Patriot Hearts: A Novel of the Founding Mothers

SALLY

Monticello Plantation

Albemarle County, Virginia

Wednesday, October 23, 1793

I love you, Sally. I could ask no greater happiness in this life, than to be your husband. Will you be my wife?”

The tall man before her bent his head, pressed his lips to her hand. Sun-dapple through the yellowing leaves of the mulberry trees flashed in Sally’s eyes, warmed the tear she felt trail down her cheek.

It was good, to have a friend.

She whispered, “Thank you, Lam,” and Lamentation Hawkin raised his head, saw his answer in her eyes. “That’s one of the nicest things anyone has ever said to me. But you know I can’t accept.”

The Charlottesville carter moved his head a little, glancing back up the hill at the two-story red-brick house. “Because of him? Or because of me?”

“Because of me.” Sally wrapped her other hand around the one that Lam still held, smiled up at him. He was one of the ugliest men she’d ever seen, and had the kindest eyes. She wished very much that she loved him, and wondered if that would make a difference to her answer.

Probably not.

“You know I’d take your boy—”

“I know. It isn’t that.” Although it was, partly. Sally knew to the marrow of her bones that Thomas Jefferson, no matter what his current feelings about the woman he had once loved, would never allow his four-year-old son to be raised by a black man.

Particularly not one who lived in a town not five miles away.

Lam was silent. Not asking, Has he taken you back? Not asking, Are you still thinking he will?

“May I still call you my friend, Lam?”

Warmth kindled in his eyes as he brought her hand up to his lips again. His fingers were strong enough to bend an iron pot-hook. “To the end of time, girl,” he said.

As he walked away down Mulberry Row toward the stable-yard where he’d left his wagon, Sally sat again on the bench where he’d come upon her, beside the washhouse door. Almost no one was around, the carpentry-shop silent, the dairy empty, the cleared ground where Mr. Jefferson was having a small nail-factory built deserted. Tobacco harvest was nearly done. Every spare hand, male and female, was down at the curing-barns, sorting and tying the leaves to dry. Only around the kitchen, a hundred feet away on the other side of the Row, was there activity, her brothers Jimmy and Pip getting dinner together for the family at the Big House.

“Papa, do come!” Patsy’s strong firm alto, drifting clearly down from the unkempt lawn behind the house on the hill’s crest, could still raise the hairs on the back of Sally’s neck. “It’s the cunningest thing! Little Annie’s decided she’s ready to ride Bergère, and poor Bergère isn’t sure what to make of it.”

Bergère was the shaggy-coated sheepdog Patsy had begged her father to buy for her, just before their return from France.

Sally picked up the chemise she’d been working on, rolled the tiny hem of its ruffle between expert fingers. Tom was back from the tobacco-barns, then, she thought: Dinner would be soon. She could picture him striding across the ragged grass to Patsy and little Annie, his head thrown back and his smile like the dazzle of the sun.

Once Pip and Burwell carried the dishes across to the house, it would be safe for her to slip in and distribute the garments she’d been working on all morning: Maria’s chemises, Mr. Jefferson’s shirts, M’sieu Petit’s waistcoat with its new buttons, all to be packed in their trunks for departure. She could be in and out without fear of meeting anyone.

And the day after tomorrow, they’d be gone.

“They dyin’ in Philadelphia.” Betty Hemings’s quiet voice spoke at Sally’s elbow, and her mother stepped around the corner of the washhouse, with an armload of newly ironed shirts. “Sixty, seventy people a day, the newspaper said.”

There were masters who would whip the possessor of any newspaper they found in the quarters, but Thomas Jefferson wasn’t one of them. Her mother’s news was no news to Sally.

“Takes two weeks to get to Philadelphia.” Sally measured out thread from the spool and snipped it with the little scissors Abigail Adams had given her in London, six years ago. “First frost’ll come by then. That always kills the fever, Lam says.”

Patsy’s voice lifted again, rejoicing in her tiny daughter. Even Socrates might ride on a stick with her without being ridiculous, Jefferson had said of his first grandchild’s sunny charm.

She heard her mother’s skirts rustle, smelled the mingled pungence of soap and starch in her clothes as she sat at her side. Glancing sidelong at the older woman, she saw her mother, too, watching the kitchen door, in her case because she’d promised to lend Pip a hand in getting the dinner ready for serving. Two years younger than Jimmy, Pip had been chosen to act as his assistant and to learn from him all the skills of Parisian cooking, before Jimmy could get his papers as a free man. Jimmy was still in charge, but today was one of “Jimmy’s days,” as everyone said around the quarters. Meaning that Jimmy had started drinking earlier than usual.

“Lam’s a good man, Sally. And you don’t have to go down live with him seven days a week. If you ask, Mr. Jefferson will give you your freedom, and you can stay here a few days a week to look after Little Tom, til he’s old enough to be left. Mr. Jefferson made no trouble over Mary going.”

Sally’s half-sister Mary—daughter of that Wayles slave who’d also fathered Martin the butler, and their sister Bett—had been leased to Tom’s friend Colonel Bell in Charlottesville while the family was in France. By the time the family returned, she’d had two children by him, in addition to the two she’d borne earlier at Monticello. Last year when Bell had offered to buy Mary—and Mary had added her request to his—Jefferson had complied, and had included the two Bell children in the bargain.

Would Tom “make no trouble,” she wondered, if she asked him leave to marry another man?

Patsy would see to it that he didn’t.

“And if you want to talk to him, now’s the time to do it.” Betty’s face, still beautiful in her fifties, was grave, her dark eyes wise with the wisdom of a woman who has survived and kept her family together against staggering odds. “They leaving Friday, and he might not be back for a year. A lot can happen in a year, first frost or no. Mr. Jefferson’s daddy died when he was a younger man than Mr. Jefferson is today. You think he’s got it in writing anywhere, that you and Little Tom’s to go free? You really want to end up bein’ sold off by Mr. Randolph, to settle Mr. Jefferson’s debts? You and Little Tom both?”

Sally said nothing. The French lawn of Maria’s chemise lay like silk over her fingers, thin enough to show through it the warm café-au-lait of her flesh.

Paris seemed like a thousand years ago. Except for Little Tom, with his sharp Jefferson features and red hair, those years could have been something Sally had dreamed, no more real than the fairy-tales she and Polly used to tell each other at night.

Except for Little Tom, and the deep-smoldering pain that never left her heart.

The voyage back from France in 1789 had been a nightmare.

