America's First Daughter: A Novel

by Stephanie Dray

  There were advantages, it seemed, in his having married the governor’s daughter. But I worried that Jeff arranged this for his sisters without asking Tom. Hoping to stave off an argument, that night as I got ready for bed, brushing my hair out in front of the mirror over my marbled dresser, I gently broached the subject with my husband.

  He surprised me by saying, “The girls would like that.”

  I nodded, abandoning my brush to climb over Tom to get to my side of the alcove bed—a ritual that had once been flirtatious but had now turned to annoyance.

  He stopped me, hands on my hips. “What ails you, Martha?”

  “What makes you think something ails me?” I was resolved to say nothing about my worries for the expense. My husband would tell me it wasn’t my place, even though his generosity—the dresses, the ribbons, the fripperies—would come out of pockets that were already empty. It wasn’t my place to question him; my meddling is what had brought us to this unhappiness, so I bit my tongue.

  But Tom’s eyes bored into mine in the candlelight. “I suppose Jeff told you I intend to sell slaves to bolster the family finances, running off to his mother like he always does. He’s still tied up in your apron strings.”

  I’m not certain how he could’ve surprised or appalled me more. When Tom proposed marriage, he said he was against slavery. Since then, of course, we’d quietly reconciled ourselves to the evil, convinced that the poor slaves needed us, as children need parents. But selling slaves … how could we ever reconcile ourselves to that? “Tell me you’d never do such a thing.”

  “I’m only selling one sullen girl,” Tom answered. “She’s difficult to manage, but she could go for more than five hundred dollars. It’ll be an investment in the happiness of our daughters, and maybe the slave will be happier with a new master, too.”

  I rolled off him. Turning to the wall, a scream echoed in my mind. I’d held back my news as long as I could, but upon hearing the evil thing my husband planned, I was too upset to dissemble. “We’re having another baby, Tom.”

  I heard nothing but silence behind me. It’d been four years since our last child, and we’d assumed my childbearing days were over. I’d been grateful for it. But now, at nearly forty-five years of age, I was pregnant again and near tears to think it.

  I already had ten children—far more than I had the strength to care for. Much as I loved them, I was wrung out with little ones climbing on me night and day. Giving birth to my last had weakened my health. God forgive me, I didn’t want another baby. But children were a source of manly pride. So, given a moment or so, maybe Tom would find his composure and tell me how happy he was. Then I’d force a smile and tell him what a joy it’d be.

  Except it would all be a lie—all of it.

  So I turned and said, “I don’t know what to do about it.”

  At these words, Tom eyed me with a mixture of curiosity and horror. Perhaps he was remembering my testimony in which I claimed to have given his sister an abortifacient. I was remembering it, too. It seemed, at the moment, like an answer. We’d never stand trial for it. My father, if he knew, might not even object, for he’d commented almost admiringly on the practice amongst Indians. I’d hate myself, but I already hated myself for bringing another child into the world when we couldn’t provide for the ones we already had.

  And yet, I should never have implied such a solution to Tom. Not even as a desperate consideration that I’d talk myself out of. Not even to get my husband’s reassurances. Tom’s lips thinned into a mean line. “There isn’t anything to be done about it, Martha.”

  Chastened, I lowered my eyes and murmured what I believed to be the truth. “It’s likely to kill me, this time.”

  Then I turned back to the wall, where I lay trapped.

  DURING THAT PREGNANCY, I was so sick and swollen and sad all the time that I couldn’t stand myself. The birth left me so insensible that I had to be told I’d given birth to a living babe—a fragile little boy, tiny and blue, for whom my father would eventually choose the name George Wythe Randolph.

  I was too weak to hold the baby or feed him, consumed with excruciating, debilitating pain and delirium. And though I was grateful to have lived through the ordeal, every time it seemed as if I might recover, I succumbed to a new cough or ailment.

