America's First Daughter: A Novel

by Stephanie Dray

  “I think you’re avoiding me, Mrs. Randolph,” William said, bareheaded, shielding his eyes against the sun.

  “I think I’m harvesting the garden, Mr. Short,” I said, from beneath the shadow of my straw hat, fretting that he should come upon me in my housedress, my hands covered in dirt. A Virginia gentleman would’ve pretended not to see the lady of the house hard at work—even if the garden was her sweet escape from the demands of everyone inside the house; a Virginia gentleman would’ve passed by without a word and waited to address me in polite company.

  But perhaps the code of Virginia gentlemen no longer applied to William Short. “Not growing Indian corn this year?” he asked.

  I plucked a squash for my basket, too nervous to do more than glance at him. “Are you missing it?”

  “I’ve missed many things from Virginia,” he said, moving with gallantry to take the basket from me.

  Feeling as if I must surrender it to him, I said, “You’ve been gone a very long time.”

  “Seventeen years. Partly in service to my country, partly for powerfully personal reasons.”

  I had no right whatsoever to ask about those powerfully personal reasons and I was determined to say nothing of his duchess. “You must find everything much changed.”

  His eyes fell upon our enslaved gardener, Wormley Hughes, working with spade and hoe at the far end of the rows, and he frowned. “Some things not enough changed.” Then William turned his gaze to me. “And other things changed nearly beyond my comprehension. I daresay your friends in France won’t believe me when I tell them the girl who ran through the convent with her petticoats in the dirt is now a reserved and nurturing mother of five.”

  He walked with me as I worked down a row. “Six if you count Tom’s little sister Jenny—and I always do. Of course, she’s of marriageable age now, and so very pretty I don’t doubt she’ll have her choice of suitors.” I rambled, unable to stop myself. “I’ll have to write more to my French friends.” Especially Marie, I thought. Marie, whose letter from a year ago I still had not answered, finding it too painful to acknowledge that we would never see one another again. “I will write the ones who I still have a way of finding. We’ve been very afraid for them since the revolution.”

  His posture stiffened. “With good reason. I’m afraid your father was entirely too optimistic about the happenings in France. But I suppose it’s difficult for anyone who wasn’t there to imagine the horrors that have unfolded.”

  “I thank God Lafayette has finally been released. Papa says it was your doing.”

  “I wish that were true. Thank Monroe and Morris. I was merely a go-between, but I’m happy for Lafayette. And I wish others had been as fortunate.”

  Then I knew that I must say something about his duchess, if only because it was beyond the bounds of decency not to. “Please know that it pained us to learn what befell the Duke de La Rochefoucauld during the September Massacres. My heart suffered for Rosalie to become a widow in such a tragic way. When you see her next, please convey my deepest sympathies and my hopes for her happiness.”

  William stared, as if doubting my words. But there was no artifice in what I’d said. Though I harbored jealousy for Rosalie—I could never wish her unhappy. Or him.

  At length, William must’ve seen the sincerity in my eyes, because he said, “If I see Rosalie again, I’ll give her your message.”

  “If you see her again?” I asked, unwisely, rashly.

  At my question, his gaze slid away. “She and I have come to a crossroads. Three times I asked her to marry me and three times she’s refused. At first, in respect to her husband’s memory. Then because she couldn’t leave Madame D’Enville to the mercy of the Jacobins. And finally, because she’d rather be the dowager Duchess de La Rochefoucauld in blood-soaked France than simply Mrs. William Short anywhere else.”

  I sensed more bitterness than truth. “You can’t mean that.”

  “I’m perhaps being unjust to Rosalie. It’s simply been my misfortune to fall under the spell of women whose loyalties to family and country cannot be shaken by my love.”

