Patriot Hearts: A Novel of the Founding Mothers

SALLY

Monticello Plantation

Albemarle County, Virginia

Sunday, June 1, 1800

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

“Is it scarlet fever?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A preacher?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She didn’t think so.

This was something different.

Her hair prickled a little on her scalp.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I thought that was all finished last year.”

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

He made the motions of sorting through the books piled on the bed, but Sally could see his eyes were absent, his mind barely registering the titles, his thoughts bitter and far away.

On Mr. Adams? The friend with whom he’d worked and laughed and conversed? By whose Sedition Act Tom could very well be convicted as a traitor?

On the election in November, and his hopes to wrest control of the central government away from those who would make its rule negate the local right of each State to determine its own needs?

On the galling failure of France’s Revolution? He had been ill during the last months of the Terror in France, had barely glanced at the newspapers that spoke of bloody mob-rule and a corrupt Directorate. For three years after that, while he quietly watched the trees and the clouds on his mountaintop, the French had gulped one another down like Roman triumvirs until the last man standing had conspired to hand the country over to Bonaparte.

She remembered his face in the candlelight of the Hôtel Langeac: It is a glorious time to be alive.

Then he sighed, and shook himself out of his reverie. “Well, if they want to crush Callendar, they’ll find themselves publicly turning their backs upon the Constitution before the whole of the country. Richmond is as full as it can hold, of men from all over Virginia. Prominent men, men of property and power. If we cannot win, we can at least hold Hamilton and his party up for all to see, and force them to admit that their aim is to ignore the fundamental right of every man to say what he wishes, to print what his conscience dictates. With the election coming, it could not be better timed. I only regret that it’s Callendar who will suffer.”

“He’s dangerous,” cautioned Sally softly, and Tom looked surprised and a little hurt.

“Am I a despot, too, now, to go about distrusting my own supporters? Were I President, I would have to defend James Callendar’s Constitutional right to print about me whatever he chose. Whatever it might be,” he added more gently, smiling down into her eyes. “Mrs. Madison gave me your warning—it was you, was it not?—and I thank you for your concern for me. But Mr. Callendar, though the man is personally reprehensible, is a friend of Liberty. He will not turn against us.”

Sally heard in that phrase, friend of Liberty, the kind of self-evident magic that seemed to have such power over people’s minds, and knew better than to press the issue. In many ways, Tom had no sense at all.

“Patsy and Mr. Randolph will be here in my absence,” he went on. “Will you be all right?” Meaning, Is there anything in that area that I need to know about? Though there seldom was, and Sally was well aware that Tom didn’t really want to know.

“Thank you, yes,” she replied, as she always did.

Her sister Critta had recently said to her, with a touch of exasperation in her voice, Why don’t you just tell her you’re layin’ with Peter Carr instead of her daddy? That’s all she really wants to hear. Make your eyes all soft an’ ask, kind of breathless, “Miss Patsy, do you know when…when Mr. Carr gonna be back here next?” Critta had put on her most simpleminded expression and crooned the name of Tom’s nephew—the father of her own son and the source of innumerable trinkets and presents—with exaggerated adoration. Is that so difficult?

Sally felt her back-teeth clench at the memory. I may be a concubine, she thought, but I’m not a whore.

Instead she told Tom, “Please tell Mrs. Randolph that some of the children have come down with scarlet fever—”

Tom startled, eyes widening with concern.

“I think Bev may be sickening for it, but it doesn’t look to be bad just yet. I’m going to let Aunty Isabel know. I’ll write and let you know, how Bev goes on.”

She left him to his packing, and returned to her son, whose face was already beginning to show the flush of fever. Through the remainder of the day she had little thought to spare, either for Callendar, or for the election that had become the focus for Tom’s considerable energy for the past eighteen months, or for the curious, ambient tension that she could feel slowly coiling its way like a poisoned mist among the cabins that dotted Monticello’s hillside.

After dinner Tom slipped away from the house and came down to the quarters, to sit for a time beside Bev’s bed, holding his son’s hand and anxiously studying his face. When the children were well, Sally reflected, as she tied up bundles of herbs to dry, Tom treated them with the same friendly affection with which he treated all the children in the quarters. Plantation gossip being what it was, he could do nothing else. But Harriet’s death had shaken him, more than he would ever express. In his face tonight she saw his anxiety, and when he spoke to her—the soft-voiced commonplaces of treatment, of herbs and symptoms—she thought she heard sadness and guilt there as well.

They had been united as partners for a dozen years—as long as his marriage to Miss Patty. If the desperation of her first love for him had not survived the years, it had settled into an acceptance of him, and a deep-rooted affection.

