Murder at Monticello

by Jane Langton

  And it did. When Fern hooked up all the wires and plugged in all the plugs, her monitor glowed softly, the tiny lights on her printer shone green, the lamp turned on—not that she needed a lamp in the middle of May, there was so much light pouring down from the round opening above.

  The snaking cables were an insult to the architecture. Fern did her best to shove them out of sight.

  It took her the rest of the afternoon to organize everything. By the time she was done, the footsteps of the tourists downstairs were fading. The guides were bustling around down there, talking cheerfully. Fern leaned over the banister and listened to the gentle Southern voices.

  “Those women weren’t even listening. What do they come here for anyway?”

  “Didn’t somebody tell you? They’re interior decorators. I suppose they were disappointed. Not enough curvy furniture and gold chairs.”

  “Ah, that explains why they kept complaining about the lack of flower arrangements. One of them offered to make gigantic bouquets for every room in the house.”

  “Heaven forbid.”

  Fern had her own key to the house, her own freedom to come and go. When everything was silent downstairs, she put her freedom to the test. She descended the two narrow flights of stairs and walked boldly into the entrance hall. One of the evening guards was there, but he knew who she was, and left her alone.

  Fern went from room to room, touching everything with her eyes—the Parisian clocks, the great French mirrors, the handy furnishings of Jefferson’s study. She was trying to magic herself into a proper excitement, the necessary fervor to begin.

  Unknown to Fern as she circled the house from room to room, someone else moved slowly around the hill below the house, treading softly like a hunter with a quiver of arrows.

  Set out early, Killed a Deer last night, examined the mens arms, & Saw that all was prepared for action.…

  Field Notes of Captain William Clark,

  May 24, 1804

  Chapter 4

  … the Sturn of the boat Struck a log … the Curt Struck her bow and turn the boat against Some drift & Snags.… This was a disagreeable and Dangerous Situation, particularly as immens large trees were Drifting down.… Some of our men … leaped into the water Swam ashore with a roap.… I can Say with Confidence that our party is not inferior to any that was ever on the waters of the Missoppie.

  Field Notes of Captain William Clark, June 9, 1804

  Next day, after revving up her computer and staring for a while at the empty monitor, Fern decided impulsively to take a walk. She snatched up her jacket and hurtled down the breakneck stairs.

  A startled face looked out halfway down. “Be careful!” warned Henry Spender from his office on the second floor.

  “Of course,” murmured Fern, plunging down the rest of the way, landing with a thump, and bursting out of the corridor into the entrance hall.

  A crowd of tourists looked at her, and Gail Boltwood’s pleasant voice paused for a second, then went on serenely, “If you look up at the balcony you’ll see a copy of the painted buffalo robe that was sent to President Jefferson by Meriwether Lewis.” All eyes obediently gazed upward.

  What Fern needed, she decided, was to explore everything, not only the house but the surrounding garden and hillside, because every square inch of Monticello had been fashioned according to Jefferson’s own design.

  There was no more personal house in the world. Every roof and chimney, every carved molding, every drapery at a window, every outbuilding, every vegetable in the garden had come into being as an act of his creative will.

  Fern dodged past the tourists who were waiting outside and headed for the path called Mulberry Row.

  Below the path lay the vegetable garden. It was a long strip of level ground, carved out of the mountainside and buttressed by a wall of rock. The grassy hillside was green and inviting. She sat down and stretched out her legs and admired the long straight rows of lettuces and cabbages and the pea vines twining around brushy twigs. Had the garden been as perfect as this in Jefferson’s time? There was a memoir by one of his slaves, a man named Isaac, who remembered his master working in the garden in right good earnest.

  Fern shut her eyes, imagining Thomas Jefferson planting Alpine strawberries, or the Arikara beans collected by Meriwether Lewis, or Lewis’s sweet-scented currants. Did they prosper? Did the strawberries come to his table?

