The evening was fine and warm in a last lingering imitation of summer. Through Tom's open window came a distant strain of harpsichord music, accompanied from time to time by a woman's voice. He would have preferred hearing the salutations of the muse of law, as he was at this moment preparing a difficult case. He pulled his candle closer to Littleton's English Law with Coke's Commentaries. A song, an echo of the original, trilled from the tree outside. Tom looked up with a smile. He liked the voice of the mockingbird, mimus polyglottos, the American nightingale. Mockingbirds were clever little fellows, modest as widows in their silver and gray suits....
Voices shouted, the harpsichord and the woman's voice ceased abruptly, and with a flutter of wings the bird flew away. Tom dipped his pen and turned to a fresh page in his commonplace book. "As our laws so have our vocabularies been shaped by the customs of our sovereign Britain. Such collective nouns as 'an ostentation of peacocks' or 'a parliament of owls' amuse our fancies and remind our intellects of the deep roots of our mother tongue. And of its insularity, that such a charming creature as a mockingbird has no such appellation..."
A knock drew his attention. "Come!"
His landlady opened the door. "Mr. Jefferson, are you working still?"
"Indeed I am, Mrs. Vobe. My colleague Patrick Henry will soon argue a case of inheritance, for which I have promised him a complete brief."
"He does go on, Mr. Henry does. Why, you'd think he was preaching revolution!"
"So one might think," Tom returned, without venturing to express those grievances of which he as well as Mr. Henry were sensible.
Mrs. Vobe was wiping down a long-necked wine bottle with her apron, causing its blue glass to wink gaily in the light. "Here you are, Mr. Jefferson. Shocking, the dust from the streets, but I reckon it repels the flies."
"Thank you." Tom placed the bottle at the far end of his desk, away from his books and papers, noting as he did so that despite Mrs. Vobe's best efforts with the apron, her own fingers, tacky with the baking and basting due her position, had left smudges upon the glass. "Did I hear voices exclaiming in the street just now?"
"Aye, that you did. Mr. Bracewell's been taken sick, very sudden, and his wife's sent for the doctor."
)
Inspired by mockingbirds, a young lawyer in Colonial Williamsburg named Thomas Jefferson solves a murder and debates issues such as liberty and the rights of--woman.
