My Thomas by Roberta Grimes (best books under 200 pages txt) 📖

it even at the moment of minuet. But it serves very well its intended purpose. Pappa offers three or four balls each year at the spring and fall sittings of the Burgesses, and whether or not these balls were the cause, he has disposed of two daughters out of four. That his first has come back seems to him no more than a passing inconvenience.

It is Pappa’s keenest wish that I should remarry, and my own keenest wish that I should not. To be an aged spinster is a shameful thing, but I am no spinster; I was married at eighteen and widowed at nineteen, and my little son Jack is nearly three. I cannot face again all the trials of marriage, yet still I find a pang in putting it by, for its promise of love and nurturance persists even though I found the promise hollow. My Pappa’s resolve that I must remarry has strengthened my own that I will not, for I must cultivate a solid will if I am to prevail against him.

I feel now just a more ardent version of my first reluctance to be a bride. Bathurst was the brother-in-law of Pappa’s third wife. I had known him since the age of twelve, and played with him at cards and pebble-games, and we had ridden out on our pair of grays we had raised from foals to pull our chaise. He always swore that I would be his wife.

This promise of Bathurst’s was a comfort to me at the callow age of twelve. Yet when I was fifteen, my Pappa began to give his balls that he might marry his daughters, so then I had my three years as a belle. Then did I dance! Then did I flirt! At seventeen I had four loving suitors all paying their addresses to me at once, and more beyond them, a whole garden of beaux that I might stroll and flirt for my own pleasure.

I had no wish to pluck a single flower when I might enjoy the garden. Yet Betsy grew fast behind me in age, and she fell much in love with Francis Eppes, so then Pappa commanded me to choose a husband that I not obstruct my sisters. Francis is the nephew of my dear dead mother, and Bathurst was related to my Pappa’s third wife, which symmetry so pleased my fond Pappa that I chose out Bathurst from the rest. It seems a great foolishness that I chose my husband primarily upon my Pappa’s whim, yet I sit here now and truly that seems to have been my strongest reason. I believed that gentlemen were much alike so it really mattered little.

My Bathurst was bold and dark of look, quite low of stature and thick at the waist and grim of a habitual set of his mouth, yet pleasant enough, had the angers and petulance he showed before his wedding-day been the worst that I would see of him. But they were the best. What had been just boyish sulking swelled after marriage into genuine rage, and his determination to have his stubborn will that had been the cause of childhood bickering became after marriage an iron rule. I shall not again place myself and child beneath the control of a gentleman who may delight before marriage in order to woo but will turn once we are wed into a tyrant-king.

It seems an adventure, this widowhood, if I may see it in that light. A widow controls her own property and holds her own children and chooses wherever she will make her abode, which seems a very garden of decisions. A married woman has no decisions at all. I know no other unmarried widow. Most are wed again before the grass grows on their husbands’ graves, which is a sorry pity, since to marry or not is almost the only choice a woman may make, and the making of it in the negative gives her rights that she may earn in no other way.

So on Friday morning I did not dress like a lady expecting beaux for a ball. I was only very plainly attired in a jump with bedgown and apron over. I spent that morning with Betty and Ondine and Suck preparing dinner for forty people, which history said was the number we might expect to arrive by three o'clock. We had extra food by for twenty more, and a plan for a bread-and-apple pudding if even more people arrived than that.

Jack’s ears were bothering him less that day, but he wanted to stay close by to me so Betty’s daughter was coddling him on a corner of the kitchen floor.

“He is fussing, mistress!” little Bett called to me. She is eleven years old, and a child of no patience. I put her aside while I worked with Ondine at stuffing the quails that would wear to the table their own heads and feathers returned to them and set upon nests of their own pickled eggs.

Bett called again. I could hear Jack fussing the half-angry sound that he often makes when the pain is rising. I left Ondine to finish the quails, and I said to Betty, “He might have laudanum. It will vex my Pappa if he spoils this day.”

That is why we were passing through the kitchen doorway at the moment when Mr. Dalrymple’s carriage rumbled into the kitchen-yard.

This gentleman is Pappa’s choice for me. His late first wife was a Carter cousin, and he has hundreds of pounds a year from England and estates above ten thousand acres, but he is a callous gentleman who cares too much for the show he makes. The thought of Mr. Dalrymple once alarmed me with the worry that I might be compelled to accept him, but now with my firming resolve not to wed I find in his pomposity much high humor. Courtship being what it is, with ladies meant to feign a lack of interest, I have been unable to persuade him that I am not merely being coy. I had worn work-clothes to discourage him so I was glad to see his carriage coming, and vastly amused when his postilion directed his horses behind the house into the kitchen-yard.