He would never be other than he was. He would never understand the rage she’d felt, four years ago, when M’sieu Petit quietly informed her that Tom had mortgaged all his slaves to obtain money to rebuild the Big House along modern architectural principles: “I’ll be able to purchase the mortgages back within a few years, with profits from the new nail-factory,” Tom had assured her when she’d confronted him. “In any case I would not include you, or any of your family. It is only a business-man’s way of raising money. It’s done all the time.”

Did Patsy know her father had just promised her patrimony to someone else if he couldn’t pay his debts? If he broke his neck taking old Silveret over a fence some day on the mountain, Patsy and Maria would be left with nothing.

But Sally knew, that even without that mortgage, if he broke his neck some afternoon on the mountain, it would make little difference whether her family went to Tom Randolph or to some bank in Richmond. They’d all end up sold and scattered.

By the same token, Tom would never believe that Patsy knew that he was the father of Sally’s children. He would always need to know that he stood first in Patsy’s heart—as she stood first in his. And though he was aware of the many afternoons Tom Randolph spent drinking himself quarrelsome in the Eagle Tavern in Charlottesville, was aware of the young man’s black moods and mercurial temper, he persisted in thinking well of his son-in-law, or at least saying that he did.

He was who he was. He never said he loved her and probably, she reflected wryly, never even thought of their relationship in those terms. But she knew he needed her. As much as the physical desire that was still as warm between them as ever, was his need to know, when he was away, that she would be there when he returned to his home.

He needed to know that he was loved.

He kept even yet the slim bundle of his letters to her, that he’d written on his travels to Rotterdam and The Hague. Sometimes she’d find them slipped behind a clock or under a book, hidden when Patsy interrupted him. He treasured those memories still.

He rose now from where he sat at the side of the cot, went to clasp Sally’s hands briefly—briefly, because Young Tom was there, sitting beside the hearth-fire with a copy of the Richmond Enquirer angled to the glow. Even before their own son they kept a distance, lest talk go around that couldn’t be denied. Very softly he asked, “Shall I send Ursula or Isabel down to help you tonight? He doesn’t seem badly off—”

“It’s early days yet.”

“I shall leave it to your judgment, then, Sally. As we pass through Charlottesville tomorrow I’ll ask Dr. Burns to come see Bev and Mollie. Patsy will be sending me messages—please, you write me, too.”

As they stepped outside into the darkness he kissed her: “Get some sleep if you can. I’m afraid you’ll need it.” Then he strode away up the hill toward the Big House, too preoccupied by his thoughts—of Bev? Of Alexander Hamilton’s plots and machinations? Of James Callendar? Of the election?—to whistle or sing.

If he becomes President, thought Sally, he will be in Philadelphia more—or in that new Federal City on the Potomac. As Mr. Adams’s Vice President, he’d spent as little time in the capital as he could, and Patsy and Randolph had lived a good part of the time on their own plantation at Varina. If he becomes President, will they be back here as they used to, ten months of the year?

The thought, though annoying, didn’t bother her as it once had.

She had done as she’d meant to do: had guaranteed freedom for her children, which was more than her mother had been able to accomplish.

Surely, she thought as she turned back into the dim warm glow of her cabin, that should be enough.

Tom left as soon as it was light enough to see the road down the mountain. He’d knelt in his riding-clothes to kiss bright-haired Annie and burly Jeff, and Sam and Peter Carr hugged their mother breathless and pretended they hadn’t had two of the younger spinning-maids up to their room last night. Patsy held baby Cornelia in her arms, and stood alone half-hidden in the dark of the scaffolding that covered the front of the house; three-year-old Ellen was sickening for a cold, and had remained indoors. Tom Randolph seemed silent and awkward as his father-in-law shook his hand.

Then Tom swung into Silveret’s saddle—he never took the carriage when he could ride—and rode out at a frisky hand-gallop, raising his hat to his family. As he passed Sally, in the misty twilight where the road curved down the mountain, he touched the brim again, in salute.

Then he was gone.

Along Mulberry Row, and in the cabins that dotted the woods on the back-side of the mountain, all the cocks had commenced their second crowing. In less than an hour the carpenters would be starting their hammering, the white craftsmen Tom had hired commencing the more exacting labor of plastering the new rooms. The whole mountain smelled of the smoke of breakfast-fires. As Sally descended to her cabin she saw that the door of the joiner’s shed stood open.

Her first thought was Mr. Dinsmore’s up early…. Which was totally uncharacteristic of the young Irishman who’d come to do the fine carpentry within the house.

