Part 2

“No, you can’t,” insisted young Cornelia, “because I’m going to do it for you. Ellen’s fetching some wool socks she knit—and, Grandpa, one is too long but please don’t mention it.”

“I won’t, I promise. Not if it reaches halfway to my neck.”

“I found these old slippers in your wardrobe. A mouse had started to build a nest in one but I brushed it out and aired it. Thank goodness, he hadn’t gnawed any holes in it.” She jumped up.

“Ah, my dear sir,” he looked up gratefully at Thomas Randolph, who was followed by a servant with a steaming mug on a server, “you save my life!”

“Just what you need to heat up your blood, sir.” said Randolph. “Another log on the fire, Cassius, and tend the fires in Mr. Jefferson’s library and bedroom.”

Jefferson sipped the warm punch slowly while his granddaughters busied themselves dressing his feet in warm hose and old slippers.

“Your breeches are damp, Grandpa,” one said. “But we can’t do anything about that.”

“I am marvelously served already.” He pulled them close to kiss their flushed young faces. “Burwell will find me some dry clothes presently as soon as I am warmed and rested. I see that our Paris lamp hasn’t tarnished very much, Patsy.” He looked up at the ceiling. “Remember what a time we had packing that thing? I remember you stuffed the globes full of hose and shirts and winced every time the box was moved.”

“I expected it to arrive here a mass of scraps and splinters,” she said, “and after you had paid such an outrageous price for it, too.”

“It was that painting you made the worst fuss about.” Jefferson emptied the bowl, handed it to the waiting servant, and got to his feet. “Ah, my old knees are stiff! But they still seem willing to support me. Now, I want to see everything. Yes”—he halted at the door of the high-ceiled drawing room—“there’s poor old John the Baptist whom you hated, Patsy.” He went nearer to study the painting over the mantel.

“It was Polly who loathed it most,” Martha said. “Not poor old John, all head and no body, but Salome lugging him on that charger wearing modern clothes and a very proper turban at that. I’d still like to throw that picture away, Papa. It used to give little Francis Eppes the horrors. Every time he had to pass through this room he’d have nightmares.”

“Nice polish on this floor, Patsy,” commended Jefferson, artfully turning her mind away from criticism of one of his favorite paintings by complimenting the gleam of the parquet floor. It was the first such oak floor laid in America and he was very proud of the way it reflected the glitter of the gilt chairs and sofas he had brought from Paris. They had cost fabulous amounts too, more than he could afford, but in his philosophy the things a man wanted and admired, that made life richer, were worth whatever they cost.

A brief nagging jerk of realism struck him—that now he would have to count the cost of things. Let that wait, let it wait until tomorrow. Tomorrow he would look over his lands, his farms; he would see how Randolph’s management had benefited them, and study what more must be done to the still unfinished house. Martha, catching his roving look, interrupted it with a protest.

“Papa, please! Don’t begin right away tearing down something and building it over. The house is fine as it is and we all love it—and you are so tired.”

“My dear, I should be even more tired with no occupation,” he argued. “Of course it will take me some little time to arrange and dispose of all my books and papers. Did they build those shelves I wrote you about in November?”

“Yes, Papa, come and see. I gave them the drawing you made and I’m quite sure they followed it exactly.” She walked ahead of him through the great hall and the narrow passage that led to the southern wing of the house which contained the library, Jefferson’s study, and his bedroom, with the bed alcove between and the steep winding stairs to the mezzanine-like second story.

There in the familiar rooms were all the homely things he had missed—his shabby old revolving chair, the painted wooden bench with its leather cushion that just fitted his lean, weary legs, the round revolving table he had had built with the legs set right so that the bench would slide under them and make of table, chair, and bench a comfortable kind of chaise longue with a high back to shut out the drafts. There was his file table with octagonal sides, each side holding a filing drawer labeled with a group of letters, and his high drawing table with drawers and shelves that could be adjusted at any angle.

Beside the library fireplace stood a high-backed leather chair, a pompous and official looking piece of furniture. Jefferson glared at it.

“And how came that thing here?” he demanded.

