Jefferson (17 page)

Twenty minutes later he was lifting the hammer-shaped knocker on a familiar door.

“C’est Monsieur Chort?”

“Oui. Madame est ici?”

“Elle est …” The young maid stepped into the hallway and partially closed the door behind her. “Elle est occupée.”

“Ah. Et ce soir, peut-être? Occupée encore?”

The maid leaned forward to study Short’s gold watch. She was about fifteen, he guessed, with straight black hair only lightly powdered. She wore a short skirt as Parisian women usually did on the streets, to keep the mud and filth from their clothes, but the ankles and calves she showed were farm-girl thick and covered with coarse little hairs. Did Madame hire such a girl as contrast with her own luminous white mane of hair? Or because a peasant girl would work for practically nothing, just to stay in the city?

“You are the Englishman?” the maid said, lifting her eyes from the watch but touching his hand with her fingers.

“American.” Or did she keep her as an apprentice, so to speak, to the trade?

“And you are Chort, but in fact you’re tall.”

Short put away the watch. “Tonight perhaps?” Between the door and the doorjamb he could glimpse plush red velvet and a crystal decanter on a table. Even in the cool hallway he felt suddenly red-faced and warm. The girl pretended to think.

“Eight o’clock,” she said at last. “Madame could see you then, for an hour or two.”

Memoirs of Jefferson
—
4

J
EFFERSON, THE SOPHISTICATED MUSICIAN
, author, and statesman of European fame, who
served French wine in the White House and spoke four different languages, grew up barefoot along wild and untamed rivers with barbaric Indian names: Pamunkey, Rappahannock, Mattaponi, Potomac.

A European confronting one of these strange-sounding American streams for the first time will be struck even now, after two centuries of settlement, by their desolation. No bridges, no Ponts Neuf, few boats; the traveler in Virginia still fords a river where he can, on foot or on horseback, waist-deep and higher in dangerously fast mud-brown water; or else waits hours on a slippery bank for one of the flat-bottomed ferries that work back and forth near the seaboard, between two dense, silent walls of blue-green forest.

In
1746
, when his son was three years old, the Herculean Peter Jefferson set out with a small party of men to survey the so-called “Fairfax Line,” an immense grant of land from King George II to Lord Fairfax, reaching from the salty head of the Rapidan all the way up to the first clear springs of the Potomac. For nearly eight weeks, while their families waited in suspense and terror, the explorers tumbled up and down over uncharted rocks and precipices, sleeping in the crevices of pines to stay clear of bears, using their rifles and knives to live off the land like savages. They went over five successive ranges of mountains that Peter Jefferson afterward remembered as endless, vast, dark, crisscrossed and choked with fallen timber and hanging ivy. They lost horses (but no men) in impenetrable swamps of laurel and stump pine. At the top of the Potomac they set up a stone marker (still there, still called the Fairfax Stone), and Peter Jefferson carved his initials deeply on a beech tree. On their return they plunged southeast through a mountainous area so rugged that they labeled it Purgatory on their map; the black, furious, dismal river that rushed through it they named Styx.

The river that Jefferson knew earliest was the less mythological but still dangerous Rivanna. In the midst of some four hundred acres of forest—bought from a friend for a bowl of warm punch in the Raleigh Tavern at Williamsburg—Peter Jefferson built a small wooden house on the sloping north shore of the Rivanna, just two hundred yards from the water. This settlement he called Shadwell, after the London parish where his wife had been born.
Here he also erected some barns, a dairy, and eventually a water mill that was to collapse in a flood.

His son, unable to leave any structure or house or room in its original state, made an early effort to alter even the Rivanna. As a young man he canoed it south to see if a channel could be made navigable all the way to the James, and then on to the Tidewater ports. It
could
be navigated, young Tom Jefferson reported back to his neighbors—and their tobacco carried straight to the waiting ships—all that they needed to do was remove some rocks and boulders six miles down from Charlottesville. He collected the money and workers and moved the rocks. It was his first act of public service (and remodeling).

But long before that, Peter Jefferson had taken him upstream into the wilderness and introduced him to the skills of a pioneer. In camp he brought his son under the watchful, unfriendly gaze of Indians, who sometimes reappeared later at Shadwell to bargain for grain or cloth. By family tradition somewhat Indian-like himself, that is to say, grave and taciturn, solemn, Peter Jefferson spent long hours teaching his boy how to hunt and ride in the rough-and-tumble frontier manner; taught him so well that long after Shadwell, Jefferson scorned all “town” games, especially those played with a ball (a prejudice he kept all his life) and recommended that for building self-reliance boys learn to shoot a rifle instead.

