America's First Daughter: A Novel (54 page)

It wasn’t difficult. For nearly six years, Mr. Trist had been con stant in his attachment to Ginny. They’d resisted all our attempts to discourage their love until we were simply forced to acquiesce to its power. Theirs was not a marriage for money or advantage, but born of long friendship, shared troubles, and a true meeting of hearts. They might live poor as church mice all their lives, but their romance was perfectly obvious to everyone. And when the bride and groom pledged themselves to one another, their voices trembling with emotion, it wasn’t Tom who gazed at me with wistful remembrance of our wedding day.

Instead, I felt William’s gaze upon me, as if imagining the wedding we’d never had.

Glancing furtively at him over the punch bowl and floral arrangements, I found myself snared by his wistful smile. I remembered that, like my new son-in-law, he, too, was once an aspiring diplomat that everyone feared would be penniless. My eldest daughter had married a man more like her father than I wished to contemplate, but Ginny was taking the risk I never took.

Later, William sat beside me to listen when Papa gifted Ginny with a gilded cittern guitar with which she serenaded her new groom.
Love endures,
I thought, then tried to shake the thought away. But it was a thought that stayed with me well into the night.

T
HEREAFTER,
T
OM ABSENTED HIMSELF FROM
M
ONTICELLO
. He didn’t come for dinner, nor take tea in the early evening. It was only after the music was played and our guests had retired that he returned—hiding away in the north pavilion, refusing my company.

I knew my husband was in pain, shattered to atoms in body and spirit. I hurt for him. I wanted to reassure him of my love, of my father’s love, of his family’s love—even Jeff’s love. But the only thing Tom wanted from me was to persuade Jeff to leave the creditors unpaid. And, for the sake of our children, that was the one thing I wouldn’t do.

“Where do you think he goes during the day?” Ellen mur mured as the younger children ran inside the house ahead of us, their feet pitter-pattering across the cherry and beech wood parquet floor.

I suspected Tom actually went to Charlottesville to drink in the taverns, but couldn’t bear to tell even Ellen as much. “I’m sure I don’t know.”

Ellen leaned against one of the columns of the west portico. “I can bring my father a tray tonight. He’s made a recluse of himself in the north pavilion, but he might open the door for me. If not me, then Septimia.”

Yes, he might open the door for Septimia because she was a child, but I didn’t intend to use her in such a way. “Your father has always suffered dark moods. Then he comes out of them. He always comes out of them. So we must give him privacy.”

From the parlor, where he’d been setting up a chessboard, my father called, “Ah, Ellen, come play!” Papa was inordinately proud of both his granddaughter and his chess set—a gift from the French court. “I’ve been telling Mr. Short that if you’d been born a man, you’d have been a great one. So show him how you’ve learned to use my chessmen.”

William had been examining Papa’s “magic” double doors, which, by some ingenious innovation, opened of their own accord. But he looked up when Ellen pulled a crimson damask chair to the board by the window and challenged him to a game. “You won’t go easy on account of my sex, will you, Mr. Short?”

William smirked. “To the contrary, I’m contemplating asking special dispensation on account of my age.”

Ellen threw her head back in laughter, a dark tendril of hair escaping the bun at her nape . . . and proceeded to a ruthless victory.

Smiling in easy defeat, William turned to me. “Your daughters have inherited your talents, Mrs. Randolph. Ellen’s wit. Virginia’s music. Cornelia’s artistry . . . why her architectural drawings rival those of professional draftsmen. I’ve advised your father to hire her for the University.”

My girls were delighted by this praise, and I was, too. Even so, I felt compelled to say, “You forget I was an abysmal artist in my youth—to this day, I can scarcely sketch a pea.”

“I remember perfectly well,” William countered. “It’s only that paints and pencils were never the tools of your trade. You were a different kind of artist. The craft you mastered was spycraft!”

“
Spycraft
?” Ellen asked, eyes round at the mention of the disreputable business.

My children were fascinated, and William looked very satisfied. “Shall I tell your children how you rooted out an English spy?”

I gave my assent with an indifferent shrug and a secret smirk, deciding that so many years had passed there could hardly be scandal in it.

The story of how I’d stolen papers from the rooms of Charles Williamos was one my father had never heard before. And in hearing it, poor Papa looked as if he didn’t know whether to scold or congratulate us. “The secrets come out only when your children think you’re too old and feeble to discipline them!”

We laughed together beneath the rows of paintings that my father prized. All of us had needed to laugh. Which left me even more grateful for William’s visit. He paid court to my father with the affection and comfort of an old friend, bolstering his spirits. He played games with my children and told them stories about Lafayette, which put them in even more excited anticipation of setting eyes upon our beloved Marquis.

