Patriot Hearts (28 page)

Even asking her would change what lay between them, forever.

Much as he strove to transform the world, and alter how men lived their lives, in his own life he feared and hated change.

But their friendship had already changed, beyond the point where it could be pressed back into its earlier form.

He wanted her, when all his life he had despised slave-owners like his father-in-law, men who took concubines from among their bondswomen.

I am a free woman here.
Back at Monticello or Eppington, Sally would already be wed, or as wed as slaves ever got. She’d be living with a man and undoubtedly carrying his child. In the markets here she’d seen girls her own age, round-bellied under the short corsets of pregnancy, and one of Mme. Dupré’s sons-in-law was every bit of Mr. Jefferson’s forty-six years.

And so she waited in the darkness. Not knowing what to expect, not knowing what she would say, if and when he were to come into her room, and stretch out on the narrow bed at her side.

And one night, when summer rain poured down the steep slate roofs and lightning flashed over the river, she heard the creak of his door opening below her, and the stealthy pad of naked feet on the attic stair.

The previous winter—the coldest within living memory, when the river froze solid so that food supplies couldn’t come into the city and hundreds of the poor died nightly in the snow-choked streets—Sophie Sparling had parted company from her employer, owing to the Luckton equivalent of Mr. Randolph, in this case Mrs. Luckton’s son. She shared a garret with three other women in rue de Vieille Monnaie, close to the Cemetery of the Holy Innocents. When Sally reached the place, the door of the old town house stood open and breathed out a stink like the halitus of Hell. Even at this hour men clustered in the wine-shop in the building’s ground floor; someone inside was shouting, “It will be today, brothers! They’ll march in and put the lot of us to the sword—yes, and our wives and our children, too!—because we’ve refused to accept one more day of being fucked in the arse by the King’s ministers and the Bitch-Queen’s hell-begotten friends! On the lamp-post with them, I say! Because we have cried out against them they will murder us in our beds!”

Sally took a deep breath and ducked inside. The stair was still black with night, slippery with feces and garbage.

Sophie must still be here. She can’t have gone.

She had no idea where she would go or what she would do if Sophie wasn’t there.

The garret was a long bare room with half a dozen smaller leading off it. Three families lived there, the women pounding at a half-loaf of mold-gray bread with hammers, to break off pieces for the gaggle of children. One of Sophie’s roommates had just come up with a jug of what was supposed to be coffee. “…puttin’ up barricades, to slow ’em down,” she was saying to the others, in her slurry Parisian French. “There’s one already by the Filles de la Visitation and another in the rue du Temple. They’re sayin’ we’re gonna march on the Invalides. There’s weapons there—”

“Sally!”

Sophie Sparling stood in the doorway, holding aside the curtain that served for a door. She didn’t ask what Sally was doing here, at this hour of the morning. Only held out her hand, drew her into her own tiny room, where two girls and a whiskery man slept on the sagging bed. Light leaked in from a single window, broken and stuffed with rags. The angry ringing of the alarm-bells, the
tocsins,
penetrated even here.

Sally said, “I think I’m with child.”

Sally took a deep breath. “I haven’t had my monthly course since May; I’m going to start showing soon. I don’t want him to know.”

Sophie had worked with her surgeon father, and had been a midwife’s assistant, while she and her mother were taking refuge with Cornwallis’s troops, after her father’s death. There wasn’t much about the relations between men and women that wasn’t written in those cold gray eyes. “What do you want to do?” she asked.

“You told me, last time we talked, about your friend Mme. de Blancheville, that’s willing to help girls who’re willing to work. Mr. Jefferson’s asked the Congress for leave to take Patsy and Polly home. Then he’ll come back, he says. But that doesn’t mean he’d bring
me
back, for all what he says. And he wouldn’t bring a baby, not on a ship.” Her jaw tightened, at the almost physical agony of the choice she had made. “In Virginia my baby’d be a slave.”

“As would you.” Sophie pointed it out bluntly.

Sally breathed a tiny snort of rueful laughter. “You’re gonna think me crazy, Sophie—I know you do already. But to tell you God’s truth, I really don’t care whether I’m slave or I’m free, as long as I can be with him.”

“You’ll care when he gets tired of you.”

“If you mean he’d sell me off, he won’t. I know him and he won’t.”

“You don’t know him.” An abyss of bitterness echoed in Sophie’s voice. “Right now he may even believe he loves you. Has he said so? I understand they generally do. At least if they’re talking to white women.”

“I don’t know all of him, no,” Sally replied quietly. “I don’t think anybody does. And that doesn’t matter now because I’m not going back. Not to Virginia, not to his house today or ever. I don’t know the difference between thinking you love someone and really loving them, and no, he hasn’t said it. I just know he won’t let me stay here.”

Sophie’s expression was a silent reminder of Sally’s legal freedom in the Kingdom of France.

