America's First Daughter: A Novel (31 page)

Besides, I couldn’t imagine how any woman could hide a pregnancy. Sally hadn’t been able to hide it. When I was fat with my own two babies, there wasn’t a person alive I could’ve fooled. And even if Nancy could hide such a thing, I couldn’t imagine anyone killing a baby. Certainly not my own kin.

“Don’t think on it another moment, Tom. We’ll put it out of our heads,” I said, stroking his arm.

That’s precisely what I aimed to do. Especially since I was nursing the newborn and worrying for my daughter, whose tummy troubles brought her whimpering into our bed in the wee hours of the morning. Laying her against the warmth of her father’s strong shoulder, I took a candle from the bedside and padded barefoot down the stairs to search out some peppermint for her to gnaw on.

The kitchen at Bizarre was much the same as I’d left it, but when I opened the canister where I expected to find peppermint, I found something else. With a mounting sense of dread, I recognized it as gum guaiacum—the very thing Judith once said could get rid of an unwanted child.

I stood there, staring into the depths of that shadowy canister, trying to deny the truth of what I was seeing. Then a question came out of the dark. “What are you looking for, Patsy?” Nancy’s sharp profile emerged from the shadows, startling me. And the sight of her in her nightclothes, hair unkempt, as if she’d just tumbled from a man’s bed, made my heart hard.

Rounding on her, I whispered, “Who was it? Who was the father?”

Nancy turned so that her face fell into the shadows. “I don’t know what you’re saying.”

I brought the candle closer, wanting to see the truth in her eyes. “Was it Theo, God rest his soul?” It couldn’t have been freakishly boyish John, whose impotence made it impossible. That left Theo as the least horrifying possibility. If spirited young Nancy had fallen in love with sickly Theo . . . if he’d meant to marry her but died before he could . . .

“There was no baby,” Nancy hissed, still turned away.

I wanted to believe her, truly I did. But if she was telling the truth, why couldn’t she meet my eyes? “Then it was Richard?” I asked, appalled. Their union would be considered not merely adulterous but also
incestuous
.

Still, there was a worse possibility—one that might explain the determination of slaves to spread the gossip even under threat of their master’s whip. I took another step closer, my own voice trembling. “Or was it a Negro slave?”

Nancy’s jaw snapped shut, and she finally dared to meet my eyes, hers burning like coals. “I said there was no baby, Patsy. Do you hear me?
There was no baby!
”

I didn’t know if she was lying to me or lying to herself.

I only knew she was lying.

Every hair lifted on the nape of my neck at her desperation, hoping it was only the kind of desperation that would drive a terrified, unmarried girl to abort her baby and not the kind that might allow her lover to chop up that baby once it was born. “Oh, Nancy,” I said, nearing tears for the dead child and the pain this would cause her family—and how it would destroy my husband.

She grabbed my arm like a drowning woman. “Say you hear me. There never was a baby.”

There never was a baby.
Just like my father had never wanted to kill himself, never taken a married woman as his lover, and never conceived a child with Sally Hemings.

“I hear you, Nancy,” I said, bitterly. “I hear you.”

Philadelphia, 12 November 1792

From Thomas Jefferson to Martha Jefferson Randolph

I have nothing to tell you but that I love you dearly, and your dear connections, that I am well, as is Maria. I hope your little one has felt no inconvenience from the journey, that Ann is quite recovered, and Mr. Randolph’s health good. Yours is so firm, that I am less apt to apprehend for you: Still, however, take care of your good health, and of your affection to me, which is the solace of my life.

W
ANTING TO PROTECT MY
HUSBAND’S
GOOD HEALTH
, I said nothing to him about the gum guaiacum or my confrontation with his sister. It wouldn’t have done him any good, and may have done a great deal of harm.

If it became known that Nancy had been pregnant, the prospects of her entire life would be forever diminished. She’d find it nearly impossible to secure a husband. She’d become a spinster, forever a financial burden on the family without any place to call her own. So, I told myself to be kind to Nancy, that she’d been preyed upon by a man who ought to have known better. That she was a victim of error if not slander, and it’d be best to carry her away from here.

We’d take Nancy with us. Maybe to Charlottesville, where we could marry her quickly before the rumor spread. But Nancy would have none of it. “If I go, it’ll only feed the gossip.”

“Nonsense,” I said, folding my own clothes for the trunk as my maid was nowhere to be found. “No one in Albemarle will have heard about this.”

I was determined to drag Nancy away if necessary, but Judith surprised me by making herself the most formidable obstacle to my plans. She went directly to my husband and said, “If you take Nancy, it’ll reflect poorly on Richard. It’ll look as though you don’t trust your own brother-in-law.”

