Murder at Monticello

by Jane Langton

  Fortunately, Pratt was still in his office. The MOUL–OVUM volume of the Oxford English Dictionary was open on his desk. He was deep in a blissful examination of the word nature in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, as in the phrase the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.

  In answer to the question about an after-hours visitor at the gate of Monticello, some guy called Homer Kelly, he mumbled, “Why certainly, yes, of course,” and went back to the OED:

  nature … The essential qualities or properties of a thing …

  No, no, that wasn’t it. Pratt ran his magnifying glass down the page of small print. Here, this was more like it:

  The general inherent character or disposition of mankind …

  Well, that was pretty good, but it was still not quite—here, what about this?

  The creative and regulative physical power which is conceived of as operating in the material world and as the immediate cause of all its phenomena.

  The examples were amusing:

  Jonathan Swift, 1738: Oh! the wonderful Works of Nature;

  That a black Hen should have a white Egg!

  But wait, here was something else:

  light of nature: (see LIGHT)

  Aha! Pratt snatched volume 8 off the shelf, smacked it down on top of volume 10, and flipped the pages. At once he found what he was looking for:

  light of nature, the capacity given to man of discerning certain divine truths without the help of revelation.

  God’s whiskers! That was it! Thomas Jefferson in a nutshell!

  Absent from Pratt’s mind was any premonition of catastrophe, any forewarning of approaching doom.

  Chapter 53

  … as it was painfull to me to be removed I slept on board the perogue; the pain … excited a high fever and I had a very uncomfortable night.

  Captain Meriwether Lewis, August 11, 1806

  Fern climbed the stairs to the Dome Room and set her empty box down on the table beside the newest piece of the time line. Leaning over it, she read the last entries.

  Tom had carried the journey of Lewis and Clark only as far as the Yellowstone:

  The morning being fair and pleasant and wind favourable we set sale at an early hour, and proceeded on very well the greater part of the day; the country still continues level fertile and beautifull, the bottoms wide and well timbered.…

  Captain Lewis, May 6, 1805

  It was a wonderful passage, revealing the fulfilled purpose of the expedition, the rich promise of the country opening before them.

  Her own entry was from March of the same year. It was Jefferson’s Second Inaugural:

  I shall need, too, the favor of that Being in whose hands we are, who led our forefathers … from their native land, and planted them in a country flowing with all the necessaries and comforts of life.

  Fern was pleased with the symmetry of the two choices. In Jefferson’s address there was an echo of the words of Meriwether Lewis, the trusted friend he had chosen to lead his cherished expedition, now working its way up the Missouri River a thousand miles away.

  Ah, well. Fern lifted her arms to stretch her back. She was in a queer mood. She was physically exhausted and she was terribly afraid for Tom, and yet foremost in her consciousness was the room itself, and beyond the room its architect.

  The sense of his presence was different from her playful summonings of an imaginary Thomas Jefferson mounted on his horse or working in the vegetable garden. Nor was it some sort of ghostly manifestation. Fern did not believe that dead people hung wistfully around the places where they had lived and died. Monticello was not haunted by Jefferson’s astral soul.

  From below she could hear feet descending the stairs, doors closing. Was she alone in the house? No, someone else had come in. There was a soft noise, a pause, another noise, the opening of a door.

  No, Thomas Jefferson was dead and buried. He was not resurrecting himself to wander along the terrace walks and peer in the windows and whisper, Dear me, the clock’s run down. And yet—Fern walked out of the Dome Room and started down the stairs—in some ways the house itself was an embodiment, an incarnation of the intricate turns of his mind.

  She paused at the second floor and put her head in Henry Spender’s office. The room was dark. She could see only the shuffle of white paper on his desk. Withdrawing, she looked down at the steep fall of the stairs below her, remembering the day Mr. Upchurch had fallen and sprawled on his back on the landing.

  —the intricate turns of a mind that had thrown out a web across history, a founding fabric that had clothed an entire people with the strength and will of kings.

  Slowly and carefully Fern began creeping down the last flight of stairs. Not alone, of course, Jefferson hadn’t done it alone. But the genius that was displayed in his house, in the shape of its rooms, in its books and furnishings and scientific instruments, was the same prophetic intellect that had envisioned the nature of a free republic, that had seen the promise of the westering land and stretched out a hand to the Pacific.

  Fern smiled, because the hand that been stretched out was Tom’s own Corps of Discovery, the expedition that had traveled up the Missouri River, across the Rockies, and down the Columbia to the western ocean, with thirty men, a black slave, an Indian woman, a dog, and a baby.

  Halfway down the last flight, she stopped and listened. One of the security people was moving quietly in another room.

  Did slavery matter? Of course it mattered. However kind and good a master Jefferson had been, there was no forgiving the fact of the hundreds of slaves he had kept on his plantations, there was no way of overlooking the extravagance that had entangled him in debts so heavy that only a few of the slaves had been set free by the conditions of his will.

  But the debt wasn’t altogether his fault. Generously he had signed a note for a distant relative who had left him holding the bag. But the consequences were cruel. Most of his household servants and all of his farm laborers had gone to the auction block after his death.

