The President's Daughter (27 page)

My own petty, indulgent occupations, my vain ambitions and longings, my selfish and egotistical strivings had disappeared in the void of Dr. Wilberforce. What did the humiliation of my own domestic slavery in the tiny confines of Monticello have to do with this immense, this cacophonous manifestation of pure evil? Even as my mind tried and tried to encompass the meaning of what I had heard, and to filter out a tiny foothold in it where my mind could rest and gather its wits, it dawned on me that comprehension was impossible. There was no way under it or over it or around it. I had to plunge into its heart like a swimmer, not knowing if I would ever rise to the surface.

I shied away from my employer's touch as we rose. Below, people were stirring. Dr. Wilberforce had received a standing ovation, and now the men were moving about, talking to one another, greeting acquaintances, coming alive . . . relieved and happy that they were on dry land. But for me, there were only the murmurings and explosive sounds of my own dry, fervent lips
praying and the click of my own tongue against the roof of my mouth and the bitter taste of God's malevolence.

One day when Mrs. Willowpole was busy with her committee meetings and Lorenzo Fitzgerald had gone to Manchester on business, Amelia Opie took me to visit the new picture gallery at Piccadilly Square. As we walked through the large central gallery, filled with Italian pictures and Dutch still lifes, I stopped before a large framed engraving, staring at the engraved copper plate beneath. It read:
THE PROGRESS OF FEMALE DISSIPATION AND THE PROGRESS OF FEMALE VIRTUE
. I
NSPIRED BY
H
OGARTH
—
MARIA COSWAY.
It was dated 1802. Suddenly there was proof that this companion of my father's Petit had told me so much about had really existed. Everything he had said came back to me: the letters which the painter Trumbull had delivered back and forth between them; the strange, erratic wandering life for which she was notorious; and the seclusion in a convent in Lodi, Italy. Hanging next to her painting was her engraved self-portrait. It showed a beautiful and fragile lady of fashion in the elaborate hairdo of the day. Her arms were folded across her décolletage, staring out of the frame. There was much to remind me of my aunt, Maria Jefferson Eppes, and I was not being fanciful in seeing a resemblance to my mother.

“A fine if wasted talent, Maria,” Amelia said.

“You know her?”

“When I was very young. I think I saw her once or twice at balls or musicals, always exquisitely dressed. She used to affect Oriental turbans and lavish Ottoman shawls. She had a monster for a husband, but he was an extraordinary artist, a painter of miniatures. No one took Mrs. Cosway's talent seriously. How could they, in the face of her husband's genius? He was very close to the Prince of Wales before he became king, and kept a splendid residence at Schmberg House. They were both part of the prince's entourage until he became regent. They had one daughter, whom Maria abandoned at six months to travel on the Continent. Six years later, the child died and Cosway fell into a deep melancholy. Maria returned, but he became more and more eccentric. Richard Cosway was dropped from the king's society, and that's when Maria Cosway fled abroad again. She traveled more and more frequently and finally ran away with an Italian castrato, Luigi Márchese. Richard Cosway finally died in 1821 and Maria, who was raised a Catholic (devout or not I cannot say), then removed herself permanently to Lodi, Italy, near where she was born, and returned to the religion of her childhood. She had founded a convent in 1812 called College della Grazie, part of an
order known as the Dames Inglesi, and she became its abbess. Why did you stop in front of this particular painting, Harriet?”

“Nothing ... the title, I think. It is very well drawn, don't you think, for a copy? And the portrait. It has a haunting quality, don't you think? Such sad eyes . . .”

“Maria
is
sad, I think. At least her life is. She was famous for being headstrong and eccentric—a true artist. It was said that it was her father who pampered her into believing she had great talent. But her husband balked at her painting for money. She could never attract any important patrons—or if she did, she was accused of artistic improprieties rather than artistic talent, as if a woman could not attract interest except through her sex. She couldn't have loved her husband, curious monster that he was—a dwarf: deformed, capricious, and degenerate. It seems that when they lived in Schomberg House, he had a private entrance to the king's chambers through a tunnel built from there to Carlton House. But come, I want to show you the Van Dyck, which is truly a wonder.”

