America's First Daughter: A Novel (30 page)

Tom eyed me, as if stunned by the devious turn of my mind, but agreed. And during those blustery cold months, I helped set up housekeeping, since Judith was heavy with her first child. We ended up staying for nearly three months in all, Tom watching—like a hawk—Theo’s every move toward our virginal Nancy.

If only he’d been watching Richard.

I scarcely took notice of the way Nancy giggled whenever our host said something amusing. Or the way, when Richard hugged her, they embraced too long. Holding hands briefly before bed. Whispering in one another’s ear. I suppose I
noticed
all these things but dismissed them as Nancy’s gratitude to her brother-in-law for taking her in when her own father was so utterly indifferent to her.

“Tom, truly. Neither John nor Theo has an eye for Nancy. And Richard’s watching out for her. You see how attentive he is,” I said as we prepared for bed one night.

I should’ve been more suspicious. I should’ve wondered what those whispers and giggles meant, but by February I was distracted and bursting with happy news. “Mr. Randolph, I’m going to give you the son you so desire.”

Tom lifted me up, clasping me against him, spinning me round, and in our joy, we left Bizarre plantation without suspecting a thing.

Monticello, 9 September 1792

From Thomas Jefferson to President George Washington

I was duped by the Secretary of the treasury and made a tool for forwarding his schemes, not then sufficiently understood by me; and of all the errors of my political life this
has occasioned me the deepest regret. That I have utterly, in my private conversations, disapproved of the system of the Secretary of the treasury, I acknowledge. His system flows from principles adverse to liberty, and is calculated to undermine and demolish the republic.

The summer just before he wrote this letter, Papa returned to Monticello in a state of agitation, telling of all the indignities he’d suffered at the hands of the cunning and ambitious secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton.

At dinner—a meal put together with the freshest vegetables from my new garden—my husband asked, “What kind of fool is this Mr. Hamilton?”

My father set down his spoon and mopped sweat off his brow with a napkin. The infernal heat of that summer had been so stifling that we hadn’t been able to sleep comfortably even with every door and window open. But it wasn’t the heat that vexed him. “The secretary of the treasury is no kind of fool at all. He is a colossus.”

Never had I heard of my father speak of a man this way. Half in awe, half in mortal dread. And because there was a crowd at our table, including my Carr cousins, in thrall with his every word, my father continued. “We are daily pitted in the cabinet like two cocks.” Papa shook his head and pushed away his plate. “I’ve confronted the president, who assures me there are merely
desires
but not
designs
for a monarchy.”

A moment of appalled silence fell upon the table as we considered the president’s most unsettling—and scarcely reassuring—reply. None of us wanted to believe our liberty to be in so much danger, but Papa’s sense of betrayal at the way his compatriots had twisted the revolutionary spirit to which he’d best given voice was clear. And seemingly warranted.

“What will you do?” Tom asked, his brow furrowed and eyes serious.

“I’ll resign.” Before anyone could protest, Papa added, “No man has ever had less desire of entering into public offices than me. Only the war induced me to undertake it. Twice before I’ve refused diplomatic appointments until a . . . domestic loss . . . made me fancy a change of scene. Now I want nothing so much as to be at home.”

A domestic loss.

Papa still couldn’t speak of it, I realized. Even in the privacy of his home, even so near to the anniversary of her death, he couldn’t speak of my mother’s passing except as a domestic loss.

I forced a smile and chirped, “We’ll be so happy to have you home for good, Papa. We’ll be together. Everything we always wanted.” And, at long last, it would be everything Mama had always wanted, too.

Of course, I had no way of ensuring that would come to pass without my husband’s consent. But Colonel Randolph had finally agreed to sell Edgehill to us, and I believed, deep in my heart, that Tom would be happier living nearer to my father than his own.

I became more sure of it in early August when we received news that Colonel Randolph’s wife had given him a brand-new baby. A boy named
Thomas Mann Randolph
—same as my husband.

