America's First Daughter: A Novel

by Stephanie Dray

  My father was optimistic that the legislature would approve the scheme. The people had voted Lafayette a pension, he reasoned—they wouldn’t possibly deny a former president the chance to live out his days in comfort.

  “Why, there’s every chance that in patriotic fervor, the government will burn all the tickets and simply make a gift to me of Monticello.”

  I was too encouraged by my father’s revived spirits to tell him that his faith in his fellow citizens was misplaced. There’d be no bonfire of lottery tickets to honor my father’s service. Virginians would genuflect before my father the monument, but they wouldn’t pay one penny in taxes to support the man. It was against their creed, and so were lotteries. Now, more than ever, the state legislature was filled with ranters and evangelists who thought games of chance were a sin. And even if they approved a lottery, the one thing no one needed in Virginia was land.

  We could hope patriots in other parts of the nation were hungrier for it, but I was afraid to hope. My life had become such a tissue of privations and disappointments that it was impossible to believe any of my wishes would be gratified, or if they were, not to fear some hidden mischief flowing from their success.

  And on the day Jeff delivered the news we hoped would be our salvation, he was as ashen as the day Bankhead stabbed him. He came in from the drizzly cold, tracking mud on the floor from his riding boots, and we went together to knock on my father’s door. Where Sally was, I couldn’t guess, but Burwell let us in, leading us to Papa, seated at his desk, his legs raised up to keep the blood in them, squinting through his spectacles as he tried to write with his own withered hand.

  Jeff cleared his throat. “The lottery has been approved with a condition that Monticello must be the prize.”

  Papa went white from his snowy white hair to the tips of his fingers. So white I feared he’d become a statue before my eyes. His lottery scheme had been meant to save our home, but might prove to be no better than if we’d auctioned it off. When Papa finally spoke, he asked, “That’s the only way?”

  Jeff nodded, scarcely able to meet his grandfather’s eyes. “You’d be able to live here until your death, and my mother until hers. But after that, Monticello will pass out of the family. I need to know what answer to carry back to Richmond.”

  My father swallowed. Removed his spectacles. Set down his pen.

  “I need some time to think and consult with your mother,” he said.

  Jeff pulled a chair for me then found one for himself.

  My father stopped him. “Only your mother.”

  There was a moment—a heartbeat of confusion—before Jeff nodded, and went out. Then Papa and I were alone together. We sat together in silence for a time.

  Papa finally said, “I never believed it could come to this.”

  It’s only a house, I wanted to say. But I knew better. “We’ll manage somehow—”

  He stopped me midthought, bringing my hand to his lips. “I’ve been in agony watching you sink every day under the suffering you endure, literally dying before my eyes. Do you remember, Patsy, when we first started playing music together?”

  I smiled a bittersweet smile, remembering Paris, where I had learned to play the harpsichord. Where we’d made music together. And where I played for him when he could no longer play, due to his enfeebled hand. “Oh, yes. I remember all our duets.”

  “I have been hearing them, lately. In my sleep. Realizing that my whole life has been, in some sense, a song that could never be sung without you. There is almost nothing I’ve ever been that I could’ve been without my dear and beloved daughter, the cherished companion of my early life, and nurse of my old age. And your children as dear to me as if my own from having lived with me from their cradle … that’s why I leave it all to you.”

  Unless the lottery wildly surpassed our expectations, there’d be nothing to leave, I thought. And worse, anything he gave to me would be taken by Tom’s creditors. “Papa, Tom’s debt’s—”

  “I’ll settle the remains of my estate upon Jeff to hold in trust for your sole and separate use, until your husband’s death, in which case the property should go to you as if you were a femme sole.”

  This would shield everything from Tom’s creditors, but was also an acknowledgment, at long last, that I needed no man to rule over me. And as if to underline his trust, he said, “I’ll need you to look after Sally.”

  “Dear God, Papa.” I brushed back welling tears.

