America's First Daughter: A Novel (8 page)

Today, if someone were to ask where I have been happiest in my life—where I found the most companionship and joy and discovered the best in myself—I would name the convent without hesitation. But my first days at the Panthemont were a misery. I lived for the evenings when Papa came to share supper with me. Every night, I thought he’d change his mind and take me home, but he didn’t.

I kept quietly to the corners, ignoring the taunts of the older girls. They pointed and laughed at my freckles and my big bony elbows. They mocked my faltering attempts to speak French. And I learned that I wasn’t the only American girl after all—there was also Kitty Church, whose mother was from New York, but she seemed to despise me most of all. A kindly abbot encouraged me to play with the other girls in the courtyard during the afternoon, but when I cleaved to him, Kitty teased me that Catholic priests couldn’t marry—which made me blush so hotly I could scarcely bear it.

Learning embroidery one day, I was asked by one of the girls, “Is it true that your father owns African slaves?”

The question was softly put, with no hint of malice, but before I could answer, Kitty Church laughed. “Yes, of course it’s true. Don’t you know that Mr. Jefferson is our slave-holding spokesman for freedom?”

The way Kitty spoke of my father, with such mockery, stung my cheeks with shame. It was a shame deepened by the fact that Kitty’s father, like mine, was an American envoy to France. Her family hailed from the North, where slaves were fewer and the abolitionists held much sway. I couldn’t help but wonder if she’d learned this scorn for my father from hers, and if her father was a rival to mine.

“Do you own a slave, Patsy?” Kitty singsonged the question. “Do you whip her when she misbehaves?”

This boldness encouraged our classmates, many of whom expressed dismay and made a point to tell me French law freed any slave who set foot in the country. I wondered if my father—or Jimmy Hemings—knew this. And while I fumbled for a reply, mortified and defensive, one of the girls stabbed a needle into her embroidery before berating Kitty Church on my behalf, hurling curses in French.

The savage-tempered girl was raven haired and tiny, and I wondered why she took up for me.

“It isn’t how you say it is,” I finally argued as the girls outdid one another in imagining horrid abuses. I remembered the day Papa commanded our overseer to stay his hand with the lash; I’d never witnessed slaves being whipped bloody, or flayed open and left to wild animals if they disobeyed. Never had such a thing happened at Monticello!

But the more I tried to defend our plantation, our home, our way of life, the more strident the criticisms became. And the nuns said nothing, for this was a house of pity, and they must’ve thought my papa a wretched sinner.

I stared down at my crude embroidery, remembering my mother’s sewing. Her neat stitches to repair a dress in need of mending. A small embroidered flourish to ornament a bonnet or a tablecloth. In a dark mood, I was lost in that memory until I looked down to see that I’d stabbed my finger with the needle and my blood had seeped into the delicate cloth.

“Come,” said the raven-haired French girl. “We’ll bandage that.”

Before I could protest, she shook her head and pressed her fingers to her lips to hush me. She was delicate and beautiful like my little sister Polly. That’s what made me follow her back to the bedroom where she sat beside me until I could face the world again. Her name was Marie de Botidoux, but she couldn’t say my name. The closest she came was
Jeffy
. I liked the way it sounded on her tongue. And I was so desperate for a friend I would’ve let her call me anything at all.

T
HE NEXT AFTERNOON,
the nuns made me draw in the parlor, imagining it to be some comfort to me. But I struggled with drawing—as I always had—my lines curving sadly down at each end, my strokes too bold on the paper, smudges on my fingers and clothes. It was in this state that my visitor found me. Deep in melancholy, I looked up slowly, believing that my eyes deceived me.

Could it be William Short, clutching at his hat?

I was so glad to see him that I rushed to embrace him with the exuberance of a Frenchwoman. “Mr. Short! Have you seen my papa?”

He gave a quick bow of his head. “The very reason for my visit, Patsy. Your father suffers of fever. He’ll be confined to his house for some days. I know you are apt to worry, so I thought to convey his warmest regards myself.”

I was unbearably grateful. He had seen us the day I was thrown from Caractacus, he understood as no one else did. He knew why I worried for Papa. But these were things that couldn’t be spoken aloud. My lower lip trembled and he must’ve seen it, for his eyes softened and he reached for my hand.

“Poor child. If it will comfort you, I’ll report to you on your father’s health every few days.”

The warmth and strength of his hand surprised me as much as steadied me. As his thumb slipped over my knuckle, I blinked up at him, reassured by the amiable smile on his well-bred, handsome face.

For a moment, I couldn’t help but study him, the only person who knew even a hint of my struggle with Papa. William Short’s countenance appeared more angular, more masculine, less boyish than it had been years before. He carried himself with a new confidence, too, one that made me glad he’d be serving at Papa’s side. “Thank you, of course. But . . . can’t I go to him, Mr. Short?”

“Don’t fret, Patsy. The thing that will best ensure his comfort and well-being is to know that you’re well cared for and thriving at your studies. If I can reassure him of this, he’ll rest easier.”

Alas, I’d presented myself in precisely the way that most vexed Papa. I’d received his new secretary in a slovenly state, smudging his hand with pencil dust. “I’m sorry, Mr. Short. I’ve dirtied your hand.”

He looked down and chuckled at the sight of my blackened fingers, the graphite smearing into the lines of his palm. “So you have.” Then mischief lit in his eyes as he reached to playfully smudge my nose with his thumb.

I giggled, which attracted the attention of sour-faced nuns. They scolded me, eyeing my green-eyed, sandy-haired visitor with a mixture of enchantment and disapproval. In French, I told them Mr. Short was a kinsman of my mother and as close to a son as my father had.

