CHAPTER 13

PARIS, MARCH 1788

Perhaps I had always known that he would claim me. Had not the same happened to my mother and my sisters?

I watched him secretly to see if he knew, but I realized he would know only when the moment had arrived. I could hasten or delay that moment, but I felt powerless to prevent it.

Once I went with Martha and her father to Notre Dame Cathedral to hear a mass by Cardinal Beaugrave. Both Martha and I were so overwhelmed by the beauty of the cathedral and the mass that we burst into tears. When I accompanied James on his excursions to the city, he would speak of what our life would be together, once we had our freedom. He would speak wildly and with arrogance, as if what he dreamed could be had at the wave of a hand. Perhaps so, but I knew as sure as death that I belonged to Thomas Jefferson.

I hardly strayed from the mansion on the Champs-Elysees. My first nine months in Paris had been happy ones, and now I tried to prolong that happiness, plunging into my studies, grateful and hardly believing my good fortune, honing the knowledge I had acquired and forgetting the sword that hung over my head.

Everyone was homesick for Virginia as one gray, damp Parisian day followed the other in monotonous succession. Even the famous Paris rats had disappeared, frozen into the sewers under the Seine on which the nobility and bourgeois skated. There was fire after fire on the outskirts of the city as entire shanty towns went up in smoke. The men were bored, and an oppressiveness hung over the days as we roamed the mansion, each in our little orbit. I remember the silence of those short days when candles burned at noon.

In January, an unheard-of freeze took hold of the city and confined us to the mansion. We knew that the poor people of Paris had begun to die of the cold and of starvation.

Haughty French officers came and went; Trumbull sketched them for his painting of the Surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown. James became more and more mysterious, speaking of "freedom" and "revolution" and "liberty." Each time he would speak in this way, I remained silent. A sense of fatality took hold of me. I was the center of a drama; yet no one else seemed to know it. Only the painter Trumbull, with his great black eyes, seemed to have a sense of what was happening.

"Do you like it?"

"Oh yes, Master. It is very fine."

I had come to serve his tea. He was finishing his study of my master for his painting of the Declaration of Independence. I gazed at the portrait. It showed a man of high countenance, young with a long and serious face, a high brow with soft curling red hair covering it and a wide unsmiling mouth that made him appear rather stern. It was a good resemblance.

I often sought John Trumbull's company. He was a gentle man. Sometimes I would be impatiently waved away. When, later, he had finished his work in Paris and was folding his easel in preparation for his departure, I felt more alone than ever. I could not confide my fears to James. I thought of Petit, who liked me, but he was devoted to his master, unlikely to thwart him in anything he desired. As for the other women in the house, I was afraid of them and realized they would have no sympathy with a so common and sought-after situation. Above all, I was separated from Polly and Patsy by their innocence. I was alone, in a strange world, as I waited for a sign.

Spring came.

The ice on the Seine cracked, and its black water seeped between the glistening white. The days became longer and the candles went out. The rats came back and the brilliant stones of Paris shone again in the pale sunlight, which had timidly reappeared.

I was fifteen years old.

"I'm going away, Sally. To Amsterdam with Mr. Adams and then to the Rhineland. I'll be gone for six weeks. I want you to study hard while I'm away."

"Yes, Master."

Away. I hadn't counted on that. More waiting.

"Don't look so sad, my Sally. It is only for a little while."

"Yes, Master."

"Your friend John Trumbull recommends the journey highly." The tall somber image of Master Trumbull distracted my thoughts for a moment.

"When I leave, you will stay with Madame Dupre, near the convent on rue de Seine. You can visit Polly and Patsy, and I have arranged that you may spend Sundays at the convent. Mr. Perrault will come to give you your lessons during the week."

"Yes, Master."

"I'm giving all the staff a holiday. It is not proper that you stay here ... alone."

"Yes, Master."

"I shall miss you, Sally."

"Yes, Master."

"Sally, is that all you have to say?"

"Yes, Master."

"Sally, I shall miss you. I promise..."

"Promise me!"

The words burst out of me, more a sob than an exclamation. I could bear the waiting no longer. I drew my head up and looked long into his eyes. Deep in the centers was a dark pinprick. My own reflection.

Yes, I thought, the time has come.

A thousand times a day fear would overwhelm me. Blood would rush to my head, and often I would clutch a velvet hanging or the back of a silk-covered fauteuil. I stopped seeing Polly and Patsy. I dared not leave the house lest he send for me. At night I fell asleep sitting upright on the side of my bed. My body would be turned away from the door, but my head and shoulders would be turned toward it. There was no lock, and I would not have dared turn the key had there been one. I would not face the door lest I invite its opening, yet I could not turn completely away. Thus I sat watch through the night.

Lord keep me from sinking down.

Lord keep me from sinking down.

Lord keep me from sinking down.

I would repeat to myself. In the early hours of the morning, exhausted, I would sleep. The night before his departure, he sent for me, but he did not appear. I fell asleep in his room, and when I awoke an immense shadow blocked my vision.

I had no idea how long he had been standing there. Now that he had come, I felt no fear, only an overwhelming tenderness. His presence for me was command enough; I took control of him. I bent forward and pressed a kiss on the trembling hands that encompassed mine, and the contact of my lips with his flesh was so violent that I lost all memory of what came afterward. I felt around me an exploding flower, not just of passion, but of long deprivation, a hunger for things forbidden, for darkness and unreason, the passion of rage against the death of the other I so resembled. For in this moment I became one with her, and it was not my name that sprang from him but that of my half sister.

At once he left me, surveying me from above with the eyes of a man afraid of heights scanning a valley from a tower. Then his body tensed and rushed toward me as if he had found a way to break his fall.

Thus did Thomas Jefferson give himself into my keeping.

When I awoke the bed was empty beside me. I slipped from the abandoned bed and stared at the gray rectangles of light from the tall windows barred by the shadows of the balconies. In the strange, majestic room, I gathered my clothes from the four corners where they had been flung in the violence of the night. I stared at the sheet and then quickly, without thinking, covered the bed with its counterpane. The feeble groping for James's dream had been erased by the force of a man's body and a man's will.

I washed and dressed, and quickly left the house by the front door. The morning was cool, but the day would be fair. Frost was still on the trees and bushes of the garden, but tiny sparks of green had begun to appear.

I started to walk slowly toward the Pont de Neuilly. I had taken my brother's heavy cloak, yet I trembled uncontrollably either from shock or cold, I don't remember. To my surprise, I recognized ahead of me his solitary figure breaking pane after pane of silvery light. Even at this dawn hour, and for every dawn to come, Thomas Jefferson had risen before me and had chosen the cold bitter morning to walk abroad.

I was filled with confusion. Should I turn back? Hurry to greet him? Stay as I was now, fifty paces behind him? Call out to him? I followed for a long moment, dreading that he would, for some reason, turn around and see me, but he kept his eyes ahead. I fell farther and farther behind as his long legs strode through the Elysian fields spread out before him. The bottom of James's cloak, wet with dew, dragged behind me. I was seized with a terrible yearning. I thought of my mother and her mother before her. Nothing would ever be the same again. Nothing would ever free me of him. Nothing would erase those strange words of love which I had to believe in my weakness. "Je t'aime,"he had said.

In his terror, he had used that most potent of weapons, the ruler of the mighty as well as the helpless. And I had answered, without any other words passing between us.

"Merci, monsieur."