America's First Daughter: A Novel

by Stephanie Dray

  “By which time it will all have rotted, with my luck!” Tom’s shout reverberated throughout the house. Then he turned and smashed the wood window frame, sending a crash of icicles down from the impact. He kept punching and punching with his fist until I feared he might break his hand, or the window, or both.

  “Tom!” I cried, and from somewhere in the house, I heard one of the older children whimper. My heart hurt to think they might live in fear of their father’s temper. I thought it might do us some good to go somewhere. Get away from our troubles for the Christmas holiday, as we’d done the year before. We’d been happy dancing in Charlottesville. Maybe we could be happy somewhere Tom didn’t feel the walls closing in on him.

  When he finally stopped punching, I appraised his bleeding knuckles and said, “We should go to Eppington for the holiday. I want to be with Polly for her lying-in.”

  My sister was pregnant for the first time, and it was only natural that I’d want to be with her, but Tom gave me a baleful stare. “You’re going nowhere, Martha. You’re scarcely out of childbed yourself.”

  It wasn’t true. Cornelia was nearly five months old. Old enough to travel. So I argued, “I’m worried for my sister. You know she’s prone to illness. Always too sick to come to visit us or to have visitors.”

  Tom snorted. “So says Jack Eppes.”

  He had a point. Papa had gone from persuasion to pleading to bribery when it came to luring Jack to bring my sister for a visit, but we hadn’t seen her in nearly two years. “She’s all I can think about, Tom.”

  “All I can think about is tobacco.”

  “There’s nothing you can do about the tobacco. Nothing but brood.” Working myself up into a true lather, I said, “My mother died in childbirth, and Polly has her frame. I have a moral duty to be with my sister now.”

  “It’s only your anxiety that makes it so,” Tom said, pacing. Oh, the irony of Tom accusing me of being overly anxious! But before I could protest, he announced, “You’re not going, Martha, and that’s the end of it.”

  I wanted to argue, but there was something inside my husband that kept twisting and twisting in on itself, and it left him wound so tight I was afraid he might strike me if I dared to argue. Instead, I went downstairs with him and helped dress Jeff.

  I got one shoe on my son just as he removed the other, which exasperated me, because he needed his shoes and a breakfast of bread and milk before he could make the two-mile walk to school. And while I tried to wrestle him into his shoes, my squirming son delivered an accidental kick to my belly. I cried out in surprise at the pain, which set my already-furious husband off like a powder keg.

  Tom grabbed our boy and shook him, screaming in his face, “You ever kick your mother again and I’ll beat you bloody! Do you hear? I’ll beat you down until you can’t ever get up again.”

  “Tom!” I struggled to pull a wailing Jeff from his father’s grasp. “Stop! It was an accident!” But my husband’s hold seemed to tighten the more I fought him. “Tom, please!”

  The next thing I knew, Jeff was in my shaking arms, the unexpected shifting of his weight against me making me stumble back. Meanwhile, Tom paced, tugging at his hair with one hand. “He should learn proper respect for his mother!”

  The time he’d struck me, maybe I’d deserved it, but I knew from the depths of my soul that my sobbing little boy had done nothing to earn such rough treatment. As I cuddled him close, my heart ached in my chest, and my stomach soured and burned.

  Because I knew that day that more than just our financial affairs were falling apart.

  SEEKING TO ESCAPE THE TROUBLES UNFURLING AT VARINA, I unwittingly brought my children to a tragedy at Monticello. For the winter of 1799 was a reaper of souls in Albemarle.

  Mammy Ursula’s husband and son, affectionately known as the Georges, died of some mysterious ailment. Then my father’s old personal servant, Jupiter, came down with it, too. He believed himself poisoned and, against all advice, went to the same black conjure doctor who had treated the Georges.

  I learned of it after a commotion outside, where my daughter had been playing in the dusting of snow with the slave children, all of whom called for me in a panic. Sally and I both flew out of my father’s house to witness a sight I’d never forget.

  Jupiter had fallen to the cold and muddy road in front of the new carriage house on Mulberry Row, twitching in a convulsion fit so strong that it took three stout men to hold him. Catching Ann up by the arms, I tried to quiet her sobs. “What’s happened?”