One hand pressing to his chest, Mr. Short startled at my diction. “I envy you, Patsy, for your French is so improved. I’ve been struggling to learn it, but now I have the solution. I’ll join the convent and live with you and all these pretty girls so that I may learn it quicker.”

His jest
scandalized
the nuns, who blushed and tittered and scowled at him in turn, before showing him out. But then, many women and girls blushed for the handsome Mr. Short. Even Marie—who blushed at nothing.

Indeed, I suspected his visit accounted for my sudden change in social fortune, for the girls made an effort to befriend me after that day. And each time one of them asked an innocent-sounding question about Mr. Short, it forced me to see him not as my family’s protector during our flight from the British, and not as my confidant, and not as Papa’s secretary, but as a bachelor in a city full of beautiful, forward women.

The thought disconcerted me for reasons I didn’t want to understand. At least Mr. Short remained true to his word, delivering regular updates about my father’s welfare and providing reassurance that I could devote myself to my studies and my life at the convent.

In that, Marie became my first true friend. We made an odd pair, Marie, who loved all the fine things a lady should love, and me, who longed to run outdoors. I’d been taught never to raise my voice in anger, but she was fierce tempered. Other girls were afraid to provoke her because she repaid them with such abuse as to make their ears bleed. And they were afraid to taunt me, too, because the moment she caught someone mocking my French or the unsophisticated style of my hair, Marie would launch into a tirade so fast and biting I could scarcely follow it.

When Elizabeth and Caroline Tufton, the nieces of the Duke of Dorset, the British ambassador to France, once dared suggest the American experiment would fail, the tongue-lashing Marie gave them for disrespecting me, my father, and the French assistance to the American cause was littered with forbidden insults. Curses like
Casse toi!
and
Je t’emmerde!
and
Meurs, pute!
exploded from her lips like bullets from a musket until both girls cowered, pleading they’d meant nothing by it.

I was so unused to someone rising to my defense that all I could do was gape. But Marie’s actions warmed my heart, too, because her friendship was the first thing I’d ever had that was mine alone, untouched by the grief and travails of the past few years. A few days later, the older Tufton sister presented me with a pretty crimson ribbon. I viewed it as a peace offering, just as their country had been forced to a peace treaty with mine. And my acceptance earned me two more steady friends.

But
that
night, I had only Marie. She slid into bed beside me, her gaze daring anyone else to say a word. No one did. When everyone finally settled for sleep, Marie turned and stroked a curl from my cheek. “
Cher
Jeffy
. You’ll be happy in Paris, you’ll see. And if not, I’ll teach you to pretend.”

“I
SHOULD STAY WITH YOU
and help Jimmy prepare our Christmas feast,” I said to Papa, who’d finally recovered from his illness but was still regaining his strength. “After all, one day I’ll have to play hostess for a husband.”

“Not for quite some time,” Papa said from his armchair, a woolen blanket over his legs. Then he gave a rueful smile. “And let’s hope when it comes to marriage, you don’t draw a blockhead. In this, I put your odds at fourteen to one.”

Bad odds,
I thought. Could it really be so hard to find a good husband or was my father’s long-absent sense of humor returning to him?

Once he felt healthy again, Papa took me to see marionettes and gardens and Yuletide decorations. We visited cafés, billiard halls, shopping complexes, and bookstalls. Once when we strolled the snowy streets, we were treated to a song by a defrocked abbé with a guitar.

With each new outing, Paris enchanted us more and more. Papa declared himself violently smitten by the classical architecture of the Hotel de Salm, and we spent many days watching its construction from a garden terrace across the river. Nearly every American in Paris gathered at our home for a holiday celebration. Another night we went to visit the Adams family and shared a feast of roast goose, and afterward, Nabby Adams taught me to slide on the ice.

Papa came out into the night air to watch us, and it was a merry Christmastide. If only the New Year had been as kind . . .

For at the end of January, the Marquis de Lafayette, returned from his journey to America, came to call. Lafayette was the French general who had saved us from the British, and we hailed him as a military commander second only to General Washing ton. But on the evening the Marquis came to call upon us, he was a humble gentleman in our doorway, unattended by his aides. In truth, the nobleman cut an impressive figure in white breeches, calfskin gloves, and a martial coat of blue adorned with two rows of gilded buttons. But beneath his powdered wig, he wore the saddest expression I’d ever seen.

What could this man say that occasioned such gravity? When Lafayette finally began to speak, emotion caught in his throat and he nearly wept, begging my father’s pardon. He carried a letter to us from the doctor at Eppington. A letter of the most dreadful tidings.

My father went to stone as Lafayette babbled heartfelt condolences, half in French, half in English. The Marquis was shockingly sentimental, even for a Frenchman, and it took me several moments to sift through his emotional speech. I heard the names of my sisters. An illness, born of teething, worms, and whooping cough, had swept through my aunt and uncle’s household, striking all the children.

“Your little Polly survived,” said Lafayette. “But baby Lucy is gone.”

Gone? I pressed a hand to my shuddering chest and struggled to draw in a breath. The pain started as a sting in my heart and burned its way out until I had to choke back a sob. Never once had I imagined my separation from my sisters to be final. Never had I thought our hasty farewell to baby Lucy at Eppington would be the last. I’d written a letter to Aunt Elizabeth just weeks ago with wishes for Lucy she did not live long enough to hear. To learn the sweet girl had been gone for over three months and I hadn’t known it, I hadn’t felt it, I hadn’t sensed the loss.