America's First Daughter: A Novel (44 page)

Nancy drew back, pale as the petticoat on the line. “I thought—I thought you knew the truth, Patsy. I thought that’s why, at trial . . . that’s why you said . . .” My blood ran even colder at the thought of her lying to me again after all these years. So I said nothing. But Nancy sputtered, “You think I’m guilty. You think I killed my baby. But if you believed I was guilty, then why—”

“I didn’t want to see you hanged,” I said, very quietly.

Nancy let out a cry, as disconsolate as if I’d turned against her before the entire tribunal. “You don’t understand, Patsy. I wanted to confess from the start, but Richard wouldn’t let me. He wanted to protect me. It’s true that I surrendered my virtue to the man I loved. It’s true. But I did nothing to harm the child, and neither did Richard. I swear it.”

“Do you forget that I saw the herbs?”

Nancy blinked. “You can’t think they were mine! It was always Judith who had my mother’s way in the garden. I was never any good with herbs.” That was true, and the whole world realigned under my feet as I remembered it. Tears spilled over Nancy’s cheeks, her lips trembling. “Judith notices everything. Always has. She knew I was pregnant before I did. She put the gum in my tea. I didn’t know what I was drinking, Patsy.”

Had Judith noticed—from the start—her husband’s attraction to her sister? Had she given her sister the herbs to be rid of her husband’s bastard?

As I asked myself these questions, Nancy was near hysterical, more than a decade’s worth of anguish bubbling to the surface. “When you testified that you gave me the gum for an upset stomach, I thought it was because you didn’t want anyone to know what Judith had done.”

In shock, the freshly laundered undergarment fell from my grasp into the dirt, but I didn’t stoop to retrieve it. Instead, I shivered, wondering if I’d somehow saved the wrong sister from the gallows. “But she defended you, Nancy. She defended both of you.”

“How else was she to cover up the crime of killing my baby?” Nancy asked. “Judy wanted both of us to pay. Me and Richard, both. You have no idea what it was like returning to that house. Richard finally told her he intended to divorce her. And lo and behold, two days later he was dead of cramps in his stomach. But John blames
me
for bringing disgrace on the family, and I think she has him convinced that if Richard was poisoned it was my doing.”

Richard Randolph’s death had been strange. But then, everything about the people of Bizarre plantation specifically, and Tom’s family generally, was strange. Still, I couldn’t wrap my mind around it. “What you’re saying, Nancy! If you suspect these things of your own sister, why did you stay with her at Bizarre all this time?”

Nancy gave a bitter laugh. “I’m a spinster sister with a blackened name. I had nowhere else to go. The Harvies would never have me at Tuckahoe. I knew you’d never have me in your household. Besides, how was I to leave until one of my brothers came for me? Judith reads all my letters coming or going. No one visits Bizarre since the scandal. Even those willing to associate with me, Judith keeps away, claiming pecuniary embarrassment. Every night, Judith takes out her Bible and makes me pray forgiveness for every little gift or kindness Richard ever bestowed on me. She employs me with drudgery every day and locks me in my bedroom at night. I’ve been so guilt ridden, I could hardly complain. I felt . . . I felt as if I deserved it. Especially since now I’m nothing but an object of charity.”

I didn’t want to believe her. I didn’t want to believe a word. Yet, it had the ring of truth to it. And tenderness for Nancy stole over me at the thought she’d been silently suffering. We’d been taking care of Tom’s younger sisters for years and I didn’t know how we’d afford another, or how our reputation would endure the scandal, but I said, “Stay here for a spell, Nancy.”

Smearing tears with the back of her hands, Nancy said, “You can’t mean it.”

“I do.”

It took her a moment to believe me. When she did, she threw her arms around my neck. “You’re so kind. My brother is so fortunate to have you for a wife. Never did there exist a more excellent woman! And you won’t be sorry. I’ll be a helper for you. And a sister in truth. A new sister for the one you lost.”

Washington, 1 July 1805

From Thomas Jefferson to Robert Smith, United States Secretary of the Navy

You will perceive that I plead guilty to one of their charges, that when young and single I offered love to a handsome lady. I acknowledge its incorrectness; it is the only truth among all their allegations against me.

T
HIS LETTER IS A DENIAL OF
S
ALLY
. Or at least, it will be read as one. Which is why I don’t burn it, even though it contains an admission of dishonor.

The handsome lady my father attempted to seduce was Mrs. Walker. And I learned of the incident in the spring of 1805, when, after having been reelected to the presidency, my father sent to me at Edgehill a carefully sealed letter in the care of my husband, with instructions that it should be delivered directly into my hands, and shown to no other.

I’d never received such a mysterious letter, folded quite small, heavy with its wax seal. And it was a letter that struck terror into my heart, because it was a message of love and repentance . . . and farewell.

“Get me a horse,” I said to the nearest servant, still clutching the letter as I left my babies in their beds and rushed out of the house. I was up and into a saddle without so much as a cloak before Tom could stop me.

“What the devil are you doing?” he shouted after me. “Patsy, you can’t go riding off into the night. It’s dusk. I’ll take you to your father in the morning.”

