The Last Patriot

CHAPTER 79

Paul Gilbertson was a large, Santalike figure in his early seventies with a full beard and glasses that dangled from a cord around his neck. His hands were rough and his fingers looked like thick pieces of rope. A Leatherman tool hung from a nylon sheath on his belt.

He accepted the architectural schematic from Nichols and put his glasses on. With the tip of his tongue between his teeth, he made sucking sounds as he studied the drawings. After turning the document around in his hands he said, “Even without knowing what all of the coded words mean, this definitely looks like Jefferson’s handiwork. They have Palladio written all over them,” and then he went back to making the noises with his tongue.

Harvath looked at Ferguson. “What’s Palladio?”

“Andrea Palladio was a Renaissance architect. Jefferson was completely self-taught in architecture and referred to Palladio’s four books on the subject as his bible.”

A couple of minutes later, as if being led by the drawings, Gilbertson walked away. The rest of the group quickly followed.

They entered the dining room and watched as Gilbertson scrutinized the woodwork around the doors and windows.

As they did, Harvath discovered a clever revolving serving door. It looked like a regular door, but it didn’t have hinges. Instead, it had a rotating pin, fastened at the top and bottom in the center of the door. Food apparently could be loaded on to shelves affixed to the back of the door and then it would be turned outward to present the food to the dining room without a servant ever having to enter.

As Harvath spun the door back to its original position, Gilbertson shook his head and said, “This isn’t a diagram for door surrounds or molding.”

“What is it then?” asked Nichols.

The docent moved away from the window and crossed to the wall. “One of these,” he said.

“A fireplace?” replied Harvath.

The man nodded. “I think it’s a design for a mantelpiece.”

Nichols looked at him. “Are you sure?”

“To be completely sure,” he replied, “I’d need a full drawing, not just a sectional. But with a full drawing, almost anybody would be able to tell what they were looking at.”

“Why do you think it’s a mantelpiece?” asked Harvath.

“The diagrams are of very specific pieces that require sophisticated joinery,” replied Gilbertson as he signaled for Harvath to follow him. Walking over to the side of the fireplace, he said, “It reminded me a lot of this mantelpiece.”

“Why?” asked Harvath.

“Watch.”

Harvath looked on as Gilbertson opened one of the mantelpiece’s panels to reveal an ingenious hidden compartment. Inside was a rope and pulley system.

“What is it?” he asked.

Gilbertson smiled. “It’s a dumbwaiter for wine. There’s one on each side of the fireplace. Jefferson designed them himself. Right beneath us is the wine cellar. When more wine was needed, a slave in the cellar would place a bottle in the box and send it up.”

“So you think this set of drawings is for a fireplace dumbwaiter system?”

“It does appear to have an attachment point for a rope and pulley system, similar to this mantelpiece, but with such a limited diagram it’s hard to tell,” said the docent. “If I had to guess, I’d say that what you have there is a sectional view of a mantelpiece that has some secondary purpose.”

“Speaking of which,” said Nichols, “when we came in here, you didn’t go straight over and show us the fireplace. You studied the doors, the windows, and the ceiling first. Why?”

Gilbertson held up the document. “The frieze Jefferson drew here looks just like the one from the Corinthian temple of Antoninus and Faustina in Rome. Susan was right to take you to the entrance hall first. But it’s this smaller design at the bottom of the page that made me think of this room.

“Look at the entablature around the ceiling in here,” he said, pointing up. “Jefferson used rosettes and bucrania or ox skulls.”

Everyone looked up.

Harvath was the first to glance back down at the paper. “But that doesn’t look like the drawing. This has a woman’s face.”

“But what’s next to the face?”

Harvath looked closer. “Vines?”

“Flowers,” said Gilbertson. “It’s the edge of a bucranium. Ox skulls draped with flower garlands were a popular sacrificial motif for Roman altars. They became popular again for adorning Renaissance buildings.”

“Did Jefferson use bucrania anywhere else here at Monticello?”

“He did. In his bedchamber and in the parlor,” replied Gilbertson, “but not with faces. The only place faces appear anywhere similar to this is in the frieze in the Northwest Piazza. It was modeled on a frieze from the Roman baths of Diocletian.”

“May I see that again please?” asked Susan Ferguson.

The docent handed her the page.

Nichols was about to say something when he noticed the intense look on his colleague’s face as she analyzed the document.

“Now there could have been a design like this here at Monticello at one point in time,” stated Gilbertson, “but I don’t know of it. That doesn’t mean that it didn’t exist, though. You may want to speak with one of the librarians about their collection of Jefferson’s notes and letters. They can be excellent research resources. In fact-”

Ferguson suddenly interrupted him. “No, Paul. You’re right. This motif wasn’t designed for Monticello.”

The docent was surprised by her certitude. “It wasn’t?”

“No, Jefferson designed it for his other plantation, Poplar Forest.”

“How do you know?”

“Several of the entablatures there were also based upon an ancient frieze from Diocletian’s Roman Baths. They had human faces interspersed with three vertical bars, but Jefferson decided to add some whimsy and directed his craftsmen to include ox skulls.”

“And the mantelpieces?” asked Harvath.

“Poplar Forest has fifteen,” offered Ferguson.

Harvath smiled. “That’s got to be it.”

“The only problem with that,” said Gilbertson, “is that Poplar Forest was gutted by fire in 1845. Only the walls, columns, chimneys, and fireplaces are still original.”

CHAPTER 80

Poplar Forest was located in Bedford County just southwest of the city of Lynchburg, Virginia. Even with a heavy foot, it took Harvath nearly an hour in waning rush-hour traffic to make the eighty-mile drive.

As they drove, Nichols filled them in on the big picture points he knew about Poplar Forest.

“Jefferson referred to Poplar Forest as his ‘most valuable possession’ and began building the house there in 1806, shortly after the First Barbary War.

“It was his retreat where he was free to carry on his favorite pursuits-thinking, studying, and reading. His parlor, which also doubled as his study, housed over six hundred books in multiple languages by authors such as Aesop, Homer, Plato, Virgil, Shakespeare, and Molière.

“The house at Poplar Forest was considered the pi

“With triple-sash and floor-to-ceiling windows, as well as a sixteen-foot-long skylight in the center of the house, every space was flooded with light. And though the idea was to create a simple, informal country retreat, the entire home, right down to its kitchen, was a state of the art masterpiece.”

The fact that Poplar Forest was closed on Mondays wouldn’t have stopped Harvath from finding a way to get inside, but Susan Ferguson had called Poplar Forest’s director, Jonathan Moss, who agreed to drive over from Roanoke and meet the men there.