America's First Daughter: A Novel (35 page)

It was none of my affair. Truly, it wasn’t. But at a loss as to how to fix everything else that had gone so wrong for the people I loved, I wanted to fix just this one thing. There was no undoing what had passed between my father and Sally, but I was convinced that no good could come of their continued estrangement.

“Why, Papa—you’ve just reminded me that I meant to buy some ribbon from Mr. Bell’s store. He’s been a good friend while you’ve been away. He treats Sally’s sister kindly.”

“Pleased to hear it,” my father said, eyes still far away.

“People talk, of course, about how he can possibly keep a former slave as his lady, but since he holds no public office, society seems content to let him live as he pleases.”

My father, who
no longer
held public office, slowly lifted his eyes to mine, seeking something in my gaze. Redemption, forgiveness, or permission. I wasn’t sure which. But whatever he wanted, I was happy to give. I ought to have made my peace with his relationship with Sally long ago. Perhaps the moment Sally had chosen to return with him to Virginia. “Would you like me to bring back some papers?”

“What?” he asked, his voice thick with emotion.

“From Mr. Bell’s store,” I replied. “I’m sure there’s news from the capital . . . then again, you’re free from public business now, aren’t you?”

“Indeed.” A dim light grew behind his eyes. “I believe I’ll stop taking newspapers altogether.”

From that day forward, things changed at Monticello.

Instead of writing ten or twelve letters a day, as was Papa’s habit for as long as I could remember, he now put his correspondence aside and replied only on rainy days. He told us—and anyone who would listen—that he was happy to have left the service of his country into abler hands. He styled himself a simple farmer, the master of his plantation and everyone on it.

Now, it’s true that I never saw Papa and Sally strolling in the fields, hand in hand. Never saw them share a kiss. He certainly didn’t squire her around town to shop for dresses, and if he gave her jewelry, she never flaunted it. But after that day, no one but Sally was ever allowed to tend his chambers. She had dominion over his most private places and possessions. And I was grateful my father found solace, comfort, and companionship in a woman so much better than Gabriella Harvie.

Sally would never steal my father’s name, love, or fortune. I believed that she would never, and
could
never, be the cause of harm to my family. And so I raised no objection to the fact he left her spending money in a drawer, to do with as she liked. Nor did I mind that she was left to her own authority about the plantation. Within a year, she was again with child. A fact that seemed to satisfy—and even embolden—the brothers Hemings.

James still earned a wage as he’d become accustomed but considered himself free as soon as he trained up his replacement in our kitchens. And Bob Hemings pressed for his freedom, too. Like almost all the Hemingses, Bob was a bright mulatto who sometimes passed as white, making it easier for him to travel freely when he had the yen. For years now, Papa had let him come and go as he pleased, and maybe that’s why Papa reacted to Bob’s request for emancipation as a personal rebuke.

“He’s already a free man in all but name,” Papa groused.

I was a little vexed that my father, who had penned so many lines about liberty, might be surprised a man might not be content with freedom
in all but name
. When Papa grudgingly granted Bob’s request, I resolved to make peace in that quarter if I could.

Because at long last, we had my father happy and contented at home. And we aimed to keep him there.

Monticello, 27 April 1795

From Thomas Jefferson to James Madison

My retirement from office had been meant from all office high or low, without exception . . . the little spice of ambition, which I had in my younger days, has long since evaporated, and I set less store in a posthumous than present name.

T
WO YEARS AFTER MY FATHER
wrote these words, he lost the election for the presidency of the United States. My sister and I believed this to be an utter calamity, but not because he had lost the presidency. It was a calamity because, through a quirk in our system, having won the second highest number of votes, he would now be obliged to serve as vice president to John Adams—the very man he’d run against, and whose political sentiments he opposed.

We urged him to refuse the office for fear he’d again be the subject of scrutiny, censure, and newspaper attack. He’d again have to leave his plantation and his people and his family. And this time, he wouldn’t even have James to look after him, for Sally’s brother had since quit the plantation with his freedom to travel the world.

Sally didn’t like the idea of my father returning to public office any better than we did. The three of us sulked, as if the combined weight of his womenfolk’s displeasure might bring my strong father to his knees.

But in the end, Papa said he feared to weaken our fledgling system of government by refusing the office, and he wouldn’t be moved on this point.

In all, my father’s retirement had lasted only two eventful years during which it seemed every friend of liberty we’d known in France was either dead, jailed, or in exile. And we’d been consumed with tumult and tragedies closer to home. Polly fell through the rotting floorboards into the cellar of my father’s half-demolished house, upon which he’d begun more ambitious renovations. Miraculously, there wasn’t a scrape on her, but others didn’t fare as well. At Bizarre, Richard Randolph died, quite suddenly, of some mysterious ailment, leaving Judith and Nancy in dire straits.

