The Condor's Head

by Ferdinand Mount

  ‘An accident, how dreadful, what sort of accident?’

  ‘An accident that no doctor can cure, for it is an accident of the heart.’

  ‘You mean, it is a new mistress, please do not say so, Addie, it cannot be, he was so loving when he left for the front.’

  Rosalie watched, scarcely able to hide her astonishment as Madame Bonaparte greedily lapped up the gloomy runes. Adelaide (whom she had previously thought rather commonplace) looked so menacing as her bent little body twisted from the cards to Josephine and back again, piling on the dismal prognostications. How could people believe such stuff? What must the Consul think? For all his vulgarity, he was a man of the Enlightenment.

  Yet she could not help liking Josephine and she felt that to be part of this ramshackle entourage might be a distraction that no watering place could match.

  ‘Oh yes, my dear, Addie mentioned something of the sort and it would be so nice to see more of you. I tell you what, would you care to be my Mistress of the Wardrobe? This whole place is such a mess and my maids are dear girls but quite hopeless and I have so many new gowns ordered for when the General, I mean the Consul, returns; he never likes to see me in the same dress twice. Oh, look at that wretched dog, I can’t imagine why Roger thought he was house-trained. Roger, where’s the coffee, we are dying of thirst, and do bring a cloth when you come.’

  Well, it would not be like discussing philosophy with Condorcet and Jefferson, but it would be a breath of life.

  He stepped out of the heat of the August afternoon. It was cool in the passage. He paused to look at himself in the long oval-topped mirror that TJ had brought back from the Hôtel de Langeac. His hair had flopped across his face after the weary ride over from Richmond. He smoothed it back and straightened his white stock. A few grey strands around the ears, perhaps a little plumper in the cheeks, but otherwise he thought the seventeen years since he was last at Monticello had not done too much damage.

  The third President of the United States was sitting out on the terrace in a lounging chair of his own devising. He was wearing a straw hat, which he threw off with unfeigned joy as he caught sight of Wm coming through the open French windows.

  ‘Oh, my dear boy, how long I have waited for this moment.’

  No, they were not to be separated, not by wide oceans nor by differences of opinion that were wider yet. It was – how long? – thirteen years since they had last set eyes on each other and their letters had become sparse and reproachful. Yet their clumsy embrace, like the clash of turtles mating, had nothing but love in it.

  ‘And she has not come after all, your friend?’ TJ enquired. Even now he could not quite manage to refer to her by name.

  ‘Not on this visit. I thought it best to confine this trip to business, but I hope to spy out the land where we may settle together. She sends her best regards to you and cannot contain her impatience to see you again.’ How fluently he lied now, as fluently as he had when he told her that this temporary separation would only strengthen their love. Anyway, with one part of his mind he still half believed it himself.

  ‘Well, well, I am sure you could build her a fine villino out at Indian Camp. Or if that site should not please her, I am reliably informed that you could sell it tomorrow for double what you paid.’

  ‘I am deeply troubled that you should have had to expend so much time on my poor affairs when you have a whole nation to attend to and my prime purpose now is to relieve you of those cares. I cannot tell you how grateful I am.’

  ‘Well, that is good of you, sir. I confess that the burden of them has come to weigh on me since I have been dragged back into the public arena. I only hope that you will find that I have been a tolerable steward.’

  ‘Oh, my dear sir, you may be sure that I shall never forget what you have done for me.’

  Which was true enough, though not entirely in the amiable sense that his tone conveyed. For it turned out that TJ had made a pretty fair tangle of Wm’s affairs. He had informally lent himself nine thousand dollars from Wm’s account, which money he had invested in two of his admirable projects – the nail factory at Monticello and the flour mill out at Milton – but the third President was now forced to confess that he had miscalculated the profits, though he claimed to keep such exact accounts. Totting up the whole ledger, including accumulated interest, it was clear that he now owed Wm fifteen thousand dollars and there was nowhere near enough coming in to pay off the loan. One of the farms had been idle for seven years for want of tenants and the Shadwell property was leased out in such small units that the tenants could barely feed themselves, let alone keep up with the rent.

