America's First Daughter: A Novel

by Stephanie Dray

  I was duped by the Secretary of the treasury and made a tool for forwarding his schemes, not then sufficiently understood by me; and of all the errors of my political life this has occasioned me the deepest regret. That I have utterly, in my private conversations, disapproved of the system of the Secretary of the treasury, I acknowledge. His system flows from principles adverse to liberty, and is calculated to undermine and demolish the republic.

  The summer just before he wrote this letter, Papa returned to Monticello in a state of agitation, telling of all the indignities he’d suffered at the hands of the cunning and ambitious secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton.

  At dinner—a meal put together with the freshest vegetables from my new garden—my husband asked, “What kind of fool is this Mr. Hamilton?”

  My father set down his spoon and mopped sweat off his brow with a napkin. The infernal heat of that summer had been so stifling that we hadn’t been able to sleep comfortably even with every door and window open. But it wasn’t the heat that vexed him. “The secretary of the treasury is no kind of fool at all. He is a colossus.”

  Never had I heard of my father speak of a man this way. Half in awe, half in mortal dread. And because there was a crowd at our table, including my Carr cousins, in thrall with his every word, my father continued. “We are daily pitted in the cabinet like two cocks.” Papa shook his head and pushed away his plate. “I’ve confronted the president, who assures me there are merely desires but not designs for a monarchy.”

  A moment of appalled silence fell upon the table as we considered the president’s most unsettling—and scarcely reassuring—reply. None of us wanted to believe our liberty to be in so much danger, but Papa’s sense of betrayal at the way his compatriots had twisted the revolutionary spirit to which he’d best given voice was clear. And seemingly warranted.

  “What will you do?” Tom asked, his brow furrowed and eyes serious.

  “I’ll resign.” Before anyone could protest, Papa added, “No man has ever had less desire of entering into public offices than me. Only the war induced me to undertake it. Twice before I’ve refused diplomatic appointments until a … domestic loss … made me fancy a change of scene. Now I want nothing so much as to be at home.”

  A domestic loss.

  Papa still couldn’t speak of it, I realized. Even in the privacy of his home, even so near to the anniversary of her death, he couldn’t speak of my mother’s passing except as a domestic loss.

  I forced a smile and chirped, “We’ll be so happy to have you home for good, Papa. We’ll be together. Everything we always wanted.” And, at long last, it would be everything Mama had always wanted, too.

  Of course, I had no way of ensuring that would come to pass without my husband’s consent. But Colonel Randolph had finally agreed to sell Edgehill to us, and I believed, deep in my heart, that Tom would be happier living nearer to my father than his own.

  I became more sure of it in early August when we received news that Colonel Randolph’s wife had given him a brand-new baby. A boy named Thomas Mann Randolph—same as my husband.

  If I hadn’t hated Colonel Randolph before that moment, I did then, because Tom took it hard, like a bullet to the heart.

  It wasn’t uncommon to name a baby after a sibling … if they’d died. From which Tom inferred that his father wished he’d never been born. “I’ve been erased,” Tom said, staring bleakly out the open parlor window with a glass of liquor dangling precariously from one hand. Then he drained it, his throat working hard to swallow the poison down. “Replaced.”

  With the imminent birth of our own new baby, I was too overcome by my belly and the stifling August heat to rise swiftly up from my chair to comfort him. It was Papa who put a hand on Tom’s shoulder and said, “Nursing this wound can’t remedy the evil, and may make it a great deal worse. Don’t let it be a cankerworm corroding eternally on your mind. Forgive your father, because Colonel Randolph surely meant nothing but to indulge his new wife in this.”

  That was putting a shine on manure, and my husband surely knew it.

  But then my father added, “You have your own family now, and a new baby to arrive any day. How can anything cloud the joy of that? If you have your wife and children, you have the keystone to the arch of happiness.”

  Tom looked down for a long moment. He gave a single nod, but I didn’t miss the sadness that deadened his eyes. And despite my father’s attempt to comfort Tom and make him see all the things he had around him, I feared it was a wound from which my husband might never recover.