“Why, Papa, don’t you recognize it? It’s the chair you sat in all the time you were vice-president. Mr. Madison had it sent up by the barge. He thought you would like to have it,” explained Martha.

He snorted. “I have spent more eternal hours of boredom in that miserable chair than in any seat whereon a man has ever rested his breeches!” he grumbled. “Stick it in a dark corner somewhere. Send it down to the servants’ quarters. The office of vice-president is about as tedious an insult to a man’s intelligence as could be conceived. To have to suffer it for four years is bad enough, but to be reminded of it the rest of his life is pure persecution. However, I shall take pains to thank Jemmy Madison properly. He meant this as a handsome gift. I’ll receive it in the same spirit, but I don’t want it around where I have to look at it and be reminded of Senator Bingham and of John Adams’s being urged to slay a thousand Republicans with the jawbone of Thomas Jefferson.”

“Oh, Papa, don’t let past times rankle. Look back on the happy ones,” begged Martha. “We did have fun in Paris, didn’t we?”

“And you went to school there,” mourned one of her daughters—Jefferson was not yet entirely sure which was which—“and saw all those fashionable people and the king and Napoleon and spoke French all the time, and we have to learn French with that stupid Miss Fraker. You should hear her, Grandpa. She pronounces French as it is spelled in English.”

“She says ‘Owy Owy,’ and we know it should be ‘wee wee,’” piped up a smaller one. Was this Virginia or Ellen? He would have to put his family tree in order soon before he mortally offended some of them.

“Grandfather will teach you proper French when he gets time,” promised their mother. “He spent four years over there and I went to school there and so did Aunt Maria. But not all that we saw was happy. We saw too many beggars and hungry people in the streets, something you will never see in Virginia.”

“We see blind Remus when we go to church,” said one child. “He sits on the path with his hat in his hand and says, ‘Please, li’l missy, give ole Remus a penny?’”

“And if we put our penny in his hat, then we have nothing when the verger comes around with the alms basin and he gives us a disgusted look,” said another.

“Remus doesn’t have to beg,” said Jefferson. “He is owned by a family able to take care of him.”

“Maybe he likes it. Sitting in the sun and hearing people pass.”

“If he’s sitting there now, he’s being snowed on,” said young Francis Eppes gravely, standing at the window. It was the first time the quiet, brown-haired boy had spoken and Jefferson from his seat in the old revolving chair looked at him sharply. This was his beloved younger daughter Maria’s only child. Maria, christened Mary, called Polly, and later changing her name in the convent to Maria, pronounced in the Italian fashion. Maria was gone now these four years but the pain of her loss was still a quivering fiber of anguish in Thomas Jefferson’s heart. She had died, as his own young wife had died, when her daughters were small, having borne too many children, wasting away after the last childbirth, fading slowly day by day. Polly’s young husband, Jack Eppes, still lived at Eppington not far away, but Francis spent a great deal of time at Monticello with Martha’s healthy, noisy brood.

“Come here, Francis,” Jefferson called gently. “Come here and let your grandfather look at you.”

“He’s always moping and looking out windows,” volunteered a young Randolph. “It’s because he hasn’t any mother.”

“Come and talk to me, Francis,” urged Jefferson. “You and I should be friends. I have no mother either.”

The boy came obediently and stood by the arm of the chair, his big eyes, so like Polly’s, very sober.

“Old people don’t have mothers, sir,” he said.

“But I did. Till I was a grown up man. I had a handsome mother whose name was Jane and I still think about her when I stand and look out of windows. I wonder if I’m the kind of a man she would have wanted me to be.”

“I can’t be what my mother wanted me to be,” said small Francis plaintively. “My father says she wanted me to be a great man like my grandfather, but how can I be like you, sir? All the things you’ve done won’t ever be done again, ever, will they? There will never be another Declaration of Independence and you wrote that. I know. My father told me.”

Jefferson circled the lad with an arm. All about, clustered close to the fire, the young Randolphs were abruptly and amazingly quiet.

