Althea led them into the dining room just as a tour group was leaving.
“We’ll have this room to ourselves until the next group comes,” she said.
Benny glanced around. Dining rooms were only interesting when there was food on the table.
“Mr. Jefferson was an intensely private man,” Althea was saying. “He wanted his guests to speak freely without servants hanging around. As you may know, Jefferson unfortunately kept many slaves. They carried food from the kitchen through an underground passageway, up a small staircase, and into this room.”
Now Benny was fascinated. “Can we see the tunnel?” he asked eagerly.
“I’m sorry we can’t. But,” Althea added, “we can see this.” She walked over to the ornately carved fireplace. “Sometimes the servants would put food on a special elevator in the cellar below. By using pulleys, meals were sent up here.”
She pulled open a panel on the side of the fireplace. Inside was a narrow compartment with boxes to hold trays and bottles.
“A dumbwaiter!” Henry exclaimed.
“Wow!” Benny said. “If I had one at home, Mrs. McGregor could send me cookies and milk anytime I wanted!”
Jessie laughed. “Mrs. McGregor is our housekeeper,” she explained to Althea.
Althea showed the children a matching secret panel on the other side of the fireplace, then said they ought to go.
“I think Benny is tired,” she observed.
“Can we come back to Monticello?” asked Jessie. “I’d like to see the gardens.”
“Absolutely!” Althea said. “I work in the Jefferson Center for Historic Plants tomorrow. You can come with me.”
“Did Thomas Jefferson have peacocks?” Benny asked.
Althea shook her head. “But he had a pet mockingbird. When Jefferson lived in the White House, he tamed a mockingbird. The bird sat on his shoulder and chirped in his ear.”
Violet was charmed by the story. Jefferson seemed more like a person.
Back at Peacock Hall, the children walked around outside. Daffodils bloomed around the empty goldfish pond, but fall leaves still lay heaped under the pecan trees.
“I thought a gardener lived here,” Jessie commented.
Henry nodded. “Tate, Althea called him.”
“He doesn’t seem to do very much.”
Suddenly a loud, eerie sound shattered the stillness.
Jessie got goose bumps. “What was that?”
Henry laughed. “I think it’s the master of Peacock Hall. He wants to make sure we notice him.”
Sure enough, the male peacock strutted around the side of a small brick outbuilding. His folded train swept behind him.
“Oh, boy!” Benny cried. “He’s big!”
The children waited, hoping the bird would display his tail. The peahen appeared, too, in her less flashy plumage.
Giving his call again, the peacock lifted his train in a dazzling show of color. He turned in a slow circle.
“He’s so beautiful!” breathed Violet. “I wish I had my camera.”
“Maybe Cousin Althea has some paper and pens. You can draw him,” Jessie suggested.
Benny admired the sapphire “eyes” in the tail feathers. “I’d sure like to have one of those feathers,” he said.
“Birds lose their feathers all the time,” Henry told him. “You and Watch are always finding blue jay feathers in the grass back home.”
“I bet Watch would bark if he saw this big bird,” Benny said. He missed his dog, but knew Mrs. McGregor was taking good care of him.
“Henry’s right,” said Jessie. “Let’s see if we can find any feathers.”
They walked around the small brick building. In the back was an enclosure made of chicken wire.
Inside the pen were pans of water and cracked corn, and a wooden shelter like a doghouse. But no sapphire-tipped plumes.
“We’ll be here all week,” Violet assured her little brother. “Maybe we’ll find a peacock feather later.”
But Benny was staring at something beyond the peacock pen. “Look!” he cried.
Violet turned her head, wondering what was so exciting about a clothesline. T-shirts and jeans hung from a line that was stretched from the small building to a locust tree.
Next to him, Jessie gasped. “Benny, you have sharp eyes!”
“It’s just a bunch of laundry —” Henry began. Then he saw it, too. The pair of jeans on the end had a hole in one knee.
“Those jeans!” Violet declared. “I bet the scrap of denim we found this morning matches the hole in those jeans. Henry, do you have it?”
Henry tugged the scrap from his pocket. “Right here. All we have to do is —”
Just then a man came around the corner. He had white hair that stood up in spikes and wore baggy jeans and a plaid flannel shirt. His face was scarlet with anger.
“What do you kids think you’re doing?” the man growled.
“Nothing, sir,” Henry said politely. “We were just walking around.”
The man came up to him. Jessie noted he wasn’t much bigger than Henry. He also seemed a lot older than Grandfather. What was he so mad about?
“We’re the Aldens,” she said, introducing the others. “We’re visiting Cousin Althea. You must be Mr. Tate.”
The man raised a white eyebrow. “You’re with Mr. Alden? Mrs. Randolph said she’d asked him to come.”
“That’s right,” Henry said. “Cousin Althea wrote to our grandfather for help.”
“She’s a fine lady,” the old man remarked. “I hope your granddaddy can get her out of this fix she’s in.”
“He’ll do his best,” Violet put in. “Are you the gardener, Mr. Tate?”
He nodded. “Yes, I’m the gardener. I’ve worked here for fifty years. My daddy was the gardener before me. And my name is just plain Tate.”
“Is this your house?” Benny asked, glancing at the brick outbuilding. “We have a little house, too. Not the one we live in now. But we can play in our old house.”
Tate looked confused.
Jessie explained, “Benny means we once lived in a boxcar. That was before Grandfather found us. He brought our boxcar to his house and we use it for a sort of clubhouse.”
Benny asked Tate again, “Do you live in this house?”
“It’s the smokehouse,” Tate said, somewhat gruffly. “In the old days, meat was hung in this building to cure. But it’s no place for children to fool around. Go on back to the main house, you hear?”
Shocked at the old man’s sudden unfriendliness, the Aldens turned and headed toward Peacock Hall.
“What’s wrong with him?” Violet said.
“I guess he’s funny about his place,” Henry said with a shrug. “It must be his house. Nobody else lives here but Althea, and she wouldn’t hang her laundry way out here.”
“She wouldn’t wear jeans and T-shirts, either,” Jessie added. “But Tate does. Those must be his clothes hanging on that line. And I still think the piece of material we found came from that pair of jeans.”
Violet stopped. “Do you think Tate climbed the ladder up to our window last night? Why would he do that?”
Jessie didn’t have an answer.
There were many mysteries at Peacock Hall. Would they solve any of them by Friday?
|