Jefferson (25 page)

“The company will be most, most amusing,” Trumbull added. “I promise it.”

“If Mr. Short went along, to remind me of business.…” Jefferson said slowly.

“I was about to ask him,” Trumbull said.

Friday, August twelfth, dawned hot and clear. By the time Short finished his breakfast at seven, Jefferson had already been working in their office for two hours, writing letters, running his new copy press. As Short walked in one door, Jefferson was leaving by the other, and before Short had fairly settled into his chair, he heard the sound of his violin upstairs.

“Did Trumbull already eat?” Short rocked a little in his swivel chair and watched James Hemings pour coffee into his cup. Jefferson disapproved of the habit—one takes one’s meal at table—but whenever Short had the office to himself, he called for a steady flow of James’s coffee.

“Mr. Trumbull came in late,” James said. He wiped the silver spout with the white linen napkin he had taken to carrying folded on his forearm, a French affectation. Short nodded and as usual found himself uncertain whether to look directly at James—with his “bright” skin, his curly reddish hair, his uncanny resemblance to Martha Wayles Jefferson—or whether to look rudely away and avoid his eyes.

“Stayed out with the artists,” James added. He frowned as he obviously tried to make out the title of one of Short’s books. He could read and write English, Short knew, but French? Short’s mind made an odd connection. The American sailors taken hostage by the Barbary pirates had been placed in literal chattel slavery, just like southern blacks. Just like James. Was Jefferson’s intransigence on hostages somehow connected to
that
?

“Out with the artists,” James repeated. “Came back at two in the morning. Mr. Jefferson long gone to bed, after his concert.”

They both listened for a moment to the strains of Jefferson’s violin.

“These artists,” James said, “got the constitution of a plow horse.”

“You don’t like Mr. Trumbull?”

James allowed himself the smallest, the most discreet of smiles. He refilled Short’s cup, then reached in his coat pocket for a sheet of paper. “This is the note when the first string beans come on the market, rue Saint-Honoré. He wanted it before, but Petit just gave it to me.”

Short placed the sheet of note paper unread on the desk blotter, and when James had left the room, he stood and transferred it to Jefferson’s desk, inserting it in the little cloth-bound volume where Jefferson recorded his first sightings of vegetables and flowers. On the lined pages, in Jefferson’s neat, regular hand, the numbers and dates looked like so many inky birds on a fence. Upstairs the violin came to a sudden stop.

Promptly at one-thirty the carriage arrived at the front door, and the three men converged from different corners of the house. Jefferson had dressed almost casually for him, in pale blue coat and thin brown trousers. One hand held his little personal sketchbook—how many different little books did he have?—the other his watch. The old Duchesse de La Rochefoucauld expected them early for dinner, she was not a person to disappoint. Trumbull, last into the carriage, gave an easy drawling command in English to the driver, and they rattled their way onto the Champs-Élysées.

The Halle aux Bleds took up a square block not far north of the Pont Neuf, which they reached by a straight but tedious route along the river; the carriage swayed like a metronome, the day was
hot. Short closed his eyes and allowed a series of associations to march Locke-step through his brain: night, watch, time; dinner; old duchesse, young duchesse. Old husband.

He opened his eyes to see that they were going past the gray-green plane trees of the Tuileries Gardens. Would the young duchesse be at the dinner that night?

Trumbull had begun to lecture Jefferson. The original Halle aux Bleds, he announced, had been no more than a two-story circular wall enclosing a central market area: grain stalls, offices, a couple of oversize entrances and exits for farmers’ wagons. Ten years ago two architects named Legrand and Molinos had accepted a commission to put a roof on the circular wall. Like all French architects, of course, they stole from the Italians. A Florentine dome was the thing, they decided, not a flat roof; and because the grain merchants, with their vast stalls of dried grain, needed interior light but not fire, a dome that would somehow open to the sky.

