America's First Daughter: A Novel (50 page)

“Why would you say such a thing?” I offered my arms, and when she came to me, I removed her cap and stroked her dark hair.

Cornelia cried, “How do you remember the numberless variety of orders and directions for the servants? I’m so tired of putting away the books and other things that seem to get everywhere all the time.”

“It becomes routine,” I assured her, knowing she longed to trade the keys and the cookbooks for her drawing paper and pencils. “You’ll get better at it.”

“Father doesn’t think so,” she said, wiping her eyes and reaching into her apron for a scrap of paper written in Tom’s hand. I worried that he’d written a stern reprimand, but instead, it was a poem about her housekeeping.

While frugal Miss Mary kept the stores of the House,

Not a rat could be seen, never heard was a mouse,

Not a crumb was let fall,

In kitchen or Hall:

For no one could spare one crumb from his slice

The rations were issued by measure so nice

But when spring arrived to soften the air,

Cornelia succeeded to better the fare,

Oh! The boys were so glad,

And the Cooks were so sad,

Now puddings and pies every day will be made,

Not once in a month just to keep up the trade.

It was such gentle teasing from Tom—and so unusually good-humored—that I laughed. But Cornelia wept inconsolably until Tom came to comfort her. Speaking soft words before sending her off, Tom closed the door and pulled a chair up beside our bed. Taking my hand in his, he said, “Your hands are so cold.”

“I’ll feel better in the morning,” I said, cheered by this unexpected husbandly affection.

“You’ve been saying that for some time.” He clasped my hand tighter and lowered his head. “The physician says you won’t survive another birth. And I’ve no intention of doing what my father did to my mother or what Jack Eppes did to your sister. It may be that we’re better off sleeping apart.”

Even as ill as I was, I didn’t want to sleep apart from Tom. For twenty-eight years, we’d lain together, and as much as I’d come to resent him in my bed, it pained me more to think of him never there again. “Oh, Tom, can’t we . . .” I trailed off, wondering what to suggest.

I hadn’t been willing to find an “agreeable Negress” to sate my husband’s needs when Dolley suggested it. That unwillingness had nearly cost me my life. But I heard from downstairs the violin of Beverly Hemings—now nineteen years old and a great favorite at Monticello—and it bolstered my resistance. Sally’s oldest son had my father’s freckles, his posture, and shared Papa’s love of music, science, and hot air balloons. The time was coming, I knew, for Sally’s son to be set free, and I dreaded explanations that would need to be made to friends, neighbors, and even my children. I’d found a way not to think of Sally’s children as my siblings—not to think much of them at all beyond a bone-deep guilt and sadness. A guilt and sadness I never wanted my children to feel.

That’s why I hadn’t taken Dolley’s advice, and nothing had changed. So I never found a suggestion. Now Tom made one of his own. “When Governor Nicholas vacates the office, I believe I’d be a good successor. I can be appointed to the post from the state legislature, and . . . the governorship comes with a salary. Money that can’t be lost to droughts or tobacco rot or Hessian flies. Money that’s certain.”

It was as close as my husband could come to admitting that the planter’s way of life that had sustained generations of Virginians in wealth and luxury was a lifestyle in utter decay. My father’s idealistic visions of an agrarian Republic where men’s wealth could be measured in land no longer reflected reality. At least not our reality.

Tom didn’t need my permission, but he seemed to be asking for it. “Richmond’s not so far that I can’t be at your side within a few hours’ hard ride. But I’d have my own bed there—in my own house.”

That might be the most important part,
I thought. Tom would no longer be living under his father-in-law’s roof. No longer a man whose position was uncertain. He might no longer be thought of as Thomas Jefferson’s underachieving political and intellectual heir—and dependent, but rather, master of a mansion in Richmond and the entire state of Virginia.

“Of course you’d be a good successor,” I managed as I debated the wisdom of an even greater distance between us. Given the long tension between us, how could I do anything but support him?

