America's First Daughter: A Novel (32 page)

That’s why I wasn’t surprised when Papa wrote to tell me that he couldn’t resign for fear his enemies would say he was driven out of office or that Washington had no confidence in him. Or they’d say that he ran from public office like he ran from the British.

No, he couldn’t be seen to leave under a cloud.

I was brooding about this while making bayberry wax candles, Tom’s favorite, because of its pleasant fragrance. It soothed him, he said, and he clearly needed soothing, given the way his boots banged heavily into the cellar kitchen where I prepared the wicks.

Arms crossed over his chest, as if he could scarcely contain his pounding heart, Tom growled out, “Richard dared to show his face at Tuckahoe, the shameless cur!”

Shameless indeed for the seducer to have visited the home of his victim’s father and brothers, I thought. Reckless, even. It wouldn’t have surprised me to hear Colonel Randolph had pulled a pistol on him. “What did he have to say for himself?”

Tom threw out his arms. “Richard asked—nay,
demanded
—that we stop accusing him of despoiling our sister’s purity!”

Let it never be said that the Randolphs—any of them—lacked in boldness.

While I let out a surprised puff of air, Tom ranted on. “Richard first insisted it was all a malicious lie. He claimed Nancy’s virtue is still intact and that if we wanted to preserve her reputation, we ought to all keep quiet and join a slander suit against anyone who’d spread the tale.”

“Perhaps that’s best,” I ventured. “If the family doesn’t rally around your sister and profess a belief in her innocence, Nancy will be ruined.”

“She
is
ruined!” Tom exploded, his voice echoing off the ceiling. “When my father refused, Richard tried his next gambit. He has a letter written by Nancy confessing her pregnancy and naming a dead man as her seducer. Her letter allegedly says Theo was the father, the child was stillborn, and she absolves Richard of all culpability.”

I gasped that Nancy should put such a confession to paper, then flushed to remember that I’d suggested Theo as her seducer in the first place. Poor deluded Nancy must have determined that if she couldn’t save herself she’d save her lover instead. “You have the letter?”

Tom’s hand flexed at his side, then balled in a tight fist. “Rich ard kept it and intends to vindicate himself on a field of honor. He’s called out my brother.”

Icy dread rushed through my veins. “Your brother will
duel
over this?”

“No. My brother won’t give Richard the satisfaction of pretending he’s an equal or a man of honor. But I swear, if Richard Randolph tries to transfer the stigma and evade blame,
I
will wash out the stain on my family honor with his blood.”

Now the icy dread froze inside me, for I’d never heard such a sure promise of violence in my life. And it came from the man that I’d married. The man I’d come to love. Trying to reason with him, I murmured, “But Theo is dead. He’s the one least likely to suffer for it. Maybe you should let him take the blame for the blot on your sister’s reputation.”

Tom slammed his hand to the tabletop. “Richard did it, Patsy! He did everything they’re saying he did. That creature seduced my sister—
both
my sisters. Then he killed an innocent babe. It isn’t gossip. I know it happened. I know it’s all true.”

Alarmed at the state he was working himself into, I put my hand on his cheek. “Tom, if it’s going to destroy your family, what does it matter if it’s true?”

At this question, my husband jerked away, his black eyes burning. “What sort of man do you take me for, Martha Jefferson Randolph?” He so seldom used my proper name that I stiffened. So did he. “If he pushes me to it, I’ll put a bullet in his heart, because I’m a gentleman of Virginia and cannot countenance a lie.”

To this day, I don’t know why his words provoked me so. Perhaps it was that like my mother before me, I’d heard my fill of supposedly high-minded ideals that rocked nations, put unhappy women in their graves, and somehow ended with people I loved being chased or captured to await execution.

Which would be exactly the fate of Richard and Nancy if their own kin wouldn’t come to their aid. Or it could end with a duel and my husband, the father of my babies, shot dead. I wouldn’t have it. I simply wouldn’t have it. “What sort of man do I take you for, Thomas Mann Randolph? Why, I suppose the sort of man who has enough sense to keep his mouth shut even if it costs him some pride.”

