Perhaps it was having lived so long in Paris, where slavery had been abolished, or perhaps it was the strong emotions my pregnancy had drawn out of me, but every word of my aunt’s inquiry aggravated me. There seemed to be so much wrongness in it that I’d go mad trying to unravel it all. Sally was, after all, almost as much Aunt Elizabeth’s sister as Polly was mine. But my aunt never acknowledged the colored part of the family except by calling them that. And because such a thing was never acknowledged in polite company, I’d have to quiet the part of my mind that persisted in thinking about the connection.
As for her question, I knew my father had no intention of giving Sally away. Not to me. Not to anyone. Not ever. He’d made Sally a promise in France, and he was honor-bound to keep it, even now that their child was dead. So I shrugged. “Sally and I wouldn’t get on well… .”
“Still, your father only gave you field hands,” Aunt Elizabeth said, pushing the needle in deep. “You can’t trust them in the house. You need someone you know. Someone with intelligence and character.”
Someone with lighter skin, she meant. Someone who behaved more like a servant so as to uphold the polite fiction of it all. Someone in the family …
Utterly sickened by her implication, I blurted, “Papa intends to free James Hemings. And Mary is now living with Mr. Bell. I think Mr. Bell means to free her, and my father will help arrange that, too. You ought to know my father believes slavery is an injustice.”
“Your father and every cultured gentleman in Virginia,” Aunt Elizabeth said, not looking very impressed. She pursed her lips. “The world is how it is and no one can change it. Not even your father.”
She was wrong, I thought. Papa had already changed it. France had changed it. Liberty was spreading across the ocean and the whole world. And what about Mr. Short? He was a Virginia gentleman who had taken a principled stand on the matter, and surely other men would follow suit. My own husband professed to want only a small farmstead he could work himself, but in Virginia, slavery was a way of life, and it would have to be the way of my life. We couldn’t get by without the slaves, and my father said they couldn’t get by without us.
“Ask your father to give you Mary’s daughter, Molly,” Aunt Elizabeth said. “She’s a girl of almost fourteen now. She knows how a house should run and she’s not so pretty as Sally, so your father won’t mind parting with her.”
That shut me right up. And for more reasons than one.
When I said nothing, my aunt added, “With a child on the way and no proper homestead, you can’t get along without a maid. Especially not at Varina, where you’ll be the only woman. What with your husband in the field and you by yourself in some old shack, I’d worry about you night and day.”
“It’s where they say Princess Pocahontas used to live,” I said, more hopeful than I had any right to be. “I’m sure it’s not so horrible… .”
In truth, nothing in my whole life prepared me for what I faced that summer at Varina. I found myself hauling river water up to a ramshackle house, wondering whether or not I’d survive another day. My fingers and ankles were constantly swollen in the heat, and the early stages of my pregnancy made me nauseated and dizzy. Since the slaves were needed in the fields, I spent all day, every day, hauling buckets and firewood by myself. Washing dishes. Scrubbing clothes. Grinding corn. Plucking chickens. Things I’d never done before. Things few plantation mistresses did without the help of servants. Things that made me so tired and filthy I thought I’d never get clean again.
Aunt Elizabeth had been right when she said I badly needed the assistance of a maid. Trapped in an endless cycle of toil and solitude, how I yearned for feminine companionship. Establishing a new plantation left no time for letters or visits with neighbors. And even eating for two, there were nights I’d have happily gone hungry rather than cook something from our near-empty larder over a fire that made the nights hotter and more miserable by far. I couldn’t get comfortable on the old bedding or on the wooden floor, and was a meal for mosquitoes either way. Grimy and drenched in sweat, aching from head to toe, I couldn’t quite conceive of how I’d come to this.
A year earlier, I’d been drinking bubbling wine from crystal glasses in Paris ballrooms. I’d been decked in silks and satins and brocades, dancing with French and English nobility, taking music lessons, attending concerts, and gambling with duchesses. For the love of God, I could have been a duchess. How did I find myself exiled to this remote farm, tossing and turning, weary to the bone?