But I lingered before the melancholy portrait. My mother, buried alive at Monticello, and Maria Cosway at Lodi were both women detached from the real world. As mothers, both had abandoned their rights to their children, Maman by remaining a slave, Maria by running away. Stillborn mothers. What would Amelia Opie think, as a writer of novels, if I told her all I knew about Maria Cosway?

Slowly I turned and followed Amelia without looking back. I began to dream not only of Paris, but of Lodi.

Our work was almost done. Our reports on the conference were completed. The letters and manuscripts for publication in Philadelphia were ready. Mrs. Willowpole continued her frantic traveling and visiting, sometimes depositing twenty cards in a single day. I spent my time transposing lectures, copying letters, and writing reports. When I had a free moment, I raced out to the music shops in the Burlington Arcade in Piccadilly and browsed hungrily through all the newly published sheet music. Everything was to be completed and sent by December so that we could avail ourselves of Amelia's invitation to spend a month in the country at Christmas.

Life had settled down to a routine. Every day, Mrs. Willowpole would do her accounts, invitations, and thank-yous at her little davenport table, writing with her new steel pen made in Birmingham, which she had bought in Woburn Walk in Bloomsbury. It was a beautiful writing instrument, decorated with a polished bone handle and necessary if one was to keep up with
the times and not be thought old-fashioned. She bought one for me, and I sent two home to Monticello for Christmas, one for my mother and the other for him, although I couldn't imagine that my father would ever write with anything except a quill pen.

We were more and more attached to our “little home,” as Dorcas Willow-pole called our furnished lodgings. Lorenzo, Brice, Mrs. Willowpole's nephew, and his friend, Sydney Locke, another young lawyer from the city, had fallen into the comfortable routine of dining with us or inviting us to dine as often as three times a week. Or the gentlemen would pass by for sherry, or for high tea or a game of backgammon. I had continued the backgammon lessons Lorenzo Fitzgerald had begun on board the
Montezuma.
I had learned quickly and easily because the game was so similar to music. One had to have rhythm, be able to count and memorize, and have at least a musical notion of mathematics. Even the noise of the dice pleased me. My fingers now flew around the board as if it were piano keys. The combination of talent tempered by pure chance appealed to my double life, in which gambling was necessarily a part. More than often I beat my employer and even began to hold my own with Lorenzo. What I did not realize until my employer teasingly pointed it out to me was that I was now surrounded by three eligible young men!

LONDON

THANKSGIVING DAY

My dearest Charlotte,

Rec'd. yours of the 15th. The weather isn't half as bad as I expected it to be at this time of the year. It is gray, of course, and night falls close after five, because we are so much to the north, but no race knows more how to live cozily in a cold climate than the English. They have invented a million comforts, not the least of them excellent chocolates, high tea, hot scones, golf, a devotion to cats and dogs, chintz material, country houses, wool tweed, umbrellas, bagpipes, cathedrals, King Edward roses, forty-branch candelabras, the men's club, and, since inactivity is considered reprehensible, not to say immoral, a host of games even the most serious adult can indulge in. Much reading is done—novels, religious and historical works, and magazines. Travel books are also in vogue, especially those about the Grand Tour. And everyone reads the London
Times
—ironed. You may draw or paint, do fancywork, rolled rapper work or embroidery, make models in wax or pictures with shells, press flowers in books, paint trays, decorate bellpulls, paste postcards in albums or magazine pictures on screens, sew dresses from paper patterns cut out of
The Englishwomen's Domestic Magazine.
There are kaleidoscopes to play with, and stereoscopes
and zoetropes, which make pictures of animals run and jump. There are magic lanterns and folios of prints and watercolors of birds to look at. There is butterfly and beetle collecting, jigsaw puzzles, cards, board games, paper and pencil games, whist, and loo, piquet, and Pope Joan, bridge and backgammon, chess and faro. Above all, dear girl, there is music. All other games are played to running conversation and small talk, at which the English excel as no other race, except that in Italy, it seems, men actually talk to women. Anyway, every spare moment I have I devote to music. Our work here is finished, and we have several months before we leave for Europe. So I plan to profit all I can from the music, great and small, that's in the city: concerts at St. Paul's Cathedral, Opera at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, chamber music at a dozen associations and societies. Oh, Charlotte, everything is here, Mario and Tosca, Norma, Lucia and Rigoletto. I heard a concert by a great continental musician, George Bridgetown, a mulatto of African and Polish descent who executed divinely a violin concerto by Giornowich, another by Viotti, and a rondo by Grosse. Music is everywhere, in private homes, especially in the country, but also in the gardens and amusement parks. I attend any and all: operas, operettas, chamber music, quartets, piano concerts, musical solos . . . everything.

