From the rocking chair, Mama attempted a smile, but her lower lip wobbled. “Have Lafayette’s forces fought back the British? Have we lost Virginia?” And when Papa’s mouth thinned into a grim line, she asked, “Is it burned? Is Monticello gone?”
“Only some wine is missing,” Papa told us, and relief had me heaving a long breath. But when Papa spoke next, there was ice in his words. “Would that I could say the same of Elk Hill.” Elk Hill was one of Papa’s other plantations where he grew corn and tobacco and raised livestock. “Elk Hill is left in absolute waste. The British burned the barns and fences, slit the throats of the youngest horses, and took everything. They carried off our crops, our livestock, and our people. At least thirty slaves are gone.”
Mama gasped and I knew she worried most for her Hemings slaves. “What of those at Monticello?”
Setting me back down, Papa crossed to the rocker and squeezed Mama’s hand. “Some were carried off, but most remain.”
“Carried off?” Mr. Short asked with a strange intensity in his boyish gaze. “Or did they flee at the promise of freedom?”
Papa’s jaw clenched, as if Mr. Short’s question carried with it some note of impertinence. “If Cornwallis took them to give them their freedom, he’d have done right. But I fear he’s only consigned them to death from smallpox in his camp.”
Mr. Short put his pistol away and bowed his head. “Is the war lost then?”
My gaze flashed to Papa, dread squeezing my stomach.
Papa answered with scarcely disguised bitterness. “The war, I don’t know, but my honor is certainly lost. They’ll remember me as the governor of Virginia who let plumes of smoke rise over the James River for nearly thirty miles. And there’s a nine-year-old girl the British soldiers—” Papa’s eyes landed upon me, and because I was nearly nine years old myself, I was desperately curious to know what he’d been about to say. But he didn’t finish. “I fear history will never relate the horrors committed by the British army.”
“What of the remaining legislators?” Mr. Short asked after a moment. “Surely I’m not the only one who escaped.”
“A few were captured. Most are gathering in the Old Trinity Church in Staunton. All things considered, our cause fared well.” Despite his words, the etched lines on Papa’s face made it clear the losses pained him. “Thanks to Captain Jouett’s ride. Had he not warned us . . .”
Mr. Short nodded. “I must join the legislature. I’ll carry your messages to them, sir.”
I couldn’t imagine Mr. Short riding through the woods by himself, even with a pistol in his belt. Papa was the son of a surveyor and knew the land, but Mr. Short was a bookish young man, so gentrified that even in exile, he still wore a lace cravat tight against his throat, as if expecting to pose for a portrait.
The same thought must’ve occurred to Papa. “It’s too dangerous, William.”
“Not as dangerous for me as for you,” Mr. Short insisted. “Loan me a horse and I’ll be out and back again within days.”
“We won’t be here,” Papa replied, grim but resolved. “I’m taking my family into hiding.”
And though Mama was still unwell and Polly kicked her little feet in a tantrum, we left that very day. We fled into the Blue Ridge Mountains, to Papa’s wilderness property, the one in the shade of poplar trees. In those days, there wasn’t a house there, only rude huts for the slaves and a two-room cabin for the overseer. No one came to greet us, for they’d no cause to know we might arrive. Nothing was ready for our comfort. Not even a fire. I thought of the sunny rooms at Monticello and our big warm feather beds, and worried that we might now spend all our days here, in a soot-stained cabin made of rough-hewn logs and a roof that leaked.
What’s to become of us now? How long can we hide?
My father was a scientist, a scholar, and a Virginia gentleman, but in the days that followed, he set about repairing fences, thatching roofs, and hunting small game for our supper like a frontiersman. He was wry when presenting my mother with a rabbit for the stew she was trying to boil in our only pot. “Ah, Martha, the circumstances to which I’ve reduced you . . .”
Yet, Mama was strangely content. “On the eve of our wedding, I rode out with you in the worst winter storm to live in a small chamber of an unfinished house. We called it a Honeymoon Cottage, don’t you remember? You were no great man of Virginia then, my dearest. But we were happy.”