Jefferson

by Max Byrd

  And with that she brushed past him, with fingers like silky fire, and hurried back up the gravel path to greet Madame de Tessé.

  At nine o’clock, while the late spring twilight still hung on the tops of the trees, Short tethered his horse at a tavern off the main Paris road and began to walk across the fields.

  Madame de Tessé’s estate stood close to the road, walled to the outside for perhaps three-quarters of a mile, the length of her formal gardens, and then merely enclosed by a wood rail fence. Short stepped easily over it and set out for the willow grove. Once in the dark trees, with his poor eyesight he could trace the gravel paths with difficulty, sometimes, in the darkest passages, only by the scrape of his boots against stone. But twenty minutes later—still insanely early!—he climbed a little sunken ditch, caught a brief view of the distant chimneys of Chaville, now little more than spots of red, and came to a stop in front of the summer house.

  It had been built, he guessed, in someone’s idea of the style of a Chinese pagoda. Green dragons and vases painted on plaster walls. Four sharp horns of roof—bright enameled red even in the twilight—swooped skyward from the front double door, which was, as promised, completely unlocked. He called once, out of caution, then pushed the door open and entered. Chairs, tables, other indistinct articles of furniture ghostlike beneath long drooping dust covers of canvas. He poked his head into each of the two rooms. One held a chaise longue and several foil-lined cabinets that evidently served to keep food or drink. Dust was everywhere, rising in puffs at every step.

  He listened to his pulse, his heart. By the open door he squinted at his watch, unable to believe he was here, that either woman had really spoken. What would Jefferson say?

  Mentally, he kicked himself; he snapped the watch case shut and thrust it into his vest. What matter what Jefferson would say? He of little Maria Cosway, he of another man’s wife. Short paced to the first step of the pagoda. Another man’s wife. The elderly, benevolent, patriotic Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Jefferson’s friend. But Rosalie de La Rochefoucauld was the most beautiful creature Short had ever seen. In his overheated imagination he had already, a thousand times over, met her and confessed it.

  He closed his eyes and listened to the blood drum a tattoo in his ears. A crunch of gravel under leather.

  When he looked up, Rosalie had just emerged from the willows. She carried a whale-oil lamp and wore a silvery green cowl and a smile still more dazzling and un-shy than before.

  “I knew you would be early. You look at your watch more often than any man I know.”

  “Rosalie—”

  “Come inside, help me pull off these awful covers.” From her robe she produced a heavy bottle. “I’ve stolen some champagne from Madame’s supply, but I couldn’t manage a pair of glasses to drink with.”

  “I shall drink from your slipper,” Short vowed, beginning to believe his eyes; beginning to grin (he thought) from ear to ear like an idiot boy.

  “You will not. A ridiculous idea.” But Rosalie was smiling as well, and as she brushed past him this time, she paused, lifted her eyes, and ran the fingers of one hand lightly, this time like the touch of white petals, across his cheek. “So handsome,” she murmured.

  Inside the pagoda she deposited the lamp on a table and shook herself free of the silvery cowl and robe. “I have one hour. Madame de Tott is keeping watch, making my excuses if someone asks. But Madame de Tessé runs a very regular household.”

  “Madame de Tott,” Short marveled. He dug the heavy cork from the bottle with one seesawing thumb. Rosalie returned from the other room holding two small tumblers. “How Madame de Tott, of all people, could arrange this—”

  Rosalie had taken over everything. She poured the champagne into each of the glasses, put away the bottle, planted herself before him, inches away, her left hand on his bare wrist.

  “You don’t understand France, do you, chèr Guillaume? French women?”

  Short grinned helplessly. She rose on tiptoe and kissed him once, then drew him sideways toward the chaise longue. “Do you know about Madame de Tott and her blind lover?”

  Sinking, he shook his head more helplessly than before.

  “Oh, yes, behind the great walls, Us choses qui se passent. Charles Pougens. No—not yet. Listen. Charles Pougens. He was a poor young painter, and Madame de Tessé and the comte met him in Rome years ago, when he’d won a prize of some sort and they were traveling. Then he went blind and, since they have no children, Madame more or less adopted him and brought him to Paris.”