William made us forget our troubles; he made it easy to pretend that my husband wasn’t lurking on the grounds each night . . . or even that I wasn’t married at all.

After winning another game, Ellen announced, “Mr. Short, you’re paying too much homage to your queen. But I’ll allow you to avenge yourself with one last game.”

“I’m content to leave the field in ignominious defeat,” William said.

She clasped her hands together. “I fear your years in Philadelphia have turned you into a Yankee! No Virginia gentleman, born and bred, would bow so easily.”

A
Yankee
. It no longer had the same bite on her tongue as it did the day Joseph Coolidge came to our door. That’s how I knew that my Ellen was in love. In love with a man she wouldn’t marry because she feared to abandon me.

That night, I took her chin and made her look into my eyes. “If you can be happy with Mr. Coolidge, then marry him. You must go and be happy.”

Her long dark lashes fluttered with surprise. “But I’m accustomed to spinsterhood. And my duty—”

“Don’t let duty chain you,” I said, though it would break my heart to lose her. “Not to me, not to your father, not even to your grandfather.”

Ellen blinked, her brow furrowed. “But I wish to do as you’ve always done, Mama.”

My heart sank at the sentiment, sweet as it was. There had been sacrifice enough for duty. Ellen deserved to make the choice I hadn’t been able to. I grasped her hands. “No, Ellen. You’ve done your duty. It’s time to consider your own happiness.” For I was determined that my precious daughter, the one I clung to the way my father clung to me, would well and truly find it.

I
AWAKENED TO THE SILHOUETTE
of a man in my bedroom doorway. It was my husband, drunk and ornery. He stumbled into my closet—where he must’ve still expected to find a bed. Smashing instead into trunks and hatboxes, he uttered a dark curse.

“Tom?” I asked, not fully awake.

He never answered. Instead, he followed my voice in the dark, then hefted his body onto the bed, climbing atop me. “You’re my wife,” he snarled, yanking down the blankets.

“You’re drunk,” I accused, pushing him away.

“So you’re the wife of a drunk,” he said, forcing upon me a rough, wet kiss.

I didn’t want him. Not like this. Not angry and rough and stinking of wine. “No, Tom. We decided—”

My words were cut off by a blow to the face.

I tasted blood and anger, even as my head swam with terror and shock and pain.

“
You
decided,” Tom said, pinning my arm and getting his knee between mine.

I might’ve cried or pleaded or used feminine wiles to prevail upon him to let me go. But I did none of those things. Instead, when he tugged at his trousers to free himself, I freed myself with an upward jerk of my knee.

Unsteady from drink, he toppled from me, howling in pain. I rolled out of the bed, my bare feet pounding on the floor as I ran. He gave chase, knocking pictures from the wall, tripping over a small table in the hall, sending knickknacks clattering to the floor.

Hearing the commotion, Ellen flung open the door to her room while children stumbled down the stairs from their rooms above. Crowding around me, the children whimpered in confusion, and George began to cry. Tom glared at me where I stood within the refuge of my children’s arms. There was something akin to pure hatred in his eyes. By Tom’s accounting, he’d been rejected by everyone in his life. His father, my father, the legislators and voters of Virginia . . . and me.

This refusal of him was another betrayal. But he didn’t pry me away from our children to force himself upon me. Instead, without a word, he lumbered back down the stairs. And I didn’t follow or even call after him.

Instead, I found myself grateful that William’s lodging on the first floor had kept him from being witness to yet another humiliation.

I
FELL OUT OF BED
,” I said to explain my bruises.

Sipping chocolate, Papa sighed. “You wouldn’t have fallen from an alcove bed.”

I nodded absently, grateful that my children said nothing of their father’s rampage. They all joined into the conspiracy of silence. But William Short wasn’t fooled for a moment. He was unusually subdued as we took our chocolate from my father’s favorite urn. His face as serious and stoic as the plaster busts hovering over us of Washington, Franklin, and Lafayette.

And later, once my increasingly frail and elderly father found his ease in his campeachy chair, William followed me on my rounds beneath the mulberry trees, delivering rations to slave cabins. “Your husband mistreats you.”

I could say nothing. I could only hurry along the road, hoping our people would swarm around me for their parcels and force William to some other subject.

But he was, as always, a dogged man. “Did he strike you?”

“William, leave it be,” I said, picking up my pace, suddenly desperate to flee. To escape his infernal prying into facts.

William darted in front of me, blocking my path. “I thought you loved him.”

One look into William’s eyes and I came undone. All the emotions—the anger, the bitterness, the fear—everything I’d so carefully wound tight into my pleasant and placid smile now unraveled.

And I fled.