In reply, Tom screamed in my face, “You dare speak to me about the cost of pride? We were
there
at Bizarre when my sister’s bastard was conceived! There, where I took Nancy on your say-so. If Richard Randolph isn’t to blame for my sister’s disgrace, then
I
am. And everyone in Virginia seems to know it but you!”

I never saw the blow coming.

My husband’s backhand caught me high on the cheek and pain exploded behind my eye in a burst of tiny fireworks. I don’t remember falling, and for a second or two, I couldn’t fathom how I came to be on the floor. My vision swam with tears and black fuzzy cobwebs of pain.

No one had ever put violent hands on me. Never in my whole life. Not even a nun had so much as laid a strap across my knuckles. I think it was the shock of it, more than the pain, that left me trembling so badly I couldn’t rise to my knees. When I finally looked up, I saw that my husband looked just as shocked.

“Dear God,” Tom whispered, hoarsely, sinking to the floor beside me. He brought his shaking hand to my hair, and I flinched, refusing to let him tilt my face to his view. “
Dear God,
what have I done to you?”

I’m not sure what I’d have said had the door not flown open. But open it did, and there stood Sally, her kerchief tight on her head, her brow furrowing as she took in the scene.

“What do you think you’re doing, Sally?” Tom snapped. “No one called for you.”

She ought to have fled, but when her majestic eyes found me sprawled on the floor, she stubbornly set her jaw. “Thought I heard something fall . . . you all right, Miss Patsy?”

I couldn’t bear for Sally to know how I’d been disciplined by my husband. That he’d struck me, just as I’d once struck her. “Perfectly fine,” I said over the lump in my throat. “These long and clumsy legs of mine get tangled up sometimes. Tripped over that basket.”

If she knew I was lying, she gave nothing away. Pushing past my husband, she said, “I’ll help you up.”

But gently taking my forearms, Tom said, “No need. I have her now.”

I
WAS ALMOST GLAD THAT HE’D HIT ME
.

Glad
because it absolved me of my guilt.

I’d fretted about my father’s reputation, but I’d given too little thought to Tom’s. I deserved to be slapped to my senses. Everyone would have thought so. Besides, the incident seemed to have shaken Tom to his foundations. The man who said his honor wouldn’t countenance a lie hadn’t contradicted the story I told Sally. He’d taken me to our bedroom and suffered no one else to tend me, bringing me a cold wet cloth for my face and my supper tray with a bouquet of springtime flowers from the gardens.

Now he sat at my bedside, kissing my hand again and again, wetting it with his tears. “Forgive me, Patsy, though I don’t deserve it. Please, forgive me for lifting a hand against you. What a wretched man I am. Heartless, just like my father.”

“You aren’t wretched or heartless,” I said softly, reminding myself that I’d no right to speak to him the way I did and that he had every right to correct me for it. “I’ll gladly forgive your lifting a hand against me if you forgive me for having given such offense to have occasioned it.”

His voice was still shaky, his thumb reaching to brush the rising bruise underneath my eye. “There’s nothing you could say to justify my leaving such a mark on you. I’ve hurt you. My adored wife.”

Though my cheek still throbbed, I said, “It’ll heal and be forgotten.”

His expression crumbled again, with anguish and self-loathing. “No. I’ll never forget it. And it’ll never happen again. I’ll never again betray the sacred charge your father put in me in giving you over into my authority. A husband ought to be kind and indulgent with his wife. To protect her from harm. It won’t happen again, Patsy.”

I believed him.

His tortured expression would have been enough to convince me, but his behavior after confirmed it. For Tom never again spoke of dueling with Richard Randolph and resolved to be the peacemaker in his family. He didn’t even rise to the bait when Richard published a screed in the
General Advertiser
proclaiming his innocence and condemning his accusers without naming them. Everyone in Virginia knew he was slinging mud at my husband, but Tom kept his peace, determined not to give himself over to rage again.

And I loved him more for it. Watching him struggle against undeserved abuse from such a villain made me forgive him, truly. But then, I was prone to forgiveness in the aftermath of Richard Randolph’s wretched newspaper notice. Especially since the very same issue announced the execution of the king of France.

