America's First Daughter: A Novel (6 page)

I hadn’t been sneaking about at all, so despite the nervousness that the slaves’ words and Mammy’s tone unleashed in my belly, I simply folded my hands over my apron as I remembered my mother doing and met her stern gaze. “Dr. Gilmer is here. Papa wants your help.”

Inoculating us was the first decision my father made about anything since the day my mother died over two months before, and it was a decision that came upon him suddenly and with the utmost urgency. Of the slaves carried off by the British, almost all had perished from smallpox and other fevers.

Perhaps it was the stories of how our people had suffered that put my father into a singular fervor that his daughters must be guarded against this illness, no matter how terrifying the treatment. Mammy Ursula had been my nursemaid when I was a babe, so I wanted her to tell me this treatment was a needful thing, and not part of my papa’s madness. Instead, Mammy brushed flour from her apron, wiped her dark hands on a cloth, and silently followed me to fetch Polly and the baby.

We found Papa in an agitated state, pacing in front of the clean-linen-covered table where Dr. Gilmer’s knives gleamed silver and sharp. In an echo of my wildly beating pulse, a November rainstorm pitter-pattered against the windowpane, and I stole a glance at the menacing little glass vial of noxious pus from a victim of the pox.

With steady hands, Papa tugged up the white linen sleeve of my shift to bare my arm for the physician, and I asked, “Will it hurt?”

Papa stilled, his bleak gaze lifting to my eyes. His lips pursed. “I wish your mother . . .” He shook his head and sighed. “Your mother would know better how to . . . what to . . .”

I hung on the edge of his words for a long moment, then finally looked to Dr. Gilmer. “It will be little more than a scratch, my dear,” Dr. Gilmer said as he removed his black frockcoat and placed it over the back of a wooden chair. “When it pains you, you must bravely set the example for your sisters so they won’t be frightened when their turn comes.”

I glanced at Papa for reassurance, but his expression had gone distant again, his fingers cold as he held fast to my wrist so Dr. Gilmer could bring his knife down on the tender underside of my arm. I hissed as the first slash drew blood, then yelped at the throbbing pain that followed. I clenched my teeth to hold back my cries lest they frighten my little sisters, waiting on the other side of the door, an effort that left me shaking.

Dr. Gilmer buried a thread soaked in the infected fluid between the folds of my rent flesh, then bandaged over it with a linen strip, tying off the ends. “There, there, Patsy. You did very well.”

I wiped away a mist of tears and tried to give a brave smile when Ursula came in carrying the baby in one arm and leading Polly with the other. But neither my brave smile nor Ursula’s presence did any good when it was Polly’s turn. My willful little sister screamed and fought and even tried to
bite
Dr. Gilmer before Mammy wrestled her still.

Papa drifted to the window, pinching the bridge of his nose. He still had his back to Dr. Gilmer when the physician took his leave.

With a worried glance at my father, Ursula hurried to see the physician out. As if Papa had commanded it, she promised to compensate Dr. Gilmer with some of her special bottled cider. I realize now that I wasn’t alone in trying to maintain the illusion that Papa was still master of his plantation—and himself.

Because Polly was still crying, I nuzzled her close. “Hush, it’s all over. Now we can go out and play.”

“No,” Papa said without turning. “You and your sisters must be confined for the next few weeks. Then we’re leaving Monticello.”

My gaze jerked up. “Leaving?”

“I’ve accepted an appointment to Paris to negotiate the end of the war.”

Scarcely anything he could’ve said would’ve surprised me more. I remembered his promise to my mother that he’d retire from public life. That he’d retire to his farm, his books, and his family, from which nothing would ever separate him again. Just two months before, hours before my mother’s death, he’d angrily refused his election to the Virginia legislature. But now everything had changed, and I was left to wonder if his promises had died with her.

I didn’t want to leave. Neither did I want Papa to go without us. “Must you serve, Papa?”

My father gave a curt nod but said no more.

In the days that followed, my sisters and I suffered from nothing more than boredom, cooped up when we would rather have been romping through piles of autumn leaves.

Then the illness came upon us, fast and merciless.

And all Papa’s cool reserve melted away. He held the pail for our vomit, wiped the fevered sweats from our brows, and offered hushed, soothing words. Often when I surfaced from delirious dreams, the sound of his violin or his soft, rasping tenor as he sang comforted me back to sleep. Having already taken the treatment, Papa would let no one else care for us, lest we spread the contagion. And he cloistered with us together in the small make shift infirmary, our world narrowing again to only one another. Our little surviving family of four.

As we shivered in our beds and groaned with aches, we couldn’t have asked for a more attentive nurse than our papa.