We have an invitation from Amelia Opie. A month in the country, with all my time for music. Sydney, Lorenzo, and Brice will be there, and God knows how many tons of people! Surely worse than any Virginian plantation. And they have as many servants as a South Carolina slaveowner, not, of course, counting agricultural workers. As many as seventy servants may sit down to dinner every day downstairs, while fifty sit down to dinner upstairs. Amelia herself employs a valet, a coachman, a postilion, a gardener, a boy, a housekeeper, a housemaid, a laundrymaid, a dairymaid, and a general maid in London. In the country she has double that number, and between the loftiest of the upper servants and the humblest of the lower, there are as many grades and ranks as in the aristocracy itself. She says more people work as domestic servants than at any other occupation, except agricultural workers: almost a million of them. And are the working-class poor worse off than the American slave? No, no, and no. Although a revolution of the poor is inevitable. Will the British arrive at abolition before we do? Yes, I would guess in less than ten years. There is a fervor here that has not reached our shores yet, but ours will surely come.

Dorcas says there are two kinds of time, real time and intellectual time; that is, the time it takes an idea to arrive to the consciousness of mankind. Immediate and worldwide emancipation's time has come, and we will both live to see it. That first day, at the convention, when, for the first time, I heard Dr. Wilberforce speak and stared absolute evil in the face, even as my soul shriveled, Charlotte, I knew as Lorenzo had assured me on the
boat: slavery was not forever. I have vowed to live to see this cancer wiped from the face of the earth. It justifies everything I've done.

My sisterly love, I wear your locket over my heart.

Harriet

P.S. Did you get the last packet of books? And the music? I know I forbade you to speak of him, but have you heard if they've arrived safely?

That winter, as cold rain and mist settled over London and we burned oil lamps in the middle of the day, merino lambs like those on my father's plantation grazed in Hyde Park, and people sold coal and wood in Lieches-ter Square and hay in Haymarket. London was so filthy with coal soot that blackness rained down with the famous fog, and armies of laundresses labored to keep the upper class clean. The filth of London made a cult of whiteness. The gentry changed clothes several times a day in a struggle that determined social standing and made whiteness a symbol of social order and beauty. Young women flaunted white muslin dresses; young men exhibited dazzling white linen that they sometimes shipped to Holland to have starched. Veils, gloves, overshoes, hats, raincoats, fog glasses, every protection was needed in the desperate fight to keep clean. A speck of dirt was considered ungodly, and its confrontation a war on evil, anarchy, and the forces of darkness. Desperately the Englishman fought the demon soot. Pale complexions, like white dresses, were considered the Holy Grail. I was much complimented on mine.

Lorenzo had told me Amelia Opie's country house, called Roxborough, was in Richmond, Surrey, one of the loveliest and most comfortable seats in all of southern England. We drove through the wrought-iron gates and up the mile-long drive past the clipped green velvet sward toward the white-stone and red brick manor, built in the manner of the architect Palladio, and arriving at the north entrance where an army of stewards, butlers, and housemaids was lined up at attention. I discovered for myself how vain were the pretensions of Tidewater gentry to architectural splendor.

The house was surrounded by fine pastures, splendid flocks of sheep, orchards, fields of hops and corn, dairy farms, and herds of cattle. Richmond was upriver from London, along the Thames estuary. Thousands made their living from the sea, and there were lead and coal mines in the Mendip Hills, forges in Sussex, tin mines in Cornwall, and ironworks in Birmingham. I marveled at how, on its surface, England was so rich, happy, comfortable,
placid, and pleased with its lot in life and its place among nations. It was very far from what I had learned at the convention about England and its cities like Liverpool, where the very stones smelled of slaves' blood.