  He took both my hands. “Burwell, Joe Fosset, and Johnny Hemings … I intend to free them with a stipend and tools and a log house for each of them. And the boys, Madison and Eston—they’ll go free on their twenty-first birthdays. I’ll petition the legislature for them to be allowed to remain in the state as if it were a favor to Johnny Hemings, naming them as his apprentices so that he can start a carpentry business.”

  It was, I supposed, the only option. My father couldn’t do for Sally’s younger boys what he’d done with Beverly and Harriet without depriving their mother of all her children. But I believed anyone might be able to see right through emancipation of Madison and Eston unless …

  The ruse, of course, depended upon Sally’s enslavement. Papa wouldn’t free her, couldn’t free her without exposing everything. Which is why he was leaving it to me.

  In the end he left everything—all of it—to me.

  “TELL THEM TO MAKE MY COFFIN NOW,” Papa said from the confines of his sickbed, where I fanned the flies away from him in the still heat of summer.

  He’d come home from some business in Charlottesville, slumped in the saddle, scarcely able to hold the reins in his crippled hands. Old Eagle clopped slowly along, careful and somber, as if he knew just how feeble Papa was. And once we got Papa down from the horse, it became manifest that his powers were failing him.

  His plan was to fight old age off by never admitting the approach of helplessness. Not even in the approach of his death, which he intended to arrange to his satisfaction.

  My father used his life, his talent, and his fortune to secure the rights of men to control their own destinies, and he still intended to command his. He’d decided to die, and nothing could discourage him, not even my cry of pure anguish when he ordered his coffin be made.

  After that, my whole world reduced to the intervals of wakefulness and consciousness between my father’s slumber. I shuddered when he said, “Take heart, Patsy. Jeff has promised to never abandon you. And when I’m gone, you’ll find within that drawer,” he said, spending his precious strength to point to it, “a little casket of gifts for you.”

  The pain that swept through me in anticipation of the end was nothing I’d ever experienced before, even for all the other losses. Nothing I thought I could survive. Even the thought of losing my father was a crushing, grinding agony of the spirit that left me not just shuddering, but quaking in its wake. “No, Papa. Not yet …”

  “Not yet,” he agreed, taking shallow, rasping breaths upon his pillow. “I want to breathe my last on that great day, the birthday of my country.”

  July the fourth, he meant. The fiftieth anniversary of our Independence. The day he became the most profound voice of his age. Of any age.

  “Mother, let us relieve your vigil,” Jeff insisted, his comforting hand upon my shoulder. “We’ll stay with him all night. We’ll drag in pallets so that he’s never alone for a moment, if only you’ll get some rest.”

  I couldn’t consent to it—especially not when Sally sat so resolutely, her spine straight upon a wooden chair nearby. I don’t know what words of farewell she exchanged with Papa.

  What they’d shielded from the world all their lives they still kept, with possessive silence, to themselves. And I had to be coaxed away from my father’s sickbed like a lamed animal to water. So violent was my own pain at the expectation of him being torn from me, I had to be pried away … until, at long last, on the third of July, my father’s suffering seemed to demand a wish for the end.

  Struggling for breath, Papa
would ask, “Is it the Fourth?”

  Because we couldn’t bear for him to perish with even one more disappointment, we told him it was. An expression came over his countenance that my children naively believed to mean: just as I wished.

  But I don’t believe my father was deceived. Even after his limbs took on the clamminess of death and his pulse was so faint only the doctor could feel it, Papa stirred again to ask, “Is it the Fourth?”

  This time the doctor said, “It soon shall be.”

  I stared at the clock, willing the hands to move. Wishing I had my father’s indomitable will to shape the world and make the laws of the universe bend. Gladly would I give up a day of my own life, a day from the lives of everyone living, to deliver my father into the morning of his glorious Fourth.

  But the physician said softly, “He has no more than fifteen minutes now… .”

  An hour later my father was still alive and refused his laudanum. He then fell back into a disturbed sleep, and in a vivid dream, he roused himself, anxiously gesturing with his hands, as if to write upon a tablet. “The Committee of Safety ought to be warned!”

