The Condor's Head

by Ferdinand Mount

  TJ seemed to be reserving all the excitement for himself. But Wm bit his lip and took his instructions, slipping into his master’s chair at the bureau plat in the oval salon overlooking the garden, where the papers were all heaped up.

  The morning had brought low cloud from the north, and the cloud had settled in bruised and glowering bolsters over the city. It was one of those steamy days that made Paris in July so uncomfortable. William took off his blue swallowtail coat and sat in his canary waistcoat with his shirt cuffs turned back, and tried to immerse himself in the sluggish sea of paper around him. After an hour or so he heard the rattle of gunfire on the far side of the long garden, and he sent Vendôme down to make sure that the looters had not climbed over the wall again. Stray crescendos of shouting came to his ears and then swiftly diminuendoed again. It was a stifling afternoon. He got up to pour himself a glass of water, then he opened the door into the great antechamber hoping for a cooller current of air from the hall below.

  There was a scuttling noise like a mouse in the wainscoting and he saw the little hooped door into the vestiaire being closed, but carefully as though the person closing it wished to escape attention. He walked quickly to the door. It was not yet latched and he had only to push it.

  She looked at him with big scared eyes, her fingers still clutching the latch. ‘Oh, it’s so hot, ain’t it?’

  All she had on was the long pink dress he had seen her wearing around the house. He was very quick and this time she did not cry out. Later he fucked her again but slower. She still had her eyes shut but she was smiling. Then a third time, and then he wished he were dead.

  You could argue – and people did – about when exactly the old fortress could be said to have fallen. Was it when the white handkerchief was flown from the battlements, or when they poured in over the drawbridge? Anyway, give or take half an hour, it was at about the same time.

  VII

  Chargé

  AMONG THE SEA stores packed in stout boxes that were sent ahead to Havre de Grace for the voyage back to Chesapeake (if Mr Jefferson could find a boat so late in the season that called as far south) were: six pounds of macaroni, eighteen pounds of Parmesan cheese, a pound of sweet almonds, five pounds of dates, ten pounds of raisins, two bottles of vinegar, ten bottles of oil and four canisters of tea. To wash down the victuals during the voyage Mr Jefferson had consigned twenty-four bottles of Meursault, a dozen of Sauterne, and a dozen each of Rochegude and Frontignac. Another selection of fine wines and delicacies filled Hamper No.1 labelled straight for Monticello. Hampers Nos 30 and 31 were destined for the President and the Secretary of State, and contained an even more refined selection of wine, viz. a dozen Montrachet – the best white Burgundy in TJ’s view – a dozen non-sparkling champagne (which he hastened to assure Mr Secretary was the kind the French still preferred) plus the Rochegude and the Frontignac. All of them he boasted he had direct from the vignerons who made them and not from the merchants who always adulterated their wines even when they swore they hadn’t. For Mr Madison instead of wine there was one of the half-dozen busts of Admiral Paul Jones, which filled crates Nos 33–35 and came freshly carved from Monsieur Houdon’s assembly line. Box 24 contained two and a half cubic feet of books for the General-President, Box 28 contained ten cubic feet of ditto for Mr Franklin. Then there were thirteen trunks, cases, boots and portmanteaus stuffed with wearing apparel for the party. And there were the most bulky items, to wit, the phaeton and the chariot.

  But that was not the end of it. For Mr Jefferson’s luggage was not simply a collection of belongings. It was an orchard. No traveller in history had carried such a horticultural transplantation across so vast an ocean unless it were Sir Joseph Banks on his return from sailing with Captain James Cook. Mr Jefferson carried with him on the Clermont, two hundred and thirty tons, Captain Colley commanding (a ship fixed on after a good deal of havering, which had the disadvantage of putting in no nearer Paris than Cowes on the Isle of Wight, but it was late September and the other ships had sailed), the following shrubs and saplings inter alia: four melon apricots, an angelic fig, three sorts of rose bay, two cork oaks, buckthorn, pistachia terebinthus (which oozed a curious gum, much chewed by the natives), assorted mimosas, the double-blossomed peach, the globe buddleia, three Italian poplars, various other figs, and even such modest plants of the hedgerow as ivy and sweetbriar, for Mr Jefferson was no discriminator when it came to plants rather than wine.