  My mouth went dry at this very soft, but very earnest, remonstration. I thought to offer some apology, some explanation that might undo the pain I’d caused him in leaving France. “Oh, William—”

  “Please don’t,” he said, cutting me off. By using his given name, I’d abandoned the propriety and formality without which our conversation might be a guilty thing. An offense to my husband and my father, both. And it seemed more than he could bear. “It’s the fate of diplomats—a natural hazard of foreign service. But as I said, Rosalie and I have come to a crossroads. Your father has made plain to me that we cannot go on as we have been.”

  “My father?” I couldn’t imagine Papa in frank discussion about … well, almost anything. But certainly not matters such as illicit mistresses.

  William nodded. “When your father was elected president, I hoped, at long last, to secure the position as minister to France that I’ve coveted. Your father, however, informed me that such an appointment is now quite impossible for I’ve been too long absent from our country to represent its sentiments. So I’ve come home.”

  He was wounded; I could see that. Nor could I blame him. Though I was certain my father had good reasons, the result struck me as profoundly unjust. William had spent the better part of nearly two decades toiling for his country overseas, sometimes in dangerous places, deftly securing our nation’s credit, making endless intelligence reports to better our position and save us from war. For it to be implied to such a man that he was somehow not enough American to represent his country … William must’ve seen it as the grossest ingratitude.

  I wished that I could think how to soothe his hurt feelings, but instead, I asked, “How long will you stay in America?”

  He shifted the basket between his hands and looked again across the garden. “Until a solution presents itself. There are apparently those who disapprove of my conduct in France and will thwart my appointment to any diplomatic post.”

  William could win them over, I thought. He was as charming as he’d ever been. More charming, I thought, when he finally reached for a vine to help me with my forgotten harvest and said, “I’ve much mending of fences to do in Virginia, where it seems I’ve been replaced entirely.”

  Wary of his closeness, I wondered if he knew that there’d been a small secret place in my heart that I’d always kept for him. I loved my husband, but Tom had never taken William’s place up entirely. “No one could replace you.”

  His eyes twinkled with amused outrage and he lowered his voice to an intimate whisper. “The young and heroic Meriwether Lewis certainly has. Your father dotes on his new secretary with a fatherly affection I once believed he reserved only for me.”

  I’d caused the breach between my father and William. Still, his jest snipped the tension. I began to laugh. Then we laughed together. “Meriwether Lewis is no William Short,” I declared.

  My father had always cultivated an endless stream of protégés, but William had been the first and best of them. For unlike the others, he had a most personal acquaintance with my father’s faults and was devoted to him anyway.

  Even having been snubbed for the appointment that would’ve crowned his career and maybe even won over his lady to marriage, still here he was, paying homage to my father at Monticello. “I don’t believe you ever need worry of being replaced, William. Papa always says that those we loved first, are those we love best.”

  William smiled very softly then. In a way I hoped meant that we could still be friends. “Come, Patsy. You’re getting pink. Let’s take some shade in one of your father’s porticoes.”

  “We’re likely to trip over a workman’s hammer and come away covered in plaster dust,” I protested, since Monticello’s renovations were endless.

  “Here then,” he said, guiding me under the sheltering leaves of a cherry tree at the far end of the garden and setting down the basket by my feet. He offe
red his forearm to help me lower to a seat against the trunk, which I took with as much elegance as my housedress and apron would allow.

  “So what will you do until some foreign post is offered?” I asked.

  He took a seat beside me but angled away, so that no one who might come upon us could think it an impropriety. With our backs to the tree, side by side, I couldn’t see his face, but only his hands as he plucked a blade of grass and rolled it between his clean, elegant fingers. “I suppose I must find somewhere to live. Some years ago I prevailed upon your father to manage my investments while I was away. With that money he purchased for me some land called Indian Camp. Very fertile, he says. Very advantageous lands here in Albemarle County.”

  Here in Albemarle. Where we might be neighbors.

  Yet I couldn’t let myself hope for it, not even for a moment, because I saw his hands reach to pluck up more grass, this time violently. And I remembered what he’d said in the heat of anger when we argued in Paris. That Virginia is stained in the evil of slavery, impossible debts and a way of life that can’t last. “But you don’t care to make a home at Indian Camp.”