  Scarcely able to sit up, I was confined to bed and bedpan, and Ellen moved into the room across from mine so that she could nurse me. In the months that followed, my daughters were forced to take turns at housekeeping in my stead. But the entire estate would have fallen to pieces if not for Sally Hemings watching over my girls and instructing them where I couldn’t. And I simply couldn’t. Neither smallpox nor typhus had rendered me so ill. Not even fears for my father’s reputation could get me out of bed. Not even to converse or dine with our guests.

  Papa’s brilliant courtship with the public went on below stairs—but my world was suddenly and sharply confined to the warren of attic rooms at the top of the house. Oh, I saw and heard most everything, for Monticello was a noisy place, with creaky hinges and floorboards, and more than twenty family members in residence at any given time. My window overlooked the same expansive vista as my father’s did—but my room was at a higher elevation. I saw more. I saw the reality. I saw, every day, Mulberry Row and all the little nail-shop boys who worked from sunup to sundown for our happiness—which only fueled my sickness and melancholy.

  One night, when Cornelia brought my supper up, she burst into tears. “Oh, Mother, you’re so very pale, and I’m such an unworthy daughter!”

  “Why would you say such a thing?” I offered my arms, and when she came to me, I removed her cap and stroked her dark hair.

  Cornelia cried, “How do you remember the numberless variety of orders and directions for the servants? I’m so tired of putting away the books and other things that seem to get everywhere all the time.”

  “It becomes routine,” I assured her, knowing she longed to trade the keys and the cookbooks for her drawing paper and pencils. “You’ll get better at it.”

  “Father doesn’t think so,” she said, wiping her eyes and reaching into her apron for a scrap of paper written in Tom’s hand. I worried that he’d written a stern reprimand, but instead, it was a poem about her housekeeping.

  While frugal Miss Mary kept the stores of the House,

  Not a rat could be seen, never heard was a mouse,

  Not a crumb was let fall,

  In kitchen or Hall:

  For no one could spare one crumb from his slice

  The rations were issued by measure so nice

  But when spring arrived to soften the air,

  Cornelia succeeded to better the fare,

  Oh! The boys were so glad,

  And the Cooks were so sad,

  Now puddings and pies every day will be made,

  Not once in a month just to keep up the trade.

  It was such gentle teasing from Tom—and so unusually good-humored—that I laughed. But Cornelia wept inconsolably until Tom came to comfort her. Speaking soft words before sending her off, Tom closed the door and pulled a chair up beside our bed. Taking my hand in his, he said, “Your hands are so cold.”

  “I’ll feel better in the morning,” I said, cheered by this unexpected husbandly affection.

  “You’ve been saying that for some time.” He clasped my hand tighter and lowered his head. “The physician says you won’t survive another birth. And I’ve no intention of doing what my father did to my mother or what Jack Eppes did to your sister. It may be that we’re better off sleeping apart.”

  Even as ill as I was, I didn’t want to sleep apart from Tom. For twenty-eight years, we’d lain together, and as much as I’d come to resent him in my bed, it pained me more to think of him never there again. “Oh, Tom, can’t we …” I trailed off, wondering what to suggest.

  I hadn’t been willing to find an “agreeable Negress” to sate my husband’s needs when Dolley suggested it. That unwillingness had nearly cost me my l
ife. But I heard from downstairs the violin of Beverly Hemings—now nineteen years old and a great favorite at Monticello—and it bolstered my resistance. Sally’s oldest son had my father’s freckles, his posture, and shared Papa’s love of music, science, and hot air balloons. The time was coming, I knew, for Sally’s son to be set free, and I dreaded explanations that would need to be made to friends, neighbors, and even my children. I’d found a way not to think of Sally’s children as my siblings—not to think much of them at all beyond a bone-deep guilt and sadness. A guilt and sadness I never wanted my children to feel.

  That’s why I hadn’t taken Dolley’s advice, and nothing had changed. So I never found a suggestion. Now Tom made one of his own. “When Governor Nicholas vacates the office, I believe I’d be a good successor. I can be appointed to the post from the state legislature, and … the governorship comes with a salary. Money that can’t be lost to droughts or tobacco rot or Hessian flies. Money that’s certain.”

