Sally Heming (15 page)

True to her word, Mistress Adams made Monsieur Petit cool
his heels for two weeks, while Polly refused to leave with a man "she
couldn't understand." But no more messages came from Master Jefferson.

And Petit was unmovable. He would not leave without us; he
had his orders. Finally, through the combined efforts of Mistress Nabby, Master
Adams, and me, Polly Jefferson was finally detached from the skirts of Mistress
Abigail Adams and bundled into the carriage that would take us on our road to
Paris.

PART II

1787

Paris

CHAPTER 11

PARIS, JULY
1787

I leave to time the unfolding of a drama. I leave to
posterity to reflect upon times past; and I leave them characters to
contemplate.

abigail adams,
l801

Thomas Jefferson
stood in the tall
rectangle of the French window looking onto his gardens at the Hotel de Langeac
and guessed at the hour. The tall frame stirred in the soft light and the
nervous fingers of Jefferson's left hand groped for his timepiece. Then, after
a moment's hesitation, he lowered his left hand and, with difficulty, raised
his right hand to his waistcoat and extracted his watch. For a brief second, he
pressed his right wrist against his breast as if in salutation and then he
brought the left hand up to cover the exposed wrist and hand which were
slightly twisted inward, the hand having an atrophied look. Slowly his left
hand caressed his injured right one, his pale eyes blinking away the pain. A
slight smile played at the corners of his fine mouth. As he had guessed, it was
almost five.

If Petit and Polly had started out early enough from
London, they would be in Dover by now. The thought of London made him pensive.
There was still no news of Maria's arrival. How long had he been waiting for
word from her? It seemed like years. He dared not move from Paris lest he miss
her. Jefferson turned and walked away from the glowing windows and the
multicolored flower beds framed by the windows of his salon. A slender man,
with a stiff air, accentuated now by the way he now held his injured wrist,
Jefferson's eyes were his finest feature. A sapphire blue of dazzling clarity,
they seemed to look out upon the world like twin mountain peaks from his great
height, frosted and glacial, tinged with melancholy, with lashes the same color
as his red-gold hair. His complexion was fair, the fine skin almost transparent
under a rash of fine reddish-brown freckles that gave him a youthful, innocent
look. The face was aristocratic and handsome with its long, slightly turned-up
nose, sensual mouth, and firm, protruding, dimpled chin.

He did not consider himself vain, but he was quite pleased
with the likeness the sculptor Houdon had begun of him. He had seen the plaster
for the first time a few days before.

Entering his forty-fourth year, Thomas Jefferson had
become, since he had been in Paris, almost dandyish in his manner of dressing,
favoring creamy lace and sapphire-blue worsted. Even his injury had a certain
romantic elegance. After his mysterious fall last year, which had deprived him
of the use of his right hand, he had been forced to re-educate himself, and he
now wrote almost as well with his left hand as he did with his right. But he
was in pain at the moment. Both the wrist and the steady throbbing in his head
had not abated since yesterday noon. He would force himself to work tonight. It
did not seem possible that Petit and Polly could arrive before the day after
next. He was very fond of his
valet de chambre.
He did feel slightly guilty that he had not sent James to
London when he had learned that his sister Sally had been sent to accompany
Polly from Virginia. He had hesitated, knowing the Adamses' disposition toward
Negro slaves; and knowing James's own temperament, he felt safer with Petit. Of
course, he could have sent them both, but the extra cost, simply to please
James, seemed excessive, especially now when the ministry and his expensive
obligations were taking all his official funds.

He stood absently in the middle of his magnificent oval
salon with its painting of "Dawn" by Berthelemy on the ceiling,
backlit by the late-afternoon sun, a figure in black with white linen and a
blue waistcoat, the fair hair pulled back in a pigtail and lightly powdered.

When a servant in pale-yellow livery entered, he was
startled. He had forgotten he had asked for the medicines and hot water to
bathe his wrist at precisely five. Thomas Jefferson looked into the eyes of his
slave James Hemings as if he were contemplating a mathematical equation.

James Hemings had not seen his sister in four years. She
had been ten and he eighteen when he had left Monticello as body servant to
Thomas Jefferson. He loved her more than any of his family and now that in two
or three days she would be in Paris, the waiting was unbearable. She would
bring the sweet breath of Monticello and all that it represented for him—family
and the slavehood he had never forgotten.

He knew he could disclaim his bondage any time he wished on
French soil. No one could hold him in slavery and now no one could hold her,
either. What providence!

Thinking himself on the brink of freedom, he could even
look on his master now with a certain affection. He did feel affection for
Thomas Jefferson. His master had been more of a father to him than his real
father, John Wayles, had ever been. When he and his brothers and sisters had
not been freed, as Wayles had promised, and were sent to Monticello as part of
his half-sister's inheritance, he had been nine years old. Old enough to work.
Old enough to grasp the dream they had been deprived of. His mother, with all
her wiles and cleverness, her airs of superiority and her concubinage, had
failed. She had failed in the only way that matters to a slave concubine: she
had not made his father love her enough to free his children by her.

