Her mind still on that July night twenty-one months ago—the legislatures of both Virginia and Kentucky had adopted resolutions declaring that the central government of the United States could not assume powers not specifically granted by the Constitution (such as arresting people for making rude comments about the President’s rather ample bottom)—Dolley felt an instant’s surge of panic at the sight. She rose in the carriage and called out, “Payne, no!” as the boy spurred his pony off into the gloom.
Anna, who had sat quietly at her side through most of the drive from Edgehill, looked up at her in surprise. “What’s wrong, dear? It just looks like company.”
A great deal of company, thought Dolley, her heart racing. And at an hour when everyone should have been indoors.
Jemmy stood waiting for her in the shadows of the porch. His sister Fanny was beside him, and with her her fiancé Dr. Rose: Both Jemmy and Fanny, Dolley saw at once, were clothed in black. “Who is it?” she demanded, as Jemmy stepped forward to hand her down from the carriage. “Not thy father—?”
Jemmy shook his head. “Francis,” he answered.
It took Dolley a moment to register who they knew named Francis. “Thy brother Francis?” Past his shoulder she could see through the door of the south parlor—the parlor of the Old Colonel’s section of the double house—a coffin resting on a black-draped table.
“He was driving back from Gordonsville yesterday evening,” said Jemmy. “His horse took fright at something just where the road goes through the woods near the old tobacco-barn.”
Dolley shuddered—having one’s horse bolt when pulling a vehicle was far more dangerous than when under saddle—but privately she wondered if brother Francis had been sober.
“I sent a man to you with word this morning—”
“We would have missed him, if he rode cross-country.” Dolley looked around her, glimpsing the figures hurrying about in the half-gloom: Jemmy’s sister Sarah Macon from Somerset Plantation, and several children of their neighbor, Tom Barbour, plus brother Will’s black valet and at least two servants she didn’t recognize. “Shall Susannah and Francis’s children stay here the night, then, for the funeral?”
Francis, two years younger than his brother Jemmy, had been a quarrelsome man, self-pitying and inclined to drink. There had been trouble between him and his father over the boundary of the land the Old Colonel had given him when he’d married, back before the War, and everyone in the family had taken sides. As a result, the only times Dolley had seen him had been at the Old Colonel’s New Year’s parties. No wonder it had taken her a moment to recognize his name.
But family was family. And in Virginia, family was all. So Dolley caught Payne—his grave face telling her that he’d already heard the news from the grooms—and made sure he knew he’d be sharing his attic room with several small boy cousins: “And if I hear one peep out of the lot of you, sirrah, I shall know who to send out to sleep in the barn.”
Payne laughed—since they both knew Dolley would no more have made good on the threat than she’d have thrown him down the well—and kissed her: “Will Aunt Patsy and Uncle Randolph be coming tomorrow, then? I can take Thundercloud and ride back with a message—”
Dolley suspected Payne’s offer had more to do with the drama of galloping a full-sized horse over hill and dale than it did with any real concern for Jefferson’s daughter.
“The messenger will have got there by this time.”
Everyone for five counties around would be coming for the funeral, Dolley knew, which meant a visit to the kitchen would be in order at once. No wonder the place had the air of a kicked anthill.
For several hours after that Dolley was on her feet, supervising preparations far into the night for what she knew would be an exceedingly long and trying day tomorrow. Starting early in the morning, Dolley knew the entire county would be on hand to condole them in their loss.
The women would bring pies and spoon bread, rolls and butter and thick pots of greens, but the sheer logistics of dinner and hospitality would outstrip those helpful contributions, not to speak of finding sleeping-space for fifty guests tomorrow night, along with their grooms, valets, and maids. Dolley consulted with Hannah the cook, counted up chickens in the runs, turkeys, ducks, eggs on hand and likely to be gathered at this season of the year, hams and sausages in the smokehouse, tea and coffee and sugarloaves, and calculated when the baking needed to be started for bread, beans, molasses pies. She drafted the plantation cooper and carpenter to the job of carrying additional water and wood, made sure Joe in the stables would have more helpers than usual to deal with the guests’ horses, ascertained that there were sheets, blankets, and pallets clean, aired, and ready to be laid down everywhere in the house there was room for them at the end of the day tomorrow. She made lists on her ivory housekeeping tablets and ticked them off in pencil: money for the preacher. Letter to Jefferson. Lend Buster to Susannah—her new-widowed sister-in-law would certainly need the extra help.
