The President's Daughter (30 page)

FATHER:
Promise me you will not abandon me again.

MAMAN:
I promise, Master.

FATHER:
I swear to cherish you and never desert you.

MAMAN:
Yes, Master.

FATHER:
I promise solemnly that your children will be free.

MAMAN:
As God is your witness?

FATHER:
As God is my witness.

FATHER:
Bolt the door.

The facade of the Hôtel de Langeac swam before my eyes.

“Brice,” I said softly, “do you think we could hire a carriage to take us to Marly? We passed it on our way to Paris. It is supposed to be ... the most beautiful park in France.”

The next day we all drove over the handsome stone bridge of Neuilly to Bougival and from there to the famous machine of Marly, a hydraulic wonder built a hundred years earlier to raise water from the Seine to the aqueduct and reservoirs of Versailles and its twin—the royal château of Marly. My voices were all in disharmony. Every object was beautiful to my father. But my mother's voice interrupted. “Your father promised me there would never be
a white mistress at Monticello.” As I looked down from the heights of the village of Louveciennes onto the great existing park, James's voice reconstructed it in my mind's eye. Then my father's voice joined in: “How beautiful was every object, the pont de Neuilly, the hills along the Seine, the rainbows of the machine of Marly, the terrace of Saint-Germain, the château, the gardens, the statues of Marly . . .”

MAMAN:
It was the summer of my fifteenth year that I saw Marly for the first time. It seemed to float above me, the earth, in its own nature, its own sky, its own sun.

PETIT:
Imagine a young woman come with her love to Marly, standing beside him.

MAMAN:
I was beginning to understand this strange, impulsive, melancholy man, full of contradictions and secrets, who owned me, my family, and his unborn child. How did it matter that he was master and I slave? That he took more space in the world than most men did not concern me, neither his fame nor his power. I cherished him. The future, like Marly, stretched out before me, total and shoreless. The surrounding fragrance drugged me and made me careless of what awaited, just beyond my view.

MAMAN:
The gardens, canals, terraces stretched for miles. On each side of the magnificent palace were six summer pavilions connected by sidewalks bowered with jasmine and honeysuckle. Water fell in cascades from the top of the hill behind the château, forming a reservoir where swans floated. In the main canal, glistening marble horses mounted by bronze men cavorted, and here and there one could see tiny gems which were ladies moving along the path and labyrinths. The only sound was wind and water; all human sound had been reduced by the vast scale to silence. That day convinced me that there was no Virginia. No slavehood. There was no destiny, it seemed, that did not include this place, this hour, this Marly.

Like a ghostly mirage, the contours of the demolished castle seemed to have engraved themselves into the thin bluish atmosphere, and its foundations traced themselves in the double-hued grasslands below us.

I returned many times to Marly before we left Paris for good. I'd stand there on the heights and try to imagine my mother gazing down at the same panorama. My mother had not come, as I had, from the enlightenment of four years of freedom, but as a slave girl, her only identity, only to hear her brother proclaim slavery a sin. She had stood here and listened to her lover
promise there would never be a white mistress at Monticello. She had believed him when he promised her children would all be free. . . . And wasn't I free? Free to detest my mother the slave, or adore her. Free to condemn my father the master, or forgive him. But how could I do either? Paris hadn't given me the answer.

“Lorenzo's coming to Paris.”

“What?”

“I've spoken to Aunt Dorcas. I don't think we shall wait for him. Several of my acquaintances have confirmed that the political situation in France is extremely volatile and dangerous. Charles the Tenth is sure to be overthrown, and a new republic formed. There are riots in the provinces, and it is only a matter of time before unrest reaches Paris. Which means revolution . . . barricades, street fighting. It's happened before. I think we should leave now.”

I wasn't following Brice's logic, but I asked submissively, “Where?”

“Why, to Italy! We could leave in a few days. Our passports are in order. We just have to get them back from the prefecture. You mentioned once that you yearned to go to Florence.”

I studied Brice. Was he protecting me as a brother, helping me flee from Lorenzo out of pity, or abducting me for his own purposes? Whichever it was, I could visit Italy without having to beg or scheme for it.