  She didn’t know, but it was easy to picture a tall man crouched on one knee, digging the beans into the ground, then standing to look down, erect in an old coat, his reddish-gray hair pulled back, his ruddy skin freckled. Oh, a hat, he needed a hat against the sun. At once Fern invented a broad-brimmed straw hat and clapped it on his head.

  She was pleased at the ease with which she had evoked him. Walking farther along the path called Mulberry Row, she could almost see him moving ahead of her, mounted on his horse Caractacus, swaying a little as the horse moved gently beneath him.

  She hardly needed to close her eyes to see that the horse was a long-legged bay and that the rider’s boots were narrow and black, like the pair standing side by side near his bed. The rippling shadow of horse and rider mingled with the tree shadows cast by the morning sun. Singing, surely he’d be singing. Slave Isaac had said so—hardly see him anywhar out doors but what he was a-singin.

  At once Fern reminded herself severely that Isaac’s memoir was not politically correct, because his interviewer had set it all down in dialect. Still, it was pleasant to add melody to her vision of Thomas Jefferson riding along the path in front of her.

  She smiled. Her task would not be so hard after all, if she could go on like this every day, calling up visions of Thomas Jefferson actually doing things, moving around his mountaintop, walking purposefully from room to room in the building he had designed entirely alone, the house he had pulled down and built up again over the course of half a century.

  Yes, oh, yes, this was the right way to begin—envisioning the man himself in hallucinatory images, right here on his own ground. The visions would be like incantations, the calling up of a spirit.

  Horse and rider were gone, but Fern moved on down the sloping brick path, not caring where it was going.

  It led to the burial ground. This too had been planned by the master of the house. An iron fence enclosed a level acre of hillside. It was full of gravestones.

  There in front of her rose his own monument, the obelisk with the famous inscription that made no mention of his presidency. And there—Fern caught her breath—who was that coming away from the cemetery, moving straight away from the obelisk as though he had melted through the fence?

  It was the liveliest vision so far, a tall, lank figure resurrected from the grave. His long shabby coat was green this time, but his red hair was still pulled back with a ribbon or a piece of string.

  As a vision, he was very nearly real. But then he faded like the others. Moving into the woods, he was soon lost among the expanding leaves of spring.

  Chapter 5

  Sergeant Floyd much weaker and no better.… Passed two Islands on the S. S. and at the First Bluff.… Serg. Floyd Died with a great deal of Composure, before his death he Said to me, “I am going away.”

  Captain William Clark, August 20, 1804

  In Concord, Massachusetts, in the Kellys’ house on the Sudbury River, Homer had another call from Ed Bailey, his old friend in Charlottesville.

  “Hey, Homer, guess what? I’ve got the tickets for the Fourth of July celebration at Monticello. Nothing to it. I said you guys were truly distinguished, you know, a coupla Hawvawd professors. But what really bowled them over, I said you were the District Attorney of Cambridge, Massachusetts. They were really impressed.”

  “Good God, Ed, you didn’t say that? It’s been years since I worked in the DA’s office, and then, for Christ’s sake, I was only an assistant, not—”

  “Well, whatever. Anyway, you can’t deny you’ve solved a lot of murder cases.”

  “Or not solved them,
” said Homer, speaking the simple truth. He changed the subject. “Listen, Ed, do you happen to know an old student of ours, Fern Fisher? She’s got a grant. She’s working at Monticello now.”

  “Don’t know her. Heard of her, that’s all. Old Upchurch’s little pet.”

  “Upchurch?”

  “Augustus Upchurch. There’s this bunch of old fuddy-duddies, Jefferson groupies. Upchurch is head groupie. He gave her a grant. She’s supposed to write this truly worshipful book.”

  “Well, good luck to her,” said Homer doubtfully.

  “Jesus, Homer, I forgot why I called. How’d you like to come down early? My landlord’s taking off until August, so you guys could stay right here until then. Come early, stay a while, enjoy the wonders of Albemarle County, the state of Virginia, the whole goddamn sunny South. See, I just have the third-floor apartment, the rest is all yours. Big ugly house, three bedrooms, two baths, no rent. Landlord just wants somebody in the house. He’s scared about crime—you know, serial killers on the loose. You just have to feed the dog.”

