Not long after that Mr. Jefferson had taken the family to his friend Mr. Cary’s home near Richmond, for the girls and the Carr children to be inoculated against the smallpox. Baby Lucie had been left with Aunt Eppes. Sally, Critta, Jimmy, and Thenia, their youngest sister, were inoculated as well. Mr. Jefferson and Polly’s nurse Aunty Isabel acted as sick-nurses to the whole group, the first time Sally had seen her master begin to emerge from the desperate isolation of his grief.

It was there that Mr. Jefferson got the letter from the Congress that his friend, the fragile Mr. Madison who Sally always thought looked like a wizened old man, had put her master’s name forward to be one of the ministers to France. With Miss Patty dead, there was no reason why he shouldn’t accept.

He’d gone to Philadelphia with Patsy. Sally had hoped to be taken along as Patsy’s maid, or at least as a sewing-girl to the household. Instead, when he came back, she heard in the kitchen that she was going to be sent with Polly and Lucie, not back to Monticello, where she had friends and family, but to Eppington.