  He crossed his legs at the ankle, so that the steel buckle of his shoe glinted in the light. “I suggested to Mr. Jefferson an experiment of sorts. That he should rent out my Indian Camp property to tenant farmers. Part of the acreage to free white men. Part to free black men. As an experiment.”

  “An experiment?”

  “I hoped to prove something to him about the potential for emancipation,” he said, watching some of the slave children play with my own little ones on the lawn. Amongst those children was Sally’s pretty Harriet. And William swallowed. “Consider, for example, the perfect mixture of the rose and the lily. I’ve suggested to your father, too, that the mixture of the races is our surest path to doing away with racial prejudice. But his unwillingness to pursue my experiment at Indian Camp, nor even acknowledge my argument, tells me that an honorable life cannot be made in Virginia. Because if a man in your father’s singular situation cannot do it—if an icon of liberty cannot do it—I must conclude it cannot be done here at all.”

  I blinked into the sun. Then blinked again. William had always favored the abolition of slavery, but what he spoke of now went far beyond the sentiments of even the most adventurous thinker on the matter I had ever met. I could not think his mention of my father’s singular situation, with regard to race mixing, was an accidental mention. But I wasn’t a naive girl any longer who could muse on such matters with impunity, and he should’ve understood that our southern silence about the color line wasn’t one I’d break even for him. “So you’ll sell Indian Camp. Can you afford to?”

  A breeze blew, and his hands let loose the grass, which floated away. “I can afford a great many things now, Patsy. Even excluding the value of Indian Camp and my lands in Kentucky, not to mention the sums still outstanding from the State Department, I estimate my fortune at nearly a hundred thousand dollars.”

  It was a very large sum. So large, in fact, that I went numb from the tip of my nose down to my tongue, and sat there stunned, like a felled ox.

  At my silence, he continued, “It’s ill-mannered to speak of money in the presence of ladies, but I bring it up to set your mind at ease about the loan I’ve made to your father. I don’t want him to feel honor-bound to repay it when I can see plainly that his fortunes have fallen here.”

  I took instant umbrage, and would have objected that of course the state of reconstruction only made it look as if my father’s fortunes had fallen, but I was too stunned by something else he’d said. “You made a loan to my father?” How had it come to pass that the man my father had once lectured about gold not falling from the sky had come to be our creditor?

  In soft tones that somehow still assaulted my disbelieving ears, he explained, “I—I’m so sorry. I was sure you knew. Yes, I made a loan for his nail factory here at Monticello and a flour mill. But personal exigencies have prevented him from repaying the loan with what profits he has taken from those enterprises.”

  I could guess at the personal exigencies that occasioned my father’s inability to pay. Papa had advanced money to my husband to pay the mortgage on Varina. Had divided up his properties to make another gift to keep us with a roof over our heads. All along I’d been so very grateful to my father for saving us from ruin, never suspecting Mr. Short was our savior. William Short, who had somehow accumulated a fortune without putting his shovel in the dirt.

  Though it was unladylike for me to ask, improper in every way, William had been the only person to whom I’d ever spoken in frankness. And thirteen years of separation didn’t change this. “How—how much does he owe you?”

  Though I’d wager he knew the exact sum down to the cent, he said, “Somewhere in the order of fifteen thousand dollars. I’ve offered to forgive the debt entirely, but your father won’t hear of it. So I must rely upon you to persuade him not to let pride be the cause of his impoverishment.”

  “I’ve no knowledge or involvement in my father’s finances,” I said, which was only the proper way of it, but somehow, in light of this man’s expectations of me, felt like a shameful confession. “He never speaks of them to me.”

  William nodded. “Nevertheless, I have no other avenue of appeal because no one has more power or influence over the president than you do.”