Jefferson had taken two tiny cabins on the Clermont, one for himself with a pallet for Jimmy, one for the girls and the extremely pregnant sheepdog Bergère. Departure had been delayed for two weeks due to storms, though once on the sea the voyage was fast, if rough. Sally kept herself bundled up in the damp cold of the autumn sea, and stayed out of sight of the other passengers when she could. Patsy—almost certainly at Jefferson’s request—had subtly conspired in the pretense that her maid was suffering nothing more than mal de mer. It was no more than could be expected of any good Virginia lady faced with the mortification of a serving-maid who’d found herself pregnant, no matter who by.

But in private, Sally could have cut the atmosphere in the little cabin with a knife.

Between morning sickness, being kept out of sight, and the daunting logistics of proximity, there was of course no question of seeing more of Tom than a couple of friendly words exchanged, and Patsy made sure she never left her father’s side. Only her resolution that she would somehow, some way, find the means to return to France with him in the spring—surely the King would have put down the rioting by then—enabled Sally to get through the journey without flinging herself over the side from sheer wretchedness.

The first thing that greeted them when they reached Norfolk, Virginia, was the froth of rumor that the new President, General Washington, would ask Mr. Jefferson to be his Secretary of State.

Sally didn’t need to ask what that would mean. A Virginian might take his mulatto mistress to France with him, and establish her discreetly in rented rooms somewhere near his Hôtel. No Virginian would bring a colored woman to the nation’s capital where his neighbors and their families were going to live.

Not even a man who spoke and wrote so eloquently of—and truly believed in, Sally knew—striking out into the unknown territory of the future, rather than living in bondage to the past.

Sally had long ago guessed that though Tom could be a poor judge of people—especially people who professed the same ideals as his—he had an almost womanly perception of the unspoken currents of gossip and public opinion: how they spread and mutated and dyed people’s thought. For all his idealism, he knew what things a gentleman simply could not do, if he wished to marry his daughters into respectable families.

The washhouse stood downslope from the Big House, part of the long row of cabins and workshops shaded by mulberry trees that Jefferson had planted when first he’d come to the mountain twenty-two years before. Sally remembered how little and thin the trees had been in her childhood, and how bare and raw the cabins had looked. For three years now Sally had waked every morning to the sound of the birds in their branches. That daily beauty had gone far toward soothing the hurt of betrayal, and had helped her put her anger in its place.

A gaggle of children dashed around the coal-house. She glimpsed Davy and Kit and Jenny’s Lew, Aunty Isabel’s Aggy and Eddy, Molly’s Bart and Cannda, and dashing along in the rear Little Tom, three and a half years old, a toddler still but long-legged like a baby gazelle. The sight of him brought a smile to her face. If she had lost Tom, Little Tom’s presence in her life more than made up for it.

Would I go through all that again, to know I’d have my boy at the end of it?

Yes, a thousand times.

And like any slave-woman who sees her child, she felt the chill on her heart.

Promises are cheap, especially a man’s promises made four years ago, to a woman he has ceased to love.

Her mother’s voice was soft as she rose. “You still have the chance to do what few of us ever get to do,” she said. “Little Tom—well, Mr. Jefferson’s gonna do about him whatever he’s gonna do, and there’s nuthin’ you can say that’ll change it. And you know, even should harm befall her daddy, Miss Patsy got too much regard for what the neighbors would say to sell him off. But as for you—you’d be a fool not to take the chance to go.”

Halfway up the slope from Mulberry Row to the hilltop, the door of the kitchen opened in the bottom floor of the little brick pavilion that had been the first dwelling on top of the mountain, the tiny house to which Tom Jefferson, in the long-ago days before the War, had brought Miss Patty as his bride. Pip stepped out, looking harassed. Jimmy must be sliding from idly talkative to argumentative.

“You better go, Mama. I’ll get these done before dark.” She patted the folded stack of garments.

She was a fool, Sally thought, as she began to work an eyelet, not to take Lam up on his offer. Lam had been free for ten years, and owned his own livery stable in Charlottesville. He’d been making it his business to seek her out, to talk with her, every time he came up to the mountain since Jefferson had departed last September, presumably when word got around that Jefferson hadn’t lain with Sally on that home visit, either. At thirty-five he was steady, gentle, no genius but reasonably well educated, didn’t drink, and—a big plus, though Sally was a little embarrassed to put it in so many words—had good teeth and sweet breath.

I’m twenty years old, she thought, looking in the direction of the stable, where her son and his friends had vanished. What am I waiting for?

But the answer to that question was a shadow at which she did not wish to look.

Patsy Jefferson had chosen the day Sally bore her child, to run hand in hand with Tom Randolph to her father and announce that they were engaged.

“I could not ask a better husband for my girl,” Jefferson had said, sitting on the foot of Sally’s bed in her mother’s cabin beside the washhouse, on a snowy January day in 1790, less than two months after the Clermont had deposited them on American shores. “I suppose every father rejoices to see his child happily wed. Yet I shall miss her desperately. Patsy tells me their attraction is of long standing, though I confess that wasn’t my impression in Paris.”

A frown briefly pulled together his reddish eyebrows—at remembered kitchen-rumor about Randolph’s expeditions to the Palais Royale?—but with a slight shake of his head he dismissed the thought, and leaned across to tweak back the wrappings from the face of the infant in Sally’s arms. “I am—glad of her happiness, though,” he added, as if forcing himself to speak the sentiment he knew he should feel. “She’s denied it, but I have felt that Patsy was…unhappy. At leaving France, perhaps.”

So that was where he’d been all day, reflected Sally. Drinking toasts and making plans with old Tom Randolph in the parlor, while Sally clung grimly to her mother’s hands, tried to breathe her way through the waves of labor-pains. While the child she’d carried in her womb back across the Atlantic struggled to be born.

The one thing that Patsy would have known absolutely would keep her father from Sally’s side.

The Randolphs were neighbors as well as cousins. Tom had grown up with old Tom Randolph, whose plantation of Edgehill lay an hour’s brisk walk from Monticello along the river road. The Randolphs had been among the first to visit when the family had returned to Monticello, two days before Christmas after a leisurely journey from Norfolk via Eppington, Richmond, and Charlottesville.

After all her years away Sally had nearly wept with joy to see the mountain again, that magical, beautiful world of her childhood. The slaves with whom she’d grown up, her family and Aunty Isabel, Tom’s groom Jupiter and Mose the Blacksmith and all the others, had rejoiced just as much at their master’s return, for the simple reason that Jefferson was one of the better masters in the state and no plantation runs well under an overseer’s hand. They’d unhitched the team and dragged the carriage up the mountain themselves, laughing in the frigid twilight.