In truth, this news was more of a blow than the one my husband had dealt me. I never thought the French would put King Louis to the guillotine. The revolutionary men in my father’s parlor in Paris never even suggested it. Perhaps with France at war with its neighbors, the revolutionaries feared to hold the king captive when his very life encouraged enemies to attack them. And King Louis
was
guilty of all the crimes they accused him of.

But even believing that, the account in the paper made my fingers rise up to my own throat as I fought back the horror of imagining the blade slicing through it. Who were these
Jacobins
who had condemned Lafayette a traitor and killed the king? And would they come next for the friends I left behind in France, like Marie?

Until this news, Papa and I had held in contempt those who complained of the revolution’s excesses. They hadn’t witnessed all we’d witnessed in France. But the men who had seized the reins there now, could they be the same men that Papa and I had known and admired? Surely not.

Papa could explain it, I was sure. And I was near desperate to have him home—especially when he wrote that the news of Richard and Nancy’s disgrace had reached him all the way in Philadelphia.

The damned story would not die. The slaves wouldn’t let it. And every white man in Virginia who ever resented the haughty Randolphs called for justice. By the time April wildflowers were in bloom at Monticello, Richard sat in a Cumberland County jail, accused of fathering a child on his wife’s sister and murdering the babe.

And I was called to testify.

T
HE
C
UMBERLAND
C
OURTHOUSE WAS PACKED
, cheek to jowl, between old wooden walls. “Jefferson’s daughter,” someone said as I entered, and the courtroom erupted, every gawker and gossip-monger in the county craning their necks to get a better look.

“Mrs. Randolph!” someone else cried, but beneath the white satin bow and broad rim of my fashionable hat, I kept my eyes on the magistrates—sixteen men in powdered wigs in whose hands the fate of my family’s reputation now resided.

I made my way through the crowd with the gliding gait I had learned at the Court of Versailles, my skirts swishing, white lace upon blue-ruffled petticoat, while whispers flew from one row of wooden benches to the next.

Is her gown from Paris?

She’s wearing a revolutionary cockade!

What will she say?

I knew the lawyers for the defense. The fire-breathing Patrick Henry and the grim-faced John Marshall. Federalists. Both men nodded to me respectfully, as if they thought I didn’t know them to be my father’s enemies. As if those glory-seeking creatures thought to convince me, for even one moment, that they wouldn’t use whatever happened in the trial to tarnish my father in the papers if they could.

I smiled serenely as I was called to stand beneath the drape of red, white, and blue—the colors of both beloved flags I’d seen waved to champion the cause of freedom. Pushing artfully coiffed copper ringlets of hair from my face, I looked out into a crowd of old Virginia gentry in fine coats and breeches, frontier planters wearing hunting shirts and homespun, and housewives in mobcaps and bonnets.

Some were friendly. Others were eager to see the Randolphs fall.

Offered a leather-bound Bible on which to swear, I was informed that the charge was murder. A fact I knew all too well. Murder of an infant, punishable by death. As my hand hovered above the Bible, I glanced at the accused. My sister-in-law and her vile seducer. Richard looked smug, but Nancy trembled.

Beneath my gloved hand I felt the warmth of the leather. If ever there was a time to repair my breach with God, I thought, it was now. So I swore my sacred and solemn oath to tell the truth.

Then I thought of the promise I had made to my mother to care for my father always. I thought of the sacrifices I’d made toward that end. A stain on Tom would be a stain on my father’s name, too. A stain on all of us.

“It was gum guaiacum,” I said, when put to question, my hand still upon the leather Bible. “That’s what Nancy Randolph had been taking in her tea.”

At the table for the defense, John Marshall didn’t look up; he merely continued to scribble notes of the proceedings. His cocounsel, Patrick Henry, however, threw me a look that blazed with surprise.

Coming closer, Mr. Henry asked, “How could you
possibly
know this, Miss Jefferson?”

“Mrs. Randolph,” I corrected. “I’m a married woman now.”

