The Condor's Head Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Ferdinand Mount

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  UNCLE BOB’S CABIN

  I: The Landing

  II: French Lessons

  III: Chalkface

  IV: The Iron Wand

  V: Follies

  VI: Falls

  VII: Chargé

  VIII: Soot and Eggs

  IX: Downriver

  GILLIGAN’S HOTEL

  AFTERTHOUGHTS:

  Sally and Thomas and William

  Debts and Farewells

  Copyright

  About the Book

  A fair-haired young man from Virginia sees a dark girl rowing on the lake at Versailles and he falls in love. She turns out to be the Duchess de La Rochefoucauld, known as Rosalie, married to a man twice her age who also happens to be her uncle. It is the spring of 1875 and the young American, William Short, nicknamed Wm, has crossed the Atlantic to serve as secretary to his adoptive father Thomas Jefferson at the Paris embassy. Lodging on the Champs Elysees with Jefferson’s two young daughters and their teenage slave Sally Hemings, Wm becomes the darling of the free spirits of the ancien regime, who wants to copy everything American, including revolution and the pursuit of happiness.

  But this is a time when nothing runs straight, certainly not the pursuit of happiness. Together and apart, Wm and Rosalie endure the bloodiest days of the Terror when everyone loses their heads or their illusions except for one man, but that man is about to become President of the United States.

  Stylish, intelligent and witty, The Condor’s Head is by turns tense and erotic, incredibly funny and unbearably sad. It includes the real-life letters of Wm and Rosalie and Jefferson, some never published before. It also incidentally reveals the truth about the Third President and Sally Hemings.

  About the Author

  Ferdinand Mount was Editor of The Times Literary Supplement from 1991 to 2003. He is a reviewer, influential columnist and political commentator. He was awarded the Hawthornden Prize for Of Love and Asthma. He is also the author of Heads You Win.

  Also by Ferdinand Mount

  Tales of History and Imagination

  Umbrella

  Jem (and Sam)

  A Chronicle of Modern Twilight

  The Man Who Rode Ampersand

  The Selkirk Strip

  Of Love and Asthma

  The Liquidator

  Fairness

  Heads You Win

  Very Like a Whale

  The Clique

  Non-fiction

  The Theatre of Politics

  The Subversive Family

  The British Constitution Now

  Communism (Ed.)

  Mind the Gap

  For Julia

  who climbed the fence

  ‘Happiness is a new idea in Europe.’

  Louis-Antoine de Saint-Just, The Spirit of the Revolution, 1791

  ‘We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable; that all men are created equal and independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent and inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’

  Thomas Jefferson,

  original draft for the Declaration of Independence

  Uncle Bob’s Cabin

  ‘Waambek-k …’ a pause, some minute variation in the breeze coming in from the back porch, and ‘wambbik …’ then the breeze so faint I could not feel it myself but, even so, ‘aamkk’. It was a slatted half-door that didn’t reach the ground or the ceiling, once sea-green but most of the paint had peeled off and its tremulous flapping against the flimsy doorpost sounded like a protest. The catch had fallen off too and there was no way of wedging it because of it not reaching the floor. She stretched out her arm to hold it shut. I could see her long fingers curled round the edge. But that took her too far away from the showerhead, so she gave up and left the door to its own devices. ‘Waamkh’ – why was the noise fractionally different each time? Now it swung open again, six or eight inches this time, and I could see the lank tow of her wet hair slopping across her pale lemony shoulder. Then she must have bent forward to let the water run over her shoulder or to pick up the soap from the tin dish on the wall and I had a glimpse of her bottom, just the top of it and the beginnings of the curve and the shadow of the dimple, and ‘waamck …’