The following day Tom Randolph had ridden over and begun to court the girl he’d played with as a child, the girl he’d met again in France two summers before. The girl who would be heiress to several thousand acres and the slaves to work them.

And though Patsy had bubbled to everyone about how glad she was to be back in Virginia, Sally knew, from weeks of living in the close confines of ship and coach, that beneath her cheerfulness the older girl was still as furious, as jealous, as hurt as she’d been when she’d announced she was going to become a nun. (And I notice, Sally remembered Sophie Sparling commenting back in Paris, Patsy seems to have recovered from her yearning for Catholicism quite quickly—Have you ever seen her pray the Rosary? Or eschew worldly dresses? In spite of her hurt, Sally had laughed.)

Taking the first husband who asked her, Sally supposed, was as effective a way of leaving her father’s house as taking the veil.

You left me for a designing black wench—now I’ll leave YOU. See how you like THAT.

The goal was the same: the pain in Tom’s eyes, at the thought of losing his daughter.

Sally could have slapped Patsy—if it hadn’t been unthinkable to do so—for hurting him. For sliding a poisoned knife into his most vulnerable spot, his unhealed dread of losing those he loved.

Because she couldn’t say any of this—because in her weaker moments she told herself such spiteful malice couldn’t be true—Sally said only, “She had many friends in France.” As she pressed her cheek against her infant son’s, past Jefferson’s shoulder she met her mother’s eyes. Saw Betty Hemings’s mouth twist in a soundless commentary of exasperation at her master’s naïveté.

Looking back on the scene from three and a half years later—sitting in comfort beneath a tree, stitching at the hem of Maria’s chemise less than ten yards from the bed where she’d lain that night—Sally could only shake her head at the fierce love she’d felt then for Tom.

He deserves all the pain Patsy or anyone else can hand him.

But her own pain at the memory was so great that her needle stilled and she had to close her eyes again, willing herself not to cry.

“They’ll be married in February,” Jefferson went on, and wonderingly brushed Little Tom’s hand, where the baby lay wrapped at Sally’s side. “I shall have to leave soon after that, if I’m to be in New York for the opening of Congress. Will you be all right here?”

And his eyes, from being focused beyond her upon what he perceived as his daughter’s joy, suddenly returned to the present, to her, and to his newborn son. Most white gentlemen, Sally was very well aware, didn’t think of their sons by slave-women in even remotely the same terms as they thought of even their white bastards, let alone the true-born children of their wedded wives.

She searched Tom’s face, Tom’s eyes—the eyes whose shape was already printed in Little Tom’s bone structure—for some clue to his thoughts. It wasn’t for her to say, This is our son; child of our mingled flesh. Child of our love.

They were in Virginia now. He was her master again. Even in two months, she’d seen how it had changed him, to be back in a land where slavery was accepted as normal and where blacks were calmly regarded as being lazy, malicious, and slightly dim-witted.

What had seemed possible in France now stood revealed to her as a naïve and preposterous dream. The simple friendship of a child with the clever and kindly philosopher who was master of the house had dissolved into the unnerving complexities of black and white, slave and master, woman and man.

Would it change him still further in the years to come, to be surrounded by all his neighbors who tupped their slave-women as casually as they pissed?

Her mother, she knew, would have told her, he’d never been unchanged. He’d always been just like his neighbors. That was how white men were. His nephew Peter Carr was regularly towsing her sister Critta and at least two other girls in the quarters: Critta had already borne his child. Peter’s brother Sam was acquiring the same reputation.

And why did it bother her anyway? She had Tom’s promise that their son would be free.

“I’ll be well,” she told him softly. “Shall I write you in cipher, and tell you how he is? ‘The tree you planted grows tall.’ ”

And he’d smiled. “I’d like that.”

Because her mother was there, he didn’t kiss her. Only cupped Little Tom’s tiny head in his white hand, and smiled down at Sally. His expression was impossible to read in the firelight. “I’ll be back tomorrow,” he said. “Now I must leave; they’re waiting for me up at the house.”

Cold air bellied into the little cabin as he slipped out the door. She heard him singing in Italian as he climbed the top of the hill, and the crunch of his boots in the snow.

He hadn’t come back, of course. Stitching in the autumn sunlight, Sally shook her head at herself. How could she have been so stupid as to believe a white man’s word?

And those few moments when she did encounter him again, “they” were always “waiting for me up at the house.”

Once news of Patsy’s engagement got out, friends, neighbors, and relatives had poured into Monticello for the wedding, which had been held a month later. Even before that, from the moment Jefferson had realized there was going to be a wedding at Monticello, there’d been a thousand things to do, completely aside from the new crop of tobacco-seedlings to be prepared. Typically—a situation so thoroughly Tom-like—when they’d arrived at Monticello, half the rooms had been in the same unfinished state in which he’d left them, six years before.

Sally had grown up watching her master continually start building and remodeling and redecorating projects that either misfired or were suspended due to lack of money or Jefferson leaving for Philadelphia or Richmond. Poor Miss Patty—and Aunt Carr who had succeeded her as housekeeper—had been driven half crazy by having furniture shifted around to make room for this or that change in the walls or the floor, and in two years at the Hôtel Langeac Sally had seen doors plastered over and cut in more efficient places in the walls, round windows put in, and ordinary beds replaced by space-saving beds in wall-niches.

So of course, faced with the prospect of all the Randolphs and Carrs and Eppeses in Virginia arriving, rooms that had been roughly finished off with a coat of paint so the girls could be moved in suddenly had to be emptied, replastered, new curtains made…

Between the birth of Sally’s son, and Jefferson’s departure on the first of March, six days after the wedding, Sally was able to speak to him exactly four times, one of those at the wedding itself.

It was the night after the wedding that her sister Critta had broken the news to her. “You know when they get back from their weddin’-trip, Miss Patsy an’ Mr. Randolph gonna be comin’ back here to stay?”

“Here?” Sally’s stomach twisted with shock. She was sitting in her mother’s cabin, nursing Little Tom and listening to the din of festivities all along Mulberry Row. Now and then, drifting down from the house, the sweet skirl of Jefferson’s violin came to her, as the scent of dried flowers echoed the sun’s remembered warmth.

She felt as if the floor had dropped from beneath her. Looking up into her sister’s eyes she couldn’t even ask, Is it true? She knew it was.

“Mr. Jefferson asked her to, specially.” Critta, a few years older and like Sally light-complected and pretty, regarded her with enigmatic eyes. “Mr. Randolph don’t get along with his papa, over to Edgehill. But his papa’s been ill, and needs him to look after the place. And if Mr. Jefferson going to New York, he’ll need someone here to look after this place, too.”

