Sally didn’t know a slave on Monticello who didn’t dread the day when Tom Randolph would become their owner.

As the hot June days of haying and corn-harvest advanced, Randolph came seldom to Monticello. His son Jeff, the only child in the Big House not sick, would sometimes sit on the dismantled pillars of the front porch for hours, waiting for him, and twice had to be stopped from going over to Edgehill, to see if he was there. Sally found herself worrying at the thought of that eight-year-old, son and grandson of slave-owners, walking by himself through the woods along the river’s edge.

It would serve them right, she told herself again.

And maybe it would.

She cached a length of rope at the back of the cupboard in the little girls’ nursery, knowing that if the house were to be set on fire, the narrow stairway—which Tom claimed was so modern and heat-saving and which every servant who had to carry things up and down it despised—would turn into a lethal chimney.

If it came to flight—if it came to a rebellion—the house, with walls and windows already breached by construction, would be no refuge. They might have only minutes to escape. And as she passed the door of the nursery in the darkness of the night, Sally would look through and see Patsy sitting quietly beside Cornelia’s cradle or little Ellen’s bed. And at the sight of her, she’d feel a sick despair.



Standing in the dark of the upstairs hall, Sally considered her old friend—her old enemy—in the soft glow of the single appleseed of light shed by the veilleuse on the nursery dressing-table. Clothed in her wrapper of rust-colored brocade, her red hair braided down her back, Patsy had never looked plainer, her long face lined with weariness and her mouth bracketed by gouges of temper and disappointment too long held in rigid check.