  “But—”

  “And Madame de Tott and Charles Pougens fell in love, of course, secretly, and wanted to marry.” Short had put down his champagne untasted and begun to kiss her shoulder, the soft V of her throat. She stirred, placed one finger across his lips, and finished her story. “And Madame de Tessé found out and forbade the union (he was so poor) and sent Pougens away, to Geneva they say.”

  “Who says?”

  “Our laundress has a brother who works in the stables here, and his wife knows the seamstress for Madame de Tott. They still correspond, but Madame de Tessé doesn’t know. The seamstress carries the letters in and out in her sewing bag, and the laundress’s brother posts them in Vaucresson.”

  “I had no idea,” Short said with utter truthfulness. Sarcastic Madame de Tott and her books of Homer, her irony, her little condescending lectures to Jefferson on the art of painting.

  “I can’t stay.” Rosalie’s face was disappearing into a veil of shadows. Outside the windows the grove of willows had begun to fade, twilight had metamorphosed into drifting French darkness.

  “No. Please.” He struggled to regain the initiative, to master her swiftly changing moods. “Since the day I saw you—since the day you came to the Hôtel de Langeac in your carriage.”

  “In my carriage with my husband.”

  At every moment she was different. Already there was a new distance in her last words. “Stay with me, Rosalie, Rosalie.”

  “I’m married, Guillaume.”

  “But you came here; tonight.”

  She framed his face between her hands and kissed him quickly. “You are so young; so blind too. Listen. Other women have lovers, but I’m not like them. I have a husband who lives for me alone. He cares for my mother, my grandmother, three aunts, all in the same house. We were married when I was sixteen. I come from a far less worthy family, he gives me safety, protection.”

  “You Love me,” Short said with an intensity he had no idea he possessed. “You do.”

  She was transformed, just as everything in France was transformed for him. The shy, delicate woman, too timid and sensitive even to meet his eyes in public, now leaned forward, lips parted, a breath of scent and champagne.

  “I only wanted to see you once and tell you,” she said after a long moment; pulling back. “While my husband’s alive, I cannot be unfaithful to him.”

  “Come with me, leave him.”

  I can’t.

  “Come to America.” Her skin glided under his touch. Her dress slipped from one shoulder.

  “No.”

  Short was trembling now from head to foot. She loved him, she was going away. He reached for her, rose in the chair, twisted the dress farther in a hurricane of rustling silk and crinoline.

  “I do love you,” she whispered, still pulling away, then suddenly returning. “Since the day I saw you first, even before.” Her voice was in his ear, on his throat. Her fingers were on the drawstring of his trousers. His heart thumped, stopped. “I can’t betray my husband … by the last favor.”

  “Rosalie, je t’adore, adore.”

  Her fingers pressed harder. She sighed once, moaned. Her head lowered toward his waist. Cool air first, then the crown of her black hair, white cheeks, tongue as soft and melting as honey.

  “He is the most acquisitive man I have ever known, surely.” Clérisseau stood at the window and motioned Short to hurry. At the other end of the room, already hurrying in six directions at once,
Short reached for his coat, Jefferson’s papers, squinted at his watch.

  “He has come back with even more things than he bought in England. Put down your letters and come look. Every servant in the quartier is carrying boxes.”

  From the window, still struggling himself into the coat, Short could peer down past Clérisseau’s shoulder and see Jefferson’s carriage stopped in front of the door. Servants lined both sides of the steps, from pavement to threshold, passing trunks and cases from hand to hand, and in their midst Jefferson, his back to the house, was directing James and Petit toward an auxiliary wagon, while all around the carriage and horses more servants and street urchins danced and chattered like magpies. It was the tenth of June, four o’clock in the afternoon, the precise day and hour that Jefferson had planned to return.

  “A human magnet,” Clérisseau murmured. “If he builds a new house to hold all that, I’ll design it and be rich.”

  In the downstairs hallway Short presented him with folders of accumulated correspondence; Clérisseau greeted him with an ironic bow and begged to inspect the injured wrist.