  “Feed the dog! How big is the dog?”

  “How big? Oh, I’d say”—there was a pause—“maybe twelve inches. Toy poodle.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Ed, I was just kidding about the dog. What do you mean, come early? My God, Ed, we’ve got our hands full. End of semester, final papers, final exams, general hysteria, helltime, kids flunk out, parents skin you alive.”

  “Tell me about it,” groaned Ed, who taught a bunch of courses himself at the University of Virginia.

  “But anyway, thank you, Ed, I’m really grateful, but I’ll have to talk to Mary. She’s looking forward to a general collapse, keeps talking like a prelapsarian? female.”

  “Prelapsarian?”

  “You know, before the Fall. Garden of Eden before the snake—in other words, before Harvard University. Keeps talking about cooking and sewing, picking flowers, she’s never going to open another book. I’ll talk to her, let you know, call you tonight. Oh, say, Ed, before you hang up, what’s all this about killers on the loose?”

  “Sorry I brought it up. By the time you get here it’ll be all over. There’s this creep prowling around, killed a buncha women, another body turned up today, you must’ve seen it on TV. Holistic practitioner.”

  “Holistic—?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, some woman. Anyway, it’s okay, not to worry, cops’ve got all these clues. Police labs, you know. Bits of fiber, pieces of skin, blood under the fingernails, pubic hair, you know the kind of thing.”

  “Pubic hair? Did you say pubic hair? Jesus! He’s a rapist?”

  “God, I don’t know. Carves ’em up and kills ’em. Or else kills ’em and carves ’em up. I forget which comes first. There’s this self-proclaimed eyewitness, swears he’s got red hair.”

  Homer put the Charlottesville killer out of his mind and went back to his stack of books about Thomas Jefferson. They were depressing. When Mary walked in and pulled off her jacket and kissed him, Homer looked at her unhappily. “This book really tears him apart.”

  “Who, Thomas Jefferson? Ah, yes, of course.” Mary shook her head sadly. “It’s the revisionist police. Those people can’t stand a genius. It’s all the rage right now, tearing down the sacred image of the noble founding father.”

  “Oh, right, I suppose so.” Homer stared dreamily at the book and said, “Ed Bailey called again from Charlottesville. Wants us to come early for the celebration at Monticello, stay in his house free of charge. What do you think?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, Homer. Did you see the news last night? That serial killer in Virginia, he’s murdered another woman.”

  Homer grinned. “Well, maybe I could lend the local investigation a hand.” Then, seeing the look on his wife’s face, he said quickly, “Joke.”

  “Well, it better be a joke, Homer. I thought you just wanted to bask in Jefferson history.”

  “Of course I do.” Homer closed the book and looked at the picture on the jacket, a painting of a thin-faced man with a narrow nose, a strong chin, and sandy hair. “Christ, now I don’t know what to think. The arguments against him are so convincing.”

  In some portraits the eyes stare directly into yours and follow you around the room. But the man on the cover of Homer’s book did not look back at him. Instead he gazed serenely to one side, as though unaware of the revelations packing the pages bound so thickly together under his chest.

  Chapter 6

  … at three miles we landed at a Bluff … by examonation this Bluff Contained Alum, Copperas, Cobalt, Pyrites.… Capt. Lewis in proveing the quality of those minerals was Near poisoning himself by the fumes & tast of the Cobalt.… took a Dost of Salts.…

  Captain William Clark, August 22, 1804

  God, they were all over the place, crawling around the body like maggots! George pushed ahead, trying to see better, but a big woman in uniform kept saying, “Keep back, come on, move back.” He pressed forward anyway, but then a barrier was set up and he had to retreat. Somebody stepped on his foot.

  George suppressed an impulse to respond with a savage shove. Instead he leaned over the strip of yellow tape and stared at the body and drank his fill. They still hadn’t covered it up, even though there were cameras all over the place. George chuckled with delight. One guy had even climbed a tree.

