I awakened this morning feeling cooler. My fever had abated. I was not gladdened. A white blur of light probed through the window, but it did not hurt my eyes. I discovered Pernia sitting in a chair in a corner, as blurred a man as he always had been, for I knew him by his conduct, and not by his heart.
“Your Excellency—”
“Why are you here?” I asked.
“Governor, we’re watching over you.”
That seemed odd. “Was I that out of sorts?”
His glance slid away. “You were indisposed, sir. You look better now.”
I had been abed a long time. “What day is this?”
“Friday, Governor.”
“I mean the date.”
“The twenty-second.”
“And when did we arrive?”
“The fifteenth.”
I measured that, slowly grasping that I had been in this bed for a week or so. I remembered phantasms, the tossing images, watchful soldiers, and the captain, yes, Russell. Captain Russell of Fort Pickering. Not Captain Clark. I remembered talking to Russell about my trip down the river, and my need to see the president, and my fear of the British on the sea, and the valuable journals I bore with me.
I looked about me, focusing eyes that refused to serve me. My trunks were collected in a corner, a black heap. A cherry field desk sat on a bedside table. Yes, I had scratched and blotted a letter to Mr. Madison. I remembered it clearly. It had required relentless effort, and neither my mind nor my hand was quite up to it. I had told the president that I would go to Washington overland; that sickness had delayed me. That I had important matters to bring to his attention. I wondered whether I might retrieve that labored epistle and do better.
“Was the letter to Mr. Madison sent?”
“Yes, Governor. I folded it, addressed it, and gave it to Captain Russell. He sent it in the next post.”
I nodded. “Where are my medicines, John? I want to take some powders.”
Pernia looked uneasy again. “The captain and the surgeon’s mate have them, sir. They took away most everything but the Peruvian bark, for fear you might make, ah, your own employment of them.”
“It was ague, then.”
“They don’t know, sir, but they kept up the quinine you’d been taking. They thought you were dosing yourself rather to excess, and it was afflicting your mood.”
“I’ll want my powders now.” It was a command.
Pernia reluctantly shook his head, fearful to be resisting my direction.
I struggled to sit up, and found myself too dizzy and weak and bewildered to do so. I had been here a week and scarcely knew the passage of time. And yet I did remember most of it after a fashion, the darkness and light in succession, the parade of soldiers sitting there, one after another, never leaving me alone, the wild thirsts, the cold wet compresses, one after another, the nausea, the quaking of my limbs.
I lay in a dry cotton nightshirt. My freshly washed clothing hung from a peg in the whitewashed wall. I struggled to get up and dress.
“No, Governor. My instructions are to keep you in bed,” my manservant said, reversing our customary relationship. “I think the captain would like to know you’re … better.”
“Back in my head, you mean. Yes, tell him,” I said.
Pernia left the room, and I was alone at last. I found a thundermug and relieved myself. I was heading for my trunks when Captain Russell came in, followed by Pernia.
“Governor, I’m glad you’re up,” he said. “You asked to see me?”
I sank back onto the bed. “I have to go to Washington,” I said. “I need to see the president.”
Russell frowned. “You need to recover first. Then I’ll help you.”
“It was ague.”
“Your Excellency, my surgeon’s mate tells me it was many things, including the wrong medicines, and they had, frankly, affected your mind. Mr. Pernia’s conveyed your request for your powders, and I’m going to say no for the time being. My surgeon’s allowing you a glass of wine at evening mess.”
The craving for some Dover’s powder made me tense, but I could see I had no choice. I nodded.
“When are you going to let me go?”
“When you’re back in health, and even then I intend to have someone accompany you. You’re not up to traveling without assistance. I thought to join you, because I’ve some protested warrants too, like you, and we could make our cases together. But I can’t get permission. They won’t relieve me. So I’ll need to find someone else.”
“I can go alone; I’ll have my man with me.”
“Mr. Pernia is an admirable and loyal man, Governor, and he’s looked after you for days, going without sleep to see to your safety. But you’ll be traveling with someone who can keep an eye on you, when I can arrange it.”
I sighed and sank back into my pillow. I was going to be taken where I would not go, watched night and day, treated as a prisoner of disease.
“Have you someone in mind?” I asked.
“Major James Neelly, sir, agent to the Chickasaws. He stopped here on the eighteenth and I’ve apprised him of your condition and the need for a traveling companion. He’s willing to wait a few days until you are able to travel. I think you’ll find yourself in good company. He’s responsible, eager to serve the governor of Louisiana in any capacity, and beyond all that, an amiable friend who admires you boundlessly for your conquest of the continent.”
I had never heard of him.
“I’ll wish to talk to him in due course, Captain. But I wish it could be you accompanying me. I prefer regular army.”
Major was an honorary title given to Indian agents. The man would no doubt be a civilian. Probably one of the innumerable parasites who sucked a living out of the government and the tribes they served. Maybe a rascal. No doubt avaricious, and probably a conniver. Maybe there would be some opportunity in all that.
“At any rate, Governor, I’m pleased to see your progress. My God, how greatly you worried us!”
“I hoped not to worry you at all,” I said dryly, knowing he would not fathom my meaning.
I settled back into my bed and he left.
“You can leave now,” I told Pernia.
“No, sir, the captain wants a man at your service, and I do a turn; another man will take the night turn.”
So I would still be a prisoner. I settled into the pillow, wondering whether anything had changed, whether my life had somehow improved, whether I might better gather my strength and proceed to Washington, dissembling about my purposes, and retreat to Ivy and obscurity.
Nothing had changed. I hated my own dissembling. I had spent a lifetime, a happier time, holding my honor above all else. And here I was, concealing the dark design of my heart, even from my supine position in bed misleading those who were responsibly and affectionately looking after my body and soul.
Did they know? They must! The governor of Louisiana, the celebrated conqueror of a continent, the much-toasted contributor to botany and zoology and other branches of science, was losing his faculties, the victim of his own night of folly, his furtive dalliance with a dusky maiden far from prying eyes.
They could not help knowing. They would know what the calomel meant. They would know what those thickenings about my face meant. They would know, they would not keep it secret, and my honor and reputation would be thinner than an eggshell.
And in Washington they would casually suggest that I retire, and I would no longer hear from my learned colleagues at the American Philosophical Society, and the ruined man, Lewis, would vanish from sight, to the safe imprisonment of a cubicle at Locust Hill, a babbling idiot, kept by his aged mother and dutiful brother far from prying eyes and malicious tongues. Nothing had changed; and neither would my plans, though I would need to dissemble all the more.
“Pernia!”
My man jumped to his feet and approached me.
“I’m not going to Washington by sea. We’ll take the Natchez Trace. I’ll get horses somehow for the trunks. Now, do you understand your duties to me?”
He looked bewildered, so I enlightened him.
“You are to take my journals to Monticello, no matter what happens to me. If I take ill again, it shall be your bounden and sacred duty to deliver those journals to Thomas Jefferson. You will keep them dry, wrapped in oilskin if need be, and take every precaution for their safety. And my effects to my mother at Ivy. Have I your word?”
“Yes, sir, Governor, my word.”
“Have I your oath, sworn before God?”
“Governor, I do swear it before God Almighty.”
I fell back on the pillow and closed my eyes.
“Pernia, it all falls on you,” I said.
I turned away from him. Not anyone, most especially my manservant, would I permit to see my face.