She tried not to reflect that it was characteristic of Francis to die in the height of the tobacco-planting season, when no one had help to spare.
Between all that she slipped back into the house and up the stairs to the guest-room, to make sure her sister-in-law was comfortable, and sat talking quietly until the widow had cried herself out, and whispered she thought she could sleep now. Dolley felt again the ache of grief for poor tiny Willie, like a heated nail driven into her soul.
And not for Willie alone. For her oldest brother Walter, lost at sea the year the War ended. For her brothers William and Isaac, both dead just after her marriage to Jemmy. No wonder she treasured Payne so!
The kitchen was in turmoil, when she stopped there to heat cocoa for old Mother Madison. Whatever Francis’s peccadilloes, the old lady had still lost a son. Dolley entered her mother-in-law’s little parlor to find Mother Madison dozing in her chair beside the fire, a shawl around her knees and another laid over her like a blanket. Huddled in her chair, she looked more like the withered mummy of a child than a living woman.
As silently as she could, Dolley set the pewter chocolate-pot where it would stay warm by the heat of the hearth. From behind the Old Colonel’s closed door she could hear the murmur of the old man’s voice, hoarse and strong for all his years.
As soon as whoever was with him should leave, she decided, she would gently wake her mother-in-law and help her to bed. On her way in she’d heard the little wall-clock in the hall strike, and knew it was close to midnight. The big brick house was growing still at last.
From the corner of the desk she took a battered copy of A New System of Agriculture, or, A Speedy Way to Grow Rich, and concentrated her mind on the four-course system and Tull’s Drill, and the advantages of rape-seed cakes over pigeon-dung as a fertilizer. On the other side of the door the Old Colonel’s voice droned on. Words rose above the murmur like fragments of rock above a churning sea: “—have the lot of them on my hands as well as Ambrose’s lands now—” “—put you in charge—” (He must be talking to Jemmy, she thought.) “You’re the only one who knows how to work, the only one who knows how much work it takes—”
As the Old Colonel had grown feebler, his proud spirit had grown more autocratic, and his hold on the acres that had been his since his father’s death, when he himself was a boy of nine, more unyielding. The Virginia Piedmont was his world, the only world he cared about; his neighbors, his family, and his slaves, the only people who mattered to him.
The words “debt” and “damned stupid overseers” cut in, over the softer murmur of Jemmy’s replies: “Won’t see it fooled away like that idiot Randolph’s—”
Jemmy must have made some further protestation, because the old man suddenly shouted, “Damn it, boy, you owe me!”
Dolley’s glance shot quickly to her mother-in-law, but the old woman did not stir.
“And you owe your family! Your brother Will’s as poor a farmer as you could find in this county! I need you, more than Tom Jefferson
or your damn Congress does! This land needs you! What gives you the right to turn your back on us?”
I should leave, thought Dolley. This isn’t my business.
“Get out, then! Go to your damned Philadelphia, if that’s what matters to you. But you have your head on wrong way round, boy! And your heart as well.”
“Father—”
“The world crawls with politicos, Jemmy, like meat with maggots. And every one of ’em will put you in the street next week, if they take a dislike to the cut of your coat, without a word of thanks for all you’ve given to them. It’s only family that matters, Son. Family and the land. And if you believe different, for all those books you read, you’re the damnedest fool in Christendom and I pity you from the bottom of my heart.”
“It isn’t that Father doesn’t understand,” said Jemmy quietly, when at last he and Dolley were together in their bedroom, and the door was shut upon the world. He unlaced her—Sukey having long since been sent to bed—and sat on the bed behind her, to brush out her hair. The fire whispered in the grate. Outside the window, the mountain silence lay oceans deep.
“He does understand,” Jemmy told her. “He’s been sheriff and magistrate in this county, has watched Virginia go through war and revolution. He knows perfectly well that those who would make a despotism of our country must be stopped. He simply doesn’t think it’s more important than keeping Montpelier running as well as it’s always run.”
“No, and I understand his point.” Dolley rose, and went to the dresser to pour water from ewer to basin, to wash from her face the dust of the road that afternoon. She had not, she realized, even changed her dress, much less had anything resembling supper. “Even had he not been—been pushed to reflect upon his mortality, by the death of a son. He hath seen the way people behave, in politics. In truth I can’t even completely blame Mr. Adams, for wanting to make it illegal to call him names in the press when he’s doing what he feels to be his best.”