  “He took a dram, Mama,” she said, clinging to me.

  “The conjure doctor gave him something that would kill or cure,” Sally said, bitterly, for the doctor had done the same for the Georges, both dead now.

  “Take the children away,” I told Sally quietly, trying to keep my wits about me. Then, to the men holding Jupiter down as he writhed in pain, I commanded, “Take him to a bed. And tell me where this doctor can be found.”

  “He’s long gone, mistress,” Ursula answered. “Absconded two and a half hours ago, after giving Jupiter the potion.”

  I paced, my skirts dragging as the men lifted up Jupiter’s twisted form, his eyes bulging so that we could see the whites, a bloody froth dripping from his lips down the black skin of his neck and into his woolly hair. My heart broke at the sight. I wanted to rail at the servants for trusting such a butcher, but more than that, I wanted Jupiter to be well.

  I tended him myself. Nine days he languished and never recovered, not even to speak his last words to anybody. Horrified by my failure to protect our people, I was relieved to see Tom ride up to the house. Our troubles seemed suddenly quite small with death all around us. “I should think this doctor’s murders sufficiently manifest to come under the cognizance of the law,” I told Tom, wanting justice.

  I wrote the same to my father.

  But my rage all came to nothing. My menfolk raised no fuss. I suppose they were all hoping that winter’s reaper of death had absconded away with the murderous doctor, and didn’t want to call either back. Alas, nature demanded more payments that winter.

  Sally’s newborn daughter died.

  Polly’s baby died.

  George Washington died, too.

  Such was the bitter partisanship of the day that my father didn’t feel he’d be welcome at the funeral for his friend, our first president, the great Virginian whose Federalist followers mourned him like the king they wished him to be.

  And I cared nothing about it, because all I could think of was the poisoned slaves I hadn’t been able to help, and my poor grieving sister, so far from me.

  Thanks to Tom, I hadn’t made it to her lying-in. And I learned about her baby’s death back at Edgehill as winter gasped its last cold breaths. The house Tom built for us was no architectural marvel; it was just a box, no wider than forty feet and two stories high. But it was the first thing we had without the taint of Colonel Randolph on it.

  Alas, the windows were done badly, and the insides had been spattered with rain and wind and mud come up from the cellar. For days after we arrived, I cleaned from dawn ’til dusk, sweeping and scrubbing until my hands were raw and cracked, while Tom worked at repairing the windows.

  “Martha,” Tom said a few mornings into our stay. He caught me with the servants in the kitchen where I was setting up housekeeping. The months of loss had taken a toll on me, and an even worse toll on us, and so I kept my eyes on the piles of dirt I was sweeping and my mouth closed. “Patsy,” he said when I didn’t look up. “Might I trouble you for a word?”

  My husband had spoken sweetly to me ever since learning that my sister’s childbirth had come to grief. For my part, I’d scarcely answered him with a word more than was necessary. He’d kept me from my sister when she needed me. I wanted to fly to my sister now and comfort her, but having been disappointed before in doing what perhaps my anxiety only deemed a moral duty, I was afraid to indulge any hopes in the matter. “I’m listening, Mr. Randolph.”

 
My broom swished, swished, swished against the rough-hewn planks of the floor, highlighting the stretch of silence between us.

  “Your father has advanced me the money to save Varina,” Tom said, sheepishly.

  I swept harder, whacking the broom against the wall as I did it.

  Tom heaved a great sigh. “How can I ever express my gratitude for his kindness? I was really on the point of ruin from my own neglect.”

  I slammed down a dustpan and collected up the debris with more force than was strictly necessary. Then I yanked open a window and emptied the pan with a clatter.

  Tom cleared his throat. “I knew all along that I should’ve sold my tobacco in full time to meet my debts. But a great price for that crop would’ve rendered us perfectly easy for life.” He stared at his feet. “I risked ruin with the hope of fortune but fear I’ve only procured embarrassments.”

