America's First Daughter: A Novel (36 page)

Jack Eppes wasn’t as handsome as my own husband, but then few men were. Still, Jack had a sunny disposition. He seemed amenable to my father’s plan to have us all live close together when he retired from office. And so we were all very optimistic that autumn. We anticipated long sojourns here at Monticello, which would—Papa promised—be completely renovated and habitable by New Year’s Day.

Sally herself was with child again, which seemed to give my father great pleasure, though he never said so. He guarded the privacy of his rooms, which must have been their lovers’ sanctuary, but I wondered where Sally took herself on days like this one, when our country neighbors and relations gathered for Polly’s wedding.

Kissing my sister’s cheeks, I said, “
Mon Dieu,
Polly. You are a beautiful bride.”

“It’s Maria!” she cried, laughing in exasperation.

“Maria,” I agreed, with a grin.

She beamed, taking up a bouquet of lavender, feverfew, and coneflowers. “You are my very best sister, and I promise, when we live apart, I’ll write you every day.”

At this, I snorted back a laugh. “That’s what you said when you went off with Papa to Philadelphia, but I can scarcely count one letter you sent me. I’m afraid you deal much in promises, but very little in deeds performed with a pen,
Maria
.”

“I’ll do better,” she said solemnly, staring at her reflection in the mirror.

Though I doubted it, I kissed her again, for it was a day for joy.

Alas, after the vows were exchanged, I found my husband miserable, leaning against the rail of the gallery, a glass in hand, watching everyone else dance in the entrance hall below. “Martha,” he said stiffly.

Since the day I’d left Varina, we’d scarcely spoken a word, so I simply answered, “Mr. Randolph.”

“They make a handsome couple,” my husband said, eyeing Jack, who whirled my sister around so that her petticoats swirled up under her skirt, heedless of her injured ankle. “Your father says Jack’s a talented lawyer.”

Truthfully, Jack wasn’t terribly talented at anything in my opinion. Certainly, my sister’s new husband didn’t have Tom’s intellect or scientific curiosity. And where my husband had a manly swagger, Jack still presented himself as a pudgy-cheeked boy. There wasn’t anything better about Jack Eppes but his temper.

Yet, he had a patrimony and a father who loved him.

Two things Tom envied.

Two things Tom would never have.

And I hurt for him, but I couldn’t let my husband’s jealousy or fears put a damper on my sister’s wedding. So I put my hand on his arm, where it rested upon the colorful buffalo robe on display over the rail, and said, “I think I forgot to tell you—my father is hoping to compare his meteorology book with yours. He doesn’t trust anyone else’s.” Shaking my head with feigned bewilderment, I added, “You two and your record keeping. Two peas in a pod, you are. I can’t imagine how your scientific minds work.”

“Your father likes Jack,” Tom said, an edge in his voice.

Frustrated, I said, “Everybody likes Jack. And Jack likes everybody.”

“No, he doesn’t. He’s all pretense,” Tom said, finishing his drink in one gulp. “He proposed to your sister because his parents wanted him to.”

Which—even if true—was no bad reason for marriage.

“Don’t spoil things, Tom.”

Setting his glass down, he lowered his eyes. “Say what you will, Martha, but I wanted
you
. . . and I still do.”

It softened me to hear it, and I smoothed my hands over the bodice of my gown, knowing that the striped silk taffeta in shades of gold brought out the fiery hues in my curled hair. “Then why don’t you come downstairs and dance with me.” Taking his hand, I drew it to my hip. “Look at our guests flapping about without any grace. They need our example.”

“Patsy,” Tom said, his fist balling within my grasp. “I’m trying to tell you something.” His throat bobbed, as if he was mustering courage. “It pains me to be an embarrassment to you, but I don’t know how to remedy my flaws. All I know is that whenever I feel strongly compelled to any act, a doubt always arises. And whereas the voice of reason is low and persuasive, passion is loud and imperious.”

It was a kind of apology. And I was reminded again that there was no guile in my husband. What he thought, what he felt, was always there on his skin. He wasn’t a diplomat; he wrestled every day with the necessary fictions of gentility that came so easily to me and my father, born politicians that we were. Sometimes Tom’s directness was refreshing, intoxicating, even.