If I’d stayed with William Short, accepted his proposed vision for my life—become the wife of a diplomat instead of a planter—
No. Tom was my husband and my place was with him now. I boxed the disloyal thoughts up and locked them away. Especially since every day, under that fiery sun, Tom worked the fields with the slaves, all of them sweating and struggling in the earth. The slaves were obliged to do it at the threat of an overseer’s whip, but Tom wanted to learn the work, and I’d never in my life seen any white man work as hard.
Until that summer I’d only known Tom as a schoolboy and then as a gentleman of learning. I didn’t know how much of a planter there was in him, and I guess he wasn’t too sure either.
In truth, when I wasn’t exhausted or sick or otherwise distracted by Varina’s countless demands, I was proud of my husband’s efforts. But I was equally worried that he was determined to prove something to his father even if it killed him.
And I feared it just might.
Almost every night he came back with his sweat-soaked shirt sucked tight against his broad chest, face sunburned, and his stomach too sick to eat even on those evenings I did manage to have something like a meal ready for him. After a particularly arduous day’s labor, Tom retched up his guts outside the house murmuring, “I hate tobacco. Too hard on our people. Too hard on me.”
“It’s the climate,” I replied, hating to see him reduced to this and stroking his handsome face with a wet cloth. A heat rash was spreading all over him, and I could tell it itched something awful. “It’s not healthful here.”
“It’s torture,” Tom agreed, peering at me from under his sweat-soaked hair.
That emboldened me, and I knelt to look him in the eyes, swabbing his face with the cool cloth once more. “The air near my father’s mountain … it’s fresher.”
“Fresher.” Tom nodded, and let his blistered hand come to rest on my lightly swollen belly. The look of defeat in his eyes nearly broke my heart, even as his next words filled me with hope. “Maybe after my father marries the Harvie girl, I’ll muster up the courage to ask him to sell us his property at Edgehill.”
And because it was as far as I could push him on the matter, I let myself be content. At least until the wedding proper …
Gabriella Harvie was a beautiful bride who floated down her father’s grand staircase into a hall filled with white flower garlands, wearing a dress of pale blue damask with a tasseled bodice. At eighteen, she had a queenly presence, a charming voice, and—as I would come to learn—no soul at all.
Her long lashes and doe eyes blinded men to the virago that dwelled within, and on her wedding day, the bride smiled so angelically at Colonel Randolph that he seemed thunderstruck by the sight of her. At the time, I hoped she’d bring him such comfort that he’d be kinder to his children. And I myself was in a hopeful mood because I’d availed myself of the amenities of the great house and finally got a good bath.
I felt like a lady again for the first time since moving to Varina.
Once the vows were said and the celebration begun in the great hall, Nancy rushed to me, crying, “Citizen Patsy is going to make me an auntie!” I was glad to see her smile in spite of the awkward circumstance her father’s marriage created. Alas, the bride soon swept over to us before I could tell her so.
“My dearest new daughters,” Gabriella said.
I laughed, since we were all only a few years apart in age. But Gabriella laced a cloying arm through Nancy’s and announced, “The fi
rst thing I’m going to do is paint the parlor white so I’ll feel more at home at Tuckahoe. The black walnut walls are so gloomy!”
Nancy stiffened. “My mother chose them.”
“All the more reason, then,” Gabriella said, her eyes glittering with malice. “It’s important for everyone to know there’s a new mistress of Tuckahoe.”
Was she taking aim at Nancy, who would have to relinquish her mother’s keys? Or was it a barb aimed at me, because of Tom’s indiscreet remarks when Sally’s boy died?
Maybe it was meant for both of us.
The bride batted her lashes. “Patsy, everyone says you’re so worldly, so tell Nancy how it works. Perhaps she’ll listen when you say that unless she’s planning a trip to Paris, she’ll never have a better chance to snag herself a wealthy husband than at this wedding. And she can’t live at Tuckahoe forever.”
From that moment, I knew Gabriella would make life miserable for my husband and his siblings. They must’ve known it, too, because when it was time for us to leave, Tom’s youngest sisters clung to his legs and begged him to take them away with us.