“Monticello is only a few miles,” I said, kicking my heels into the horse’s side. Tom shouted for his own horse as I galloped off, but I never looked back. Instead, I rode with the sureness of the trained horsewoman I’d nearly forgotten I had inside me, racing up Papa’s mountain like Jack Jouett did in raising the alarm that the British were coming. Breathless by the time I swung down in front of my father’s house and still stinging from the lash of tree branches, I hurried into the entryway. “Sally?” I called, but heard no answer. And in a place like Monticello, where it was never quiet, I found myself instantly alarmed.

I found Papa—secretly returned from Washington City—alone at his table with a glass of sherry, perusing a box of curiosities from Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, whom he’d sent on a grand expedition. Inside the chest were the preserved skeletons of all manner of creatures. Wolves, weasels, and elk. And I had a sudden memory of my father in his much younger days, feverishly scribbling down the correct way to preserve dead birds.

“Patsy.” He shook his head, as if he wished I hadn’t come.

I fought for both breath and composure. “Papa. You can’t just send me a letter like that and—”

“Spoken words fail me where my pen rarely does.”

I held the back of a gilded chair for steadiness. “You cannot mean to fight a duel.”

Just the summer before, my father’s old nemesis had died in a duel. Alexander Hamilton was dead before the age of fifty, and it was my father’s vice president who killed him.

Hamilton—whose reputation had also been sullied by the revelation of an affair with a married woman—had tangled with Aaron Burr, who demanded satisfaction upon a field of honor. And as if seeking an end to his life, Hamilton dueled upon the very same spot where his son had died, using the very same pis tols. Blood for reputation. Blood for honor. And now my father intended to follow in his footsteps. “You’re the president of the United States. Surely you don’t intend to dignify—”

“It’s true, Patsy,” my father broke in. “I did try to seduce Mr. Walker’s wife. It happened before you were born or conceived. Before your mother. I regret that you should have to know the truth of it.”

After all the other truths to which I was privy, did he really think
this
truth would matter to me? He clearly condemned himself, because his posture was stiff, tortured, and guilty indeed. Guiltier, I think, than when I asked him to deny Sally Hemings. He believed he had a right to his relationship with Sally. In some ways, he’d become defiant about it—allowing her to name their new baby James Madison Hemings, after both her beloved brother and my father’s closest political ally.

If Papa felt shame for Sally anymore, he never showed it. But this matter with Mrs. Walker was something else altogether because he had lied to me. He had told me that his quarrel with the Walkers had arisen over money matters, a thing I had repeated, unwittingly fanning the flames of the scandal. Now he stood shamed for that, and I could see, in the bleakness of his eyes, that he feared an irreparable breach between us.

Poor Papa. Didn’t he know that a breach between us was not possible?

Taking a deep breath, I pulled the crinkled letter from the bosom of my dress where I’d tucked it away. “What matter can it possibly make that it’s true? I’m happy to throw your confession on the fire and forget such an incident. As you should.”

Papa gave a slight shake of his head. “For years, I’ve tried to suppress the stories. Alas, they’re in the papers now, saying I made a cuckold of Mr. Walker. He’s demanding satisfaction.”

What a farce to imagine my elderly father taking up his pistols to duel with the elderly Mr. Walker over a matter nearly forty years in the past. “Let Mr. Walker demand satisfaction. You don’t have to give it to him.”

My father downed his sherry in one gulp—something I’d never seen him do before. “Mr. Madison has already attempted to negotiate a peaceful resolution. I’m afraid it cannot be escaped this time.”

This was madness. We lived in a world where a sitting vice president had murdered the former secretary of the treasury. That my father should open himself up to die the same way, shot over some trivial matter—was tempting fate’s sense of irony.

But I had judged Alexander Hamilton to be an intemperate man. My father was, in almost all matters, a man of cool reason. How could he let himself be goaded to such foolishness? Perhaps he didn’t require much goading. Once, I’d put myself between him and his pistols. Perhaps now that my sister was dead, he was still, after all this time, trying to keep an appointment with them.

Dragging a chair close to my father, I collapsed into it, then took his aging hand in mine—the one that had been broken and disfigured for foolishness in France over a different married woman. “Papa, I’ll never let you do this thing.”

His chin bobbed up. He was the president. The most powerful man in the country, and a master of his own destiny. Who could stop him from doing anything? Certainly, it wasn’t the place of a daughter to tell a father what he must or must not do. But it was my place. It had always been my place to pull him back from the abyss.

Perhaps he knew it, because his expression crumbled. “Oh, Patsy.”

“You wrote to me because you knew I’d never let you duel Mr. Walker. So what does he want other than your blood?”

My father’s shoulders rounded and drooped. “He wants me to publicly admit my fault and declare his wife innocent—which she was. She rebuffed my advances. The wrongdoing was entirely mine.”

“Perhaps then, you ought to confess it.” I’d advised him to deny Sally Hemings, but Mrs. Walker was a white woman, and the circumstances were not ongoing. An appeal to pragmatism was unlikely to move him, given his guilty heart, so I argued, “Admit it for Mrs. Walker’s sake. If she’s innocent, a gentleman would do no less than clear her name.”