When any bitterness steals into my heart for the choices I’ve made in devotion to my father, I remember that even in the depths of his stupor and despair, he found it within himself to protect us the best way he knew how.

At some point in my delirium, I awoke to the soft, mournful strains of his violin. The notes ached with a sweet sadness. Forcing my eyes open, I lifted my head from a sweat-soaked pillow. “Didn’t the treatment work, Papa?”

He lowered his instrument. “The science is sound. It asks us to suffer a milder form of the illness to guard against the more virulent attack.” He explained more, but the words were beyond my reach and my head ached intolerably. I must’ve said as much, because he glanced up at the ceiling, closing his eyes. “Patsy, suffering strengthens our constitutions and builds inner fortifications so that we never fall prey to the same agony twice. We must take upon ourselves a smaller evil to defend against the greater evil. We must take upon ourselves a smaller pain in order to survive.”

I was too young, then, and too overcome with illness to realize that the agony he spoke of was not smallpox. But his words weren’t madness, and they stayed with me long after the fever had passed. Even now they help me understand why my father felt the need to rip us from our home and hasten away with such urgency.

It pained him to leave Monticello.

But what would have survived of him if he’d stayed?

Ampthill, 26 November 1782

From Thomas Jefferson to Chastellux

Before the catastrophe that closed this summer, my scheme of life had been determined. I’d folded myself in the arms of retirement, and rested all prospects of future happiness on domestic objects. A single event wiped away my plans and left me a blank I had not the spirits to fill. In this state of mind an appointment from Congress required me to cross the Atlantic. My only object now is to hasten over those obstacles which retard my departure.

A
FTER THREE MONTHS
of searching every brine-scented port in the colonies, Papa couldn’t find a ship willing to undertake the perilous winter voyage through waters filled with enemy vessels. And more than a few ship captains muttered darkly at my father’s persistence, wondering if he was a man chasing after an icy death.

It shames me still that I cannot say they were wrong.

Indeed, I feared they had exactly the right of it. We’d left Polly and Lucy with Aunt Elizabeth at Eppington, and though I missed my sisters, I was glad they didn’t have to witness this latest manifestation of Papa’s grief. While my father no longer stared down his pistols in the dead of night, he braved the brigand-infested roads with a recklessness that terrified me.

I wondered if I’d been wrong to keep Papa’s secrets. I wondered if I ought to have confessed the full breadth of my fears to Mr. Short the day he came upon us in the woods. But now there was no one to whom I could turn. For Papa kept us always moving from city to city.

Everywhere we found brown and red brick buildings squeezed close together, jostling carriages on snow-covered cobblestone streets, docks burdened with goods waiting to traverse safe seas, and mobs of people. The cities of the new states blurred, one into another, until we returned again to Philadelphia, where bells rang and celebrants gathered around great bonfires blazing orange in the streets in celebration of the news.

Peace with Great Britain had been achieved.

A provisional treaty had been signed, and when I heard, I tugged on Papa’s sleeve from my place beside him in the carriage. “Then the war is over?”

“Nearly,” was his soft reply.

After so great a struggle, so many harrowing hours and devastating losses, I thought Papa would be overjoyed at our victory. But he received the news with reserve, chagrined to learn that peace was made without need of his negotiations.

I’ve come to believe that he hoped to regain his honor by ending the revolution he’d helped start. In his guilty grief, he counted my mother as a casualty of that war and felt robbed of his chance to ensure her loss was not in vain. But at the time, I thought the cause of Papa’s melancholy was because we wouldn’t be going to Paris after all, and he didn’t want to go home. Indeed, he seemed to think of every possible excuse to delay, even contriving a visit with our Randolph relations at Tuckahoe.

I wondered if, in this, there was an opportunity. The Randolphs were Papa’s people through his mother, and he’d spent his childhood on Tuckahoe Plantation. Some part of me hoped the Randolphs would be able to see behind the cool blue veneer of my father’s gaze to the dark abyss I still saw. No one at Monti cello had the authority or audacity to question Papa, but I knew Colonel Randolph would have no such qualms.

“You’ll be glad to see Colonel Randolph, won’t you, Papa?” I asked as the carriage jostled along on the long, narrow drive to Tuckahoe under a foreboding canopy of trees. The drive was so narrow, in fact, that if we veered even a little, our wheels would get stuck in the mud.

“He’s a good man,” Papa said, which is what he always said about Colonel Randolph, for the two men had been raised together as boys by my grandfather when he was custodian of Tuckahoe.