Her second, Why is there no lantern-light inside? was still half-formed in her head when a shadow appeared in the doorway, a huge hand reached out and caught her wrist. Sally’s hand was coming back to claw, her breath dragging into her lungs to scream, when she saw in the chilly dawn light that it was Lam Hawkin.

He swept her into the joiner’s shed with a violence that pulled her off her feet, shut the door, not with a kick, but with soundless swift care.

“I can’t stay.” His fingers were already pressed to her lips. “And I can’t be seen here—”

“You’re a free man, Lam.” Sally pushed his hand away. “Who you runnin’ from?”

“I don’t know. And what I tell you, you must swear to keep to yourself, for your own sake and your boys’. Or they’ll be after you, too, Sally, to keep you silent.”

In his eyes she saw everything: the lights bobbing through the darkness to the trees, the way the carpenters had looked at her yesterday. The strange black man disappearing fast in the direction of the woods.

Who? died on her lips and even her breath felt stilled for a moment, as if she’d been slammed against a wall.

Then she whispered, “Is it a revolt?”

Lam nodded.

And she remembered: It was what the French King had asked, when someone told him about the rioters seizing the Bastille. Is it a revolt? The messenger had replied, No, sire, a revolution.

A terrible complex shiver went through her, born of a thousand memories. She felt cold, as if, the grannies said, a goose had walked across her grave. A revolution.

She whispered, “Sam and Peter Carr were down in Richmond two days ago, they hadn’t heard—”

“It ain’t started yet. I don’t know when it will start. Soon, I think, before the tobacco harvest. It’s big, Sally, and it’s organized like an army, with scouts and spies and recruiters. And it’s spreadin’. They got lieutenants workin’ in secret, in Henrico County, an’ Hanover, an’ Caroline, an’ Louisa Counties. They got secret workshops makin’ bullets, hammerin’ plow-iron into pikes. They gonna take Richmond, they say, an’ make a kingdom of black men, where none are slaves to none. Just like Toussaint did in Saint-Domingue, nine years ago.”

“An’ kill the whites?” Sally remembered the torrent of panic that had swept Virginia, just after her own return from France, at the news that in the wake of the French Revolution, the slaves in the French sugar-island of Saint-Domingue—who outnumbered the whites on the island ten to one—had risen in revolt. They had slaughtered not only the whites, but the free colored caste of artisans, slaveholders, shopkeepers there. Two French fleets had been defeated there so far. The blacks were still free.

Lam’s eyes shifted. “Some of ’em. I hear there’s some they won’t, those they feel are on their side and will help.”

She felt the half-truth through her skin but said nothing. No man who owned slaves, no matter what he’d written about equality and freedom, would be considered on their side. Nor would his family.

“Sally, I took a chance comin’ here to warn you. Because I trust you. And I don’t want to see you hurt, or your boys hurt. I don’t know when it’ll happen, but when it does, I’ll come here, me an’ my girls.” Lam had married the year after Sally had returned to Tom, the cook-girl of a Charlottesville lawyer. He’d bought their two daughters as they were born, and had saved up about half the two hundred dollars it would take to free his wife, when she’d died last year. “We’ll go back into the mountains, until it all blows past, for better or for worse. But you gotta be ready to go. We may not have more’n a few minutes to spare. Food, money—all the money you can gather. We gonna need it. An’ you cannot tell, Sally. Not your family, not anyone. Swear to me that.”

He had risked his life, to come up here and tell her. If rebellion was being planned, the community of the unfree would—and could—strike swiftly at a potential talebearer. And no white sheriff would even investigate a black man’s unexplained death.

She whispered, “I swear.” Then: “But if you honestly think a rebellion’s going to succeed, you’re mad. You really think a—a kingdom of black men can stand here in Virginia? That any white will help ’em? The whites got militia, Lam. They got an army up north of ten thousand—”

“That’s exactly what people said when your Mr. Jefferson an’ his friends all spit in the face of the British,” Lam said harshly. “You don’t hear anyone goin’ around these days sayin’ how stupid that was.” He was silent for a moment. Then he asked, “Whose side you on, Sally?”

She pulled her arm sharply away from his grip. “I am on my children’s side.”

“And your children look white enough to pass for white boys. Or to be killed in mistake for ’em, if killin’ starts.”

Sally knew he spoke the truth. But for years she’d heard Tom talk of the Saint-Domingue rebellion, as he’d talk to her about almost anything that was on his mind at bedtime, in the world-within-a-world that was his room. He talked the way he made music, to clarify his mind, and from things he had said, it was perfectly clear to Sally that the only reason the blacks in Saint-Domingue were still free was because Saint-Domingue was an island, and the French were too busy fighting everyone in Europe to spare an invasion force of sufficient strength.