He hadn’t called me to testify at this hearing, after all, because he suspected I knew anything material. I hadn’t been anywhere near the Harrison place when the wicked deed was allegedly done. I’d already told him this before the hearing, but he’d insisted on calling me anyway. These two Federalist lawyers had called me to perform at this spectacle for one reason, and one reason only—to embarrass my father. To connect the Jefferson name to this scandal by whatever means necessary, even while arguing on behalf of my Randolph kin.

They thought they were so clever. They thought they knew my father’s weak spots. Maybe they did. But they didn’t know me or mine. “You’re asking how I know Nancy Randolph took gum guaiacum?”

I let my eyes slide past the old firebrand to settle upon my pale and trembling sister-in-law and the devil that brought us all to this state. Not Richard—though he, too, was a villain—but Colonel Randolph, whose indifference to his children had sent them fleeing his house. There the old buzzard stood, gouty and in ill health, doing nothing whatsoever to save his own daughter’s life. And standing next to him was Gabriella Harvie, with a sweet smile on her face, as if she weren’t half to blame for driving her stepdaughter to such peril.

Richard stood accused, but Nancy’s life was at stake, too. Popular sentiment ran so strongly against them that the prisoner had to be taken to the jail under heavy guard. If this hearing went badly, he’d face the gallows, because murder was a capital offense. Adultery, fornication, incest, and bastardy were crimes, too, but I doubted anyone could remember the last time someone was prosecuted for those, even here in Virginia. No, it was the death of the baby that’d put Richard in his grave, and Nancy thereafter—for
she’d
be charged with infanticide, the only crime for which women were legally presumed guilty, rather than innocent.

Knowing this, I steeled myself. I made sure not to look at my tall, beautiful, but temperamental husband. And though each false word bit at the edge of my tongue with the sharp conviction of the guillotine, I let the blade fly. “The reason I know Nancy Randolph took gum guaiacum . . . is because I gave it to her.”

A collective intake of breath punctuated a chorus of shocked murmurs that echoed from one side of the courtroom to the other. All sixteen magistrates leaned in closer to hear my words, the curls of their powdered wigs bobbing as they stared. Even the unflappable John Marshall looked up from his scroll, one eye twitching.

Patrick Henry’s jowls reddened. “You mean to say—do you mean to say—Miss Jefferson—”

“Mrs. Randolph.”

The fire breather advanced. “Are you telling this court that you provided an
abortifacient
to your sister-in-law?”

Without lowering my gaze, I nodded. “Yes, I did.”

The prosecutor was suddenly on his feet. “Do you know what you’re saying, woman? It is your testimony that you knowingly aided and abetted Nancy Randolph in ridding herself of a bastard child by giving her a dangerous medicine to produce an abortion?”

Inside, I was all atremble, but I somehow kept my voice steady and calm.
You
’re a Jefferson,
I thought, as if to spite Colonel Randolph.
Sunny disposition, but ice water in your veins
. “No sir, I’m not confessing to a crime. In truth, I hadn’t the slightest notion that Nancy could’ve been with child, though, obviously, I suspect it now.”

At my words, Patrick Henry couldn’t recover swiftly enough. It was John Marshall whose cool question cut through the crowded courtroom. “If you had no notion that Nancy Randolph might be with child, why did you supply her with the gum?”

That was the question I’d needed someone to ask, and I wanted to pat Mr. Marshall on the head like a good dog for asking it. “I gave her the gum because I know it is an excellent medicine for colic. So when my sister-in-law complained of colic—you know, Nancy has been afflicted with colic as long as I’ve known her—”

The judges looked impatient with my aside, but I saw hatted heads nod amongst the spectators. I’d laid my ground over a hundred teacups these past weeks, sighing of Nancy’s delicate stomach. Was there a soul in Virginia who wouldn’t swear she’d always had colic? Not after the seeds I’d sewn.

“She’s delicate that way,” I said. “It runs in the family. So when I visited a few weeks before the incident, I added some of the resin to her tea and encouraged her to avail herself of it whenever she felt her pains coming on.”

Nancy went even paler at my story, shock and confusion warring in her expression. Meanwhile, Mr. Marshall was quick to seize upon my testimony. “Did the defendant, Richard Randolph, know that you provided such medicine to the women in his household?”