Now to a boy, a father is like a king.… For Jefferson the antimonarchist I suppose I had better correct my phrasing. To a boy, a father is like a
hero
. Peter Jefferson could sleep all night in the hollow of a tree, gun across his lap; he could fight off savage animals (or Indians) and lift gigantic hogsheads with one hand. His fastidious son, who never slept in anything but a bed his whole adult life, inherited the physical stamina but not the father’s taste for the frontier. If Peter Jefferson was a hero to his son, it was doubtless in the more civilized guise of the skilled surveyor, whose maps imposed measurement and order on an otherwise chaotic Nature. A surveyor, moreover, with the manual laborer’s passionate reverence for book-learning. In the house at Shadwell, hundreds of miles from any bookseller’s shop, Peter Jefferson somehow managed to accumulate forty-two volumes of books, including Addison, Swift, Pope, and Shakespeare, and his dying
instruction was that the boy should receive a thorough and “classical” education. “If I had had to choose between my father’s estate and a liberal education,” Jefferson liked to say years later, “I would have chosen the latter.” No need to choose, of course. On August 17, 1757, when the boy was fourteen, the father died, in the dying time, leaving to his care sixty slaves, seven thousand acres, six sisters, one brother, and a difficult widow who lived twenty years longer.

Short poured champagne and glanced down for the twentieth time at his open watch. He had chosen a café off the rue Saint-Honoré, half a mile from the cul-de-sac where, at eight o’clock, his appointment awaited him. On the table the garçon had placed a second bottle of champagne squarely atop his copies of
Noted on Virginia
. Short leaned forward and daubed the little ring of moisture the bottle had left. Then the clatter and noise of the café rose even higher. A gentleman wearing the huge silver star of an English lord on his coat crossed the room, scattering good money and bad French. Short smiled at the fuss, the scene, the easy cosmopolitan air, the reflection that he was
here
, an ocean away from—everything. He twisted in his chair to watch the milord emerge on the street, adjust his powdered wig, and disappear. In the windows of the opposite building, twilight was slowly hardening into darkness. On the street carriages sailed by like golden boats.

He cupped his watch in his palm.

The Ace of Spades had white hair above; black hair below.

Short leaned back against the bolsters, stretched his legs under the silk sheets, and watched her cross the room toward him, carrying a scented candle on a candlestick.

Not only black below but trimmed neatly into the shape of her name.

Short sighed and inhaled deeply as she slid into the bed beside him. French women rarely bathed—Marie-Antoinette was said to bathe three times a week and was widely regarded as a fanatic—but his companion kept a small tub in her bedchamber, behind a translucent gauzy screen, and after each
conversation
she liked to
retire for a few moments there. Short inhaled again and turned on his side to touch soft, damp skin. In the flickering light of the candle and the coal fire, her body was a landscape of black and white shadows.

“So, Guillaume, you brought me a present?” Her English was perfect; one languorous arm dipped to the floor and came up with a copy of—Short blinked:
Notes on Virginia
.

“No. No, I brought you champagne.”

But she had already pushed her white shoulders higher and opened the book at random. “ ‘Cumberland, or Shawanee river intersects the boundary between Virginia and North Carolina 67 miles from the Mississippi, and again 198 miles from the same river …’ ” One part of Short’s mind registered the thought that here indeed was the surveyor Peter Jefferson’s true son speaking. Another part recoiled from the indecency or comedy (or both) of reading Jefferson’s book in such a place. But as always the controlling part stirred and grew at the sight of breasts rising, nipples hard and dark as berries. His hands curved down the valley of belly and thigh, burning.

She flipped to another page. “ ‘The Comte de Buffon,’ ” she read incredulously. “This is a book about France?”

Short had begun to pull the sheet away from her hips. She was long-legged, small-breasted. The white hair framed an oval face of slow, sensual intelligence, punctuated by a black beauty patch at the corner of her mouth. Like all Parisian women she was never entirely naked; a gold chain hung around her neck, its triangular diamond medallion flat between her breasts, reflecting the hair above; below.

“Buffon,” he told her, “claims that all animals and men in America are physically smaller than in Europe, because the climate is hotter.”

“Don’t.” She stirred.

“And moister.”

“Don’t.”

“The author refutes him.” The book closed. The sheet fell. In Williamsburg, of course, Short had known women—upstairs in the Raleigh Tavern you could arrange what you liked—but nothing had prepared him for the exoticism of Paris. He inhaled the smell of cinnamon, peach. Long legs wrapped around him, skin
against skin, moving like silk against silk. White hair, soft wide lips; games played with a ball. Two. The candle guttered and the bed creaked as they shifted. Her voice, at once amused and breathless, came first in French, then English. “Buffon a fait une erreur.” Short felt her fingers brush the flat, rigid muscles of his stomach.