  They stood, all three girls, by the coach steps in the little odd-shaped courtyard of the hotel. Patsy and Polly were wearing the dark-blue cloaks they had worn at the convent. Sally wore the old grey mantle in which Patsy had crossed the Atlantic the other way. All three of them were weeping, or trying not to.

  Patsy was the first to rush forward and kiss Wm on the cheek.

  Then Polly followed suit. ‘You must kiss Sally goodbye too,’ she said. ‘It isn’t fair if you do not, because she’s crying too.’

  So he went across to Sally and kissed her. His lips brushed against the tears on her warm cheek. It was the first time he had touched her in two months.

  She took his hand (they were half hidden from the others by the high coach wheels) and she clutched it fiercely.

  ‘Do not forget me,’ she said.

  She had put up a fight against going, but of course nobody could think why. Look, they said, James is going back home, and don’t you want to see your mama and all your folks, and anyway you came to look after Polly and Patsy and are you not fond of them? Yes, I am, mighty fond, she said mulishly, but I want to stay in Paris.

  ‘I wonder if someone has been stuffing her with notions of getting her freedom if she stays over here,’ Mr Jefferson said. ‘Alas, I fear it is a poor lookout for a young coloured girl on her own in Paris. Anyway, I have told them both that they can have it when they are twenty-one.’

  ‘Have you, sir? That was good of you,’ Wm said, somewhat taken aback. TJ was not a great liberator of his own slaves, despite his principles. Perhaps he was making an exception for the Hemingses because he thought them his late wife’s kin.

  ‘Or it may be,’ Mr Jefferson said, a rare mirthful gleam stealing into his watering blue eyes, ‘that Sally has grown sweet on you, William.’

  ‘I hardly think that likely, sir.’

  He had fabricated a mask of frigid indifference. At first, when they passed one another in the narrow passages around the top of the stairs (the hotel’s upper reaches were a warren of zigzags because of it being built on a corner wedge site), she would slip him a sly grin that pierced him so sharp he was hard put to maintain the distance he had fixed on. When he was sitting with Mr Jefferson in the big oval study and she brought in the hot chocolate in that fine silver urn that TJ himself had designed, he did not look up from his papers. But these precautions failed to keep her out of his mind: the way her strong brown legs began to move in time with his, the quick sobbing that overtook her and the sweetness of her languor afterwards, which was somehow different because she was still so shy. The thought of her beauty kept swimming through him as he was totting up the figures for the importation of rice through Lorient, which TJ was anxious to have settled before he left, being resolved to demonstrate that it was a better port for the purpose than Havre de Grace. Sally, Sally, he murmured to himself, as though repeating her name would somehow expel her from his thoughts.

  He could not, would not, become one of those hard-boiled Virginia squires who always kept the youngest prettiest slave in the house. How dared they prate of liberty and the rights of humanity when they were fucking the most fuckable fifteen-year-old on the plantation and then packing her off down to the sheds when they had had enough of her?

  Doing it here in Paris was no better, worse in fact, especially when he was the American nation’s unofficial representative on the Société des Amis des Noirs. Could he ever again sit in Madame de Tessé’s salon listening to those high-minded dukes gassing on about the dire conditions in Sainte Domingue or Haiti when all h
e was thinking about was Sally – and how she clenched him … why did it make him think of a tulip?

  ‘This figure, for the kingdom of Sardinia, it seems somewhat high.’

  ‘What, sir? I was distracted.’

  ‘The importation of rice from Sardinia, 41,363 quintals, I had not thought they could produce so much.’

  ‘It does seem high,’ said Wm, struggling to find his place.

  He managed the business, but he knew how cruel it was to her. He saw her lovely oval face with its serene moon-look tighten first into uncertainty and then into the certainty that he had rejected her.