“That’s so,” the old man agreed. “I did write that paper, didn’t I? And after I’d written it, four other men sat around in Philadelphia for about a week and picked it to pieces and made changes in it and couldn’t make up their minds whether to adopt it or not. I guess they never would have made up their minds and we’d still be British subjects and paying taxes to the king. But at last they all decided to accept the Declaration of Independence, leaving out some parts I had labored hard to make perfect. So—we declared ourselves independent of Great Britain.”

The small Randolphs were convulsed in a hysteria of giggles but young Francis kept a grave face.

“On the fourth of July, 1776,” he said, “and I know the names of those other men too, Grandfather.”

“So do I!” piped up a cousin. “One was John Adams and one was Benjamin Franklin—”

“And Roger Sherman of Connecticut and Robert Livingston of New York,” finished Francis, “and Thomas Jefferson of Virginia. But you should have been the first man to sign it, Grandfather. Why did you let John Hancock beat you?”

“He was the president of the Congress, my son. It was his right to put his name first. Have you read the Declaration, any of you?”

“Ha!” shouted some older ones. “We know it by heart.” And straightway there began a chanting recitation, the big ones trying to drown out the smaller ones.

Jefferson jumped up, waving his hands for silence. “Enough! Enough! You know it. I concede that you know it. Better than your grandfather no doubt, for I have to think hard at times to remember parts of it.”

It was Ann, the oldest Randolph daughter, who broke up the conclave around the fire.

“Grandfather, the wagons have come!” she announced from the door. “Do you want all those boxes brought in here?”

“All of them.” He jumped up and was quickly at the door. Now he would open and arrange all his papers at his leisure. Slaves tramped in and out through the outer library, endlessly piling up heavy parcels.

“Twenty-nine,” counted Martha finally. “Papa, there should be thirty. I know. I counted them twice in Washington.”

“Something has been lost or stolen,” he worried, “and I won’t know what it is until I have emptied every box.”

“I know what it is!” she cried, studying the pile. “It’s that wooden box we packed in your bedroom—there at the last. The one that had all your Indian writing in it.”

“My comparative study of all the Indian languages,” he fretted. “Some one must go back at once. Thomas, send two boys down the river in a canoe tomorrow to search the bank where all these parcels were unloaded from the barge. That Indian work could be valuable. I meant to pursue it further. It must not be lost.”

The lost box was found a few days later. It had been torn open on the muddy river bank and obviously the thieves, seeking for money, had been disappointed in the contents, for the precious papers were torn and scattered far and wide. What little could be salvaged, Martha dried and pressed but little was legible on the sodden sheets.

Thomas Jefferson’s years of study of the Indian tongues was forever lost.

3

_Monticello: Summer, 1809_

Spring came burgeoning over the Virginia hills, warming quickly into promise of summer. The bulbs Thomas Jefferson and his lost wife Martha had planted so long ago pushed up through the damp earth and the children came running excitedly to call him whenever a bud showed, tight and green-sheathed above its protecting sword blades.

“Grandfather, come quick! The Roman Empress tulip has a big bud showing and a teeny one.”

“Fine, Virginia.” She was one of the younger ones, still small enough so that he could toss her on his shoulder. “We’ll go and see but not touch.”

“We know. They turn brown and don’t open out to be flowers. Francis pinched the Queen of the Amazons last spring and it never bloomed at all.”

“And some little girl tattled, which isn’t nice, do you think?” he teased, waiting for the others who invariably like hungry chicks came flying out several doors whenever he walked on the lawn.

“Francis thinks he is kind of special because he doesn’t live here all the time,” said Ellen, “but he does stay for long times and he has lessons with us and so he shouldn’t be any different.”

“Francis,” explained Jefferson, “does not have a lot of people to love him. He’s not rich in love like all the Randolphs. Now let us look into the case of this foreign woman, the Roman Empress.”

He bent over the bed where the nubby little buds ventured up into the thin, warming sun of spring. An old pain, long kept hidden deep stirred again in him, stabbing at his heart, clasping icy fingers at his throat to make an aching cramp there. Martha, his own Martha, so long gone, so always present and living still in that deep place where no person, no plaudit, no antagonism or ambition had ever been permitted. He could almost see her long white fingers now, as they had pressed the warm earth down lovingly over the dry, somnolent bulbs, always so delicately careful not to break an embryo root or smother too deep the promise of the crown.