Jefferson was visibly impatient, regretting already, Short assumed, that he had left his work for this. Turning away from Trumbull, he penciled an entry in his book and frowned through the window at the labyrinthine old palace of the Louvre, now on their right, where Clérisseau, David, and a hundred other artists had their apartments, not to mention Talleyrand’s mistress and her
tolérant
spouse. Then he closed his book and eyes. He was known to abhor the Louvre, with its dank, cramped medieval cells, in almost the same proportions as he loved the wide vistas of Monticello. The truth was, Short thought, Jefferson was bored with France, bored with his life here. If not for the lure of the skylights, he would certainly have stayed home today. Short closed his eyes and tried again to devise a third name for his code: Surveyor; Spartan.

The arcades of the Palais Royal replaced the Louvre; then, as the carriage rolled east into a crowded square, they passed a bizarre stone column at the edge of the Halle, standing free like the turret of a castle and decorated with carved moons and planets and a belt of elaborately shuttered green windows. Dismounting on the rue de Grenville, Jefferson paused to look back at it and murmur in Short’s ear, “A long day so far, my friend—don’t forget the old duchesse, bring out your watch.”

It was almost the last thing Short heard him say for half an hour. The noise of the grain market—a low hivelike rumble from the street—rose to a deafening roar at the entrance.

“Pandemonium!” Trumbull shouted happily. “There they are!”

He pulled Jefferson forward. Short followed, stopped. A wagon the size of a house lurched forward on tilting wooden wheels, dragged by six great dray horses, rumps like the King of England, and pushed by a dozen shirtless workers whose torsos gleamed under a thick silver coating of grain and dust. More workers converged on either side, another wagon, a team of oxen pulling barrels; two merchants shouted orders and pointed in opposite directions, hands snatched Short backward, out of the path of the oxen, and he felt himself passed along a gauntlet of gesticulating men—one woman, mountainous in white apron—until he stood twenty yards away from the wagon. On the other side Jefferson and Trumbull had disappeared into the crowd.

“A droite!” someone shouted. “Attention!”

Short sprang back a step. He pressed his shoulders against the side of a stall. The smell of grain filled his nostrils and burned his eyes. When he looked up, blinking, the whole space of the dome was floating overhead, sixty feet high, hazy, a golden bell of sunlight.

“Monsieur, attention!”

Short pinched the bridge of his nose and squinted upward through the dust, impressed in spite of himself. Score a point for Trumbull. How was it done? The dome appeared constructed in strips of alternating glass and wood, two feet wide at the base, arching in tandem all the way from the top of the circular wall to a small nipplelike center. Below it noise and dust swam in the light, everything moved about in a dazzling light. On the far side of the entering wagons Short could just see Jefferson’s red hair between two huge stalls of wheat.

“A droite, monsieur! Prenez garde!”

He stumbled to his right again and stopped by a ten-foot pyramid of burlap sacks. Jefferson was now on the far side of the hall, near the opposite entrance. If he tried to follow the same way, the convoy of wagons rumbling in would hold him up; if he simply kept walking to his right, however, threading the maze of grain stalls and shouting merchants, he would meet them from the other
direction. What was Jefferson doing? The red hair dipped in a courtly bow. Blond hair—extraordinarily blond, even in the midst of so much light and gold—bobbed near him. Then Trumbull’s dark hair moved in front.

The noise was less overwhelming if you stayed near the base of the circular wall. Short detoured around a basket scale. Grain cascaded out of a wagon, a waterfall of light. He jumped sideways, kicking his feet, and three black Norway rats scampered through his legs, squealing.

He hurried forward over a carpet of grain and dust. On the other side of the market Trumbull was now pointing up to the skylights; beside him stood a small, wiry-limbed man dressed all in purple and red—Cosway? At this distance, with his bad eyes, Short thought, shaking his head, the man looked like a costumed monkey.

Where was Jefferson?

He neared the center of the stalls. Jefferson and a slender young woman—the dazzling blond curls of a moment ago—had detached themselves from Trumbull and stood apart, almost at the second doorway, heads close in conversation.

