg and then to Richmond, and the British invaded the state anyway. They’d seized Richmond, and the family barely got away; Sally remembered clinging to her mother’s skirt as the servants huddled around the wagons, and hearing baby Lucie Elizabeth, who’d only been born the previous November, wailing thinly in the cold.

Three days later the British riddled the house with bullets at point-blank range, then rounded up the servants who’d remained there, and sold them off for cash. Both Miss Patty and baby Lucie Elizabeth came down sick as a result of the flight through the freezing countryside. In April, Lucie Elizabeth died.

Eighteen months later, just after Mr. Jefferson’s term as Governor was ended and he returned to Monticello, a militia captain came tearing up the mountain one June morning at dawn, shouting that the British were but three hours behind him and had already taken Charlottesville. Mr. Jefferson woke his wife and daughters and got them into the carriage, carrying Polly down the stairs wrapped in a blanket. Aunt Carr, Mr. Jefferson’s sister who had lived with him since the death of her husband, wailed prophecies of doom as her older boys Peter and Sam struggled to keep the younger ones calm, and Miss Patty’s parrot Shadwell shrieked and swore.

Sally and her older sister Critta, and their sixteen-year-old brother Jimmy, helped load the farm wagon with food, blankets, clothing. Mr. Jefferson lifted her and Critta into the wagon, but their mother went in the carriage with Miss Patty, to quiet their mistress’s terror as the vehicles went jolting down the breakneck, rutted road. Sally later heard from her oldest brother—Martin, the butler—that Mr. Jefferson had tried to pack up some of his papers and had gotten away from the house only minutes before the first red-coated dragoons emerged from the woods.

After the first flight from Richmond, Miss Patty had never been well. By the time they’d escaped from Monticello, the bones of her cheeks stood out through the sunken skin and her hands were like dead leaves.

Yet when Mr. Jefferson was there, Miss Patty would laugh and twine ribbons in her beautiful dark red hair, and insist she was much better; that there was really nothing wrong. Even as a child, Sally had sensed how desperately they both needed to believe this was true. By the fall of 1782 Miss Patty was with child again, her seventh, according to Sally’s mother, counting the little boy she had borne to her first husband. She’d put on weight for the baby’s birth—the second little Lucie Elizabeth—but even Sally could see it was unhealthy bloat, not the smoothness of returning health.

Those last four months, between Lucie’s birth in May and September, when Miss Patty died, had a nightmare quality in Sally’s memory. What they must have been for Mr. Jefferson she could not imagine. There was no more playing school with Patsy, or reading in the library, or learning fine stitching or the art of dressing hair. Sally had been put in charge of Polly—then four—sleeping on a pallet on the floor of the girls’ room and helping Aunty Isabel in the nursery with baby Lucie.

Even little Polly sensed something was amiss, though Patsy whispered through gritted teeth that no one was to tell her sister how desperately ill their mother was. At night, when Polly couldn’t sleep, Patsy would tell her stories, enlisting Sally’s aid when her own limited invention flagged. Afterwards, when the younger girl drifted off to sleep and Sally returned to her pallet, Sally could hear the heartbreaking liquid sweetness of Mr. Jefferson’s violin from downstairs, as he played for his wife in the darkness.

“Did Mama have freckles?” Polly sat up suddenly, her small, oval face puckered with sudden fright at the recurring concern. “Papa said he wouldn’t love me, if I let myself get freckled.”

“Your papa only said that because he’d heard that pirates on the high seas look especially for freckled ladies, to haul away into captivity,” Sally informed her gravely. “He just didn’t want to scare you by saying so.” And when Polly gave her a suspicious look, she laughed and said, “Sugarbaby, when your papa sees you, he’ll be so glad he won’t care if you’re covered all over with spots like a bird’s egg.”

For three weeks after Miss Patty’s death, Mr. Jefferson kept to his room. Passing the door, Sally had heard him weeping, or pacing incessantly, like an injured animal trying to outwalk pain. It was whispered in the slave-quarters that he would follow his beloved into her grave, from the sheer shock of his grief. Often Patsy would be with her father in his room nearly all night, as she was most of the day. Then it would fall to Sally to tell Polly stories, and hold her in bed until the little girl slept.

One afternoon he went through the whole of the house, gathering every letter, every list, every scrap of his wife’s handwriting, and burned them all in the kitchen fire; cut to pieces the single small likeness of her that had been painted the year before. Sally remembered waking one fog-wrapped dawn, hearing a door close softly somewhere in the house, and Patsy’s voice downstairs call hesitantly, “Papa?” Long familiar strides, first in the hall, then grinding on the gravel outside, heading toward the stables at the far end of Mulberry Row. Sally slipped out of her blanket and ran to the window in time to see Mr. Jefferson plunge down the drive on his fast bay stallion Caratacus. Tall and thin and stiff in her rumpled dress, Patsy stood by the back door with her rufous hair hanging down her shoulders. The pink of her shawl in the gray fog had been like the last flower of a summer gone.

Not long after that Mr. Jefferson had taken the family to his friend Mr. Cary’s home near Richmond, for the girls and the Carr children to be inoculated against the smallpox. Baby Lucie had been left with Aunt Eppes. Sally, Critta, Jimmy, and Thenia, their youngest sister, were inoculated as well. Mr. Jefferson and Polly’s nurse Aunty Isabel acted as sick-nurses to the whole group, the first time Sally had seen her master begin to emerge from the desperate isolation of his grief.

It was there that Mr. Jefferson got the letter from the Congress that his friend, the fragile Mr. Madison who Sally always thought looked like a wizened old man, had put her master’s name forward to be one of the ministers to France. With Miss Patty dead, there was no reason why he shouldn’t accept.

He’d gone to Philadelphia with Patsy. Sally had hoped to be taken along as Patsy’s maid, or at least as a sewing-girl to the household. Instead, when he came back, she heard in the kitchen that she was going to be sent with Polly and Lucie, not back to Monticello, where she had friends and family, but to Eppington.

“Is it true?” she demanded of her mother, when she’d raced in a flurry out to the sunny room across the yard from the kitchen, where the Cary slaves and those of their guests gathered to do the mending and ironing and stitching of clothing for the household. The Cary slaves had regarded her in mingled pity and surprise, that at age nine she still seemed to think it would cross any white person’s mind to even ask if she wanted to leave her family or not.

“It’s true,” her mother had answered. And then, when Sally turned to run from the room, “Where you goin’, girl?” She’d caught Sally by the arm, led her outside into the yard behind the big Cary house at Ampthill, the air cold after the frowsty sewing-room’s warmth. “You thinkin’ of runnin’ in to Mr. Jefferson, to ask him not to send you to Eppington? Are you?”

When Sally didn’t reply, Betty Hemings shook her, not roughly but urgently, pulling her eyes back to her own. “Don’t you even think about it, girl. Don’t you even think that because he teaches you your letters, and talks kindly to you, and answers all your fool questions, that he really cares even that much—” She measured the width of a lemon-pip between forefinger and thumb, “—where you want to go, or what you’d rather do than what he tells you to. Not him, not any white, man, woman, or child. They got a word for niggers that think they can ask not to do things they don’t want to do and that word is spoiled. And once they start thinkin’ you’re a spoiled nigger, then they start lookin’ around for ways to un-spoil you. To teach you real hard not to talk to ’em as if you wasn’t black. You understand?”

Sally, trembling with defiance, looked up at her mother’s face and saw there fear as well as anger: a terrible, piercing fear. She thought, What does she think he’ll do? Sell me?

And the thought succeeded it as instantly as the following heartbeat, He could.

It was indeed what her mother feared.

“It’s like that Decoration of Independence Martin was tellin’ us about,” her mother went on, her voice low and tense. “Mr. Jefferson wrote, All men is created equal, but what he meant was, All white Americans is created equal to all white Englishmen. Can you give me the name of any one of his slaves that he’s turned loose since he wrote that?”

Sally whispered, “No, ma’am.”

“You’re damn lucky you’re just goin’ with Polly, and not bein’ sold to Mrs. Eppes.” Betty’s voice was low, and she glanced at the back door of the Cary house, where young Peter Carr, just shooting up from boy to young man, could be seen flirting with one of the light-complected housemaids. “If Mr. Jefferson was to die tomorrow, every one of us would be sold off to pay his debts. You better get used to it, girl, and thank God it’s no worse yet.”

Sally had returned quietly with her mother to the sewing-room, and had taken up work on a shirt for Sam Carr, as a way to quiet her mind and her hands. But later that evening, when the men had finished their port and were going in to join Mrs. Cary and the older girls in the parlor, seeing Mr. Jefferson walking behind the others Sally slipped from the shadows and tugged his sleeve, whispered, “Mr. Jefferson, sir—must I go to Eppington?”

He paused in his steps and looked down at her. His tall loose-jointed form seemed to loom against the candle-glow and gloom of the early-falling winter darkness. She was at the age when the slave-children began to be given real jobs, and had graduated from short calico shifts to a real dress of printed muslin, her hair—which was like a white woman’s, silky and long—braided tidily up under a linen cap. In the half-dark she was aware that, being taller than the other girls her age (except for Patsy, who at ten was as tall as little Mr. Madison), she seemed already one of the adult servants, and not a child who can ask for things because she doesn’t know any better.

Mr. Jefferson’s voice was gentle and kind. “Now, Sally, Polly asked specially that you go with her to her aunt Eppes. She knows you, and loves you. I’m sending you with her so that she won’t be lonely there.”

He didn’t sound in the least as if he even comprehended that she, too, might be lonely there. Shock, anger, disappointment pierced her heart like a thorn, but looking up into his eyes she saw there was no arguing. She’d seen that side of him as he’d dealt with other people, but never before had he turned that kindly implacability on her.

He simply didn’t want to hear there was a problem. His hands rested briefly, warmly, on her shoulders. “You’re a good girl, Sally, and I’m trusting you to take care of my daughter. And it won’t be for very long.”

It was to be four years.

And for those four years, Sally had hated Thomas Jefferson.

The carriage emerged from the woods. Sunlight dyed the dust egg-yolk gold. They passed through a village: white stucco houses, brown tile roofs patched with green moss, a thick smell of pissy gutters, smoke, and pigs. A few of the people wore town-folks’ clothes, like the people Sally had seen in Williamsburg and in the fascinating bedlam of London, but they looked patched and threadbare. Most wore smocks and breeches, ragged and baggy and without stockings, like the field-hands.

But if they were field-hands, Sally reflected uneasily, somebody was short-feeding ’em and selling off the rations. One man spat after the carriage as it clattered by.

Looking back, Sally had to admit that painful as it had been, her sojourn at Eppington had been for the best. If she hadn’t been there when Mr. Jefferson’s letters had come, insisting that Polly be sent to join him in France—if Aunty Isabel hadn’t been with child and unable to make the voyage—she wouldn’t be sitting here now. She wouldn’t be about to see Jimmy again, her favorite brother. Lazy, handsome, prankish, troublemaking Jimmy: She almost laughed out loud at the thought of him. Her mother had sent her word that Mr. Jefferson was having him taught French cooking, which was supposed to be the best in the world, though Sally couldn’t imagine better cooking than what her Aunty Lita could produce in a single pot over the fire.

She wondered if he’d learned to speak French like the lofty M’sieu Petit. (Enough to cheat at cards and find every alehouse for five miles around, anyway!)

She wondered if he’d changed.

A stone bridge, and the deep glitter of water; a speckled flotilla of ducks. Then woods again, like the wooded mountaintop of Monticello, crisscrossed with paths and dotted with lawn and flowers. A park, like the great parks in London, Hyde Park and Grosvenor Square where Mr. and Mrs. Adams would go walking with Polly, during the ten days they’d stayed in that wonder-filled metropolis.