Knowing Richard had seduced Judith before their marriage, I guessed my husband wouldn’t find this argument compelling. Tom snapped, “How can it be unmannerly to take my own sister home with me?”

Then Richard’s brother John intervened. “Now
Toooom,
” he drawled, smoothly stretching out his name. “If you take Nancy, it’ll look as if you don’t believe her innocence.” If there was anyone at Bizarre we were certain hadn’t seduced Nancy, it was John. Stunted but more effusive than a Frenchman, he was as persuasive as a serpent in the Garden of Eden, so we left Nancy there.

We were quiet on the way home, but for little Ann, whimpering at every bump in the road, unable to keep down her breakfast of milk-soaked biscuit. The journey should’ve only taken hours, but with our girl spitting up and our boy fussing at my breast, it seemed like days. I was already weary when we rolled up to the mountaintop and saw Sally on the front portico, her amber eyes intent on me.

“Miss Patsy,” she said with an urgency that told me she’d been waiting. Though every other slave on the plantation now called me
Mistress Randolph,
Sally rarely did, either a sign of her intimacy with me or our complicated history. Waiting until Tom had gone in the house with the babies, she rushed up to me. “There’s a rumor in Charlottesville about your Randolph kin—about Miss Nancy.”

That the news had traveled so far, so fast, surprised me. But it shouldn’t have. In slave society, families on one plantation almost always had kin on another. Slaves hired out, they traveled as messengers, worked as boatmen and coach drivers, and saw one another at church. If they wanted to get word to each other, they could. What should have surprised me was the insistence of the slaves telling this tale, even under threat of their master’s whip.

With a weary sigh, I nodded. “We’ve heard it, Sally. It’s just Mr. Harrison’s people telling a malicious story and they’ll be punished for spreading it.”

Sally gave a quick shake of her head, her bronze fingers tightening into fists. “At least twelve of Mr. Harrison’s people claim to know something of it personally. Maids saw Miss Nancy naked and big with child. Some heard her scream at night. Some saw Richard Randolph go into her room. And there’s a bloodstained wood shingle.”

So Richard had apparently taken no care to shield his sins from their eyes. Such indiscretion might be that of a man who wished to help his sister-in-law in need. Or in a man who was guilty.

Either way, it was the act of a fool.

Sally leaned in. “White folk are talking, too. Mr. Page says he’s seen Richard Randolph’s familiarity with Miss Nancy, kissing and hugging on her. Nancy’s aunt says she saw her in a state of undress . . . that she
was
with child. And the white housekeeper saw bloody sheets the next day.”

White witnesses. That changed absolutely everything. I glanced nervously at the house, hoping Tom was well out of earshot.

Sally lowered her voice to a whisper. “I heard it at Mr. Bell’s store. My sister Mary thought it might touch on us, here at Monticello, given that Miss Nancy stayed here for a time. And given what people are saying about your father.”

That stopped me cold. “What are people saying about Papa?”

Sally’s pretty dark lashes swept low. “You haven’t seen the gazettes?”

Most of the Hemingses could read and write, though how they’d learned, I’d never asked. Still, it surprised me a little that they’d been following matters in the papers. “Let me see them.”

“We haven’t any papers here,” Sally said. “They’re all down at Mr. Bell’s store. But it’s dreadful. In the press, Master Jefferson is being attacked for everything from intrigue to dishonor.”

Fury washed through me. I was already road weary and worried for my husband’s state. And now to learn Papa had been attacked! Despite my exhaustion, I got back in the carriage and summoned Sally to follow, telling the driver, “To Charlottesville, straightaway.”

M
R.
B
ELL’S STORE
stood on the corner of Main Street. Boxes and barrels crowded together in the middle of the wood plank floor while tins and glass bottles and blue-painted plates lined the shelves. The scent of lavender wafted down from baskets hanging on the eaves overhead so that, tall as I was, I had to stoop to get to the counter where Mary Hemings busied herself boxing up a pipe for a customer, who replied, “Thank you, Mrs. Bell.”

Mary wasn’t Mr. Bell’s wife, but given the way Thomas Bell smiled at her from where he stacked goods on a high shelf, he was plainly smitten. Everyone in Charlottesville seemed willing to accept the arrangement, and I was happy to do the same.

Sally sorted through stacks of pamphlets and pulled free some copies of the
Gazette of the United States
. Handing them to me, she warned, “It’ll sicken you.”

Nevertheless, I began flipping through the pages of papers published this past summer and fall. My eyes landed on one passage right away.