  My children wondered what he could be dreaming about. I didn’t have to wonder. I knew. He was, in his final breaths, readying for the British invasion, readying to fight the war for Independence all over again.

  We’d later learn that in Quincy, Massachusetts, John Adams was also on his deathbed, equally determined to see the morning of the Fourth. He’d die on the cherished day, my father’s name on his lips, but all we knew was that in Virginia, the struggle went on, and on.

  My Papa’s frail chest rose and fell under the obelisk clock that ticked the interminable stretch. Mr. Short had that clock made for Papa; and in remembering that, it seemed as if William, too, was hovering over Papa in vigil. Burwell helped to arrange Papa’s head upon his pillow. Jeff swept his lips with a wet sponge, which my father sucked and appeared to relish.

  Just a few more hours, I thought, until the Fourth. And I turned to see Sally, too, straining to see the hands of that same clock move.

  When the clock finally struck midnight with a sweet silvery ring, sighs of relief exploded around us. And upon seeing the faint breath of my papa upon a glass held to his lips, I felt a grim satisfaction, like a commander upon a battlefield who has seen a victory.

  But Papa didn’t leave this victory to chance. He soldiered on until noon when, with eyes wide in apprehension of his triumph, he ceased to breathe.

  That moment, for me, was an eclipse of the sun. A blackening of the whole earth. An unfathomable grief in which I no longer knew myself, or the world, or my place in it. But my father—who had always known his place in that world—passed like the hero he was from life into legend.

  ON MULBERRY ROW a white sheet draped over a thornbush, flapping ghostly in a light summer breeze to signal to neighboring farms that my father was dead. In the carpentry shop, Madison and Eston helped their uncle sand the rough edges of Papa’s wooden coffin. On the western side of the mountain, slaves dug the grave.

  And I … I did nothing.

  Numb with grief, overwhelmed by loss, I couldn’t seem to catch my breath. “Take some fresh air,” one of my children said; I don’t know which one. I was blind and deaf to everything. I couldn’t feel my limbs. All I felt was the slow calcification inside me, spreading so that I couldn’t move. Someone grasped me at the elbows to prompt me outside onto the terrace; someone else called for the doctor to tend me. And it was there, on the terrace, in the most acute distress, that I heard the pounding of horse hooves.

  Papa, I thought. Was he riding hard upon Caractacus, as he loved to do in his youth? Then the vision swam before my eyes, not of my father, but of my husband. Tom in his youth. A young and handsome horseman, riding up the road toward our house.

  I blinked and the vision came clear. It was Tom. No longer young or beautiful, but still riding like a demon. Where he’d gotten the horse, I didn’t know. Nevertheless my husband swung down from the saddle of a frothing, pawing animal. “Is he dead?”

  At my elbow, the doctor nodded. “Mr. Jefferson expired a quarter after noon.”

  To hear it said again, I nearly stumbled. Behind me, the children must’ve gathered, because I heard little George blubber while Septimia choked out tiny, delicate sobs. “Grandpapa is gone.”

  “You poor children,” Tom said, a light in his eyes strangely fueled by the sight of our misery. “Look how grieved you are to lose him … but not your mother. Her eyes are dry as always. Can’t you shed a tear, Martha? Not even for your father?”

  The physician stiffened at my side. “Colonel Randolph!”

  Colonel Randolph? He was entitled to be called that, of course, but I could only think of his father. That’s who Tom had become. A miserable old rotter like the one who begat him.

  Tom advanced upon me in a scatter of flies. “Don’t you think it’s unnatural for such a devoted daughter to lose her father without even a tear? And Thomas Jefferson, no less. A great man that the whole of the country will mourn, but not his own daughter.”

  The doctor barked again, “Colonel Randolph!”

  All that escaped me was a tiny keening sound. And my husband’s face twisted in feigned concern. “Don’t you see, doctor? She can’t cry. My wife must be suffering from a morbid condition. Won’t you prescribe some medicine to cure her?”