Mrs. Eppes, and Aunty Isabel, had given Sally strict instructions about staying at Polly’s side and staying in the house when Polly was out with the white folks—by the time it was known Sally would accompany her charge to France, Mrs. Eppes was as familiar as Aunty Isabel was with Sally’s boundless curiosity, her omnivorous craving to find out about anything she didn’t know. Neither the white aunt nor the black nurse had ever been to a city bigger than Williamsburg, but they’d guessed what temptations would flaunt themselves across Sally’s path.

“The girl’s never to be found when you want her,” the delicate, formidable Mrs. Adams had complained, on their second day beneath her roof. “A fine nursemaid for a child Polly’s age!”

But London—!

Even the birds were different in London: cocky little brown sparrows, instead of the silvery doves Sally knew in Virginia. The summer night-noise, too, was different, watchmen and carts and vendors all yelling, instead of the incessant clamor of night-crying insects. Her heart hurt for the songs of the mockingbirds, but in Grosvenor Square, walking in the twilight (when she should have been back at Mrs. Adams’s house!) she’d heard the indescribable sweet voice of the nightingale, that all the fairy-tales talked about.

All those crowded houses had their stables along separate alleyways that begged to be investigated. The Square and every street around it was alive with vendors who brought not only milk and eggs and vegetables from the markets but also hot pies, scarves, slippers, quills for making pens. The markets were jaw-dropping carnivals of activity, produce, servants, housewives, whores—Sally had never seen a whore, and had to quietly confirm with Mrs. Adams’s maid Esther that yes, those women with bright clothes and hair that startling color made their living by coupling with men.

Sally loved Virginia with the whole of her heart—loved its stillness, the sweetness of the woods, and the soft peaceful twilights. But the world was a marvel-filled place. Even Mrs. Adams had unbent, when Sally had asked, a little fearfully, if she might be permitted to read some of the books in Mr. Adams’s library: Coming back to books after four years without them was like sitting down at table starving. Like Mr. Jefferson, fat, grumpy Mr. Adams loved books, and like Mr. Jefferson both he and his beautiful wife were born schoolteachers.

There would be books in Mr. Jefferson’s house.

Had Mr. Jefferson changed?

Though her resentment at him had burned bitter in her for four years, she had never been able to eradicate from her heart the memory of his violin echoing in the darkness for his dying wife. The tireless months Mr. Jefferson had spent in Miss Patty’s room watching her fade from life returned to Sally’s mind, confusing the simplicity of her anger at all he had done. And not only to her: Even as a child of eight, Sally knew it took two to make a baby. It was impossible that Mr. Jefferson, a grown man who had read books and talked to doctors, wouldn’t know it, too.

“She was afraid, if she put him out of her bed, that he’d start lyin’ with Iris or Jenny,” Sally’s mother had said, naming the light-skinned housemaid, and the young wife of the plantation cobbler. Both had shown Mr. Jefferson—and a number of his guests at one time or another—their willingness. Being the master’s woman was a good way to get extra food and gifts, and to pass along to any offspring the inestimable gift of preference in an unfair world.

“Why you think she always smiled, and made herself pretty the way she did?” her mother asked. “It’s not just so he wouldn’t fret. It was to draw him back to her, to bind him. To keep him from going away. She’d rather risk death than lose him.”

Sally still thought Mr. Jefferson should have known better. And maybe, she reflected, recalling not only despair but horror in his eyes as fevers, weakness, infections ravaged the beautiful woman he had loved—maybe he had guessed at last what he had so frantically told himself wasn’t true.

On that last morning, on the threshold of autumn of 1782, nine-year-old Sally had been in the room when Miss Patty reached for Mr. Jefferson’s hand and whispered, “Swear to me that you will never give my girls a stepmother.” Miss Patty had had two stepmothers in succession. From what her mother had told her of them, Sally wasn’t surprised that the young woman had been grateful to Betty Hemings for her kindness and for the fact that she’d kept old Jack Wayles from needing to marry a third.

Mr. Jefferson had fainted from grief, and had been carried into the library next to Miss Patty’s room. Everyone went back into the sickroom—Mrs. Eppes and Aunt Carr and Miss Sparling, the young nurse that the doctor from Yorktown had left to care for Miss Patty—but Sally had lingered. She’d looked down at the ravaged unshaven face, the straight red eyelashes like gold against the discolored bruises of sleeplessness. He knows it’s true. He knows that it’s he who killed her by possessing her.

Later she’d overheard some of his friends remark on the excessiveness of his pain, that in those first few weeks he could not even look at his own children without collapsing, and she knew why he couldn’t look at them.

Those things she’d remembered in her days at Eppington, even when her hunger for her family had been at its worst. She’d hated him, when she felt herself going half crazy with longing to be able to read again and when Mrs. Eppes came up with extra tasks and duties in the kitchen and the scullery to “un-spoil” a slave she considered inattentive and uppity. Yet she never could hate him with the whole of her heart.

In time her anger had altered, changed to a kind of slow-burning frustrated grief. For she knew that all things were the way all things were.

She had come to love Polly, and sunny-hearted baby Lucie, as if they were her own sisters. Mrs. Eppes had a baby daughter named Lucie as well: Polly would braid ribbons of identical color into both toddlers’ hair, and say the Lucies were her own twin babies.

Then in early October of 1784, shortly after Mr. Jefferson left for France with Patsy, whooping cough swept over Eppington Plantation.

Both little Lucies died.

“Mesdemoiselles, les voilà!” M’sieu Petit nudged his horse up close to the chaise window, bent from the saddle, and pointed through the trees with his quirt. “Les murailles de Paris. How you say…?” He mislaid the English word, and shook his head with a wry smile, but pride and happiness sparkled in his eyes. Then he simply explained, “Paris.”

For the past mile, Sally had seen through the trees the tall walls of houses—palaces—set back from the road at the end of aisles of trees. Now ahead of them she saw the gray stone wall Mrs. Adams had told them about, which the French King had let his friends build so they could charge every farmer and merchant a fee to bring goods into Paris. Sure enough, a knot of carts and donkeys and wagons was clumped in front of the small gatehouse, while uniformed officials pawed through their contents.

And beyond the wall, distant over yet more trees, could be glimpsed rooftops, chimneys, church steeples. It looked like a fairy-tale, but it was a city, no mistake. The stench was too real for it to be a dream.

Polly’s face contorted with disgust. “Pew!”

And M’sieu Petit’s eyes twinkled. “Ah, la puanteur de Paris! Ça te fait forte!” He thumped his chest. “It make strong!”

Stench, movement, shouting as if everyone at the Tower of Babel were being slaughtered at once all rolled in with the braying of asses, the bleating of sheep, the barking of a thousand dogs…

Paris.

An official strolled over to let them through the gate, M’sieu Petit slipping him a coin to let them through without being searched. The farmers to whom the man had been speaking—or who’d been shouting at him—followed, still shouting, filthy barefoot men, unshaven and carrying sticks. The official in his blue uniform ignored them, like a white overseer brushing off the impotent anger of field-hands. Sally couldn’t tell what the problem was, but as the chaise went through the gate she saw their eyes: like the eyes of slaves who’re burning to torch the kitchen some night.

But on the plantations around Charlottesville, a slave with such anger in him generally worked alone. She’d never seen that many men—that many sets of smoldering eyes—together.

She was house-servant enough to be frightened.

Whatever was going on, somebody was going to catch it bad.

On the other side of the gate lay a great circular open space, surrounded by rows of trees, with streets radiating in all directions. Among the milling farm-carts and gaggles of sheep, elegant carriages maneuvered. The long avenue beyond was almost like a country road, lined with trees and kitchen-gardens. Here, too, were both market-carts and fancy carriages, strollers in bright silks and farmers in faded rags. Less than a mile along, the coachman drew rein at the first courtyard wall. M’sieu Petit sprang from his horse as the porter ran from the lodge to open the gates.

With a breathless start, Sally realized, We’re here.

Polly understood at the same moment, sat up very straight, her eyes huge with panic, her hands pressing guiltily to her freckled nose.

The gate opened. The courtyard was cobbled. Servants in white shirtsleeves came out of the tall gray house.

M’sieu Petit opened the carriage door, helped Sally down first, then Polly. Polly’s hand was cold on Sally’s, like a frantic little claw. “He’s going to hate me—”

A man emerged onto the house’s front steps. Not as big as Sally remembered him from her childhood, though still a tall man. Either she’d remembered his hair being redder or it had faded, and though the gouges of grief and sleeplessness were gone from his sharp quizzical features, she saw where their echoes lingered still.

He wore a brown coat, and had one arm in a sling, wrist tightly bandaged. Yet he slipped it out to reach down and steady Polly as he scooped her up effortlessly in his strong arms.

The next second another pair of arms went around Sally’s waist from behind and Jimmy’s voice said in her ear, “Who’s this gorgeous lady? Can’t be my sister Sally! Sally’s skinny and got knock-knees—”

“I do not have knock-knees!” She whirled, striking at him as if they were children again together, laughing up into his eyes. Dark eyes—of all their mother’s children, only Sally had inherited her ship-captain grandfather’s turquoise-blue eyes. “You still as ugly as I remember, so you got to be Jimmy.” Which was a lie. Jimmy was good-looking and he knew it.

Then Jimmy looked past her and dropped back a step, and she turned, as Mr. Jefferson came up to her, holding out his left, unbroken hand. “Sally.” The soft, husky timbre of his voice brought back to her in a rush all the memories of Monticello, all the tales he’d once told her of ancient Kings. “You’ve grown.”

You sent me away. Like a dog or a bird. But four years had passed. She’d learned that it was something all white men did.

So like the child she’d been, she peeped at him from under her eyelashes and responded meekly, “You’d have to write me up in your philosophical journals if I hadn’t, Mr. Jefferson.”

Something in the way his shoulders relaxed, in the old answering sparkle of his eyes, made her realize that, white man and adult though he was, he’d been as homesick as she.

He set Polly on her feet again and put his unbroken hand on his daughter’s shoulder, drawing her close. “Thank you, Sally,” he said. “Thank you for keeping such care of Polly, and for bringing her safely here to me.”

Behind them, servants were unloading trunks from the back of the chaise: Polly’s big one, and the small wicker box of Sally’s few possessions. Sally was only a little conscious of her brother’s glance going from her face to their master’s, of the speculation in his eyes. Mostly she was aware of Mr. Jefferson, the god of her childhood, the master who wrote of freedom but kept his slaves, the ravaged face of the man unconscious in the library and the retreating beat of hooves in fog, fleeing the place he loved but could no longer endure.

With Polly’s hand in his he ascended the few steps to the door of the house, and Jimmy and Sally followed him into its shadows. Beyond the gatehouse in the avenue, someone was shouting, “We will not forever be slaves!”

Washington City

August 24, 1814

“Mrs. Madison, I cannot allow you to remain here!” Red-faced and covered with dust, Dr. Blake—Washington’s stocky mayor—gestured furiously toward the parlor windows, though Dolley assumed he meant to point northeast at the Bladensburg road. “I have been in Bladensburg since dawn, digging earthworks, and I know what will happen there!”

“Have the British attacked, then?”

“That is not the issue, Mrs. Madison. They are on their way. Last night they took Upper Marlborough. The men in Bladensburg are exhausted. Their rations were lost, they’d been marching all night—”

“And the President?”

