America's First Daughter: A Novel (27 page)

So when next I wrote Papa, I sent him only reassurances of my love. I wanted to say more, because something felt terribly wrong about
this
silence. But in the end, that’s all I wrote.

New York, 30 May 1790

From Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Mann Randolph Jr.

Your resolution to apply to the study of the law is wise. On my return to Virginia in the fall, I hope some practicable method may be devised for your settling in Albemarle. Nothing could contribute so much to my happiness. You might get into the assembly for that county. Meanwhile, a motion has been made in the Senate to remove the federal government to Philadelphia and the French revolution still goes on well.

M
Y FATHER WISHED
to keep me close to Monticello—and I desired the same—but in marrying Tom, I understood my destiny to be entwined with Tuckahoe.
Tuckahoe
was the family seat. The jewel of the Randolph fortune. And since Tom was the oldest son, tradition held that he’d inherit the place.

It would always have a hold on him.

But the place that had a hold on my little sister was
Eppington
. Polly didn’t wait for the carriage Colonel Randolph finally lent us to come to a stop before flinging the door open and leaping out into the arms of Aunt Elizabeth—the only mother my little sister remembered. And watching my aunt’s calico housedress billow up as she spun my sister made me forgive her for keeping Polly from us all those years.

But I confess, it made me a little jealous, too. At least until Aunt Elizabeth grabbed at my hands and I caught a scent of lavender water that she and my mother both used for perfume. “Patsy, you’ve grown so regal, you make us look like peasants. Your mother would burst to see you now.”

Uncle Frank did his best to make my new husband feel welcome, too, pouring him a glass of his best liquor and asking him about his studies at Edinburgh. And I breathed a sigh of relief to be away from the tension at Tuckahoe. Little by little, my reticent husband relaxed into the company of my family until Uncle Frank said, “Mr. Randolph, you must congratulate your father for me on his betrothal.”

Tom stared, frozen in surprise, his glass at half tilt. He managed to choke out three words. “My father’s
betrothal
?”

Oblivious to Tom’s distress, Uncle Frank lifted his own glass for a celebratory toast. “I’ve yet to set eyes on Gabriella Harvie, but I’m told she’s a young lady of great beauty.”

It was Aunt Elizabeth who recognized Tom’s expression as horrified shock and she tried to silence her husband with a sharp “
Mr. Eppes
.”

But my uncle blundered on in confusion. “Didn’t you just ride out from Tuckahoe? Surely your father shared the happy news of his forthcoming remarriage. Everyone else in the countryside has heard by now.”

Tom curled slightly inward, as if he’d been run through with a sword and didn’t want anyone to see how badly he was bleeding. I reached for him, my own mind reeling, but he pulled from my grasp, excused himself, and begged leave to take Uncle Frank’s bottle with him.

Tom strode off to the stables and I followed, half-afraid he’d hop on a horse and ride off. Realizing I was following, he picked up his pace, but so did I.

“My mother is only a year in her grave,” Tom said, taking two swallows straight from the bottle. “And my father has set his mind to marry a girl younger than his own daughters.”

There was nothing unusual about that; older men of means took young wives. No, Gabriella Harvie’s youth wasn’t the trouble; it was that her father was a landed gentleman of Virginia who would expect his daughter and any children she bore to reap the rewards of this marriage at the expense of my husband and his siblings.

Tom took another swallow, his dark eyes burning. “My mother gave him three sons and seven daughters, but now he wants to start a
new
family.”

I stepped closer. “Doesn’t mean he’ll neglect the one he’s got.”

“Yes he will,” Tom hissed. “He’ll start fresh and forget us, since we’ve ever been such a disappointment to him. He’s done this to hurt me, I promise you that.”

I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to hurt Tom. And, frankly, it seemed impossible that
any son
would ever please that old man. “Colonel Randolph is a widower. Is it possible he’s just lonely?” I suggested, trying to be more generous.