She had been heavy with child that spring day, carrying the son who had only lived a few days, and when he protested that she must not tire herself she had given him a little push and said, “No, I must do it, I must plant them. Don’t you know that whatever I plant now will grow?”

The years—the years! Almost thirty of them now since she had looked at him with dimming eyes, and said, “Promise that my children will never have a stepmother.”

He had kept that promise. No other woman had ever approached the walled-off chamber of his heart where she was enshrined. There were times when, observing Patsy’s healthy brood, an impatient bitterness colored with a haunting kind of guilt would burn in him. Too many children—six of them in ten years—had been too much for Martha’s frail strength; yet Patsy had borne eleven easily and naturally. Childbirth to her had not been the draining, killing ordeal that had taken Martha, and their well-loved Maria also. He wondered often if Jack Eppes, Maria’s young husband, felt too that continuing, sickening weight of self-accusation.

He got to his feet quickly, bidding the sad ghosts of the past to depart. “Off with you all now,” he ordered. “It’s time for lessons. Run, before your mother scolds you and me too.”

“Race you?” screamed one Randolph to his sisters.

“No, no—start fair!” they shrieked in protest.

Jefferson called a halt. “Line up. Smallest one three paces ahead of the next. You here, Cornelia.”

“I’m Ellen, Grandfather.”

“All right. Some day I shall hang labels around all your necks. No inching forward now! You—big fellow, three paces to the rear. Now, when I drop my handkerchief—go!”

Small feet flew, braids flopped, hats fell off, and happy squeals and shouts made pandemonium. Flushed and hot and breathless they straggled back to the dreariness of lessons, the older ones knowing that they must learn history and Latin verbs well, for inevitably before the day ended their grandfather would be catechizing them and putting on a sober, disappointed look if they missed the correct answers.

There were letters waiting for replies and papers to be gone over and sorted in his study, but Jefferson discovered a reluctance in himself to begin these tasks. Pacing the long terrace to the south he came to the door of a little one-room building. This was what had always been called Honeymoon Cottage, the first room built at Monticello. He had lived a bachelor’s life in that one room in ’71 and, when Shadwell, his mother’s home, had burned, it had become his only and permanent home.

He took from his pocket the big iron key he had carried for so many years, turned the stiff lock slowly lest some rusted part should snap, and opened the door. Long unused, as it had been for years, the room still held a fresh, sweetish smell of femininity. Patsy had obviously kept it aired and cleaned, knowing that it was still the secret abode of his tired old heart. At the windows the dimity curtains were fresh and starched, the valance and tester of the bed still bright with old-fashioned wool embroidery. His own mother had worked those many-hued flowers and curious fruits, coloring the wool in her own dye pots with homemade dyes set with alum and vinegar.

The slender posts of the bed were polished, as was the brass fender of the fireplace. An armchair stood on the hearth rug and Jefferson sank into it, relaxing his long legs, staring into the cold fireplace where three dry logs rested on the andirons.

His mind whet, far back in time, thirty-six years back, to a snowy January night in ’72, when he had brought his bride, Martha Wayles Skelton, to this room, the only home he had to offer her.

Monticello had been a beginning then, some walls raised, part of a wing roofed over, windows boarded up, floors rough laid and strewn with scraps and sawdust where they were laid at all. But nowhere within the ambitiously planned structure a room complete enough for a lady, and the winter snows had halted all work until a thaw came.

Thomas Jefferson could almost visualize that spindle-legged, freckle-faced bridegroom, that brash twenty-nine-year-old fiddler who had charmed his lady with his music and won her away from a swarm of admirers by tricking them with a clever stratagem. It had never occurred to him in those courting days at the Wayles’ place, The Forest, that he might likely be catalogued with some of Martha’s other swains as an ambitious country boy and embryo lawyer set on improving his state by marrying a rich young widow. He had cared too much for Martha, loving her, he was arrogantly certain, as no man had ever loved a woman before, and he had brought her here to this cold little room so confident of her love and courage that a chill or two did not matter.