  I turned back to the National Geographic, which was the only reading matter in the place because according to Wizz it was the only magazine his uncle considered worth a dime. The article I was reading was about the many medicines to be extracted from plants in the Amazon jungle, which the natives have known about for centuries but which Western medicine has only just discovered. There was a picture of a stringy Indian, naked except for a rather exaggerated cache-sexe, standing by a bleeding tree. Sharing the same page was a doctor in a white coat with a grim smile on his face, and ‘waaaa …’ And I saw three-quarters of her as the door swung open wide; her head was turned away but her body wasn’t and I saw the surprising swell of her thigh and beyond her thigh the tips of the sandy fuzz. ‘… Ammmgkk.’ And I tried to concentrate on the text, in which Dr Donald Ohrstrom, presumably the man in the white coat, was explaining that the medical profession was not to be blamed for its reluctance to explore the potential of forest medicine because it was like shooting at a needle in a haystack.

  I couldn’t take the strain any more, so I got up and walked out on to the front porch. The paint was peeling here too. Uncle Bob had handed the place over to Wizz four or five years back, but Wizz had been finishing his master’s and had not had the time to do it up. Besides, he liked the peeling look – interior decorators spent hours with a blowtorch to achieve the same effect, he claimed. Anyway Wizz was an outdoor type, though you would never think it to look at him, he was so slight and the lick of fair hair across his bulging brow gave him an air of fragility, the sort of boy who invited bullying. In fact, Franco said, when the two of them had fetched up together at this strange boarding school out in the wilds of Idaho – he on a scholarship, Wizz’s old man paying Wizz’s fees – it was always Wizz who came in first on the big trek at the end of term, Wizz who had the fastest time for swinging across the creek on the rope strung between two thirty-foot pines. To see him stripped down swinging the axe on a stack of timber would have made Charles Atlas eat his heart out because there he was, this nine-stone weakling with no muscles to speak of, knocking the hell out of these enormous pine logs. He was no slouch either on the academic side, which was heavily geared to Homer and Plato and he had already inhaled them back East. Whereas at South Philly High the classics were closed books, except to Betsy Paglia who sat two desks away from Franco and was a prodigy even then.

  Francesco O’Mara, as he was christened (at Saint Joseph’s of course), came from pretty much the toughest part of the City of Brotherly Love. His father worked in the meat market, his mother was a nurse, he being Irish obviously and she Italian. Franco dodged between his two ancestries depending on which crowd he was running with at the time. If with the wops, he was Franco Mara, full of twinkle and swagger. If with the Irish, which was the more likely because the street they lived on was Irish, he was Frank O’Mara, a stonier personality with the makings of a hard man about him. It was a mistake, Franco explained, to see his fellow Hibernians as full of blarney and bonhomie. The Philly Irish took a decidedly chilly view of the world, which had helped him to survive out at Fournier College.

  That peculiar institution had been founded by Edward P. Fournier in 1925 with a view to reconstituting the moral fibre of the American race. Edward P. had made a packet in the stock market an
d decided that the only answer was to build his own college and raise a new cadre of leaders far from the enervating influences of the East Coast and the Ivy League. And each year since then a clutch of young men, no women, had been carefully selected, without regard to income or background (though until recently all white; there had been trouble about that), and shipped off to Idaho to learn how to become leaders of men.

  It was an austere place, Franco said, like a monastery without God. The first generations of Fournier men back in the Twenties had built the bunkhouses with their bare hands, living in tents until they had carved the first cabins out of the stands of pine on the lower slopes of Cat Mountain. Just before the war the class of ’36 or maybe ’37 had learnt a little dynamiting and quarried some stone from the now bare hillside. They built a plain four-square lodge for EPF, but the old man refused to stay in it when he visited (they used the lodge as a sickbay now), preferring to bunk down with the Adjutants, as he had dubbed the permanent staff, a skeleton crew because the students mostly taught each other. They also drew up the rules themselves and looked after the discipline though there was not much call for it.

  ‘You see, the selection procedures were pretty damn accurate, so most of the guys were leaders already, chilly, inner-directed personalities who were always thinking one move ahead, you know, like how is this going to play with the Old Man, how will it look in my final report, oh, and will this be for the good of the school.’

  ‘I wasn’t like that at all,’ Wizz said. ‘I was an innocent youth who knew nothing of the world.’