It was the wrong thing to say. Tom shrugged away from me and threw himself down on a hay bale. “Patsy, you’ve only had a taste of how malicious my father can be. You haven’t the faintest notion of how miserable he’s made me and you wouldn’t care if you knew. So go to bed and leave me be.”

Something in his eyes frightened me, and left me no room to argue. So I went into the house, fretting the whole while. I
did
care that my husband was miserable. Of course I cared. But I didn’t know how to help him.

By the time Tom came to bed that night, he was drunk. He wasn’t gentle. But before I could scold him for putting a tear in my nightclothes, he buried his face in my hair, sniffling and sobbing barely coherent apologies. Some part of me was horrified to see him weep like that, a big strong man curled up against me like a boy. But another part opened up to love him just a little.

His loss was altogether too familiar for me not to feel compassion. My mother had died years ago, but Tom’s pain was still fresh. So I held him without resentment while he sobbed how much he loved his mother, and how bitterly he resented his father for never having loved her at all. “Patsy, I regret every little neglect I ever made in my affection to my mother. No one will ever love me like she did.”

I knew that pain, so I stroked his back, realizing he now feared to lose what little of his
father’s
love he’d ever had.

That’s what Tom feared.

But as my husband fell asleep on my shoulder, my fears were entirely financial. I married him, in part, because he was the heir to Tuckahoe, as grand a place as there was in Virginia. But I’d seen greater estates fall to ruin in France. How Colonel Randolph’s lands would provide for his remaining unmarried daughters was already a matter of concern. As the eldest son, Tom would take the largest share, but how many more ways would the colonel have to divide his holdings if he had more children?

Because my husband’s inheritance—and what might be left of it—was a thing of peculiar interest to me now that I suspected I was soon to have a child of my own.

C
OLONEL
R
ANDOLPH’S IMPENDING REMARRIAGE
worked itself like a poison into my husband’s blood. My family opposed the idea of setting up housekeeping at Varina, but Tom was now more determined than ever. He’d gone ahead of me to get crops into the ground and expected me to join him soon. And I dreaded it, because it was a hot summer and I was swelling with child and didn’t want to live in such proximity to the Randolphs. . . .

“I don’t understand it,” Aunt Elizabeth said, sitting on the porch, teaching me some tricks of mending while we watched Polly play with the dogs in the summer sun. “You need a maid when you’re in this condition, Patsy. Every Virginia gentleman gives one to his daughter on her wedding day. Sally should be tending you. Is your father saving her for your sister?”

Perhaps it was having lived so long in Paris, where slavery had been abolished, or perhaps it was the strong emotions my pregnancy had drawn out of me, but every word of my aunt’s inquiry aggravated me. There seemed to be so much wrongness in it that I’d go mad trying to unravel it all. Sally was, after all, almost as much Aunt Elizabeth’s sister as Polly was mine. But my aunt never acknowledged the colored part of the family except by calling them that. And because such a thing was never acknowledged in polite company, I’d have to quiet the part of my mind that persisted in thinking about the connection.

As for her question, I knew my father had no intention of giving Sally away. Not to me. Not to anyone. Not ever. He’d made Sally a promise in France, and he was honor-bound to keep it, even now that their child was dead. So I shrugged. “Sally and I wouldn’t get on well. . . .”

“Still, your father only gave you field hands,” Aunt Elizabeth said, pushing the needle in deep. “You can’t trust them in the house. You need someone you know. Someone with intelligence and character.”

Someone with lighter skin,
she meant. Someone who behaved more like a servant so as to uphold the polite fiction of it all. Someone in the family . . .

Utterly sickened by her implication, I blurted, “Papa intends to free James Hemings. And Mary is now living with Mr. Bell. I think Mr. Bell means to free her, and my father will help arrange that, too. You ought to know my father believes slavery is an injustice.”

“Your father and every cultured gentleman in Virginia,” Aunt Elizabeth said, not looking very impressed. She pursed her lips. “The world is how it is and no one can change it. Not even your father.”