Now he thought back on that snowy ride up from Blenheim, where, because of the deepening snow, they had been obliged to leave the chaise in which they had started out from Williamsburg, as well as the warm robes and blankets with which it had been loaded. There had been a debate, he remembered now, about whether they should ride on or wait for morning, but Martha had laughed his misgivings down.

“I can weather any storm that you can weather, Thomas Jefferson.”

So saddle horses had been brought, his own tired team stabled, and the slave who had driven the chaise sent to bed with orders to drive to Monticello in the morning. Jefferson recalled now his dubious concern when he discovered that the snow on the mountain road was eighteen inches deep.

He had ridden ahead, breaking a track for Martha’s horse, trying to shield her as best he could from the storm that stung their eyelids and sifted inside collars and up sleeves. But Martha had been undismayed. She had shouted jokes at him through the wind, ordering him to wait now and then while she wiped the snow off her face. Eight miles they had had to climb, the horses sliding, stumbling, and blowing through the dark until at last they saw the brick piles and scaffolding of what was to be their home through the weird snow light.

Not a light showed, not a feather of smoke lay on the air. Where were all the black people who should have been there ready to serve them with warm fires and a hot meal? Jefferson burned with hot angry impatience; then common sense prevailed. No one could possibly have expected them home at this hour. It was far past midnight.

The honeymoon cottage felt a trifle chilly now to his old bones, but on that January night long ago it had held a tomblike cold. Just as he had done on that night, now he rummaged the old brass pot beside the hearth, finding scraps of slivers of kindling, mounding them into a heap under the logs, struck flint, and fired a bit of bark. The tiny flame wavered and grew as he blew upon it and coaxed fire to burn, as he had done for his beloved. Finally it leaped in a bright blaze to the resinous pine logs and Jefferson dropped into the chair again, trying to vision her there, shaking the snow off her riding skirt, holding one foot and then the other near to the blaze while he held her up with a supporting arm.

They had been very silly that night, he knew now, and was glad of the gay nonsense that had lightened the beginning for them. Life had been grim enough afterward. He was happy now to recall the laughter. There had been a mouse who came calling and Martha had not screamed or leaped on a chair as his sisters did. Instead, she had waggled her fingers at the mouse, as it sat upright blinking at them, and had exclaimed, “Thomas, it has big brown eyes!”

He had played the fiddle for her then, the same fiddle faithful Jupiter had saved from the burning ruin of Shadwell. Now, he could not play any more. Just as well. His music had belonged to people he loved. To Martha, to Dabney Carr, who had married his sister and been his heart’s best friend until his untimely death. Dabney Carr lay now out on this hill, under the oak where they two had sat together while young Thomas Jefferson blithely planned the place he would have here someday. They had sworn then that the two of them would both be buried under those trees. Jefferson had kept that promise. His music had belonged for a while with his friendship for Patrick Henry, another fiddler and a blithe and restless spirit, but most especially it had been for Martha. He had wooed her with that fiddle—their duets had excluded her other suitors—now it was as well that it would be forever silent, now that there were no more loved ears to hear.

Ten years he had had before she faded away, and he had been too much away from home in those years. First as a member of the rebellious House of Burgesses that had been peremptorily dissolved by Governor Dunmore. That assembly had marched off to hold meetings in the tavern and out of their angry discussions had grown the idea of the Colonial Congress.

Their first year had brought him his little daughter, the other Martha who had been promptly called Patsy because there were already two Marthas, her mother and her aunt, Jefferson’s sister.

For too much of the time, Jefferson knew now, he had kept to himself when he was at home, shut away with his books. Out of the works of the old and new philosophers and historians he had striven to evolve some plan that could help a troubled America. While hammering went on around him, as the house of his dreams slowly took form and shape, he had struggled to put his ideas into words. But the essay he finally evolved with much labor was called too bold by the members of the assembly. Then, in that miasmic summer of ’73, the fever had laid him low and his best friend, Dabney Carr, had died.