To Be Remembered as Time of Love Allow...

"Master of my own Secret..."

“Master of my own Secret…”

“…as I was quite determined to be master of my own secret…” –Thomas Jefferson to William Short, Aix-en-Provence, 27 March 1787

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Thomas Jefferson sat in lamp-lit darkness suffering L’Fiege’s drafty apartments. In those same hours the little Scotch doctress reengaged her labors in the Hotel Dieu--history and exam, perhaps a cathartic diagnosis--the American ambassador was consumed by the process composing his letter to William Stephens Smith.

The November chill seeped between poorly sealed, thin glass panels, disturbing heavy swathes of curtains meant to insulate the room.

The cold made his hand ache, stiff from hours of writing.Thomas flexed his wrist, uncurling knotted knuckles, trying to knead out the numbness.

The action beckoned random reflection.Had it not been for a moment of careless infatuation, the resulting injury to his right hand and forearm, the year before—a subsequent botched reduction attempt to set the fracture—his justification for the Spring excursion to the south of France would have existed upon entirely different grounds.

He wished, not for the first time, he had heeded the advice of the little Scotch doctress who had been the first to examine his injured wrist.

Her talents in medicine lay in other specialties, but she had assisted her brother numerous times in the re-setting of bones.

Splinting the bruised, tender forearm, Caroline Eleanor Graham, in the tones of a lecturing parent—an inflection to which she routinely subjected her usual patients—counseled delaying, for a day at least, any attempt to reduce what she suspected as a dislocation.

Beware the French setters, she had cautioned. They’ll want to snap any bone back, even if it’s not displaced, and the joint merely sprained. Let Edward look at it tomorrow evening, after the swelling has subsided some.

Dr. Edward Graham, surgeon-in-service to the British embassy of Paris, two years merging into three by that euphoric autumn of Maria Cosway’s visit. The rakish Scottish surgeon was also a regular staff-attendant, fielding the chaos amid the municipal Parisian hospitals. Brother and sister, they came from the tradition of solid British physic; a superior training, to Caroline’s mind, than the rash experimentalism of many untried French interventions.

Thinking back on that day, Thomas Jefferson pondered strange, belated realizations.

Eyes fastened on the thin slither of silver wrapped over and around his twisted fingers, icy and dazzling before the light of the oil-lamp, Caroline—the little doctress, her affectionate epithet—was the only person, besides himself, who knew the full story leading to “…how the right hand became disabled.”

Later the next month, mentioning the event in a correspondence, coincidentally to William Stephens Smith, the Virginian could only admit, lamely, “…it would be a long story for the left to tell. It was by one of those follies from which good cannot come, but ill may.”

Caroline had been lost in her own thoughts that afternoon, rare time away from her usual attendance at the parish infirmaries. Seeking the solace of a lovely, sunny autumn day, and the privacy of a solitary stroll, she had been stepping carefully along the cobbled lane, perusing a letter in her hands announcing the pending betrothal of a lover from her youth, home on American shores.

That had been a forbidden romance from Caroline’s adolescence.

A brilliant mulatto man, Samuel Aquila Lett, his family, befriended the Scottish Grahams in the years Caroline’s father served the British military, prior to the uprising of the American colonies.