Monticello, 1 January 1819

From Thomas Jefferson to Francis Wayles Eppes

A school master is necessary only to those who require compulsion to get their lesson.

I
SMILE TO READ THIS LETTER
, filled with stern advice for my sister’s son on how to perfect his Greek grammar. Papa never seemed to believe that his own brilliance was unique to him. Instead, he believed his grandchildren all inherited his intellectual capacity and that if they only applied themselves, they’d easily match his accomplishments in science, architecture, and statecraft.

But he was always overly optimistic about the generations that came after him.

Jeff was so burdened with his own growing family and managing my father’s plantation that there’d never be any opportunity for him to become a man of letters, a thing for which he felt an acute lack. Perhaps one of my younger sons might attend the university my father was founding in Virginia, but until then, our hopes for the next generation of intellectuals rested upon Polly’s son.

My daughters, meanwhile, were likely to end up spinsters. Nothing came of their season in Richmond during which the men allegedly considered them altogether too educated in the male arts and not enough in the womanly ones. In the end, only a single offer of marriage was made—and it was worse than none at all. The offer came from Nicholas Trist, a neighbor, the son of a friend, an idealistic but penniless boy of seventeen who wanted to marry my penniless daughter Virginia of the same age. Though I’d married at seventeen—or maybe because I did—I thought them both too young to be entangled by an engagement that would decide the happiness, or wretchedness, of their lives.

Inexplicably, the young suitor, who aspired to be a diplomat, addressed his request to me, rather than to Tom. And so from my sickbed, I composed a short note, entreating him to learn more of the world before judging whether Ginny was vital to his happiness. It’d buy time, I hoped, for my daughter to seek an older, more established man with whom to build an easier life—if such a thing could be had in Virginia, where the price of cotton had fallen nearly 25 percent in a single day. The irony wasn’t lost on me that in warning away my daughter’s suitor, I was doing exactly as my father had done to me and William, but I better understood my father’s position now and felt a pang of sympathy.

It was February before I was able to get out of bed and go below stairs. And the first full day I spent upright was on account of a special occasion. There was to be a reunion at Monticello, as we were expecting Ann and her reportedly now-sober husband to dinner. So I summoned my girls down from the attic cuddy they had fashioned into a salon for themselves, where they were happier to contend with wasps and rafters than with Papa’s guests. Then I had one of the servants carry down for me a comfortable but worn gilded chair from France to the kitchen, where I held my
Le Cuisinier Royal
cookbook open to my handwritten notes.

Amidst the shiny copper pots and sooty walls of the kitchen, Ginny moped in like a kicked puppy, having apparently surmised that I’d thwarted her nascent courtship. Nicholas Trist would never have been so bold as to declare his feelings to her without my blessing. But I remembered the artful games William and I had played and knew such matters could be understood without being spoken.

In any case, if Ginny was nursing a broken heart, she was too much a Jefferson and not enough a Randolph to say so. Instead, she sulked. “I don’t see what the point of learning this is. A few months of housekeeping badly done aren’t going to give me one useful acquirement, not even the industrious habits which would enable me to spend my future more profitably. I’d rather read than sew or keep house.”

With a sharp look at her sister, Ellen said, “Which will profit you not at all. Taking turns means we can each learn what we need to be useful wives, then go with Grandpapa to study like men do, for gratification and because it’s the most agreeable way of passing time.” Then Ellen rounded on me. “And, Mother, your insistence on supervising is defeating the purpose of giving you rest.”

“I’ve been resting for nearly a year. I’m quite weary of rest,” I complained, as the cook and the servants who did the arduous work here all bustled about. “Besides, the less occupation we have, the less we’re disposed to do.”

That day, I rode the girls like an overseer, right up until the great clock reached the dinner hour according to the gong at the top of the house.

“Charles is coming along soon!” Ann chirped, having arrived ahead of him. “He had to stop first in Charlottesville at the store.”

