Jefferson (32 page)

“Ah.”

“For as long as I’ve been in Europe,” Jefferson said, “the British newspapers have been reporting the collapse of the American government. By my count, Washington’s house has been burned to the ground four times at least, poor Franklin has been stoned and resurrected a dozen times—I think, to be candid, the Grown wishes to discredit our experiment in democracy and rebellion, so they plant false information in the press.”

“They are
jealous
?” Cosway’s last word hung in the air for a long moment as he and Jefferson gazed at each other.

Maria turned quickly to Hoffman’s table. “He’s finished!” she declared, pointing.

Hoffman held up a stiff rectangular paper, slightly larger than a calling card. With a little flourish of wrist and arm he extended it to Jefferson, who took a pen from the worktable, bent over the card for a moment, and then presented it—hesitating—to Cosway.

“He doesn’t give me one.” Trumbull told Maria in a sardonic aside, “because I’m leaving Paris tomorrow. Why waste paper?”

Cosway passed the card to his wife.

“He writes in your name
here
,” Hoffman said over her shoulder. “He writes in what date
there
. You see? Now it looks just like he wrote it all himself. I make one hundred copies today, in fifteen minutes. Watch!”

“The great advantage,” Jefferson told her as Hoffman turned back to his copying press, “is that you print a supply of blanks, use them, print a new supply as often as you like.” Maria looked from the card to his enthusiastic face, then back again. To her eye the printer’s dark ink and the ink from Jefferson’s pen were so different in shade as to make the card quite ugly. But Jefferson’s pleasure was unmistakable.

“You can save hours of copying,” he said, “and then you simply store the master plate till you need it again.”

“Can you copy drawings, engravings?” Trumbull took the card from her fingers.

Jefferson shook his head. “The details are lost, the quality isn’t as fine as an artist would want—excellent for handwriting, less good for designs. In fact, I have an idea for changing the mixture of chemicals in the ink.…”

As he spoke, Maria raised her face to catch Richard’s eye, but as always Richard had contrived to look elsewhere. His right hand brushed imaginary lint from his left shoulder, his wig slipped
backward with the motion, exposing an inch of mottled white skin.

“You don’t agree, then, that George Washington will be king?” With a little bounce Richard interrupted Jefferson’s disquisition on ink.

Jefferson glanced past her to Trumbull—he has also looked at me today just once, Maria thought; a sign of what?—and moved a step or two away from the
thump-thump
of Hoffman’s press. “I think no one will be king in America,” he said levelly.

“Now three years ago,” Trumbull drawled, “then you would have had a case,
then
we were very near to succumbing.”

“To a king?”

“Oh, worse.”

“He means,” Jefferson said, “a military dictatorship, a coup d’état by the army.”

“Ah!” Cosway fairly wriggled in delight. “Just as I said—Washington the sovereign, call him whatever you like.”

Jefferson had a mild way of instructing, Maria thought. He savored his words, he made large, expressive gestures with his hands (his large hands), he seemed almost to caress his famous facts. You could see the effect on Short, who would stand by him like a schoolboy, thirstily absorbing every word. Trumbull’s gruffness fooled nobody as to his admiration. Even Richard’s face softened, his pose relaxed, as Jefferson began to talk. She searched her vocabulary for two hard, precise, contradictory words: he was an
intellectual sensualist
.

“In Europe,” Jefferson said, “the general impression is that America won the war in ’81 at Yorktown, when Cornwallis surrendered to Washington. But the truth is, the war went on almost two years longer. Cornwallis commanded only a quarter of the British forces—an enormous army still occupied New York and much of New England, and though they never fought another serious battle, Washington had to keep
his
army together as long as the British kept
theirs
.”

“No pay,” Trumbull said concisely, “no supplies, no food.”

“Meanwhile the British dragged out the treaty negotiations in Paris, month after month after month. By spring ’83, the army was a powder keg about to blow. The soldiers were in rags, starving,
clamoring for Washington to march on Congress in Philadelphia and demand their back pay, two years’ worth. The officers wanted even more—they were plotting by the hundreds to rebel and establish Washington as their king.”

“Colonel Hamilton wrote him a letter proposing it,” Trumbull interposed. “ ‘Call yourself king, regent—whatever title you like,’ the colonel said. I saw the damned thing.”

“But every country is ruled by a king.” Cosway bared his teeth again in his monkey’s smile.

“We believe, oddly,” Jefferson said, and Maria lifted her eyes at the combination of idealism and irony in his voice, “that all men are equal. The people choose their government, not the army.”

“Washington wouldn’t hear of it,” Trumbull said, “so the officers decided they would rebel anyway and choose somebody else—General Gates, probably, because he hated Washington. I was there, Newburgh, New York.”

“Newburgh,” Jefferson said, addressing Maria directly, who felt herself flush at the unexpectedness of it, “was the army’s winter camp on the banks of the Hudson River. In early March ’83 the soldiers reached such a pitch of anger that the officers called an illegal meeting to organize a march. Washington was horrified. He saw civil war, chaos, the collapse of the whole nation if the army set out on its own.”

