Jefferson (48 page)

“Polly is not alone, by the way,” Jefferson said, suddenly returning to the subject of his daughter. “She is accompanied by a servant girl. James Hemings’s younger sister Sally.”

Voices, masks bore down on them.

“Is there some deficiency,” Short said softly, “in my conduct, that you should wish to see me depart?”

Jefferson turned much too quickly to face him. “By no means, William. By no means. The last thing I wish, from my point of view, is to lose your company. What I say is for your interest, not my own. And I insist on nothing—stay as long as you will, as long as you can. I only observe that the sooner the race is begun, the sooner the prize will be obtained. And I say it with a bleeding heart, for nothing will be more dreary than my situation when you and my daughters all have left me.”

“Monsieur Jefferson!” called the shepherdess, waving her crook. Behind her a flock of glittering yellow and white. “Now your mask is off, come talk to us about the famous Insurgents.”

Jefferson smiled at her and bowed. To Short he said, in the careless tone of an afterthought, moving away, “But if one forms too fixed an attachment in Europe, all freedom is gone.” He stopped to brush his sleeve and bow again to the shepherdess. “And if an attachment of a certain sort, perhaps all reputation as well.”

In the starlight, in the overturned bowl of his consciousness, Short realized, with deep shock, that Jefferson meant the Duchesse de La Rochefoucauld, just as he had known by a kind of mesmeric telepathy about the Ace of Spades.

“Short, come and join us,” Lafayette ordered, raising a torch.

Or—Short took a mechanical step—did he mean by some wild Jeffersonian indirection to accuse himself instead? To refer to Maria Cosway? Or even to both of them, father and son, adulterers in tandem?

At the edge of the path Jefferson was waiting for him. “I haven’t seen Sally Hemings,” he said, as if to change the subject, “since the day she was born.”

S
ally Hemings had grown to be five feet six inches tall, straight as a stick. She wore a faded calico dress, pinned her brown hair up in a braid with a ribbon, plantation-style, and spoke not a single word of French.

“You pick up the tray,” James told her in a tone of impatient fraternal disgust. “All right? You don’t have to
day
nothing. You carry it into the room and stop in front of each one of them and wait to see what they take.”

“Polly too?

James made a noise she couldn’t understand—French. James spoke French like a native. Sally had made fun of him the first day because he talked French so fast and pushed his lips in and out when he did it, in and out, like a fish in a bowl or a pig that wanted to kiss you—wee, wee, wee, this little pig. But his temper was awful, he’d shouted like a sailor. Now he simply turned his back on her and started to shake something out of a cloth bag over his tray of pastry. Sally stepped to one side, ignoring the stare of the old French lady cook, and peered at whatever he was sprinkling.

“Sucre,” the old lady said. “Sucre en poudre.”

“Powdered sugar.” James glanced sideways at Petit, who stood by the cutting table with his arms crossed disapprovingly over his
vest. He handed Sally the tray and pointed one sugary white hand—white on brown—toward the stairs. “You go to the top. Big room on the right, ceiling got a sun painted on it, doors to the garden. Some of them might be in the garden, so you walk around, just like home.”

Sally also looked at Petit, then tossed her head with a flounce. “Not a
thing
like home,” she said.

As she disappeared up the narrow stairs, balancing the tray on her shoulder, the old lady returned to her stool and gave the coals a kick. “She’s not very black,” she told James in a guttural French right out of the Fauborg Saint-Marcel. “Both of you look almost white, you look like two big cups of
café crème
.”

James banged a second tray down in front of his oven.

“Quel âge a-t-elle?” the old woman asked.

He squatted beside the oven and frowned. At the top of the stairs Sally’s long legs had reappeared for a moment while she turned to push the door with her back. Thin feet, shapely ankles.

“Quinze ans,” he said. “Fifteen years old. She’s only a child.”

The old woman followed his eyes and grinned at Petit. Then she snorted in disbelief. “Ha!”

“Only a child,” Maria Cosway repeated. She took care to speak in French so the girl wouldn’t understand. Even so, they looked steadily at each other across the tray of hot pastries until Maria shook her golden head again and smiled and the girl backed away. “How old, in fact, is she?”

“Fourteen, fifteen perhaps.” Jefferson sat down beside her on the sofa; a smell of soap, leather—she leaned instinctively toward him; then, remembering that she had come to Paris as a new woman, a woman of independence, Maria drew deliberately back to the arm of the couch. “She’s the sister of my black servant,” Jefferson added, remaining where he was, “the one who cooks the pastries—and Mrs. Adams used your very words about her: ‘quite a child,’ she wrote me, ‘so useless as a maid you had better send her back with the captain.’ My sister in Philadelphia chose her.”

They watched Sally cross the room. She offered the tray awkwardly to Short and Clérisseau, nearest members of a group of six
or seven other guests—there were nearly twenty altogether—standing in a half-circle beneath the famous sun painting.

“Well,” Maria said. Storklike, Sally was now rubbing the back of her leg with her foot. “Child or not, you’d better buy her new clothes, and do something about her hair. Will we be late?”

As she knew he would, Jefferson pulled out his newest watch and studied the dial. Last year he had briefly carried
two
new custom-made watches—one he claimed to be testing for his friend Madison—
and
a pedometer to measure how far he walked.

“We have hours before it closes,” he said, and, as she also knew he would, reached his left hand toward her fingers in a gesture friendly and possessive at the same time. In the corner of her eye she saw the white hook of his right wrist—so stiff, withered, and clawlike that she turned away instantly and started to rise.