  Yet how sweet the prospect was from the veranda, with the newly planted vines and orchards slipping away down the hill and the tobacco fields beyond, and then the blue hills. The tribulations of Mammon had left no mark on the President’s long face. To Wm he looked just as when he had first seen him thirty years earlier. The God in whom he only half believed had dowered him with a serenity that was certainly not to be shaken by a few financial hiccoughs, let alone by the unsavoury effluvia of politics, that black art for which TJ had such a surprising inclination, being a dab hand at the kind of intriguing and horse-trading that you might have thought beneath him.

  ‘You will stop a few days, will you not? I have Lee and Pinckney and a few of the other fellows coming over. It will be good for you to pick up the threads.’

  ‘I would like nothing better,’ Wm said firmly, ‘but I fear I must take ship for New York to meet my bankers. I have a passage booked out of Richmond tomorrow.’

  ‘That is very sad. I shall take it greatly amiss if you do not come back immediately and take a journey with me to see all the improvements that are going forward at Poplar Forest. Besides, you must greet all our friends from Paris, Polly and Patsy of course, and Petit, who has settled down splendidly over here, and James who is now in my poor judgement the best cook in Virginia, and then you will remember little Sally who is little no more and has become a most admirable mère de famille.’

  William could scarcely trust himself to speak, he was blushing red enough as it was, but if he did not say something he knew that TJ in his remorseless rambling way would continue to give news of Sally’s progress, which was the last thing on earth he wanted. He had planned that his visit should be short to the point of abruptness, so as to reduce the chances of having to see her. So he said now in a rushing effusive fashion, which he feared must sound as false to the President as it did to himself, ‘There is nothing I look forward to more earnestly than to see them all again, but now, I know it is unmannerly and the pleasure of seeing you again, sir, I cannot say how profoundly I feel …’

  ‘Nor can I, my dear William, I have missed you greatly and I look forward to our next meeting with the greatest empressement.’

  Wm could not say afterwards how he managed to take his leave, he retained only the most blurred recollection of the President waving him off with his straw hat as he made his escape through the French windows.

  As he stumbled along the brick path towards the stables where his hired horse was being fed and watered, he passed the slave quarters that Mr Jefferson had just rebuilt in brick of a pleasant mellow tint. Two or three boys were tossing stones at each other and looked up at him curiously as he passed. By the last dwelling there was a brick well-head with an iron hoop for the drawing rope. Two women were talking there, one leaning against the hoop, making a dreamy gesture with her hand. Their faces were turned away from him. But something about the gesture – no, surely that was fanciful, after thirteen years you could not recognise someone by a gesture.

  Then the woman who had made the dreamy gesture called out to the boys and they ambled across as boys do when their mother calls. The taller boy must have been eleven or twelve by the look of him.

  Wm visited Monticello once or twice more but always on business and for the briefest possible period. That winter he spent in New York City. He took the opportunity to refit his wardrobe for his
new life. He had Rich and Disbrow make him breeches of black Dutch cashmere, a waistcoat of striped Florentine silk and flannel drawers for the cold weather. The next year he moved down to Philadelphia to take up residence in the St Francis Hotel. He had his tailor there make him a pair of black cashmere pantaloons (the coming thing), a French napped coat and a velvet surtout. He was becoming a financier.

  He reckoned that on his return he possessed a total of thirty-nine thousand dollars in liquid funds in the United States, all held by Daniel Ludlow, Van Staphorst’s man in New York. Then Mr Jefferson had invested nearly forty-seven thousand dollars for him, mainly in US bonds, which were cheap just then because the Peace of Amiens had forced the wartime speculators to sell up. Then there were the thirty-three shares he held in the James River Canal Company, worth a cool ten thou, as they said in New York. Not a bad haul but one that became a good deal larger when Wm started reinvesting it. He took four hundred shares in the Manhattan Company Bank and another tranche in the Bank of Pennsylvania. Most of the rest he put into New York real estate at seven per cent, which he fancied would provide the best security if the United States became embroiled in Napoleon’s wars and destroyed its funds. He became known as a long-headed sort, ‘a warm man’, well launched on the way to becoming that once unimaginable being, a millionary, or as they were beginning to call it now ‘millionaire’, which sounded more expansive yet with that swaggering final ‘aire’.