  “I shall never play the violin again.” Ruefully, Jefferson demonstrated the clawlike stiffness of his fingers. Short looked with shock at the withered muscles. “The waters at Aix were useless, worse than useless. But at least I write with tolerable ease now, I can hold the reins of a horse.”

  “I have brought you, personally, an invitation to the Duchesse de Baronne’s masquerade ball tonight,” Clérisseau told him. “You can’t plead fatigue—it’s to welcome you back: Everyone will be there, Lafayette, de Corny.” Without a glance at Short. “The noble Duc de La Rochefoucauld. You can wrap up your hand like an Egyptian mummy. You’ve been away so long, it will be like seeing a ghost.”

  “If I come, I might better dress as a smuggler,” Jefferson said. He was pressing through the busy clutter of bags and boxes being placed on the floor, leading them toward his study. From a leather portmanteau Petit had propped on a chair he seized three little packets, each the size of a brick, tightly wrapped in waxy blue paper of a foreign look.

  “Books?” Clérisseau guessed.

  “Seeds.” Jefferson crossed into the study and began to line the packets precisely along his desk blotter. “Rice seeds. It’s against the law to export them from Italy, on pain of death, the border guards told me. But I rode over into Lombardy and stuffed as many as I could in my pockets. I mean to send them to friends in South Carolina to plant there and improve our native stock.”

  “The Robin Hood of rice,” Clérisseau said, taking up his hat and making another ironic bow. “You steal from the poor and give to the free. I leave you larcenous gentlemen to cultivate your garden. For the afternoon only. Tonight, dear Jefferson—‘dear heart,’ as Lafayette has taken publicly to addressing his wife—I shall see you at the masquerade. I shall be disguised as ‘The Friend of Man.’ ”

  As he closed the door, Jefferson extracted a letter from one of the folders and held it up for Short to see. “My daughter Polly is coming,” he said. “I almost forgot. My sister wrote poste restante at Lyon. She embarked May first, bound for London—she may even have arrived by now. But she was so unwilling to come that they tricked her, poor girl; they all went aboard the ship, her cousins, too, in Philadelphia, as if taking a tour, and delayed and played until she fell asleep. Then they put her in bed and snuck away, and the ship was under sail before she awoke.”

  The procession of servants with parcels had ended at last. Still behind his desk, head down, Jefferson was now moving from one stack of letters to the next, singing softly as he went. Short attempted to make himself useful by drawing sheets of paper from already opened envelopes. Jefferson’s left hand sorted and squared; his clumsy right hand swept the heavier piles to one side.

  “I must arrange for transport from London to Paris, or go myself,” he said half to himself, half aloud. “She’s only nine. And answer these. And fall back into routine at once.” He looked up and sighed. “Travel exhausts me, William. I suppose I must go to the ball tonight, you too. But then I need to sit down and write a memorandum of my trip before I bury it under business. And I need, of course, to be brought up to date—the Assembly of Notables, Calonne’s performance, Lafayette—”

  “Along that line”—Short grinned—“I’ve prepared a pictorial summary.” He took two steps behind the desk and reached over Jefferson’s copy press to bring out a large rectangular cartoon that he had cut from the Journal de Paris and ordered to be mounted and framed. He tilted it for Jefferson to see: a monkey wearing an oversize crown and carrying a skillet addressed a barnyard of poultry, the Assembly of Notables. The monkey was saying cheerfully, My dear creatures, I have called you here to deliberate on the sauce in which you will be served.

  Jefferson smiled and put the print aside.

  “And Petit will want to make a household report,” Short added, hiding his disappointment at Jefferson’s reaction; nonreaction. “First, he seems to have dismissed half a dozen servants for thievery—he means to give you every detail. Second, James Hemings has been in another fight. This time with the Prince of Condé’s cook, who was giving him private lessons. The cook has a bandaged head and a black eye. James doesn’t seem to be damaged at all. He—”

  Jefferson surprised him by interrupting. “Have you set aside any letters from Mrs. Cosway?”

  After a moment’s hesitation Short crossed the room and reached into his own desk for the morocco-bound portfolio where he had placed Maria Cosway’s single letter. Jefferson took it without expression and dropped it into his left coat pocket.

