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Monticello: Summer, 1809

Spring came burgeoning over the Virginia hills, warming quickly into promise of summer. The bulbs Thomas Jefferson and his lost wife Martha had planted so long ago pushed up through the damp earth and the children came running excitedly to call him whenever a bud showed, tight and green-sheathed above its protecting sword blades.

“Grandfather, come quick! The Roman Empress tulip has a big bud showing and a teeny one.”

“Fine, Virginia.” She was one of the younger ones, still small enough so that he could toss her on his shoulder. “We’ll go and see but not touch.”

“We know. They turn brown and don’t open out to be flowers. Francis pinched the Queen of the Amazons last spring and it never bloomed at all.”

“And some little girl tattled, which isn’t nice, do you think?” he teased, waiting for the others who invariably like hungry chicks came flying out several doors whenever he walked on the lawn.

“Francis thinks he is kind of special because he doesn’t live here all the time,” said Ellen, “but he does stay for long times and he has lessons with us and so he shouldn’t be any different.”

“Francis,” explained Jefferson, “does not have a lot of people to love him. He’s not rich in love like all the Randolphs. Now let us look into the case of this foreign woman, the Roman Empress.”

He bent over the bed where the nubby little buds ventured up into the thin, warming sun of spring. An old pain, long kept hidden deep stirred again in him, stabbing at his heart, clasping icy fingers at his throat to make an aching cramp there. Martha, his own Martha, so long gone, so always present and living still in that deep place where no person, no plaudit, no antagonism or ambition had ever been permitted. He could almost see her long white fingers now, as they had pressed the warm earth down lovingly over the dry, somnolent bulbs, always so delicately careful not to break an embryo root or smother too deep the promise of the crown.

She had been heavy with child that spring day, carrying the son who had only lived a few days, and when he protested that she must not tire herself she had given him a little push and said, “No, I must do it, I must plant them. Don’t you know that whatever I plant now will grow?”

The years—the years! Almost thirty of them now since she had looked at him with dimming eyes, and said, “Promise that my children will never have a stepmother.”

He had kept that promise. No other woman had ever approached the walled-off chamber of his heart where she was enshrined. There were times when, observing Patsy’s healthy brood, an impatient bitterness colored with a haunting kind of guilt would burn in him. Too many children—six of them in ten years—had been too much for Martha’s frail strength; yet Patsy had borne eleven easily and naturally. Childbirth to her had not been the draining, killing ordeal that had taken Martha, and their well-loved Maria also. He wondered often if Jack Eppes, Maria’s young husband, felt too that continuing, sickening weight of self-accusation.

He got to his feet quickly, bidding the sad ghosts of the past to depart. “Off with you all now,” he ordered. “It’s time for lessons. Run, before your mother scolds you and me too.”

“Race you?” screamed one Randolph to his sisters.

“No, no—start fair!” they shrieked in protest.

Jefferson called a halt. “Line up. Smallest one three paces ahead of the next. You here, Cornelia.”

“I’m Ellen, Grandfather.”

“All right. Some day I shall hang labels around all your necks. No inching forward now! You—big fellow, three paces to the rear. Now, when I drop my handkerchief—go!”

Small feet flew, braids flopped, hats fell off, and happy squeals and shouts made pandemonium. Flushed and hot and breathless they straggled back to the dreariness of lessons, the older ones knowing that they must learn history and Latin verbs well, for inevitably before the day ended their grandfather would be catechizing them and putting on a sober, disappointed look if they missed the correct answers.

There were letters waiting for replies and papers to be gone over and sorted in his study, but Jefferson discovered a reluctance in himself to begin these tasks. Pacing the long terrace to the south he came to the door of a little one-room building. This was what had always been called Honeymoon Cottage, the first room built at Monticello. He had lived a bachelor’s life in that one room in ’71 and, when Shadwell, his mother’s home, had burned, it had become his only and permanent home.

He took from his pocket the big iron key he had carried for so many years, turned the stiff lock slowly lest some rusted part should snap, and opened the door. Long unused, as it had been for years, the room still held a fresh, sweetish smell of femininity. Patsy had obviously kept it aired and cleaned, knowing that it was still the secret abode of his tired old heart. At the windows the dimity curtains were fresh and starched, the valance and tester of the bed still bright with old-fashioned wool embroidery. His own mother had worked those many-hued flowers and curious fruits, coloring the wool in her own dye pots with homemade dyes set with alum and vinegar.

The slender posts of the bed were polished, as was the brass fender of the fireplace. An armchair stood on the hearth rug and Jefferson sank into it, relaxing his long legs, staring into the cold fireplace where three dry logs rested on the andirons.

His mind whet, far back in time, thirty-six years back, to a snowy January night in ’72, when he had brought his bride, Martha Wayles Skelton, to this room, the only home he had to offer her.

Monticello had been a beginning then, some walls raised, part of a wing roofed over, windows boarded up, floors rough laid and strewn with scraps and sawdust where they were laid at all. But nowhere within the ambitiously planned structure a room complete enough for a lady, and the winter snows had halted all work until a thaw came.

Thomas Jefferson could almost visualize that spindle-legged, freckle-faced bridegroom, that brash twenty-nine-year-old fiddler who had charmed his lady with his music and won her away from a swarm of admirers by tricking them with a clever stratagem. It had never occurred to him in those courting days at the Wayles’ place, The Forest, that he might likely be catalogued with some of Martha’s other swains as an ambitious country boy and embryo lawyer set on improving his state by marrying a rich young widow. He had cared too much for Martha, loving her, he was arrogantly certain, as no man had ever loved a woman before, and he had brought her here to this cold little room so confident of her love and courage that a chill or two did not matter.

