We could hope patriots in other parts of the nation were hungrier for it, but I was afraid to hope. My life had become such a tissue of privations and disappointments that it was impossible to believe any of my wishes would be gratified, or if they were, not to fear some hidden mischief flowing from their success.
And on the day Jeff delivered the news we hoped would be our salvation, he was as ashen as the day Bankhead stabbed him. He came in from the drizzly cold, tracking mud on the floor from his riding boots, and we went together to knock on my father’s door. Where Sally was, I couldn’t guess, but Burwell let us in, leading us to Papa, seated at his desk, his legs raised up to keep the blood in them, squinting through his spectacles as he tried to write with his own withered hand.
Jeff cleared his throat. “The lottery has been approved with a condition that Monticello must be the prize.”
Papa went white from his snowy white hair to the tips of his fingers. So white I feared he’d become a statue before my eyes. His lottery scheme had been meant to save our home, but might prove to be no better than if we’d auctioned it off. When Papa finally spoke, he asked, “That’s the only way?”
Jeff nodded, scarcely able to meet his grandfather’s eyes. “You’d be able to live here until your death, and my mother until hers. But after that, Monticello will pass out of the family. I need to know what answer to carry back to Richmond.”
My father swallowed. Removed his spectacles. Set down his pen.
“I need some time to think and consult with your mother,” he said.
Jeff pulled a chair for me then found one for himself.
My father stopped him. “Only your mother.”
There was a moment—a heartbeat of confusion—before Jeff nodded, and went out. Then Papa and I were alone together. We sat together in silence for a time.
Papa finally said, “I never believed it could come to this.”
It’s only a house, I wanted to say. But I knew better. “We’ll manage somehow—”
He stopped me midthought, bringing my hand to his lips. “I’ve been in agony watching you sink every day under the suffering you endure, literally dying before my eyes. Do you remember, Patsy, when we first started playing music together?”
I smiled a bittersweet smile, remembering Paris, where I had learned to play the harpsichord. Where we’d made music together. And where I played for him when he could no longer play, due to his enfeebled hand. “Oh, yes. I remember all our duets.”
“I have been hearing them, lately. In my sleep. Realizing that my whole life has been, in some sense, a song that could never be sung without you. There is almost nothing I’ve ever been that I could’ve been without my dear and beloved daughter, the cherished companion of my early life, and nurse of my old age. And your children as dear to me as if my own from having lived with me from their cradle . . . that’s why I leave it all to you.”
Unless the lottery wildly surpassed our expectations, there’d be nothing to leave, I thought. And worse, anything he gave to me would be taken by Tom’s creditors. “Papa, Tom’s debt’s—”
“I’ll settle the remains of my estate upon Jeff to hold in trust for your sole and separate use, until your husband’s death, in which case the property should go to you as if you were a femme sole.”
This would shield everything from Tom’s creditors, but was also an acknowledgment, at long last, that I needed no man to rule over me. And as if to underline his trust, he said, “I’ll need you to look after Sally.”
“Dear God, Papa.” I brushed back welling tears.
He took both my hands. “Burwell, Joe Fosset, and Johnny Hemings . . . I intend to free them with a stipend and tools and a log house for each of them. And the boys, Madison and Eston—they’ll go free on their twenty-first birthdays. I’ll petition the legislature for them to be allowed to remain in the state as if it were a favor to Johnny Hemings, naming them as his apprentices so that he can start a carpentry business.”
It was, I supposed, the only option. My father couldn’t do for Sally’s younger boys what he’d done with Beverly and Harriet without depriving their mother of all her children. But I believed anyone might be able to see right through emancipation of Madison and Eston unless . . .
The ruse, of course, depended upon Sally’s enslavement. Papa wouldn’t free her, couldn’t free her without exposing everything. Which is why he was leaving it to me.
In the end he left everything—all of it—to me.
“TELL THEM TO MAKE MY COFFIN NOW,” Papa said from the confines of his sickbed, where I fanned the flies away from him in the still heat of summer.
He’d come home from some business in Charlottesville, slumped in the saddle, scarcely able to hold the reins in his crippled hands. Old Eagle clopped slowly along, careful and somber, as if he knew just how feeble Papa was. And once we got Papa down from the horse, it became manifest that his powers were failing him.