If I hadn’t hated Colonel Randolph before that moment, I did then, because Tom took it hard, like a bullet to the heart.

It wasn’t uncommon to name a baby after a sibling . . . if they’d
died
. From which Tom inferred that his father wished he’d never been born. “I’ve been erased,” Tom said, staring bleakly out the open parlor window with a glass of liquor dangling precariously from one hand. Then he drained it, his throat working hard to swallow the poison down. “
Replaced
.”

With the imminent birth of our own new baby, I was too overcome by my belly and the stifling August heat to rise swiftly up from my chair to comfort him. It was Papa who put a hand on Tom’s shoulder and said, “Nursing this wound can’t remedy the evil, and may make it a great deal worse. Don’t let it be a cankerworm corroding eternally on your mind. Forgive your father, because Colonel Randolph surely meant nothing but to indulge his new wife in this.”

That was putting a shine on manure, and my husband surely knew it.

But then my father added, “You have your own family now, and a new baby to arrive any day. How can anything cloud the joy of that? If you have your wife and children, you have the keystone to the arch of happiness.”

Tom looked down for a long moment. He gave a single nod, but I didn’t miss the sadness that deadened his eyes. And despite my father’s attempt to comfort Tom and make him see all the things he had around him, I feared it was a wound from which my husband might never recover.

I worried over it until my son was born a few weeks later, fearing even as I held him in my arms that Tom would name the child after Colonel Randolph, either from tradition or from provocation, and make his own wound even deeper. But taking our cherub into his own strong arms, Tom proudly named him, “Thomas Jefferson Randolph. We’ll call him
Jeff
for short.”

I gasped with delight, knowing how much it would please Papa. “Oh, Tom!”

“You’ll be the only one with that name,” Tom promised the boy as he hugged him close against his broad chest. Then little Ann came running into the room to hug Tom’s knees. Chuckling, Tom settled his big hand on Ann’s head and smiled down at her. “You’re a big sister now, Miss Randolph.”

She reached up her hands for her baby brother, and Tom knelt down to give her a closer introduction. In that moment, seeing the three of them together and happy, I felt suddenly overcome by a pang so deep in my heart that it undid me. Grasping at my chest and swallowing hard over my confused emotions, I realized what had happened.

Why, somehow, I’d fallen in love with my husband.

It wasn’t a sweet, dreamy love that made my heart skip. It didn’t make me want to shout and spin pirouettes on my toes. It was some other kind of love, so quiet it snuck up on me in the shadows. Nevertheless, it was as
real
as any love I’d ever felt, and my eyes misted over to feel it.

Tom peered up at me. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing at all,” I said, resolving to be so kind to him that he’d never need any other family but ours. And what a family it was. My son was a remarkably fine boy. Smaller than my daughter had been at his age, but healthier. So much so that, within a few weeks, we felt confident in taking little Jeff out into the world for a visit to Bizarre.

Given the news about Gabriella Harvie’s baby boy, I expected to find the Randolph sisters in a state and braced for the gnashing of teeth. But we found our hosts quietly melancholic. Judith smiled to see us, but it was a brittle smile. And Richard was wound tight as a drum as he told us about the recent death of his younger brother, Theo. Tom and I had already heard it was the laudanum that did him in. That, in the end, the young man had been a skeleton, unable even to walk on his own. But as we sat around the parlor at Bizarre, Richard insisted, “It was tuberculosis.”

My husband’s gaze flicked to his sister Nancy, who hadn’t found a husband yet and who wasn’t likely to find one, looking as frail as she did now. Her skin was like paper and she was unable to muster even a brittle smile. Indeed, the back of the settee appeared to be all that held her upright. I knew Tom was imagining what sort of mischief she’d gotten herself into here at Bizarre.

Was she taking laudanum, too?

“Nancy hasn’t been feeling well,” Richard said, putting a comforting hand upon her knee. The gesture was so intimate that Tom went rigid, a shadow over his eyes. And in spite of my happily gurgling baby boy, and Ann’s giggles as she ran about the house, the air went thick with tension.