  One of the stairs creaked, repeating the word death in a calm whisper. So did the matter-of-fact bottom step.

  Fern walked into the entrance hall. In her strange mood, everything was transformed. The walls were whispering the same word, death. No, that was wrong. It wasn’t death exactly. She closed her eyes to listen. The word was dead.

  Opening them again, she looked at the slave-built Joinery, the folding ladder, the Great Clock, the map of the new country on the wall, and tried to work it out. Perhaps the truth about Jefferson’s failure to free his slaves was part of a general failure of compassion and imagination. It was a stain across the entire commonwealth of Virginia, at least until the Emancipation Proclamation, and then much later still.

  The finger of blame could not be pointed at a single master, at one exacting setter of tasks—the number of nails to be fashioned every day in the Nailery, the number of acres of plowing at Shadwell, the number of oxcarts to carry the Tufton wheat, the number of hands to stump and dig Monticello’s Roundabout roads—no, it could never be an indictment of a single exploiter of human life—it was a universal and general blame.

  Beyond the glass door to the portico, Fern could see two uniformed guards. They were part of the security forces that were swarming all over the mountaintop on the eve of the Fourth of July celebration. One of them leaned against a pillar and tossed away a cigarette. The other nodded at Fern through the glass. She nodded back.

  And then there were other noises. Fern turned quickly around. She could hear hammering, the fluttering of paper, the tuning of a fiddle. The soft syllable dead still whispered discreetly in the background, but the house itself had come alive.

  Chapter 54

  I overtook Capt. Clark and party and had the pleasure of finding them all well. as wrighting in my present situation is extreemly painfull to me I shall desist untill I recover.…

  Captain Meriwether Lewis, August 12, 1806

  The things she saw were not really there, that was cle
ar enough to Fern. And yet, in some strange way, they were true.

  In the entrance hall, the ticking noise was the winding of the Great Clock. The ladder had been unfolded, it leaned against the wall, and the long wooden key was twisting around and around, first in one hole on the face of the clock, and then in the other. The pendulum began to swing, and in the corners of the room the cannonball weights were rising slowly, straining their ropes over the pulleys. Fern watched as the topmost ball on one side jerked to a stop at the painted word Sunday.

  Yes, of course, the clock was always wound on Sunday. Now the gong on the roof was clanging eight o’clock.

  When the gong stopped, the fiddle began. It struck up a dainty melody adorned with grace notes and trills. Fern listened, entranced, but after a few bars the music faded and the hammering began.

  She ran to the greenhouse, but the hammering stopped when she threw open the door. Yes, there was Jefferson’s workbench, there were his tools, there was the hammer. She picked it up. It was still warm. If only she’d been quicker, she might have seen the carpenter himself.

  Therefore, when a creaking began somewhere on the other side of the house, she turned on her heel, raced along the corridor, plunged tinder the balcony, and burst into the dining room.

  It was empty. No tall host presided at the head of the table. No daughter Martha sat at the other end, the mistress of the house. There were no grandchildren, no guests—no Lafayette, no Daniel Webster or Margaret Bayard Smith, no George Ticknor or Abbé Correa de Serra. There was only the crick-crick of the rope of the dumbwaiter rising to the narrow closet beside the fireplace. Fern reached out her hand and opened the closet door. There on the shelf, still wobbling from its shaky journey up from the cellar, stood a dusty bottle of wine.

  The midsummer daylight was gone. Fern blew off the dust and carried the bottle to the window to read the label. Was it one of the wines that had been ordered in such sumptuous quantities from Paris—crates of Château d’Yquem, hampers of champagne? The label said Lafite, 1787. What would it taste like now?

  She set the bottle back on the shelf and closed the narrow door. At once there was another sound, bright and loud in the silent house, a sharp scritch-scratch.

  Fern laughed. She knew what it was, but it was a miracle that it could be heard so clearly. It was the two pens of the polygraph in Jefferson’s Cabinet.

  Once again she ran. Would she find the great man sitting at his table, studiously at work?

  In the Cabinet she found the polygraph writing busily, the two pens leaving identical trails of ink on the two sheets of paper. No hand directed them, no long legs were stretched out on the bench below the table.

  But the revolving chair was in motion, as though an invisible person were turning to look at her, and the bookstand was whirling, the books on its five surfaces sailing around and threatening to fall off. Beside it, on the table, the little ivory fan that was a pocket notebook spread itself wide and slapped shut. On the floor the round globe spun on its axis.

  The two pens stopped scratching. Together they lifted from the paper and poised in air. What had they written? Fern bowed over the table and recognized at once the swift legible hand, the looping capital “T” and the lower-case “d”s with their curled-over tops. The word that had been whispered in the air, dead, dead, was part of Jefferson’s last request to James Madison. Here it was in his own hand. Fern knew it by heart—Take care of me when dead.

  Straightening, she was startled to see a movement in the small round mirror that hung on the wall. It was one of the optical devices that had so interested the natural philosopher in Jefferson. On its concave surface everything was reflected upside down, including the master of the house himself.

  There he was in the mirror, the grand old man of Monticello, standing on his head with one arm outstretched as if to alert her, and his eyes were staring directly at her, urging her, telling her in all but words, Take care of me when dead.