  It was the kind of frank admission of fault that Tom was, alone amongst the men I knew, capable of giving. And I worried he had beggared us for the rest of our lives. How long would he really be able to keep Varina, even with my father’s help? He should’ve sold that damned farm. Let it go. Started fresh. But that’s not what I really blamed him for. “My sister is ailing. Her breasts have risen and broke.”

  And this is your fault because you wouldn’t let me go to her, was my silent accusation.

  He frowned, not needing me to say it. “I’ll take you to Eppington, if you still want to go.”

  We left that very day, and when I saw my sister half-dead in a fetid bed, I thought I might swoon away at the shock of seeing her so thin and frail. But my resentment of Tom was utterly eclipsed by my anger at yet another quack physician. This one had Polly confined to bed taking so much castor oil that she’d wasted away. “My poor Polly!”

  “Maria,” she whispered with a faint smile, unable to lift her head from the pillow, but fluttering her eyes at me as if grateful that I’d finally come. Childbirth had ravaged her. Even beyond the grief of losing her baby, the damage done to her delicate body was like nothing I’d ever seen. The doctor murmured that she wasn’t the sort of woman God made for childbearing, to which my sister replied, “Patsy, rescue me… .”

  I vowed I would—because I feared that under his regimen of mysterious elixirs she might never rise from her bed again. Fortunately, I wasn’t the only one stricken by the state of her.

  Tom was adamant. “She needs to be up and out of that sickbed and her breasts need to be drained of the swelling.” Whether he was dissecting opossums, nursing our children through smallpox, or theorizing how to relieve a new mother’s breasts when her baby had died, my husband’s peculiar interest in science made me think he would’ve done better to pursue a career in medicine than farming. And I hoped that Jack Eppes would take my husband’s advice.

  Unfortunately, Jack and Tom mixed like oil and water. Maybe it was because Tom seldom laughed at Jack’s jokes. Or maybe it was because Jack laughed too much at Tom, poking fun at his serious nature. Whatever the reason, Jack defended the physician as an old family friend. “We’re perfectly happy with his ministrations to my wife.”

  “My apologies for intruding, then,” Tom said stiffly, sensing he’d pressed the matter as far as he could in another man’s house about another man’s wife.

  But Polly wasn’t only the wife of Jack Eppes, she was also my sister. I wasn’t about to leave it alone.

  That night, after the fire burned low, I left Polly in the care of her maid Betsy—another Hemings girl—and went to find Jack, where he was shutting up for the night. “My sister wants to stretch her legs. Breathe in fresh air. Get a little food into her without castor oil purging it. Surely you don’t want her confined forever, do you?”

  “Oh, Patsy,” Jack said, giving me a genial pat. “I want her alive and well!”

  Jack was smiling that glib smile of his, and I had the most unladylike urge to punch it from his face. He was supposed to take care of my sister. To love her and take seriously her ailments. The fact that he could smile at me like that while she wasted away hardened me. “If you truly want her alive and well, Jack, then understand that she can’t ever have more children.”

  A planter needed sons and it was a wife’s duty to produce them. I considered it my duty, certainly, but my mother had considered it hers, too, and died trying. “My sister wasn’t made for it, Jack. You take one honest look at her, and you’ll know it’s true—”

  “What am I supposed to do about it if it is?” he asked, an edge of anger in his voice. And maybe he had a right to be angry with me. This was an interference of the highest order, but in the past months, I had not been vigilant enough.

  “Stay off her,” I said. “For the love of God, Jack. Stay off her.”

  He stared at me a moment, shocked, but then all the masks fell away and he hung his head, as if in shame. I put a hand on his shoulder, to soothe him, and was rewarded with Jack’s teary nod.

  PAPA WAS DEAD.

  Or so it was reported that summer, when the presidential campaign for the election of 1800 was in full swing and the newspapers were hard at work with vile slanders. My father was said to be dead, an atheist, and a coward. President Adams was said to be a tyrant and a criminal. My father was said to be “a swindler begot by a mulatto upon a half-breed Indian squaw.” President Adams was said to be a hermaphrodite.

  It would’ve been laughable if the stakes weren’t so high.