There was an undertone of satisfaction in Critta’s voice, a kind of pleased spite. Sally had heard the echo of it all her life, when people spoke to her mother or to any of her siblings. The whole Hemings clan were set slightly apart, as left-handed members of the family who were in line to receive special favors; slaves who would be the last to be sold in bad times.

And when the master of any plantation took a woman, it set her apart still more, even from her family. As if she had sold herself, to put herself ahead of them.

Maybe it was only because Sally had their master’s promise that her son would be a free man, while Critta’s boy Jamey—Peter Carr’s son or not—could be sold like a blood-horse or a dog.

She wanted to reach out to Critta, to say, Don’t turn against me!

But Critta would only deny that she felt anything of the kind.

And Tom of course didn’t see what the problem was, in the few minutes he was able to snatch, to speak to Sally before he left for New York. “Patsy was in charge of my household for a year in Paris, and you got along quite well,” he said, conveniently forgetting the occasions when his daughter’s needling criticism and cutting remarks had reduced Sally to tears. And seeing the look in Sally’s eyes, he took her hands. “She doesn’t know, Sally—”

He glanced over his shoulder as if to make sure they were unobserved, though there wasn’t much place for spies in a one-room cabin ten feet by fourteen. “And there’s no reason she ever has to know. You won’t be doing maid’s work until the summer…” His eyes warmed as he glanced down at Little Tom, asleep on Sally’s cot and folded thick in his quilts. “I’ll be back before then.”

But before he returned in September, Patsy was with child.

Jefferson had given Randolph and Patsy a thousand acres of his land as a plantation called Varina, and—because land was worthless without them—a hundred and twenty-five slaves. But the lowland climate of Varina was too humid for Patsy’s health. And just before Jefferson’s return, Tom Randolph’s fifty-year-old father had suddenly married a girl Sally’s age, who had let it be known that neither Randolph nor Patsy—nor, for that matter, Randolph’s sisters Nancy and Virginia—were welcome in her home.

So Patsy and her husband returned to Monticello to live.

Above her on the hillside, Sally saw Pip and her sister Bett’s son Burwell emerge from the kitchen with big wicker trays of Queensware vessels in hand. The savory odors of sugared pumpkin and roasted chicken drifted down to her as she folded up shirts and chemises, climbed the slope of the hill, the long grass rustling against her skirt. Even though she was still Maria’s maid when her charge was in residence, Sally had mastered the technique of coming silently, doing her work quickly, and departing like a shadow. It wasn’t only Tom and Patsy she sought to avoid, but Patsy’s husband: Two days ago word had gone around the quarters that Tom Randolph had had his wife’s sixteen-year-old maid Lacey in the linen room.

So much for keeping your menfolks away from the help.

There were also Peter and Sam, and Jack Eppes, who was also part of the household these days. All had so far kept their distance from Sally, even as Tom Randolph did, as if she still bore Jefferson’s mark upon her flesh.

But she’d felt them watch her. Knew they speculated among themselves about whether the master of Monticello was done with her or not.

To avoid the family, when they were at dinner—when she knew Tom was with them—she made it a habit to slip into the house through the floor-length window of Tom’s “cabinet,” the little half-octagon office that opened off his bedroom. Laying his folded shirts on the bed, Sally had to shake her head and smile.

Tom would always act just like Tom.

Every horizontal surface in both cabinet and bedroom was stacked with books, far more than could fit into the three trunks he’d allotted himself for the trip. From a lifetime of acquaintance, Sally knew he’d be awake until almost dawn Friday—the day of his departure—trying to figure out which to take and which he could bear to leave behind. Even then, he’d be sure to send for them within days of arrival in Philadelphia. Upstairs in the library the situation would be even worse.

All that first year he’d been gone, in spite of Patsy’s enmity and the demands of new motherhood and the apprehension about encountering Tom Randolph or one of the Carr brothers, Sally had sometimes made the time to steal into the cabinet and try to make some order out of the chaos there. She knew better than to even try going into the library.

Once she’d found in his desk the smashed pieces of the miniature he’d had painted of her in Paris—did he really think Patsy didn’t know? Before he’d left, she’d returned to him the letters he’d written her on his travels in Europe, fearing that if she kept them in her mother’s cabin, they’d fall into Patsy’s hands.

She had written him twice: The tree you planted grows tall—

He had never replied.

When at the end of a year he came home—for barely six weeks at the time of the tobacco harvest, the busiest of the year—Patsy had made sure she was always at his side.

His daughter would cling to him like a lover, take him for walks in the garden that was his deepest delight. Patsy had been four months gone with child by then and frightened that like her mother she would be harmed by the birth. She had played that card for all it was worth, making sure she was at her father’s elbow the first time he and Sally saw one another after his return, and where possible, every time after that.

With an infant to look after—an infant who officially did not exist—Sally had been unable to fight her.

He was my friend, she thought as she laid down the shirts, stood for a moment looking around her at the cabinet and the bedroom beyond. Virtually no one in the quarters, including the other members of her family, accepted that it was possible for a white to truly be a black’s friend, especially where the one was the master of the other.

It seemed to her now that they were right.

The shame of feeling what she had felt—what she still felt—kept her silent, apart from those with whom she lived as she was apart from the folks in the Big House.

As she had always, it seemed to her now, been apart. Neither of one world nor the other.

His violin lay on the desk, with the folders of his music and the little iron dumbbell that he was still forced to use, to strengthen the stiff and damaged tendons of his mis-set right wrist. On the chair were two intricately wrought pedometers he’d purchased in Paris, to measure how far he walked; on the floor all around, stacks of newspapers and correspondence, of charts and notebooks, keeping track of everything: When did peas first sprout and how long from that sprouting did it take them to be table-ready? On what date did the first redbuds bloom in the woods? Temperature and barometric pressure for every day, wind direction and speed—details of the physical world that entranced him, details that did not change or leave him as human beings changed and left. Among the papers lay a palm-sized hunk of gray flint, in which the coiled shapes of strange shells seemed to be molded, life transformed into stone.

As she slipped into the hall she heard Tom Randolph’s loud voice grate from the dining-room: “Everyone knows that the Bank is just Hamilton’s way of making money for his speculator friends.” He sounded sober still, but angry. That anger had smoldered in him since April when Patsy had testified, in open court in Culpeper County, that in her estimation his sister Nancy had indeed gotten pregnant by the husband of his sister Judith. News of that particular scandal had percolated around the quarters like an infestation of bedbugs since the winter before, when Randolph’s sister had, it was said, either aborted her brother-in-law’s baby or given birth to a child whom her paramour had then murdered and left on the woodpile: Tom Randolph had been brooding and drinking over the disgrace ever since.