But in Saint-Domingue, the rebelling slaves had murdered white—and free colored—children along with adults.

“I’m not sayin’ these people is smart or dumb, Sally. And I’m not sayin’ what their chances are. I’m only sayin’ they’re comin’. It could be soon. It could be damn soon.”

Richmond is as full as it can hold, she heard Tom say, of men from all over Virginia. Prominent men, men of property and power….

If they was smart, thought Sally dizzily, NOW would be the time to strike. An attack now would buy ’em time.

And she felt in her heart the slow hot blaze of anger, at the thought of the men and women she’d known in Eppington and Williamsburg, who had been sold away from their families or seen their wives, their husbands, their children sold away.

Who had seen their daughters or their wives or their sisters raped or seduced—who lived daily with the knowledge that any white man could molest them with nothing more to fear than his neighbors saying, Tsk. Who lived hourly with the awareness of men sizing them up, as Tom Randolph and Peter Carr and Jack Eppes sized her up each time she walked past.

Serve them right.

For the unavoidable and unquestioned fact that one day the children Young Tom and Bev played with were all going to be sold away from their families and friends, sent to places where they knew no one; and when they were grown, they’d see their children taken away and sold in turn.

For the sheer unthinkability that a white man would or could feel genuine love for her—unthinkable even by the white man himself.

Serve them right, if it was a thousand times worse.

Outside the window, she heard Young Tom whistling as he came back from the kitchen. Like his father, he was always singing, and Tom had even begun, in his casual way, to teach him to play the fiddle. She said softly, “You better go. The men’ll be up at the Big House soon and they’ll see you if you stay. I swear I’ll be ready, and I swear I’ll tell no one. Thank you, Lam,” she added, as he clapped on his hat, and opened the shed door a crack to make sure the coast was clear. “More than I can say, thank you. You’re a good man.”

He brought the door shut again, regarded her in the gloom. “And you’re a good woman, Sally. I just wish you were as happy as you deserve to be.”

She returned a crooked smile. “We’re all as happy as we deserve to be, Lam. God bless you. I’ll see you soon.”

“That you will, girl.” His eyes grew hard. “That you will.”

Bev’s fever-flush had spread over his face and body. His throat, when she carried him to the cabin’s window to look, was fiercely inflamed. Young Tom was sitting on the edge of the bed with a dish of leftovers from the Big House breakfast, his sharp face worried: “He didn’t eat anything last night, Mama, and now he won’t have anything either.”

“There grits there, sugarbaby? Mix ’em up with a lot of milk, and pour some honey in. I bet he’ll take a little of that.”

Between them, Young Tom and Sally got the toddler to eat a little, and to drink the bitter willow-bark tea against the fever. When Young Tom had gone back up to the Big House, Sally carried her younger boy over to her mother’s cabin, where Betsie told her that Jenny’s Mollie was worse that morning, and Minerva’s youngest two were showing symptoms as well. Despite all this, and between Sally’s own tasks at the Big House of keeping Tom’s room in order and feeding his three mockingbirds in their cages, she made the time during that day to discreetly scout hiding-places and exit-routes in the woods that could be used that night, if necessary: hiding-places that would accommodate both herself and a three-year-old boy. Young Tom, she knew, was clever enough to escape on his own and rejoin them later.

She came back from one of these scouting expeditions to find both Jeff and Annie Randolph at Betty’s cabin, with another jug of milk pilfered from the kitchen, and some extra blankets. “We heard some of the pickaninnies were sick, ma’am,” explained Annie, glancing worriedly from Betty Hemings’s face to Sally’s, and back. Since Patsy couldn’t very well order her children to shun Sally without an explanation, the golden-haired nine-year-old and her brother had never been told to keep away from her: Like the white children of most plantations, they played with the slave-children and ran in and out of the cabins as cheerfully as if they lived there. “Will they be all right?”

“We’re praying so, sugarbaby,” replied Sally, and smiled down at the girl: Tom’s granddaughter, even if she was Patsy’s child. Only a year older than Maria had been, when Sally and she had set sail for France. Unlike Jeff, she hadn’t yet grown bossy around the slave-children; she would hold the babies with the same grave care that a few years ago she’d devoted to her dolls, practicing to be a mama herself.