Blake shook his head. “He’s there somewhere. I didn’t see him. Armstrong’s an imbecile—you’d make a better Secretary of War than he does!—giving orders now to retreat, now to advance…The men are untrained and there isn’t a horse in the Army that’s smelled blood and battle-smoke before. They’ll break and run, if the men don’t.”

“I shall stay until Mr. Madison comes.” Dolley folded her hands as if the dusty, exhausted man before her were any morning caller come to pay polite respects, not a messenger from the edge of battle. “I appreciate thy concern, sir, but I will not abandon the capital to an enemy, particularly one who hath not yet fired a shot at me. And I will never abandon my husband. I have a Tunisian saber on the wall of my dining-room and I am perfectly prepared to use it.”

“Do you really?” inquired Sophie, coming in from the hall after Dr. Blake had left, bewildered by the obstinacy of the President’s lady. “Have a Tunisian saber?”

Dolley nodded. “Patsy Jefferson gave it to me; her father got it for her in Paris.” She plucked a fragment of the tea-cake Paul had brought with the refreshments for Dr. Blake and carried it to the window, where Polly had been roving back and forth on her perch for the past hour, cursing under her breath in Italian. “If thou didst know the Adamses in Paris, thou must have known Patsy and her sister there as well.”

“I did, but not well. We were not intimates. To raise the money Mother and I knew we’d need in England, I worked for a time as a sick-nurse for a doctor in Yorktown. Mr. Jefferson had him up to Monticello, when Mrs. Jefferson did not seem to be recovering from her last childbirth; I stayed on to look after her. I think in her heart Patsy Jefferson always considered me a servant. And in Paris I was a paid companion to one of those disreputable old Englishwomen who hung on the fringes of salon society. Patsy was kind, of course. To those who don’t get between her and her father she has great natural kindness of heart.”

Dolley was silent, knowing of whom she spoke. Polly sidled over to her and curled one huge gray claw around Dolley’s wrist, and with the other took the tea-cake.

“Thank you, darling,” the parrot croaked.

And because Polly expected it, Dolley replied gravely, “Thou’rt welcome, Pol.” Plumes of dust were rising now not just along Pennsylvania Avenue, but throughout the muddy, weedy wasteland of scattered groves and still more scattered buildings. Dr. Blake is right, Dolley thought, fighting against the panic that scratched within her breast like a rat behind a door. He and I both know what will happen there, if it has not already begun. The British were on their way. It was insanity to think that the exhausted, disorganized, starving men could stop them.

It was insanity to stay.

Sophie stepped to her side, her dark clothing like a shadow against the room’s bright color, and a blinding round of light flashed from her palm as she held out her hand.

Dolley’s breath caught.

She should have known, when Martha gave it to her, that it came from the French Queen. The miniature on the reverse wasn’t a good one—it could have been any Frenchwoman with high-piled hair and a fantasia of ostrich-plumes—but who other than Marie Antoinette would have given a hand-mirror whose rim was studded with diamonds?

She regarded the painted face on the ivory, the long chin and sweet, pouting mouth. In 1782, this frivolous, softhearted woman couldn’t have known that the powder-trail ignited at Concord Bridge was going to bring down the Bastille’s walls. In 1782, Martha Washington hadn’t even been the wife of the head of state: just a woman whose husband—and whose husband’s cause—was the dernier cri of fashion in the salons of Paris.

Martha had probably sent the French Queen a letter of congratulation on the birth of her son—Dolley recalled Martha speaking of the celebrations in the new Dauphin’s honor, held by the American troops at the tail-end of the winter camp on the Hudson. Martha, who at that time had just lost her own son. And because Martha’s famous husband had just defeated France’s enemy—or was it simply out of fellow-feeling for a woman who followed her husband to the dirt and hardship of war? Marie Antoinette had sent a gift in reply.

She’s adorned / Amply that in her husband’s eye looks lovely, someone had written somewhere. The truest mirror that an honest wife / Can see her beauty in.

Dolley turned the mirror over in her hand. Liberté—Amitié, the graven letters said, that most ancient of riddles: Freedom and Friendship. Though her faith in a truly omnipotent God precluded superstition, the echo of old beliefs still whispered in her heart, that those who’d looked into mirrors left some fragment of themselves, some echo behind within the glass. It seemed to her that she should be able to catch a glimpse of the pretty French Queen, in her diamonds and her ostrich-plumes and her fatal nimbus of impenetrable naïveté, kindheartedly sending off this gift to the woman whose cause would transform itself into the monster that would devour the giver.

Certainly she should be able to see in it Martha’s face, pale within the black of her final mourning. Or to meet within its depths Abigail’s indomitable gaze.

Half to herself, she murmured, “I don’t suppose either Martha or Abigail would have fled.”

“No,” Sophie replied. “But then, neither did the Queen who sent Martha that mirror, and these days no one calls her brave for not getting out when she had the chance.”

Dolley looked up quickly, to meet her friend’s implacable eyes.

A horse rushed by on the Avenue, appearing, then vanishing, through the dust. Voices shouted incoherently. Another gunshot cracked, followed by the frenzied barking of dogs.

Into the silence that followed, Dolley said shakily, “I don’t expect even this is as bad as Paris was, in the summer of ’89.”

“No,” said Sophie softly. “No—Even if the British sacked this city and burned it to the ground, it could not be as bad as it was in Paris, that summer of ’89.”

Paris

Monday, July 14, 1789

Sally woke and lay for a long time, listening in the darkness.

All was silent, but the smell of burning hung thick in the air.

Yesterday a mob had torn down and burned the wooden palisades on either side of the customs pavilions that flanked the city gate up in the Étoile, had stormed and sacked the pavilions themselves and routed the inspectors there. The Champs-Elysées had been jammed with carts, wagons, carriages, and terrified horses, people fleeing the town or people rushing in from the faubourgs to join in the fray. Furious, filthy men and women had rampaged among them, waving butcher-knives, clubs, makeshift pikes. Mr. Jefferson had been away at Versailles, where the newly formed National Assembly was meeting. At the first sign of trouble, M’sieu Petit had closed and barred the courtyard gates. When he’d reopened them in the evening, at Mr. Jefferson’s return, the stink had been horrific, because of course every member of the mob on the way to and from the Étoile had used the gateways of every house on the avenue as a toilet.

Mr. Jefferson had called a meeting of the whole household in the candle-lit dining-room: servants, stableboys, his daughters, and his secretary Mr. Short. “The King’s troops have surrounded the city,” he said in that soft voice that everyone had to strain to hear. “But the King has pledged to General Lafayette and the National Assembly that he will not attack his own people. These are but the birth-pangs of a new government, the fire that will release the phoenix. We have no call to fear.”

Sally wasn’t so sure about that.

“There’s every kind of rumor coming in through the kitchen, Tom,” she had said to him, softly, much later in the night when he went up to bed. There was a signal between them, a Boccherini piece he would play on his violin, when all the house fell silent. Then Sally would wrap herself in a faded old brocade gown, and move like a ghost barefoot down the dark attic stair.

“Most of ’em you wonder how anyone could believe—that the King’s bringing in Austrian troops, that he’s going to send them in to burn the suburbs where the National Assembly has support, that he’s had explosives put under the hall where the Assembly’s meeting and he’s going to blow the whole lot of you sky-high…How would he get that much powder down into the cellar with you meeting overhead?” She sat cross-legged on the end of his bed as he set aside the violin. “But all over town, people are breaking into gunsmith shops for weapons. I looked out the gate today, and a lot of those men out there had muskets.”

“Good.” Jefferson drew her to him, the faint shift of muscle and rib comforting through the thin layers of muslin that divided flesh from flesh. “The will to liberty must be armed, Sally, and it must show itself willing to shed blood. After all these centuries of oppression, the French people are waking up. They’re remembering that they are men. It’s a frightening time. But the King is a man of good heart, and stronger than the creatures who surround him. He’s shown himself willing to step beyond the old ideas, and to work with the Assembly. Only barbarians fear the clear light of freedom.”

For a moment the glow of the single candle shone in his eyes, as if he looked beyond that small brightness to some greater glory. Then he smiled at her, as if in her silence he read her fear.

“And this house has very stout gates. I’m known to everyone in Paris as a friend of freedom, as a regular guest, if not a participant, in the Assembly. And I’m known to the King as the Minister of his sworn ally. We have nothing to fear from either side, Sally.”

He cupped her face in both hands, brushed her lips with his. “It is a glorious time to be alive.” Then he slipped the nightgown down from her shoulders, and they spoke no more of the King.

A short lifetime spent at Jefferson’s elbow, watching him tinker with inventions that seldom worked out in practice, had taught Sally already that Tom was an incurable optimist who tended to believe whatever he wished were true. Still, when she was with him, whether at his side in the secret stillness of his bedroom or on the opposite side of the dining-room among the other servants, it was impossible to contradict him. Impossible to pull her heart away from the power of his words and his thought.

Lying beside him in the aftermath of loving, she felt safe. Able to look, as he did, beyond the walls of the Hôtel Langeac and the veils of time, to see this beautiful fairy-tale land that had been for so long bound in the chains of the King’s power and the King’s friends and the all-dominating Church. To hear its people saying, at last, There is another way to live.

The bells of the old abbey on Montmartre Hill chimed distantly. In her attic bedroom, Sally heard the striking-clock in the hallway answer with three clear notes. In another half-hour the cocks in all the kitchen-gardens up and down the Champs-Elysées would begin to crow. Jacques the kitchen-boy would be awake soon after that, as first light stained the sky.

Then it would be too late to flee.

Sally slipped from beneath the sheets of her narrow bed. As she shed her nightgown, found the stays and dress and chemise she’d put out last night knowing she’d have to dress in the dark, she tried not to think about what she was doing. She laced up her shoes, braided her hair by touch alone, and put on a cap. Leaving Tom’s room last night, with the candle sputtering out, she had forced herself not to look back. Not to think, That was the last time. But as she slipped away, she did pause in the doorway of the girls’ room to make out, very dimly, the blur of white that was Polly’s sheets, the dark smear of the little girl’s hair.

Almost as much as Tom, she would miss Polly.

She would even miss Patsy, who for nearly a year had made her life a wretched guessing-game of frozen silences, petty frustrations, uncertainty, and spite.

And she would never see her family again.

The front gates would be locked, but Sally drifted like a shadow down to the kitchen, past the cubbyhole shared by Jimmy and the kitchen-boy Jacques. There were times in the past two years that Sally had hated her brother. First, because he had slyly maneuvered to push her and their master together, then later because he had come to her to borrow—or steal, if she wouldn’t lend—the money that Tom would give her, for small pleasures like gloves and shoes and fans. After Patsy came home from the convent and started keeping the household books, Tom began leaving money for Sally in a drawer of his desk, rather than buy her things as he had before.

Sometimes, she was almost certain, Jimmy got to the drawer before she did.

She moved the iron bolts of the kitchen door, slipped it open barely the eight inches that would admit her body, then closed it softly again. She paused long enough to slip her feet into the pattens that protected her shoes from the black, acid Paris mud, then tucked her small bundle of belongings more firmly under her arm. At this hour, she should be fairly safe. Even rioters had to sleep sometime.

Still she felt breathless as she walked in the hushed stillness beneath the chestnut trees. The kitchen-boy had told her yesterday that while the rioting was going on in the Étoile, the lawyers and merchants who’d elected the representatives to the National Assembly had declared themselves a Governing Committee, and had called for forty-eight thousand militiamen to keep order and deal with the royal troops camped in the Bois de Boulogne and the vegetable-farms around Montmartre and Rambouillet, should they attack.