“Polly isn’t here?” she said at random. With her fan she waved toward Madame de Corny, who had come to London last season for a month and never called on her, who (not caring perhaps for women of independence) had barely spoken to her today.

Madame de Corny was too close to avoid replying. “The most charming little girl, Polly,” she exclaimed. “And you haven’t seen her? Our tall friend here most cleverly arranged for Patsy to stay at home the first week and take her to the convent school to play every afternoon. By the end of the week, she wanted to go by herself.”

“Monsieur Clever,” Clérisseau said, coming up and bowing. “Madame de Tessé’s pet name for him,” he told Maria. “I believe we should go, yes? The wine and pastries are finished.” And bending down toward her, popeyed and wrinkled as a frog, he asked loudly, “I don’t see Mr. Cosway yet, no?”

Always a rescuer, Jefferson placed his left hand through her arm. “Mr. Cosway stayed in London, alas,” he told Clérisseau. “Even the opening of the Salon couldn’t draw him.”

Clérisseau’s eyes were huge, his nose was like a snout. “Then, my dear lady, you are staying where?”

“With Princess Lubomirska,” Jefferson answered. “Beyond the Boulevards.”

“Much too far away,” Madame de Corny said, and paused, Maria was sure, long enough to let the ambiguity of the phrase be heard. Far away from what? But Jefferson had pulled out his
watch again, and the efficient, mind-reading Short was opening the doors, leading the way, and before anyone could say one more word about Richard, about her, about a married woman coming to Paris all by herself to see a Salon of paintings, before she could do anything but smile sweetly (her mask), they were all outside, underneath the golden September sun of Paris, climbing into their carriages. At the corner, as they swayed onto the Champs-Élysées, she saw Sally Hemings standing on the doorstep, still holding her tray; looking, at a distance, less and less like a child.

The Salon, as everyone called it, took its name from the room in the Louvre, the Salon Carré, where the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture held an exhibition every other year for precisely one month. Richard had looked up, interested, when Maria first proposed the trip—David would have a new painting, of course; and Madame Vigée-Lebrun, and the silly, effeminate Roland de la Porte, who had flattered Richard so outrageously last year. But then he had simply shaken his head. No Paris. No excursions. No further
talk
of it, please. So that, heart pounding, pursued by her visions like a thief, she had simply gathered her—what? her courage? rebellion?—into a ball and dashed away one morning without permission, over the Channel, over the plains of Normandy, down the long worm-curl of the Seine and into the arms of Paris. Paris only.

“Since you were here,” Jefferson said, “they’ve begun a new bridge at the Place Louis XV.”

Maria shaded her eyes, and peered out. In her own mind, the condition of independence was this: She would travel alone, she would mix with friends; she would
not
cause a scandal,
not
yield to … the Désert de Retz.

“Over there,” Jefferson pointed—miles inside, behind her bright smile, she shuddered at the sight of his wrist—“just beyond the king’s statue. In fact, they won’t begin construction for another year, but the surveyors are hard at work.”

“And the other bridges?” she asked. “They were going to demolish all the charming little dolls’ houses on top of the bridges?”

“Ah, Clérisseau is delighted, all the architects are—they’ve cleared every charming brick and stone from the Pont Notre-Dame and started on the Pont au Change, level right down to the pavement. The views are wonderful.”

“They were so quaint and
lively
,” Maria said, falling back. The carriage was bouncing east now, along the Seine embankment. On the left, on Jefferson’s side, you could see the Tuileries Palace, which Trumbull called a “vile Gothic jumble.” “I loved the old bridges,” she said. On her side the brown river rocked back and forth, back and forth, like a living thing in a cage.

“Our old friend Saint-James,” Jefferson was saying—did he hoard his gossip just for her, she wondered—“Do you remember him? The old gentleman who lived near the Bois? Saint-James has gone bankrupt, to everyone’s astonishment, and sold his gardens and taken refuge in the Bastille, where no one visits him. Mademoiselle Bertin’s dress shop is also closed—bankrupt.”

“A dangerous city,” Maria murmured.

Jefferson patted her hand.

In the Grand Galerie of the Louvre their party regathered—the de Cornys, Short, Clérisseau, two or three abbés whose names she had missed, some American merchants in awkward three-pointed hats.

“I appoint myself guide to charming ladies,” Clérisseau announced, swooping out of the shadows and inserting his arms, satyrlike, between Maria and Marguerite de Corny: “Virgil to all female spirits.” At the top of the stairs he bent comically toward each of them in turn. “This Salon,” he declared, “is perfectly to my taste, no criticisms therefore are to be recorded. Everything is antiquity, Roman or Greek. I require only sighs of admiration, the occasional
frisson
of pleasure.” He cocked his head at Madame de Corny, whose flattened breasts threatened to bulge entirely out of her dress. “We could begin with
Ulysses Tempted by Circe
, yes?”

“Who transformed men into swine,” said Madame de Corny, adjusting her neckline.

“An allegory,” Clérisseau said.

“A redundancy,” Madame de Corny replied.

In fact, they began with
Priam Asking Achilles for Hector’s Body
by Gabriel Doyen, a vast canvas (
vast
was the word of the day in London) in the lurid historical genre that, just as Clérisseau said, dominated every wall. Maria disengaged her arm and stepped back—the painting was truly awful—and while Clérisseau explained it point by point to Madame de Corny, she glanced around, first for Jefferson, then at the room itself. As always, the
French had crowded too many paintings into one place. They ran in uneven lines, five or six rows high, twenty feet or more over the tallest spectator’s head, Jefferson’s head.