Even Jeff seemed cowed in the presence of sickness. To Betty he murmured, “They gonna die?” and he sounded both scared and grieved. He added, stumbling a little on the words, “My baby sister got sick and died. The first Ellen, not Ellen now.” Jeff had been not quite three years old when that fragile little girl had succumbed.

As she watched Tom’s two oldest grandchildren dart back up the slope toward the brick mansion in its tangled cocoon of scaffolding, Sally seemed to hear in her mind the distant clamor of bells ringing the tocsin, of rough voices singing Ça Ira.

She shivered, although the afternoon was warm.

That night Sally dreamed of fire. Dreamed that Paris was burning, that the flames leaped over the customs-barrier and kindled the faubourgs beyond it, and the woods and fields beyond that, fields of tobacco and sugar. The blaze was spreading, and would soon consume the world. Sick with panic, she crouched in the shadow of a wall on the rue St.-Antoine watching the baying mob surge closer and closer, and in the lead walked a woman she knew was her grandmother, the proud black African woman who’d been raped by a sea-captain while on her way to the New World in chains. She carried a torch in one hand, and a pike in the other, and impaled on the pike was the head of Thomas Jefferson.

Sally woke with a gasp, lay in the darkness staring in the direction where she knew the window lay, half expecting to see the shutters limned by flame in the dark.

But the hot, thick night was still. The only sound she heard was the drumming of the cicadas, the skreek of the crickets, and Young Tom’s deep, even breath.

Nearly every slave conspiracy Sally had heard of had ended up betrayed by someone on the inside, some slave who’d gone running to his master with all the details. As a child Sally had sniffed with contempt at such craven treachery; and because she had loved Tom and Patsy and Polly and Miss Patty, it had never crossed her mind that one day vengeance might come knocking on their door.

Now she understood how people could be good and well-meaning—even shocked by the evils of the society of which they were a part—and still deserve retribution for the part they had played.

Now she understood how a man or woman could betray the freedom of all, for the sake of an oppressor who had been gentle and kind.

It is a glorious time to be alive, Tom had said in France, his eyes shining in the candlelight, but he’d still made preparations to get his daughters out of the bloody path of the juggernaut.

In the days that followed, Sally was careful to go about her business, and avoid any show that she was listening more carefully to half-heard conversations. She’d always kept money cached in the rafters of the cabin where Jimmy wasn’t likely to find it, money Tom gave her for little luxuries for her children, like Young Tom’s secondhand fiddle. Now she began to conceal food there as well.

In this she was aided by the fact that nothing at Monticello was quite normal during that time.

Bev’s sickness was soon seen to be mild: he cried and scratched, but he always seemed to know who and where he was. But in the Big House, Patsy’s daughter Ellen was very sick indeed.

Sally found herself plotting out routes of flight—plotting out hiding places—suitable not for one woman with a three-year-old, but two women with not only toddlers but a baby. For she understood, almost without conscious decision, that if she got Tom’s grandchildren to safety, she would have to spirit Patsy away as well.

It wasn’t just that Tom would expect nothing less of her.

When faced with the thought of rebelling slaves overrunning Monticello—coming up from Charlottesville or across the river from Edgehill, crazy as the men and women of Paris had been crazy—she simply could not leave Patsy to her own devices.

Any slaves who worked for Tom Randolph, Sally guessed, would be crazy with rage if a revolution sparked to life, and out for blood. Though Randolph was careful not to get a reputation in the neighborhood as a harsh master or a cruel one, he had qualities that were almost worse. He was careless with money and in debt—Tom had on several occasions had to lend his son-in-law money—and he was unpredictable.

Sally didn’t know a slave on Monticello who didn’t dread the day when Tom Randolph would become their owner.

As the hot June days of haying and corn-harvest advanced, Randolph came seldom to Monticello. His son Jeff, the only child in the Big House not sick, would sometimes sit on the dismantled pillars of the front porch for hours, waiting for him, and twice had to be stopped from going over to Edgehill, to see if he was there. Sally found herself worrying at the thought of that eight-year-old, son and grandson of slave-owners, walking by himself through the woods along the river’s edge.

It would serve them right, she told herself again.

And maybe it would.

She cached a length of rope at the back of the cupboard in the little girls’ nursery, knowing that if the house were to be set on fire, the narrow stairway—which Tom claimed was so modern and heat-saving and which every servant who had to carry things up and down it despised—would turn into a lethal chimney.

If it came to flight—if it came to a rebellion—the house, with walls and windows already breached by construction, would be no refuge. They might have only minutes to escape. And as she passed the door of the nursery in the darkness of the night, Sally would look through and see Patsy sitting quietly beside Cornelia’s cradle or little Ellen’s bed. And at the sight of her, she’d feel a sick despair.