“It's true,” he said, “that the newspaper headlines are alarming. The Estates General is calling for a republican constitutional monarchy, and there are strikers in Lyon and riots in front of the National Assembly. It seems Louis Philippe has returned from exile in America.”

America ... I felt as if I were being pursued by Sykes again. Wouldn't America ever leave me alone? My face must have shown my alarm.

“Then it's settled. We leave for Italy. And Dorcas thinks we should spend a few days in Lausanne . . . where she has some people to see. I'll make the arrangements this time.”

We stopped for a week in Lausanne. By the time we arrived in Florence, I had made up my mind to find out if Maria Cosway was living or dead.

105
RUE DU RIVOLI, PARIS

MAY 1ST

My dearest Charlotte,

After the shattering experience of the convention and the new life in London, I survived a tragicomic misadventure in Amelia Opie's country house in Surrey. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry, so I have fled to Paris.

Arriving by coach from Calais, I had the strange feeling I had been here before, in another life. Everything seemed so familiar—landscapes, descriptions, the city itself, with its
magnifique
art and luminosity, its gardens and monuments. I've never seen a people who will erect a monument in bronze or marble to everything and anything at the drop of a hat. There are still traces of the Revolution. In the place where the Bastille used to stand, they have erected a huge column of gilded bronze to the glory of the Revolution and the victories of the infamous, now-destroyed dungeon. The people of Paris can't be ignorant of their history when they have a monument on every corner!

For weeks I have heard voices that accompany me everywhere— cajoling, intimate, loving voices, plaintive, happy, tormented, exuberant, mysterious—you would think Paris was haunted. Perhaps it is, for me. I was happy to leave England. I have had my fill of Englishmen and their bizarre way of looking at life—form is all, content nothing; moreover, it is better not to think at all, but merely follow the rules—remain on one's insular little island and never breach an etiquette or a frontier. And who makes the rules? Men. And they insist it is for our (women's) own good —that if the world's affairs were left to women, there would be only emotion, anarchy, and chaos. I have seen in London what these same men have perpetrated on the world—the myriad sufferings, so great we women couldn't possibly do worse, so great we can't even imagine such depths of cruelty. But being closer to nature and children and common sense, I truly believe, Charlotte, that we can do better. And as I roam Paris with Brice Willowpole and my voices, which have in a way become my family, just as Paris has become a kind of home. I will be loath to leave this place. Perhaps I'll never leave, although Dorcas and Brice insist we should quit Paris for a while to avoid political disturbances here. And where are we going? Italy! I have always wanted to see Italy, and I intend to go to see if an old friend of my father's in Lodi is still alive. I intend to surprise her, and perhaps the riddle wrapped up in a dilemma, as Brice calls me, has a rhyme or reason and Lodi has the answer. At least I pray God it does.

Do you see Thance? Is he in Philadelphia or abroad? Oh, Charlotte, Charlotte! Voices. The opera again tonight, and new voices to go with my old ones. Music is the only safe place for me, the place no one can hurt me. Perhaps, in a way, I have composed an opera of my own here: fatal and tragic and romantic. The voices I hear in my head in this country. But they haven't answered my question, Charlotte. They haven't answered my question.

Your loving and lonely Harriet

The wheels of time moved with a rapidity of which those of our carriage gave hut a faint idea, and yet, in the evening, when one took a retrospect of the day, what a mass of happiness we traveled over.

Thomas Jefferson

On the fifth of May 1826, at 8:50
A.M
., our three figures spread one thick black shadow across the treeless piazza of Lodi. The town lay under the dauntless Italian light, which was what I imagined light in Africa must be like. The square in which we stood was perfectly silent except for a lark's song, and there were no villagers abroad but for a bandy-legged old man trailing four saddled mules behind him. Reigning over the rectangular space to the north was the Church of the Crown of Santa Maria of the Annunciation, a handsome, squat, rectangular edifice with a golden roof of glistening Byzantine mosaics. As if by consensus, we had all dressed in black: Brice in a black frock coat, black trousers, and straw hat; Bruno, our guide, in a black shirt open at the neck and black pantaloons stuck into filthy black boots, his black carbine slung over one shoulder; and myself, in a high-necked, black linen dress trimmed in grosgrain galloons and eyelets. The train of my skirt swept the ground, leaving a trail of corrugated dust which erased my footprints. The black veil attached to my straw hat served to hide my face as well as keep out the dust, which rose in miniature whirlwinds from the parched earth. I held a black parasol over my head, which merged into the long inky outline: flesh, transparent shadow, and black cloth with the shadow of Bruno's gun as unicorn.