“Now, girls,” I said gently. “Do your best to welcome your father’s new wife, and make Tuckahoe a place of happiness and contentment for everyone.”
But I felt a peculiar uneasiness on the road. And in the carriage, Tom turned to me and said, “I wasn’t apt to like her, but I never guessed Gabriella would be such a horrible woman.” So alone amongst the men, he hadn’t been ensnared by her beauty. And I adored him a little bit for it. Even more when he said, “You cannot imagine how I want to turn around, grab up my sisters, and carry them away with us.”
“I don’t have to imagine it. I feel it, too.”
His head jerked up and he stared. Then, all at once, heedless of who might see us through the carriage windows, he kissed me. He kissed me with such fierceness, such gratitude, such passion … that then and there, I promised myself for the hundredth time that I’d stop comparing him to William Short.
William had been pleasure and principles—in the end, he hadn’t understood the inexorable pull of family. Tom Randolph understood it, and because he did, a very real tenderness for him took root inside me right along with our babe already growing there. I might never love him; I was half-certain I could never fall in love again. But I was starting to feel something for Tom that might be deeper than love, if only I could find a name for it.
I WAS NEVER SO HAPPY to be back at Monticello as I was that autumn, when Papa returned from the capital. Dignity itself wouldn’t have stopped me from running into my beloved father’s arms, but I was too heavy with child to run.
Seeing me that way put a proud gleam in my father’s eye that warmed me from head to toe. But in putting his hand on my belly, that proud gleam faded to sadness, and I wondered if he was thinking of Sally’s little boy, dead and buried months ago.
When the news had finally reached him, he’d suffered his most violent headache yet, lasting nearly six weeks in duration, and with no one there to care for him. I wondered now what kind of reunion Papa and Sally might’ve had if she’d been here with the rest of the servants we’d summoned to welcome my father home. Instead, she was still with Polly at Eppington. I’d been slow to send for her when I learned my father would be coming—a mistake I’d never repeat after seeing Gabriella Harvie installed as mistress of Tuckahoe.
After witnessing the graceless way the new Mrs. Randolph claimed her position, elbowing poor Nancy out of the way, I believed myself to have been a fool for ever raising even the slightest objection to my father’s liaison with Sally.
I vowed to change my thinking in the matter. For I understood that the promise my mother exacted from my father not to marry was an act of maternal, not wifely, love. Perhaps remembering the remarriages of my grandfather Wayles before he had finally settled upon Elizabeth Hemings as his concubine, my mother had said she couldn’t bear to have a stepmother brought in over us.
It was no coincidence, then, that my father took up only with women he could never marry. Beautiful women who meant something to him without having to mean anything to us. Or women like Sally—a slave who could never push me or Polly out of my father’s home.
That night, when I sat down to play music with Papa in Monticello’s parlor, he grasped my hands and brought them to the light for inspection. “What’s this?” he asked of the state of my bruised knuckles and blistered thumbs.
“Just war wounds,” I said, remembering how I’d smashed those knuckles between two buckets while hauling water. “I’ve been fighting a battle against dirt and thirst at Varina.”
“Tom isn’t doing well for himself there?” he asked, the light of the fire highlighting the red of his hair.
Because I sensed in this some criticism of my husband, I said, “You wouldn’t blame him if you knew how little mercy he shows himself in trying to make a profitable farm. He’s strong, Papa, but he’s working himself near to death.”
My father smiled mildly, for he knew better than I did the hard work of plantation life. “No word, yet, on whether Colonel Randolph will sell him Edgehill?”
I shook my head, clenching my teeth to keep from saying something ugly about Colonel Randolph. Just then, Tom came in from some errand, his boots heavy on the floor. “Are you to make music for us, Patsy? I’ve never heard you sing.”
I preferred playing to singing, but Papa rescued me by announcing, “Tom, I regret imposing upon you, but I find myself in need of a favor. I supposed my appointment to France to be the last public office of my life. However, now my duties will keep me at President Washington’s side for an indeterminate time. And it pains me to see Monticello in this run-down state, my people still scattered to the winds.”