I gave a disdainful sniff. “Womanly troubles are hardly the sort of thing a gentlewoman of Virginia discusses with menfolk . . . unless, of course, she’s dragged from hearth and home to talk about it before the whole county.”

I heard a chuckle in the audience, followed by another. I’d been a little tart, but not
too
tart. They were charmed by me, I hoped.

Marshall leaned forward. “Is that why you didn’t mention it before now?”

Acutely aware that my husband was in this courtroom, no doubt burning a hole in me with his dark eyes, I replied, “I hadn’t thought of it before now. I came here believing the accusation was against
Richard
for some criminal mischief. But when I heard witnesses blaming Nancy for taking an elixir, that’s when I remembered the gum.”

I don’t think I fooled the owlish Mr. Marshall, but he wasn’t about to lose a case by contradicting me. I’d given him the bait. Now it was up to the illustrious lawyers for the defense. I’d provided all the evidence they should need to persuade the magistrates that even if Nancy had been delivered of a child, it was likely stillborn—its death an accident, not murder.

But would anyone believe me?

“
N
OT GUILTY
,”
CAME THE VERDICT
.

Richard let out a triumphant cry, while Nancy’s knees nearly buckled underneath her. Some people cried, “Shame, shame!” Not at Richard, but at his accusers, many of whom were slaves, forbidden from testifying at all.

Given the glee with which Richard celebrated the verdict, hooting with no sense of decorum, he seemed to believe himself vindicated. His honor restored.

I knew better.

In the end, he’d been saved by women. By Nancy’s willingness to sacrifice her own honor by writing that letter, by my willingness to lie, and even by his poor betrayed wife.

Judy had stayed by his side, insisting to the court that her husband and her sister were innocent. What other option did she have? She couldn’t let him die. Neither could she leave him and go back to her father, even if Colonel Randolph would’ve had her back. She was Richard Randolph’s wife and could never be separated from him. His fate was her fate. If he was ruined, so was she. So if she had to
pretend
her husband had no carnal knowledge of her sister, then that’s what she’d do.

I felt so sorry for Judy, betrayed once already by her husband and her own sister. Sorrier, still, when Richard insisted that Nancy return with them to Bizarre. For a moment I feared that my husband would rush upon Nancy and tear her away from her lover. Or, much worse, that he’d descend upon Richard and dash his head open on the cobblestones. But in spite of all the rage brewing in him, my husband kept his silence, a thing more galling to him than perhaps any other indignity of his life.

And I was so unutterably proud of him, though I remained more than a little frightened of his reaction to what I’d done. Nancy never thanked me for it. Never spared me a glance. I supposed it was because she knew perfectly well the judgment she’d see in my eyes—for she’d already seen it, that night in the darkness of Bizarre’s kitchen. For my husband’s sake, I’d saved her life, but I knew they were guilty. I knew not only that they were guilty, but also that only a small part of the world would be influenced by the decision of the court.

Nevertheless, we watched Tom’s disgraced sister climb into Richard’s phaeton and drive off with him, either too stupid, or too deluded, to realize that she ought to be chastened to her soul by the entire sordid debacle.

In our carriage back home, Tom quietly said, “They’d have strung my sister up.”

“Yes,” I replied, nervously wetting my lips.

His gaze burned into the side of my face. “They would’ve strung her up—if not for you.”

“Yes,” I said, again, swallowing hard.

This dark man of savage impulses stared so hard I felt on the precipice of something awful. But then his voice lowered to a whisper. “I suppose, then, it’s good you remembered the gum.”

I turned to him but wasn’t able to meet his eyes. “I wish I’d remembered it sooner.”

He tilted his dark head of hair against the cushion as we rattled down the road. He was tired, wrung out from the whole ordeal. But just when I thought he’d fallen asleep, he said, “I pray I never hear another word about it.”

A
T SUMMER’S END,
Papa burst in the front door of Monticello, my little sister all but yipping at his heels with the dogs she’d left behind. After patting their ears and kissing their heads, Polly ran to me, threw her arms around my waist, and hugged me so tight I could scarcely breathe.