Jefferson’s reply—scarcely audible, like a summer breeze whispering through the treetops—was, as always in dealing with his son-in-law, friendly, as if no scandal or difficulty existed: “…not simply a matter of States’ debts. The Bank means that only bankers can understand the country’s finances—that the purse-strings of everyone in the country will be held by the central government…”

Patsy was encouraging her husband to go into politics—Sally suspected as a way of supporting her father. A gift to him that only she could give.

But then, after years of watching Patsy manipulate her father the way her father manipulated his own political constituents, Sally would have suspected her of anything.

When Tom had returned from New York in September of ’90, he had been his usual genial self, greeting Sally with the same embrace and kiss he gave Betty Hemings, Critta, Bett, and Thenia. What more could he do, with Patsy standing by? His eyes had met Sally’s once, and had looked swiftly aside from the withdrawn hurt in them at those unanswered letters, those twelve long months of sewing for his daughter and living under her orders. And before he could look back, Patsy had taken his arm and said, “Now you must come down to visit Iris, she’s just had a child, too….”

The following day his younger daughter Maria had arrived from Eppington. A few hours behind her had appeared Aunt Marks, Tom’s silly younger sister, and after her the withered little Mr. Madison, and then two touring Frenchmen with letters of introduction from the Philosophical Society in Paris.

For six weeks, during the height of the tobacco harvest, there had been no moment for the master to find a few spare minutes to walk down to Mulberry Row unaccompanied or unwaited-for. Nor had he made the attempt. She had waited for a word from him, for even an enquiry as to how Little Tom did. None had come. It must be tiredness, she told herself, or the press of business, that made him leave the room, on those rare instances when she’d stolen a minute to try to speak to him alone. That brought that withdrawn expression in his face, when their eyes fleetingly met.

Through forty long evenings, when he returned late from the tobacco-fields to find his company still sitting outdoors taking the coolness in the starry dark, he would sit up and talk with them, sometimes past midnight—Sally would hear their voices drifting down the hill. Afterwards no sound of the violin sang from the dark of the Big House.

What had happened to change his mind?

And after that, he was gone for another year.

He’ll be gone again on Friday.

If I want to marry Lam Hawkin—if I want to ask for my freedom before he goes back to Philadelphia—now is the time.

“I don’t see why Mr. Hamilton’s opinions should make any difference anymore,” came young Jack Eppes’s voice, as Sally returned from Maria’s room. “He’s retired, hasn’t he?”

In the parlor, Miss Patty’s old parrot Shadwell screeched at one of the maids.

China and cutlery clinked as the dining-room dumbwaiter lifted dishes up from the pantry below. Jimmy liked to impress the other servants by telling how the dumbwaiter had been invented by the lascivious old King Louis XV so that servants couldn’t spy on his orgies where all the rich old nobles and their gorgeous mistresses sat naked around the table, but Sally knew that the only true part of that tale was “so that servants couldn’t spy.”

“And a good thing, too,” put in kindly Aunt Carr. “You never speak to that man when he doesn’t give you a headache, dearest. Honestly, when you arrived in September I was truly worried for you, Tom.”

Betty’s remark about the age at which Tom’s father had died flitted again through Sally’s mind as she stepped through the rear door of the house and hurried down the hill to the sanctuary of Mulberry Row. Upon his return to Monticello, Tom had indeed looked ill, too thin. His hair had definitely begun to gray, and he did not sing as he rode out or walked about the house. He looked like he’d had a headache for months.

Sally could guess why.

At the same time the newspapers began to write of the yellow fever in Philadelphia, news had reached them, even here at Monticello, of what was happening to the French Revolution that Tom had hailed with such triumph shining in his eyes. The guillotine had been set up near the gates of the Tuileries gardens: It would have been visible from the front gate of the Hôtel Langeac.

Tom had come to Monticello for two months last year, and six weeks the year before, and on those visits he’d looked tired beyond computation, but healthy. Now he had the look of a man being torn to pieces inside.

The memory returned, of the letters she’d taken such pains to send him secretly, to which he had never replied; of the chilly politeness with which he turned away even her glance, much less any chance at speech; of Patsy’s remarks to guests that Sally had gotten herself with child by one of the French grooms in Paris. Let him die of it, Sally thought. He is not the only one who has been betrayed.

But he would not speak to her. Nor could she bring up that or any other subject to him.

He will never be other than he is. She carried soiled garments from the bedchambers back into the square stone washhouse, with its two big iron cauldrons, its smell of ashes and soap. And things will never be other than they are.

Her mother was right. She could do nothing to remove Little Tom from Monticello—certainly not to a town where everyone would recognize him as Jefferson’s son. But she could get away herself, from a situation that was intolerable.

Last week Jimmy had cornered Sally in the cabin she shared with their mother. “What you up to, girl?” he’d demanded roughly. “You foolin’ away your chances, and gonna end up with nuthin’.”

“I haven’t been offered a chance so far to fool away,” Sally had retorted, “in case you ain’t been watching.” The encounter had been late in the evening. Jimmy’s shirt smelled of cheap rum under the sweat.

Jimmy grabbed her by the arm and shook her, his voice hoarse with the fury that seemed never to have left him, since they’d sailed for home. “You waitin’ for him to send you a bouquet? Write you a love-letter in French maybe?” Up to the night before departure he’d spoken of staying in France, had tried to talk Sally into remaining with him. What would have become of them—of Little Tom—if she had? “You be waitin’ for him in his bed when he quit jabberin’ with his folks some night, he give you all the chances you want.”

“I’m not his whore!” Sally jerked at her arm and her brother’s hand tightened hard. “You think I’m like those girls in the Palais Royale, the ones who’d stand on chairs with their skirts pulled up to their waists, showin’ what they got to passersby?”

Jimmy dragged her face close to his, so that she could see the gleam of the dying hearth like streaks of gold in his eyes. “You his slave, girl. You was a free woman in France and you came back here to be his slave. You his whore.”

If she slapped him, Sally knew he’d strike her back. Drunk, he’d struck her before. So she twisted her arm and turned her body, the way she’d learned to do when the footmen in Paris would grab for her, and slithered free of his grip. Her arm smarted so she knew already it would bruise up bad. She had to bite back the words on her lips: If I’m his whore, what does that make you?

But she knew they were the words that Jimmy would have said to himself, if he hadn’t drowned them in rum.

So she only whispered, “Go to bed, Jimmy.” And retreated into the hot dark of the cabin.

