Now she is looking into his eyes, her own eyes tremulous in the flickering firelight.
There is a plunging in his breast that is equally pain and joy. “My God!” he says. “You are so beautiful.”
Sally Hemings pulls her chin away from his still-extended finger. “No.” She is looking again into her lap.
“Yes!” he insists, allowing his finger to lightly stroke her cheek as he withdraws his hand. “You are a vision!” He refills his glass, then swirls the dark fluid once.
“No,” she says, still not looking at him. “I didn’t take your hand.” At the word “didn’t,” her head lifts and she looks him straight in the eye. Her gaze is firm, but he can see that she is trembling, that she is afraid, that in a moment she will begin to cry.
“I’m sorry.” He takes a deep sip from his glass. “I am sorry. I have been presumptuous.”
“No,” she says. “You have—”
He cuts her off: “I am sorry.” There is anger in his final word, and he is ashamed of his anger. Now he is the one looking down. “I have allowed myself to be blinded by feeling.”
“No.”
“Please,” he insists. “I am sorry.” This time he speaks the word with a suitable tenderness. “You are a beautiful young woman, Sally, but that does not give me the right—”
He stops speaking when he sees that her gaze has fallen to her lap.
“What?” he asks softly. When she doesn’t answer, he slumps in his chair. “And now I am making everything worse.”
“No,” she says. And she looks up at him with a small, shy smile. Again that plunge of joy and pain. He wants to pull her into his arms but only takes another deep sip from his glass. She is still smiling, and he begins to wonder if he might hope.
“What?” he says again, even more softly. He leans toward her.
“Nothing,” she says. “I had a lovely day. I will never forget it. C’était un vrai miracle de voir un homme voler dans le ciel.”
“Yes,” says Thomas Jefferson. “Wonderful. Vraiment.” She has stopped smiling. He sees the trouble in his own face reflected in hers. “Perhaps you had better leave me alone, Sally. I have work to do.”
The smile returns weakly, then vanishes as she pushes her chair back from the table and stands.
“Certainly,” she says and, as she backs away from the table, “Sorry.”
Then she is gone.
Alone in the warm, illuminated room, Thomas Jefferson finishes his glass and pours another.
~ ~ ~
… It was a true miracle to see a man flying in the sky….
~ ~ ~
First Sally Hemings sees a golden shimmer along the top of her door, and then she hears the whisper of a leather sole on wood. A knock. So light that she is able to pretend to herself she hasn’t heard it. Then another knock. She has been lying flat on her back for more than an hour, unable to sleep. For much of that time, she felt herself listing sideways in the darkness, as if her bed were a boat swept along by the current of a mirror-smooth river. It was the wine. She has never drunk so much wine. She feels it still, as a wisp of nausea at the base of her throat. And the listing. That is still there, too.
But it isn’t only the wine.
No sooner did she stretch out under her covers than the moments of her day began to repeat inside her head: le Comte de Toytot waving happily as he drifted over the trees, the low vibration of Thomas Jefferson’s voice filling her ear, the feather touches of his lips, his sweating hand — but also what he said while she was drinking her wine: “You are so beautiful. You know that, Sally, don’t you?” His nose was red, his eyes and mouth drooping, as if his face were melting in the heat of the fire. “Beautiful,” he said. Over and over. At first, as she heard these words, the hot thickness in her throat felt like embarrassment, but then it hardened into a sense of something wrong — maybe something very wrong. “Beautiful,” he said. “You cannot pretend to be ignorant—”
Another knock. “Sally?”
Him.
He knocks again. “I’m sorry to disturb you.”
It is raining. She hears the echoey clatter of water in the gutter pipes and the gust-driven rain like sand flung against the windows.
“Sally?”
“One second,” she says.
She is already standing, her bare feet on the cold floor. She doesn’t know what to do. The cold is creeping up her body inside her shift. She wants to find her yellow gown, but she doesn’t know where she left it. There is no light in her room. She can’t see anything at all except the wavering glow around the door.
“I’m sorry,” says Thomas Jefferson.
Maybe she threw the gown across the chair beside her chest of drawers. As she takes a step in that direction, her middle toes slam against the corner of her night table. A flare of pain illuminates the blackness. The enamel chamber pot clanks but doesn’t spill.
“Sally?”
“One second,” she groans, balancing on one foot, clutching her throbbing toes with both hands.
“Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.”
She has found the chair — nothing on it but a single stocking. Now her knee collides with the chest of drawers, but only enough to rattle the glass knobs. No pain, but somehow the fact that she keeps knocking into things leaves her feeling helpless and faint. She is trembling.
She knows what is happening, or what seems to be happening, but she doesn’t know it at the same time. White men do such things. Her own father did. But she cannot make herself believe — even now — that so gentle, sad and wise a man as Thomas Jefferson could be like that. And the disparity between what she is able to believe and what seems manifestly to be happening makes her feel disconnected from the world.
“I’d just like a word with you,” he says. “One word.”
She steps toward the wavering golden outline of the door. There is something soft under her foot. Her gown. And now she remembers that in her haste to bury herself under her covers she simply threw the gown onto a chest, from which it must have slipped to the floor. She picks it up, puts it over her head and slides her hands down the sleeves. Now she is standing just inside the door, the back of her gown unbuttoned to her shoulder blades.
“It’s late,” she says.
“I know. It won’t take a minute.”
The door is not locked. He could have opened it and come in at any time. Maybe everything she’s been thinking is foolish. Maybe there’s nothing at all to fear.
She lifts the latch and pulls the door inward, peering around the edge, keeping her body out of sight, pressed flat against the paneled wood.
“Oh, Sally!” Thomas Jefferson gasps softly, and then gives her a happy smile. His hair is a mess, as if he has been gripping it in his closed fists. His eyes look gelatinous in the glow of his candle. Even as he stands without moving, he is clearly having difficulty staying on his feet.
“Might I come in?”
For reasons that Sally Hemings will never be able to comprehend, she backs away from the door as soon as he asks this question, and then she runs to her bed — which she realizes instantly is exactly the wrong thing to do.
Thomas Jefferson is in the room, and he has closed the door behind him. He hurries toward where she stands, puts the candle on the night table and takes her hand as he sits on the edge of the bed.
“My sweet girl!” he says.
He is holding her hand in both of his. She does not resist. She is paralyzed and feels as if she is hovering a few feet above her own head, watching what is happening and not particularly caring — feeling nothing but a hurtling sort of numbness.