When James entered the room, he found Thomas Jefferson
standing, as if he had forgotten something. He had been in this mood for days
now. He was, James knew, expecting word from London on the arrival of Lady
Maria Cosway. The servant felt a wave of affection and pity for his master as
he saw him there cradling his wounded wrist. Thomas Jefferson was not a happy
man, thought James, despite all his fame and riches and celebrated friends. He
was lonely. The death of his wife had made it impossible for him to believe
again in happiness or good fortune. Moreover, his master missed his home more
than he admitted.

Personally, James never intended to see Monticello again,
nor Virginia for that matter, but he could understand pain and homesickness,
especially since the sudden death of Jefferson's third daughter, Lucy. Now
Thomas Jefferson's two remaining children would both be with him, and he,
James, would be reunited with his beloved sister. As if they shared the same
thought, Jefferson gave him a strange look, then smiled and squeezed his arm.
Without a word, Jefferson sat in one of the armchairs and asked his servant to
bathe and massage his wrist.

Two days later, a public coach drew up to the gates of the
hotel, and Petit, a little girl, and a very young woman stepped out. Polly
Jefferson burst into tears at the sight of her father, whom she didn't
recognize, while her maid paled at the sight of her brother. The two girls
clung to each other, and finally the two of them embraced James Hemings, as Polly
would not let go of her maid.

The joy of seeing the beauty and purity of his sister's
face moved James deeply. She was well dressed, he thought, in new black silk
that showed off her pale complexion and her dark hair, and she was fully
formed. Her eyes were a pure liquid gold, a color he had not seen on anyone
else. He took her in his arms and watched as, shyly, his master approached his
daughter and pulled her away from her slave. James knew that the paleness of
Jefferson's face was an indication of great emotion. Thomas Jefferson was
intimidated by his own daughter. Later, he said he would not have known her if
he had met her on the street, nor she him.

Polly Jefferson was to make him pay for those four lost
years, and Thomas Jefferson paid gladly. He ruled his daughters, as he did
everyone, with a fastidious tyranny. It fell hardest on Martha, who loved him
most, but all of them were to feel the weight of that demand and its fetters of
steel.

But that day they were a happy and reunited family. Martha,
home from her convent, was dazzled by the beauty of her little sister and her
maid. After much kissing and embracing, Thomas Jefferson and his two daughters
went inside. Brother and sister remained behind in the sunshine.

Only Petit remained apart from this "family"
celebration. How strange were the ways of Americans and their servants, he was
thinking. James had explained to the Frenchman that they were literally the
same family. This had shocked Petit, for he was the perfect servant: discreet in
his service, correct, loyal in his protection of the ruling class and their
privileges.

As they kissed and embraced, Adrien Petit saw more clearly
than any of them the farce and the tragedy of that reunion.

Before the week was over, Polly Jefferson was in the Abbaye
de Panthemont with her sister Martha. Sally Hemings was installed at the
ministry and being taught by James's tutor, Mr. Perrault, and Petit began to
teach her to be a ladies' maid.

Jefferson remembered everything and asked questions about
everyone, white and black. Sally Hemings, through her mother, knew everything
that had gone on in the intervening years. She delighted him with her stories,
her reports on the crops and gardens. She took over from James the duties of
nurse, and every day, her small but surprisingly strong hands would bathe and
massage his wrist while she kept up a steady stream of conversation in her soft
Virginia accent, a relief to his ears from the harsh beauty of the French he
had become so accustomed to. Nothing seemed to be too trivial for him to ask
about.

"Tell me everything," he begged. "Who has
died, who has married, who has hanged himself because they cannot marry?"

The mansion where she would live now, explained James to
his sister, was called the Hotel de Langeac. James had moved there with his
master about a year after they had arrived in Paris, where his master was
minister plenipotentiary and ambassador to the French king, Louis XVI. The
Hotel de Langeac was situated halfway up the Champs-Elysees, one of the main
thoroughfares leading out of the city. It went up to and then down the bridge
leading to Neuilly and thence to Saint Germain-en-Laye, Marly, and the king's
palace of Versailles. The hotel (which James explained to her was the French
name for a private mansion) adjoined the Grille de Chaillot, a large and
beautiful wrought-iron and gilded-bronze gate that marked the limits of the
city and was one of its exits and entrances at which the city tolls were
levied.

The mansion itself was in creamy white stone with sculptured
friezes. The main gate led into a spacious courtyard. To the right were the
steps that led up to the front door. To the left of the reception hall was a
sweeping pink marble staircase that led to the upper stories. On the ground
floor was a circular room with a skylight, and adjoining it was an oval drawing
room, one of the most beautiful of the mansion, from which steps led into the
garden. It was the ceiling of this oval room which was decorated with the
painting of Jean-Simon Berthelemy's "Dawn," the master's favorite.

James led his stunned sister through the elegant, beautiful
rooms. On the second floor were the master apartments, with their spacious
sun-filled bedrooms, each the size of the drawing room at Monticello, and each
with its dressing room and bathroom attached with a hammered-copper and
porcelain bathing tub. Then, with great excitement, James showed his sister the
"lieux anglais,"
or water closets, the latest invention and most modern installation
imaginable. The young girl marveled at the painted ceilings and walls covered
with silk. She looked out of the tall rectangular windows. And to think
Virginians had the nerve to call what they lived in "mansions"!
Monticello. She burst into laughter at what she had until now called with awe
the "Big House."