Sally shook her head. “He doesn’t let go, Sophie. Not of what he sees as his. He was furious when Jimmy said he’d leave him. When poor Polly didn’t want to come here, after her little sister died, he had her kidnapped, just about; tricked onto the ship. In all these years, he’s never really let go of Miss Patty. It tears him up inside,” she added, more quietly. “If it was just me, it would be different. But if it was just me, it wouldn’t be such a problem, because he’d bring me back here next year—”

“If he still cared.”

She whispered, “He’ll still care. But it isn’t just me.”

And she knew herself well enough to know that when she was with him, she couldn’t think clearly. Any more than a moth can think clearly about the amber glory of flame.

“Will you take me to your Mme. de Blancheville? And ask her to take me in?”

The din in the outer attic had grown louder, men’s voices shouting now, and children crying. Then jostle and clatter as everyone left and went down the stairs. The man in the bed sat up with a grunt, ambled out into the outer room to piss in the bucket there—the few windows being too high for the purpose. “Have you eaten?” Sophie asked, and unearthed a tin box from beneath her pallet on the floor, then led Sally out to the now-empty outer attic to share her bread and what was left of the coffee.

This stuff was like eating a rock, the flour so adulterated that even soaked in coffee, it gritted on Sally’s teeth. Jefferson had told Sally that the bread being sold in Paris was nearly inedible, but as American Minister—and a plantation-owner used to buying in bulk—he at least had a store of flour laid by from last summer.

“You know Mme. de Blancheville works servants hard,” cautioned Sophie. “Far worse than Mr. Jefferson. You won’t be allowed to go out of the house, and she’ll require you to become a Catholic.”

“It won’t be forever. Mr. Jefferson thinks he’ll get leave soon. I would have waited til just before they left, so he couldn’t look for me, but I feared I’d start showing before then. He talks about what a wonderful thing it is, that the French are casting off the chains of a thousand years, but he still doesn’t want his daughters here in the middle of it.”

“Mr. Jefferson has always impressed me as a man who doesn’t quite understand why things
can’t
be the way they
should
be: why the Revolution that he considers so purifying to the human soul—God knows why, he can’t have encountered some of the members of the patriot militia I did—doesn’t
actually
purify the individual men who participate. Maybe he considers that it purified
his
soul and that’s all he’s aware of.”

“He thinks men can be better than they are.”

“Maybe they can.” Sophie rose and collected a rather battered straw hat. “But politics won’t make them so. We’d better go. If there is another riot and the King’s troops do march in to break it up, I’d rather be close enough to Mme. de Blancheville’s to take refuge there.”

As they descended the stair, Sally said, “After he’s gone I’ll write to him. I’ll tell him where I am, and why I left as I did. Then when he returns next year, he can do as he likes. He’ll be angry,” she added softly. “But I think he’ll understand.”

Sophie sniffed.

“As soon as the baby’s born I’ll start looking for something to do for my living. I can cut and pattern dresses as well as sew. After he’s gone I’ll see if Mme. Dupré—our seamstress—will take me in. I’d go to her now but I think she’d tell him, or tell someone in the house, and it would get back to him. She’s not good at keeping her mouth shut. And she always hated it, that a man would be able to have women and girls as slaves.”

“It’s hard to find grounds upon which to dispute her sentiments,” Sophie remarked drily, as they reached the street. The mob around the wine-shop was larger now, and angrier, stirring and churning like swarming bees. The same orator or another was still shouting at the crowd, and men were waving pamphlets, fresh-printed and smudgy with cheap ink. Sally glimpsed the headings,
ARISE
! and
FRIEND OF THE PEOPLE
. She shivered. This, and the mob who had surged past the Hôtel yesterday to burn the customs barrier, were a far cry from Tom’s sharp-featured face in candlelight as he spoke of the National Assembly meeting in Versailles, of the soldiers who were deserting the King’s regiments in droves to join with the men who demanded an end to royal privilege and royal inefficiency.

She’d seen pamphlets of the same sort in the kitchen at the Hôtel Langeac, and suspected it was Mme. Dupré who’d brought them in.

She was almost certain it was Mme. Dupré who’d told Patsy.

All the servants knew, as servants always knew. During those first few weeks, Jefferson was discreet—with Mr. Short and various other guests in his household he could hardly be otherwise. But he quietly arranged times to meet her away from the house, to visit the gardens of the royal châteaus of Marly and St.-Cloud or to walk in the far pathways of the Bois de Boulogne, where they were unlikely to meet anyone Tom knew. Once or twice he took her, in the evenings, to the Palais Royale, masked and with her hair powdered gray, and had an artist there paint a miniature of her on ivory, to carry in a locket, out of sight of all.

They would return separately to the house, to meet again in his bedroom, behind the bolted door.

In France Sally was, to all intents and purposes, a white woman, only a little more dusky of skin than the Spaniards and Italians who carried in their veins the blood of the Levant. It was only the Virginians in the household—Mr. Short, and Patsy, and Polly—who saw her as African, and then only because they’d been brought up from childhood to look for the subtle signs.