Sally didn’t answer. The sharp golden half-light of autumn, slanting through the jalousies of the cabinet’s windows, laid bright slits across his sharp features. In his eyes Sally saw the shaken look of a man who has stood near a tree in a lightning-storm, only to see God’s hammer rend the living thing to pieces a yard from his elbow.

Was it the nearness of their escape that frightened him? she wondered. The fact that he and all his friends had barely avoided being overrun and slain, as the aristocrats of France had been murdered? The fact that while he and his lanky friend Governor Monroe and clever little Mr. Madison had all been scheming about the balance of local rule with the power of the Congress, black men whose labor they all took for granted had been making plans of their own?

Or was it the awareness that he, and they, and his daughters, and his friends’ families, all stood unmasked in the eyes of the country as the oppressors, the exact equivalent of those French aristocrats who had “brought it on themselves”?

Sally folded her hands and answered calmly, “No.”

His eyes met hers. I think you’re lying, Sally.

And hers replied, Better a liar than a coward, Tom.

Both knew that the words could never be said. That to speak them would end the friendship that, flawed as it was, was still a source of comfort to them both.

And Sally had known for a long time, that he would not and could not be other than he was, no matter what was said.

It was he who looked aside.



The rebel slave Gabriel Prosser was hanged on the tenth of October. Rumors went around the quarters for weeks beforehand, of slaveholders demanding that the forty or so men condemned with him be “made an example of” by mass executions, or burning alive. Tom Randolph’s cousin (and brother-in-law) John, newly elected to Congress, had written, The accused have exhibited a spirit, which must deluge the Southern country in blood: and many had demanded vengeance accordingly.