Sally couldn’t remember back before she’d loved him, though the day she’d quit doing so was vivid as yesterday in her mind. It still filled her with sadness, and a sense of confusion for which she had no name. She’d seen them so often together, Mr. Jefferson and Miss Patty. Had been aware of how deeply they loved one another, like the red rose and the briar in the old ballad, inextricably twined.

She had seen, too, the grief, loneliness, and—once the War began—the constant quiet terror in which her mistress lived, each time Mr. Jefferson went away.

Miss Patty was all things beautiful, lovely as the dogwood blossoms, sweet-scented, filled with music. Mr. Jefferson, with his tales of ancient Kings and Indian lore and the secret lives of every bird and grass-blade, was wise and quirkily marvelous. Kind, too. He was firm and reasonable with his slaves, both field-hands and house-servants: he would threaten whippings, but in fact the worst that would happen was that he’d sell an offender away. This was bad enough, and not simply because it meant losing every friend and relative you had. Everyone in the quarters along Mulberry Row knew that pretty much anywhere in the State would be worse than Monticello. At the time, it had seemed to Sally that she’d loved Mr. Jefferson merely for the fact that he didn’t assume she was simpleminded, just because she was a little girl and a slave. Though she was always being scolded by her mother and Miss Patty for wandering off into the garden to look at plants when she should have been practicing her stitching, Mr. Jefferson always took her side. “It’s rare enough to find any child, black or white, who will read Nature’s textbooks so avidly,” he’d tell them. He’d joked with her, and laughed when she gave him back clever answers. Like a good father he’d always been happy to answer her endless questions, to explain the clouds and the winds—and the War.

In the snowy January of 1781, when Sally was eight, the family had been in Richmond, where Mr. Jefferson was Governor of the state. He had come back from the Congress, Sally’s mother had said, because Miss Patty had begged him to, because she could not live with him gone all the time. Sally guessed her mistress feared that if the British took the Congress prisoner, Mr. Jefferson would be hanged. So he’d come back to Virginia, first to Williamsburg and then to Richmond, and the British invaded the state anyway. They’d seized Richmond, and the family barely got away; Sally remembered clinging to her mother’s skirt as the servants huddled around the wagons, and hearing baby Lucie Elizabeth, who’d only been born the previous November, wailing thinly in the cold.

Three days later the British riddled the house with bullets at point-blank range, then rounded up the servants who’d remained there, and sold them off for cash. Both Miss Patty and baby Lucie Elizabeth came down sick as a result of the flight through the freezing countryside. In April, Lucie Elizabeth died.

Eighteen months later, just after Mr. Jefferson’s term as Governor was ended and he returned to Monticello, a militia captain came tearing up the mountain one June morning at dawn, shouting that the British were but three hours behind him and had already taken Charlottesville. Mr. Jefferson woke his wife and daughters and got them into the carriage, carrying Polly down the stairs wrapped in a blanket. Aunt Carr, Mr. Jefferson’s sister who had lived with him since the death of her husband, wailed prophecies of doom as her older boys Peter and Sam struggled to keep the younger ones calm, and Miss Patty’s parrot Shadwell shrieked and swore.

Sally and her older sister Critta, and their sixteen-year-old brother Jimmy, helped load the farm wagon with food, blankets, clothing. Mr. Jefferson lifted her and Critta into the wagon, but their mother went in the carriage with Miss Patty, to quiet their mistress’s terror as the vehicles went jolting down the breakneck, rutted road. Sally later heard from her oldest brother—Martin, the butler—that Mr. Jefferson had tried to pack up some of his papers and had gotten away from the house only minutes before the first red-coated dragoons emerged from the woods.

After the first flight from Richmond, Miss Patty had never been well. By the time they’d escaped from Monticello, the bones of her cheeks stood out through the sunken skin and her hands were like dead leaves.

Yet when Mr. Jefferson was there, Miss Patty would laugh and twine ribbons in her beautiful dark red hair, and insist she was much better; that there was really nothing wrong. Even as a child, Sally had sensed how desperately they both needed to believe this was true. By the fall of 1782 Miss Patty was with child again, her seventh, according to Sally’s mother, counting the little boy she had borne to her first husband. She’d put on weight for the baby’s birth—the second little Lucie Elizabeth—but even Sally could see it was unhealthy bloat, not the smoothness of returning health.

Those last four months, between Lucie’s birth in May and September, when Miss Patty died, had a nightmare quality in Sally’s memory. What they must have been for Mr. Jefferson she could not imagine. There was no more playing school with Patsy, or reading in the library, or learning fine stitching or the art of dressing hair. Sally had been put in charge of Polly—then four—sleeping on a pallet on the floor of the girls’ room and helping Aunty Isabel in the nursery with baby Lucie.

Even little Polly sensed something was amiss, though Patsy whispered through gritted teeth that no one was to tell her sister how desperately ill their mother was. At night, when Polly couldn’t sleep, Patsy would tell her stories, enlisting Sally’s aid when her own limited invention flagged. Afterwards, when the younger girl drifted off to sleep and Sally returned to her pallet, Sally could hear the heartbreaking liquid sweetness of Mr. Jefferson’s violin from downstairs, as he played for his wife in the darkness.



“Did Mama have freckles?” Polly sat up suddenly, her small, oval face puckered with sudden fright at the recurring concern. “Papa said he wouldn’t love me, if I let myself get freckled.”