He took from his pocket the big iron key he had carried for so many years, turned the stiff lock slowly lest some rusted part should snap, and opened the door. Long unused, as it had been for years, the room still held a fresh, sweetish smell of femininity. Patsy had obviously kept it aired and cleaned, knowing that it was still the secret abode of his tired old heart. At the windows the dimity curtains were fresh and starched, the valance and tester of the bed still bright with old-fashioned wool embroidery. His own mother had worked those many-hued flowers and curious fruits, coloring the wool in her own dye pots with homemade dyes set with alum and vinegar. The slender posts of the bed were polished, as was the brass fender of the fireplace. An armchair stood on the hearth rug and Jefferson sank into it, relaxing his long legs, staring into the cold fireplace where three dry logs rested on the andirons. His mind whet, far back in time, thirty-six years back, to a snowy January night in ’72, when he had brought his bride, Martha Wayles Skelton, to this room, the only home he had to offer her. Monticello had been a beginning then, some walls raised, part of a wing roofed over, windows boarded up, floors rough laid and strewn with scraps and sawdust where they were laid at all. But nowhere within the ambitiously planned structure a room complete enough for a lady, and the winter snows had halted all work until a thaw came. Thomas Jefferson could almost visualize that spindle-legged, freckle-faced bridegroom, that brash twenty-nine-year-old fiddler who had charmed his lady with his music and won her away from a swarm of admirers by tricking them with a clever stratagem. It had never occurred to him in those courting days at the Wayles’ place, The Forest, that he might likely be catalogued with some of Martha’s other swains as an ambitious country boy and embryo lawyer set on improving his state by marrying a rich young widow. He had cared too much for Martha, loving her, he was arrogantly certain, as no man had ever loved a woman before, and he had brought her here to this cold little room so confident of her love and courage that a chill or two did not matter. Now he thought back on that snowy ride up from Blenheim, where, because of the deepening snow, they had been obliged to leave the chaise in which they had started out from Williamsburg, as well as the warm robes and blankets with which it had been loaded. There had been a debate, he remembered now, about whether they should ride on or wait for morning, but Martha had laughed his misgivings down. “I can weather any storm that you can weather, Thomas Jefferson.” So saddle horses had been brought, his own tired team stabled, and the slave who had driven the chaise sent to bed with orders to drive to Monticello in the morning. Jefferson recalled now his dubious concern when he discovered that the snow on the mountain road was eighteen inches deep.