Tom finished by saying, “I wish I knew what part of my nature prevents me from being happy.”

I knew exactly what part of his nature was to blame. It was
the Randolph
in him. And when I considered his miserable father, his shameless sisters, and all his selfish, hotheaded kin, I counted it a miracle that Tom was, at heart, a good man. That he wasn’t a happy man couldn’t be counted much against him.

So I pushed onto my toes and kissed him, very softly, at the corner of his mouth. “Ask me to dance, Mr. Randolph.” And when he finally swept me onto the dance floor, I whispered, “I’ll tell you a secret about being happy, Tom. Sometimes you just have to pretend at it until it becomes real.”

Monticello,
11 October 1798

From Thomas Jefferson to Stevens Thomson Mason

These Alien & Sedition laws are merely an experiment on the American mind to see how far it will bear a violation of the constitution. If this goes down, we shall see another act of Congress declaring a hereditary President for life or the restoration of his most gracious majesty George the third. That these things are in contemplation I have no doubt after the dupery of which our countrymen have shown themselves susceptible.

My husband snapped open his paper at the breakfast table. “This damnable Jay Treaty is going to be our undoing.”

I wish he hadn’t said it, only because I didn’t want Papa agitated about politics during his visit. It some ways, we all lived in a state of suspended animation until my father came home each autumn, and I didn’t want to spoil our time together.

Unfortunately, Tom’s words worked Papa into a rare state of heat. “For President Adams to side with Britain against France.” Papa fumed, glancing at Tom’s paper and adjusting the spectacles he’d purchased for his sore eyes. “Against our sister Republic, our lone ally in a world of monarchies!”

The treaty had gone down badly. Violence between political factions broke out in Philadelphia and had to be dispersed by light cavalry—much as in Paris on the eve of revolution. What’s more, President Adams had authorized the prosecution of critics of the president’s administration, which now included my father, his vice president.

Federalists claimed these measures were necessary to keep anarchy—and the guillotine—from American shores. But we saw in this the possibility for the very end of the American experiment with liberty. We were afraid to write political letters of any kind for fear of being jailed—especially since Papa was certain his were being intercepted and read.

He removed his spectacles and rested them upon the ledge of the small mahogany lap desk he once used to draft the Declaration of Independence itself, then gave a mournful sigh. “I know not which mortifies me most—that I should fear to write what I think or that my country bears such a state of things.”

“Papa,” I said, trying to soothe him. “Perhaps you should resign the vice presidency in protest. Retire early, because in a very short time, there will be another election and it shall all be someone else’s worry.”

Papa should’ve agreed with me. He might at least have pretended to think about it, especially considering the weight it would take off Tom. Instead, Papa snapped, “This reign of witches must end!”

That was the moment I realized my father was going to run for the presidency. Not be reluctantly volunteered. But actively campaign for the office.

He was ready for rebellion. Papa’s powerful, implacable, political outrage reminded me that underneath his gentility, he would always be a revolutionary. He wouldn’t retire. He’d run for the presidency of the United States, and this time, he wanted to win.

Like a soldier readying for battle, he’d returned to Monticello only to regroup in the bosom of his family. A thing made even plainer to me when he groused, “Where the devil is Maria? I gave Jack my chariot to make it easier to come, and assured them both the house and servants would be ready to receive them.”

But Jack hadn’t seen fit to bring my sister home. In fact, we’d scarcely seen Polly since her wedding the year before. In that time, Sally had lost poor little Harriet to some childhood illness and borne my father another child—a boy named Beverly. It must’ve been some consolation, but babies were fragile, and Papa had already lost so many children he was apt to guard his heart against loving the new ones too dearly. So, my father centered his anxieties on my sister. “Is she ill?”

“Just a newlywed,” I said, because if it was an illness, it mysteriously reoccurred whenever it served to excuse a visit to Monti cello, and I began to harbor a belief the Eppes family was keeping my sister from us once again.

My husband had cause to know how very much this upset me and as we prepared for bed one night, he attempted to raise my spirits against the specter of a holiday without my sister. “You ought to chaperone the Christmas Ball in Charlottesville, Patsy. It promises to be a gay season.”