My daughter Ann had turned into a scarecrow since I’d seen her last. She and the grandchildren lived poorly; their threadbare clothes and worn shoes told the tale. And an hour later, Bankhead still hadn’t arrived. Jeff was late, too. So late that Papa didn’t want to hold supper any longer.

Finally, at evening, the dogs barked at a rider galloping madly up our road. Burwell went for the door, but Ellen also raced for the entryway with unladylike haste.

I tried to follow but was such an invalid that the blood drained from my head; I nearly toppled Ann when she tried to steady me. “Mother, careful! You’re not well, yet.”

“It’s only a visitor,” Papa said.

But I never remembered anyone riding a horse that violently to deliver good news. And Ellen returned to the dining room, ashen, overseer Bacon behind her, sweating and breathless from his ride.

“It’s Jeff,” Ellen cried, her eyes flitting with fury to her older sister. “Your worthless malignant husband stabbed our brother!”

As my heart leapt into my throat, the napkin fell from my father’s hand. Papa rose to his feet at once. “Where?”

“Charlottesville,” Bacon answered. “They came to blows in the courthouse square. I had them carry your grandson inside Leitch’s store and put him upon a bale of blankets, but . . . he can’t be moved. He’s bleeding badly and the physician doesn’t expect him to live until morning.”

Those words ringing in my head in all their horror, my legs went out from under me. The next moment, I was on the floor staring up at the fireplace where fickle Fates carved in Wedgwood danced in blue mockery before my eyes.

“Loosen her stays,” Ellen insisted while my other daughters crowded around me, fanning my face.

In my continued illness from childbirth, I’d swooned away like some delicate damsel when all I wanted was to get to my son. “
Jeff,
” I gasped. Servants rushed in to help and all the while I kept saying, “Tom, please take me to Jeff.” But Tom wasn’t there. My husband, the new governor of Virginia, lived now in Richmond, a thing I’d somehow forgotten in the fog of my terror. “A carriage—someone get me a carriage. I must go to my son!”

“No, Martha.” The long absent steely edge of fatherly command returned to Papa’s voice. “If Charles is on a drunken rampage again, he’ll come here next for Ann.”

“He can’t have done this,” Ann sobbed. “Charles isn’t drinking anymore. He wouldn’t stab my brother for no reason!”

“He
is
drinking again, Mrs. Bankhead.” Bacon accepted a glass of water and chugged it down. “He literally rode his horse into a tavern. Your brother confronted him. Jeff said something to him about abusing you, and Mr. Bankhead sprang on him with a knife. I had to pull your husband off your bleeding brother myself.”

Ann backed away from the truth of Bacon’s words. “Not for my sake. This can’t have happened for my sake!”

As deeply as I felt her anguish, I could think of nothing but Jeff. I struggled into a sitting position and grasped at Ellen’s shoulder. “Get the carriage.” The elegant arched room spinning around me, I looked up at Papa, then to Bacon. “Get the carriage
now
. Please!”

“Patsy, you’re not well enough,” my father snapped, using my childhood name to command me. “Stay with the girls. Bolt the doors. Hide if Charles comes. I’ll post Burwell, Beverly, and Bacon to stand guard over you.”

Ellen rose and stepped in front of my father. “You’re not riding out by yourself, are you?”

“Fetch my horse,” he instructed the servants in a tone that brooked no opposition. “Eagle.”

Eagle was a far more accommodating mount than the spirited Caractacus had been, but still we worried. The servants wouldn’t oppose Papa, but Ellen did. “Grandpapa, it’s cold and dark. You can’t go galloping into the winter night!”

But that’s exactly what my seventy-five-year-old father did, hurtling himself up into the saddle like a man half his age, applying the whip, and, with only the moon as his guide, disappearing in a clatter of hooves off into the snowy forest.

T
HEY BROUGHT MY SON HOME IN A WAGON
, my heart breaking with each turn of its wheels on the icy road. The servants rushed to lift the makeshift stretcher upon which my boy lay covered in dried blood, one limp hand dragging in the snow.