“What did he do?” Cosway’s smile had faded. Behind him Hoffman had finished printing the blank invitations and now stood with them in his hand, watching Jefferson’s face.

“He called a meeting of his own. March 15, 1783. The single most important meeting ever held in the history of America.”

“You were there?”

“
I
was there,” Trumbull said. “They had built a stage out of wood and cannon wagons, and about dusk Washington suddenly strode out on it and started to speak. Half a dozen of us wrote it down, every word. He said he had served all these years without pay himself, just for love of country. The officers’ faces didn’t soften. He said the country they meant to set a dictator over was in fact their own wives and children and neighbors. How could they fight for freedom, then call for tyranny? Not a face softened. He said democratic government was slow, but eventually it would
give them justice. If they marched now, they would destroy their own future and wade into a rising empire of blood.” Trumbull paused. “Faces like stone.”

“And then …?”

“And then a great thing happened,” Trumbull said. “The general had finished his speech, clearly, but nobody was convinced. He hesitated up on the stage, then he said he remembered he had a reassuring letter from someone in Congress, and he pulled it out of his pocket. Now you have to understand—Washington is the most magnificent physical specimen you have ever seen. Six feet tall, built like a gladiator, he used to lead every charge of his army, out front in the middle of rifle fire, cannon fire, pistol fire—he would come back to us, his uniform riddled with holes and cuts, tatters, but himself unharmed, always. Once, they said, in the French and Indian wars his units broke in half and started to fire on each other by mistake, and Washington rode between them on his white horse knocking up their musket barrels with his swords—you never saw such a
man
. But he was fifty-one years old at Newburgh, he was growing old. He pulled out the letter and stared at it and swallowed helplessly. And all the officers in the audience leaned forward, suddenly anxious. He looked up, he looked to his left, square at me. Then he pulled out of his other pocket something only his closest aides had ever seen him wear—a pair of little wire eyeglasses—and he put them on. Then he said, ‘Gentlemen, you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown gray but almost blind in the service of my country.’ ”

“And the officers wept,” Jefferson said softly.

As they shook hands with Hoffman and started down the stairs, loaded with samples of printing, Cosway turned back, grin pasted in place once again, and told Jefferson that of course they accepted his invitation for dinner. “Which I can read, you see, without spectacles.”

Beside him on the staircase Maria stiffened with embarrassment and looked away. Jefferson and Trumbull had lived so
seriously
compared with them, compared with her. At the street she tried to think of a comment on Trumbull’s story, something wise,
true
.

“So General Washington took no advantage of his situation,”
she said; “he was self-sacrificing, yes?” As she spoke she saw Jefferson fumbling with his papers. On the Boulevard des Italiens a carriage careened too close, spraying mud and straw, and everyone scattered, shouting, turning in a whirl of bright skirts and hats. She stumbled backward into the doorway, furious, and swiped with her fan at a stain. Then in her hand she saw the second card that Hoffman had printed.

“
I
think,” Jefferson said, settling back into the carriage seat beside her. The coachman, evidently well instructed beforehand, set off down the rue Coqhéron without a signal. In her lap, for reasons she could not explain, Maria Cosway’s hands trembled like birds. “I
think
,” Jefferson repeated, “that after two years I must have seen every form of wagon and voiture that there is in Paris.”

“And made a list of them, I’m sure.” In honor of the excursion to the Désert de Retz, Maria had chosen a new straw bonnet with two long trailing blue ribbons, a full skirt of blue silk to match the ribbons, and a bodice of silk and Venetian gauze, finer than lace. Some instinct had led her to prepare secretly a little portmanteau of other things—Richard had walked through her room without even glancing at it—and hand it to the coachman. At no point in her life, she thought, gripping the edge of the bench, had she ever felt so unhappy and anxious.

“Not a formal list,” Jefferson said, smiling.

She touched his wrist with the tip of her fan, a gesture all the more daring, she thought, because they seemed so utterly alone in the coach.

“Well,” he laughed, “not a
written
list, in any case.”

“
Bien
. Let me guess.” She held up the fingers of her left hand, swaying slightly with the motion of the wheels, and began to count. “I’ve been here only a month. But there are remises, cabriolets, phaetons, fiacres, wiskeys, turgotines—” She stopped and frowned, and Jefferson raised his own hand to indicate a little brown carriage going past in the opposite direction, bobbing like a cork. “And
désobligeantes
,” she said, “but I never know why they’re called that.”

“Ah. Because you cannot seat another person next to you, as we are. It disobliges them.”

Maria smiled much more brightly than she had intended.

In another moment their own carriage—Jefferson’s phaeton-calèche, with its crimson wheels and blue roof—entered the Place Louis XV, boiling as always with wheels, horses, clouds of dust. The Tuileries appeared on their left, then the equestrian statue of the king on their right, and Jefferson was pointing and saying something about the statue, lost in the noise. Maria nodded but looked past his hand toward the top of the square, where a pair of tall buildings framed the pillars of a handsome new church whose name she suddenly could not remember.