Standing in the dark of the upstairs hall, Sally considered her old friend—her old enemy—in the soft glow of the single appleseed of light shed by the veilleuse on the nursery dressing-table. Clothed in her wrapper of rust-colored brocade, her red hair braided down her back, Patsy had never looked plainer, her long face lined with weariness and her mouth bracketed by gouges of temper and disappointment too long held in rigid check.

It was the face she never showed her father—never showed anyone. Like Tom, who had molded his daughter into the image of what he thought a woman should be, Patsy was determined to be unfailingly cheerful and polite to all.

She and Randolph had quarreled that morning, over yet another dunning letter from one of his creditors; his shouting could be heard down on Mulberry Row. He had slammed out of the house, ridden off like a madman leaving the overseers in charge of the harvest. He had not returned for dinner.

Now—and it was nearly midnight—Patsy looked as if she had a headache as savage as any that so frequently felled her father. As Sally watched, Patsy reached down to stroke the matted hair from Ellen’s forehead—as Sally herself had stroked Bev’s earlier that evening—and drew back her hand, lest she wake the child. Then her whole body shivered, shaking, as if she were being racked with silent, tearless sobs.

Quietly, Sally withdrew. She descended the narrow twist of stair with the practiced care of one who has studied for years to come and go undetected. She passed like a shadow from the house and down the hill, to her own cabin where Bev dozed fitfully alone, Young Tom having gone to his grandmother’s to sleep. Sally bent over her child, then returned to the hearth and gathered up the ingredients for the “headache tea” she so often made for Tom: catnip, betony, valerian, and rue, which he said the Indians had showed his father.

Well it isn’t forbidden for me to come into her Sacred Presence, reflected Sally.

The Big House was dark, save for the dim light visible in the nursery window. But as Sally stepped through Tom’s cabinet window, she heard Patsy’s voice downstairs in the high-ceilinged, half-finished room that would one day (Tom said) be the entry hall, low and reasonable as it always was….

“That isn’t what I said—”

“It’s what you thought! It’s what you goddam think every time you see me here! You’d be happy if I took my sorry carcass out of your life so you could turn my children over to Papa for good, like you did before!”

“You know you were ill—”

“I know more than you about it, woman! You wish I was ill! You wish I was goddam dead so you could come back here to Papa!”

From the doorway of Tom’s bedroom Sally could see their shadows in the light of a branch of candles, huge grotesque shapes looming over the half-plastered walls, the unfinished gallery. “That isn’t true—”

Randolph struck her, a backhand blow that knocked her to her knees. Though Patsy was a towering woman, her husband was built like an oak tree. “Don’t you goddam tell me what’s true, you sneaking bitch! All you wanted was to give your precious Papa grandchildren and you didn’t care whose spunk you made ’em with!” He stepped close to her and she cowered—

Patsy, thought Sally, shocked and sick. Patsy cowering.

Cowering like a woman who’s been beaten before.

He caught her by the hair so that she cried out, twisted her head to force her to look into his face. For a moment they remained frozen thus, a huge shadow and a crumpled pale shape. Then with a strangled groan he shoved her back against the wall, and disappeared into the passageway. Sally heard him collide with a wall, and then the crash of his body on the floor.

In the nursery, Cornelia and Ellen began to wail.

Patsy lay where she’d fallen, trembling with soundless sobs as she had before, but Sally knew in her bones that the only thing needed to complete the wretched agony of her humiliation, would be the knowledge that Sally had seen it.

The only dignity she had left was secrecy.

Like a swift shadow, Sally ascended the stair, set the tea-pot down on the nursery table, went to the cradle, and gathered Cornelia in her arms. “It’s all right, sugarbaby,” she murmured. “Nothing to be afraid of.” Holding the baby with one arm, she brushed Ellen’s cheek with the backs of her fingers.

“Mama,” Ellen whispered.

Grizzle the dog crept to Sally’s feet, glad that a human had come to take charge.

“Your mama be up soon, or your aunt Carr.” Not that Aunt Carr, who didn’t believe in getting involved in “unpleasantness,” would emerge from her room before morning.

On the other side of the little room Annie turned her face on her pillow, whispered, “What happened, Sally?”

“Your papa got mad at one of the grooms, that didn’t put his horse away right,” Sally replied. “That’s all, sweetheart.” She gently laid Cornelia back down, wrung out another rag and wiped the baby’s face with it. It was impossible to distinguish much about the rash in the nursery’s near-dark, but she thought Cornelia’s fever seemed less, no more than what Bev’s had been yesterday. The little girl had grown quiet with the touch of careful hands.