A glorious time to be alive.

Everything will be all right.

Desperately, Sally hoped so. Whatever was happening in Paris, it was going to be her home henceforth.

When Mr. Jefferson had said last November that he had asked to return to the United States for a short visit, to take Patsy and Polly home, Jimmy had announced that he would not return with them. As slavery did not exist in France, he declared, he was a free man, free to go or to stay. And he chose to stay.

Jefferson had answered, with cool reasonableness, that as Jimmy was a free man he must accept a free man’s responsibilities, among them not robbing the man who had brought him to France and was paying for him to be taught the skills of French cookery by which he intended to make his living. Jimmy owed it to his former master—Tom’s voice had gritted over the word—to return to Virginia for as long as it would take him to train a replacement there. Then he would be free to go wherever he wished.

Sally had seen that for all the calm rationality of his answer, Tom was furious.

He’s a white Virginia gentleman. Sally quickened her step between the chestnut trees, the half-seen pale blocks of great houses set back from the road in their parklike grounds. Whatever he might write, or think, or say about the Rights of Man and the injustice of slavery, what he feels is what he feels.

It was this dichotomy, this yawning gulf between his ideals and the demands of his flesh, that had made him turn away from her, all those months.

Wanting her in spite of every inner vow he had made to himself, the promise not to be the kind of master who would force a slave-girl.

Even at fifteen, turning from girl to woman, she had seen that in his eyes.

Within a week of her arrival with Sally in Paris, Polly had gone into a convent-school. She and Patsy would come home on Sundays, to spend the afternoon and the night in their father’s house and return to the Abbaye Royale de Panthemont in the morning, and on those nights Sally would sleep in a cubicle just off the girls’ bedroom. Mr. Jefferson was strict with Sally, forbidding her to go about the streets by herself. In Williamsburg, and in Richmond, she knew instinctively the kinds of places it was safe for a young girl to go, and in Williamsburg she knew, too, that any black woman, and most black men, would be her friend in a difficult situation.

Mr. Jefferson had assigned M’sieu Petit the task of teaching Sally the finer skills of service, how to clean and mend and care for fine clothing, how to pack it loosely in paper and straw to be stored in trunks in the attic til it was wanted. How to starch and iron ruffles, and how to dress hair. Miss Patty herself had taught Sally the art of fancy sewing; the little Frenchman clicked his tongue approvingly, and put her to study with Mme. Dupré, the household seamstress and laundrywoman, the only female in the masculine establishment.

But these things didn’t take up all Sally’s days. When Polly went off to the convent, Sally asked, a little timidly, if she might read in the library while Mr. Jefferson was out. “Mr. Adams would let me, sir. You can write and ask him, if I ever tore or damaged anything, or didn’t put it back.”

To her surprise Mr. Jefferson replied, “Of course you may, Sally. Even when you were quite a little girl I remember you were always careful with books.”

She hadn’t thought he’d noticed.

It was his library that brought them together—his library, and Sally’s unquenchable curiosity about everything and anything. She picked up kitchen-French quickly, and the slurry argot of the cab-men, street-singers, and vendors of ratbane and brooms. But Mr. Jefferson hired a French tutor for both her and Jimmy. And often in the evenings, if he wasn’t invited out to dine, Mr. Jefferson would take an hour to help her read the French of good books. More than once, having left her in the library deep in Mr. Pope’s Iliad or some article in Diderot’s Encyclopédie, he would return late to find her still there, reading by candlelight while the rest of the house slept.

Much of the time he’d be with Mr. Short, his secretary from Virginia who also had a room in the attic of the Hôtel Langeac, or Mr. Humphreys, another semipermanent Virginian guest. But Mr. Humphreys had his own friends among the Americans in Paris, and Mr. Short was having an affair with a society lady. On many nights Mr. Jefferson would return, a little bemused, alone. Then if Sally was still in the library he’d bring a chair over next to hers, and they’d talk about the marvels described in the Encyclopédie, or he’d tell her the gossip that everyone traded in the Paris salons. Sometimes he’d play his violin for her, though his broken wrist was slow to heal, and the music that gave him such joy was also now a source of pain. Sally guessed that without his daughters during the week he was lonely. For a man as gregarious as he was, there was a part of him that needed his family; that needed faces familiar to him from home.

And in a sense, she and Jimmy were family. She had known Mr. Jefferson since the age of two, and thought no more of being alone with him at midnight, while all the household slept, than she would have thought of staying up late talking to one of her old uncles on the cabin step of the quarters along Mulberry Row.

Jimmy, who’d started out teasing her about getting wrinkles from too much reading, sometimes looked at her with that calculating glance and said, “No, you stay up however late you want, Sal. You learn lots of things, reading.”

She hadn’t known what he was getting at, at first. In that first year in Paris, so enchanted had she been with that whole glittering city that she’d barely been aware of the changes in her body.

She was used to people telling her she was pretty, and used to men—both black and white—trying to steal kisses. From the age of twelve Sally had been adept at defending herself with nails and knees from would-be swains in the quarters. And like any female slave from that age up, she had learned the risky maneuvers involved in saying No to white men without being punished for insolence.

She was aware that she was getting taller. She knew her hips had widened, and her breasts filled out, because just before her first Christmas in France, soon after her fifteenth birthday, she’d overheard Mr. Short remark to Jefferson, “By gad, Jefferson, that girl of yours is growing into a beauty.” Not long after that Jimmy had taken her aside and said, “Now, you don’t let those good-for-nothing footmen down in the kitchen go sweet-talkin’ you into lettin’ ’em kiss you, girl,” and Sally had only stared at him in disbelief.

“I ain’t that fond of garlic,” she’d retorted, and Jimmy laughed.

But he’d sobered quickly, and said, “You be gettin’ more’n a tongue full of garlic, if you let ’em catch you alone. You remember, girl, you in France now. You and me, we’re free here. There’s no law here that says a black girl can’t scratch a white man’s face if he puts his hand up her skirt.”

“And how many times you had your face scratched, brother?”

“Enough to know.”

Jefferson apparently shared Jimmy’s concerns. The following March—1788—when he went to Amsterdam to meet Mr. Adams and sign a treaty with the Dutch, he arranged for Sally to board with the seamstress Mme. Dupré and her husband rather than stay in the Hôtel Langeac with the other servants. Sally had romped with Mme. Dupré’s grandchildren and helped Madame and her daughter in the kitchen. At the market one morning there she had encountered Sophie Sparling, who had helped nurse poor Miss Patty in her final months. Twenty-two now, Sophie was a paid companion to a Mrs. Luckton, an English widow who lived in the nearby rue des Lesdiguères.

Things were indeed different in Paris. Here, one wasn’t immersed in a world of slaves and slaveholders. She had seen in the way Mr. Jefferson spoke to her, that with her fair complexion and long, silky hair, he sometimes almost forgot that her grandmother had been African. Maybe because she knew herself to be legally free, she found herself shedding the barriers of caution that existed between slaves and masters. Here, he could no longer give her away, or send her where she didn’t wish to go.

Somehow, in Paris, it didn’t matter that Sophie Sparling was the white granddaughter of a tobacco-planter, and Sally Hemings the not-quite-white granddaughter of an African woman who’d been enslaved and raped. It was good to speak English to another woman who remembered Virginia’s green hills. A little to Sally’s surprise, Sophie seemed to think so, too.

Looking back now on those weeks at Mme. Dupré’s, Sally felt a desperate longing for the simplicity she’d known then.

That’s how I want to live, she thought, as she hurried down the thinning gray gloom of the Champs-Elysées. In a little house like that, just a couple of rooms that’ll be my own.

And she shivered, though the dawning day was already scorching hot.

Around her, the city seemed eerily still. The big houses set along the fashionable avenue were dark, shutters closed tight. But as she approached the open expanse of the Place Louis XV, she could see men clustered in the wine-shops under the colonnade, muttering and waving their arms.

Saturday—the day before yesterday—men and women had poured into the huge square to protest the King’s dismissal of his Finance Minister M’sieu Necker, who—everyone in the kitchen said—was the only man capable of ending the famine and financial mess that had held the country in the grip of death for a year. Cheap pamphlets—commissioned by Necker’s salonnière wife—praised his skills, and vomited scatalogical invective on the men the King had selected to replace him.

The demonstrators had been met by a regiment of hired German soldiers, under the command of a cousin of the Queen’s.

Dried blood still smeared the cobblestones, dark under a blanket of dust and drawing whirling clouds of flies.

Sally lowered her head and cut through a corner of the square, with barely a glance at the equestrian statue of a former King, now smeared with dung and garbage. Another day she would have walked through the Tuileries gardens rather than along the quais at the riverside, for the river stank like a sewer. But she felt uneasy about going into those aisles of hedges and trees. Men roved the streets and alleyways of Paris these days, men out of work and hungry—angry, too. With the shortages of bread, the tangled national finances that were driving more and more men out of employment, there were fewer who could pay for servants, barbers, new clothes, new shoes, food.

As she hurried along the dark quais, Sally could glimpse them: long dirty hair, baggy trousers, bare legs, the wooden shoes of peasants. Some moved about the garden, others slept beneath its trees.

Everything will be all right.

She felt sick with fright.

Those days at Mme. Dupré’s, those days of walking about the city with Sophie, seemed to her now like the last time that her life had been normal: that she had been herself, her real self. When Sophie could get away from her employer, which was seldom—Mrs. Luckton was worse than any plantation mistress—they would rove together through the gardens of the Luxembourg and the Tuileries, or wander among the exceedingly expensive shops of the Palais Royale. They’d pretended to shop for silks of the most newly fashionable hues—“flea’s thigh” and “goose-turd green”—and admired the jeweled rings and watches—or whole coffee-sets or sewing-kits or travelers’ writing desks of enamel and gold—at Le Petit Dunkerque.

At the cafés beneath Palais Royale’s arcades, street-corner orators had denounced the King, the Austrian Queen, and the horrifying thing called The Deficit which France owed to everyone. In the evenings at Mme. Dupré’s, Sally would read, sometimes the books she’d buy at the booksellers along the narrow streets, sometimes the newspapers and pamphlets that Mme. Dupré always had about the house—political, filthily scurrilous, and occasionally fascinating. On other evenings, she’d read and reread the letters Mr. Jefferson would send her, from Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Strasbourg.

Brief notes, but full of canal-locks, churches, what was being said, and worn. He knew she was eager to hear such things, of a world even wider than the one she now knew.

On the evening of the twenty-third of April he returned, and Sally walked back with Mme. Dupré on the morning of the twenty-fourth. She ran up to her attic room with her little satchel of clothes, her long hair loose upon her shoulders as it was the fashion to wear it in Paris, and had just emerged from the back stairs on her way down to the kitchen to see Jimmy, when she came face-to-face with Mr. Jefferson in the hall.

He was in his shirtsleeves, stepping from the door of his own room, and stopped as she cannoned into him. She backed away laughing, and dropped him a curtsey. He said, “Sally,” as if for just a moment he was making sure that it was Sally, and not someone else who looked like her. A little hesitantly, he added, “It’s good to see you again. I missed you.”

“And I you, sir.” Though he might still own her mother and her brothers and sisters as if they were so many stallions and mares, she understood, from her friendship with Sophie, what kind of life the daughters of a planter would have to look forward to, if their father were to simply free his slaves.

And because he looked weary from his journey, she added impulsively, “Thank you for writing to me, sir. It was good to get your letters.”

“There were a thousand things more on that journey that I wish you could have seen.” He seemed about to say something else, but then fell silent, and in silence seemed to study her face. In silence she returned his look, aware, for the first time since her childhood, of the straightness of his carriage, and the fine long-boned hands permanently stained about the fingers with ink.

