Murder at Monticello (19 page)

44

A warm southerly breeze filled breasts with the hope that spring had truly arrived. Snowstorms could hit central Virginia in April, and once a snowstorm had blanketed the fields in May, but that was rare. The last frost generally disappeared mid-April, although days warmed before that. Then the wisteria would bloom, drenching the sides of buildings, barns, and pergolas with lavender and white. This was Mrs. Murphy's favorite time of the year.

She basked in the sun by the back door of the post office along with Pewter and Tucker. She was also basking in the delicious satisfaction of delivering to Pewter the news about the books in the hiding place. Pewter was livid, but one good thing was that her brief absence had allowed Market to overcome his temper and to make peace with Ellie Wood Baxter. The gray cat was now back in his good graces, but if she had to hear the words “pork roast” one more time, she would scratch and bite.

The alleyway behind the buildings filled up with cars since the parking spaces in the front were taken. On one of the first really balmy days of spring, people always seem motivated to buy bulbs, bouquets, and sweaters in pastel colors.

Driving down the east end of the alleyway was Samson Coles. Turning in on the west end was Warren Randolph. They parked next to each other behind Market Shiflett's store.

Tucker lifted her head, then dropped it back on her paws. Mrs. Murphy watched through eyes that were slits. Pewter could not have cared less.

“How are you doing with the Diamonds?” Warren asked as he shut his car door.

“Hanging between Midale and Fox Haven.”

Warren whistled, “Some kind of commission, buddy.”

“How you been doing?”

Warren shrugged. “Okay. It's hard sometimes. And Ansley—I asked her for some peace and quiet, and what does she do but let Kimball Haynes go through the family papers. 'Course he was a nice guy, but that's not the point.”

“I didn't like him,” Samson said. “Lucinda pulled the same stunt on me that Ansley pulled on you. He should have come to me, not my wife. Smarmy—not that I wished him dead.”

“Somebody did.”

“Made your mind up about the campaign yet?” Samson abruptly changed the subject.

“I'm still debating, although I'm feeling stronger. I just might do it.”

Samson slapped him on the back. “Don't let the press get hold of Poppa's will. Well, you let me know. I'll be your ardent supporter, your campaign manager, you name it.”

“Sure. I'll let you know as soon as I do.” Warren headed for the post office as Samson entered Market's by the back door. With remarkable self-control Warren acted as though not a thing was wrong, but he knew in that instant that Ansley had betrayed his trust and was betraying him in other respects too.

It never crossed Samson's mind that he had spilled the beans, but then, he was already spending the commission money from the Diamond deal in his mind before he'd even closed the sale. Then again, perhaps the trysting and hiding were wearing thin. Maybe subconsciously he wanted Warren to know. Then they could get the pretense over with and Ansley would be his.

45

Since Kimball had kept most of his private papers in his study room on the second floor of Monticello, the sheriff insisted that nothing be disturbed. But Harry and Mrs. Hogendobber knew the material and had been there recently with Kimball, so he allowed them, along with Deputy Cooper, to make certain nothing had been moved or removed.

Oliver Zeve, agitated, complained to Sheriff Shaw that lovely though the three ladies might be, they were not scholars and really had no place being there.

Shaw, patience ebbing, told Oliver to be grateful that Harry and Mrs. Hogendobber knew Kimball's papers and could decipher his odd shorthand. With a curt inclination of the head Oliver indicated that he was trumped, although he asked that Mrs. Murphy and Tucker stay home. He got his way on that one.

Shaw also had to pacify Fair, who wanted to accompany “the girls,” as he called them. The sheriff figured that would put Oliver over the edge, and since Cynthia Cooper attended them, they were safe, he assured Fair.

Oliver's frazzled state could be explained by the fact that for the last two days he had endured network television interviews, local television interviews, and encampment by members of the press. He was not a happy man. In his discomfort he almost lost sight of the death of a valued colleague.

“Nothing appears to have been disturbed.” Mrs. Hogendobber swept her eyes over the room.

Standing over his yellow legal pad, Harry noticed some new notes jotted in Kimball's tight scribble. She picked up the pad. “He wrote down a quote from Martha Randolph to her fourth child, Ellen Wayles Coolidge.” Harry mused. “It's curious that Martha and her husband named their fourth child Ellen Wayles even though their third child was also Ellen Wayles—she died at eleven months. You'd think it'd be bad luck.”

Mrs. Hogendobber interjected, “Wasn't. Ellen Coolidge lived a good life. Now, poor Anne Cary, that child suffered.”

“You talk as though you know these people.” Cynthia smiled.

“In a way we do. All the while we worked with Kimball, he filled us in, saving us years of reading, literally. Lacking telephones, people wrote to one another religiously when they were apart. Kind of wish we did that today. They left behind invaluable records, observations, opinions in their letters. They also cherished accurate judgments of one another—I think they knew one another better than we know each other today.”

“The answer to that is simple, Harry.” Mrs. H. peeked over her shoulder to examine the legal pad. “They missed the deforming experience of psychology.”