She was wrong, I thought. Papa had already changed it.
France
had changed it. Liberty was spreading across the ocean and the whole world. And what about Mr. Short? He was a Virginia gentleman who had taken a principled stand on the matter, and surely other men would follow suit. My own husband professed to want only a small farmstead he could work himself, but in Vir ginia, slavery was a way of life, and it would have to be the way of my life. We couldn’t get by without the slaves, and my father said they couldn’t get by without us.

“Ask your father to give you Mary’s daughter, Molly,” Aunt Elizabeth said. “She’s a girl of almost fourteen now. She knows how a house should run and she’s not so pretty as Sally, so your father won’t mind parting with her.”

That shut me right up. And for more reasons than one.

When I said nothing, my aunt added, “With a child on the way and no proper homestead, you can’t get along without a maid. Especially not at Varina, where you’ll be the only woman. What with your husband in the field and you by yourself in some old shack, I’d worry about you night and day.”

“It’s where they say Princess Pocahontas used to live,” I said, more hopeful than I had any right to be. “I’m sure it’s not so horrible. . . .”

In truth, nothing in my whole life prepared me for what I faced that summer at Varina. I found myself hauling river water up to a ramshackle house, wondering whether or not I’d survive another day. My fingers and ankles were constantly swollen in the heat, and the early stages of my pregnancy made me nauseated and dizzy. Since the slaves were needed in the fields, I spent all day, every day, hauling buckets and firewood by myself. Washing dishes. Scrubbing clothes. Grinding corn. Plucking chickens. Things I’d never done before. Things few plantation mistresses did without the help of servants. Things that made me so tired and filthy I thought I’d never get clean again.

Aunt Elizabeth had been right when she said I badly needed the assistance of a maid. Trapped in an endless cycle of toil and solitude, how I yearned for feminine companionship. Establishing a new plantation left no time for letters or visits with neighbors. And even eating for two, there were nights I’d have happily gone hungry rather than cook something from our near-empty larder over a fire that made the nights hotter and more miserable by far. I couldn’t get comfortable on the old bedding or on the wooden floor, and was a meal for mosquitoes either way. Grimy and drenched in sweat, aching from head to toe, I couldn’t quite conceive of how I’d come to this.

A year earlier, I’d been drinking bubbling wine from crystal glasses in Paris ballrooms. I’d been decked in silks and satins and brocades, dancing with French and English nobility, taking music lessons, attending concerts, and gambling with duchesses. For the love of God, I could have been a duchess. How did I find myself exiled to this remote farm, tossing and turning, weary to the bone?

If I’d stayed with William Short, accepted his proposed vision for my life
—
become the wife of a diplomat instead of a planter—

No. Tom was my husband and my place was with him now. I boxed the disloyal thoughts up and locked them away. Especially since every day, under that fiery sun, Tom worked the fields with the slaves, all of them sweating and struggling in the earth. The slaves were obliged to do it at the threat of an overseer’s whip, but Tom wanted to learn the work, and I’d never in my life seen any white man work as hard.

Until that summer I’d only known Tom as a schoolboy and then as a gentleman of learning. I didn’t know how much of a planter there was in him, and I guess he wasn’t too sure either.

In truth, when I wasn’t exhausted or sick or otherwise distracted by Varina’s countless demands, I was proud of my husband’s efforts. But I was equally worried that he was determined to prove something to his father even if it killed him.

And I feared it just might.

Almost every night he came back with his sweat-soaked shirt sucked tight against his broad chest, face sunburned, and his stomach too sick to eat even on those evenings I did manage to have something like a meal ready for him. After a particularly arduous day’s labor, Tom retched up his guts outside the house murmuring, “I hate tobacco. Too hard on our people. Too hard on me.”

“It’s the climate,” I replied, hating to see him reduced to this and stroking his handsome face with a wet cloth. A heat rash was spreading all over him, and I could tell it itched something awful. “It’s not healthful here.”