America's First Daughter: A Novel

by Stephanie Dray

  Perhaps she was also eager to repair whatever had been ruptured between them, which had made her status on the plantation uncertain. But when Sally reached for my father’s coat, he nearly jolted at the brush of her fingers at his neck. And when she stooped to take his muddy riding boots, Papa stopped her. “That’s all right, Sally. I’ll do it.”

  Her lower lip wobbled and she bolted away, disappearing somewhere into the recesses of the house.

  “What the devil was that about?” The look of bewilderment on my father’s face might’ve been comical were the cause for Sally’s distress not so plainly obvious.

  “She’s a woman who wants to please you,” Polly said, her cheeks pink with the cold. “Can’t you see that, Papa?”

  “She does please me,” he protested, looking between us. “I found no fault in her. I said nothing harsh whatsoever.”

  My sister put a hand on her hip, addressing my father as no one else dared. “You didn’t have to say it, Papa. You don’t let her do anything for you. Not even pour your tea.”

  My father gave a little snort. Then, as if to make us forget the scene with Sally, he asked me, “Isn’t Mr. Randolph coming down?”

  “Tom’s not hungry.” Or at least, that’s what he said whenever I tried to take something up to him. He’d taken ill after his father’s death and was now unable, or unwilling, to rise from our bed. But it was an erratic illness.

  One day, Tom would be so low in spirits he couldn’t muster the energy to rise and shave his own cheek. The next day, he’d be up before dawn working on threshing machines at such a fevered pace he’d forget to come to bed entirely. It’d been that way for weeks.

  I worried for him.

  Since he wasn’t hungry, I had some strong tea sent up with white sugar—some of the few goods that could still be bought with cash, for the smallpox outbreak and want of commerce had rendered the whole of Virginia a place of only barter and trade.

  But when he refused it, I went up myself to coax him. “At least drink a little tea, Tom. Then maybe you’ll want supper with us tonight. Asparagus has finally come to our table and pairs nicely with eggs.”

  The toll on him was evident; it hollowed out his beauty and made his eyes sink into his head. “I can’t keep anything down,” Tom insisted, bunching the quilt under his chin and turning away toward the wall. When he did, I saw his ribs beneath the broad expanse of his muscular back. He was wasting away while trying to make sense of who he was if he wasn’t his father’s heir.

  Wasting away to the nothing he feared he’d become.

  And I didn’t know what I could say, or do, to help him.

  When I went back down, my father asked, “Is he feeling any better?” I gave a quick, distressed shake of my head and Papa frowned. “You know that you’re both welcome to stay here at Monticello as long as you like.”

  “We’re so grateful,” I replied, wishing that my husband could see that even if his own father had never valued him, mine did. But Monticello wasn’t Tuckahoe. My husband had been hurt and humiliated by his father’s last wishes. What Tom wanted now was to make his own lands profitable, because the longer he lived in another man’s house and managed another man’s farm, the more he doubted his worth as a man.

  My father had his own solution for the problem. “There’s an opening for justice of the peace; Tom should run. It’ll be an honor and a distraction. He’ll have more time for studying the law if he puts off leaving. Besides, it’s been a great comfort having you both here to look after my farm, and now that I’m in a position to enjoy Monticello, who else can I share it with?”

  My father had no sons to give it to, that’s what he meant. Not by blood. Not even Sally’s dead boy. And I was reminded again of just how much my father’s promise never to remarry had cost him. My mother had extracted that from him to fend off women like Gabriella Harvie. And my father had given his word without hesitation, even though it now left him without an heir, and fearful of his legacy.

  But I had given him a grandson. A namesake. Jeff. My thriving baby boy. And I hoped I was about to give him another. Touching the small swell of my belly, I said, “Perhaps my husband will be persuaded to stay when he learns that I may be in a delicate condition.”