Tom’s granddaughters. Her own kin. And if they weren’t, thought Sally despairingly, could I really stand aside and watch even the children of total strangers killed, for what their parents did?

Ellen whimpered, “Mama,” again, and Sally said, “Your mama’s on her way, baby.” She thought she heard the creak of a footfall in the hall, and Grizzle raised her head and thumped her tail eagerly. But looking toward the door, Sally saw only darkness. It was ten minutes before Grizzle thumped her tail again, and this time Sally saw the moving fire-fly of a candle there, and a moment later, materializing in its glow, Patsy’s haggard face. She’d re-braided her hair and her eyes looked swollen, as if she’d been crying.

Sally got at once to her feet, curtseyed, said, “Ma’am,” and made to go. Patsy stepped in front of her, her face cold and hard as carved bone. Weary, as if Sally were one more rock in the load of rocks that she was forced to carry to her grave.

Yet she made her voice low and pleasant as she said, “Thank you, Sally. I appreciate your taking over.”

“Ma’am.” Sally curtseyed again, as if she’d never played with this person when they both were children; as if Patsy had never taught her to read, or let her into her father’s library in quest of books. Then, because of that unspoken past: “I made you some tea, ma’am; a tisane I should say, that’s supposed to be good for headaches.”

Patsy’s breath drew in, blew out in a sigh like the sigh of the dying. She whispered again, “Thank you,” in a voice that made it very clear that the tea was going to be poured out the window the minute Sally was out of the room.

“Ma’am,” said Sally quietly, “if you’d like, I’ll stay with them tonight, so you can get some sleep. I think Miss Cornelia’s fever’s less.”

Patsy turned immediately to feel her daughter’s forehead; Sally saw her wide, flat shoulders relax. “I think you’re right. Thank God.” She closed her eyes for an instant, though her hand pressed briefly to her mouth as if she would hide from Sally even its momentary tremor. “Thank you very much for your concern, Sally, but I shall be all right here.” And as she turned back her eyes said, Anything, rather than accept a favor from the hand of my father’s whore.

Sally wanted to shake her. Wanted to shout at her, Can’t you see that you and I can’t go on living this way?

He needs us both.

Why don’t you admit the truth? We’re both going to be in his life for a long time.

But Sally knew, as surely as she knew her own name, that if she said those words, even now alone in the deep of the night, Patsy would simply gaze at her with those chilly eyes and change the subject, exquisitely polite and stone-deaf.

Like her father, when there was something he didn’t want to hear.

Sally curtseyed again, and turned away with a sense of despair. She was the betrayer, the seductress. The succubus who had lured the father Patsy adored away from his true nature, into the disgrace of being a man who bedded his slaves.

And beyond that, Patsy could not see and would not look.

Sally thought, Dammit. Took a deep breath, and turned back in the doorway. “Miss Patsy?”

Patsy straightened up from Ellen’s bed, face stiff with distaste. “What is it now?”

“Miss Patsy.” Sally injected a note of what she hoped sounded like shyness into her voice. “You wouldn’t know whether—whether Mr. Peter is coming back with Mr. Jefferson, would you?”

As disgusted as she was at herself for this piece of play-acting, Sally was astonished to see that it worked exactly as Critta had said it would. For one moment Patsy regarded her with a startlement—an expression of enlightenment—that was almost comical. “Mr. Peter Carr?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Sally dropped her eyes, and for good measure twisted her apron a little in her hands. And as she lifted her gaze again to the other woman’s face, she saw there a look of such dawning relief that it struck her to the heart with a sense of shock and pain.

Did she truly need the illusion that much?

Had her spite, her cold talebearing, come from pain that desperate?

Critta had been right. The only thing in the world Patsy had wanted to hear was that her father was not the father of Sally’s children.

“I—I had no idea—”

Whether she simply didn’t want to think about the issue of Young Tom, or whether she clutched at the belief that Tom’s Casanova nephew had succeeded his uncle in Sally’s life, Sally didn’t know and never afterwards found out. But the frozen enmity in Patsy’s voice dissolved like mist in the sunlight.

She was once more, in her own eyes, the only woman in her father’s life, and Sally was shaken by a sense almost of shame as she saw how the reprieve from unhappiness altered the white woman’s face. It was like watching a woman drinking water, who has stumbled for days in the desert.

“Please don’t speak of it, ma’am. Not to Mr. Peter—please not to your father. Your father’s been so good to me.”

