America's First Daughter: A Novel
Page 31
Holding a letter, my husband said, “My father is dying.”
He gave immediate orders to fetch his horse, then took my hand. “I must ride to Tuckahoe without delay. Follow as soon as you can with the children.”
“Of course. As quickly as I can.” Not knowing if I should feel grief or relief at the news that the main source of my husband’s longtime suffering might soon leave us forevermore, I threw my arms around Tom’s neck. “Ride safely.”
He grasped my face, kissed me, and departed.
Tom wanted us to hurry, but my maid was so slow and sullen that I nearly shouted at her. Thankfully, Sally took the baby, shooing my maid away before I lost my temper. “Hush now,” Sally said to my baby son. Then to me, she said, “If you like, I’ll go on with you to Tuckahoe, Miss Patsy. Lay some flowers on my baby’s grave before the snows come.”
It would only be right, I thought, so I nodded. Besides, she’d keep out of the way at Tuckahoe, where the Randolphs were surely set to feud again. Oh, I never really worried that the old man was truly dying. I was sure he was entirely too mean to die. This latest crisis was almost assuredly another bit of Randolph theatrics.
So I was stunned when, after more than a day’s travel, we rolled up the long tree-lined drive to Tuckahoe and my husband met us at the gate, overwrought. “He’s dead, Patsy. He’s dead!”
“Oh, Tom,” I said, clutching his hand.
He lowered his head, tears welling in his eyes. “I was too late. Rode as hard as I could, but when I got here John Harvie was in the door, telling me I didn’t get here in time.”
Seeing my husband in such a state, Sally disappeared somewhere with my children, for which I was enormously grateful. I went into the house with Tom, into the very room where the Randolph book of ancestry resided, with its drawings and coats of arms. And the moment we were alone behind closed doors, Tom went to his knees, burying his face in my belly, letting me stroke his hair while he sobbed.
My heart broke for Tom, who had now lost both a mother and a father in only a handful of years. We’d known, of course, that one day it’d come to pass that we’d be master and mistress of Tuckahoe. But neither of us had desired it, nor expected it, so soon. Even as much as I loathed that old man, I hadn’t wished death on him.
At only twenty-five years old, my husband had already taken on the role of patriarch—that’s why he’d been so upset about his sister’s scandal. As the eldest son, his younger siblings already looked to him for guidance, but now they’d look to Tom for everything. And I couldn’t begrudge him his torrent of grief in light of the burdens that were now his to bear.
Once spent of his tears, Tom asked if I’d take on the education of the children. “My sisters look up to you, Patsy. Your learning in France will stand them in good stead. Maybe Nancy will come back to help so she can have a life with her family even if no decent man will have her now.”
My throat swelled with emotion. “Of course I will, Tom. I’ll do whatever you need me to. And with utter devotion.” I meant it with all my heart, because I understood that with Colonel Randolph’s death, our lives would never be the same. We’d have to move to Tuckahoe, lock, stock, and barrel. We’d have to make this bleak plantation, and all its slaves, support the whole family—all Colonel Randolph’s children, and his widow, too. We’d have to mend the quarrels with Gabriella and reconcile Tom’s unmarried sisters to living under one roof again, as family ought to.
I’d have to help him do that. I’d have to be more loving to my husband and his family than ever before. Which was why when I went down the next morning and discovered the widow presiding over the sitting room in fine black silks, I resolved to be kind to her. She’d driven my husband’s sisters away—even the littlest ones, who had lived with us at Monticello ever since. But I was determined to forget that now.
Bleary-eyed after a night of troubled sleep, I sat beside Gabriella and said, “You have my sympathies in your loss, and—”
“Colonel Randolph is with God now,” she interrupted, standing up and walking to the window.
I rose to follow her, imagining she must be frightened, widowed and with two babes, now at the mercy of my husband for her upkeep. “You mustn’t worry about anything. Now is a time for family to come together. Please let me know what I can do to ease your time of mourning.”
Very calmly, Gabriella traced a finger over the windowpane where Nancy had carved the date of her mother’s death. “You think of me as family?”
I hadn’t. Not truly. But I was resolved, henceforth, to do so. “From this day forward—”
She spun to face me. “Don’t bother. It won’t be long before I remarry. I have my looks, two babies to prove I’m fertile, a respected family name, and a fortune to bestow.”
I supposed there were advantages to being the daughter of John Harvie, but to say such things while her husband was only a few hours dead … well, I excused it as the shock of her loss. “Just know that you’ll always be welcome here at Tuckahoe. It’s your home.”
She gave an amused snort. “I will be welcome here, of course.”
It was a strange remark, but I dismissed it. And I thought it was merely her father’s natural aristocratic sense of command that made him strut about the place, giving commands to the slaves at Tuckahoe as if it were his own plantation. None of this went down easy with Tom or his brothers.
And, adding to the tension, the Randolphs of Bizarre arrived for the burial the next day. Judith, Nancy, and Richard all arrived in one carriage. For his safety, I suppose Richard counted upon the solemnity of the occasion, and the protection of his womenfolk, as always. Having escaped justice—though not the censure of all right-thinking Virginians—he obviously felt free to go in public with his lover on one arm and his wife on the other.