Sally, he meant, and I cursed myself again for not sending for her sooner.
Tom stood just behind me in my chair, his hand on my shoulder while Papa continued. “If you and Patsy would be willing to stay at Monticello through the winter and bring some order here, I’d be forever in your debt.”
The truth was that we’d be in his debt. It was an act of generosity—my father wanted to give us somewhere civilized to live while bringing our baby into the world. But in spite of my father’s exquisite diplomacy, Tom knew it for what it was. His hand squeezed my shoulder. “Mr. Jefferson,” he said, his tone just shy of indignant. “I don’t—”
“I realize, of course, that I couldn’t ask you to toil here on my account forever,” Papa said quickly to soothe stung pride. “Not when you want a place of your own. But perhaps, in small repayment for your help, I could go to Tuckahoe and talk with your father about securing Edgehill for you. Perhaps his happy nuptials will put him in a mood to agree.”
At that moment, the gratitude I felt for my father was sweeter than jelly on fresh bread, hot from the oven. For a long moment, Tom didn’t reply, and I felt that I might burst in waiting for his answer.
Finally, Tom’s hand relaxed again and he gave a small bow. “I’m your humble servant, Mr. Jefferson, as always.”
Happiness welled in my chest. Farewell Varina.
I was to be, for the first time in my life, the mistress of Monticello.
ON A RIBBON WORN ROUND MY GROWING BELLY, I wore the keys to all the cabinets and storerooms at Monticello. And as a woman soon ready to birth a babe, I was in a frenzy to put the house right. I counted and polished my father’s silver like my mother had done before me. I kept close records of everything coming in and out of the kitchen. I brined meat in a big wooden salting barrel. I went a thousand times a day from the storehouse, to the washhouse, to the orchard, to the garden, to the kiln, then back to the storeroom again, navigating my way among sacks of grain and loaves of sugar and boxes of supplies.
And, of course, I found myself in command of the house servants—doling out their rations of cornmeal, fish, and pork. In France, when Sally was our maid, I’d not hesitated to direct her, but now that she’d returned to Monticello in my father’s absence, what was she? Fort
unately, Sally took on mending and cleaning without having to be told, and so we settled into a silence all our own.
I’d lost a friend in her, without realizing that I’d had one. I tried never to show just how much I missed Paris and our friends there, great and small. Still, I did long for them. More than I would, or could, ever say. Which is why I nearly swooned when, as the Indian summer gave way to the first bite of winter, a letter from Marie de Botidoux came to the house.
The packet had taken some time to arrive because the post was in a shambles. Now, moving as fast as my belly would allow, I made for the parlor, my little sister trying to snatch the thick paper from me, crying, “I want to read Marie’s letter!”
Fortunately, my height made it easy to keep it from her reach. “It’s not for you, Polly.”
“Well, then, fine,” she fumed. “But I’m too grown-up to be called Polly—if you’re going by Martha, I want to be Mary.”
I lowered myself into an armchair. “If you’re so grown-up, go see if Mammy Ursula needs you to read out a recipe, then study Spanish so I don’t have to tell Papa how lazy you’ve been.”
Once she’d skulked off, I held the letter close, realizing that I might never see my friend again in the flesh. I was careful with the wax seal and reverently unfolded the page, grateful for the news from France.
Mirabeau—who had worked with my father and Lafayette to draft the Declaration of the Rights of Man—was dead. The French tricolor flag was officially adopted. Hereditary titles had been abolished. Catholicism would no longer be the religion of the state. Finally, the king tried to escape and rouse Prussia and Austria to restore the monarchy by force of arms, but was captured by the revolutionaries before he could do so.
And I couldn’t find it in myself to feel sorry.
Who but Papa would understand this news as I did? We’d returned to a country much transformed by six years of relative peace. America’s war of independence was already, for some, a distant memory—the extraordinary sacrifices now an unpleasant recollection, easily buried under the business of rebuilding ordinary lives.
America's First Daughter: A Novel Page 26