  For several days she threw him piteous smiles. Then, as he passed the little hooped door on the way to change his clothes for dinner at Aunt Tessé’s, she came out and stood in front of him, four-square. ‘Will you not speak to me? What have I done wrong?’

  ‘It is I who have done wrong, Sally.’

  ‘I do not think so, sir, and if I do not—’

  ‘I cannot stop to explain now, I must go, I am late,’ he said, turning away hurriedly. But she just stood there as though she were modelling for a monument to sadness.

  He knew he had to do more to make matters plain. The next morning he found her leaning over the balustrade that surrounded the skylight from the hall below. For a moment he was seized by the terrible fear that she was about to climb over and throw herself down. But her staring seemed too listless and vacant for any action so violent. He stood beside her and looked down into the hall as though they were a couple of tourists gazing upon some celebrated view.

  ‘Sally, what I did to you was wrong and I am very sorry and it must not happen again.’

  ‘I did it too,’ she said, not without a flicker of pride.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘but I should not have initiated it.’

  ‘I don’t know about nishying but if we love each other, then it’s natural.’

  ‘Oh Sally, I do not think we can talk of love.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘For a start, you are so young.’

  ‘Jane Quilt weren’t above fifteen when she took up with Mr Baines and they been living together ever since, and my mother—’

  ‘I just do not think—’ he said harshly, interrupting, and there he stopped, for what did he think that was not calculating and selfish? That he could not become an ambassador if he had a black mistress? That he would be the scorn of liberal Paris if it became known that he had abused a slave?

  ‘Sally, we must agree to end our’ (our what? There was no word that covered both her tenderness and his coldness) ‘our – we just cannot, you know, it has to stop.’

  ‘But it only just started, sir.’

  ‘Don’t call me sir.’

  ‘What else am I to call you then?’

  ‘I fear I have nothing more to say, that must be the end of it,’ he said and he walked away.

  But every morning as he and Mr Jefferson set off to roam the streets, no matter how early they started, there she was, standing by the little hooped door, silent now, just looking at him with her huge eyes. Sometimes she would try a smile, but it was a smile that had no hope in it, nothing like that brimful loving smile she had once given him, full of all the pleasure in the world.

  Together he and his master saw all the sights of those tumultuous months. They watched the citizens, sixty thousand of them in every shape and size, the lucky ones with the muskets they had prised out of the Invalides and the Bastille, the others with pikes, scythes, pruning hooks, sticks, anything they could lay their hands on, following the King’s carriage all the way to the hôtel de ville, with Lafayette riding behind on his white horse, at once the King’s protector and the people’s general, his beaky nose sniffing the summer air, loving every minute. And standing on the steps of the town hall, they saw their friend Bailly the astronomer, now transformed into civic dignitary, stick the red-white-and-blue cockade into the King’s hat and prompt the poor stultified monarch with a few appropriate words, which of course he muffed. They saw the crowds scavenging the boulevards and the alleys, battering at the doors of bakeries shut against them because the terrified bakers had no more bread. They saw the Bastille being pulled down stone by stone, the most joyful demolition site in history. They checked the wilder totals given for the casualties of the tumults and reckoned that the corpses were to be tallied in dozens rather than in the rumoured thousands and tens of thousands. And then on top of all that they had to busy themselves with the many preparations for Mr Jefferson’s going on leave and Wm’s stepping into his shoes.

  Yet however late he came to his room, footsore if he had been out, for the streets were still unsafe for carriages, and his head abuzz with bills of lading and letters of credit if he had been all day in the office, there she would be, leaning over the banister as he came up the stairs or sitting at the door of her room, for all the world as if she were sheltering from the midday sun on the veranda at Monticello. At these evening encounters she would bob to him, as though she were a servant he hardly knew. He suspected some mockery in the curtsy, but could see no sign of it in her face. He slept badly and wondered whether she did too. He wondered also whether others in the household had any inkling, but their wing of the hotel was remote from the main part and he never ventured now into the kitchens where she spent much of the day with her brother and the girls.

  ‘You seem distracted, Will.’

  ‘There is much to do before you go, sir.’

