by Bob Mayer
“Yes,” Doc said.
“Curious,” Franklin said. “A most curious compromise. Unethical. Morally ambiguous. Utterly practical.”
“Ultimately, just an empty gesture,” Adams said.
“Not empty,” Doc said. “All those who sign it will have it on their mind. It will change them. It will change the way they view the future. Smart men who are slave owners, who make money off it, will see it as a business they need to shift out of.”
Franklin nodded. “Most true. A man acts according to the dictates of his purse.”
Doc looked at Jefferson. “It will act on the signees’ consciences. It will change the way they see things.”
“But who would know of it in fifty years if it is a secret and we are all dead?” Jefferson asked.
That was the linchpin of Doc’s improvised plan. “The signed document will be held by one of you, hidden away, the location given to a select few. Perhaps there will be a way to hide it so that only the final survivor will know where it is.”
“I know of a way,” Jefferson said. “I have something that will work perfectly. My Cipher.” He indicated Franklin. “You have seen it, sir.”
Franklin nodded. “Yes. Encode the location. Break up the disks among a select few.
The download updated Doc on what Jefferson was talking about.
“That would be perfect,” Doc said. “Contingencies should be written in a short addendum. First, whoever is alive at fifty years, will make the Declaration of Emancipation public. Second, in their will upon their death before fifty years, those who hold the disks will them sent to another who is alive.”
“All sent to Thomas,” Franklin said. “It is his Cipher. He should be primary. If, unfortunately, he passes first, then to John.”
Doc kept talking, not wanting them to overthink it. “As the disks consolidate, if it comes down to only one man alive before the fifty years, he makes the Declaration public. His last duty.”
Doc had nothing more. He looked about, the implications of what he’d just done finally sinking in. Lecturing five of the Founding Fathers, two future Presidents, and most of all, Benjamin Franklin.
“Thomas?” Franklin said. “What say you?”
“I feel a strong compulsion in my heart to have this done now,” Jefferson said. “Today. It is an unnatural compulsion, much as the vision was unnatural.” He looked at the papers in front of him. “My heart directs me one way. My head another.” He slid a piece of parchment aside from the others. “I wrote of Independence with inspiration and hope, but the words were from my head.”
“They are brilliant words,” Franklin said.
“This, though—” Jefferson picked up a different paper. “This was all from the heart, my head clouded by the vision. Yet—” He hesitated.
“Speak freely,” Franklin said.
“Yet, I believe it is right,” Jefferson said.
Sherman pounced on his uncertainty. “It will destroy us before we even have a country. You know that. We all know that.”
“One step at a time,” Livingston added.
Jefferson nodded. “You make sense, gentlemen.” He shifted his gaze to Doc. “Your compromise makes sense. Still.”
“John?” Franklin asked.
Adams was rubbing his thumb on the edge of the table. “I fear we will not get a majority on the Emancipation document today. Indeed, I know we will not, since they made us strike the portion dealing with slavery.” He swallowed. “I am willing to compromise.”
“I believe I know where you gentlemen stand,” Franklin said dryly, pointing his cane at Livingston and Sherman. “We will compromise. Thomas, if you will make the changes and add the addendum, I believe we are done here. Perhaps we can rest for a few hours before reconvening with the rest of Congress.”
With that, Franklin struggled to his feet, putting his weight on the cane. “And you, sir,” he said to Doc. “I suggest you remain around the building. We will want to talk further with you.”
“Of course,” Doc lied.
Franklin left. The sound of his halting steps on the stairs echoed back into the room.
Sherman and Livingston whispered together for a few moments, then took their leave. Adams stood, looked at Doc, then at Jefferson, then shook his head and departed.
Doc walked to the table across from Thomas Jefferson. “Sir. Like the vision you received and the signed document in front of you, I am telling you of something that will happen. In fifty years. At Monticello. A woman will arrive.” He described to Jefferson exactly how Moms had been dressed during the briefing.