I didn’t know about that. I knew Nancy intended to try to find a husband there, in spite of her blackened reputation. And Tom’s littlest sister, Jenny, would come out into society for the first time. I myself hadn’t been out in society in years and couldn’t imagine that it’d make me feel any better about missing Polly or about losing my father to politics for another four years.

But then Tom added, “I’ll go to the Christmas Ball with you. It occurs to me you need a chaperone. One never knows what kind of trouble you might get up to without me, young lady.”

Lighthearted flirtation didn’t come naturally to Tom, and it warmed me to know that in spite of all his own struggles, he was trying to help me with mine. In my nightdress, I sat on the edge of the bed, my fingers trailing along the neckline. “Mr. Randolph, it’s your sisters you need worry about. I’m an old woman of twenty-six years and quite above reproach.”

Tom tugged me against the strong muscles of his bare chest and playfully leaned his face close to mine. “But I might like to give you a stern reprimand or two anyway.”

He wanted me. That hadn’t changed. Not since the day he decided he
must
have me did his desire wane. Sometimes I thought it was because whenever he made love to me, he was reaching inside me for something more than the love I bore him, reaching for something I couldn’t give. But as long as he kept reaching, I thought it would hold us together.

So that Christmas, we loaded up Jenny and everyone else we could stuff into the carriage. Tom and I danced and exhausted the youngsters, putting them to shame. We were still laughing when we returned, much to the consternation of our children at Monticello, where we’d left them in Sally’s care.

When Tom smooched my cheek, our six-year-old son Jeff—a little heathen who refused to wear shoes even in coldest winter—made an ugly face. His older sister Ann complained bitterly of the unfairness that we hadn’t allowed her to come with us, threatening to go to
Phildelphy
with her grandpapa who would surely spoil her with cake. And two-year-old Ellen—a child I named after the daughter I’d lost, promising myself to love her enough for
two
angels—babbled her complaints, clinging to my skirts.

Oh, how I loved my little cherubs, and by springtime, I was expecting another. At this news, my husband leapt from his chair to spin me around. Tom wanted another boy—of course he did. And the knowledge we had another baby coming set him off on a manic fit of activity, building us a new house at Edgehill.

Tobacco was in the ground, and everyone was predicting high prices. “This will be a good year, Patsy,” Tom said. “We’ll get a good harvest, sell at the peak of the market, pay off debts, and live easy the rest of our lives. Just you wait and see.”

Varina Plantation, 1 July 1799

To Thomas Jefferson from Thomas Mann Randolph Jr.

There is a story of an ancient king whose touch turned everything to gold. You will recognize in me the makings of Midas, except that everything I touch turns to dust.

N
OTHING CAME UP
out of the dirt that summer.

What plants did grow were small and sickly things. Most farmers lost their entire crop; we lost most of ours. Tom worked desperately to salvage what he could. In the end, he had to rely on tobacco, which was his undoing.

That summer prices reached dizzying heights, but the odious Federalists had suspended commerce with France—the biggest market for Virginia tobacco. By autumn, prices crashed, and we couldn’t give it away. My husband had gambled and lost, but he wasn’t the only one—not the only one by far. Every man in Virginia suffered that year.

That’s why I burn this old letter.

I thrust it into the flame and watch the edges curl, happy to protect my husband’s too-earnest heart, as he was never able to do for himself. Tom’s bitterness was a cause of much misery in my life, but he came by some of it so honestly that I can’t bear to think of people reading this letter and mocking his pain.

And so I burn it, gladly, to ash.

At the time he
wrote
this letter, of course, Tom kept from me the magnitude of the financial disaster. It wasn’t a wife’s place to know the particulars. I was meant to concern myself with raising our children—four in all now, including baby Cornelia, who we’d named after the famous Roman matron, in keeping with the revolutionary spirits of the time. But in the midst of chasing after the little ones, I had guessed that he wouldn’t be able to pay the mortgage on Varina and tried to comfort him, hushing baby Cornelia in my arms. “You couldn’t know the right time to sell the tobacco, Tom. Nobody could. Besides, the trade embargo with France will expire in the new year and you can sell then.”

“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.

S
EEKING TO ESCAPE THE TROUBLES UNFURLING AT
V
ARINA
, 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.”