  Papa’s face lit up. “Why, that’s wonderful, Patsy. A baby is just the thing to give a man a renewed sense of purpose.” Then I watched the direction of Papa’s eyes as they settled on Sally in the far room, where she was making noise by scrubbing the floor on her hands and knees like my mother used to do. He watched her with longing, his throat bobbing with every bounce of her earrings as she worked. “Do the floors really need scrubbing?”

  “Sally must think so.” When it came to the servants, I never had to ask Sally or Mammy Ursula to do anything. But whereas Mammy ruled over the other slaves like a queen who must be obeyed, Sally just quietly claimed dominion over whatever she felt needed to be done.

  And in her unhappiness, I suppose she’d decided the floor needed scrubbing.

  Papa murmured, “When we left Paris, I promised never to work her hard. That’s why I don’t ask her to tend me.” It was, I thought, a startling dishonesty, for tending to him was the easiest work on the plantation. Then he added, “Your sister’s right about women. Even while employed in drudgery, some bit of ribbon, ear bob, or necklace, or something of the kind will show that the desire of pleasing is never suspended in them … they’re formed by nature for attentions, not for hard labor.”

  It was none of my affair. Truly, it wasn’t. But at a loss as to how to fix everything else that had gone so wrong for the people I loved, I wanted to fix just this one thing. There was no undoing what had passed between my father and Sally, but I was convinced that no good could come of their continued estrangement.

  “Why, Papa—you’ve just reminded me that I meant to buy some ribbon from Mr. Bell’s store. He’s been a good friend while you’ve been away. He treats Sally’s sister kindly.”

  “Pleased to hear it,” my father said, eyes still far away.

  “People talk, of course, about how he can possibly keep a former slave as his lady, but since he holds no public office, society seems content to let him live as he pleases.”

  My father, who no longer held public office, slowly lifted his eyes to mine, seeking something in my gaze. Redemption, forgiveness, or permission. I wasn’t sure which. But whatever he wanted, I was happy to give. I ought to have made my peace with his relationship with Sally long ago. Perhaps the moment Sally had chosen to return with him to Virginia. “Would you like me to bring back some papers?”

  “What?” he asked, his voice thick with emotion.

  “From Mr. Bell’s store,” I replied. “I’m sure there’s news from the capital … then again, you’re free from public business now, aren’t you?”

  “Indeed.” A dim light grew behind his eyes. “I believe I’ll stop taking newspapers altogether.”

  From that day forward, things changed at Monticello.

  Instead of writing ten or twelve letters a day, as was Papa’s habit for as long as I could remember, he now put his correspondence aside and replied only on rainy days. He told us—and anyone who would listen—that he was happy to have left the service of his country into abler hands. He styled himself a simple farmer, the master of his plantation and everyone on it.

  Now, it’s true that I never saw Papa and Sally strolling in the fields, hand in hand. Never saw them share a kiss. He certainly didn’t squire her around town to shop for dresses, and if he gave her jewelry, she never flaunted it. But after that day, no one but Sally was ever allowed to tend his chambers. She had dominion over his most private places and possessions. And I was grateful my father found solace, comfort, and companionship in a woman so much better than Gabriella Harvie.

  Sally would never steal my father’s name, love, or fortune. I believed that she would never, and could never, be the cause of harm to my family. And so I raised no objection to the fact he left her spending money in a drawer,
to do with as she liked. Nor did I mind that she was left to her own authority about the plantation. Within a year, she was again with child. A fact that seemed to satisfy—and even embolden—the brothers Hemings.

  James still earned a wage as he’d become accustomed but considered himself free as soon as he trained up his replacement in our kitchens. And Bob Hemings pressed for his freedom, too. Like almost all the Hemingses, Bob was a bright mulatto who sometimes passed as white, making it easier for him to travel freely when he had the yen. For years now, Papa had let him come and go as he pleased, and maybe that’s why Papa reacted to Bob’s request for emancipation as a personal rebuke.

  “He’s already a free man in all but name,” Papa groused.