She was silent for a moment, recalling the peppery New Englander who’d come to one of her dinners back in Philadelphia: the towering erudition and the kindly questions asked about Payne and her mother. “Will Jefferson go against Mr. Adams again, for the Presidency?” she asked. “For if he does—I was told something today that disquieted me very much.”
Jemmy listened gravely to Dolley’s account of what she’d heard that morning beside Patsy Randolph’s garden gate. When she had finished he said, “Right now Callendar has a bigger target for his spleen. But he hates injustice more than he hates the mighty. It may be he is gathering material to blackmail Tom with—and certainly we must write and warn Tom at once. But it may also be that he gathers it to confront him with what he perceives as hypocrisy.”
Dolley opened her mouth to say, And is it not hypocrisy?
Is accepting from thee the gift of a woman as a wedding-present? Is keeping such a woman, so as not to offend thy dear good parents or upset thy political standing among thy neighbors?
How long would it be, she wondered, before Payne began asking for a slave of his own?
Tom Jefferson is right, when he speaks of slavery as corrupting all it touches. And she asked herself, not for the first time, if she had not done Payne a terrible disservice, in marrying a slaveholder. In bringing her son here to Virginia to grow up in an atmosphere that she sensed was dangerous, even to those who meant well.
Yet from the first evening she’d spent in Jemmy’s company she could conceive of living with no one else.
The Great Little Madison, tired and shivering in his scuffed brown velvet wrapper, as he always shivered when he was tired. His long white hair hanging to his shoulders, he paced to the window, where the white rainbow of stars burned above the trees.
“Tom must run for President, Dolley,” said Jemmy wearily. “He is the only one with the stature for it. He is the one whose name everyone knows.”
Just as everyone knew Washington’s name, thirteen years before, Dolley thought. When the country was falling apart and someone had to be found to hold up as a beacon of personal loyalty, to draw men’s approval to the Constitution.
Poor Martha. She recalled her friend’s reserve when she and Jemmy had driven down to Mount Vernon only a few months ago, on a visit of condolence after the old General’s death. Martha understood—and had known how her husband loved and respected Jemmy’s judgment. But despite Martha’s exquisite manners, the strain had shown through.
“Tom must run against John Adams, and he must win.” In the fire’s sinking glow Jemmy’s pale, wrinkled face was as intent as Dolley had ever seen it. “They will eviscerate the Constitution—Hamilton, and the men around him who think that freedom of speech applies only to speech they deem appropriate, and freedom of ideas only to what they consider proper and safe. They have already begun the process.
“Hamilton—and the bankers and merchants who would make up his court—would have this country be like the other nations of Europe, nations ruled by the ‘right sort of men,’ who are ‘right’ because they’re like themselves. But this is a country that isn’t like the nations of Europe, and has never been. It isn’t despotism only that I fear, Dolley. I fear the dissolution of the Union that will inevitably follow. Men like my father—and Jefferson, if you put a pistol to his head—would choose Liberty over unity. And no single state is strong enough to withstand conquest, by England from Canada or France from the Caribbean or Spain from Louisiana and Mexico. We were lucky to have won through the first time.
“This country is more fragile than men think, my beloved. And both its strength and its weakness lie in the hearts of its citizens. Jefferson must win. And if he wins, it is you and I who must go with him—not to Philadelphia, but to this new capital they’ve built—to make certain that the government does not fall victim to a clique of the wealthy again.”
His hands closed over hers, but his gaze turned back to the window, and to the mountain night beyond. In the profound stillness, a hunting owl hooted in the woods, where even in darkness the dogwood shone white, like drifts of snow.
Within a squirrel’s jump of Heaven.
A retirement I dote on, Jefferson had described his mountaintop world, living like an antediluvian patriarch among my children and grandchildren, and tilling my soil. I cherish tranquility….
And little enough he hath had lately of that, Dolley reflected, recalling the things the newspapers had called him. It crossed her mind to hope that Sally took good care of him.
“I had thought I could finish, and come home when Father needed me,” Jemmy said. “I see now that isn’t true. Maybe none of us can finish, ever.”
“Nonsense.” Dolley tightened her grip on his hand, which was smaller than her own, and smiled up into his eyes. “If Mr. Jefferson is correct, and the genius of humankind doth fling forth the truth in its consensus, then the coming generation shall engender minds every bit as great as his or thine. They will take the load of the sky from off thy shoulders, when it shall be time to do so.”
But her heart lifted at the thought of returning to the center of government again, wherever that center would be.
Jemmy chuckled. “Then let us hold up the sky for them, my darling, til they’re grown.”
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 chi
ldren, 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.
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