  And did he think of her? Yes he did, every day. He took the cherrywood box on his business trips and on lonely nights in grubby upstate inns he would take out her letters and read them with meticulous care as though he feared he had missed something. He thought of her too as he was being paddled in a canoe across one of the Finger Lakes to inspect a stretch of timber that he was interested in. The drops of water cascading from the paddle as it came out of the water brought back that first day on the lake at Versailles when he could not believe that she was the Duke’s wife and had mistaken poor Madame d’Astorg for the Duchess.

  Then, when the native guide was showing him the stacks of timber that had already been felled, the sawdust and the fresh scars on the logs reminded him of their walks up in the hazelwoods at La Roche-Guyon and the time when she had accused him of playing the simple woodman.

  He looked away from the stacked timber to the standing trees stretching over the hillside. It was cool, almost chilly in their shadow, though the sky overhead was a deep blue-violet. His eyes ached following the bare trunks upwards to the firmament. How mean and insignificant they were, this little group – himself, the guide and the agent – haggling about what price these noble sentinels would fetch after they had been cut down and trimmed and sledded over the pass and floated down the river to some depot far off in Canada. What right had they, in preference to all other species in the universe, to expect to enjoy some sort of perpetual happiness?

  Too much was asked of love. It could not always be bright and all-consuming. Love wore on, as even the best of days did, and the most you had a right to was the memory of how fresh the dawn had been. As for happiness, perhaps that was not the same thing at all. Nobody could live for ever at the peak. Happiness was what you found when you came lower down into the trees – a cooler, quieter place where a man could breathe. Is that what Mr J had meant by the pursuit of happiness? But then he remembered that same day at Versailles when the third-President-to-be had seemed a little foggy about exactly what he had meant.

  ‘They are asking three thousand dollars including the island. That seems a bit steep to me. I’d better have Daniel’s agent do a proper valuation. He is a fine judge of timber.’

  He went to visit his sister Jenny in Lexington, Kentucky, and told her that he still meant to marry Rosalie. Jenny was the one in the family he had always liked best and he did not wish to disappoint her. She wanted to see him happy and settled as she herself was and she was indignant that anyone should be so heartless as to refuse to marry her charming brother. She fussed over his clothes because he had no woman to look after them. He had put on weight and she let out the seam of his favourite cream-and-gold waistcoat that Rosalie had embroidered for him. Rembrandt Peale painted him wearing it, and when the portrait was finished Wm gave it to Jenny as a surprise present because she had been kind to him in his solitude.

  ‘Oh, it is so like. What’s that in the background?’

  ‘It’s the temple of Paestum, Jenny. I saw it when I went to Naples with Johnny Rutledge.’

  ‘I think it would have been better if he had painted that chateau, what’s its name, that she came into, you know, the one in the Auvergne.’

  ‘It would be rather presumptuous to put it in a portrait of me, it’s scarcely my property.’

  ‘Well, it surely ought to be. I don’t know who she thinks she is, keeping you on a string like that all these years.’

  ‘Jenny, to me Rosalie is everything that’s good and clever.’

  ‘Well, she could prove it by making you a good old-fashioned wife.’

  ‘One day I’m sure she will,’ he answered weakly.

  ‘One day,’ she snorted. ‘Listen here, William Short, if you really are going back to her, nothing will reconcile me to her but she marries you the day you step off the boat in Paris.’

  ‘Boats don’t go up to Paris, sister,’ he said.

  All the same, he began to convince himself that it might still be possible. They would each of them have tasted solitude and, busy as he made himself, he had to confess that the taste of it could sometimes be bitter. When he came back to his hotel and pulled off his boots in his first-floor room with its view over the park, he began to muse on their days together driving over the stony tracks of the Auvergne or reading in her little island garden at La Roche-Guyon or sitting in the early evening by the pool beyond the parterre at the rue de Seine, and he started to imagine that all these things were part of his future as well as of his past. How could such sweet days not come again?