  “So many days in a rolling carriage alone, so much time for reflection,” he said, walking toward the window. In the harsh afternoon light, as Short now saw him, his face was lined, his red hair faded to a sandy brown; Jefferson was what a learned friend of Short’s had once described as “prognathous,” protruding of jaw. Strained, weary, he looked every one of his forty-four years. “Tonight,” Jefferson said. His gaze drifted sideways again in the manner that made his political enemies call him evasive, and suddenly, without warning, Short felt a sensation of ice in his throat. “Tomorrow at the latest.…” Jefferson looked away. “Let me sit down with you, William, and have a serious talk about your future.”

  But the future had to wait on the present. The Duchesse de Baronne’s masquerade began according to fashion at eleven that night, in the ballroom and lighted gardens of her newly constructed hôtel on the rue de Varenne.

  “These are called golden ‘girandoles,’ ” said an enormous German woman dressed as a shepherdess. She pointed to the glittering star-shaped decorations attached everywhere to the walls. In the whirl of dancers and noise, Short bowed foolishly.

  “They’re only made of paper and wax,” the shepherdess told Jefferson. Like Short, he bowed. “But they catch the candlelight, don’t they, and make the room dance. You’re both foreigners.”

  “American.” Short was distracted, glum. He pinched the nose of his domino mask—at such affairs ladies always dressed, men were permitted to wear masks only; not for a moment had he and Jefferson considered a costume. The shepherdess playfully tapped his shoulder with her crook and fairly shouted over the music. “You’ve done your hair in the style we call ‘sleeping dogs.’ ” Short raised his fingers from his mask to his curled hair. “Very popular style, but too old for you.” Her breasts heaved, buttery islands bobbing in a sea of lace. “I believe in dressing young.”

  She had turned to Jefferson, whose dignity (even in a domino), Short observed, usually had that effect on women. Seizing his opportunity, Short moved away from the entrance, past the musicians, and toward the series of six great crystal punch bowls set out by the garden doors.

  Beneath an entire constellation of glittering girandoles he found Lafayette, unmistakable in his tiny black domino, blue silk coat, and elaborately embroidered vest, which showed on the left side an Indian carrying a bow, and on the right side (over his heart) Washington dressed in a ye
llow toga.

  “The Court’s chosen color this season,” he said, in a mood evidently as glum as Short’s, for once speaking French, “is yellow. Even the punch is yellow.” He held up his glass. “We go back and forth. When I returned in ’82 after the Battle of Yorktown, the new rage was white. A decree of the queen. Everybody wore white in every possible combination—before that, thanks to the birth of the royal heir, the color was yellow, ca-ca dauphin.” Unbelieving, Short mentally translated: baby-shit-yellow.

  “Where is Jefferson? Never mind.”

  In the shifting tide of the crowd Lafayette was replaced by an elderly man who also wore his curls in the sleeping dogs style. Together he and Short backed away slowly from the circle of dancers taking the floor. Short scanned the shepherdesses, princesses, milkmaids, houris before him. Clérisseau was chattering, the two de Cornys were dancing gaily. Rosalie was nowhere in sight—she had been nowhere in sight for him since the memorable night at Chaville exactly one month ago. Not a word, not a note.

  “I’m sixty-five years old,” the elderly man said emphatically; he gripped Short’s arm with an old man’s impatience and led him toward a quieter corner of the room. “I first entered society in 1735. Wit was the fashion then, did you know that? All the women thought they were witty, all the priests. Everybody wrote books, conversations became dissertations.” With one hand he pushed up his mask to rub his eyes. How could she ignore him now? Could she really be so pure, so devoted to her husband?

  “Next,” the old man persisted, “this was about the middle of the century, next came Science. Everybody took chemical courses, everybody kept a geometrician instead of a page. The last gasp was Mesmer. Mesmer and Buffon.” His fingers scraped lint from Short’s sleeve. “Today it’s politics. The Assembly of Numbskulls, ambassadors everywhere. All the women are political now, not witty. Last night Madame de Simiane talked for an hour on the question whether Virginian tobacco should be taxed.”

  “I’m Virginian.” It was all Short could think to say.