Jefferson was incredulous. “How can you know how someone will be dressed fifty years from now?”
“Don’t worry about that,” Doc said. “Just remember what I told you. A woman will arrive at Monticello. When she arrives, you are to give her the Declaration of Emancipation. She will know what to do.”
“And what is that?”
“Preserve the future,” Doc said.
“Who are you?” Jefferson demanded. “Why do you think I will be alive in fifty years?”
Doc picked up the Declaration he’d brought with him. He carefully rolled it and put it in the tube. “I have to go.”
“But this is—“ Jefferson had no words and Doc left before there would be any more questions he couldn’t answer. As Doc exited Liberty Hall, dawn was breaking in the east. He was considering where to spend the day, when he noticed someone standing at the entrance to an alley across Chesnut Street.
Thyia, with her hood up, her face hidden. As still as a statue.
Doc turned toward her, but then saw someone else. Another woman in a cloak, standing farther away, down the street, in the shadows of a building. An old woman, hunched, her gnarled hand holding a black staff. She lifted the staff up an inch from the ground, brought it down, and then was gone.
Thyia whirled, having missed that, whipping the bow and arrow out.
She hadn’t known the old woman was there, Doc thought.
And then he was sucked into the tunnel of time.
Monticello, VA, 4 July 1826
Hemings pulled the blanket over Jefferson’s slack face.
Paris? Moms checked the download as Hemings stared at the old man’s body. Paris was supposedly where Jefferson first took Hemings as his lover. She’d accompanied him as nanny to his daughter when he replaced Franklin as the representative of the United States.
Maria? That was the twist. Not Sally. Moms was—
“He didn’t free me,” Hemings said, turning around to face Moms. There were tears in her eyes, although Moms didn’t know if they were from his death or the statement.
“How do you know?” Moms asked, although the download confirmed it.
Hemings held up the two leather pouches and shook them. “Because he was counting on his foolish Declaration.”
Moms had nothing to say to that.
“Maria,” Hemings said bitterly, shaking her head. “That was it? His final thought? His final word? With me standing right there? All my years at his side? Our children?”
Maria Cosway. The download filled in the blank: a woman Jefferson met in Paris. A married woman whom Jefferson fell in thrall with for six weeks. So much so that he broke his wrist, trying to jump over a fountain to impress her. Despite such a romantic gesture, she returned to England with her husband. Jefferson never saw her again, but they maintained a life long correspondence. After her departure, Jefferson wrote a classic rumination, the Head-Heart Letter, where his head argued with his heart over what he should do.
In the end, the head had won.
Jefferson had known Cosway for six weeks. Sally Hemings her entire life. He’d been smitten by Cosway; he’d owned Hemings and her children. His children.
Hemings pulled a beautifully embroidered kerchief from the sleeve of her dress and wiped away her tears. Moms was sweating, but Hemings appeared cool and fresh despite the heat and attire.
Hemings tucked the kerchief away then gestured toward
the bedroom door. Moms accompanied her into the short corridor. Hemings shut the door behind them. They took a left turn into the Parlor, where Poe was sitting by himself, a half-empty decanter on the table nearby.
“You may go, sir,” Hemings said to Poe.
Despite being a slave, Hemings was obviously the woman of this house. And with the man of the house now passed, she ruled, at least for the moment.
“He won’t need my services?” Poe asked.
“He is gone,” Hemings replied.
“Oh.” Poe was at a loss for a proper response. What do you say to the slave-mistress of someone who has just died? Even in this era of overblown etiquette, that one wasn’t in the books. “Sorry,” he muttered as he drunkenly scurried to the door.
Moms watched him leave, making a mental note. His name had come up on Ivar’s mission to West Point on the D-Day op. Two encounters in the wide expanse of history was stretching coincidence.
Done with Poe, Hemings turned to her. “Would you like some tea?” She didn’t wait for a reply, pulling a thick cord. Thus the slave summoned another slave to serve them.