So thick that I actually startled when someone banged on the front door.

None of the house servants went to answer it, but Judy got up and peered out a window at an angle from which she couldn’t be seen. Going pale, she said, “It’s our neighbors.”

“Well, aren’t you going to let them in?” I asked, anxious as any southern woman to the dictates of hospitality. Of course, if I’d known what the neighbors had come to say, I’d have barred the door myself!

The Harrisons hadn’t come on a social visit. Indeed, while her husband glowered, Mrs. Harrison left her bonnet on, though she tugged nervously at the pink ribbon holding it to her head. Standing just inside the room, as if she intended an abrupt exit, she finally said, “The rumor is still being passed around, Miss Nancy. We thought you ought to know.”

“What rumor?” my husband asked.

Mr. Harrison continued to glower, but to answer Tom, Mrs. Harrison chirped nervously, “The slaves are saying that the night your sisters and your brother-in-law stayed as guests in our home, Richard was seen taking a bundle out to the woodpile, and—” She glanced at Nancy’s belly, fluttering a bit in her unease.

Before she could continue her thought, Mr. Harrison cut her off with a blunt, “They’re saying Miss Nancy gave birth to Richard’s bastard and that he chopped it to pieces.”

Shooting to his feet, Richard cried, “Slander!”

Richard’s outrage was so convincing that I put a hand on Tom’s arm to still him. But my husband, too, shot to his feet. And he was plainly not convinced.

Richard insisted, “That’s a damnable lie.”

“Is it?” Mr. Harrison shot back. “You drag your whoring to my house and stain my name—”

“
Please,
” his wife begged of him, as if she might swoon away at the unpleasantness. And when her husband quieted, she added, “Nevertheless, you should know it’s being said. The servants claim they heard screams in the night and found bloody sheets in Miss Nancy’s bed.”

Nancy’s pretty big eyes rounded with fear or outrage; I couldn’t say which. “They were
groans
. Not screams. I was ailing from womanly troubles and pains in the abdomen. I’ve always suffered from colic. My sisters can tell you that’s true. Isn’t that right?”

“Of course it’s true,” I said, reflexively. “She’s always had terrible colic.” She’d never had colic in her life as far as I knew, but what else could I say as my husband went from red to purple?

The moment the Harrisons uttered some stilted courtesy and took their leave, Tom whirled on Nancy, grabbing her by the arms and pulling her to shaky feet. “Were you seduced, sister?”

Tears filled Nancy’s eyes. “There was never any baby. Someone’s telling lies!”

My husband didn’t believe it. He shook her, that familiar angry vein pulsing in at his temple. I’d never seen him so angry before, but I understood the cause. Not just the fear that young Nancy had been exploited by the man to whom we’d entrusted her care, but also that if her honor had been sullied by a baby begot out of wedlock, it’d sully Tom’s honor, too.

And that was to say nothing of a dead baby!

When Nancy looked to Richard for help, my husband’s rage worsened, his knuckles going white. Tom turned to Richard, too, and I thought he might commit murder then and there.

But just then, Judith gave a bitter laugh. “It’s just slave talk. This is what happens when we hold Negroes in bondage. I imagine this dreadful rumor is being spread by Mr. Harrison’s slaves to embarrass him. Or to urge him to be a better, more benevolent father over them.”

Judith’s explanation had merit. Mr. Harrison
was
known as a cold and heartless slave master. His slaves very well might want to call his honor and authority into question. I glanced at Tom, hoping he’d calm himself. But my husband’s jaw was so tight I thought he’d chip a tooth if he tried to speak.

He didn’t speak. Not a word. Only later that night, on the pillow beside me, did he finally ask, “It’s too preposterous a tale about Nancy to be believed, isn’t it?”

“Entirely preposterous.” Silently, I counted back the months. “Why, in order for it to be true, she’d have got with child when last we visited here!”