“Do you realize, sir,” she faced him sternly, “that you have not spent a Christmas day in this house since I was a little girl?”
“You have kept count all these years?”
“I have kept count. And so has every one at Monticello. You owe something to Monticello in my opinion.”
“Then by all means, that is one debt that I shall pay,” he smiled, letting his long, thin lips relax, and his voice sink to a caressing murmur. “Plan it all, Daughter. Plan it all well and then simply tell your old father what it is that you want him to do.”
6
Monticello: Christmas, 1809
Of all the people on Jefferson’s Little Mountain, old Burwell was happiest in those lowering, chilly December days.
This, the old man orated happily in the servant’s quarters below stairs, was the way things ought to be on a gentleman’s estate in Virginia. Plenty of cider cooling ready to be sent posthaste up to the dining room, riding Mister Tom’s dumb-waiter. Women running up and down the steep, narrow curving stairways at either end of the house carrying pitchers of hot water and clean sheets, and heating irons in the rooms below to press voluminous dresses for the young misses. Trula, the laundress, kept a whole row of sadirons heating on the hearth of her little brick-floored room, and in the warming kitchens were rows of clean scrubbed bricks heating too, ready to be wrapped in flannel and carried upstairs should some members of the family find the clean linen sheets too icy for their feet.
Mr. Jack Eppes had come riding up from Eppington, bringing a haunch of venison that he had hung for days to tender it, and now it was turning slowly on a great iron spit, with a half-grown Negro boy sitting by with a mop of clean lint to dip into melted fat and wine vinegar whenever the meat needed basting. For days the service yard had been full of squawkings and drifting feathers as the women killed and dressed turkeys and geese. A fat ham simmered, and plump plum puddings boiled and bubbled, with sauce being beaten up in earthen bowls.
“This here now,” stated Burwell, pompously, “is going to be a sure-enough Christmas.”