  I was a little vexed that my father, who had penned so many lines about liberty, might be surprised a man might not be content with freedom in all but name. When Papa grudgingly granted Bob’s request, I resolved to make peace in that quarter if I could.

  Because at long last, we had my father happy and contented at home. And we aimed to keep him there.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Monticello, 27 April 1795

  From Thomas Jefferson to James Madison

  My retirement from office had been meant from all office high or low, without exception … the little spice of ambition, which I had in my younger days, has long since evaporated, and I set less store in a posthumous than present name.

  TWO YEARS AFTER MY FATHER wrote these words, he lost the election for the presidency of the United States. My sister and I believed this to be an utter calamity, but not because he had lost the presidency. It was a calamity because, through a quirk in our system, having won the second highest number of votes, he would now be obliged to serve as vice president to John Adams—the very man he’d run against, and whose political sentiments he opposed.

  We urged him to refuse the office for fear he’d again be the subject of scrutiny, censure, and newspaper attack. He’d again have to leave his plantation and his people and his family. And this time, he wouldn’t even have James to look after him, for Sally’s brother had since quit the plantation with his freedom to travel the world.

  Sally didn’t like the idea of my father returning to public office any better than we did. The three of us sulked, as if the combined weight of his womenfolk’s displeasure might bring my strong father to his knees.

  But in the end, Papa said he feared to weaken our fledgling system of government by refusing the office, and he wouldn’t be moved on this point.

  In all, my father’s retirement had lasted only two eventful years during which it seemed every friend of liberty we’d known in France was either dead, jailed, or in exile. And we’d been consumed with tumult and tragedies closer to home. Polly fell through the rotting floorboards into the cellar of my father’s half-demolished house, upon which he’d begun more ambitious renovations. Miraculously, there wasn’t a scrape on her, but others didn’t fare as well. At Bizarre, Richard Randolph died, quite suddenly, of some mysterious ailment, leaving Judith and Nancy in dire straits.

  And I lost a child—a little angel named Ellen, not even a year old.

  She had apple cheeks and the longest toes of any baby I ever saw. I held her in my arms as she struggled for her last little gasps through lips tinged with blue. And when she closed her eyes for the last time—the tiny veins beneath her porcelain skin pulsing once, twice, then no more—the grief was unfathomable. The pain was like a burr, the kind that only digs deeper when you try to pluck free of it. So I just let the pain dig into me deep, where I keep it to this day, since I couldn’t keep my baby girl.

  But after we buried her, the grief put Tom into a nearly hopeless state. My husband was struggling with what the doctors called a nervous condition. He took mineral water at the hot springs, but I knew it’d do no good. After all, no magic elixir was going to transform him into the master of Tuckahoe, and we could never be happy at Varina, where we’d moved to build up Tom’s only inheritance.

  And oh, how I hated Varina.

  Not because it was filled with memories of that first miserable summer we spent as newlyweds. Not because there weren’t enough rooms for the children and our servants. No, I hated Varina because whenever Tom came home from overseeing the fields, he’d stand on the porch with a glass too-full of whiskey, his eyes on the blue horizon, as if he could see his father’s malevolent ghost hovering over the childhood home at which we’d never again be welcome.

  As if he sensed Colonel Randolph looking down on us, standing in judgment.

  And I hurt for my husband. Truly, I did.

  Tom seldom spoke of the lawsuit he was fighting with his father’s creditors, but it weighed on him. My husband was likely to lose, which would saddle us with even more of Colonel Randolph’s debt. I would’ve sold bloody Varina and left everything having to do with Colonel Randolph behind, but Tom couldn’t stomach it, which meant that my husband’s only hope of paying the mortgage was to get in a few good crops, and sell them at a profit—a nearly impossible feat, given British tariffs on our goods.

  That’s why I was so alarmed when Tom announced, “I’m going to stand for the state legislature.”

