It is a glorious time to be alive, Tom had said in France, his eyes shining in the candlelight, but he’d still made preparations to get his daughters out of the bloody path of the juggernaut.

In the days that followed, Sally was careful to go about her business, and avoid any show that she was listening more carefully to half-heard conversations. She’d always kept money cached in the rafters of the cabin where Jimmy wasn’t likely to find it, money Tom gave her for little luxuries for her children, like Young Tom’s secondhand fiddle. Now she began to conceal food there as well.

In this she was aided by the fact that nothing at Monticello was quite normal during that time.

Bev’s sickness was soon seen to be mild: he cried and scratched, but he always seemed to know who and where he was. But in the Big House, Patsy’s daughter Ellen was very sick indeed.

Sally found herself plotting out routes of flight—plotting out hiding places—suitable not for one woman with a three-year-old, but two women with not only toddlers but a baby. For she understood, almost without conscious decision, that if she got Tom’s grandchildren to safety, she would have to spirit Patsy away as well.

It wasn’t just that Tom would expect nothing less of her.

When faced with the thought of rebelling slaves overrunning Monticello—coming up from Charlottesville or across the river from Edgehill, crazy as the men and women of Paris had been crazy—she simply could not leave Patsy to her own devices.



Any slaves who worked for Tom Randolph, Sally guessed, would be crazy with rage if a revolution sparked to life, and out for blood. Though Randolph was careful not to get a reputation in the neighborhood as a harsh master or a cruel one, he had qualities that were almost worse. He was careless with money and in debt—Tom had on several occasions had to lend his son-in-law money—and he was unpredictable.