Dropping the basket in the road, I took hold of my skirts and hurried away from him down the hill into the vegetable garden, for it seemed the most likely avenue of escape, past rows of artichokes and beans and brown Dutch lettuces.

I didn’t think he’d follow me, because it meant sinking his well-made shoes into the autumn muck. But he more than followed. He
chased
. “Patsy,” he cried, taking the liberty of using my childhood name. And when we reached the garden pavilion, he took the further liberty of grasping my wrist before I could close the glass-paned door in his face. Again, he insisted, “I thought that you loved him.”

“And I thought you loved Rosalie,” I shot back. “So love has carried neither one of us to the destination we wished.”

Startled, he let go of me, and I retreated inside the square little fortress lit by tall windows on every side. My father had built it so that he might peacefully survey the whole of his world in any direction, but I tucked myself into a corner, feeling vulnerable and exposed.

At length, William mustered the courage to step inside, rubbing his face in his hands. “Rosalie said she wouldn’t marry—she feared for her husband’s reputation, she feared to leave her elderly relations, she feared to leave her country. But the truth was, she simply wouldn’t marry
me
. When last in France, I learned that she’d married the Marquis de Castellane, an aging nobleman of some prestige. So trust me when I say that I understand perfectly what it is to love someone who can never give you what you want or deserve.”

I withdrew farther into the corner, wrestling the sob that threatened to overtake me. He stood beside me, our hands brushing where they dangled. We touched, skin to skin, an unmistakable intimacy as his finger linked, softly, tenderly, with my own.

And a longing I’d buried so long ago coiled within me anew, very much alive. We breathed in perfect harmony, bound again, finger to finger, even as we ached for more. And I felt the strength and comfort which I’d not experienced this way in more than thirty years.

His voice was a whisper. “I loved Rosalie, yes. But I loved you first, Patsy. Always have loved you. Always will.” He turned to me, touching my bruised lip very gently, right where it hurt, a very tender gesture.

Then he moved in, lowering his head as if he meant to kiss me.

And it took every bit of strength in me to turn away.

“W
HO IS HE TO YOU?”

The growled words startled me, coming from behind me in the washhouse where I’d come in the cool of the evening to search out some missing stockings. Sally was there, having set soiled clothing to boil in a copper cauldron outside. Sally disliked when my daughters and I visited the dependencies, where the slaves did their work, for my father’s concubine ruled here, in her quiet and competent way. Perhaps that’s why she turned her head with scarcely disguised imperiousness to see who was stooped in the low doorway.

But I knew before I looked.

It was Tom, having lumbered down from the nearby north pavilion where he was sleeping these days, his face red from cheek to jowl, with rage or liquor, or both. “Get out,” he barked at the laundry girls, and they darted past him in the doorway. Sally was slower to obey, her glance flicking to me. Only when I nodded did she tug at the bodice of her gown to make it straight, then gracefully ducked under my husband’s outstretched arms to make her exit.

We stood there then, my husband and I, the sound of the laundry bubbling and hissing in the cauldron behind him. Then Tom roared, “
Who is he to you
?
William Short. That sanctimonious stock jobber. That morally bankrupt lecher. I saw you. I saw both of you.”

My heart leapt to my throat like a shot from a pistol and I could do nothing but brazen it out. “I can’t imagine what you mean.”

“You left your basket in the road,” Tom said, his teeth clenched together like an animal trap that had taken so long to spring it was now rusted shut. “Couldn’t fathom where you’d got to until I looked up at the garden pavilion. I saw you there, with him. In his arms. I saw it!”

Sweat broke across my brow and the nape of my neck, not only from the big fire under the cauldron nor even the heat of this stifling little room, but because guilt seared its way through me until I worried I might faint dead away. Haltingly, I began to say, “I wasn’t in his arms, Tom. You know he’s an old friend. A dear one. He offered me comfort and solace in a moment of need. That’s all.”

That was a lie. That wasn’t all William Short had offered me in my father’s garden pavilion. He told me he loved me. He’d tried to kiss me, too, but I’d turned away.

“Nothing carnal took place,” I insisted. “He was my suitor once. In France. But I spurned Mr. Short, then married you.”

I hoped it’d soothe his wounded pride.

It didn’t.

“William Short makes whores of other men’s wives.” These words carried such quiet fury that they frightened me more than if he’d shouted them. Tom came toward me, very slowly, very quietly, wrapping his big hand around my throat like Charles Bankhead had once done. Tom didn’t squeeze but merely held me there against the wall, slightly suspended, like a rag doll hanging from his string. “Short is infamous. His exploits are so well known he was too ashamed to make his home in Virginia. But you’re giving him what you won’t give me, isn’t that right?”