  It was as close as my husband could come to admitting that the planter’s way of life that had sustained generations of Virginians in wealth and luxury was a lifestyle in utter decay. My father’s idealistic visions of an agrarian Republic where men’s wealth could be measured in land no longer reflected reality. At least not our reality.

  Tom didn’t need my permission, but he seemed to be asking for it. “Richmond’s not so far that I can’t be at your side within a few hours’ hard ride. But I’d have my own bed there—in my own house.”

  That might be the most important part, I thought. Tom would no longer be living under his fatherin-law’s roof. No longer a man whose position was uncertain. He might no longer be thought of as Thomas Jefferson’s underachieving political and intellectual heir—and dependent, but rather, master of a mansion in Richmond and the entire state of Virginia.

  “Of course you’d be a good successor,” I managed as I debated the wisdom of an even greater distance between us. Given the long tension between us, how could I do anything but support him?

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Monticello, 1 January 1819

  From Thomas Jefferson to Francis Wayles Eppes

  A school master is necessary only to those who require compulsion to get their lesson.

  I SMILE TO READ THIS LETTER, filled with stern advice for my sister’s son on how to perfect his Greek grammar. Papa never seemed to believe that his own brilliance was unique to him. Instead, he believed his grandchildren all inherited his intellectual capacity and that if they only applied themselves, they’d easily match his accomplishments in science, architecture, and statecraft.

  But he was always overly optimistic about the generations that came after him.

  Jeff was so burdened with his own growing family and managing my father’s plantation that there’d never be any opportunity for him to become a man of letters, a thing for which he felt an acute lack. Perhaps one of my younger sons might attend the university my father was founding in Virginia, but until then, our hopes for the next generation of intellectuals rested upon Polly’s son.

  My daughters, meanwhile, were likely to end up spinsters. Nothing came of their season in Richmond during which the men allegedly considered them altogether too educated in the male arts and not enough in the womanly ones. In the end, only a single offer of marriage was made—and it was worse than none at all. The offer came from Nicholas Trist, a neighbor, the son of a friend, an idealistic but penniless boy of seventeen who wanted to marry my penniless daughter Virginia of the same age. Though I’d married at seventeen—or maybe because I did—I thought them both too young to be entangled by an engagement that would decide the happiness, or wretchedness, of their lives.

  Inexplicably, the young suitor, who aspired to be a diplomat, addressed his request to me, rather than to Tom. And so from my sickbed, I composed a short note, entreating him to learn more of the world before judging whether Ginny was vital to his happiness. It’d buy time, I hoped, for my daughter to seek an older, more established man with whom to build an easier life—if such a thing could be had in Virginia, where the price of cotton had fallen nearly 25 percent in a single day. The irony wasn’t lost on me that in warning away my daughter’s suitor, I was doing exactly as my father had done to me and William, but I better understood my father’s position now and felt a pang of sympathy.

  It was February before I was able to get out of bed and go below stairs. And the first full day I spent upright was on account of a special occasion. There was to be a reunion at Monticello, as we were expecting Ann and her reportedly now-sober husband to dinner. So I summoned my girls down from the attic cuddy they had fashioned into a salon for themselves, where they were happier to contend with wasps and rafters than with Papa’s guests. Then I had one of the servants carry down for me a comfortable but worn gilded chair from France to the kitchen, where I held my Le Cuisinier Royal cookbook open to my handwritten notes.

  Amidst the shiny copper pots and sooty walls of the kitchen, Ginny moped in like a kicked puppy, having apparently surmised that I’d thwarted her nascent courtship. Nicholas Trist would never have been so bold as to declare his feelings to her without my blessing. But I remembered the artful games William and I had played and knew such matters could be understood without being spoken.

  In any case, if Ginny was nursing a broken heart, she was too much a Jefferson and not enough a Randolph to say so. Instead, she sulked. “I don’t see what the point of learning this is. A few months of housekeeping badly done aren’t going to give me one useful acquirement, not even the industrious habits which would enable me to spend my future more profitably. I’d rather read than sew or keep house.”