Brice and I had left Dorcas Willowpole inspecting the village
fabbrica
for
which Lodi was famous and which produced white procelain dishes, pierced with elaborate and delicate cut-out designs called
jourance,
the most expensive and beautifully wrought porcelain in all of Italy. I had explained to Dorcas Willowpole that I had a private and urgent pilgrimage to make to the College della Grazie convent of the
Dames Inglesi,
in Lodi, and she had suggested that all of us go, concluding that the famous cathedral and its even more famous porcelain were well worth the trip. The hotel in Florence had insisted we hire an armed guide and coachman, and had sent us Bruno, as dark as his name. He now stood between Brice and me, a broad-chested, silent giant with the profile of a face on a Roman coin. It was he who insisted on the mules, explaining to us in his halting English that the convent was erected on one of the hills surrounding the village and was a good four-hour climb.

I looked up at the rolling hills. I had traveled to London to find out something about world slavery and had discovered it was not infallible, but doomed. I had traveled to Paris to find out something about my mother's slavery, and had encountered the echoes of impossible love. And now I was in Lodi to find out something about my father's slavery: that fateful crossing of disparate lives called destiny. In Lodi I would find the famous woman painter Maria Cosway, who had briefly been my father's mistress and was known as
la maestra
for her profession and
la madre
for her convent. She educated English ladies of good family, sheltered and trained novices, country girls who were promised to the order, and gave refuge to abandoned or divorced wives, disgraced and pregnant young girls, repudiated mistresses. And illegitimate daughters, I thought. Perhaps this was just the place for me.

The devout Catholicism of Maria Cosway, Dorcas had explained, was the only facet of her reputation that was not dubious. Her piety had been recognized by the emperor of Austria, Francis I, who had made her a baroness for having established a branch of the religious order called the
Dames Inglesi,
which meant “the English ladies.” And so this title had been added to the others by the villagers, who referred to their Italianate English benefactress and landlord as
la baronéssa maestra Maria, madre della Dames Inglesi e nobile donna.

The scent of mule manure that surrounded the old man made me hold my breath as Bruno helped me mount sidesaddle. Brice had insisted on coming along as my chaperone and the two Italians doubled as bodyguards. The Italian states of 1826 were in the throes of popular revolt against Rome, and a wave of republicanism had swept a new general-bandit called Garibaldi into power. I noticed that Bruno wore the black shirt and the red bandanna of the general, while the old man wore a white band across his forehead, which symbolized the aristocracy and the pope. The old man, whose name was
Acromeo, would have found nothing unusual in a lone English lady climbing the Baroness's
monticello,
as he called it, to my astonishment. No one had ever told me that
monticello
meant “little mountain.” But Brice had been adamant. No white lady for whom he was responsible was going to go anywhere with two strange Italian bodyguards in the Piedmont hills, which were full of bandits that the ruling family, the Gonzagas, periodically ordered their soldiers to either kill or exile.

It was a quarter to two before we reached the white-and-yellow walls of the abbey and rang the cowbell attached by an iron chain to the heavy, iron-studded wooden doors. They swung open almost immediately, as if we were expected, and before me stood a nun in crimson and white, outlined against a long allée of cypress and oleander trees that seemed to stretch into infinity and then drop suddenly into the sky. She held a basket of food for the guides and was followed by a servant, who carried a pail of water for the mules. When Brice made a move toward the open doors, the Italians restrained him, explaining that no men were allowed beyond that boundary. At his quizzical look, I only shrugged, remembering Dorcas's remark at the convention: “Now you know what it feels like to be a Negro.”