~ ~ ~
A day has passed. Sally Hemings is standing in the doorway to Thomas Jefferson’s study, but so silently that he doesn’t notice until she draws her breath to speak. “Mr. Jefferson,” she says, softly but emphatically. She looks stunned. Her eyes are wide but focused on nothing. The rest of her face seems frozen.
“Are you all right, Sally?” he says. “Is something wrong?”
“I need to talk to you.”
“Certainly.” Thomas Jefferson has been writing a letter. He wipes the tip of his quill with a rag and flips shut the top of his inkwell. “Sit down.” He gestures at the chair in front of his desk.
“No, thank you.”
He places a piece of blotting paper atop the letter he has been writing and smooths it down with the side of his fist.
Sally Hemings has taken a couple of steps into the room, and when he looks at her, she takes a couple more, but not toward him, only away from the door.
“What is the matter?” he says.
She swallows. And when she speaks, her voice is trembling. “I have something to say.”
“All right.” He folds his hands on top of his desk, in part to conceal his own slight trembling. When she doesn’t speak, he asks, “What is it?”
“I have been struggling with my conscience.” She is silent a long moment, then takes a deep breath. “And I have realized that I must… that unless I tell you—”
Her words cut off as if she has been grabbed by the throat. Her wide eyes and still face express something closer to fear.
“Go ahead, Sally,” Thomas Jefferson says softly, his own throat going dry. “What is it you have to say?”
“I have to tell you that you shouldn’t—”
Again she stops, looking so frightened and lost.
Her face hardens. “I have to tell you,” she says, “that—” Another pause, but this time she is only gathering strength. Her words come all in a burst. “I will never forgive you for what you did.”
A tremor runs through her whole body, and then she is looking at him with a fierce alertness.
For reasons that Thomas Jefferson does not comprehend, he is glad at what she has said. He has stopped trembling.
“You are perfectly justified,” he says at last. “I neither deserve nor expect your forgiveness. But I am sorry. Very sorry.”
Sally Hemings continues to stare into his eyes, breathing heavily — and looking utterly beautiful. She says nothing.
“I don’t expect you to accept my apology,” he says. “I only want you to know what I feel.”
Once again her words come in a burst. “Why did you do it?”
Thomas Jefferson gasps. “Hah!”
“Why are you laughing?”
“I’m sorry. I was just surprised.”
Sally Hemings has taken another step toward the center of the room.
“I had no good reason,” he says. “I was a fool. And I had had too much wine. Also…” He looks away from her, picks up his quill and gives it a turn. Then he puts it back on its tray, looks at her and shrugs. “The most foolish thing of all, I suppose, is that I hoped that you might”—he looks away again—“welcome my… attentions.”
When he looks back at her, her expression has softened, though she is still looking him straight in the eyes. Her voice is so quiet he can hardly hear it.
“I didn’t.”
“I know.”
They look into each other’s eyes for a long moment. Then Sally Hemings turns her gaze toward a framed map of France on the wall.
“Perhaps you had better go, Sally,” he says.
“Yes, Mr. Jefferson.”
She is gone from the room in three steps.
~ ~ ~
The air in the ballroom is dense with the odors of meat, burning whale oil and male sweat. More than twenty men are gathered at the round table at the center of the round room, the majority of them standing and all of them shouting. They are also consuming prodigious quantities of duck, salmon and potatoes — new plates of which Sally Hemings and the other servants are constantly ferrying into the room (the entire staff of the Hôtel has been impressed into service for this meeting, including Monsieur Petit), and, of course, the men are also emptying dozens of bottles of Bordeaux.
This morning Monsieur Petit told the staff that a very important meeting would be occurring at the Hôtel that night, that the most courageous and brilliant men in all of France would be coming to discuss matters of utmost importance “to the future of humanity.” He did not say what those matters might be, but as Sally Hemings has moved among the men carrying bottles and trays, she gathers that they are intending some sort of confrontation with the king, and she wonders — though she hardly dares to hope that this might be true — if this meeting isn’t like the ones that Thomas Jefferson attended in Philadelphia when she was a baby and that led to the Revolution. The thought that she might be a witness to a great moment of history fills her with an intense excitement that expresses itself as a buoyant sense of well-being — as if she has gotten mildly intoxicated on the fumes of the wine she’s been pouring.
Most of the men are crowded at one end of the table, where an old man whose wig rests crookedly on his bald head sits, flanked by candelabras, plume in hand, and occasionally transcribes phrases shouted to him by one or more of the men. The Marquis de Lafayette, standing just behind the old man, sometimes claps his hand on the man’s shoulder and gives him commands to write additional phrases or to cross out ones he has already set down. Most of the time, these commands are met by incredulous roars and upraised hands and then a new round of shouting, in which the marquis actively participates, his expression alternating between mischievous delight and the conviction that he is surrounded by imbeciles.
Apart from the elderly scrivener, Thomas Jefferson is the quietest man in the room. He stands beside the marquis, his arms folded tightly across his chest, although his right hand does clutch a wineglass. Every now and then, the marquis will move his mouth close to Thomas Jefferson’s ear and they will confer behind a cupped hand. Some of the other men standing around him also address remarks to him or ask questions, but none of his responses are audible above the cacophony. Sally Hemings can’t help but feel disappointed that he is not taking a more active role in this important discussion. She feels that he is letting himself down and worries that his moment in history may have passed.
At one point late in the evening, as she is walking down the dark corridor from the kitchen, a bottle of wine in each hand, she hears that the room has gone silent and that Thomas Jefferson is speaking. She stops just inside the door, in the wavery brown dimness, far from the lamps and candles on the table.
He is one of the tallest men in the room, and seems even taller standing next to the much smaller marquis, yet his stature seems diminished by a vagueness in his eyes, as if he can’t actually see the people he is addressing, and his voice is pitched higher than normal and sounds thin.
All at once Sally Hemings realizes that he is afraid.
“Le premier principe doit être que tous les hommes sont créés égaux,” he says. “Tous les droits découlent de cela.”
He is quoting his own writing: “All men are created equal.” Is he doing that because he is nervous? Do the other people notice? Do they think he is a fool for repeating a phrase they must all have heard a thousand times?
She looks around the room. A couple of men just in front of her are murmuring to each other, but she can’t hear well enough to tell if there is anything derisive in their tone. The faces of the other people in the room are unreadable masks. There is a snakelike fixity in the shining eyes of the marquis. Is that his way of trying to hide his embarrassment? Or could it be an expression of his anger that Thomas Jefferson is making a fool of them both?