Patriot Hearts

by Barbara Hambly

  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’ M
r. 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….”