  I wondered if I ought to feel flattered or terrified to believe it. It was a fact that my bond with my father was strong enough that even sometimes Polly complained of it, gently accusing Papa of loving me better. And though only Sally Hemings was allowed to freely roam his private chambers, whenever he returned from the capital, he didn’t race back to Sally, he came straightaway to Edgehill to get me.

  “You’re too kind, William. Both to my father and to me.”

  “I would be kinder, if I could,” was his reply. Then, after a few moments of silence, he added, “Your children are wonderful.” William breathed in sharply, then snapped off his succinct evaluation. “Jeff seems a very robust little fellow. Ann and baby Ginny are sweet enough to rot teeth. Your Ellen is very clever. But I see the essence of you in Cornelia’s eyes. That little girl isn’t all she seems to be.”

  I smiled. “I’m afraid I’ve become exactly what I seem to be.”

  He gave a dubious laugh. “And I’m afraid that I have become an old bachelor, with nothing to show for my efforts but the adoration of other men’s children. I suppose I’ll have to take more of an interest in my nephews.” With a comedic sigh that in no way disguised the seriousness, he added, “In the meantime, I suppose I must now leave you to your gardening and sow seeds of my own. We dine with Mr. Madison tonight, and, as your father has made plain to me, I must reacquaint myself with our countrymen.”

  I must reacquaint myself with our countrymen… .

  William had said this lightly, but at supper that night, it became manifestly evident that my father wasn’t wrong to have insisted upon it. The unique situation of my father’s house being unfinished—the expense of the redesign project Papa had conceived upon our return from Paris combined with his frequent absences to make the rebuilding of a large portion of Monticello an unending affair—led to an informality that permitted women to remain in the dining room after the men began to drink, and I was present to witness an argument.

  It began amiably enough, with the Virginia gentlemen all sipping wine and peppering William with questions about Europe. They wanted to know especially of Napoleon Bonaparte, the new First Consul of France, which now modeled itself even more closely after ancient Rome. William harbored some admiration for the sense of order restored by Bonaparte, but warned against embracing the brilliant revolutionary general, given his hunger for power.

  This quickly turned into a disagreement about the nature of French diplomacy, pitting Mr. Short’s cynicism about French revolutionaries against Mr. Madison’s faith in their good intentions, leaving Madison to simmer like a teapot, growing more florid by the moment. The conver
sation went from bad to worse when the subject turned to finances. My father and Mr. Short agreed that the James River Canal Company was an opportunity for profitable investment. I confess I was distracted in that moment, scolding Jeff for running past the tables, so all I caught was Mr. Short making the wry remark, “No doubt the Virginia legislature will attack the canal company as soon as the dividends begin to excite envy.”

  A scandalized silence followed until Jack Eppes cried, “An outrageous accusation!”

  My husband, thankfully, only set down his glass. “Why ever would you say such a thing, Mr. Short?”

  Mr. Madison accused, “Because he’s thrown in with the stock jobbers and paper men.”

  It was so chilly a remark, filled with such disdain, that it couldn’t be dispelled by the thin smile that followed. Good southern Republicans were planters. Northern Federalists were stock jobbers and paper men. Virginians were suffering financially, suffering badly, but William had profited. I understood the unspoken assessment of the secretary of state, my father’s closest political friend and ally. Madison was saying that William Short wasn’t one of us anymore.

  Though William ignored the insult and quickly steered the conversation to more pleasant topics, I worried for his reputation, not to mention his future as a diplomat at Mr. Madison’s Department of State. And I worried for the disruption of our domestic tranquility when Tom was still brooding about the discussion that evening.

  As we checked on the children in the nursery, he murmured, “This country is so divided.”

  “Yes,” I said, though a part of me wondered if it was ever thus.

  “Mr. Madison and Mr. Short … they’re accomplished men. Lawyers. Jack fits with them better than I do. I feel like the proverbially silly bird who can’t feel at ease amongst the swans.”