He was the first to turn away. Sally walked, rather than scampered, down the back stairs to the kitchen, and through that day and the night she found her mind returning to small details of his voice and the sharp points of his shoulder-bones under the white linen of his shirt.

This awareness of Mr. Jefferson as a man, this new fascination that drew her eyes and her thoughts back to him, strengthened through the summer of ’88. Sometimes she could be friends with him as she’d used to be, when on an occasional quiet evening in the library they’d talk about the canals in the Rhineland or the emissary of the pirate-monarch of Tripoli whom Jefferson had met in London. Then unexpectedly, it seemed, she would be fiercely conscious of him and of herself, and the blood would rush to her face, smothering her in confusion and heat. There were times when she felt that he must be aware of this, because he took to avoiding her. When he would return late, without Mr. Short, those hot summer nights, to find her reading in the library, he would not get the chessboard or settle down to talk, but would say only, “I think it’s time you went to bed.”

It grieved her, that feelings she could not help were causing him to send her away.

That summer, as the bankrupt French Treasury issued promissory notes that no one would accept and freak hailstorms lashed the countryside destroying most of the wheat-crop, another Virginian visited Paris. Thomas Mann Randolph, twenty-two, swarthy, and tall, was newly come from four years at the University of Edinburgh and Mr. Jefferson’s cousin. The servants were accustomed to friends of the American Minister coming to stay for days or weeks at a time—the artist John Trumbull had remained for months. Sally’s first encounter with young Mr. Randolph consisted of being seized from behind as she emerged from the back stairs into the upstairs hall, shoved against the wall, and ruthlessly kissed.

She slithered free and fled, hearing behind her Mr. Short call out jovially, where had Randolph taken himself off to? She reached the kitchen trembling, and helped herself to some of the coffee there to take the taste of the man’s liquor-sodden tongue out of her mouth. “What is it, little cabbage?” inquired Mme. Dupré, and Sally only shook her head. On any number of occasions the seamstress had expressed her contempt for masters who took advantage of their female staff, white or black. Sally knew she’d take the matter to the master of the house.

She might be a free woman now, but she’d learned in childhood that a black girl’s word wouldn’t be taken against a white man’s in the matter of anything from stolen kisses on up to forcible rape. Mr. Jefferson was a Virginian, and Tom Randolph was his cousin, the son of one of his oldest friends. There were things that Virginians, white and black, knew about other Virginians: what they would and would not do, what they would and would not and almost could not speak of.

When all was said and done, it was only a kiss.

So Sally said nothing.

She was glad of her silence, seeing how Mr. Jefferson welcomed his handsome cousin, and introduced him to the salons and societies that made up his own circle of friends. When not in liquor, Tom Randolph was a quiet young man, charming and intelligent, and shared Mr. Jefferson’s love of books and agriculture. When Patsy and Polly came home from the convent that Sunday, Randolph bowed over Patsy’s hand and joked with her about their childhood back in Virginia, and Jefferson beamed with fatherly joy.

At sixteen, Patsy was taller than most Frenchmen—nearly six feet—and as nearly pretty as she would ever get. Her delicate complexion had been subdued to freckle-less alabaster by the convent’s dimness, her square face surrounded by fine ringlets of the red-gold color Sally remembered Mr. Jefferson’s being. Randolph spoke to her about horses and dogs, and asked about her music. Back in the kitchen, Sally commented to Jimmy that of course Randolph was attentive: Mr. Jefferson had some eight thousand acres of Virginia land, upwards of a hundred and fifty slaves, and no son. Patsy and Polly were his only heirs.

Tom Randolph stayed for weeks, and during that time, when Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Short were away in the daytime, Sally stuck close to the kitchen. From the footmen she knew Randolph spent a number of his days sampling the prostitutes at the Palais Royale; she didn’t need the other servants to tell her of the man’s foul temper and occasional drunkenness. One Thursday evening in August, when Mr. Jefferson was away dining with one of his philosophical societies and, she thought, Randolph was absent also, Randolph waited in the darkness of Polly’s bedroom, for Sally to pass its door. When she bit him he struck her, hard, the way a man would strike a man; tearing out of his pawing grip, she slashed at him with the candle-scissors from the bedside table, and felt the sharp upper blade rip flesh.

“Nigger bitch!” he gasped, and stumbled away from her, a black bulk huge against the shadows. “You lead me on, you give me that bitch-eyes come-hither—”

Sally said nothing, kneeling in the tangled sheets with her dress torn open to the waist, panting, praying he wouldn’t come at her again for she knew his strength was too much for a second struggle. But he only spat at her and lurched out the door. Only then did she begin to shake, her weapon almost dropping from her hand. She clutched at the bedpost, then sank against it: I mustn’t faint, she thought, and I mustn’t cry…

Had he gone upstairs to his own room? Is he waiting by the stairs? Waiting to follow me up to the attic when I leave this room? Is there no place now within this house that I’ll be safe? Her breath came in a ragged sob. You lead me on, he’d said—something every white man said about every slave-woman he bedded.

The creak of the doorsill and the flare of candlelight alerted her too late and she swung around, scrambled up, fumbling at the scissors.

Mr. Jefferson stood in the doorway.

It was the only time she’d seen him truly angry—

“Who did this?” He set the candle down and caught her shoulders in his strong hands, then the next second—drew her torn dress over her breasts. “Are you hurt? Sally?”

“No, sir. I—I didn’t see.” No Virginian, she well knew, ever believed true ill of a family member. That was just something about Virginians. You lead me on….

Would any Virginia gentleman truly believe there was any harm in “stealing a kiss” from a black servant-girl?

“Are you sure? Because I promise you, whoever it was will be dismissed from my service.”

Not the smallest thought that it was the only other Virginia gentleman in the house.

“No, sir,” she whispered. “I truly didn’t see.” Her eyes held his unflinching. It was even the truth. She’d known her attacker by his voice, and by the stink of the liquor on his breath.

He moved his hand as if he would touch the bruise on her face. She heard him draw in his breath. Then his eyes turned aside. “I am most sorry—and most angry—that this has happened, Sally. And I will speak to Mr. Petit, to let it be known among the servants that I will not tolerate members of my household being abused. You are here under my protection. I promise you, this will not happen again.” He hesitated, his eyes still on her in the candlelight, in her torn dress with her hair streaming down her shoulders. “Shall I send for Mme. Dupré? She’s gone home, but I will send a note….”

Sally shook her head. She wanted only that the incident be over. Only that she could go to him like the child she’d once been, cling to him for comfort. “No, sir. Thank you, sir.”

He left the room with swift abruptness. She heard his steps retreat down the hall, the opening and closing of his door. Later that night, lying awake, she heard, hesitant and stiff, the music of the violin.

I mustn’t think about that.

Sally stopped in her tracks where the long soot-black wall of the old Louvre Palace stood above the stone embankment and the river. In the tangle of filthy streets on the other side of the Louvre, she could hear voices muttering, a man’s occasional angry shout. Already? A sick qualm turned her cold—fright? she wondered. The stink of the river in the hot dawn? Or some other cause?

Men strode along the embankment, not the clerks and hairdressers you’d usually see this time of the morning going to work—certainly not the bakers, coming in from Gonesse, for there hadn’t been bread sold in the city for weeks.

Dirty men, ragged and angry, armed as the mob had been armed yesterday, with clubs and butcher-knives. Somewhere a church bell began to ring, a wild alarm-note, waking the city to another day of fear.

If I go back to the Hôtel now, someone will have noticed I’m gone. When he comes home, he’ll ask me where I was. And why I fled.

She knew instinctively he’d find some way not to let her leave. Beneath that gentle exterior he had a steely will and an iron determination to get what he wanted—to hold what he had. She’d seen that with Jimmy.

It was even worse because she couldn’t imagine living without him, any more than the ocean could imagine not yearning toward the Moon. The thought of never hearing his voice again, never feeling on her flesh the touch of his hands, never tasting his mouth, turned her sick with grief.

She pushed the thoughts from her mind, and quickened her pace.

For the week between Randolph’s assault and the young man’s departure, Jefferson barely spoke to her. But she felt his eyes on her, whenever they were in a room together. A dozen times she felt him on the verge of speaking, of putting his hand on her shoulder. He’d be out late, most nights, but still, hours after she heard him return—heard Mr. Short go to bed, footsteps palpable through the floor of her little attic in the still of the night—she’d hear him playing. More than once she heard him open his door, but though she listened for his step on the attic’s narrow stair she heard nothing. It was as if he were simply standing at its foot, looking up into the dark.

And she knew that one night he would come to her.

She saw it as clearly as if it had already happened, as if it were a memory or a dream. Almost it seemed to her she could look through the walls and see him, standing in the dark of the hall, barefoot in his nightshirt, his hair unqueued on his shoulders. On one of those dense summer nights when all the city lay waiting for the cleansing war-drums of thunder, she thought, If I tell him No, he will go away. But then he’ll send me away—back to Virginia. Not to punish her, but so that things would not be, in his own mind, messy and awkward. How could a Virginia gentleman go on living under the same roof with a servant-girl he had tried—and failed—to bed?

Even asking her would change what lay between them, forever.

Much as he strove to transform the world, and alter how men lived their lives, in his own life he feared and hated change.

But their friendship had already changed, beyond the point where it could be pressed back into its earlier form.

He wanted her, when all his life he had despised slave-owners like his father-in-law, men who took concubines from among their bondswomen.

I am a free woman here. Back at Monticello or Eppington, Sally would already be wed, or as wed as slaves ever got. She’d be living with a man and undoubtedly carrying his child. In the markets here she’d seen girls her own age, round-bellied under the short corsets of pregnancy, and one of Mme. Dupré’s sons-in-law was every bit of Mr. Jefferson’s forty-six years.

And so she waited in the darkness. Not knowing what to expect, not knowing what she would say, if and when he were to come into her room, and stretch out on the narrow bed at her side.

And one night, when summer rain poured down the steep slate roofs and lightning flashed over the river, she heard the creak of his door opening below her, and the stealthy pad of naked feet on the attic stair.

The previous winter—the coldest within living memory, when the river froze solid so that food supplies couldn’t come into the city and hundreds of the poor died nightly in the snow-choked streets—Sophie Sparling had parted company from her employer, owing to the Luckton equivalent of Mr. Randolph, in this case Mrs. Luckton’s son. She shared a garret with three other women in rue de Vieille Monnaie, close to the Cemetery of the Holy Innocents. When Sally reached the place, the door of the old town house stood open and breathed out a stink like the halitus of Hell. Even at this hour men clustered in the wine-shop in the building’s ground floor; someone inside was shouting, “It will be today, brothers! They’ll march in and put the lot of us to the sword—yes, and our wives and our children, too!—because we’ve refused to accept one more day of being fucked in the arse by the King’s ministers and the Bitch-Queen’s hell-begotten friends! On the lamp-post with them, I say! Because we have cried out against them they will murder us in our beds!”

Sally took a deep breath and ducked inside. The stair was still black with night, slippery with feces and garbage.

Sophie must still be here. She can’t have gone.

She had no idea where she would go or what she would do if Sophie wasn’t there.

The garret was a long bare room with half a dozen smaller leading off it. Three families lived there, the women pounding at a half-loaf of mold-gray bread with hammers, to break off pieces for the gaggle of children. One of Sophie’s roommates had just come up with a jug of what was supposed to be coffee. “…puttin’ up barricades, to slow ’em down,” she was saying to the others, in her slurry Parisian French. “There’s one already by the Filles de la Visitation and another in the rue du Temple. They’re sayin’ we’re gonna march on the Invalides. There’s weapons there—”

“Sally!”