Yet, even now, I cannot imagine a less likely candidate for my father’s friendship than his childhood companion Colonel Randolph. Where Papa projected a calm, composed demeanor, the colonel was a militant man, marching impatiently along the white-painted fence in front of his riverside home, barking out his welcome to Tuckahoe plantation. Where Papa wore a gray homespun frockcoat with wooden buttons, we found Colonel Randolph clad in formal dress, colorful as a Tory in a crimson coat and matching embroidered waistcoat. And whereas Papa was the author of our independence, Colonel Randolph was decidedly conflicted about the revolution. “This damned war,” he spat, when my father shared the happy news of a treaty. “The inability to ship tobacco overseas has brought my finances into a very low state. Now, I’ll have to pay a fortune on it in customs duties.”

“The price of liberty,” Papa replied with a tight smile.

Colonel Randolph grunted, waving us into the dark-paneled entryway of his abode. “I fear liberty has impoverished us.” It was a boast cloaked in modesty, much like his wooden plantation house itself. At first glance, Tuckahoe looked to be a modest white-painted house with two chimneys, but circling round the drive revealed it was really
two
houses connected by a central block, like the letter H. The rear of the mansion was dedicated to entertaining guests in high style, complete with salons and a great hall, which gave the lie to the idea that the Randolphs were in any way impoverished.

A veritable army of well-dressed house servants carried our luggage up the ornately carved walnut staircase, while I drifted into the parlor, entranced by mirrors and polished rosewood and mahogany—every piece so splendid I was afraid to touch. The only thing to mar its beauty was the damaged paneling over the fireplace, and as I stared at it curiously, Tom Randolph, the eldest of the Randolph children, happened upon me. “The British came searching for your father during the war. When we wouldn’t give him up, Tarleton ripped our coat of arms from the wall.”

“Your coat of arms?” I asked.

“My ancestors were great lords in England and Scotland,” Tom said, showing me a leather-bound book opened to a page of what looked to be heraldry. “My people were amongst the first families of Virginia. Better than yours.”

Tom was just an overeager puppy then; if I forget the wolf he became, I can still smile at the memory of the fourteen-year-old boy, tall and lanky, with brown hair and eyes so dark they appeared almost black. Given his imperious pronouncement about his lineage, I felt as if he expected me to curtsy. Instead, I said, “We’re kin, Tom. Your people are my people, too.”

“But
I’m
also part Indian,” he countered, making of his face an amusingly savage scowl. “That’s why I’m an excellent horseman. I’m descended of Pocahontas. Are you?”

“I don’t think so,” I replied, for I was certain Papa would’ve told me if we had any direct relation to the famous native princess. “But we display buffalo robes at Monticello.”

A hint of genuine curiosity shone in Tom’s black eyes. “I’d like to see those . . . though savage items are hardly fit to display in a home where girls and women are about.”

I bristled with indignation, but this was more attention than a boy of Tom’s age had ever paid me, and though I had weightier worries, I didn’t want it to go badly. “Papa doesn’t agree.”

“I’m sure he doesn’t. After all, your father thinks nothing of carrying you to Boston and back again, when you should be in the care of a woman to teach you domestic arts.”

Red hot anger straightened my spine at these words he must’ve heard spoken by his parents. Though my journey with Papa had been a terrifying blur of grief and long carriage rides and cobblestone streets, I met his smug gaze and boasted, “Not only Boston. We went to Philadelphia and Baltimore, too, and now I’ve seen all the states. Have you?”

This proved to be an embarrassing mistake, for Tom quizzed me on all thirteen newly independent states until it became apparent that I was woefully short of the full set. Moreover, my ignorant boast caused Tom to puff up and announce, “Anyway, I’ve come to tell you that you’ll take your supper with the children. I’ll be dressing for dinner and sitting at the table with the other men—of course.”

He wanted me to feel young and foolish, and I did. But more than that, he made me anxious that Papa and I should be apart even for the length of a supper. Leaving Tom, I found my father dressing for dinner, his manservant adjusting his cravat. When I told Papa what Tom said, he stared into the mirror, muttering, “Patsy, try to get along with Tom. It isn’t easy for him as the colonel’s
heir apparent
.” He said the last words with a hint of contempt, then added, “The Randolphs like to make much of their pedigree, to which I suppose everyone else must ascribe whatever merit they choose.”

Thus, banished to the lower-level kitchen where the children ate, I intended to sulk. It didn’t quite work out that way when I fell into the company of the Randolph sisters. Judith was my age and Nancy only a little younger, and by the time we’d taken our fill of egg custards and apple tarts and candied cherries, we were fast friends. Their companionship both eased the ache I felt for missing my sisters and worsened it.