  Fern could only nod and nod, and swear a solemn, silent vow. Yes, yes, she would try, she would really try.

  There was only one more vision in the transfigured house, but it was the most remarkable of all. Walking slowly into the parlor, Fern saw it at once, the object on the round marble table.

  It was the traveling lapdesk that had been crafted so carefully to Jefferson’s design, the desk on which he had written the Declaration of Independence in July 1776 in an upstairs room in Jacob Graff’s boarding house in Philadelphia.

  Fern knew perfectly well that the famous lapdesk could not possibly be here in this house, because it was one of the national treasures of the Smithsonian. And yet there it was in the middle of the table, a neat box closed over on itself. She reached out to open it, but at once there was a great clattering. The top fell back and the little drawer flew open with a bang. On the hinged writing surface lay a heap of handwritten sheets.

  Fern’s eyes were magically keen. She knew exactly what they were—the four manuscript pages of the first draft of the Declaration. But they were rustling and lifting, and then, as the door behind her flew open and the glass cracked and splintered and a great wind rushed through the house, the precious pages sailed high over her head.

  At once the entire room was aflutter with paper. It was a blinding snowstorm of letters and documents and architectural drawings and lists of garden vegetables and financial accounts and notes on the distribution of slaves.

  Gasping, Fern reached up and snatched at the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, but it flew too high, and so did the bill against the Alien and Sedition Act, and the one against entail and primogeniture, and the Virginia law abolishing the importation of slaves, and—look, look—almost within her grasp was the famous letter to Captain Lewis, The object of your mission is to explore the Missouri river. For a moment Fern had it in her hand, but it whisked out of her fingers and flew away.

  “Jeanie!”

  What? Fern turned around and saw George Dryer standing within the shattered door. Between his fists was a heavy chain.

  Chapter 55

  … they informed me that they were Tetons and their chief was the black buffalow.… 7 of them halted on the top of the hill and blackguarded us, told us to come across and they would kill us all.…

  Captain William Clark, August 30, 1806

  The paper snowstorn had vanished. For an instant Fern thought the man at the door was guarding the house. Then she knew who he was. Slowly she began to back up.

  George made a rush at her, lifting his chain. She cried out, and he almost had her. But then something came between them, a clumsy obstruction, a stumbling block.

  It was an old man, weeping. He threw his arms around George and sobbed, “No, no.”

  George cursed and tried to wrench himself free from the fumbling clutch of the senile old fool. Fern slipped away and dodged into the corridor. Grasping the banister, she hurled herself around the turn of the narrow stairs and plummeted into the basement below. With her heart in her mouth she began clumping down the dark tunnel toward the square of dim light at one end, her feet like slow stumps in a nightmare. Oh, poor Mr. Upchurch. What was happening to poor brave Mr. Upchurch?

  But nothing was happening to Augustus Upchurch. Nothing would ever happen to him again. To George Dryer, Augustus was only a minor obstacle, a tiresome speck, a buzzing fly. George swatted him dead with a single blow of his chain, then turned on his heel and bolted into the corridor after Jeanie.

  In the narrow hallway there was a staircase going both up and down. Pausing, George heard the thump of Jeanie’s feet going down, and he thundered after her, plunging four steps at a time.

  Half a minute later a guard came running into the parlor. He had heard Fern’s cry while making his rounds upstairs. Now he was shocked to find the body of an elderly gentleman spread-eagled on the floor. Where was the girl?

  Homer felt more and more foolish. What the hell was he doing here? Driving up the mountain in the gathering dark, he had to stop and explain himself a
gain and again. Even after he left his car in the privileged parking lot, he was accosted three more times as he walked toward the house.

  The last two inquisitors were standing on the steps of the East Portico. They turned their flashlights on him as he loomed up out of the shadowy lawn, a gigantic stranger with wild hair and ferocious whiskers, a threat to the sanctity of the house and the safety of four hundred distinguished guests tomorrow morning, including the Prime Minister of Great Britain and the presidents of France and the United States of America.

  “Stop,” thundered one of the flashlights. “Stand where you are.”

  Blinded, Homer grinned in the friendliest possible way, but before he could explain himself there was a squawking babble of amplified static. The flashlights whirled away, the glass door was thrown open and the two men rushed inside. Homer could see their bright beams streaking back through the house.

  Something violent must have happened on the West Portico, over there where the speakers would be standing tomorrow, all those important people from all over the world. What the hell was going on?

  Homer turned away and began galloping across the lawn. Behind him there were hoarse shouts and rasping commands. At the corner where the North Terrace Walk made a sharp right angle, he glanced over his shoulder and saw armed men converging from all directions. No one was looking for a fool named Homer Kelly. He grinned as the last of them bounded up the steps.

  No, not quite the last. Someone was pelting along the east front of the house, racing past the portico steps. Even in the darkness Homer recognized Fern Fisher. She was running toward him, stumbling clumsily, gasping, struggling for breath.

  Then Homer could see why. Someone was darting after her, catching up, reaching out, snatching at her. He was faster on his feet than Fern, and he had a chain in his hand.