  I worried over it until my son was born a few weeks later, fearing even as I held him in my arms that Tom would name the child after Colonel Randolph, either from tradition or from provocation, and make his own wound even deeper. But taking our cherub into his own strong arms, Tom proudly named him, “Thomas Jefferson Randolph. We’ll call him Jeff for short.”

  I gasped with delight, knowing how much it would please Papa. “Oh, Tom!”

  “You’ll be the only one with that name,” Tom promised the boy as he hugged him close against his broad chest. Then little Ann came running into the room to hug Tom’s knees. Chuckling, Tom settled his big hand on Ann’s head and smiled down at her. “You’re a big sister now, Miss Randolph.”

  She reached up her hands for her baby brother, and Tom knelt down to give her a closer introduction. In that moment, seeing the three of them together and happy, I felt suddenly overcome by a pang so deep in my heart that it undid me. Grasping at my chest and swallowing hard over my confused emotions, I realized what had happened.

  Why, somehow, I’d fallen in love with my husband.

  It wasn’t a sweet, dreamy love that made my heart skip. It didn’t make me want to shout and spin pirouettes on my toes. It was some other kind of love, so quiet it snuck up on me in the shadows. Nevertheless, it was as real as any love I’d ever felt, and my eyes misted over to feel it.

  Tom peered up at me. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing at all,” I said, resolving to be so kind to him that he’d never need any other family but ours. And what a family it was. My son was a remarkably fine boy. Smaller than my daughter had been at his age, but healthier. So much so that, within a few weeks, we felt confident in taking little Jeff out into the world for a visit to Bizarre.

  Given the news about Gabriella Harvie’s baby boy, I expected to find the Randolph sisters in a state and braced for the gnashing of teeth. But we found our hosts quietly melancholic. Judith smiled to see us, but it was a brittle smile. And Richard was wound tight as a drum as he told us about the recent death of his younger brother, Theo. Tom and I had already heard it was the laudanum that did him in. That, in the end, the young man had been a skeleton, unable even to walk on his own. But as we sat around the parlor at Bizarre, Richard insisted, “It was tuberculosis.”

  My husband’s gaze flicked to his sister Nancy, who hadn’t found a husband yet and who wasn’t likely to find one, looking as frail as she did now. Her skin was like paper and she was unable to muster even a brittle smile. Indeed, the back of the settee appeared to be all that held her upright. I knew Tom was imagining what sort of mischief she’d gotten herself into here at Bizarre.

  Was she taking laudanum, too?

  “Nancy hasn’t been feeling well,” Richard said, putting a comforting hand upon her knee. The gesture was so intimate that Tom went rigid, a shadow over his eyes. And in spite of my happily gurgling baby boy, and Ann’s giggles as she ran about the house, the air went thick with tension.

  So thick that I actually startled when someone banged on the front door.

  None of the house servants went to answer it, but Judy got up and peered out a window at an angle from which she couldn’t be seen. Going pale, she said, “It’s our neighbors.”

  “Well, aren’t you going to let them in?” I asked, anxious as any southern woman to the dictates of hospitality. Of course, if I’d known what the neighbors had come to say, I’d have barred the door myse
lf!

  The Harrisons hadn’t come on a social visit. Indeed, while her husband glowered, Mrs. Harrison left her bonnet on, though she tugged nervously at the pink ribbon holding it to her head. Standing just inside the room, as if she intended an abrupt exit, she finally said, “The rumor is still being passed around, Miss Nancy. We thought you ought to know.”

  “What rumor?” my husband asked.

  Mr. Harrison continued to glower, but to answer Tom, Mrs. Harrison chirped nervously, “The slaves are saying that the night your sisters and your brother-in-law stayed as guests in our home, Richard was seen taking a bundle out to the woodpile, and—” She glanced at Nancy’s belly, fluttering a bit in her unease.

  Before she could continue her thought, Mr. Harrison cut her off with a blunt, “They’re saying Miss Nancy gave birth to Richard’s bastard and that he chopped it to pieces.”

  Shooting to his feet, Richard cried, “Slander!”

  Richard’s outrage was so convincing that I put a hand on Tom’s arm to still him. But my husband, too, shot to his feet. And he was plainly not convinced.

  Richard insisted, “That’s a damnable lie.”

