“Fine, Virginia.” She was one of the younger ones, still small enough so that he could toss her on his shoulder. “We’ll go and see but not touch.”
“We know. They turn brown and don’t open out to be flowers. Francis pinched the Queen of the Amazons last spring and it never bloomed at all.”
“And some little girl tattled, which isn’t nice, do you think?” he teased, waiting for the others who invariably like hungry chicks came flying out several doors whenever he walked on the lawn.
“Francis thinks he is kind of special because he doesn’t live here all the time,” said Ellen, “but he does stay for long times and he has lessons with us and so he shouldn’t be any different.”
“Francis,” explained Jefferson, “does not have a lot of people to love him. He’s not rich in love like all the Randolphs. Now let us look into the case of this foreign woman, the Roman Empress.”
He bent over the bed where the nubby little buds ventured up into the thin, warming sun of spring. An old pain, long kept hidden deep stirred again in him, stabbing at his heart, clasping icy fingers at his throat to make an aching cramp there. Martha, his own Martha, so long gone, so always present and living still in that deep place where no person, no plaudit, no antagonism or ambition had ever been permitted. He could almost see her long white fingers now, as they had pressed the warm earth down lovingly over the dry, somnolent bulbs, always so delicately careful not to break an embryo root or smother too deep the promise of the crown.
She had been heavy with child that spring day, carrying the son who had only lived a few days, and when he protested that she must not tire herself she had given him a little push and said, “No, I must do it, I must plant them. Don’t you know that whatever I plant now will grow?”
The years—the years! Almost thirty of them now since she had looked at him with dimming eyes, and said, “Promise that my children will never have a stepmother.”
He had kept that promise. No other woman had ever approached the walled-off chamber of his heart where she was enshrined. There were times when, observing Patsy’s healthy brood, an impatient bitterness colored with a haunting kind of guilt would burn in him. Too many children—six of them in ten years—had been too much for Martha’s frail strength; yet Patsy had borne eleven easily and naturally. Childbirth to her had not been the draining, killing ordeal that had taken Martha, and their well-loved Maria also. He wondered often if Jack Eppes, Maria’s young husband, felt too that continuing, sickening weight of self-accusation.
He got to his feet quickly, bidding the sad ghosts of the past to depart. “Off with you all now,” he ordered. “It’s time for lessons. Run, before your mother scolds you and me too.”