I was a free woman in France. She emerged from the washhouse, to the speckled afternoon shade. The bruise left by Jimmy’s hand still hurt. And I came back here with him, knowing I’d be his slave.

But even if he had changed his mind about wanting her, he was a man who wouldn’t let go.

Who would never let any man have what had once been his.

But I’m not his whore.

If what she wanted was his body between her thighs and those little sums of money he’d used to leave for her in his desk drawer—the money Jimmy wanted to get his hands on—then yes, she could simply slip through his cabinet window and be waiting for him, naked, on his bed tonight. And she was sure he’d be delighted to bull her and send her on her way with a friendly slap on the flank and a little present in the morning, because—no matter what they said to their friends and in public print about the amalgamation of whites with blacks—men didn’t turn anything down when offered.

But it wasn’t what she wanted.

She knew that what she wanted was no longer possible: to read in his library, to talk far into the night, to play backgammon and chess after he’d come back late from one of his dinners, to drive out with him to the old palace at Marly or to walk under the trees of the forest at St.-Cloud. It wasn’t possible in Virginia. It wasn’t possible with an adult Patsy. It wasn’t possible with Little Tom.

If she wanted sex and upkeep, there was Lam—and safety, too. And she wouldn’t have to deal with Patsy.

Or with the satisfied pity in her sister Critta’s eyes.

But there was a word for trading sex for upkeep, even with Little Tom’s safety thrown in. Those girls standing on the chairs in the Palais Royale with their skirts pulled up to their waists probably had children to feed, too.

Outside the washhouse, children’s voices called her name. Not joyful now but scared—badly scared. She stepped quickly to the door as they swarmed around her, Eddy and Aggy, Bart and Cannda, all those children too young to be put to work yet: round faces, wide frantic eyes, brown legs sticking out under faded calico shirttails. Danny, the oldest at nine, carried Little Tom on his hip like a baby, Little Tom clutching his right hand in his left, his face ashy with shock.

“Tom got snake-bit,” Eddy whispered, terrified, and four-year-old Aggy wailed, “He ain’t gonna die, is he?”

Panic struck Sally like a single cold arrow going into her heart. Dear God, not Tom and Little Tom, too! But to say so would only scare them worse, so Sally took a deep breath and said, “No, he isn’t gonna die,” and held out her arms. “What’d the snake look like? Did he have any red on him?”

She sat on the bench beside the door where she’d been sewing, Little Tom clinging to her, face buried in her bosom. Davy said, “No red, ma’am,” and looked around at the others for confirmation. “It was black and shiny like oil.”

“And ten feet long!”

“And he had yellow on his belly, and black spots.”

“And I bet he bit you by the corncrib, when you went stickin’ your hand in through the slats.” Almost faint with relief, Sally turned Little Tom’s hand to the light, to show up the small horseshoe of tiny punctures in the creamy skin. As a child, she’d explored every foot of the woods on the mountain, and between them her mother and Mr. Jefferson had conveyed to her all their considerable woodcraft.

“See that?” she went on, gesturing the children close. “When it looks like that, it means the snake wasn’t poison, and there’s nothing to fret about—except that you, little man, are damn lucky it wasn’t a rat that bit you, instead of a king snake who was just tryin’ to catch up on his sleep. A poison snake’ll leave two marks, like that—” And she pressed with the tip of her little scissors, not breaking the skin but leaving two pink indentations on the back of her son’s wrist.

The children gazed, fascinated, logging the information for further use. Little Tom’s tears vanished, and he turned his wrist over, studying it.

“Then do we got to cut a X with a knife,” asked Bart excitedly, “and suck out his blood?”

“Then you got to come to me,” replied Sally firmly, “and I’ll do whatever cuttin’ an’ suckin’s to be done around here—after I wear the lot of you out with a cornstalk for goin’ playin’ where you got no business to be. You hear?”

They all murmured, “Yes’m,” but they knew Sally was just as bad as they were, for wandering among the trees and seeing what she could see under every rock and hollow stump.

As the other children dashed off, Sally led her son into the washhouse, and scrubbed the wound with a fingerful of soft-soap and a little rainwater dippered from the barrel. Monticello’s breath-taking prospect and mountaintop magic meant that there was no well and no spring convenient to the house. Another oversight, smiled Sally wryly, blindingly typical of Tom.

He would always strive for what ought to be, and then scurry around trying to make it work, like championing the Rights of Man in a world where no one could afford to give up owning slaves.

“That wasn’t a poison snake?” asked Little Tom softly, his hazel eyes still worried. “Eddy said I was going to die.”

“Well, Eddy was scared.” Sally led her son out to the bench and held him against her. “You can’t believe everything people say, ’specially when they get scared. Then people say things they don’t mean, and sometimes they try to scare other people, to make themselves feel better.”

Like Jimmy, she thought: bitter with being still back in Virginia and obliged to do work before he could leave. For all his talk, he hadn’t had the nerve to simply disappear into the terrifying Paris of ’89, either.

Like Patsy, in the face of her husband’s sullen mutterings about how she’d betrayed his family honor. In the face of her own choice to wed, and her need to have her father be what she thought he should be.

Sally held the boy against her, feeling those small shoulders, like the shoulders of a kitten. Marveling in the compact warmth of him, and the silkiness of his red hair against her cheek.

Whenever Patsy handed a chemise or a tucker back to her with a tart remark about paying a little more attention to the work she was supposed to be doing—whenever Tom Randolph would stroke her arm and whisper that he knew how much she wanted “it”—Sally would remember the ragged shouting of the mob, and the blood spattered on the cobblestones of the rue St.-Antoine. At least I kept him out of that.

Only last week she’d come on Maria weeping over a letter that told of the death of Sister Himmisdal, the nun who’d taught her Christian doctrine at the convent-school. The old woman had been guillotined in front of a howling mob. Sally wondered what Tom had had to say to his daughters about that.

She pressed her cheek to Little Tom’s hair, and tightened her hug.

“You all right?” she asked, letting him go.

The boy nodded. “Eddy threw Aggy’s dolly in the corncrib,” he explained. “Aggy was scared to get it.”

“Aggy was smart,” said Sally, and kissed him. “But that was very brave of you, and very good to help her. Next time use a stick, though, all right?”

His face brightened. “All right.”

She took the bitten hand, kissed the little horseshoe of harmless pinpricks that were already beginning to fade. “All better, sugarbaby?”

“All better, Mama.”