Sophie Sparling stood in the doorway, holding aside the curtain that served for a door. She didn’t ask what Sally was doing here, at this hour of the morning. Only held out her hand, drew her into her own tiny room, where two girls and a whiskery man slept on the sagging bed. Light leaked in from a single window, broken and stuffed with rags. The angry ringing of the alarm-bells, the tocsins, penetrated even here.

Sally said, “I think I’m with child.”

Sally took a deep breath. “I haven’t had my monthly course since May; I’m going to start showing soon. I don’t want him to know.”

Sophie had worked with her surgeon father, and had been a midwife’s assistant, while she and her mother were taking refuge with Cornwallis’s troops, after her father’s death. There wasn’t much about the relations between men and women that wasn’t written in those cold gray eyes. “What do you want to do?” she asked.

“You told me, last time we talked, about your friend Mme. de Blancheville, that’s willing to help girls who’re willing to work. Mr. Jefferson’s asked the Congress for leave to take Patsy and Polly home. Then he’ll come back, he says. But that doesn’t mean he’d bring me back, for all what he says. And he wouldn’t bring a baby, not on a ship.” Her jaw tightened, at the almost physical agony of the choice she had made. “In Virginia my baby’d be a slave.”

“As would you.” Sophie pointed it out bluntly.

Sally breathed a tiny snort of rueful laughter. “You’re gonna think me crazy, Sophie—I know you do already. But to tell you God’s truth, I really don’t care whether I’m slave or I’m free, as long as I can be with him.”

“You’ll care when he gets tired of you.”

“If you mean he’d sell me off, he won’t. I know him and he won’t.”

“You don’t know him.” An abyss of bitterness echoed in Sophie’s voice. “Right now he may even believe he loves you. Has he said so? I understand they generally do. At least if they’re talking to white women.”

“I don’t know all of him, no,” Sally replied quietly. “I don’t think anybody does. And that doesn’t matter now because I’m not going back. Not to Virginia, not to his house today or ever. I don’t know the difference between thinking you love someone and really loving them, and no, he hasn’t said it. I just know he won’t let me stay here.”

Sophie’s expression was a silent reminder of Sally’s legal freedom in the Kingdom of France.

Sally shook her head. “He doesn’t let go, Sophie. Not of what he sees as his. He was furious when Jimmy said he’d leave him. When poor Polly didn’t want to come here, after her little sister died, he had her kidnapped, just about; tricked onto the ship. In all these years, he’s never really let go of Miss Patty. It tears him up inside,” she added, more quietly. “If it was just me, it would be different. But if it was just me, it wouldn’t be such a problem, because he’d bring me back here next year—”

“If he still cared.”

She whispered, “He’ll still care. But it isn’t just me.”

And she knew herself well enough to know that when she was with him, she couldn’t think clearly. Any more than a moth can think clearly about the amber glory of flame.

“Will you take me to your Mme. de Blancheville? And ask her to take me in?”

The din in the outer attic had grown louder, men’s voices shouting now, and children crying. Then jostle and clatter as everyone left and went down the stairs. The man in the bed sat up with a grunt, ambled out into the outer room to piss in the bucket there—the few windows being too high for the purpose. “Have you eaten?” Sophie asked, and unearthed a tin box from beneath her pallet on the floor, then led Sally out to the now-empty outer attic to share her bread and what was left of the coffee.

This stuff was like eating a rock, the flour so adulterated that even soaked in coffee, it gritted on Sally’s teeth. Jefferson had told Sally that the bread being sold in Paris was nearly inedible, but as American Minister—and a plantation-owner used to buying in bulk—he at least had a store of flour laid by from last summer.

“You know Mme. de Blancheville works servants hard,” cautioned Sophie. “Far worse than Mr. Jefferson. You won’t be allowed to go out of the house, and she’ll require you to become a Catholic.”

“It won’t be forever. Mr. Jefferson thinks he’ll get leave soon. I would have waited til just before they left, so he couldn’t look for me, but I feared I’d start showing before then. He talks about what a wonderful thing it is, that the French are casting off the chains of a thousand years, but he still doesn’t want his daughters here in the middle of it.”

“Mr. Jefferson has always impressed me as a man who doesn’t quite understand why things can’t be the way they should be: why the Revolution that he considers so purifying to the human soul—God knows why, he can’t have encountered some of the members of the patriot militia I did—doesn’t actually purify the individual men who participate. Maybe he considers that it purified his soul and that’s all he’s aware of.”

“He thinks men can be better than they are.”

“Maybe they can.” Sophie rose and collected a rather battered straw hat. “But politics won’t make them so. We’d better go. If there is another riot and the King’s troops do march in to break it up, I’d rather be close enough to Mme. de Blancheville’s to take refuge there.”

As they descended the stair, Sally said, “After he’s gone I’ll write to him. I’ll tell him where I am, and why I left as I did. Then when he returns next year, he can do as he likes. He’ll be angry,” she added softly. “But I think he’ll understand.”

Sophie sniffed.

“As soon as the baby’s born I’ll start looking for something to do for my living. I can cut and pattern dresses as well as sew. After he’s gone I’ll see if Mme. Dupré—our seamstress—will take me in. I’d go to her now but I think she’d tell him, or tell someone in the house, and it would get back to him. She’s not good at keeping her mouth shut. And she always hated it, that a man would be able to have women and girls as slaves.”

“It’s hard to find grounds upon which to dispute her sentiments,” Sophie remarked drily, as they reached the street. The mob around the wine-shop was larger now, and angrier, stirring and churning like swarming bees. The same orator or another was still shouting at the crowd, and men were waving pamphlets, fresh-printed and smudgy with cheap ink. Sally glimpsed the headings, ARISE! and FRIEND OF THE PEOPLE. She shivered. This, and the mob who had surged past the Hôtel yesterday to burn the customs barrier, were a far cry from Tom’s sharp-featured face in candlelight as he spoke of the National Assembly meeting in Versailles, of the soldiers who were deserting the King’s regiments in droves to join with the men who demanded an end to royal privilege and royal inefficiency.

She’d seen pamphlets of the same sort in the kitchen at the Hôtel Langeac, and suspected it was Mme. Dupré who’d brought them in.

She was almost certain it was Mme. Dupré who’d told Patsy.

All the servants knew, as servants always knew. During those first few weeks, Jefferson was discreet—with Mr. Short and various other guests in his household he could hardly be otherwise. But he quietly arranged times to meet her away from the house, to visit the gardens of the royal châteaus of Marly and St.-Cloud or to walk in the far pathways of the Bois de Boulogne, where they were unlikely to meet anyone Tom knew. Once or twice he took her, in the evenings, to the Palais Royale, masked and with her hair powdered gray, and had an artist there paint a miniature of her on ivory, to carry in a locket, out of sight of all.

They would return separately to the house, to meet again in his bedroom, behind the bolted door.

In France Sally was, to all intents and purposes, a white woman, only a little more dusky of skin than the Spaniards and Italians who carried in their veins the blood of the Levant. It was only the Virginians in the household—Mr. Short, and Patsy, and Polly—who saw her as African, and then only because they’d been brought up from childhood to look for the subtle signs.

How Tom himself saw her, Sally wasn’t sure. She had heard him say to Mr. Short how abhorrent he found the mingling of the white and the African races, but they were speaking of those slave-owners who thought themselves entitled to cover any bondswoman who took their fancy. She had heard him say to several of his French guests that blacks were “inferior in the faculties of reason” to whites, but this hadn’t stopped him from teaching any number of children at Monticello to read. He certainly talked to her, and always had, as if he expected her to follow his reasoning, and gave every sign of enjoying their conversations as much as he enjoyed lying in her arms.

But then, Sally suspected that if Tom were being led to the stake, he’d get wrapped up in conversation with the executioners.

Did he see her differently, she wondered, because she was nearly white? Because he’d known her from childhood? Because she and her family were halfway between the quarters and the Big House, neither white nor field-hand black?

Because she was Miss Patty’s sister? Because she was “family”?

However Tom saw her—whatever they were to one another, in the enclosed and secret world of his bedroom—Sally knew that to his older daughter, she was and would always be not only a slave, but a betrayer.

She’d known the instant someone told Patsy. The silences, the spate of complaints about insolence, laziness, and imagined thefts, were unmistakable.

Jefferson would have guessed, too. But Patsy, who loved her father with a ferocious passion, would neither ask nor accuse. And it was unthinkable, for Tom to discuss with Sally the reasons for his daughter’s sudden enmity. If Sally was almost white when she was alone with Tom, the moment they stepped out into the rest of the house—the moment he saw her through Patsy’s eyes—she was black again, slipping from one set of rules to another, the way she herself was long used to slipping from the formal, refined speech of white folks to the language of the quarters as soon as she was with her family.

He admonished Sally gently—in Patsy’s presence—to be a little more humble, a little more mindful of her duties, and like a good Virginian, Sally had murmured, “Yes, sir,” and apologized to Patsy. In her father’s presence there wasn’t much Patsy could say, since the apology was for insolence and laziness, rather than the true crime of lying with Patsy’s father—or being to him what Patsy herself could never be. When Patsy and Polly had returned to the convent, and Tom next spoke to Sally alone, he had only asked, with nebulous gentleness, that she be “patient and good.”

Sally had not pressed the matter. She had known, long before the day he first told her she’d be going to Eppington with Polly, that he never let anyone talk to him about things he didn’t want to talk about.

Then a week later Patsy announced that she was going to remain at the Convent of Panthemont, and take her vows as a nun.

Jefferson was livid. Like a good philosopher he waited two days to cool down, then went to the convent and withdrew both girls, hiring a tutor for young Polly—or Maria, as she was now called, the fashionable variant of Mary—and making Patsy, on the day after her seventeenth birthday, the hostess of his household.

And with his daughters under his roof, that was the end of even such small freedom as Sally and Tom once had enjoyed.

Had that been what Patsy intended all along?

The day had turned savagely hot. The tall soot-black houses and narrow streets of this most ancient portion of the city trapped the heat like a bath of tepid glue. And over all, the vengeful clanging of the church bells.

Where the rue de la Verrerie crossed the rue St.-Martin Sophie halted, hissed, “Christ Jesus!” through her teeth. Two carts had been dragged shaft-to-shaft across the rue St.-Martin. The whole of the neighborhood, it seemed, swarmed over them like ants, each man or woman adding something to the reinforcement of the wall. Timbers from houses wrecked or burned, doors, window-gratings, shutters, baskets filled with earth. Chunks of cobblestones dug up from the streets; hampers, roof-tiles, rolled-up mattresses, the ruins of a shed. Someone had broken into a wine-shop—the sign was worked into the barricade—and people passed the bottles among them as they hoisted stones and wood into place.

About thirty feet down the rue de la Verrerie another barricade was being built. A knot of the new civic militia stood by that one watching the work, muskets in their hands. Sophie remarked, “I wonder if they have the slightest idea how to load those things, let alone aim them. Let’s backtrack to the rue de Diamant. They’ll be barricading the bridges if we try to go by the quais.”

“Do you think the King’s troops really will march on the city today?”

Sophie cocked her head to listen, as if anything might be heard over the wrangle of the bells, the shouting around the barricade. “I think they’d better,” she remarked after a moment, “if they don’t want the whole city torn apart.”

When the bell-ringers paused to spit on their hands, or the din diminished around those monstrous walls of cobblestone and garbage, Sally thought she could hear, far off, the crack of gunshots.