And I lost a child—a little angel named Ellen, not even a year old.

She had apple cheeks and the longest toes of any baby I ever saw. I held her in my arms as she struggled for her last little gasps through lips tinged with blue. And when she closed her eyes for the last time—the tiny veins beneath her porcelain skin pulsing once, twice, then no more—the grief was unfathomable. The pain was like a burr, the kind that only digs deeper when you try to pluck free of it. So I just let the pain dig into me deep, where I keep it to this day, since I couldn’t keep my baby girl.

But after we buried her, the grief put Tom into a nearly hopeless state. My husband was struggling with what the doctors called a nervous condition. He took mineral water at the hot springs, but I knew it’d do no good. After all, no magic elixir was going to transform him into the master of Tuckahoe, and we could never be happy at Varina, where we’d moved to build up Tom’s only inheritance.

And oh, how I hated Varina.

Not because it was filled with memories of that first miser able summer we spent as newlyweds. Not because there weren’t enough rooms for the children and our servants. No, I hated Varina because whenever Tom came home from overseeing the fields, he’d stand on the porch with a glass too-full of whiskey, his eyes on the blue horizon, as if he could
see
his father’s malevolent ghost hovering over the childhood home at which we’d never again be welcome.

As if he sensed Colonel Randolph looking down on us, standing in judgment.

And I hurt for my husband. Truly, I did.

Tom seldom spoke of the lawsuit he was fighting with his father’s creditors, but it weighed on him. My husband was likely to lose, which would saddle us with even more of Colonel Randolph’s debt. I would’ve sold bloody Varina and left everything having to do with Colonel Randolph behind, but Tom couldn’t stomach it, which meant that my husband’s only hope of paying the mortgage was to get in a few good crops, and sell them at a profit—a nearly impossible feat, given British tariffs on our goods.

That’s why I was so alarmed when Tom announced, “I’m going to stand for the state legislature.”

He was standing on the porch, deep in his cups, so I wasn’t entirely sure he meant it. And I didn’t like the idea at all. Tom was a better farmer than most, but inconstant with his attention to his own plantations—always distracted on some errand for my father. It was so much worse now with Papa away in the capital. Polly had come to live with us at Varina, which meant Tom and I were both struggling to make a functioning household with our sisters and our little children underfoot. I didn’t know how we’d manage it if Tom took on public duties besides. “What of . . . what of the farmsteads?”

My husband squinted. “Patsy, I’ve always wanted to serve in public office. That’s why I went to Edinburgh. It’s why I admire Mr. Jefferson so much. My father never thought I could do it. He wanted me
here,
digging in the dirt . . . but it’s these little specks of land which prevent mental effort and accomplishment in youth.”

My family had already suffered enough for public ambitions, but because I thought the source of my husband’s recurring illness might be that he’d so long denied himself a political career, I forced myself to say, “I suppose the country needs good Republicans.” Tom was no great revolutionary thinker, like my father, but he was intelligent and honorable. Two things I thought might put him in good standing with the public.

Which shows you just how much I still had to learn about politics.

Tom declared his candidacy. Unfortunately, he did little more than that. Maybe he thought he didn’t need to; he had the Randolph name, after all, and the support of Thomas Jefferson, Virginia’s favorite son. Hadn’t my father just been elected to the vice presidency without campaigning for it?

But when it came to the state legislature, a presence was expected. Candidates were to go to the town square to press flesh and charm country voters over barrels of whiskey. When Tom ought to have been putting on his finery and practicing speeches and witty barbs, he decided upon another course altogether.

“There’s a doctor in Charlottesville who will be administrating smallpox inoculations,” Tom said. “I’m taking the children to have it done.”

It always moved me that he was so intent on the welfare of our children, but smallpox also struck terror in my heart. “But they’re so young.”

“Best to do it while they’re young,” Tom said.

That had been my father’s thinking, too. Unfortunately, a mother’s heart is, of all things in nature, the least subject to reason. The idea of exposing my children to such a disorder made me perfectly miserable. Polly and I and our dearly departed little Lucy had made it through. Sally, too. But sometimes the treatment killed the patient, and knowing that made me clutch my babies tight against my skirts. “It takes some time—we can’t leave them without a nurse to tend them. I’ll have to go with you.”

“I need you here at Varina,” Tom insisted. “Someone’s got to look after the girls.”

His little sisters, he meant, including little Jenny, who was still with us now, as if she’d been our daughter to start with. His father hadn’t left him the estate, but Tom had still taken on the responsibility of the family.

“I can look after everything,” Polly broke in. “I’m eighteen now, Patsy. You can go watch over your children and I’ll play mistress of Varina for a time.”