But whereas Nancy and Richard were unrepentant, the scandal had obviously taken its toll on poor Judy and her baby son, who had been afflicted with deafness. Some said it was God’s punishment for Richard’s crimes. I myself sometimes worried about God’s vengeance, having broken my promise to enter his nunnery and having sworn falsely upon a Bible at court. But would God really visit the crimes of the father onto his child? Judy must’ve thought so, because she wore her mourning clothes as if she might never wear any others, clinging to her Bible, praying more devoutly than a nun.
Draped in expensive black lace that made her an even prettier widow than she’d been a bride, Gabriella leaned in at the grave site and whispered to me, “He’s thinking of divorcing her, you know.”
“What?” I asked, sure that I’d misheard.
“Richard,” Gabriella replied, impatiently. “He’s been consulting a lawyer in Richmond about the possibility of divorce and showering his whore with little gifts. I suppose he means to switch sisters.”
I’d never known anyone who’d been divorced. Not even at the convent in Paris, where I’d met women who had run away from their husband and wanted annulments, but never divorce. I didn’t even think it was possible in Virginia. Especially not to divorce one sister and take the other as a wife! “Poor Judith,” I breathed.
No wonder she was clinging to her Bible, thumbing the pages, murmuring a prayer by her father’s grave site that seemed more desperate than devotional. And while we waited on the officiant, my husband stooped beside his mother’s unkempt grave site and began to clear the weeds with his bare hands. “Couldn’t someone be bothered to tend her grave?” he muttered, and I had to put a hand to his shoulder to silence him. But his sisters overheard and cast looks of blame at Gabriella.
I kept my silence because, even as I tried to remember this was my family now, I didn’t understand the Randolphs. A short time later, listening to the officiant praise a man I’d never thought of as any sort of father, my eyes drifted to the edge of the woods where I saw Sally Hemings standing by a field of wildflowers, mourning for her dead son—a little boy who, like her, was my family in truth.
I was still thinking about her—worrying for her—after we
’d returned to the house for tea while the men closeted themselves together to go over Colonel Randolph’s will in the great hall.
All at once Tom burst out of the arched double-doors, looking as if he’d been struck with a hammer like a hog at the slaughter. Without a word, he walked right out of the back door of the house, staggering toward the river, like a man come unmoored from his senses.
“Tom!” I cried, hurrying after him. I had no idea where he was going as he then changed his path and circled the house. He never turned when I called his name. Holding my skirts in both hands, tromping through autumn leaves, I chased after him, realizing that we’d come again to the little white schoolhouse my grandfather built when he’d presided here at Tuckahoe.
All at once, Tom whirled and pulled me up the stairs and inside. “It’s my fault. My fault for not staying at Varina.”
“What’s your fault?” I asked, looking into his bleak eyes.
“John Harvie says that if I’d stayed at Varina, the plantation my father gave me, I’d have been close by at the end.”
“Oh, Tom, no,” I said, thinking it extraordinarily cruel for someone to say such a thing to a grieving son. “You rode out the moment you heard your father was ill. You rode like a madman to get to his side. You can’t think—”
“I was too far away,” Tom broke in. “If I’d been at Varina, I’d have been at his bedside. And that’s why …” He shuddered.
A sense of dread washed over me. “That’s why what?”
“That’s why he changed his will!”
My stomach clenched. “What can you mean?”
“I’m not the heir to Tuckahoe,” Tom said, his eyes dropping from mine, as if he couldn’t bear the shame. “He took from me my patrimony as eldest son and gave it to the new boy. He gave Gabriella’s son everything. My name, my father, my ancestral home. As if in my twenty-five years on this earth, I was never anything to him. And now I’m nothing, Patsy. He’s left me with nothing.”
Chapter Twenty-two
THE MAGNITUDE OF THE DISASTER—both emotional and financial—was too much to take in. “That can’t be true,” I said, my head spinning as I grappled with all this would mean for us.
“It is true,” Tom said, too weary to stand. Sinking down onto the schoolmaster’s desk, he said, “My father rewrote his will in his last hours. He chose to spite me with his very last breaths.”
Suddenly, Gabriella’s strange remarks at breakfast took on a new light. No doubt Colonel Randolph’s young widow and her father hovered like buzzards over the mean old bastard to the last. They’d stolen Tom’s patrimony, but I’d have to put a more charitable spin on it, because Tom looked on the verge of shattering to pieces.
Regardless of the inheritance, my husband would be guardian over the children and steward of the estate. Much as my grandfather had been when he built this schoolhouse. That was the custom, and Tom could find some solace in that. “Tom, I’m sure your father was only worried the child would have nothing. That boy isn’t even two years old and will need us to look after him and his mother. It’ll be nearly twenty years before he comes into his inheritance, and with your stewardship at Tuckahoe—”
“You don’t understand,” Tom said, sharply. “I won’t have a stewardship at Tuckahoe. I meant what I said. I’ve lost my ancestral home. Not just the profits and enjoyment of it. But everything. John Harvie was named guardian over the younger children.”