“Why don't you read what he copied down?” Cooper whipped out her notebook and pencil.

“This is what Martha Randolph said: ‘The discomfort of slavery I have borne all my life, but its sorrows in all their bitterness I never before perceived.' He wrote below that this was a letter dated August 2, 1825, from the Coolidge papers at U.V.A.”

“Who is Coolidge?” Cooper wrote on her pad.

“Sorry, Ellen Wayles married a Coolidge—”

Cooper interrupted. “That's right, you told me that. I'll get the names straight eventually. Does Kimball make any notation about why that was significant?”

“Here he wrote, ‘After sale of Colonel Randolph's slaves to pay debts. Sale included one Susan, who was Virginia's maid,' ” Harry informed Cynthia. “Virginia was the sixth child of Thomas Mann Randolph and Martha Jefferson Randolph, the one we call Patsy because that's what she was called within the family.”

“Can you give me an abbreviated history course here? Why did the colonel sell slaves, obviously against other family members' wishes?”

“We forgot to tell you that Colonel Randolph was Patsy's husband.”

“Oh.” She wrote that down. “Didn't Patsy have any say in the matter?”

“Coop, until a few decades ago, as in our lifetime, women were still chattel in the state of Virginia.” Harry jammed her right hand in her pocket. “Thomas Mann Randolph could do as he damn well pleased. He started out with advantages in this life but proved a poor businessman. He became so estranged from his family toward the end that he would leave Monticello at dawn and return only at night.”

“He was the victim of his own generosity.” Mrs. Hogendobber put in a good word for the man. “Always standing notes for friends and then,
pfft
.” She flipped her hand upside down like a fish that bellied up. “Wound up in legal proceedings against his own son, Jeff, who had become the anchor of the family and upon whom even his grandfather relied.”

“Know the old horse expression ‘He broke bad'?” Harry asked Cooper. “That was Thomas Mann Randolph.”

“He wasn't the only one now. Look what happened to Jefferson's two nephews Lilburne and Isham Lewis.” Mrs. Hogendobber adored the news, or gossip, no matter the vintage. “They killed a slave named George on December 15, 1811. Fortunately their mother, Lucy, Thomas Jefferson's sister, had already passed away, on May 26, 1810, or she would have perished of the shame. Anyway, they killed this unfortunate dependent and Lilburne was indicted on March 18, 1812. He killed himself on April tenth and his brother Isham ran away. Oh, it was awful.”

“Did that happen here?” Cooper's pencil flew across the page.

“Frontier. Kentucky.” Mrs. Hogendobber took the tablet from Harry. “May I?” She read. “Here's another quote from Patsy, still about the slave sale. ‘Nothing can prosper under such a system of injustice.' Don't you wonder what the history of this nation would be like if the women had been included in the government from the beginning?—Women like Abigail Adams and Dolley Madison and Martha Jefferson Randolph.”

“We got the vote in 1920 and we still aren't fifty percent of the government,” Harry bitterly said. “Actually, our government is such a tangled mess of contradictions, maybe a person is smart to stay out of it.”

“Oh, Harry, it was a mess when Jefferson waded in too. Politics is like a fight between banty roosters,” Mrs. Hogendobber noted.

“Could you two summarize Jefferson's attitude about slavery? His daughter surely seems to have hated it.” Cooper started to chew on her eraser, caught herself, and stopped.

“The best place to start is to read his
Notes on Virginia
. Now, that was first printed in 1785 in Paris, but he started writing before that.”

“Mrs. Hogendobber, with all due respect, I haven't the time to read that stuff. I've got a killer to find with a secret to hide and we're still working on the stiff from 1803, excuse me, the remains.”

“The corpse of love,” Harry blurted out.

“That's how we think of him,” Miranda added.

“You mean because he was Medley's lover, or you think he was?” Cooper questioned her.

“Yes, but if she loved him, she had stopped.”

“Because she loved someone else?” Cynthia, accustomed to grilling, fell into it naturally.

“It was some form of love. It may not have been romantic.”

Cynthia sighed. Another dead end for now. “Okay. Someone tell me about Jefferson and slavery. Mrs. Hogendobber, you have a head for dates and stuff.”

“Bookkeeping gives one a head for figures. All right, Thomas Jefferson was born April 13, 1743, new style calendar. Remember, everyone but the Russians moved up to the Gregorian calendar from the Julian. By the old style he was born on April 2. Must have been fun for all those people all over Europe and the New World to get two birthdays, so to speak. Well, Cynthia, he was born into a world of slavery. If you read history at all, you realize that every great civilization undergoes a protracted period of slavery. It's the only way the work can get done and capital can be accumulated. Imagine if the pharaohs had had to pay labor for the construction of the pyramids.”

“I never thought of it that way.” Cynthia raised her eyebrows.