Mr. Dalrymple travels like the Governor himself in a carriage of dark-green trimmed in red with four black horses in silver-trimmed harness. He had standing at the back of it four footmen in varied livery, so I knew he carried other gentlemen within. His custom since he had bought the carriage was to carry the most honorable gentlemen he could find, and since the day promised rain he had found three companions willing to bear him for the sake of the ride.

My suitor had a new postilion. His former boy had run away, and I knew from Pappa that he had bought a new Negro who had been in country for barely a year and was hardly past his sickness. He bought him, I could see, for the show he made, so tall and black on the blacker horse, and for the savings in cost. But I am certain he rued the savings when his new postilion knew no better than to drive a carriage full of noble gentlemen right around the house into the kitchen-yard.

“Idiot! Fool!” Mr. Dalrymple called, and he bounded out the door of his carriage. He pulled the postilion off the near leader and shook him by his handsome coat. The boy was young, I thought him still in his teens, a whole foot taller than Mr. Dalrymple, and broad and strong as the horse he rode. The gentleman seized his postilion’s whip and beat the boy about the head with it while the boy could only tremble and make a sound very like Jack’s painful fussing.

I reached for my son to protect him from the sight, but Betty had him first. She caught him up with his face in her bosom before we confronted that scene again.

The other gentlemen were descending. I could see they were as vexed as we, and as helpless as we to intervene. While it is not polite to beat one’s slave, it is less polite to grab the whip and belabor the gentleman in his turn.

That was when I noticed Mr. Jefferson. I guessed at once who he was. My Pappa had described for me this tall young lawyer from Albemarle who went Burgess at only twenty-six and is kin to the Randolphs and heir to a respectable acreage far to the west beyond Richmond. Pappa sees him as not a bad secondary choice. I had thought Mr. Jefferson must be another of my Pappa’s unfortunate marital candidates, which misapprehension made more confounding my first complete sight of him.

He seemed to me remarkably tall, the tallest man that I had ever seen, with a strong nose and chin and a look about him of sweet good humor and gentle wit. His hair was red-brown, less ruddy than mine, but I thought our coloring much the same. He wore an unadorned brown coat and a plain black ribbon on his queue. His hair above his ears was not even curled, but it played unruly on the moistening wind. I liked that lack of wig or powder. I liked the long, calm look of him as he stepped down out of the carriage door.

And I liked what came next. Mr. Jefferson looked at me with my child and my maid standing helpless at the kitchen door, and as he looked, he stumbled. I would have thought him the most ungraceful of men had his stumble not been deliberate, but I saw how with care he contrived to place himself directly beneath the whip.

“Pardon me, sir!” He caught Mr. Dalrymple’s hands as if he meant to right himself. He put an arm about the gentleman’s shoulders, standing as he did so far above him that he could have been a father instructing his son. I listened as we passed, and I heard Mr. Jefferson commending Mr. Dalrymple on the wisdom of his new postilion in having chosen the kitchen road for its deeper ruts and more obvious use. “The boy is learning quickly, Henry,” I heard him say while he contrived to limp. “All he wants is a little instruction in custom.”

That moment in the kitchen-yard changed all my plans for the afternoon. While Bett rocked Jack in my chamber-corner until the laudanum had its effect, Betty and I must find something splendid for me to wear to the ball. I had planned a brown sack-back trimmed in black to further discourage Mr. Dalrymple, but the thought of that gown and Mr. Jefferson together was a juxtaposition not to be borne.

“Your Pappa will believe you have changed your mind, mistress,” Betty said as she searched with me through the press where I had folded away all my gaudy gowns at my husband’s death. “If you dress yourself gaily he will think you past mourning.”

“I will not marry again. You may count on that.”

“Then make yourself less pretty, mistress.”

Betty Hemings has all of a slave-woman’s wisdom. She declares that her fortune and her bane is her face. And she is right, I know, for a gaudy gown is like a sign upon the bosom begging the attention of any gentlemen who might be in the way of a wife. That I did not want. My only wish was to show good Mr. Jefferson how grandly I am able to dress whenever I might choose to dress.

“I only refuse to be wasteful,” I said for feeble explanation. “It seems a sorry pity to waste these gowns.”

My poor dear mother died in childbed only days after I was born, so forever she will be for me twenty years old, as she is in the miniature my Pappa gave to me when I was near about the age of four. As a child, I found my comfort in her face when my step-mother often upbraided me, styling me