America's First Daughter: A Novel (51 page)

No. I would not hear it. I would
not
. Choking back tears, I said, “Jeff is strong. He’ll live.”

My father hung his head. “Ah, Patsy. What tragedy that two young men of my own family have come to this.”

“They aren’t both family,” I snapped. “Vows were said, but if Charles were Ann’s husband in truth, would he put hands on her the way he does?”

I waited for my father to utter some optimistic platitude, but his shoulders slumped. “I fear she’ll meet her end at his hands unless we keep her here.”

“She won’t go back with him,” I insisted. “Not after this. We won’t let him take her.”

But by morning, Ann was gone.

“D
ON’T TELL ME
I
CAN DO NOTHING!
” my husband shouted, love for his son showing itself as pure, unadulterated fury. “I’m the governor of the goddamned state.”

Charles had made bail and fled the county, taking Ann and our grandchildren with him. And having returned from Richmond to hear this, Tom was an inferno. “I wish I’d caved in his skull, even if it ended in my swinging from the gallows.”

A savage part of me understood just how he felt, but I wouldn’t trade my husband’s life for Bankhead’s blood. We were promised that if Charles set foot in Albemarle, he’d be jailed. Meanwhile, neighbors were feeding a steady stream of gossip and my poor son begged us to let the matter drop. It was because Jeff carried guilty secrets with less alacrity than I’d always done, but my daughters all believed it was a gallant gesture to protect Ann. And they privately blamed her for taking Charles’s part with a ferocity only sisters can. Cornelia confided that if justice wasn’t served, she hoped never to see Mr.
or
Mrs. Bankhead ever again.

Though I had a babe still in diapers to care for, little children who ran about like wild things, and a plantation full of ser vants to manage, I spent that spring and early summer dedicated entirely to helping Jeff use his arm again. Jeff tried riding, but couldn’t do it without assistance. Each night, he’d collapse in my sitting room, suffering, inside and out. “It’s no use.” He stared with withering scorn at the offending limb. “I’m maimed.” And when his wife pressed a cloth to his forehead he shouted, “Leave it alone, Jane! I’m good for nothing.”

When she scurried from the room, Jeff sulked in my chair.

A boy might rightly expect coddling from his mother—to be taken against her soft bosom to weep at cruel fate. But it was a soft heart that brought my family to this place. “How would you feel if you heard your father speak to me that way?”

Jeff’s eyes blazed. “I
have
heard him speak to you that way.”

There was no use denying it. “Well, I suppose you have, but the way you hollered at Jane just now . . . that’s how your sister’s husband behaves. Except that you’re sober and don’t have the excuse of Charles’s madness.”

Jeff lowered his eyes. “I feel so useless, Mother.”

I rubbed at his sore shoulder. “You can’t afford to be useless. Too much relies on you. Don’t you know how important you are? There’s a reason you’re named Jefferson, you know. Your grandfather hurt his wrist twice. It was never the same after, but he never let it leave him maimed. Use your arm until it heals, every day, even if you feel weak as a newborn pup.”

Jeff’s head jerked up. “You don’t know what I’ve done.”

“The blame is on Charles,” I insisted.

“I’m talking about Jane. I brought her into this family, and now, because of it, I’ve led us all to disaster.”

Had the laudanum dulled his wits? “Your wife is lovely!”

Jeff seemed unable to swallow over the emotion. “Grandfather keeps these things from you, but—”

My hands stilled on his shoulder. “You’re scaring me, Jeff.”

“You know about the panic in the banks. Well, Jane’s father has become indebted.”

“What’s that to do with us?”

“Grandfather signed as a guarantor on one of his loans.”

Virginia gentlemen did this sort of courtesy for one another—especially when there were family ties between them. It didn’t surprise me that the former governor would take a loan or that my father would help him do it. Only that a man of his means would
need
my father’s surety. “Are you saying Mr. Nicholas can’t make the payments?”

Jeff nodded. “Because of the panic, they’re calling in the loan in total. Hamilton is dead, but his banking system is still ruining the country.”

My stomach twisted. “Jane’s father has property . . . surely he can pay his own debt.”

Jeff actually trembled. “I fear the burden is going to fall entirely upon my grandfather. It could be a crippling blow to his finances.”

It seemed impossible that Papa would suffer for another man’s debt. “How much?”

“Twenty thousand dollars.”

I nearly swooned away again. Twenty thousand dollars was so much money, I couldn’t fathom what might be done to raise it.

Monticello, 22 April 1820

From Thomas Jefferson to John Holmes

There’s not a man on earth who’d sacrifice more than I would, to relieve us from slavery, in any practicable way. But, as it is, we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.

E
VERYONE’S SO SAD,”
Ginny cried, swishing into my sitting room. “We’re estranged from Ann. Jeff’s afraid to look Grandpapa in the eye. And Ellen’s so dispirited she’s thinking of teaching school.”