  “Is it?” Mr. Harrison shot back. “You drag your whoring to my house and stain my name—”

  “Please,” his wife begged of him, as if she might swoon away at the unpleasantness. And when her husband quieted, she added, “Nevertheless, you should know it’s being said. The servants claim they heard screams in the night and found bloody sheets in Miss Nancy’s bed.”

  Nancy’s pretty big eyes rounded with fear or outrage; I couldn’t say which. “They were groans. Not screams. I was ailing from womanly troubles and pains in the abdomen. I’ve always suffered from colic. My sisters can tell you that’s true. Isn’t that right?”

  “Of course it’s true,” I said, reflexively. “She’s always had terrible colic.” She’d never had colic in her life as far as I knew, but what else could I say as my husband went from red to purple?

  The moment the Harrisons uttered some stilted courtesy and took their leave, Tom whirled on Nancy, grabbing her by the arms and pulling her to shaky feet. “Were you seduced, sister?”

  Tears filled Nancy’s eyes. “There was never any baby. Someone’s telling lies!”

  My husband didn’t believe it. He shook her, that familiar angry vein pulsing in at his temple. I’d never seen him so angry before, but I understood the cause. Not just the fear that young Nancy had been exploited by the man to whom we’d entrusted her care, but also that if her honor had been sullied by a baby begot out of wedlock, it’d sully Tom’s honor, too.

  And that was to say nothing of a dead baby!

  When Nancy looked to Richard for help, my husband’s rage worsened, his knuckles going white. Tom turned to Richard, too, and I thought he might commit murder then and there.

  But just then, Judith gave a bitter laugh. “It’s just slave talk. This is what happens when we hold Negroes in bondage. I imagine this dreadful rumor is being spread by Mr. Harrison’s slaves to embarrass him. Or to urge him to be a better, more benevolent father over them.”

  Judith’s explanation had merit. Mr. Harrison was known as a cold and heartless slave master. His slaves very well might want to call his honor and authority into question. I glanced at Tom, hoping he’d calm himself. But my husband’s jaw was so tight I thought he’d chip a tooth if he tried to speak.

  He didn’t speak. Not a word. Only later that night, on the pillow beside me, did he finally ask, “It’s too preposterous a tale about Nancy to be believed, isn’t it?”

  “Entirely preposterous.” Silently, I counted back the months. “Why, in order for it to be true, she’d have got with child when last we visited here!”

  Besides, I couldn’t imagine how any woman could hide a pregnancy. Sally hadn’t been able to hide it. When I was fat with my own two babies, there wasn’t a person alive I could’ve fooled. And even if Nancy could hide such a thing, I couldn’t imagine anyone killing a baby. Certainly not my own kin.

  “Don’t think on it another moment, Tom. We’ll put it out of our heads,” I said, stroking his arm.

  That’s precisely what I aimed to do. Especially since I was nursing the newborn and worrying for my daughter, whose tummy troubles brought her whimpering into our bed in the wee hours of the morning. Laying her against the warmth of her father’s strong shoulder, I took a candle from the bedside and padded barefoot down the stairs to search out some peppermint for her to gnaw on.

  The kitchen at Bizarre was much the same as I’d left it, but when I opened the canister where I expected to find peppermint, I found something else. With a mounting sense of dread, I recognized it as gum guaiacum—the very thing Judith once said could get rid of an unwanted child.

  I stood there, staring into the depths of that shadowy canister, trying to deny the truth of what I was seeing. Then a question came out of the dark. “What are you looking for, Patsy?” Nancy’s sharp profile emerged from the shadows, startling me. And the sight of her in her nightclothes, hair unkempt, as if she’d just tumbled from a man’s bed, made my heart hard.

  Rounding on her, I whispered, “Who was it? Who was the father?”

  Nancy turned so that her face fell into the shadows. “I don’t know what you’re saying.”

  I brought the candle closer, wanting to see the truth in her eyes. “Was it Theo, God rest his soul?” It couldn’t have been freakishly boyish John, whose impotence made it impossible. That left Theo as the least horrifying possibility. If spirited young Nancy had fallen in love with sickly Theo … if he’d meant to marry her but died before he could …

  “There was no baby,” Nancy hissed, still turned away.

