“He does understand,” Jemmy told her. “He’s been sheriff and magistrate in this county, has watched Virginia go through war and revolution. He knows perfectly well that those who would make a despotism of our country must be stopped. He simply doesn’t think it’s more important than keeping Montpelier running as well as it’s always run.”

“No, and I understand his point.” Dolley rose, and went to the dresser to pour water from ewer to basin, to wash from her face the dust of the road that afternoon. She had not, she realized, even changed her dress, much less had anything resembling supper. “Even had he not been—been pushed to reflect upon his mortality, by the death of a son. He hath seen the way people behave, in politics. In truth I can’t even completely blame Mr. Adams, for wanting to make it illegal to call him names in the press when he’s doing what he feels to be his best.”

She was silent for a moment, recalling the peppery New Englander who’d come to one of her dinners back in Philadelphia: the towering erudition and the kindly questions asked about Payne and her mother. “Will Jefferson go against Mr. Adams again, for the Presidency?” she asked. “For if he does—I was told something today that disquieted me very much.”

Jemmy listened gravely to Dolley’s account of what she’d heard that morning beside Patsy Randolph’s garden gate. When she had finished he said, “Right now Callendar has a bigger target for his spleen. But he hates injustice more than he hates the mighty. It may be he is gathering material to blackmail Tom with—and certainly we must write and warn Tom at once. But it may also be that he gathers it to confront him with what he perceives as hypocrisy.”

Dolley opened her mouth to say, And is it not hypocrisy?

Is accepting from thee the gift of a woman as a wedding-present? Is keeping such a woman, so as not to offend thy dear good parents or upset thy political standing among thy neighbors?

How long would it be, she wondered, before Payne began asking for a slave of his own?

Tom Jefferson is right, when he speaks of slavery as corrupting all it touches. And she asked herself, not for the first time, if she had not done Payne a terrible disservice, in marrying a slaveholder. In bringing her son here to Virginia to grow up in an atmosphere that she sensed was dangerous, even to those who meant well.

Yet from the first evening she’d spent in Jemmy’s company she could conceive of living with no one else.

The Great Little Madison, tired and shivering in his scuffed brown velvet wrapper, as he always shivered when he was tired. His long white hair hanging to his shoulders, he paced to the window, where the white rainbow of stars burned above the trees.

“Tom must run for President, Dolley,” said Jemmy wearily. “He is the only one with the stature for it. He is the one whose name everyone knows.”

Just as everyone knew Washington’s name, thirteen years before, Dolley thought. When the country was falling apart and someone had to be found to hold up as a beacon of personal loyalty, to draw men’s approval to the Constitution.

Poor Martha. She recalled her friend’s reserve when she and Jemmy had driven down to Mount Vernon only a few months ago, on a visit of condolence after the old General’s death. Martha understood—and had known how her husband loved and respected Jemmy’s judgment. But despite Martha’s exquisite manners, the strain had shown through.

“Tom must run against John Adams, and he must win.” In the fire’s sinking glow Jemmy’s pale, wrinkled face was as intent as Dolley had ever seen it. “They will eviscerate the Constitution—Hamilton, and the men around him who think that freedom of speech applies only to speech they deem appropriate, and freedom of ideas only to what they consider proper and safe. They have already begun the process.

“Hamilton—and the bankers and merchants who would make up his court—would have this country be like the other nations of Europe, nations ruled by the ‘right sort of men,’ who are ‘right’ because they’re like themselves. But this is a country that isn’t like the nations of Europe, and has never been. It isn’t despotism only that I fear, Dolley. I fear the dissolution of the Union that will inevitably follow. Men like my father—and Jefferson, if you put a pistol to his head—would choose Liberty over unity. And no single state is strong enough to withstand conquest, by England from Canada or France from the Caribbean or Spain from Louisiana and Mexico. We were lucky to have won through the first time.

“This country is more fragile than men think, my beloved. And both its strength and its weakness lie in the hearts of its citizens. Jefferson must win. And if he wins, it is you and I who must go with him—not to Philadelphia, but to this new capital they’ve built—to make certain that the government does not fall victim to a clique of the wealthy again.”

His hands closed over hers, but his gaze turned back to the window, and to the mountain night beyond. In the profound stillness, a hunting owl hooted in the woods, where even in darkness the dogwood shone white, like drifts of snow.

Within a squirrel’s jump of Heaven.

A retirement I dote on, Jefferson had described his mountaintop world, living like an antediluvian patriarch among my children and grandchildren, and tilling my soil. I cherish tranquility….

And little enough he hath had lately of that, Dolley reflected, recalling the things the newspapers had called him. It crossed her mind to hope that Sally took good care of him.

“I had thought I could finish, and come home when Father needed me,” Jemmy said. “I see now that isn’t true. Maybe none of us can finish, ever.”

“Nonsense.” Dolley tightened her grip on his hand, which was smaller than her own, and smiled up into his eyes. “If Mr. Jefferson is correct, and the genius of humankind doth fling forth the truth in its consensus, then the coming generation shall engender minds every bit as great as his or thine. They will take the load of the sky from off thy shoulders, when it shall be time to do so.”

But her heart lifted at the thought of returning to the center of government again, wherever that center would be.

Jemmy chuckled. “Then let us hold up the sky for them, my darling, til they’re grown.”

SALLY

Monticello Plantation