Cautious and shy, wrapped up in impenetrable silence and mystery, seated on his pivot chair, Mr. Jefferson is involved in political deception. . . .

I’d seldom heard a word of censure against my father. He’d been, here in America and in France, idolized by nearly everyone. I suppose that’s why my cheeks stung to read such pointed criticism. Rifling through pages so violently I might’ve torn them, I found another attack.

Had an inquisitive mind sought evidence of Mr. Jefferson’s abilities as a statesman, he’d have found the confusions in France. As a warrior, to his exploits at Monticello. As a mathematician, to his whirligig chair.

I frowned anew that anyone might blame the “confusions” in France upon Papa and not the royalists who bankrupted their country and left the peasants to starve. It embittered me, too, that we were to still suffer censure for our late-night flight from Monticello—where I suppose they believed we ought to have brandished pistols and pitchforks against the trained British dragoons, women and children, and all.

And what was their obsession with my father’s chair?

As a philosopher, his discovery of the inferiority of blacks to whites, because they’re unsavory and secrete more by the kidneys.

There I stopped, remembering that Sally had brought this to my attention. Perhaps if I’d not come of age in France, I wouldn’t have felt such an acute shame, but I couldn’t look at either Sally or Mary. I could only whisper, “Who wrote this? Do we know these men?”

Mr. Bell stepped down off his ladder. “Some say it’s the secretary of the treasury using different names.” Given all my father had said of Mr. Hamilton, I believed it. “But plenty of others agree with him. Not just northerners either. John Marshall is leading the Federalists here in Virginia, and now Patrick Henry is going over to that side, too.”

Patrick Henry. The very man who cried
give me liberty or give me death,
had spread the story of my father’s supposed cowardice in the face of British soldiers. Though I had only childhood memories of the famous orator, I’d long disliked Patrick Henry as my father’s political enemy. Now my anger was fueled anew.

“They’re calling on your father to resign,” Sally said, pulling me from my bitter thoughts. “They’re digging for an excuse, and the gossip about your kin—”

“Nancy Randolph hasn’t been under my father’s roof in nearly two years!” Quickly, I brought my fingers to my lips, as if to recall what I’d said, for it was a tacit admission that I believed my sister-in-law guilty.

Fortunately, if the Hemingses knew anything, it was discretion. Clutching one of the screeds against my father, Sally replied, “It doesn’t seem as if Federalist writers care much for facts or fairness.”

No, they didn’t. And if these men could work themselves up into such a furor over my father’s
chair,
what would they make of kin who lived in incestuous and adulterous union, and murdered a baby? Still, I tried to persuade myself that the scandal wouldn’t touch my family. “Surely, no one could think my father would tolerate the debauching. . . .”

There I trailed off. I couldn’t pretend in front of the Hemingses—no matter how discreet they might be—that nothing improper ever took place under my father’s roof.

For Sally Hemings was proof that, in fact, it did.

H
ONOR
.
I
N
V
IRGINIA
it wasn’t merely a matter of masculine pride—it was a matter of survival. Every loan for the farm, every advance of credit for seeds and foodstuffs, every public office and proposal of marriage depended on honor.

Men would fight and die for it.

And women would lie for it.

Which is why, whenever asked about the rumors about Nancy and Richard—as I was, more and more often that spring—I dismissed it as an absurd story having no merit.

If only others had done the same.

When Tom learned there were white witnesses, he flew into a rage that had him slamming about the house, heaping undeserved abuse on every servant he passed. And whenever he heard Richard’s name, he cursed in the most obscene manner possible. Egged on by his younger brother, Tom determined to ride out and rescue Nancy from the clutches of her seducer, who must be made to confess and suffer the loss of his honor.

Tom said it often, and to everyone who’d listen, which struck me as madness, for it fueled the gossip.

But then, the entire
world
had gone mad.

The new revolutionary government in France had charged Lafayette with treason. A galling notion—the very
idea
of Lafayette being a traitor to the revolution he helped start was an unjust, enraging indignity! More ridiculous and horrifying was that in attempting to escape arrest, Lafayette had been caught by counterrevolutionary forces, who
also
deemed him a traitor.

He was, as of the last news we had, in a dungeon awaiting execution.

Even consumed at Monticello with chores, child rearing, and family scandal, I couldn’t seem to shake the violence this news did to my faith in the revolution. What knaves had come to power in France that they could turn on Lafayette?

Perhaps the same sort of knaves who hounded my father in the papers, savaging his ethics, and twisting every word that flowed from his pen . . .