  I wanted to believe her, truly I did. But if she was telling the truth, why couldn’t she meet my eyes? “Then it was Richard?” I asked, appalled. Their union would be considered not merely adulterous but also incestuous.

  Still, there was a worse possibility—one that might explain the determination of slaves to spread the gossip even under threat of their master’s whip. I took another step closer, my own voice trembling. “Or was it a Negro slave?”

  Nancy’s jaw snapped shut, and she finally dared to meet my eyes, hers burning like coals. “I said there was no baby, Patsy. Do you hear me? There was no baby!”

  I didn’t know if she was lying to me or lying to herself.

  I only knew she was lying.

  Every hair lifted on the nape of my neck at her desperation, hoping it was only the kind of desperation that would drive a terrified, unmarried girl to abort her baby and not the kind that might allow her lover to chop up that baby once it was born. “Oh, Nancy,” I said, nearing tears for the dead child and the pain this would cause her family—and how it would destroy my husband.

  She grabbed my arm like a drowning woman. “Say you hear me. There never was a baby.”

  There never was a baby. Just like my father had never wanted to kill himself, never taken a married woman as his lover, and never conceived a child with Sally Hemings.

  “I hear you, Nancy,” I said, bitterly. “I hear you.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Philadelphia, 12 November 1792

  From Thomas Jefferson to Martha Jefferson Randolph

  I have nothing to tell you but that I love you dearly, and your dear connections, that I am well, as is Maria. I hope your little one has felt no inconvenience from the journey, that Ann is quite recovered, and Mr. Randolph’s health good. Yours is so firm, that I am less apt to apprehend for you: Still, however, take care of your good health, and of your affection to me, which is the solace of my life.

  WANTING TO PROTECT MY HUSBAND’S GOOD HEALTH, I said nothing to him about the gum guaiacum or my confrontation with his sister. It wouldn’t have done him any good, and may have done a great deal of harm.

  If it became known that Nancy had been pregnant, the prospects of her entire life would be forever diminished. She’d find it nearly impossible to secure a husband. Sh
e’d become a spinster, forever a financial burden on the family without any place to call her own. So, I told myself to be kind to Nancy, that she’d been preyed upon by a man who ought to have known better. That she was a victim of error if not slander, and it’d be best to carry her away from here.

  We’d take Nancy with us. Maybe to Charlottesville, where we could marry her quickly before the rumor spread. But Nancy would have none of it. “If I go, it’ll only feed the gossip.”

  “Nonsense,” I said, folding my own clothes for the trunk as my maid was nowhere to be found. “No one in Albemarle will have heard about this.”

  I was determined to drag Nancy away if necessary, but Judith surprised me by making herself the most formidable obstacle to my plans. She went directly to my husband and said, “If you take Nancy, it’ll reflect poorly on Richard. It’ll look as though you don’t trust your own brother-in-law.”

  Knowing Richard had seduced Judith before their marriage, I guessed my husband wouldn’t find this argument compelling. Tom snapped, “How can it be unmannerly to take my own sister home with me?”

  Then Richard’s brother John intervened. “Now Toooom,” he drawled, smoothly stretching out his name. “If you take Nancy, it’ll look as if you don’t believe her innocence.” If there was anyone at Bizarre we were certain hadn’t seduced Nancy, it was John. Stunted but more effusive than a Frenchman, he was as persuasive as a serpent in the Garden of Eden, so we left Nancy there.

  We were quiet on the way home, but for little Ann, whimpering at every bump in the road, unable to keep down her breakfast of milk-soaked biscuit. The journey should’ve only taken hours, but with our girl spitting up and our boy fussing at my breast, it seemed like days. I was already weary when we rolled up to the mountaintop and saw Sally on the front portico, her amber eyes intent on me.

  “Miss Patsy,” she said with an urgency that told me she’d been waiting. Though every other slave on the plantation now called me Mistress Randolph, Sally rarely did, either a sign of her intimacy with me or our complicated history. Waiting until Tom had gone in the house with the babies, she rushed up to me. “There’s a rumor in Charlottesville about your Randolph kin—about Miss Nancy.”