Jeff was still alive, but barely. We had him carried into the bedroom opposite my sitting room, onto the alcove bed, which the girls stripped of its damask bedspread. He’d been stabbed in the hip and arm. He’d lost so much blood that he was as pale as a newborn babe, and I still remembered Jeff that way. My father’s little namesake, the baby who made me realize for the first time that I loved my husband. The little boy who, from his first breath, embodied hope for my family.

If he died, so would everything hopeful or loving in me.

While the physician rebandaged Jeff’s wounds, servants got a fire burning and warmed sherry for him. Meanwhile, my daughters crowded in the doorway. “I hope Charles swings for this,” Cornelia said, her dark eyes flashing with
the Randolph
. “I hope he’s tried and convicted and that I’m there to witness him at the end of a noose!”

Ann recoiled, sobbing into a handkerchief. “You don’t mean that. He’s the father of my children. Surely you don’t mean that!”

“Of course she doesn’t,” I said, very calmly. My daughters were Randolphs; their tempers ran hot. But mine ran cold. “A trial would cause a sensation and bring shame down upon your grandfather’s good name. Instead, we’ll hire a keeper to prevent mischief, lock Charles in a room with all the whiskey he desires, and let him finish himself off.”

My words made Ann shudder. She eyed me with scarcely disguised horror, backing away, as if she had apprehended a monster in me she’d never known dwelt there before.

But I meant every word. I’d done my daughters no favors hiding behind feminine virtues, allowing men to do as they pleased with little more than sarcasm and secrecy for protest. Seeing my son half-dead, something changed in me—my willingness to obey, my willingness to accept, to
let the men handle it
was gone.

When the doctor went out, I went in. On a moan, Jeff tried to rise up on the arm that
wasn’t
nearly severed from his shoulder. And I snapped, “You lay back down! Jane will be here soon or we’ll take you to her when you’ve recovered.”

“My arm.” Jeff groaned, falling back against the pillow. “The doctor says I’ll never be able to use it again.”

I held my breath, trying to imagine my boy maimed. My strong son with his broad back who prided himself on his ability to outwork his father . . . diminished forever in his abilities. And I didn’t care so long as he lived. Stroking his hair, I murmured, “My precious Jeff.”

He gritted his teeth. “Where’s Bankhead?”

“He’s been arrested for attacking you.”

“He didn’t attack me.” Jeff closed his eyes in an excess of emotion that might’ve been shame. “When grandfather found me lying in my own blood, he bent his head and wept. He wept for me, and I couldn’t disappoint him. I couldn’t tell him the truth.” Jeff cried in anguish. “I struck the first blow. I swung down off my horse with my whip and advanced on Bankhead. We quarreled about some things he said about my wife, and I swore that if he did violence to my sister again I’d beat him down like a slave. He shouted that he could kill Ann dead and there wasn’t anything I could do to stop him. So I hit him with my whip and I remember nothing else till Bacon was pulling us apart.”

“Oh, Jeff,” I said, one hand to my cheek.

“Charles isn’t guilty. I am.”

“You’re guilty of
nothing,
” I whispered. I didn’t care what the law might say. I never felt prouder of my son and wasn’t about to let him think he’d brought this misery upon himself. “Jeff, you’re remembering it wrong. Your pain is bending your mind. Rest easy with a clear conscience. Overseer Bacon says Charles attacked you.”

And I vowed that Bacon would keep on saying it.

When the laudanum did its work and Jeff drifted to sleep, I ought to have been too weary to stand. But anger is a kind of fuel, and I went in search of my father. I found him in the greenhouse, near a carelessly abandoned stack of clay pots and digging tools, feeding seeds to his newest mockingbirds, who serenaded him with a French tune.

“What are you doing out here, Papa?” I asked, rubbing my arms against the cold.

Looking over the dried-out stalks the gardener had yet to prune for next year’s planting, he murmured, “It’s winter. A time when everything we’ve planted withers and dies on the vine.”