“Of course,” promised Patsy, with an eager sincerity that reminded Sally achingly of their vanished days of mutual innocence. For all her coldness and spite, Sally knew that when she gave her word about something, Patsy Randolph would keep it. “I thought—Of course. Never a word.” She drew a deep breath, as if bands of iron had snapped from off her chest for the first time in twelve years, and the freedom to breathe left her dizzy.

They stood in silence for a few moments in the darkened nursery, the breathing of Patsy’s children soft around them, the house and the mountain sunk in night as if at the bottom of the sea.

Tom returned a few days after that, fuming at the result of Callendar’s trial. Judge Chase had interrupted, disallowed, and overruled the journalist’s defense attorneys until all three of them had walked out of the courtroom in disgust. Callendar had not even been given a chance to speak. He had been convicted, heavily fined, and sentenced to prison for the duration of the Sedition Act’s existence, whether that should be nine months—until Adams was out of office—or nearly five years.

“Every newspaper in the country shall carry it.” Tom’s voice was both enraged and exultant. “Madison’s already writing for the papers in New York, in Philadelphia, in Charleston. No man who loves his country can ignore what’s being done now. When the vote comes, they must surely be driven from office—or the country itself will be destroyed!”

But destruction lay closer than the election, ran deeper than any Sedition Act. It was averted only through the inexplicable machinations of Fate.

On the night of the thirtieth of August, a thunderstorm of unprecedented violence inundated Richmond, swelling Virginia’s rivers to impassable floods and washing out bridges for miles. The following day, two Richmond slaves cracked—as Sally had sworn her own resolve would not crack—and went to their masters with the information that on the previous night, despite the downpour, a band of armed slaves had assembled at the rendezvous point, ready to attack under the command of a slave named Gabriel Prosser.

Because of the rain, Prosser had reset the date of the uprising—which comprised almost eleven hundred armed and organized rebel slaves—for the following night, the thirty-first.

But by the following night, Governor Monroe had militia patrols out sweeping the roads. Within days, almost thirty of the leaders had been taken.

“Did you know?” Tom asked.

Sally didn’t answer. The sharp golden half-light of autumn, slanting through the jalousies of the cabinet’s windows, laid bright slits across his sharp features. In his eyes Sally saw the shaken look of a man who has stood near a tree in a lightning-storm, only to see God’s hammer rend the living thing to pieces a yard from his elbow.

Was it the nearness of their escape that frightened him? she wondered. The fact that he and all his friends had barely avoided being overrun and slain, as the aristocrats of France had been murdered? The fact that while he and his lanky friend Governor Monroe and clever little Mr. Madison had all been scheming about the balance of local rule with the power of the Congress, black men whose labor they all took for granted had been making plans of their own?

Or was it the awareness that he, and they, and his daughters, and his friends’ families, all stood unmasked in the eyes of the country as the oppressors, the exact equivalent of those French aristocrats who had “brought it on themselves”?

Sally folded her hands and answered calmly, “No.”

His eyes met hers. I think you’re lying, Sally.

And hers replied, Better a liar than a coward, Tom.

Both knew that the words could never be said. That to speak them would end the friendship that, flawed as it was, was still a source of comfort to them both.

And Sally had known for a long time, that he would not and could not be other than he was, no matter what was said.

It was he who looked aside.

The rebel slave Gabriel Prosser was hanged on the tenth of October. Rumors went around the quarters for weeks beforehand, of slaveholders demanding that the forty or so men condemned with him be “made an example of” by mass executions, or burning alive. Tom Randolph’s cousin (and brother-in-law) John, newly elected to Congress, had written, The accused have exhibited a spirit, which must deluge the Southern country in blood: and many had demanded vengeance accordingly.

While tidying Tom’s cabinet, Sally found a letter from Governor Monroe, asking Tom’s advice. Pinned to it was a note containing Prosser’s reply to the question asked in court, of why he had conspired to revolt.

I have nothing more to offer than what General Washington would have had to offer, had he been taken by the British and put to trial by them. I have adventured, endeavoring to obtain the liberty of my countrymen, and am a witness to their cause.

After a little further search among the papers, Sally found Tom’s polygraph copy of his reply.

The world at large will forever condemn us if we indulge a principle of revenge, or go beyond absolute necessity. They cannot lose sight of the rights of the two parties, and of the unsuccessful one.

Later, Lam Hawkin told her that on Tom’s recommendation, ten of the accused had been reprieved, and their death sentence commuted to banishment.

Not a spectacular change of heart, Sally reflected. But like her decision to help Patsy and her children, what he could do without betraying his own. And more than one might expect, of a man who sought the Presidency, a month before the election in the South.