  This hope flickered and faded again to dwindle into the faintest ghost of a chance on the farthest horizon and he had almost given up on it altogether when he received a letter, out of the blue, from Mr Jefferson. The third President intended to send him to Moscow. It was part of his latest grand design, to encircle and so isolate the overweening British. Tsar Alexander was the hope of liberal spirits everywhere. The Tartars and Muscovites were to be brought in to redress the balance of the old world.

  Secrecy had grown upon Jefferson as he grew older and it now gripped him with an obsessive power. He warned Wm that his mission must be suspected by no mortal until it is arrived at St Petersburg. I write you this now before our minds are all made up, that you may begin to huddle up your affairs and to give out that you shall without delay return to France. By the time the Senate knew of the mission, Wm would be in Paris. In theory, he could have travelled directly to St Petersburg, but it was the end of September and the ice was already closing in, and the Baltic sea lanes were no place for neutral shipping. So he was to proceed swiftly and without fanfare to France and thence overland to the Russian court. He took only his French valet and his polygraph for making copies of his dispatches. His covering story was that he was going to supervise his investments in Europe.

  ‘Not changed, even a little? It is six years, you know.’

  ‘No, you are lovelier than ever, just as I dreamed you would be, all my lonely nights in strange hotels.’

  ‘You have come back more of a flatterer than ever. The ladies of Moscow will be bowled off their feet.’

  ‘No, no, you must not mock me, I am so overwhelmed to see you again and to know that you have not forgotten me.’

  ‘Can’t you see that I am in the same case? When I heard that you were here my heart stopped, and now I can hardly form my words.’

  ‘I would have forewarned you, I had no wish to take you by surprise, but there was no time. Besides, I dared not break Mr J’s oath of secrecy, though the Senate will have to know soon enough.’

  ‘Oh, let th
em wait, let the whole world wait.’

  They kissed and he began to unhook her lilac dress. He was impatient and rough, and his fingers had trouble with the hooks. She stepped away from him and unfastened the dress herself. He pushed her back on the sofa and threw up her petticoats. He had not had a woman for six months and then it had been a streetwalker in a small Canadian timber station when he was sheltering after a thunderstorm.

  ‘You are not … disappointed?’

  She flexed her knees wide to make it easier for him.

  ‘Rosalie, you know how happy you make me. After, let us not say how many years, we cannot expect instantly …’

  ‘No, of course not, it will take time, and then it will be as it was for us before you went away.’

  But as he kissed her hot cheek, he had to admit that he was dismayed. It had been a quick dry humping, there was even something – no, ugly could not be the word – impersonal about it. As he caressed her apple breasts he felt like a customer rubbing the merchandise between finger and thumb. And he found himself thinking of the Canadian girl – she had been pretty, with long legs and she cried out as if she meant it. Rosalie tried to rub him into life and he hardened but it was a mechanical response, he felt as though it was nothing to do with him. They did it again and they both knew that it would be the last time.

  ‘You must meet the Empress. I am so fond of her, I cannot understand why people say these unkind things about her and of course the Emperor has been so cruel. She has such a good heart and she is much cleverer than they say. I am sure she will be very helpful to your mission.’

  ‘I am sure she will.’

  But his mission could progress no further until the Senate had confirmed him. And so he resumed his former life among old friends, Madame de Tessé, Madame d’Astorg, Lafayette, even old Mère Postulard who had fallen asleep beside Rosalie in the carriage when she was going home just after they had first made love and the jolting of the carriage had reminded her of it. They went again as they had in the old days to stay with her cousin Boni de Castellane whose wife had just died, and to her country house at Reuil, now well established, and on down to the green hills of the Auvergne that were so much bigger than the hills of Albemarle County. But now they kissed each other goodnight and went their separate ways down the passage like old married couples who find it too uncomfortable to share a bed but who are still fond.