  ‘I fear that there is. You will find it delightfully peaceful when we are gone. I am reluctant to leave Paris in such interesting times.’

  This was humbug, Wm thought. TJ was itching to go home and had been in a great fret until he had received his official congé. His concern with the progress of the revolution in French affairs had visibly ebbed. He turned his mind to other topics: the fusil muskets he had promised Mr Madison, the design for the new candlesticks to replace the stolen ones, Tom Paine’s ingenious design for an iron bridge to be erected in pre-cast segments. France had no further need of his counsel. TJ had in fact persuaded himself (and there was no greater master in the art of self-persuasion) that her affairs were now largely under control and no longer demanded his intimate supervision. He wrote to his correspondents in England and Geneva to tell them that ‘tranquillity is perfectly established at Paris and pretty generally so thro’ the whole kingdom’. He himself had slept as quietly through the whole commotion as ever he had in his life. He had the highest confidence that the National Assembly would use their power justly. Indeed, he would agree to be stoned as a false prophet if all did not end well in this country. This was but the first chapter of the history of European liberty.

  And he himself had played his part in it, had he not, a part no less brilliant than he had played in the revolution of his own country. It was he who had drafted the declaration that had grounded the new National Assembly and he who had touched up the second declaration that Lafayette presented only a couple of days before the Bastille was taken. Besides, any fool could see that the language and sentiments of it were as to nine-tenths filched from America’s own declaration of independence, and who was the author of that? In his spare moments he had also to say a good deal to Mr Madison on the terms of the new Bill of Rights that was to be tagged on to America’s constitution. So that made a round total of four declarations on two continents, each of which schoolchildren would be condemned to learn by heart for all eternity. Time enough to take a holiday.

  The girls were flitting around the back of the coach like a little flock of finches, trying to stuff some last articles into a yellow wooden trunk. Then they turned, or Patsy and Polly did, to run and greet their father who came through the grey doors of the hotel and across the yard with that inimitable shambling gait that gave the impression that he had not yet fixed on his final destination. The girls danced alongside him tugging at his long bony hands. Suddenly Wm had a plummeting feeling in his stomach that he would never see any of them again.

  ‘Well, William
, as you know, I find farewells painful. Let us comfort ourselves with the thought that we shall all meet again in April.’

  ‘Till April, sir.’

  They clasped hands. William wished he had the courage to embrace his master but he feared to encounter a repulse. Instead he looked into Mr Jefferson’s watering blue eyes with a long and loving gaze. Perhaps he had never done such a thing before, certainly not with such intensity. Virginia gentlemen did not as a rule stare at one another. At any rate he was startled by what he found. In the depths of those eyes there was a terrible coldness. Their blue was the blue of an iceberg in the Arctic Ocean.

  ‘Come on, Papa, come on.’

  Mr Jefferson hoisted his angular frame into the coach and slammed the door in that abrupt way he had with doors. The dull clop of hooves on the gravel, the jingling of the English harness that Lafayette so disapproved of, the slow scrunch of the carriage wheels. Hands waving at the window. Was that a light-brown hand among the others? Then they were lost in the bustle of the rue de Berri, and the courtyard was silent and empty.

  As he walked across the yard, Wm felt bereft, but he also had to admit to certain sensations of relief that he knew were not to his credit though he tried to give them decent covering. It was better for Sally that she should be away from him; he could bring her nothing but distress and he hoped that she would not take amiss the lacquered box containing ten louis d’or that he had given Polly to give her, on strict condition that she, Polly, swore not to tell a living soul of it. Even as he comforted his amour propre with these thoughts, other thoughts came back to him, thoughts of her long legs and the slow, slow – but he managed to swerve away from all that by concentrating his reflections on Mr Jefferson.

  The icy look in those blue eyes suddenly reminded him of another scene, a very recent one, which had greatly disquieted him at the time but had dropped out of his head with all the hubbub of TJ’s departure.

  Ten days before TJ had left Paris, Monsieur de Condorcet had invited Jefferson and Wm to a farewell dinner at the Mint, where he was now one of the two Inspectors General and enjoyed an apartment of heroic dimensions.