Now he thought back on that snowy ride up from Blenheim, where, because of the deepening snow, they had been obliged to leave the chaise in which they had started out from Williamsburg, as well as the warm robes and blankets with which it had been loaded. There had been a debate, he remembered now, about whether they should ride on or wait for morning, but Martha had laughed his misgivings down.

“I can weather any storm that you can weather, Thomas Jefferson.”

So saddle horses had been brought, his own tired team stabled, and the slave who had driven the chaise sent to bed with orders to drive to Monticello in the morning. Jefferson recalled now his dubious concern when he discovered that the snow on the mountain road was eighteen inches deep.

He had ridden ahead, breaking a track for Martha’s horse, trying to shield her as best he could from the storm that stung their eyelids and sifted inside collars and up sleeves. But Martha had been undismayed. She had shouted jokes at him through the wind, ordering him to wait now and then while she wiped the snow off her face. Eight miles they had had to climb, the horses sliding, stumbling, and blowing through the dark until at last they saw the brick piles and scaffolding of what was to be their home through the weird snow light.

Not a light showed, not a feather of smoke lay on the air. Where were all the black people who should have been there ready to serve them with warm fires and a hot meal? Jefferson burned with hot angry impatience; then common sense prevailed. No one could possibly have expected them home at this hour. It was far past midnight.

The honeymoon cottage felt a trifle chilly now to his old bones, but on that January night long ago it had held a tomblike cold. Just as he had done on that night, now he rummaged the old brass pot beside the hearth, finding scraps of slivers of kindling, mounding them into a heap under the logs, struck flint, and fired a bit of bark. The tiny flame wavered and grew as he blew upon it and coaxed fire to burn, as he had done for his beloved. Finally it leaped in a bright blaze to the resinous pine logs and Jefferson dropped into the chair again, trying to vision her there, shaking the snow off her riding skirt, holding one foot and then the other near to the blaze while he held her up with a supporting arm.

They had been very silly that night, he knew now, and was glad of the gay nonsense that had lightened the beginning for them. Life had been grim enough afterward. He was happy now to recall the laughter. There had been a mouse who came calling and Martha had not screamed or leaped on a chair as his sisters did. Instead, she had waggled her fingers at the mouse, as it sat upright blinking at them, and had exclaimed, “Thomas, it has big brown eyes!”

He had played the fiddle for her then, the same fiddle faithful Jupiter had saved from the burning ruin of Shadwell. Now, he could not play any more. Just as well. His music had belonged to people he loved. To Martha, to Dabney Carr, who had married his sister and been his heart’s best friend until his untimely death. Dabney Carr lay now out on this hill, under the oak where they two had sat together while young Thomas Jefferson blithely planned the place he would have here someday. They had sworn then that the two of them would both be buried under those trees. Jefferson had kept that promise. His music had belonged for a while with his friendship for Patrick Henry, another fiddler and a blithe and restless spirit, but most especially it had been for Martha. He had wooed her with that fiddle—their duets had excluded her other suitors—now it was as well that it would be forever silent, now that there were no more loved ears to hear.

Ten years he had had before she faded away, and he had been too much away from home in those years. First as a member of the rebellious House of Burgesses that had been peremptorily dissolved by Governor Dunmore. That assembly had marched off to hold meetings in the tavern and out of their angry discussions had grown the idea of the Colonial Congress.

Their first year had brought him his little daughter, the other Martha who had been promptly called Patsy because there were already two Marthas, her mother and her aunt, Jefferson’s sister.

For too much of the time, Jefferson knew now, he had kept to himself when he was at home, shut away with his books. Out of the works of the old and new philosophers and historians he had striven to evolve some plan that could help a troubled America. While hammering went on around him, as the house of his dreams slowly took form and shape, he had struggled to put his ideas into words. But the essay he finally evolved with much labor was called too bold by the members of the assembly. Then, in that miasmic summer of ’73, the fever had laid him low and his best friend, Dabney Carr, had died.

I left her too much alone, he told himself as he watched the fire burn low. She had been ill so often, weak and sorrowful because of the loss of three children, two stillborn, while he was off riding for days to reach Philadelphia, there to have a part in the birth of the new nation. Now that nation lived, but a part of his life was forever dead and lay on that grassy slope down the climbing road.

A loud knock at the door broke off his gloomy reverie. The door was pushed open and Burwell pushed his head in hesitantly.

“Mister Tom, it past one o’clock,” the old Negro complained, “and they got that horse out here waiting for you so long he done pawed a hole mighty nigh deep enough to bury hisself.”

“Sorry, Burwell.” Jefferson jumped up. “I was just sitting here thinking about old times. I’ll ride now as soon as I change my breeches.”

“Yes, suh, Mister Tom. I done looked everywhere for you. Then I seen this little bitty smoke comin’ out this yere chimney. Ain’t been nobody in this little room for a time now ’cept Miss Martha. She fetch the gals in here to clean it up good before you come home.”

“There won’t be anybody in here from now on, Burwell. Cover this fire so it will be safe. This place is too full of ghosts and ghosts are sad company when you are getting old.”

“Law, you ain’t old, Mister Tom,” protested the slave, shoveling ashes carefully over the dying embers. “You peert as a lot of young men. Might get you a young wife yet. Out in the quarters the people been saying, now Mister Tom come home for good likely he get him a lady of his own. Miss Patsy, she a fine woman but she got Mister Tom Randolph and all them chillen and you ain’t got nobody.”

“I’ve got you, Burwell. And all the others. They’re all mine.” He took out the iron key and carefully locked the door. Ghosts, he was thinking, had so little respect for locks. Even the grim locks a man closed upon his own heart.