Tom and I looked at my delicate little sister where she was indolently reclining upon a sofa in nothing but a slip of a gown, with all her chores undone. And the decision was made in one glance. Tom would take the children, and I’d stay behind.

On the appointed day that first week of April, my eyes filled with tears at the thought that when I said good-bye to my little angels, it might be for the last time. I consoled myself with the certain knowledge that Tom would be a tender and attentive nurse; he could be gruff with Jeff, but he was always sweetness itself with Ann. What I didn’t expect was that he would tarry there with the doctor, studying the science of the thing, sitting at the bedside of his children on election day itself.

Tom never showed up in the town square.

Never slapped any backs. Never cracked open a barrel of whiskey. Never gave a speech. Never thanked his supporters—not even the local militiamen who came out to rally in my father’s name. By the time I realized it—when a neighbor came riding up to the house in a cloud of dust to ask if something terrible had befallen my husband—Tom had already lost the election and looked like a sore, brooding loser to boot.

Not knowing what else to do, I hurriedly sat down at the table to scribble a letter to be read out to interested parties, explaining that my husband was tending to sick children. But it arrived too late to do any good, and the humiliating rumors spread like wild fire, such that they reached even my father in the capital, who was obliged to apologize on my husband’s behalf.

When I finally heard Tom’s wagon roll up that warm day, I grabbed up my skirts and raced out into the yard to scoop up my children, kissing them all over their faces in relief to see them alive. But Ann pressed shyly against my bodice, whispering, “My papa isn’t well.”

Tom was drunk. It was the middle of the day and he was drunk—so red-faced and staggering I wondered how he’d driven the horses. “Go,” he barked at the children. “Get on in the house.”

When they ran off, my husband put his finger in my face and drew near enough that I could smell whiskey on his breath. “You think you’re so much above me, don’t you, Patsy? All that
convent learning
. . .” Scarcely knowing what I’d done to anger him, I was struck by his sudden resemblance to his father. And while I stood there in bewilderment, winding my hands in my apron, he shouted, “Don’t you
ever
apologize for me.”

So he’d seen the letter I’d written to excuse his absence on election day. “I only thought—”

“Who are you to apologize for me? You’re Mrs. Thomas Mann Randolph. That’s who you are. You’re the wife of a man who has been erased by a younger brother, rejected by the voters of Virginia, and can do nothing whatsoever right. You’re
that
man’s wife and that’s
all
you are.”

With that he shoved past me, leaving me to stare off in the horizon, where I, too, fancied I could see the shadow of Colonel Randolph. But I decided then and there that old tyrant could only haunt my husband.

Not me.

I
wasn’t
just Mrs. Thomas Mann Randolph. I was first, foremost, and above all, Thomas Jefferson’s daughter. So while Tom slept off his hangover, I packed up my sister and my children, and returned to Monticello.

Philadelphia, 8 June 1797

To Martha Jefferson Randolph from Thomas Jefferson

I receive with inexpressible pleasure the news of Jack’s proposal of marriage to your sister. After your own happy establishment, which has given me an inestimable friend to whom I can leave the care of everything I love, the only anxiety I had remaining was to ensure Maria’s happiness. If she had the whole earth free to choose a partner, she could not have done so more to my wishes. I now see our fireside formed into a group, no one member of which has a fiber in their composition which can ever produce any jarring or jealousies among us.

“I do believe you’re faking,” I said to my limping sister, helping her with her stomacher. “If you don’t stay still and let me finish dressing you, I’m going to tell everyone that you turned your weak ankle on purpose to force Jack Eppes to carry you over the threshold of your wedding chamber.”

“I’m not that clever,” my sister protested, radiant in her best gown, and blushing. “Besides, why would any bride willingly forgo dancing at her own wedding? It’s not my fault that Papa’s house is in perpetual disarray. Silly me for expecting there to be a stair under the door to step down onto!”

I’d regretted the dangers of returning to Monticello’s permanent chaos of construction as Papa’s Italian-inspired architecture took shape into a domed manor house that would have three stories while appearing only to have one. And yet, we were still happier here amongst hammers and plaster dust and tarps than we’d been at Varina. When Tom discovered that I’d left, he’d been enraged. But I’d only meant to strike a little fear into his heart, not mount a rebellion, so I lied to him about the reasons why. I told him that in his shamefully drunken state, he’d commanded me to go so he could put all his attention on the harvest.

And when Polly—who disapproved of men who drank— confirmed my story, Tom was too embarrassed to admit that he couldn’t remember what he’d said. I sensed there lingered in him a fear that he had a willful wife who might not always tolerate his outbursts, which suited me.

And I saw some of the same sincere regret he’d shown after he’d struck me. But more happily, our return to Monticello had coincided with a visit from Jack Eppes, our country cousin with whom Polly had spent many years. He’d proposed marriage, and she’d agreed straightaway.