Before bed, Mrs. Randolph gathered us round her harpsichord in the richly appointed great hall, and the men drifted in with their brandy. Puffing on a pipe, Colonel Randolph said to Papa, “It’s fortunate your appointment to France came to nothing. You’re better off in retirement. No good comes of public service anymore.” Ignoring the strained smile of his wife, whose expression seemed to warn him away from such talk, Colonel Randolph continued, “I practically funded Washington’s army myself, but I’ve been criticized by so-called patriots for the liberality with which I treated British soldiers.”

Settling into one of the tasseled armchairs, Papa crossed one leg at the knee. “We must endure criticism if we’re to honor the spirit of independence.”

Colonel Randolph’s jowls reddened. “The spirit of independence! Every man who bore arms in this revolution now considers himself on the same footing as his neighbor. I tell you, Jefferson, the spirit of independence has been converted to the abominable idea of
equality
.”

Papa, who had declared to the world that
all men are created equal,
was long acquainted with Colonel Randolph’s bluster, and merely drank in silence. And in irritation, Mrs. Randolph chirped, “Shall we have Judith play another song?”

Alas, Colonel Randolph wouldn’t be silenced. “I won’t serve again in the legislature, and you should follow my example, Jefferson.”

Papa grimaced, contemplating the crystal goblet in his hand. “What else is left for me but public service when all my private happiness has been so utterly destroyed?”

Colonel Randolph swallowed and Mrs. Randolph fluttered her fan. In the astonished silence, Papa’s cheeks reddened. He’d been goaded into expressing his darkest thoughts and his embarrassment pained me like a hot stone in my belly. Some part of me had hoped the Randolphs would see my papa’s devastation, that they’d realize he was a man on the edge of something . . . terrible, but their silence was excruciating.

Young Tom had been slumped in his chair, trying to affect an air of manly indifference. But now he perked up, sitting straighter. “I’d like to serve in public office one day, Mr. Jefferson.”

I didn’t know if Tom blundered forth in self-interest or to ease the tension, but his question gave my father a moment to recover. His mother flashed him an adoring smile of appreciation, and the gratitude
I
felt toward Tom made me forget I’d ever disliked him.

“You’ll need an education,” Papa suggested. “You’ll want to study law—”

“He’ll study how to plant tobacco,” Colonel Randolph barked. “There’s good reason gentlemen are withdrawing from public life, my friend. Retire to Monticello, plant your crops, and enjoy the fruits of your labor. That’s my advice to you.”

Despite the colonel’s provocation, it seemed good advice to me; certainly, it was what Mama had wanted. And, in the days that followed, I hoped Papa would be persuaded by it. But on the day the Randolph sisters coaxed me to play with them and their dollies in the springtime sunshine, Papa saw me laughing and his gaze filled with an even deeper melancholy.

That night he didn’t sleep. He paced the floors of his room, then came into mine. I think he knew I’d be awake. Gently brushing my hair from my face beneath my sleeping cap, he asked, “Could you be happy here, Patsy? With the Randolphs?”

The question was mildly spoken, but his eyes had a mad intensity to them. Both sent my heart into a breath-stealing sprint. Was it a rebuke? Did he think I’d forgotten my mother? Did he consider my laughter a dishonor to her memory? My stomach knotted in guilt, and I bunched the quilt in my fists. “No.”

“The schoolhouse here,” he said softly. “Your grandfather built it. Judith and Nancy are suitable playmates, and Tom might even make a good husband for you one day.”

“
No,
Papa,” I insisted, my fears rising. “I couldn’t be happy here. Not without you.”

“You might be—”

“It’s not
true,
Papa.” Now anger swirled with fear inside me, forcing me to cry, “I can only be happy with you!”

“It’s only that circumstances might take me . . . elsewhere for a time.” He sighed with a gravity that made me recognize it as a plea. Even if he could hide it from the rest of the world, he couldn’t hide from me his longing for death. It was in the spaces and silences between his words that the truth could be found.

I heard it in what he didn’t say.

And I determined never to give him an excuse to take his leave of this world. “I’d be
miserable
here, Papa. I find the Randolphs entirely disagreeable. Wherever your duty takes you, it must take me, too.”

For the memory of my mother could not be honored, my promises could not be kept, and my own duty could not be met anywhere else.

Only when his shoulders sagged in resignation, and he pressed a tender kiss to my brow, did my heart finally calm within my chest. The next morning, I shied away from Judith and Nancy, instead following Mrs. Randolph past the schoolhouse into her orderly herb garden. There, in the striped linen short gown and straw hat she wore for gardening, she let me help her tend the raspberry and sweet goldenrod she used to brew her liberty tea. “I suppose now that the war is over, we’ll drink the real stuff again. But my boy Tom has been kind enough to pretend he’s fond of my concoction and I dare say your father likes it, too.”