I hadn’t been sneaking about at all, so despite the nervousness that the slaves’ words and Mammy’s tone unleashed in my belly, I simply folded my hands over my apron as I remembered my mother doing and met her stern gaze. “Dr. Gilmer is here. Papa wants your help.”
Inoculating us was the first decision my father made about anything since the day my mother died over two months before, and it was a decision that came upon him suddenly and with the utmost urgency. Of the slaves carried off by the British, almost all had perished from smallpox and other fevers.
Perhaps it was the stories of how our people had suffered that put my father into a singular fervor that his daughters must be guarded against this illness, no matter how terrifying the treatment. Mammy Ursula had been my nursemaid when I was a babe, so I wanted her to tell me this treatment was a needful thing, and not part of my papa’s madness. Instead, Mammy brushed flour from her apron, wiped her dark hands on a cloth, and silently followed me to fetch Polly and the baby.
We found Papa in an agitated state, pacing in front of the clean-linen-covered table where Dr. Gilmer’s knives gleamed silver and sharp. In an echo of my wildly beating pulse, a November rainstorm pitter-pattered against the windowpane, and I stole a glance at the menacing little glass vial of noxious pus from a victim of the pox.
With steady hands, Papa tugged up the white linen sleeve of my shift to bare my arm for the physician, and I asked, “Will it hurt?”
Papa stilled, his bleak gaze lifting to my eyes. His lips pursed. “I wish your mother . . .” He shook his head and sighed. “Your mother would know better how to . . . what to . . .”
I hung on the edge of his words for a long moment, then finally looked to Dr. Gilmer. “It will be little more than a scratch, my dear,” Dr. Gilmer said as he removed his black frockcoat and placed it over the back of a wooden chair. “When it pains you, you must bravely set the example for your sisters so they won’t be frightened when their turn comes.”
I glanced at Papa for reassurance, but his expression had gone distant again, his fingers cold as he held fast to my wrist so Dr. Gilmer could bring his knife down on the tender underside of my arm. I hissed as the first slash drew blood, then yelped at the throbbing pain that followed. I clenched my teeth to hold back my cries lest they frighten my little sisters, waiting on the other side of the door, an effort that left me shaking.
Dr. Gilmer buried a thread soaked in the infected fluid between the folds of my rent flesh, then bandaged over it with a linen strip, tying off the ends. “There, there, Patsy. You did very well.”
I wiped away a mist of tears and tried to give a brave smile when Ursula came in carrying the baby in one arm and leading Polly with the other. But neither my brave smile nor Ursula’s presence did any good when it was Polly’s turn. My willful little sister screamed and fought and even tried to bite Dr. Gilmer before Mammy wrestled her still.
Papa drifted to the window, pinching the bridge of his nose. He still had his back to Dr. Gilmer when the physician took his leave.
With a worried glance at my father, Ursula hurried to see the physician out. As if Papa had commanded it, she promised to compensate Dr. Gilmer with some of her special bottled cider. I realize now that I wasn’t alone in trying to maintain the illusion that Papa was still master of his plantation—and himself.
Because Polly was still crying, I nuzzled her close. “Hush, it’s all over. Now we can go out and play.”
“No,” Papa said without turning. “You and your sisters must be confined for the next few weeks. Then we’re leaving Monticello.”
My gaze jerked up. “Leaving?”
“I’ve accepted an appointment to Paris to negotiate the end of the war.”
Scarcely anything he could’ve said would’ve surprised me more. I remembered his promise to my mother that he’d retire from public life. That he’d retire to his farm, his books, and his family, from which nothing would ever separate him again. Just two months before, hours before my mother’s death, he’d angrily refused his election to the Virginia legislature. But now everything had changed, and I was left to wonder if his promises had died with her.
I didn’t want to leave. Neither did I want Papa to go without us. “Must you serve, Papa?”
My father gave a curt nod but said no more.
In the days that followed, my sisters and I suffered from nothing more than boredom, cooped up when we would rather have been romping through piles of autumn leaves.
Then the illness came upon us, fast and merciless.
And all Papa’s cool reserve melted away. He held the pail for our vomit, wiped the fevered sweats from our brows, and offered hushed, soothing words. Often when I surfaced from delirious dreams, the sound of his violin or his soft, rasping tenor as he sang comforted me back to sleep. Having already taken the treatment, Papa would let no one else care for us, lest we spread the contagion. And he cloistered with us together in the small make shift infirmary, our world narrowing again to only one another. Our little surviving family of four.