America's First Daughter: A Novel(7)
Mama gasped and I knew she worried most for her Hemings slaves. “What of those at Monticello?”
Setting me back down, Papa crossed to the rocker and squeezed Mama’s hand. “Some were carried off, but most remain.”
“Carried off?” Mr. Short asked with a strange intensity in his boyish gaze. “Or did they flee at the promise of freedom?”
Papa’s jaw clenched, as if Mr. Short’s question carried with it some note of impertinence. “If Cornwallis took them to give them their freedom, he’d have done right. But I fear he’s only consigned them to death from smallpox in his camp.”
Mr. Short put his pistol away and bowed his head. “Is the war lost then?”
My gaze flashed to Papa, dread squeezing my stomach.
Papa answered with scarcely disguised bitterness. “The war, I don’t know, but my honor is certainly lost. They’ll remember me as the governor of Virginia who let plumes of smoke rise over the James River for nearly thirty miles. And there’s a nine-year-old girl the British soldiers—” Papa’s eyes landed upon me, and because I was nearly nine years old myself, I was desperately curious to know what he’d been about to say. But he didn’t finish. “I fear history will never relate the horrors committed by the British army.”
“What of the remaining legislators?” Mr. Short asked after a moment. “Surely I’m not the only one who escaped.”
“A few were captured. Most are gathering in the Old Trinity Church in Staunton. All things considered, our cause fared well.” Despite his words, the etched lines on Papa’s face made it clear the losses pained him. “Thanks to Captain Jouett’s ride. Had he not warned us . . .”
Mr. Short nodded. “I must join the legislature. I’ll carry your messages to them, sir.”
I couldn’t imagine Mr. Short riding through the woods by himself, even with a pistol in his belt. Papa was the son of a surveyor and knew the land, but Mr. Short was a bookish young man, so gentrified that even in exile, he still wore a lace cravat tight against his throat, as if expecting to pose for a portrait.
The same thought must’ve occurred to Papa. “It’s too dangerous, William.”
“Not as dangerous for me as for you,” Mr. Short insisted. “Loan me a horse and I’ll be out and back again within days.”
“We won’t be here,” Papa replied, grim but resolved. “I’m taking my family into hiding.”
And though Mama was still unwell and Polly kicked her little feet in a tantrum, we left that very day. We fled into the Blue Ridge Mountains, to Papa’s wilderness property, the one in the shade of poplar trees. In those days, there wasn’t a house there, only rude huts for the slaves and a two-room cabin for the overseer. No one came to greet us, for they’d no cause to know we might arrive. Nothing was ready for our comfort. Not even a fire. I thought of the sunny rooms at Monticello and our big warm feather beds, and worried that we might now spend all our days here, in a soot-stained cabin made of rough-hewn logs and a roof that leaked.
What’s to become of us now? How long can we hide?
My father was a scientist, a scholar, and a Virginia gentleman, but in the days that followed, he set about repairing fences, thatching roofs, and hunting small game for our supper like a frontiersman. He was wry when presenting my mother with a rabbit for the stew she was trying to boil in our only pot. “Ah, Martha, the circumstances to which I’ve reduced you . . .”
Yet, Mama was strangely content. “On the eve of our wedding, I rode out with you in the worst winter storm to live in a small chamber of an unfinished house. We called it a Honeymoon Cottage, don’t you remember? You were no great man of Virginia then, my dearest. But we were happy.”
That’s when I first knew my mother had heard enough of revolution and the sacrifice of patriots. Indeed, it seemed to be her singular mission to draw Papa into the delights of simple domestic life. Though the overseer’s cabin was no proper home for a gentleman’s family, Mama set up housekeeping. She had me down on my knees with her, scrubbing at the floorboards with a stiff brush. We hung quilts and beat dust out of them. And when Papa had to leave to make his forays into the woods, Mama and I saw to it that there was a candle burning in the one window of the cottage to guide him back to us.
A few weeks later, harvest time for the wheat arrived, and Mama sent me with Papa to oversee the slaves toiling in our fields with sharp sickles. The women cut the stalks, beads of sweat running down their bare brown arms. Meanwhile, the shirtless dark-skinned men gathered the cut wheat into bundles, hauling the golden sheaves into the sun to dry.
I loved nothing more than riding atop majestic Caractacus with Papa, and though we were far away from our mountaintop home, it almost made me feel everything was just the way it should be.
But I knew it wasn’t.
“Will the British find us, Papa?” I asked, peering up at him over my shoulder.
His strong arms tightened around me. “This farmstead came to me through your Grandfather Wayles. The British won’t think to look here. . . .” he said, trailing off when he heard Mama singing from across the field where she scrubbed linens in a bucket.
Her voice carried sweetly, unaccompanied, until Papa joined in her song. At hearing his tenor, she smiled, and I felt his breath catch, as if she’d never smiled at him before. He loved her, maybe more than ever. And with her eyes on us, Papa used his heels to command his stallion to a proud canter. “Let’s show your mother what Caractacus can do.”