  He was standing on the porch, deep in his cups, so I wasn’t entirely sure he meant it. And I didn’t like the idea at all. Tom was a better farmer than most, but inconstant with his attention to his own plantations—always distracted on some errand for my father. It was so much worse now with Papa away in the capital. Polly had come to live with us at Varina, which meant Tom and I were both struggling to make a functioning household with our sisters and our little children underfoot. I didn’t know how we’d manage it if Tom took on public duties besides. “What of … what of the farmsteads?”

  My husband squinted. “Patsy, I’ve always wanted to serve in public office. That’s why I went to Edinburgh. It’s why I admire Mr. Jefferson so much. My father never thought I could do it. He wanted me here, digging in the dirt … but it’s these little specks of land which prevent mental effort and accomplishment in youth.”

  My family had already suffered enough for public ambitions, but because I thought the source of my husband’s recurring illness might be that he’d so long denied himself a political career, I forced myself to say, “I suppose the country needs good Republicans.” Tom was no great revolutionary thinker, like my father, but he was intelligent and honorable. Two things I thought might put him in good standing with the public.

  Which shows you just how much I still had to learn about politics.

  Tom declared his candidacy. Unfortunately, he did little more than that. Maybe he thought he didn’t need to; he had the Randolph name, after all, and the support of Thomas Jefferson, Virginia’s favorite son. Hadn’t my father just been elected to the vice presidency without campaigning for it?

  But when it came to the state legislature, a presence was expected. Candidates were to go to the town square to press flesh and charm country voters over barrels of whiskey. When Tom ought to have been putting on his finery and practicing speeches and witty barbs, he decided upon another course altogether.

  “There’s a doctor in Charlottesville who will be administrating smallpox inoculations,” Tom said. “I’m taking the children to have it done.”

  It always moved me that he was so intent on the welfare of our children, but smallpox also struck terror in my heart. “But they’re so young.”

  “Best to do it while they’re young,” Tom said.

  That had been my father’s thinking, too. Unfortunately, a mother’s heart is, of all things in nature, the least subject to reason. The idea of exposing my children to such a disorder made me perfectly miserable. Polly and I and our dearly departed little Lucy had made it through. Sally, too. But sometimes the treatment killed the patient, and knowing that made me clutch my babies tight against my skirts. “It takes some time—we can’t leave them without a nurse to tend them. I’ll have to go with you.”

  “I need you here at Varina,”
Tom insisted. “Someone’s got to look after the girls.”

  His little sisters, he meant, including little Jenny, who was still with us now, as if she’d been our daughter to start with. His father hadn’t left him the estate, but Tom had still taken on the responsibility of the family.

  “I can look after everything,” Polly broke in. “I’m eighteen now, Patsy. You can go watch over your children and I’ll play mistress of Varina for a time.”

  Tom and I looked at my delicate little sister where she was indolently reclining upon a sofa in nothing but a slip of a gown, with all her chores undone. And the decision was made in one glance. Tom would take the children, and I’d stay behind.

  On the appointed day that first week of April, my eyes filled with tears at the thought that when I said good-bye to my little angels, it might be for the last time. I consoled myself with the certain knowledge that Tom would be a tender and attentive nurse; he could be gruff with Jeff, but he was always sweetness itself with Ann. What I didn’t expect was that he would tarry there with the doctor, studying the science of the thing, sitting at the bedside of his children on election day itself.

  Tom never showed up in the town square.

  Never slapped any backs. Never cracked open a barrel of whiskey. Never gave a speech. Never thanked his supporters—not even the local militiamen who came out to rally in my father’s name. By the time I realized it—when a neighbor came riding up to the house in a cloud of dust to ask if something terrible had befallen my husband—Tom had already lost the election and looked like a sore, brooding loser to boot.

  Not knowing what else to do, I hurriedly sat down at the table to scribble a letter to be read out to interested parties, explaining that my husband was tending to sick children. But it arrived too late to do any good, and the humiliating rumors spread like wildfire, such that they reached even my father in the capital, who was obliged to apologize on my husband’s behalf.