  With a sharp look at her sister, Ellen said, “Which will profit you not at all. Taking turns means we can each learn what we need to be useful wives, then go with Grandpapa to study like men do, for gratification and because it’s the most agreeable way of passing time.” Then Ellen rounded on me. “And, Mother, your insistence on supervising is defeating the purpose of giving you rest.”

  “I’ve been resting for nearly a year. I’m quite weary of rest,” I complained, as the cook and the servants who did the arduous work here all bustled about. “Besides, the less occupation we have, the less we’re disposed to do.”

  That day, I rode the girls like an overseer, right up until the great clock reached the dinner hour according to the gong at the top of the house.

  “Charles is coming along soon!” Ann chirped, having arrived ahead of him. “He had to stop first in Charlottesville at the store.”

  My daughter Ann had turned into a scarecrow since I’d seen her last. She and the grandchildren lived poorly; their threadbare clothes and worn shoes told the tale. And an hour later, Bankhead still hadn’t arrived. Jeff was late, too. So late that Papa didn’t want to hold supper any longer.

  Finally, at evening, the dogs barked at a rider galloping madly up our road. Burwell went for the door, but Ellen also raced for the entryway with unladylike haste.

  I tried to follow but was such an invalid that the blood drained from my head; I nearly toppled Ann when she tried to steady me. “Mother, careful! You’re not well, yet.”

  “It’s only a visitor,” Papa said.

  But I never remembered anyone riding a horse that violently to deliver good news. And Ellen returned to the dining room, ashen, overseer Bacon behind her, sweating and breathless from his ride.

  “It’s Jeff,” Ellen cried, her eyes flitting with fury to her older sister. “Your worthless malignant husband stabbed our brother!”

  As my heart leapt into my throat, the napkin fell from my father’s hand. Papa rose to his feet at once. “Where?”

  “Charlottesville,” Bacon answered. “They came to blows in the courthouse square. I had them carry your grandson inside Leitch’s store and put him upon a bale of blankets, but … he can’t be moved. He’s bleeding badly and the physician doesn’t expect him to live until morning.”

  Those words ringing in my head in
all their horror, my legs went out from under me. The next moment, I was on the floor staring up at the fireplace where fickle Fates carved in Wedgwood danced in blue mockery before my eyes.

  “Loosen her stays,” Ellen insisted while my other daughters crowded around me, fanning my face.

  In my continued illness from childbirth, I’d swooned away like some delicate damsel when all I wanted was to get to my son. “Jeff,” I gasped. Servants rushed in to help and all the while I kept saying, “Tom, please take me to Jeff.” But Tom wasn’t there. My husband, the new governor of Virginia, lived now in Richmond, a thing I’d somehow forgotten in the fog of my terror. “A carriage—someone get me a carriage. I must go to my son!”

  “No, Martha.” The long absent steely edge of fatherly command returned to Papa’s voice. “If Charles is on a drunken rampage again, he’ll come here next for Ann.”

  “He can’t have done this,” Ann sobbed. “Charles isn’t drinking anymore. He wouldn’t stab my brother for no reason!”

  “He is drinking again, Mrs. Bankhead.” Bacon accepted a glass of water and chugged it down. “He literally rode his horse into a tavern. Your brother confronted him. Jeff said something to him about abusing you, and Mr. Bankhead sprang on him with a knife. I had to pull your husband off your bleeding brother myself.”

  Ann backed away from the truth of Bacon’s words. “Not for my sake. This can’t have happened for my sake!”

  As deeply as I felt her anguish, I could think of nothing but Jeff. I struggled into a sitting position and grasped at Ellen’s shoulder. “Get the carriage.” The elegant arched room spinning around me, I looked up at Papa, then to Bacon. “Get the carriage now. Please!”

  “Patsy, you’re not well enough,” my father snapped, using my childhood name to command me. “Stay with the girls. Bolt the doors. Hide if Charles comes. I’ll post Burwell, Beverly, and Bacon to stand guard over you.”

  Ellen rose and stepped in front of my father. “You’re not riding out by yourself, are you?”