She smiled after him, watching him run through the long grass after his friends. He was almost old enough to begin teaching him his letters, she thought, settling back on the bench. His memory was good. He could repeat back any of the hundreds of stories that got told every night in the quarters, when the work was done for the day: tales of wise rabbits and ugly stupid foxes, and of High John the Conqueror who always was able to outsmart the whites, and of little boys who went on magical journeys with their talking dogs.

Yet another reason to remain at Monticello—not, she knew, that she’d have a choice. To make sure Little Tom did get some instruction. It was a good bet Patsy wouldn’t give him any.

She sighed, and turned her head—

—and saw Tom Jefferson standing where the hillside crested beside the kitchen, his shoulder against a poplar tree, outlined by the twilight sky.

Her eyes met his across the distance. She thought about getting up and walking back to her mother’s cabin, but knew already that she wouldn’t.

His shoes swished in the long grass as he came down the hill. Dinner with his family was about the only time of day he wasn’t in riding-boots. Sally found she was holding her breath. Bracing, not only for the bleak chill she’d seen so often in his eyes, but for the sound of Patsy’s voice, calling to him from the house.

“What happened?” he asked when he got close, and nodded in the direction of the stables where Little Tom had disappeared.

For one flash of time, the sound of his voice obliterated the years, and she remembered how it had been, to be friends with this man.

She exhaled, made herself let go of her own dread of another silent battle with Patsy, another wordless round of her anger and his coldness. He sounded like he was forcing himself to speak as he’d used to, but that, at least, was something. She replied, “He put his hand in the corncrib and got bit by a snake. I remembered what you told me about the teeth-marks—” She held out her hand and traced on the mound of her thumb where Little Tom’s wound had been. “It sounds like a king snake. Eddy said it was ten feet long but I suspect that isn’t the case.”

Tom’s eyebrows shot up and his whole face relaxed. “If it is I shall have to trap it and write it up for the benefit of those naturalists who claim American species are smaller and degenerate—though I think I’d prefer it should go on living in the corncrib and eating rats. Is he all right?”

“Scared.”

“Good Lord, I should think so. The first time I was bitten I was convinced I’d swell up and die in agony. My father—”

“Papa?” called Patsy’s voice from the house.

Sally felt her face freeze. She’d known the moment was too good to last. “You’d better go.”

“Do you wish me to?” His voice, too, had gone cold.

“Papa?”

She’d appear over the edge of the hill in a moment. Sally looked up into his eyes.

Tom took her arm and led her into the washhouse, and closed the door.

But having done so he didn’t speak. For some moments they only stood, inches apart, in the big stuffy chamber with its smells of soiled linens and damp stone and soap. Then he asked, “Is it true you’re going to marry Lam Hawkin?”

Her heart raced, as if he had opened a door for her.

But a door to where?

“Who told you that?”

“You know what plantations are like for gossip. Is it true?”

Now is the time. He’ll never be other than he is. I made a wrong choice once….

Slowly, she said, “I ran away from you once, sir. When I came back, you were angry that I hadn’t trusted you. I promised you then that I would always be here. No, I’m not going to marry Lam Hawkin, or anyone else.”

Stillness again, and the chitter of birds as they nested in the eaves for the night. A dog barked: Bergère, or Bagwell the cowman’s one-eyed herd-dog, driving the cows in for milking. The magical peace of Monticello.

Tom asked, in a voice that sounded much more like his own, “Why didn’t you answer my letters?”

Her shock must have showed in her face, for his own eyes widened. To her own astonishment she kept her voice calm. “Did you get mine?”

“I got two. I answered both.”

And the next moment, as fury rose through her like a heat, she saw his own cheekbones darken with the flush of blood as he, too, realized what had happened to his replies.

Of course, she thought, he’d enclosed them in letters to Patsy. Even had he not, any messenger would have laid them on the table in the front hall. It would never have occurred to him to send his messages to her via a slave. Not if Patsy “didn’t know.”

Levelly, knowing that words once spoken can never be taken back, Sally said, “Yours must have gone astray. When I didn’t hear from you, I thought—” She stumbled a little. She took a deep breath, and went on. “I thought you had changed your mind.”

His eyes flickered back to hers, filled with that bleak wariness she’d seen in them these past three years, and she couldn’t keep the edge from her tone as she asked, “What else did you hear about me?”

She didn’t add, And from whom? and she didn’t need to. She saw the muscles of his jaw clench and felt the anger that stiffened the whole of his body: anger at her for implying that his daughter knew and had deliberately lied; sick disgust at the impossible position of being trapped between two women; outrage at the circumstance that put him, a white master, in the position of owing an apology to a slave. Wishing—she could see it in his eyes—that he could simply walk away and go back to being what Patsy wanted him to be.

“Nothing to signify. Idle gossip only.”

Sally became aware that she was trembling with anger. Had Tom really believed that having a touch of African blood in her veins, she would casually betray him, as she guessed that Patsy had implied? That she would take a lover—or several lovers—in the quarters, men whom Tom couldn’t even challenge because the subject was not one to be discussed?

Of course he did. Weren’t blacks more amorous than whites? Didn’t every white man in Virginia—including Tom—keep saying how they were slaves to their own passions? “Born under the sign of Venus” and incapable of anything more than “animal eagerness”?

It wouldn’t have needed more than one or two sidelong comments to put that bleak distaste for her in his eyes. To give Patsy her victory. To “save him from himself.”

If Patsy had been of her own color—And I am damn near almost of hers!— Sally would have stormed out of the washhouse and torn out every handful of her rival’s hair. The fact that she couldn’t silenced her, stilled her, and in that stillness she was forced to look at Tom again, and see disgust and outrage ebb and alter, and his chill steely anger shift.

“Next time you hear something, sir,” Sally told him, “ask me yourself.”

“Papa?” They heard Patsy’s skirts swish as she passed the washhouse door on her way down to the half-dug terraces of what would be the new vegetable gardens on the lower slopes of the hill. Tom’s eyes moved a little, as if they followed her. As if, hearing his daughter’s receding steps, he were putting together a thousand fragments of irrefutable and unacceptable truths, to form a conclusion that he could not face.

Sally added, more quietly, “Ask me and I will tell you the truth, whatever it is.”

“I know that.” He held out his hands to her. “I will. I promise.”

After a long moment she reached out and took them.

“I’ve missed you, Sally.”

Even when I was right down the hill and you were poking around the gardens with your daughter?

But she knew that she would never rival Patsy in his heart.

She sighed, letting go of something within her, although she couldn’t tell whether it was the future or the past. “And I you, Tom. I’m sorry if I did wrong—”

“It wasn’t your doing. I should not have believed…rumor. I will not do so again. Forgive me.”