  The outraged physician said, “The medicine she needs is quiet, sir.”

  The admonishment did nothing to dissuade Tom. In fact, a maniacal grin broke over his face. “Quiet? Oh, yes, by all means, give her quiet. All the country will be firing cannons, tolling bells, and wailing in grief, but Martha will quietly go on. She’ll quietly persevere. She has ice water for blood—”

  “Enough, Tom,” I finally said, all the emptiness my father had left filling up with a terrible rage. That my husband had descended into madness was without question. But I was sure to follow him there if I let this go on today, of all days.

  “You don’t tell me what’s enough.” Then he began working the muscles of his face, spasming and contracting them, as if to manufacture the sudden tears that swept down his cheeks. “I know you won’t mourn me when I’m dead, but I thought you might be able to muster a tear for the only man you really loved.” Tom sobbed, howling as if to mock me. “And I loved him. He was my father, too, and I loved him.”

  “You hated him,” Jeff snarled, having come out of the house with a bang of the door to encounter this scene. “You hated my grandfather in life and you neglected him in death. You’re only here to harangue my mother like some scavenging beast over the corpse. You’re more ferocious than a wolf and more fell than a hyena!”

  Jeff put himself between his father and me. The other boys drove my husband off, but I knew he’d be back again for the funeral. It was open to the public, so we couldn’t keep him away. I knew there’d be talk, whether because my lunatic husband was absent or because he was there. There was nothing for it. And I was scarcely sensible enough to care. My world was shattered. The loss I felt unfathomable. And it wasn’t just my own loss, for my father belonged to the people, perhaps now more than ever.

  The bells had tolled for my father’s death, and the townspeople closed the city. Donning black armbands, they formed a processional up the mountain that was delayed by the rain. While we waited for people to arrive on the dismal and dreary day, Sally and I stood on either side of the open grave, Papa’s coffin between us, held up on planks.

  Huddling with her enslaved family against the rain, Sally wore a plain black dress with the locket my father had given her long ago, her eyes trained not on the coffin but on me. She must’ve known her fate now rested in my hands, but there was nothing servile in her expression. Only an expectation of justice.

  She seemed to believe herself a free woman and didn’t lower her eyes in deference. Not even for Tom when he appeared to taunt us. “Here are his two widows … and neither of them shedding a tear.”

  In that momen
t, I wished Tom straight to hell and believe Sally did the same.

  “Let’s start,” Jeff finally said, fearing my husband wanted witnesses to cause a scene. He wasn’t wrong. Tom quarreled with him that we ought to delay on account of the rain, then held himself over Papa’s coffin, wailing in affected grief while I looked on like a statue in the driving rain.

  “You’ve got a heart of stone,” Tom shouted at me.

  But his words didn’t pierce me. He was right. Until that moment, I believed my heart was flesh and blood like any other. But my heart had turned to stone.

  The sky itself might cry, but I wouldn’t. My tears, when they came—if they came—wouldn’t be for Tom. All my life I’d held back my tears. For my father’s sanity, for his reputation, and now for his legacy. However much I wished for release, for a moment to feel the loss, no one would ever see me fall to pieces. No one would ever see that.

  Certainly not Tom Randolph.

  So I endured his taunts.

  I endured the shoveling of dirt over my father’s grave.

  And I endured the silence that followed.

  Our silence. Our special silence.

  Others would suffer, truly suffer, for what my father hadn’t said in his lifetime. But I’d always divined his wishes in that silence, and could hear his words echoing in it even now. And those words were:

  Take care of me when I’m dead.

  Chapter Forty-two

  Monticello, Unknown Date

  From Thomas Jefferson to Martha Jefferson Randolph

  Farewell my dear, my loved daughter, Adieu!

  The last pang of life is in parting from you!

  Two Seraphs await me, long shrouded in death:

  I will bear them your love on my last parting breath.