Now where was
Trumbull
?

By the time Short reached the far entrance, the noise of wagons and merchants had struck an unexpected lull. He quickly circled an island of stacked barrels and almost ran into Jefferson. A moment later, against a backdrop of straw and oats, he found himself bowing, his forehead inches away from those same blond curls, gazing into a clear, exquisitely formed face. Eyes violet or gray. Dress blue. Neck slender and arching, perfect. As she lifted her head he saw the pale white curve of her bust, blue lace, a finger’s width of bare décolletage.

“And also Mr. Cosway,” Trumbull was saying.

Reluctantly Short turned to his left. Richard Cosway bowed and clicked his heels, stepping backward at the same time, as if, Short thought, to let him take in the whole dandified effect: lavender silk coat, feverishly embroidered from shoulder to tail with red leaves and berries; tight, pipe-stem trousers of shiny black; dress sword with one of those enormous ribboned sword-knots that the English treasured. Lace collar. Silver wig. Brown little face, wrinkles,
patches, a quick false smile like the flash of a razor.
Exactly
like a monkey.

“Delighted,” Short said.

“Enchanté.” Another click of the heels.

“Now we can hear,” Trumbull said, beaming at them. The wagons had all come to a halt. The workers and merchants had started to gather for some commercial reason at the other end of the hall, their voices fading. Overhead, a flock of chattering sparrows turned and splashed through the dome of light.

“Now we can
breathe
!” Cosway said, fanning himself with a little leather-bound book.

“No, no—this is the time to look at the dome, study the dome.” Trumbull had raised both hands high in artistic benediction. “Look at the joints, all of you, the woodwork, the play of glass and timber!”

Cosway opened his book. “ ‘A modern work, but based on a design by Philibert Delorme,’ ” the artist read pompously. “ ‘Sixteenth-century author of
Inventions pour bien bâtir
. Twenty-five wooden ribs, twenty-four identical windows. Hemispherical space with a radius of sixty feet. Ninety tons of glass and Normandy oak. Circumference of more than two hundred feet—.’ ”

To Short’s amazement Jefferson and Mrs. Cosway had strolled away, to a point just at the edge of the doorway. When Cosway looked up and caught sight of them, he smiled at Short and snapped the book shut.

“My wife and the heat,” he said, “the heat and the dust.”

Outside, Jefferson had found a stone bench under a tree, and Maria Cosway had sat down on it, in a little blue cloud of crinoline and silk.

“It was too much inside,” she told them as they all arrived. “Too close.” A shake of the golden curls. A smile, Short had to admit, almost as bright as the curls. She spoke in breathless musical tones, with a charming accent partly English, partly Italian, worlds away from the nasal—Cockney?—of her famous husband. “The air in London is so terrible, so gloomy and wet—we came to Paris for me, really, just to escape the gloom—we call it ‘gloomth’ in London. But here it’s so hot and dusty, I feel like a silly girl, I can’t be pleased.”

“Oh, Paris
is
hot,” Jefferson said, who never complained about the weather. “But outside the city, in little villages like Saint-Germain—”

“We haven’t
been
,” Maria Cosway interrupted, placing her hand on his sleeve. “Ten whole days, and we haven’t been anywhere at all except people’s houses and artists’ studios, not the simplest excursion.”

“Not even to Saint-Cloud or Versailles?”

“Nulle part!”

“My work,” Cosway said. He had made his way restlessly behind the bench, guidebook still in one hand, page marked by a long simian finger. “I am a painter, as Trumbull knows, as
Paris
knows. No sooner arrived than the Duc d’Orléans, out of the blue, sends to our hotel. I must paint his children’s portraits, his wife’s, his friends’—” He turned his tiny brown face from Jefferson. “So Maria languishes days at a time while I pursue the bubble ‘art.’ ” He nodded and made a quick, unnerving bow inside his too-large lavender coat.

“That,” Maria said, rising from the bench and pointing her fan, “is a wonderful tower or column—do you see?”