Sally only nodded, and let him draw her against him. The nature of what lay between them, she thought, existed beyond the bounds of words. His kiss was gentle, the kiss of a friend, but the touch of their lips was like flame thrown onto oil, and his arms tightened crushingly around her. It was nearly dark before they spoke again, as they lay together on the damp brick floor of the washhouse, panting in the tangled disorder of half-shed garments. She whispered, “When will you be back?”

“In January.”

She sat up, her hair hanging like a dark mermaid’s around her shoulders, her body feeling queerly shaky with the aftermath of passion: aching, exultant, yet longing to weep.

“I’m going to risk sounding like those ladies in the Palais Royale and ask, would you have time before you go to ask Mr. Randolph to get another cabin built for me, while you’re away? I wanted to ask you before—”

“It’s my fault.” He put his palm to her cheek, then stood, and helped her to her feet. “And I am sorry, Sally, more than I can say. I will see to your cabin myself.” He straightened his clothes, looked around for the black velvet ribbon with which his long hair had been tied. Sally found it for him, gathered up her own disheveled curls under her cap again.

“I’m coming back to stay, Sally,” he said softly, and looking around at him, startled, she saw in his eyes a bitter and beaten weariness. It was as if, she realized, the prospect of returning to Philadelphia even for two more months was more than he could endure.

“I can’t—” He almost visibly stopped himself from the admission, I can’t take it anymore. “I can’t sleep at night. I find I’m barely able to take pleasure in reading, nor in conversation, since everything in Philadelphia concerns politics these days, and half of everything men speak is lies, or half-truths twisted by ignorance or malice.”

He hesitated on the words, as if at the reminder of gossip and lies closer to home, then shook his head.

“I’ve done everything I can to keep this country from being dragged back into despotism stronger and more subtle than the King’s. I feel as if I’m shouting into a windstorm. And in return I’ve been reviled, and betrayed by all in whom I’ve placed my trust.” He fell silent a moment, then added quietly, “All except you, it seems.

“I’ve never been good at brangling and quarreling, and it seems to me that there is only that, twenty-four hours out of every day. I’m not that strong, Sally. For three years now I’ve been tilting at windmills, and have been well and truly beaten by them. I don’t know what else to do.”

She touched his hand. “Does your family know?”

“I told them this afternoon, at dinner. I only want to come home, Sally. To be with those I love, to wake each morning with nothing more important to occupy me than the progress of my garden, and the observation of the clouds.”

Don’t we all? thought Sally wearily. Don’t we all. She knew it was Patsy, Maria, his sister, and his granddaughter he was thinking about, when he said, those I love.

“There’s a lot of knights out there in the world,” she said after a time. “Enough to keep the windmills at bay. I’m glad you’ll be home.”

“And I,” he answered softly, “that you’ll be here to come back to.”

Sally’s mother gave her a long look when she joined her family, gathered in the candle-glow of the cabin steps. Little Tom clung to her skirts and wanted to know where she’d been, for it was the first time she hadn’t been at supper, or somewhere that he could find her, in the evening.

Jimmy watched her narrowly, but after supper Betty Hemings sent her sons on their way before Jimmy could corner Sally with questions. “Too many people in this family pokin’ into what don’t concern ’em,” she said.

What Betty Hemings didn’t know about other people trying to manipulate a woman’s relationship for their own profit, Sally reflected, could probably be written on the back of a button and still leave room there for the Lord’s Prayer.

All she said to Sally was, “You want me to tell Lam?”

It would be all over the quarters by midnight, thought Sally with a sigh, and up to the Big House with breakfast in the morning—unless Patsy’s maid Lacey thought twice about mentioning to her mistress who was tupping whom in that household.

“No.” She dipped the cups into the bucket of hot scrub-water on the hearth, mopped them briskly with the rag. Like other things in the Hemings household, they were finer than the gourds or hand-fashioned clay used by the field-hands: salt-glaze stoneware that had been the original dishes up at the Big House. “There’s too many people as it is, not saying what they need to say to the person they need to say it to.”

She tucked Little Tom into his low truckle-bed and told him a story about Mr. King Snake in the corncrib, and how he’d bit the Giant Hand that came busting into his house whilst he was taking a nap. The night was warm, but fall had definitely come to the mountain. When she went out to sit on the step again, there was only the crying of crickets in the woods, and the hoot of hunting owls.

Her body ached, between her thighs, from the unaccustomed movements of lovemaking, and she had a bruise on her shoulder from the bricks of the washhouse floor. A kind of languid peace filled her, as she pulled off her cap, shook out her hair, and combed it with the silver comb that she kept locked in her chest beneath the bed. Lam had said to her that afternoon that he was coming up tomorrow, with salt and coffee and sugar, and nail-rod iron for the new construction Jefferson planned. She would have to speak to him then.

Tell him there was no chance of her changing her mind, soon or ever.

You foolin’ away your chances, Jimmy had accused.

But which chances had she been fooling away?

And was she still?

She ran her hands through her long hair, curly and silky as a white woman’s, gathering it back into a wavy knot. I love you, Lam had said.

And Tom, as usual, nothing at all. To him words were weapons, and the palette with which he painted dreams.

And in any case words shifted their meanings, depending on the race of the speaker and the one to whom they were said. Does I need you really mean I need someone?

Was it his heart that needed her, or only his prick?

She knew what any woman on the place would have answered to that, yet in three years, there were easier solutions to that problem than the one he chose. Because she was a Hemings, and not, in his eyes, truly black? Because she was familiar, trusted, a friend since childhood—because he knew he could dominate her?

Because she had known him from her childhood, had seen everything that had gone into making him the man he was?

With Tom, one could only speculate—she wondered if Patsy had any clearer idea of her father’s heart than she had. And oddly, she felt a regret that they could not talk as they had when they were children. She would genuinely have liked to compare notes with the one other woman who knew him well.

But in love with him and out of love with him didn’t seem to matter to the deeper attachment of her heart, nor did her awareness of his faults. They were—and would always be—a part of one another’s lives, completely aside from whatever he might tell himself about his feelings for her, if he told himself anything at all.

He might simply tell himself—or his little friend Mr. Madison, who these days seemed closest to his heart—that a man needed an occasional “bout” with a woman for the sake of his health, and a clean, healthy country slave-woman was certainly preferable to whatever was available on the pavements of Philadelphia.

Yet in her heart she knew it was more than that. And she suspected that whatever her mother might say, Tom probably didn’t understand it any more than she did.

Light and sweet, above the crying of the crickets the whisper of a violin drifted down from the house, playing Boccherini in the dark.