I lowered myself into an armchair. “If you’re so grown-up, go see if Mammy Ursula needs you to read out a recipe, then study Spanish so I don’t have to tell Papa how lazy you’ve been.”
Once she’d skulked off, I held the letter close, realizing that I might never see my friend again in the flesh. I was careful with the wax seal and reverently unfolded the page, grateful for the news from France.
Mirabeau—who had worked with my father and Lafayette to draft the Declaration of the Rights of Man—was dead. The French tricolor flag was officially adopted. Hereditary titles had been abolished. Catholicism would no longer be the religion of the state. Finally, the king tried to escape and rouse Prussia and Austria to restore the monarchy by force of arms, but was captured by the revolutionaries before he could do so.
And I couldn’t find it in myself to feel sorry.
Who but Papa would understand this news as I did? We’d returned to a country much transformed by six years of relative peace. America’s war of independence was already, for some, a distant memory—the extraordinary sacrifices now an unpleasant recollection, easily buried under the business of rebuilding ordinary lives.
People forgot the fragility of our enterprise as a new nation, and sometimes forgot, too, how much we owed France for it. But it was different for my father and me. We’d gone from one revolution to another, leaving America flush with victory only to find ourselves ensnared in the same struggle for liberty on a distant shore.
For us, the revolution had never ended.
Papa’s words had shaken the world, but if liberty failed in France, it could still fail in America, too. Then everything we’d sacrificed would be for naught. However, letting my eyes caress each cherished word of Marie’s letter, it wasn’t only the politics that pained me—there were also the lines she penned of William Short.
According to Marie, he had despaired my leaving France. So much so that when she asked after his feelings for me, William angrily renounced them. Marie didn’t believe him; she wrote that she thought he still loved me. But this was long ago. It had been just over a year since I’d left him, and now I was great with another man’s child.
It doesn’t matter any longer, I told myself.
Nevertheless, my mind was still in a fog of regret when I stumbled upon my husband in the greenhouse, some unrecognizably bloody animal hacked to pieces on a butcher block under his hands. “What can you be doing?” I asked, tugging my shawl around me.
“Dissecting a dead opossum,” Tom replied, as if there were nothing odd about it at all. The kill was fresh, judging by the steam still rising off the remains of the carcass in the chilly air. “Your father has engaged in a debate with someone about the creature, and asked me to perform some experiments and observations to keep in a diary along with meteorological readings.”
I pressed my hand to my mouth, unable to look away from the gore. Only my father would debate anyone about opossums! If Papa still did have a madness, it was in that he had to take a measure of everything under God’s creation, obsessively recording the tiniest minutiae, as if it would all add up to an answer for what ailed us in this world. And now he’d dragged poor Tom into it. Poor Tom, who was here running another man’s plantation—my father’s plantation—instead of his own. And for my comfort.
I cleared my throat. “I regret my father has troubled you with this.”
“It’s no trouble,” Tom said, wiping bloody hands on a gardener’s apron.
He was being mannerly. My husband had been ripping out dead trees for my father and planting new ones at Monticello, working himself from dawn to dusk. And when he wasn’t busy with that, he was kindly tutoring my little sister in arithmetic and botany. He wasn’t as tired as he’d been at Varina, but he was restless, as if always finding new ways to prove himself.
“Papa will understand that you’re too busy to indulge every little curiosity.”
“Patsy,” Tom said, with a sheepish shake of his head, “I’m happy to do whatever Mr. Jefferson asks because your father wants to learn everything, whereas mine thinks he’s got nothing left to learn. And if my father ever did have a question, I’m the last person he’d ask for help.”
Seemingly of its own accord, my body moved closer to him. My hand found Tom’s cheek and stroked it tenderly. Bashfully, he turned his face to kiss my palm, careful not to touch me with his own bloodied hands. “Don’t suppose you’ve a French recipe for opossum stew?” he asked.
I laughed. And in that moment, my life in Paris seemed as far away as the stars.
Part Two
Founding Mother
Chapter Nineteen
Monticello, 8 February 1791
To Thomas Jefferson from Thomas Mann Randolph Jr.