“It comforts my old shoulders and the pockets are all in the right places,” he asserted.
“Very likely full of rocks and arrowheads and dried leaves and dead butterflies at this moment.” She bent and kissed him, her fancy headdress slipping a little. She pulled it off freeing reddish brown curls to fall over her ears. “I’m going to bed myself. Those fiddles and trombones can squawk all night but they won’t keep me awake.”
Left alone, Thomas Jefferson dug a comfortable hollow in his pillow and tried to sleep. But too much went coursing through his mind. That resolution passed by the Virginia Assembly, especially the words at the end: “You carry with you the sweetest of awards, the recollection of a life well spent in the service of your country.”
That sentiment assuaged a little some of the bitterer things. Young Alexander Hamilton, George Washington’s handsome protégé and Thomas Jefferson’s relentless enemy, dying, after he had fired dramatically in the air, from the bullet of Aaron Burr. And there had been Burr, as Jefferson knew, always plotting, dreaming up his grandiose schemes to set up an empire of his own in the West, fleeing to England when his treasonable activities were discovered, forfeiting his bail.
John Marshall had been to blame for that. John Marshall, John Adams’ midnight appointee, named for petty spite, and the sworn and bitter enemy of Thomas Jefferson, had so muddled Burr’s trial that a jury had acquitted the man of treason and altered the charge to some trivial misdemeanor. And then Marshall had had the effrontery to subpoena the President of the United States as a witness!
These are they who had worked all manner of evil against me, the words ran through the old man’s tired brain. Yet do I stand and my arm prevails against them. Curious how darkness and silence always brought back to him some line or other from the thousands of books he had read. That was something he would do at Monticello to fill up his days—catalogue all his books, almost ten thousand of them there must be now, for he had sent home boxes full every year. He would teach his older grandsons, Jefferson Randolph and Francis Eppes, to appreciate books too, and some of the girls might show some signs of possessing an eager mind like his Patsy’s.
Someone opened a door below and the blare of a marching tune came to his ears which likely meant that the dancing company were going down the chilly halls to the unfurnished rooms where the collation was spread on trestle tables. Jefferson found himself drumming his fingers on his chest in time to the music. There had been so much martial music in his life. He thought of Patrick Henry riding into Williamsburg on that cloudy morning at the head of his militia. Gallant, shabby Patrick, who had stood so tall in his run-down boots and worn leather breeches, his coat out at the elbows, who had twice sent great words ringing on the air of America, words that were so trumpet-strong and stirring that they still echoed in the ears of men and made a small thrill quiver in the breast of Thomas Jefferson himself.
“If this be treason, make the most of it!” And “Give me Liberty or give me Death!” He would hear them again and again so long as he lived, remembering that they had challenged the hesitant hearts of rebelling Virginians until they were ready to dare even the great guns of the Third George of Hanover.
But now, Jefferson was thinking, how early the fires of patriotism had cooled in Patrick Henry. Patrick had been successful at Red Hill, his plantation. He had made some money, grown old before his time, and been content the last time Jefferson had seen him to sit under a green tree with a jug of cool spring water near by and his grandchildren playing around. Ease and security—were they the drugs that abated the eternal challenge in the minds of men? And did nations like men grow sluggish and apathetic when they were well fed and bodily comfortable, Jefferson wondered?
Patrick Henry was dead now, and George Washington was dead. One by one the passionately dedicated builders of the temple of the Republic had vanished from the arena, leaving the affairs of state to the younger, noisier men who had not known the travail, the risks, the fiery trials of the beginning. I am a lone dead leaf hanging on the tree, the old man told himself. I am that despised democrat who greeted pompous envoys in a shabby coat, the one they called Infidel.