How absurd it was. Beggaring belief, even. At our age, for two men to be vying for a mother of eleven children. “Tom, you’re letting jealousy poison your mind! Don’t you realize the absurdity—”

“Tell me you haven’t bedded him. Go on. Lie to me, you convent-trained
whore
.”

My husband’s chest heaved with anger so deep and divisive that it seemed to open the very earth between us. It seemed to make strangers of us. And perhaps we
were
strangers now. For I was no longer the young wife who believed that her husband’s violence was her own fault.

And slowly, pulling from some reserve inside myself I didn’t know I had, I stood taller on my side of that chasm. “Whatever I am, Thomas Mann Randolph, you’re not worthy of.”

On that last, I broke free of him. But I didn’t run. I’d run from him when he’d tried to force himself upon me—run from him like Ann ran from her maniac of a husband.

But I was done running from Tom.

I
walked
out of that washhouse, even as my husband called after me. “I’ll have satisfaction, Martha. I’ll call him out!”

I snorted with bitter laughter, grateful to be certain of one thing. “William will never fight a duel with you.”

“If he won’t, it’s because he’s no Virginia gentleman.”

“No, Tom. He won’t duel you because
you
aren’t. Not anymore.”

W
ILLIAM AND
I
MET IN THE GROVE
, a canopy of autumn leaves overhead, strangely reminiscent of that long-ago day he found me on the ground, having fallen from my father’s high horse.

“Patsy, say something
.
” Those words, too, were an echo of the past, but I was hearing them again now as he pleaded, “Your silence cuts me deeper than the sharpest rebuke.”

He was wrong. My words would cut him deeper, I knew. And I wished I could say anything other than what I’d come to tell him. But we weren’t young comrades amongst a tangle of saplings at the start of our journey any longer; we were grizzled veterans standing atop the rotting fruit of our long struggle. And so, with the stink from the leaves of my father’s chinaberry trees in my nos trils, I forced myself to speak, even as the words themselves left a painful sting on my lips. “I must ask you to leave Monticello.”

William reeled, as if he’d taken a blow. “I meant to comfort you and have made a fool of myself with unwanted attentions. I’ll leave, of course, if that’s your desire, but I promise I’ll never allow myself such a lapse. It will never happen again.”

I wanted it to happen again. I wanted that desperately. “You’re no fool, William, and your attentions are not unwanted. To the contrary, they’re temptations that my virtue is no proof against.” He startled, his expression lighting upon some hope that I was soon to dash. “But Tom saw us. He saw us in the garden pavilion. So you must go and never come back.”

“God,” William said, though the word carried with the sound of a profane curse. Color came to his cheeks, and he put a hand to the back of his neck. “I’ll speak to him. I’ll assure him of your blamelessness.”

“But I’m not blameless.” My heart cried out that I never wanted to part with him. That now, more than ever, I wanted to keep him near. “And you must go, because he means to call you out.”

An unexpected bloodlust filled William’s eyes. “
Does
he?”

“He thinks himself betrayed. Here under his own roof.”

“Your father’s roof,” William corrected, then blanched at his own words.

I didn’t have to explain to him the scandal of gentlemen with pistols meeting on my father’s lawn, only weeks before the arrival of Lafayette. And that was to say nothing of the fact that such a duel might very well end in blood and tragedy. I had no doubt whatsoever that my husband would try to put a bullet in William’s brain. Even if he missed—even if it was William whose aim was true—it’d make a widow of me and an orphan of my children.

“Please forgive me, Patsy. I should have never—”

“Loved me?” I asked, tears welling in my eyes. I’d made of myself the model Republican wife and daughter, reputed for virtue and spotless reputation. Tom would try to take that from me now; he was angry enough to tarnish me and my father’s legacy—the only thing of value my children might ever inherit. And I’d been reckless enough to give him the means with which to do it. I had no excuse but one. “Don’t regret loving me, I beg you, because I return your love, a thousandfold.”

William blinked, and when he finally found his voice, it quavered. “I worry that you’re saying it because this is a trying time, one of overwrought emotion, and here I am, conveniently—”

“I
love
you,” I insisted, certain to the marrow of my bones. “Do I need to carve it in one of these trees? I loved you first, I loved you always, and will never stop loving you. Which is why I’m begging you to go. We must never see one another again. This must be good-bye.”

He stared, his throat bobbing with emotion. “How can you ask me to leave you at the mercy of that man? Not after you tell me what I’ve waited thirty years to hear. If I leave Monticello, Patsy, leave with me.”

He wanted me to leave with him. To leave Monticello behind. The beauty and grandeur, the violence and slavery . . . and my father. It was more impossible now than it’d been in France all those years ago. Then, I had only my father and my sister. Now, I had children.