“That’ll be the Invalides,” Sophie told her. “I think that’s where my neighbors said they were going to get guns. It’s clear on the other side of the river. Let’s go this way.”

But there was another barricade where they came out of the tangle of medieval streets near the rue St.-Lazare. In the end they walked nearly to the priory of St.-Martin des Champs before they found a place that wasn’t crowded with armed and angry rioters. By that time the distant shouting was audible over the church bells. “Do you think the King’s troops have attacked?” whispered Sally.

“We’d have heard gunfire.”

Even in streets where no looting was going on, everyone was out, no one was working. In other neighborhoods every window was shuttered, every door locked, like streets of the dead. It was like being outside in a storm, not knowing where lightning would hit. “Why doesn’t the King do something?” Sally asked, wondering how she was going to live in this city, how she was going to get through her time, bear her child, with all this going on and maybe worse. It couldn’t last, she knew—if nobody was making any money they’d all be starving, they’d have to go back to work….

“The King doesn’t do anything because he’s waiting for the good people of France to come to their senses.” The girls flattened back in the doorway of a church as a crowd of armed men jostled past. At least half of them wore the white coats of the King’s troops, unbuttoned over dirty shirts and stained with wine and mud. “And because he doesn’t trust his army to obey their officers. Damnation!” she added, stepping out of their shelter and moving on.

There were barricades in the rue du Temple, huge ones; it looked like the frenzied citizens were tearing down a house to build them.

Thirsty in the scorching heat and feeling slightly sick, Sally followed her friend as they tried to work their way around the mobs. The sun hammered down into the streets where for four days now neither garbage nor horse-dung had been collected. The air seemed to be a flashing river of black and silver with whirling flies. Sally stopped, gasping, in the doorway of an apartment-block and vomited. Sophie gripped her arms to support her.

Head spinning, she leaned against the coarse stucco, wondering if she’d faint. Hoping, dizzy and sickened, that M’sieu Petit and Jimmy had barred the doors of the Hôtel Langeac tight, that everyone was safe inside…

“Listen!”

Sally raised her head, dark curls straggling from under her cap, sticking to her face with sweat. Gunfire. And the surging shouts of men.

“Oh, thank God. The army—”

“No. If it was regular troops they’d be firing in volleys.”

Sally swallowed, the taste in her mouth indescribable. “Is that near the Place Royale?”

“Right behind it,” said Sophie grimly.

People were running, when they stepped into the street again, men and women—children, too, fierce little urchins with eyes like stray cats’—clutching knives and shouting. Sally staggered, giddy. A nightmare of distant gunfire and shouting, of church bells hammering. Someone running by screeched something about the men of the faubourgs coming in, the artisans and laborers who lived around the city outside the customs-barrier. Sally caught the words “powder in the Bastille,” the old royal fortress that was still used as prison and arsenal. Had someone got word to Tom? Would he try to ride back from Versailles to be with his family? Sally knew he’d try, prayed someone would stop him before he got caught in crossfire, when the troops finally marched in. The stink of smoke snagged her throat. Houses must be burning somewhere.

Keep him safe. Dear God, keep them all safe, even Patsy….

They reached the Place Royale to find it silent, as if stricken with plague. The shops along the colonnade had been looted. Some of the brown stone town houses were locked and shuttered, barred. Others stood open, scattered trails of silverware, gowns, curtains, and broken furniture marking like blood-tracks from wounds where the rioters had gone. Exhausted, sick with terror—for Sophie was right, the Bastille lay only a street or two away and the shouting and gunshots seemed right at their elbows—Sally quickened her pace to a run. “What number?” she panted over her shoulder. “Dear God, let her open the door to us….”

Sophie said, “Number fourteen.” She walked more slowly. Sally paused in her flight, looked behind her impatiently, and saw the look on the older woman’s narrow, pale face. Turned and looked ahead of her, at the closest broken doorway with its dribble of smashed china and spilled flour and apples. Looked up at the number, carved in its little stone shield above the door.

No, she thought, as if God had somehow made a mistake and if she pointed it out to Him, He’d rectify it. No.

Though it was bludgeoningly obvious what had happened, Sally had to go to the broken gateway, climb the graceful stair to the rooms above.

Blood had been shed in the drawing-room. It was splashed on the pale green wall and on the carpet. The cabinets were broken open and everything of value taken. Even the candles had been stripped from their holders. In the terrible stillness, the noise of shouting around the Bastille was hideously loud.

She looked back as Sophie came into the room behind her. “Would you know where they’d have gone?”

Sophie shook her head. Trembling, Sally sank into a brocaded chair. “Let’s check the kitchen,” said Sophie reasonably, “and get something to eat. There’s a fountain in the square where we can get water. Do you want to come back to my room, or try to get home?”

“Your place,” Sally breathed. The thought of standing up again, of going with Sophie down to the kitchen and out to the fountain, was hideous, but even more hideous was the thought of being in that blood-splashed room alone.

There was of course not a thing to eat in the kitchen. By the state of the garbage it looked like the house had been looted yesterday, when the mobs burned the customs-barricades.

How can this be happening?

The old man who’d sold her and Tom lemonade in the Bois—was he shooting at the garrison in the Bastille, trying to get whatever gunpowder was there? Mme. Dupré’s shabby son-in-law and her chubby, joking daughter—were they in the rue St.-Martin adding cobblestones to the barricade?

How was she going to live in this?

“We’d best get back.” Sophie finished her inspection of the pantry stores, returned to where Sally sat at the kitchen table. The shouting nearby seemed frenzied now. It surged like the sea in a storm. There was no more shooting, but the wild baying of the mob had a deeper note to it, a savage shrieking of triumph. “It sounds like everyone’s still at the Bastille. We can probably get down the rue St.-Antoine ahead of them. That way, they’ll be between us and the troops, if troops ever come in.”

“Do you think they will?” Sally got to her feet, shook out her skirts, so tired she felt she would die. She picked up her parcel of clean chemises and stockings, Tom’s letters to her and a few books, and the silver combs he’d bought her for her hair, a parcel she’d carried through the whole of that broiling, nightmare day.

Sophie’s gray eyes were like dirty ice, as if she were seeing a repeat of a bad play that had disgusted her once already. “Ever, you mean?”

Sally hadn’t thought in those terms.

They crossed the Place to its handsome gatehouse, hastened down the short street that connected it with the rue St.-Antoine. They were almost at the corner when a burst of shouting enveloped them. Howls of diabolical glee rolled down the larger street like the blast of cold wind before a storm. The mob surged into view.

Army deserters, laborers, laundresses. Butchers who hadn’t had meat to cut in weeks, bakers who had neither flour nor wood. Students and clerks, gunpowder and dirt making their faces as black as their coats. Housewives with a child on one hip and a pike in the other hand, hair unloosed, screaming like vicious harpies. The reek of smoke and sulfur churned in the summer air.

The men in the front row carried pikes. At first, against the hot glare of the sun, Sally thought that what was impaled on them were loaves of bread.

Then she saw they had faces.

The parcel fell from her hands and she pressed her fingers to her mouth, and it seemed to her that the entire world shifted, like one of Tom’s optical experiments when he moved the lens. No food, no law, no army, no safe place to hide—no going back to what the world had been.

Those men—one of the heads still wore the gold-embroidered hat of a garrison commander—had waked up this morning as she had, in a world where the King ruled France and things would eventually be sorted out. The eyes they’d opened this morning looked at her as the mob passed the end of the street: stared past her into a future incomprehensible, rushing like a world-consuming fireball at them all.

The mob passed, hauling with them carts and wagons filled with sacks—gunpowder or the garrison’s food?—and, riding in the carts, six or seven bewildered and terrified elderly men, all the prisoners who had been kept in the old fortress’s cells. Sally was afraid, when she and Sophie crept out at last, that the cobbles would be splattered with the garrison officers’ blood. But even that had been swallowed up by the black Paris mud.

“Can you come with me as far as the Champs-Elysées?” she whispered to Sophie. “I have to go back. To go home. I want to go home.”

It was twilight before Sally and Sophie reached the double line of chestnut trees, the handsome houses of the Champs-Elysées. There were barricades in the rue St.-Honoré, and crowds still gathered, shouting, around orators in the Place Louis XV. Sally suspected that’s where the mob had taken their trophies from the Bastille: gunpowder, food, and severed heads. Wine, too. As she and Sophie made their way along those quiet fashionable streets, past the shuttered town houses, she could hear the drunken shouting.

He’s got to be all right, she told herself, her anxiety growing as they passed first one house and then another silent and dark. He was to ride out to the National Assembly today at Versailles. He wouldn’t have heard about the rioting until noon or maybe later. They were all over at the Bastille on the other side of the city….

The thought of what she would do—of what they would all do—if Tom had been killed was more than she could bear.

Please, God. Please.

Beside that, the prospect of another several months in a household ruled by that bitterly silent girl who had once been her friend, of six weeks and maybe more sharing a ship’s cabin with her, faded.

Please, God, don’t let me find at Langeac what I found at the Place Royale….

In her heart she saw the familiar courtyard strewn with shattered crockery and dropped silverware, with scarves and gloves and the broken corpses of books. Saw the rooms she knew sacked and emptied. Saw blood splashed on the library walls.

Not that. Please not that.

“Sally!”

The voice stopped her in her tracks—almost stopped the breath in her lungs. In the deepening twilight she couldn’t imagine how he’d even seen her, much less recognized her.

As if she were no more than a trick of shadow, Sophie faded back into the trees and was gone.

Sally was alone when Jefferson came striding across the road to her, breaking into a run. He caught her in his arms, crushed her, as if uncertain whether to embrace her or shake her til her teeth rattled: “Are you all right? Where did you go? Why did you leave? Don’t ever do that—don’t ever go out like that….”

She pulled back from him, looked up into his face. I’m a free woman, she told herself. And I can choose.

It took all her strength to speak. “I’m going to have a baby.” She saw him reel back, eyes widening at the news, all the anger going out of him for the moment. Say it, Sally, say it—“And I didn’t want my baby born a slave.”

His face changed. Blood surged up under the thin fair skin as he understood that she hadn’t meant to come back. His eyes turned bleak with the same pale rage she had seen when her brother had dared to bargain with him. When Patsy had turned from him toward the Church that he hated.

An anger made greater, maybe, because he had no reply that would fit in with the ideals he had proclaimed before all the world.

She went on, “But I can’t stay here in France now. The men—the mob—They killed the soldiers at the Bastille. They carried their heads down the street, and the King’s army didn’t do a thing. There’s no bread in the city, no food—”

“And that’s the only reason you came back?” He caught her face in his hand, forcing her eyes to his. The strength in his hand was enough, she felt, to break her jaw. “Because you were afraid?”

She closed her eyes, her whole body rigid and cold. “I didn’t want you to stop me.”

By the hoarse draw of his breath he was fighting to keep his temper, the temper of a Virginia gentleman, trained since childhood to rule his slaves and his womenfolk. The temper against which he had struggled all his life.

“Do you trust me so little, Sally?” he asked at last, and she opened her eyes to see in his not only icy anger, but grief, and guilt, and shame for his country, whose laws she feared. And still deeper, the fear of being left alone by those he cared for. “You should have told me—”

“When it comes to my child I can’t trust anyone. I don’t know who to trust.”

His eyes turned from hers.

“You could die the day after we put foot in Virginia, Tom. And then I’d belong to Patsy—”

“Patsy doesn’t know.” It was one of the few times her name had been spoken between them, as if his daughter were a wife he was betraying, an adultery of the heart.