  ‘Oh Wizz, come on. I’ve never seen any seventeen-year-old with so much natural self-confidence.’

  ‘You must have been so sweet,’ Polly said.

  ‘I’m rather sweet now, don’t you think?’

  You could see what Franco meant, though. For all his willowy figure and the poignant lick of fair hair, William Short Stilwell did have an air of command about him, a hint of the seigneurial.

  When we had been buying the groceries down in Leconfield, the girl at the check-out treated him with an instinctive respect although he had not been in any way condescending. But there was something else about him too, a slightly detached, almost mournful quality, as though he used to be part of the scene he was in but had somehow lost his place, perhaps for a reason he himself was unaware of. Even when he was at his most entertaining, telling his long, artful stories, this glimmer of sadness was never quite gone, so that a racy, even raucous anecdote appeared to carry some tragic ulterior meaning.

  We all loved Wizz, Franco because he had lightened those stern days at Fournier, I because he was the first American I got to know properly and his laconic humour and unashamed enthusiasms came fresh to me, and Polly because, well, she could talk to him like you could talk to a girl but without any of the bitchy competitive stuff that always crept into being friends with another girl.

  She had met him when she had come over for a year’s postgraduate study on trade cycles, and then he had gone to England for a year at the LSE and stayed with her parents in Camden Town. When Polly’s younger sisters Mel and Terps were home from school, they were all on top of each other in the tall stucco house and Wizz said he felt he was turning into their long-lost brother, which none of them minded a bit, although they told him that brothers had never been on the agenda, because their father, John Castle, had conceived the absurd project of fathering nine daughters who would all be called after the classical muses. He got as far as three before his American wife Anne called a halt. Still, Polyhymnia, Melpomene and Terpsichore were there as witnesses to this hopeless enterprise, like three arches of an enormous unbuilt nave. Mr Castle, known as Turret to his daughters, had one of those brains that was good for learning Latin and Greek and solving crossword puzzles but was otherwise spark-free. He toiled away in an old-fashioned merchant bank, which had been taken over by a less old-fashioned merchant bank and then submerged in a huge American bank where his services were of uncertain value. He was clinging on by his fingernails, dreading his annual appraisal. His consolation – and it was a glorious consolation – was his daughters, free spirits whose long solemn faces belied their unbridled characters. Polly in particular liked to exaggerate her solemn look while talking dirty, a trait immediately spotted by Wizz: ‘Polly, why do you always look like a particularly glum twelfth-century saint when you’re talking about fucking?’

  ‘Oh, do I? I just thought I was looking thoughtful.’

  We had come to Uncle Bob’s Cabin, as Wizz called it, the night before. When we were unpacking, there was a violent storm. All night the trees outside were cracking and wailing, and the mosquito panels never stopped rattling (nor did the shower door). The next morning there was driving rain that lasted through the afternoon. We ventured outside for a walk through the pines, our sneakers skidding on the wet pine needles and splashing through puddles flecked with sawdust from the fresh-cut timber, but the rain drove us back in again. So we sat indoors reclining on the shabby old bunk seats by the windows, refuelling on junk food and cans of beer from the coolstore. After wearying of the National Geographic, I turned back to The Adventures of Augie March (I had just discovered the big sloppy American novelists), but now and then I found the texture a bit chewy and I would glance across to the other three: Franco was reading his way through the novels of Fanny Burney for his thesis on The Rise and Fall of Sentiment in Mid-Georgian England, sitting crosslegged holding the little blue book with its gold-embossed cover between his hairy paws, looking like a chimp especially pleased with itself because it thinks it is reading; Polly drying her hair while slowly absorbing the Vogue and Marie-Claire she had brought with her. She was a trained economist now (her special paper on Kondratieff’s Long Wave Theory had been the pick of the year), but when she was off duty she liked to veg out in a feminine style. Wizz, by contrast, could not sit still; in fact, could not sit at all and was constantly on the move fixing things, rigging up the new gas canister we had brought from Leconfield, securing the mosquito frames, nailing down a loose floorboard, dusting off the wicker chairs on the porch, shunting the garbage out into the yard (if you could call it a yard, it was really just a clearing in the scrub where Uncle Bob had once tried to grow vegetables – a few mildewed artichoke stalks were still poking through the long grass). His homely industry gave the scene an unexpected uplift, which he did not fail to notice: ‘In the American frontier home,’ he descanted in a sing-song schoolmarm voice with his wet anorak still over his head, ‘everyone had his or her allotted task. While Mom saw to the domestic chores, the boys stuck at their studies in the hope that one day they might get to go to college in faroff Omaha, Nebraska, while little Polly was growing up fast and learning how to be a woman.’