His gnarled fingers tightened on mine, but he didn’t answer.

“That will have to be enough for Mr. Walker, Papa. Because dueling isn’t for fathers or for those charged with other great moral concerns. Do you remember in Paris how you pleaded with me to choose you over a life in the nunnery, though I felt called by God?”

He nodded, made sheepish by the reminder.

“Well, you’re only being called by Mr. Walker.”

My father sputtered in soft laughter, and brought my hand to his lips to kiss. “He’s one of a thousand hounds baying for my blood.” He still felt besieged. He had virulent enemies in Congress, not least of whom was the pretentiously styled
Randolph of Roanoke
. “I need you there with me, Patsy. In Washington City. I hesitate to ask it of you, because I know you’ve long wished that I wouldn’t seek public office . . . but I need you with me.”

“You must never hesitate to ask anything of me, Papa,” I said, making my mind up at once.
Your father needs a first lady,
Dolley Madison had once said to me. I hadn’t wanted to hear it. I’d spent half my life resenting my father’s political career. Why, I hadn’t even congratulated him when he was elected to the presidency.

Some part of my resentment was worry for how public service had dwindled our family fortune. Another part was the sullen memory of a young girl in France whose father answered her every political inquiry with silence. But I was no longer a girl, and he’d never dream of discouraging my political curiosity now; if anything, he filled his letters to me with all the news of the day to ensure I was informed.

My father had changed, and so must I.

My mother, in her final breaths, had tried to make me understand that my father was a great man. But he might not be remembered as one if his presidency failed. I couldn’t let it fail— not if everything my family had suffered and sacrificed were to mean something in the end.

Papa and I were seated like that, close and affectionate, when Tom burst in the door. “Martha!” Tom cried, fixing me with a glower. Then, to my father, he said, “She rode out like a madwoman before I could stop her.”

“Just in time to pull me back from the edge,” Papa murmured.

I’d always done it and I always would.

T
OM DIDN’T WANT ME TO GO TO
W
ASHINGTON
C
ITY
.

He had good reason, in that our financial situation was bleak. As a congressman, Tom only made six dollars a day, and saved on expenses only by living in the President’s House with my father and Jack Eppes. Meanwhile, the Hessian fly had come to Virginia and laid waste to our wheat, leaving us nothing to sell, and scarcely enough to make bread or lay grain away to feed us for the year. Tom’s sister Jenny found an upright man to marry, which meant my husband felt honor bound to pay an enormous dowry.

And because Tom wasn’t willing to sell Varina, our creditors were at the door. Add the fact that I was pregnant again, and my husband had good reason to worry about the expense of bringing his growing family to Washington City.

By this time, baby Mary was talking. Six-year-old Cornelia was already an artist with her pencils. Whip-smart Ellen had moved on from Latin to debating with her grandpapa. Jeff was old enough to run errands but not yet strong enough to be a real help to his father. And my pretty Ann was now a lady of fourteen, of age to come out into society.

They were growing up fast—faster than we could keep them clothed, in truth. Certainly not in a style befitting their status as the president’s grandchildren. But to have me near, my father insisted on taking upon himself the entire expense of our trip.

He sent half a dozen pairs of shoes for Ann. He had Dolley buy me hats and dresses and wigs for my hair. Tom didn’t like it and took my father’s every generous gesture as a comment on his own inability to provide for his family in wealth and luxury. But I was overjoyed when he finally consented. “Thank you, Tom. It’s going to mean so much to my father.”

“I’m sure it will,” he said, digging his hands down into his pockets. “But that’s not why I’m allowing it. I’m taking you with me to Washington City because when your sister died, I cursed myself a thousand times, knowing that it could’ve been you.” He gave an emphatic, pained shudder, repeating, “It could’ve been
you
. Maybe Jack Eppes can smile and laugh again, now that his wife is more than a year in the ground. But that’s not the man I am. If I should lose you, Patsy, it would destroy me. So I’ll keep you with me in Washington City, and watch over you in your pregnancy, even if it’s financially unwise. Even if it should bankrupt us.”

He said all this with his head hanging down, as if it unmanned him shamefully to confess such tender sentiments, but I was deeply moved. I supposed the same thing in his nature that made him so temperamental and morose was what let him pour out his heart in such a way. So I kissed his cheeks, one side, then the other, finishing with a tender kiss to his lips that I hoped might tell him how my heart swelled to know his true feelings.

Then I set out that autumn, six months pregnant, with all my children crowded together in a carriage, making our way slowly over bumpy roads to Washington City.

“Look at the capitol building,” Ellen said, wrestling Cornelia to see out the window.

“One day it will have a great dome atop it. Your grandfather designed this city, you know,” I told my girls, and watched their eyes widen. Even now when I look at the great capital Washington has become, I see the bones of it as my father laid them. And I marvel. But Jeff wasn’t as impressed as his sisters by his grandfather’s handiwork—he was merely disappointed that the Mammoth Cheese no longer occupied the downstairs of the President’s House. Fortunately, my son gorged his curiosity on Papa’s new camera obscura, which made silhouettes, and the collection of fossil bones my father had all in one room, displaying the artifacts of the America he was building and exploring.