  Indeed, I worried that my poor sister would hear the news of my father’s passing before we could tell her the truth, and that it might stop her frail heart. It vexed me that she wasn’t with us at Monticello, where Papa desired us all to join him. Jack Eppes had promised they’d come, but now he pled the excuse of the harvest, even though we all knew perfectly well my sister would be of no use to him on the farm. If Jack had let her come with us, I wouldn’t have to fret for her like I did. Or, at the very least, I’d have someone other than Sally with whom to share my amazement at the circus in my father’s house that summer… .

  Though we lived in the same house, I scarcely saw Papa, for he was always in a crowd. Politicians, financiers, and newspapermen flocked to our mountaintop to pay court to the man they wanted for their next president. They behaved as if he belonged to them, and I suppose he must have. But at night, when he retired to his private chambers, he belonged to Sally. For even though we had a house full of guests, he’d recklessly got her with child again by autumn.

  And while Sally tended to Papa, I was left to cater to my father’s guests—men and their wives who hadn’t waited on an invitation, but nevertheless, needed to be fed and offered every hospitality. They ran over us like locusts, and it reminded me of the weeks we were under siege by the British, and the legislators gathered together at Monticello to avoid capture. There were no dragoons hunting us now, but there may as well have been for all the chaos. As if, in campaigning for the presidency, they were bringing about a new revolution.

  For my part, I wanted none of it.

  If only Papa’s candidacy had been the most troubling thing we faced.

  In early September, alarming news reached us from our longtime friend and neighbor, Mr. Monroe, now the governor of Virginia.

  “I’ve just received word,” Papa said, indicating a letter he held in a shaking hand, and a crowd drew round him in the entryway. “The planned slave insurrection in Henrico has been clearly proved. Ten Negroes have already been condemned and executed, and there are upward of forty more to be tried.”

  While the crowd of men murmured at the news, I held my breath. News of a possible slave rebellion near Richmond had reached us days before, but the terrifying specifics of the plot were just now becoming clear.

  Varina was in Henrico County. Had Tom’s slaves been involved? And what if Tom had been at Varina when the violence began?

  “As many as forty more you say?” one of the men asked, as if startled to learn so many slaves would be willing to take up against their masters in concerted effort. To imagine
slaves killing whites and setting fire to the Virginia countryside—not in far-off Haiti, but actually here—was a thing of which not a few slaveholders’ nightmares were made.

  Though he usually hung back in a crowd, Tom frowned and shook his head, saying, “Were it not for a thunderstorm thwarting their plans, who knows how many more might have joined them?”

  This comment caused an uproar with our guests, some of whom opined that these rebel slaves ought to be made terrible example of. But Papa wandered off while they ranted, and they didn’t seem to notice his leaving.

  Tom and I followed him into the solitude of his study, where the wavering candlelight cast Papa’s big shadow upon the octagonal walls. I looked from my husband’s face to the parchment in Papa’s hand, and dared to ask, “What else does Mr. Monroe say?”

  Papa sighed and rubbed his forehead. “He wishes to know my opinion on how to deal with the conspirators.” This had been a frequent topic of conversation at our dinner table amongst Papa’s guests, who also wished to know his thoughts, as it seemed everyone did on every topic these days.

  After a long moment of silence, I asked, “What will you say?”

  Laying the letter upon an open ledger, Papa sat in his red revolving chair. “This is unquestionably the most serious and formidable conspiracy we’ve ever known in these parts. But there’s been hanging enough.”

  Tom nodded his agreement. “We open ourselves for condemnation if we indulge in a principle of revenge, or go one step beyond absolute necessity.”

  “Indeed,” Papa said. “The problem is how to strike the balance between justice and public safety.” Sally knocked as she came in from the greenhouse, interrupting the conversation with the news that more guests had arrived.

  “I’ll greet them,” I said wearily, gathering my skirts. As I passed Sally, I wondered what she knew of this rebellion. What did any of the slaves at Monticello know of it? For, the instigators had reportedly gathered support from slaves as far away as Charlottesville. And I’d long ago seen proof of how quickly important news traveled amongst the slaves.