Ann, Jeff, and Ellen. My oldest three understood harsh life. While Papa put stock in the assurances that Mr. Nicholas wouldn’t leave us on the hook for even a dollar, Ellen and Jeff refused to pretend that all was well. If Ann was with us she’d have done the same.

But the rest of the children—their memories were here at Monticello where they’d always lived in luxurious comfort and their grandfather’s cheer. “All this sadness and strife can’t be borne,” Ginny chirped. “For Grandpapa’s sake, we should be happy and gay! So I’m inviting you to a dance.”

I allowed frustration into my tone. “A dance?”

“Yes, a dance,” she replied. “On Saturday next, the youngsters of Monticello will adjourn to the south pavilion and dance to Beverly’s music. I’d like to invite Jeff’s wife, who must be mortified that her relations put ours in jeopardy. After the stabbing and now this, we’re in need of cheer. And so is Grandfather. All this gloom can’t be good for his health.”

That I couldn’t argue. I wondered if Papa could weather such distress at his age. “Well, if your grandfather has no objection—”

“He doesn’t!” Ginny clapped her hands. “He’s going to invite scholars from the university to form up like soldiers and have Ellen make a speech for him. Perhaps in Greek. But he said if
you
object, we must give up the idea.”

I’d never deny my father anything that would add to his happiness. If he wanted a dance, he’d have a dance. So we gathered on the terrace with a mountaintop view of the countryside below so clear that it was as if we could see the whole nation my father helped build. A nation as beautiful, imperfect, and unfinished as every other project my father ever undertook.

And it was there we gathered to listen to Beverly Hemings play his violin. While Beverly worked his bow and filled the air with music, from the corner of my eye, I caught Papa staring at Beverly with fatherly pride. Sally watched with pride, too—and it broke my heart, because the servants didn’t know what was coming.

If Papa was forced to pay even half of the twenty-thousand-dollar debt, slaves would have to be sold. Jeff would have to undertake it on Papa’s behalf; he’d start with the field hands, but what about the families on Mulberry Row? Not the Hemingses, of course. Papa would never agree to sell them if it weren’t by their own choice. But what of those who worked in the textile mills or Papa’s nailery? Those slaves we knew, we saw their faces every day. The idea of selling them was barbarous.

Yet, we fiddled and danced and laughed because it would have done no good whatsoever to cry.

W
HEN EVENING FELL,
I followed my father into the house, leaving the young people to their festivities. We stopped together in the empty book room, alone together for the first time in a good while.

“He’s twenty-one,” Papa said. Beverly, he meant. The boy’s birthday had come and gone in the chaos of stabbings and debt. I hadn’t remembered it. My father obviously had. Papa was kind to Sally’s children, but he wasn’t in the habit of showing them fatherly affection. At least not in front of me. So I was surprised to hear him say, “He can read and write and play music. He takes as much joy in science as I do. And if he’s pressed, he knows carpentry, and how to make nails and how to be useful on a farm. Beverly’s grown to be a fine man, hasn’t he?”

“I believe so,” I said, cautiously, wondering if I’d feel the pull of jealousy at my father’s pride in his son. But all I felt was the truth of the sentiment. Beverly
was
a fine young man. “The overseer complained about him not going to the carpenter’s shop for about a week or so, but I’ve never heard another word spoken against him by anyone.”

My father’s expression betrayed great anxiety. “Beverly knows his freedom has been promised. It’s time, but I worry. . . .”

I refused to let myself calculate Beverly’s monetary worth and the loss it would mean to my father’s estate. “What worries you?”

Papa looked stricken. “I’m worried about the explanations that’ll be demanded of me when I petition the legislature to grant Beverly permission to live and work in the state of Virginia as a free man.”

That’s when his anxiety infected me. Since the last slave revolt years ago, freed Negroes couldn’t live in Virginia without special dispensation. And the moment my father asked for that dispensation, there’d be a thousand questions. Beneath my sheer linen cap, a cold sweat broke across my brow. “You mean to acknowledge him?”

My father’s lips tightened into a grim line. He knew—surely a man of his political genius knew—that to ask for dispensation would be to acknowledge Beverly as his son. And every old story about his
Congo harem
would be splashed again on the front page of every paper in the country. Had pleas from men like William Short finally reached into my father’s guilty heart and shaken something loose that he would want to admit to his relationship with Sally after all these years?

“Papa, after all the denials . . .” He’d left his friends and family to deny it. I’d have denied it and defended him anyway, but a great many people were likely to feel deceived. They’d never forgive any of us. It’d taint his legacy and our whole family. “You chose to keep this secret long ago.”

He lifted his tired blue eyes to mine. “I also made a promise to Sally.”

Did he think me so heartless that I’d want him to break it? Somewhere inside me was still the naive girl in Paris who so ardently wished for all the poor slaves to go free. But my concern was my father. He’d promised to let Sally’s children go free, but he hadn’t promised to sacrifice himself on the altar of public opinion. If Beverly wanted his freedom, there were other ways to get it. “Can’t you just . . . let him walk off this mountain?”