“Slaves have typically been those who were conquered in battle. In the case of the Romans, many of their slaves were Greeks, most of whom were far better educated than their captors, and the Romans expected their Greek slaves to tutor them. And the Greeks themselves often had Greek slaves, those captured from battles with other
poleis,
or city-states. Well, our slaves were no different in that they were the losers in war, but the twist for America came in this fashion: The slaves that came to America were the losers in tribal wars in Africa and were sold to the Portuguese by the leaders of the victorious tribes. See, by that time the world had shrunk, so to speak. Lower Africa had contact with Europe, and the products of Europe enticed people everywhere. After a while other Europeans elbowed in on the trade and sailed to South America, the Caribbean, and North America with their human cargo. They even began to bag some trophies themselves—you know, if the wars slowed down. Demand for labor was heavy in the New World.”

“Mrs. Hogendobber, what does this have to do with Thomas Jefferson?”

“Two things. He grew up in a society where most people considered slavery normal. And two—and this still plagues us today—the conquered, the slaves, were not Europeans, they were Africans. They couldn't pass. You see?”

Cynthia bit her pencil eraser again. “I'm beginning to get the picture.”

“Even if a slave bought his or her way to freedom or was granted freedom, or even if the African started as a free person, he or she never looked like a Caucasian. Unlike the Romans and the Greeks, whose slaves were other European tribes or usually other indigenous Caucasian peoples, a stigma attached to slavery in America because it was automatically attached to the color of the skin—with terrible consequences.”

Harry jumped in. “But he believed in liberty. He thought slavery cruel, yet he couldn't live without his own slaves. Oh, sure, he treated them handsomely and they were loyal to him because he looked after them so well compared to many other slave owners of the period. So he was trapped. He couldn't imagine scaling down. Virginians then and today still conceive of themselves as English lords and ladies. That translates into a high, high standard of living.”

“One that bankrupted him.” Mrs. Hogendobber nodded her head in sadness. “And saddled his heirs.”

“Yeah, but what was most interesting about Jefferson, to me anyway, was his insight into what slavery does to people. He said it destroyed the industry of the masters while degrading the victim. It sapped the foundation of liberty. He absolutely believed that freedom was a gift from God and the right of all men. So he favored a plan of gradual emancipation. Nobody listened, of course.”

“Did other people have to bankrupt themselves?”

“You have to remember that the generation that fought the Revolutionary War, for all practical purposes, saw their currency devalued and finally destroyed. The only real security was land, I guess.” Mrs. Hogendobber thought out loud. “Jefferson lost a lot. James Madison struggled with heavy debt as well as with the contradictions of slavery his whole life, and Dolley was forced to sell Montpelier, his mother's and later their home, after his death. Speaking of slavery, one of James's slaves, who loved Dolley like a mother, gave her his life savings and continued to live with her and work for her. As you can see, the emotions between the master or the mistress and the slave were highly complex. People loved one another across a chasm of injustice. I fear we've lost that.”

“We'll have to learn to love one another as equals,” Harry solemnly said. “‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with inherent and unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.' ”

“History. I hated history when I was in college. You two bring it to life.” Cynthia praised them and their short course on Jefferson.

“It is alive. These walls breathe. Everything that everyone did or did not do throughout the course of human life on earth impacts us. Everything!” Mrs. Hogendobber was impassioned.

Harry, spellbound by Mrs. Hogendobber, heard an owl hoot outside, the low, mournful sound breaking the spell and reminding her of Athena, goddess of wisdom, to whom the owl was sacred. Wisdom was born of the night, of solitary and deep thought. It was so obvious, so clearly obvious to the Greeks and those who used mythological metaphors for thousands of years. She just got it. She started to share her revelation when she spied a copy of Dumas Malone's magisterial series on the life of Thomas Jefferson. It was the final volume, the sixth,
The Sage of Monticello
.

“I don't remember this book being here.”

Mrs. Hogendobber noticed the book on the chair. The other five volumes rested in the milk crates that served as bookcases. “It wasn't.”

“Here.” Harry opened to a page which Kimball had marked by using the little heavy gray paper divider found in boxes of teabags. “Look at this.”

Cynthia and Mrs. Hogendobber crowded around the book, where on page 513 Kimball had underlined with a pink high-lighter, “All five of the slaves freed under Jefferson's will were members of this family; others of them previously had been freed or, if able to pass as white, allowed to run away.”

“‘Allowed to run away'!” Mrs. Hogendobber read aloud.

“It's complicated, Cynthia, but this refers to the Hemings family. Thomas Jefferson had been accused by his political enemies, the Federalists, of having an affair of many years' duration with Sally Hemings. We don't think he did, but the slaves declared that Sally was the mistress of Peter Carr, Thomas's favorite nephew, whom he raised as a son.”

“But the key here is that Sally's mother, also a beautiful woman, was half white to begin with. Her name was Betty, and her lover, again according to oral slave tradition as well as what Thomas Jefferson Randolph said, was John Wayles, Jefferson's
wife's
brother. You see the bind Jefferson was in. For fifty years that man lived with this abuse heaped on his head.”