I gasped in outrage and insult, my arms hugging my stomach against the sudden burning ache that settled there. Never mind the money; how could Colonel Randolph have entrusted his children into the care of the Harvies? And I was suddenly struck with fear that little Jenny, who had been living with us for years now, might be ripped away. “That cannot be true.”
Tom gripped the edge of the table so hard the wood creaked. “You think I’d make it up? Until the boy comes of age, Harvie will be master of Tuckahoe, not me. My mother’s children have no place here any longer.” My husband laughed bitterly. “But my brother and I do have the singular honor of executing my father’s estate.”
Which meant that Colonel Randolph had left my husband to settle his debts.
My throat tightened and my heart raced, sending my head into a spin. I pressed a hand to my forehead. That malevolent old rotter said my Jefferson blood ran cold. But nothing could have been colder than this. Colonel Randolph hadn’t simply impoverished us, but aimed to rip Tom’s sisters away from us and saddle us with costs and expenses besides.
He was as petty a tyrant as any king who’d ever lived, and the most un-Christian feelings welled up inside me such that I wanted to make the trip to the cemetery just to spit on Colonel Randolph’s freshly dug grave.
But my fears, disappointment, and anger were nothing in the face of Tom’s loss. “I—I tried to obey him,” Tom murmured through bloodless lips. “Tried to please him when I could. You saw that. I tried to make of myself something he might be proud of, but I didn’t always obey and I never could find a way to please him no matter how hard I tried. Even so, I never thought he could hate me. What did I do to make him hate me so?”
Reaching for my husband’s face—which was somehow even more beautiful in its anguish—I cradled his cheeks in my hands. “Your father didn’t hate you.” It was a lie, but I’d told others and for lesser cause. To protect my husband from this pain, I’d tell this lie and a hundred others. “No father could ever hate his son, and especially not you. Not a learned, hardworking, loving, and lovable son like you.”
“I’m not lovable, Patsy.” Tom clutched at my arms. “Never have been.”
“You are.” I brought my lips to his brow, like I was soothing a babe.
But he drew back with a shudder. “You know better than anyone that I’m not worthy of love. You’ve always held yourself back because you see what’s in me—this darkness. This melancholy and temper that slips its reins. I think my father must’ve seen it, too. Must’ve known that something was broken in me, like dogs know there’s something wrong with a pup.”
At the sight of tears in his reddened, swollen eyes, I brought my forehead to touch his, whispering, nose to nose. “There’s nothing wrong with you, Tom Randolph.”
A sob escaped him. “Then why would my father do such a thing to me?”
For spite, I thought. But it wouldn’t help Tom to know his father was a spiteful worm, lower than dirt. When a man knows that he’s come from nothing he may never aspire to better. So I said, “Your father was very ill. To do such a thing, in the end, he must’ve been quite out of his senses.”
A spark of hope lit in Tom’s eyes. “Do you think so?”
I nodded, firmly. Convincing myself as much as him. “I do. Why, any right-minded person might suspect your father’s widow stood over the bed and held the pen in the dying man’s hand.”
I was sowing discord amongst the living when it was the dead who was to blame, yet, in my estimation, the Harvies had stolen my children’s birthright, and I wasn’t apt to be charitable.
Meanwhile, Tom choked back another sob. “I should’ve been here. I should’ve been here sooner.”
I was to blame for that. I was the one who hated Varina. I’d hounded him to move to my father’s mountain, thinking it was the best place for my children. Was I wrong to have done it? “You went to him the moment you heard,” I reminded him, stroking his hair, still marveling at the thickness of it between my fingers.
Since the day Tom struck me, I hadn’t felt the stirrings of arousal and desire, so I was surprised to feel them now, stronger than ever. Tom was so vulnerable that I remembered how sweet he could be. How much pleasure we’d found in one another. How he’d driven away my pain and heartbreak with the sheer force of his desire.
Now I wanted to do the same for him.
He’d accused me of holding myself back from him, and I had. There still seemed something too dangerous in admitting that I loved him, so I tried to show him, kissing him with a brazenness I’d never dared before.
“You’re all I have, Patsy,” he whispered. “All I have now …”
THAT WINTER, my father limped home from his battles with the secretary of the treasury, battered and bruised in spirit, desiring to give up the work of government forever. He had resigned and retired.
It was, of course, what my sister and I wanted most.
We wanted our father home. We didn’t want to share him with the world anymore, and we both believed he’d be happier as the simple gentleman farmer he professed to be.
But when Papa returned to Monticello, it wasn’t with the high spirits of a man finally freed from public duty. Oh, he nattered excitedly about the price of wheat and molasses, sheep and potatoes, and seemed to be eager for the spring thaw. But I knew him too well not to notice the tension leaking out the edges of his daily routine.
On his third day home, he and Polly came in from a ride, and Sally Hemings was there in an instant, eager to attend him. I suppose that after years of living under Tom’s authority while steering clear of me, Sally was as grateful as I was for Papa’s return as unquestioned master of the plantation.