“I’ve considered that,” Papa said, quietly. “I could call him a runaway and never send anyone looking for him. But then he could never return and this is the only home he’s ever known. Where else could he go and make his way?”

Beverly was a capable young man, I thought. He could make his way anywhere. Washington, maybe. He might enjoy living as a free man in a city that our father brought into being. “The capital isn’t so very far away.”

“Far enough we’ll likely never see him again,” Papa snapped.

Was he angry with me, with Beverly, or himself? Papa had always been possessive; he’d never forgiven Sally’s brothers for insisting upon the formality of their freedom, when he’d allowed them to live as free men in practice. Did he resent Beverly for insisting upon the same?

But when Papa turned his head to hide a sudden welling of tears, I realized it wasn’t resentment of Beverly’s freedom that upset him. It was love. Beverly shared his looks, his temperament, his taste in music, and his interest in science. Beverly was a young man who was always aware—much as I was—that our father had penned the lines that began:
All men are created equal.

My father would’ve been a monster not to feel a prick of pride that his son wanted liberty. But the price of that liberty was steep. “Papa, Beverly can live as a freed black man here in Virginia, with your reputation in tatters, or he can forge a new identity as a white man anywhere else. It seems to me that you ought to ask Beverly his preference. It’s his future, after all.”

That had seemingly not occurred to Papa, so I left him pondering, congratulating myself that I’d handled the situation with as much grace as might be expected of me and done right by Beverly besides.

So it was with alarm that I awakened the next morning to find Sally Hemings inside my bedroom, her back stiff against the door, her hands behind her on the handle, as if to steel her nerve, and her eyes filled with fury.

“Mistress Randolph,” she said, instead of
Miss Patsy,
as was her habit since our childhood. “I realize the sight of me offends you, but I beg you not to take it out on my son.”

I rose from my bed, bewildered. “Whatever can you mean?”

Sally met my gaze levelly, but her lower lip was atremble. “I loved your sister. I loved Miss Polly all her life, and she loved me, too, but I could never win your affection.” I started to tell her that she did have my affection, but she ran over my words. “That’s why I’ve always kept out of your way and made myself of use to you so that someday you might feel some small bit of love for me—”

“I do feel it,” I protested. “Of course I do.”

“Then why are you trying to take my son from me?” Her anguished question echoed through the room, and I was speechless in its aftermath. She pointed with an accusing finger. “I know it was you. Your father wouldn’t speak to anyone else about such a thing. And whatever you said to him—”

“I advised him to ask Beverly what he wanted!” I cried, in defense of myself.

But this appeased her not a bit.

“
Beverly
? My son is too young to know what he wants.”

Older than you were when you had to decide,
I thought. “He’s a grown man, Sally.”

She shook her head, nostrils flaring. “He thinks he knows what’s out there for him in the world. Thinks he can leave this mountain behind without regret and make his own way. But it’s a decision he can’t take back. I want him free—but I’m not ready to let him go.”

How could I blame her? Especially after so nearly losing my own son? But from the edge of my bed I said what I believed to be true. “Wouldn’t it be kinder to let him go, Sally? His Negro blood . . . it’s only one-eighth. He’s legally white. If Papa petitions to keep Beverly here in Virginia, everyone will know your boy as a former slave. He’ll live with the taint and the shame of it all his life. But if Beverly leaves . . . he can
pass,
Sally. Beverly can marry into white society. Isn’t that the best future you can give him?”

She blanched, wiping tears with the backs of her hands. “That’s what you’d want, if he was your son?”

I thought hard about her question. I’d been afraid for my son when he marched off to war. Terrified when they brought him back to me in a wagon, bloodied and maimed. Each time, the thought of parting with him forever nearly unraveled me.

But if I had to give my son up to save him, I would. I was sure Sally would, too. I’d always known her to be a protective mother. And it’d taken the courage of a mother lioness to confront me this way. “Yes, I would, Sally. God as my witness.”

And this time, it was no lie.

She narrowed her eyes, hugging herself, bronze arms against a bright white apron. “What happens when your father dies and his estate passes into the hands of a man who hunts Beverly down as a runaway slave?”

Though I couldn’t bear to think of my father’s death, his health and vigor wasn’t what it once was. When we lost him, his estate would pass to my husband and my sons. “I’ll never let anyone hunt down Beverly. I vow, I’ll never let that happen.”

When she was sixteen, she’d relied upon my father’s promise. Staked her whole life upon it. I couldn’t say she’d been wrong to, but she was less trusting now.

And my vow mustn’t have persuaded her, because she kept Beverly at Monticello and sent him back to work as a slave in the carpentry shop.

J
EFF’S FATHER-IN-LAW DIED
in the autumn of 1820, leaving everything and everyone ruined: his people, his plantation, his once-haughty widow, and quite likely my father, too.

The only good news was that Jeff was moving his arm. It still pained him, but he had the use of it, which improved my spirits and Tom’s, too. Returning from Richmond for Sunday dinner, my husband set down a carefully folded piece of paper onto the writing table beside me. “A letter from Nancy for you.”