Routine was a salve for grief. Moms had seen it before.
Hemings instructed the young black girl, who appeared and then disappeared. Hemings pointed to a hard-looking chair and Moms reluctantly sat, making a mess of her petticoats.
She was doing it all wrong and the information was in the download, but Moms didn’t care at this point.
Hemings sat across from her and gazed about the room. “It feels different without his spirit here. It will never be the same.”
Moms didn’t want to think about the dead man in the tiny hundred-degree, room, on the even smaller bed. Right now, she just wanted to ensire the Declaration of Emancipation was never found, and get back to her own time. A bead of sweat crawled down between her breasts.
“You’re not from around here, are you?” Hemings said.
“I’m from up north,” Moms replied, but she sensed there was more to the question.
“I’ve never seen a white woman of station with sunspots on her hands,” Hemings said.
Too much time deployed, Moms thought, but she was surprised at the oversight by Edith and her team. Skin. It made sense that Hemings would pay close attention to skin.
“He told me a woman would come, even down to the clothes she would wear. What you are wearing.”
Doc!
“What did he say to you?” Hemings asked. She had the leather pouches on her lap.
“It didn’t make sense,” Moms lied.
“Did he tell you of Philadelphia?” Hemings asked. “Of the vision they saw? Of the Declaration of Emancipation?”
So much for secrets.
Moms didn’t know what to say; she was pondering how big a Ripple she would cause by taking out Hemings to get the Cipher. That was preferable to allowing her to use it to uncover the Declaration . . . that is, if Hemings had the key phrase.
Moms held the larger implications of stopping Emancipation in 1826 at bay, not wanting to accept the responsibility.
As if knowing what Moms was thinking, Hemings said, “He told me everything.” She snorted. “I know more about this place and his affairs than even he ever knew. He is in debt. Deep debt. For a man so wise in so many things, he never focused on one of the most important: his finances. He measured the weather every day and recorded the growth of his plants so carefully, but money? No.” She waved her hands about, indicating their surroundings. “It is to be hoped that we are not sold off as collateral.”
Hemings speech and vocabulary indicated all the years spent in ‘polite’ society, at Jefferson’s side.
“You won’t be,” Moms said, surprising herself at the shift from thinking about killing the woman sitting across from her to impinging Rule One of Time Patrol.
The door opened and the girl brought in a tray. She served tea silently, but shot questioning glances at Hemings. All the slaves now had to worry about their fate. Would families be broken? Sold to a cruel master?
“Thank you,” Hemings said, when the girl finished.
The slave left.
“My, our, daughters pass,” Hemings said, staring at the door. “Seven-eighths white. But if their secret were revealed, that Negro one-eighth would wipe it all out. They were supposed to be freed when they reached twenty-one. He promised me that when I was pregnant the first time, in Paris. That was the deal we made so that I would come back here.”
“You could have petitioned for your freedom in Paris,” Moms said.
“I was sixteen,” Hemings said. “My family was here. My mother. Everyone. Who did I know in Paris? A sixteen-year-old black girl. Pregnant.” She sighed and shifted her attention from the door to Moms. “Are you like the man who came to them in Philadelphia? Who gave them the compromise, so they could put off what they knew was right until they were dead or dying? Who showed them a document he could not have had?”
Moms wasn’t sure how to answer that. “I’m a friend,” she said, wondering how large a lie that was.
“He knew you as soon as he saw you. I did too from what he told me. Fifty years. Fifty years. I was but three when all that happened. Tell me. How can someone predict what will happen fifty years in the future?”
That was getting a little too close for Moms.
“Tom told me he feared this day, yet he hung onto life to see its dawn. The others faded away or were taken away well before. Except for him and Adams.” She shook her head. “And now, both are gone. Adams is dead, isn’t he? He was dying when he sent his responsibility to Tom. So like him.”
“If Adams is not dead already,” Moms said, “then he will be by the end of the day.” She was telling a truth that would be known across the country in just a few days, as fast as the messengers could ride with the news.