  Most of the daily papers and all the news programs on TV contented themselves with images of the police ambulance, the crowded backs of the forensic team, and an interview with the Charlottesville Chief of Police, who was beside himself with frustration. There was a photograph from a high-school yearbook of the unhappy murdered girl, an acupuncturist in a chiropractic clinic on Massie Road.

  But one of the papers regularly brought home by Augustus Upchurch, president of the Society for Jefferson Studies, was more shameless. The color picture on the front page had been taken from high in a tree.

  Augustus was drawn to the story. The ghastly photograph both repelled and attracted him.

  Chapter 7

  A foggy morning a heavy diew last night.… Some of the Indians Swam across the river to git Some breakfast with us, at the hour of 9 oClock the commanding officers had all things in readiness to hold a counsel with the chiefs and warrier of the Souix nation.… their was four of them which were always a Singing & playing on their curious Instruments.…

  Sergeant John Ordway, August 30, 1804,

  among the Yankton Sioux

  When Fern went out next day, there was fog all around the mountain. Monticello was a castle on an island—blue sky above, soft billows below.

  It was too early for visitors. They would soon be here in droves, riding up in the shuttle bus from the gatehouse, but for a little while Fern would have Mulberry Row to herself.

  She walked along the path briskly. Leading her on was the hope of calling up another vision like the firmly three-dimensional spirit that had astonished her yesterday in the burial ground.

  Mulberry Row had been Monticello’s factory street. Small signs marked the sites of the Weaver’s Cottage, the Stable, the Joinery, and the Nailery.

  Fern paused at the sign for the Nailery and stared at the grass around it, straining her imagination, trying to shape a building in the air, a cluttered dark space with anvils and fiery kilns, where iron rods had been wrought into nails by young black boys, with Jefferson himself explaining the nail-cutting machine.

  The picture refused to come. All she could see was the ground where the structure had stood and the vegetable garden below. This morning two volunteers were already at work in the garden plots, bowed low over their weeding. Today there was no ghostly master of the house inspecting the neat rows of spinach and the feathery heads of carrots.

  The only image forming in Fern’s mind was of the house servants of two hundred years ago, kneeling beside the long beds, harvesting fresh produce for Jefferson’s table.

  Then Fern corrected herself. Servants was a euphemism. Even the household servants had been slaves.
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  Slaves. The word rose up and smote her, because Jefferson’s plantations had been worked entirely by slave labor. Some of the slaves had been highly skilled. In the Joinery, John Hemings had made furniture for his master’s use. Slaves had manufactured the bricks and built much of the house themselves. They had fetched and carried, harvested the fields, cared for the stock, washed the linen, raised the vegetables, pruned the orchard, built the encircling roads, and waited on table. Even the French-trained chef, James Hemings, had been a slave.

  A slave. Fern tramped on, heading once again for the graveyard, the word pounding in her head. It had been her sensible position on the question of slavery that had so pleased the Grant Committee.

  Well, it hadn’t been the whole committee. It was really just Mr. Upchurch. His was apparently the deciding vote; in fact, perhaps it didn’t matter what the others thought, because only Mr. Upchurch had been present at the final interview.

  They had sat in a small room in the headquarters of the Society for Jefferson Studies in Charlottesville, just the two of them, Fern and Mr. Upchurch. He was a dignified white-haired old man with pink cheeks.

  There had been very few questions. All the members of the Grant Committee had read Fern’s application. They were pleased, Mr. Upchurch said, with her qualifications.

  “Thank you,” murmured Fern. Was the interview over?

  No, there was a pause. Mr. Upchurch’s face bunched itself together as if in gastric distress. Leaning forward, he uttered the word “Slavery.”

  “Slavery?” said Fern, not sure what was coming.

  “It’s what they can’t forgive him for,” went on Mr. Upchurch, “the fact that he had so many slaves.”

  Oh, of course, thought Fern. Glibly she comforted Mr. Upchurch. “But all those Virginia gentlemen had slaves. All those great men who were the backbone of the American Revolution, every one of them was the owner of a plantation worked by slaves.”