Free Grant: A Novel by Max Byrd Page B

spread his arms in a gesture of unruffled tribulation. Trist smiled and craned his head to look at the painting again.
    “The artist, John Trumbull, was also blind in one eye. Come walk with me a little, Mr. Trist,” Adams said. “As the feller says, ‘I would have speech with thee.’ ”
    I WOULD HAVE HIM TO DINNER,” CLOVER ADAMS SAID. “I WOULD sit him down at the table next to anybody, if that’s what you want.”
    Emily Beale held her teacup poised just at her lips, without tasting (though Clover Adams was known to spend a fortune on her teas), and waited delightedly for Elizabeth Cameron to reply. Emily had been away from Washington for three full months in California, which was the same as the other side of the moon, and they had only arrived home late last night, much too late to call on anybody. But today was another matter. She was not about to waste another morning without real society.
    “At heart, you know, I really am a democrat,” Clover continued when Elizabeth Cameron said nothing. “In my family we never make any fuss about mingling with servants”—this was true, Clover had been so friendly last year with two Irish carpenters doing work for her that she had actually gone to visit their wives, and Henry had been
furious
. “Besides,” Clover said, “if Mr. Bancroft
requests
him—”
    “Well, not ‘request’ exactly.” Elizabeth put down her cup and shook her head slightly, so that a few long strands of black hair came loose from her bun, and Emily wondered for a moment (as she had, often, before) what the beautiful Elizabeth Cameron would look like if she wore her hair long and loose, down past her shoulders, like some of the women they had seen in Paris.
    “He only said that the name ‘Trist’ was a very old name—”
    “It means ‘sad,’ ” Emily contributed, “in French.”
    Elizabeth smiled kindly at her. “And he does
look
sad, doesn’t he?”
    Emily nodded and raised the teacup back to her lips;
almost
raised her knees to her chin like a little girl. At the age of eighteen she still felt young and unformed in the company of such matrons, though Elizabeth was only twenty-two or twenty-three. Clover, of course, was forty, fifty.…
    “Mr. Bancroft only said it was very likely he came of the Trist family that intermarried with the Jeffersons, before the war.”
    “Henry said the same thing. He said if he were
that
kind of Trist, he might have family papers for the Book.”
    “The Book,” Elizabeth and Emily murmured in unison. Henry Adams had recently published a life of somebody Emily had never heard of, Albert Gallatin, who had once been Secretary of Treasury. But it was understood by everybody in Lafayette Square that Henry’s
real
book was a massive, endless history of Thomas Jefferson (the Adams family enemy) and James Madison when they were presidents. He had gone all over Europe poking in archives. He disappeared most mornings into his study and wrote for hours. Emily had an impression—more than an impression, since she had once, by total accident, found two or three sheets of paper in
dialogue
—that he wrote other things as well, to amuse himself. But “the Book” was sacred.
    Clover stood up to hand around a plate of seed cakes, and Emily took the opportunity to glance into the next room, where Clover had set up some of her photography apparatus. Amid the dozens of bookshelves in the sitting room—the Adamses had books the way other houses had ants—she had already hung two or three of her new photographs, including an incredibly stern portrait of her father-in-law and mother-in-law. Both disapproved, Emily knew,
thoroughly
disapproved, of Clover.
    She glanced back to see Clover and Elizabeth bent side by side over the tray of cakes as Clover explained something about the recipe, which was undoubtedly her own original creation. It was a cruel contrast, there was no denying that—for all her brilliance Clover Adams was a flat, plain woman with pallid