Empire

by Edward Cline

  At this point, Hugh awoke with a start, shook his head, opened his eyes, and saw the darkness around him and heard the crickets and tree frogs beyond a window. Then, with a fleeting, half-conscious awareness that he had been dreaming, he fell back on the divan and resumed his interrupted sleep.

  Epilogue: The Sparrowhawk

  Young Thomas Jefferson, two mornings after Lieutenant-Governor Francis Fauquier dissolved the General Assembly, left a New Kent ordinary and resumed his journey by cart north to Albemarle County and his Shadwell estate in the company of his friend and slave servant, Cupid, a black youth only slightly younger than his master. The latter noted that his master had been pensive and taciturn ever since they left Williamsburg, not his usual gay and talkative self. He ventured to ask, as they sat together on the board as the cart bumped and rocked over a dirt road rutted with the passage of innumerable wagons and coaches, “What troubles thee, Master Tom?”

  “Troubles me?” scoffed Jefferson with astonishment. “Ask, rather, what excites me! Back there in the Capitol, my friend, I witnessed a battle of the Titans for possession of the earth and of our future on it! I regret not having had a hand in its outcome! Oh, how I ached to enter the fray and support Mr. Henry and the others! I would have gladly suffered a mortal wound in that contest, knowing as I died that I had helped to advance a great cause!” He chuckled and shook his head. “Well, I was grazed nonetheless, by Mr. Randolph, and was given a thorough dressing down by Mr. Wythe for having reminded my mother’s cousin of his wishful venality. You heard him ranting at me that very evening!”

  “Mr. Wythe was very angry with you, sir,” agreed Cupid with amused irony. “I thought he would strike you.”

  Jefferson laughed again. “Well, no matter! What happened back there, my friend, has enriched us all. A few well-chosen, well-spoken words have cracked a wall groaning with the ivy of slothful ignorance, and that wall must someday tumble down from the rot! And through the widening cracks shines a magnificent, incalescent light, one that shows what is possible to us, a light that cannot but warm the brow of any man who chooses to contemplate it! It is a sobering experience, to see such a light. It gives one pause to think of which course in life one must choose to take — to show one’s back to the world and its ways and remain a mere spectator, or to face them and say ‘No!’”

  Jefferson felt the worried scrutiny of his companion on him, and turned to bestow a reassuring smile on him. “Never mind my ramblings, my friend. I am burning bright myself.” He cocked his head once in appreciation. “That Kenrick chap was right. I have overlooked myself, all these years. I have neglected to raise my head and see the broader vista. The fire is in me, and shall ever burn from this day forward. I have a greater ambition now, a new direction. Law is in jeopardy, and it is law I shall study and uphold…come what may…. ”

  He glanced back at the baggage piled in the bed of the cart. Among his things was a worn and marked-up copy of Sir Edward Coke’s Institutes of the Laws of England, which, together with other treatises on law, he had been studying for a time under George Wythe’s direction. “What irony, my friend! In back of us is Coke, our greatest jurist and an enemy of royal tyranny. Yet, there was a man who, in one damning instance, ignored his own reason and rules of evidence, and charged Walter Raleigh, a patriot and benefactor of his country, with treason on the most specious of testimony. Inconstancy is a great enemy of virtue, even among sages, my friend. And it is at work again! We must work hard and be constant in our principles, to ensure that we are virtuous enough that such history does not repeat itself in our own conduct…. ”

  Cupid’s attention was diverted then by some motion in the blue sky ahead of them. “Look!” he exclaimed, pointing to a black spot that hovered high over a field. Even as he spoke and as Jefferson lifted his head to watch, a sparrowhawk circled once, then folded its wings and plummeted to the earth. At the last moment it spread its wings again over a pair of doves that had just risen from the field. Too late did the doves become alert to the menace. In an instant the sparrowhawk seized one of the doves, then soared off into the sky, its prey clenched firmly in its talons. The second dove fled in another direction.

  Jefferson laughed. “There goes Mr. Henry, making off with Mr. Randolph!”