  ‘Can it, Wizz,’ Polly said without looking up from painting her toenails.

  The rain was still sluicing down outside and a pleasant feeling of security stole over me, a feeling of being on the inside for once in my life. I felt so close to them all, although Franco I had just met for the first time and I only knew Wizz through Polly. My life had been so closed-up, solitary. Nobody’s fault but mine. If anybody needed to be taken out of himself it was me and this, I thought with something close to joy, was what was happening to me here.

  Perhaps I felt so relaxed because I was tired. I had only landed the day before and it had been a weary five-hour bus ride to the depot at Leconfield where Wizz had met me in the pick-up. So my defences were down and I said in an unguarded way, not my style at all, something about what a great welcome they had given me and how at home I felt.

  ‘Enjoy it while it lasts,’ said Franco, stretched out on the bunk seat with his wet sneakers propped against the stove.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘We’re great at saying hi to new people. In fact, saying hi is what we do best. We can become best buddies over a single beer. But it doesn’t go any deeper. You will see when you have been among us a while longer that Americans have no gift for intimacy. There is no intimacy in
American literature. Just when you think you are getting really close, somehow we aren’t there any more.’

  ‘Well, where are we then?’ Wizz enquired, rather sharply.

  ‘Getting ready to say hi to the next guy.’

  Even stretched out on the bunk Franco still had that prehensile look, as though he might tumble over at any minute and curl his hairy fingers round the next branch.

  ‘So Americans never really fall in love, not in books anyway?’

  ‘Oh, sure, we fall in love, with a whale or a river or with some millionaire across the bay who we don’t know at all; in fact, that’s the point because if we did know him properly we’d realise what a total prick he was. Mostly we fall in love with ourselves and that’s fine because that’s a lifelong romance. But what we don’t do is fall in love with another person, I mean love in the sense of singling her out – OK, him too – from the rest of the human race and living for her and with her so intensely that the rest of life is flat and trivial, and if it breaks up your life is shattered. There’s nothing like that in American literature.’

  ‘What about Love Story? Or Gone with the Wind?’

  ‘I said literature.’

  ‘But books don’t necessarily have anything much to do with life. Even if your theory was true, it could be something to do with the way we write, not the way we live,’ said Wizz, sounding distinctly nettled. ‘After all, we’re obsessed about relationships, half the self-help books you see in the stores are about how to improve the quality of our relationships.’

  ‘The stores are also full of books telling you how to improve your cooking. That doesn’t mean that we love to cook – in fact, it means the opposite, we prefer to go out and take away. We’d like to learn the language of intimacy, but we can’t even pronounce the menu.’

  ‘So where did we go wrong?’

  ‘Did I say anything about going wrong? Going ahead would be nearer the mark. We’ve merely jumped the romantic stage, moving in one tidy leap from Puritanism to pure egotism without stopping at the love station. In any case the romantic project was always doomed to be self-cancelling. If you put the holiness of the heart’s affections in the number one spot, then the holiness of the heart’s disaffections has to be number two and pretty soon divorce gets to be as big a deal as marriage. You rightly observe, my dear Wizz, that these relationship therapy books are on the self-help shelf. If there’s a bookshop with a self-sacrifice section, I haven’t found it yet.’