“Strange men,” Hemings said. “I met all of them at one time or another. More than once in some cases. Mister Jefferson despised Mister Adams for most of his life. President Adams could not vacate what they are now calling the White House quickly enough after that election, leaving it in poor shape for President Jefferson. He had not the decency even to stay and see President Jefferson inaugurated.”
It was strange to hear the formal designations come from the woman who’d borne Jefferson’s children, slept with him and who had just pulled a blanket over his lifeless face. How it shifted from Tom to President Jefferson, depending on the memory.
Hemings continued. “But then Mister Adams wrote a letter to Mister Jefferson in ‘12. They never met again face-to-face, but they wrote. Oh, Tom, he loved to write.” Moms noted the familiarity in words, especially so soon after the formality. “A friendship at a distance, with time before responding, is what the two needed to get along. In person, there was deep animosity. I had hoped Adams would be the last, and take the burden from Tom, but Adams sent the courier while still alive. A man of great words, but his actions oft fell short.”
Hemings’s vocabulary was impressive. Moms realized he’d chosen Hemings not just for her beauty and likeness to her half-sister, but for her acumen and brilliance, qualities his wife had also shared.
“Franklin?” Hemings shook her head. “Wily. Practical. The grease that kept all those great minds working together. Tom never quite grasped him. So different. So passionate. Except for those damned six weeks. That’s when Tom got a glimpse of what Franklin’s heart always been full of: passion.” Hemings held her cup of tea, but had yet to take a sip. Moms’s was also growing cold on the table next to the chair. “But Franklin passed early.”
“Why are you telling me this?” Moms asked.
“Those are the men who were in that room fifty years ago,” Hemings said. “Who had that same terrible vision.” She smiled sadly. “Such foolish men.” The smile disappeared as she stared at Moms. “But you are here, as predicted, so perhaps, not so foolish. Perhaps there is something more to all this. Something larger than all of us.”
Hemings began to nod. “They are all gon
e. Without having made the decision. They couldn’t fifty years ago, and they couldn’t do it on their deathbeds, so that means it is yours.”
“My what?”
“He said, if you appeared, it was for you to make the final decision.” Hemings held up the two pouches. “This is yours now. You decide whether the Declaration of Emancipation should be revealed or not. Whether I, and all slaves, should be declared free. Today.”
“Hold on,” Moms said, not expecting the choice to be put into her hands so freely.
Hemings opened the two pouches. She pulled out the rod with the thirteen disks on it, then Adams’ pouch with the remaining thirteen disks. She unscrewed one end of the rod and then, checking the number inscribed on the side of each thin wooden disk, placed them on the rod in order. Done, she screwed the knob back on. She stood, walked across the room, then held it out for Moms to take.
Moms didn’t raise to the bait. “That’s not why I’m here.”
“Why are you here, then?” Hemings still held the Cipher out.
Good question, Moms thought. She took the Cipher. Hemings went back to her chair, sat down, and picked up her tea. Her hands were shaking.
Moms looked at the Cipher. Twenty-six letters in an order that made no sense. “I don’t have the Key.”
“You don’t?” Hemings shrugged. “It isn’t hard.”
“You know it?”
Hemings didn’t respond.
Moms felt the weight of the Cipher, the weight of history. If the document abolished slavery today, what effect would that have?
More than a Ripple. A definite Cascade. Perhaps even a Tsunami, wiping everything and everyone out.
Moms thought of what Eagle had done with Josiah Henson’s mother. He’d talked her into going back into slavery in order to eventually bear the son into slavery who would later be free and write the precursor to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. A terrible price for one person, but Eagle had done it.
Moms held the fate of millions in her hands. Not just the slaves in the now, but the generations between now and the Civil War, and the seven hundred thousand dead of the War itself. Ivar and Roland were there now, in the bubbles of this attack by the Shadow. What would happen to those bubbles if—