Sally said nothing. Only looked up at him with her green eyes.

“Don’t leave me.” His hand tightened around her hair, where it straggled down from beneath her cap. “Don’t ever leave me.” A man speaking, not a philosopher. Perhaps the closest she’d ever seen him, to the man he was inside. Not as good a man as he needed people to think he was, but a real one.

“I’ll make arrangements for the child.” His long hand was now cupping her cheek, his eyes, dark in the gathering darkness, looking down into hers. As if by will alone he could force her heart to return as well as her body. She saw that he wore the rough corduroy coat and boots that he’d wear to go rambling in the woods, looking for butterflies or rare plants. Later she learned that he hadn’t gone into Versailles that day at all, but that the whole household had been imprisoned in the Hôtel Langeac since sunup, hearing the gunfire and the shouting across the river at the Invalides.

“I promise you our son will be a free man. I’ll be coming back here next year, I’ll send for you—and for him—as soon as it’s safe. I swear it, Sally.”

Looking up into his eyes, Sally thought, He probably even believes that.

“But I want you with me. I want you near me.” His soft voice, husky and hesitant at the best of times, stumbled over the admission, as if he weren’t used to speaking the truth about anything he felt. “I’ve lost too many people in my life, too many dead. People I loved, people who were the bricks and stones of my heart. One can only lose so many bricks from a wall before the wall gives way. You’ve always been—”

He stopped himself, as if some part deeper than conscious thought realized he was about to say words to her that no Virginia gentleman could say to a black girl. As if he were in danger of forgetting, in this darkness that smelled of drifting powder-smoke, that she was a black girl, and he a white man. They were both of them prisoners within their skins.

But there was a part of him that couldn’t forget.

“I need to know you’ll be there,” he finished, stumblingly.

Like a footstool? Or a water-bottle to keep his bed warm?

Like the wife he had sworn never to take? When he’d reach for her in the darkness, press his face to her hair, was that because he needed her, Sally Hemings, or just that he needed someone to fill that empty hole in his life?

Would he understand if she asked him that question?

And if he knew, would he speak a true answer?

Since the dark before dawn that morning, she felt she had aged a dozen years. Like the officers of the Bastille guard, she had opened her eyes on a world that now no longer existed.

And where else was there for her to go, but back to Virginia with him? To what acquaintance in England or Italy or Holland could the American Minister send a pregnant girl who had once been his slave, without admitting what no Virginian, much less the much-acclaimed Apostle of Liberty, would ever speak of?

“I’ll be there,” she said. “I promise you. Just free my children—our children—and I’ll be there for you, as long as I live.”

His arms closed around her, tightly, greedily, pressing her against him as he did in the secret enclave of his bedroom, that world-within-a-world which was the only place in which they could be to one another what they actually were. Having said the words, having stepped past the point of no return, Sally felt a kind of dazed relief that she wouldn’t be obliged by Fate and duty to leave him. That he’d remain a part of her life, and she of his.

A voice within her was crying, What have I done?

But she had no answer to that.

He kissed her then, in the dark beneath the chestnut trees, and led her back across the Champs-Elysées, bloodied and filthy with the debris of yesterday’s riots. His hand felt warm and strong against the small of her back.

“Did you indeed see them, when they destroyed the Bastille?” There was a wistfulness in his voice, a vibrant eagerness, as if he wished he had been there, too.

She wished he had. Maybe then he would be less ready to say, It is a glorious time.

Or maybe he would say it still. He was a man, and his first love was and always would be liberty. As genuine as his possessive need for her was the craving to see other men cast off the chains of tyranny, and freedom was worth more to him than his own life.

“I saw them,” she said. “I heard people saying that they’re tearing down its very walls, to show the King that he can no longer make them slaves.”

“And I daresay to remove a potential royal cannon emplacement commanding the gate into the city,” commented Jefferson, with a swift flash of practicality. “It is indeed a glorious time to be alive, Sally—but not one in which I’d wish to see my daughters embroiled. Or my son.”

He kissed her again, and handed her back her parcel which he’d been carrying. Then with a businesslike air he led her to the gate of the Hôtel, and rapped at it sharply, two quick raps, then three more.

The judas slid open. Sally saw candlelight and Adrien Petit’s dark eyes. Then as swiftly it shut, and the wicket beside the carriage-gate opened. “I found her,” said Jefferson, and led her inside. “She went to take some things to Miss Sparling, early, before trouble could start in the streets.”

As he led the way quickly across the black pit of the courtyard, the house door opened. In the dim light Patsy stood silhouetted, tall and rigid with fury, like the angel with the sword guarding the gate of a vanished paradise, as her father and Sally came up the steps.

“Sally says the mob destroyed the Bastille.” Tom’s eyes almost glowed in the candlelight. “The King cannot pretend, now, that things can go back as they were.”

And Sally thought, No. No one can pretend that things can go back as they were.

Washington City

Wednesday, August 24, 1814

11:30 A.M.

“It was an ill year,” said Sophie quietly, “1789.”

Dolley turned the mirror over in her hand. Beyond the windows, the street was now a torrent of carts, wagons, carriages, masked in yellow dust. The silence of the morning had given way to the constant clatter of harness, the yelling of men, and the barking of dogs.

“An ill year all around,” she murmured.

Pol sidled along her perch, flapped her wings for attention and, when Dolley stretched out a hand to stroke her head, ducked into the touch like a cat. What will happen to Pol, wondered Dolley, should worse come to worst? Her mind still flinched from coming out with the words: If the British defeat us. If the British march into Washington.

If the city is sacked, Jemmy taken prisoner…

She studied, with a curious sadness, the ivory miniature on the back of the mirror. It was in 1789 that the armies had started marching again.

“We all thought it such a marvelous thing,” she told Sophie. “The French rising in revolt against their King.”

“You weren’t there.”

“No. But those who were, who saw the bloodshed, some of them saw the wider end: that Liberty should blossom in another land than ours. That year poor Martha saw her husband made President, and her hopes that she would live quietly with him and those she loved dashed. Not so great a tragedy, one would say, whose granddaughters and nieces had someone to look after them properly. Abigail would have reveled in it, save of course, that Mr. Adams was furious that he hadn’t been elected Vice President unanimously, as General Washington was elected President. And so of course Abigail had to be indignant, too.”

“Abigail had worries of her own that year.” Sophie moved to the mantel, and took down the small clock that Mr. Jefferson had given Dolley and Jemmy at their wedding; wrapped it in one of Dolley’s silver-tissue turbans as she spoke. “Troubles which she could not tell John. They were back in Braintree by then—in the finest house in town, which, she wrote me, looked much larger in her memories than it turned out to be once they tried to get all their French and English furniture into it. It was that year that it began to be clear to her that her daughter’s fine husband hadn’t the slightest intention of actually working for a living, being under the impression that as a Hero of the Revolution—” Her tone was as subtle and sharp as a glass splinter. “—the new government must of course provide him with a lucrative position. I think that was also the year her son Charley—one of the pair she left behind in Massachusetts—was thrown out of Harvard for a drunken prank.”

“Poor Charley.” A shiver of foreboding went through Dolley, at the memory of what had become of that charming, gentle, intelligent young man. “And poor Abigail.”

Her own son’s charming, gentle, intelligent face seemed to her, for a moment, to glance from the little mirror’s depths.

Was that what invariably happened to those whose mothers set them down in what they believed was a safe place, to labor at their husbands’ sides in the vineyard of Liberty?

No, she thought quickly. Payne’s case is different. My son will outgrow his bad habits. He will be all right….

Would Payne’s life have been different, without the events of 1789?

She set the mirror down. “It was the year my father—” Even at the distance of two and a half decades, it was hard to understand what had happened to the man Dolley had known.

“He went bankrupt that year,” she said slowly. “Dost know that it is the rule in many Meetings, that a man who cannot pay his creditors is read out of the Congregation? It broke my father. The Meeting was his life. He became lost in some inner darkness. He would not come out of his room. He would bolt the door, and Mama took to sleeping with us—Lucy and Anna and Mary and me. When John Todd offered for my hand, Mama begged me to accept him. To hesitate, and wait upon my own heart, was a luxury I could not afford. We were wed on Twelfth Night, John and I. The thirty-first anniversary of Martha Washington’s marriage to the General, and a bare month before Patsy Jefferson, not even eight weeks returned from France, married her Mr. Randolph.”

“And moved into Monticello with him.” Sophie tucked the clock into the trunk, and packed it into place with a shawl. “To show her father she didn’t need him, yet wasn’t about to leave his side.” She rose, shook out her somber skirts. “I’m going to go see if McGraw’s anywhere in sight, with or without a vehicle. If you’re going to stay here, I think it’s high time we started counting how many able-bodied men we have in the house, and how many weapons.”

“The day before yesterday, we had a hundred,” Dolley said bitterly. “And Colonel Carberry swore upon his sword that they would stay and defend the house from the British. I should like to think they’re on their way to Bladensburg at this moment—Yes, Paul?”

The young valet had appeared again in the parlor door.

“Mrs. Madison? M’sieu Roux wants to know, will you be serving dinner this afternoon?”

“Yes, of course. Please ask M’sieu Sioussat to set the tables for forty.” Dolley turned back to Sophie, who was looking at her as if at a madwoman. “Martha Washington often said to me that the whole of her task, as the Presidentress, was to show the country, and the world, the nature of the office of President. The nature of what we, as a republic, are and should be.” Dolley sat again at the desk, where the letter she’d begun yesterday to her sister still lay unfinished beside the Queen’s mirror, a fragment of normality that seemed to say, I have not fled.

I will not flee.

“It isn’t enough to say it, she would tell me. The French spent years, during the Revolution, saying how things should be. One must live as an example. That is the reason, whatever happens, I must not flee.”

Dolley looked, for a long moment, into the chilly eyes of her friend.

Then she added, “And why I must not be taken. Nor Jemmy, either.”

“A challenging conundrum,” murmured Sophie, “given the bravery and superb organization of the militia guarding the Bladensburg Bridge. Between counting out dessert-forks, I shall still ask M’sieu Sioussat how many guns are in the house.”

“Surely the British won’t—”

“I’m not thinking of the British,” said Sophie quietly. “I’m thinking of looters.”

She disappeared into the dark of the hall. For a long minute Dolley sat at the desk, the unfinished letter to her sister Lucy beneath her fingertips.

I am determined not to go myself until I see Mr. Madison safe…Disaffection stalks around us…My friends and acquaintances are all gone…

The words seemed clear one moment, gibberish the next.

And do those who remain do so only to speed our enemies’ pursuit?

She plucked her tortoiseshell snuffbox from the desk-drawer, inhaled a pinch—a nasty habit, she knew, but the nicotine soothed her.

Lucy, she thought, lifting the letter and half smiling in spite of her fear at the thought of her brash and pretty blond sister. It was Lucy who had first brought her and Martha Washington together in 1793.

In the year that the world tore itself apart.

If 1789 had been an ill year for everyone, 1793 had at times had the quality of nightmare, as if the Horsemen of the Apocalypse had ridden across the land.

War, Greed, Plague…and Death on his pale horse, following after.

Outside the windows, above the curtain of dust, clouds had begun to thicken, and far off she heard the rumble of thunder.

It will storm, she thought, and soak the men….

But the thunder did not stop. Not a single peal, but a heavy sustained booming, muffled by distance…

“Do you hear it?” Sophie reappeared, her hands full of silver plate and Dolley’s shawls.

Dolley understood then, with a sudden chilling sensation beneath her breastbone, that it wasn’t thunder.

“Cannon,” Sophie said.