America's First Daughter: A Novel (26 page)

“I
SN’T HE ADORABLE?”
Polly asked, cuddling Sally’s infant son. “As sweet as an angel.”

Fortunately, no one at Tuckahoe looked askance at my sister sharing a bed in the dormitory with Sally, who they believed was her lady’s maid. And if Colonel Randolph or any of Tom’s family guessed the mewling baby was closer kin to us than any other Hemings, they didn’t say a word.

Papa had gone off to serve as secretary of state with James Hemings at his side, and Tom intended for us to stay with his family a few weeks before making the traditional round of honeymoon visits to all our friends and country neighbors. But I hoped our stay at Tuckahoe would be brief, because Colonel Randolph reigned over his family like an aging despot.

He cut my husband with casual insults. And the old man’s daughters—my new sisters—fared worse. Colonel Randolph spared hardly a glance for his littlest girls and left the older ones quaking in fear of his temper. Especially Nancy, who’d taken on the role of mistress of Tuckahoe for her widowed father. “Keep your pickaninny quiet,” Nancy snapped at Sally. “Or my father will rage at the noise.”

Seated with Polly on the divan, Sally looked up with only a flicker of indignant anger. In France she’d been an exotic beauty and cosseted mistress. Here in Virginia, she was just a slave again, and it must’ve been difficult for her to swallow down. Still, she did it, whispering a soft, “Yes, Miss Nancy.”

The next day, Nancy glanced nervously at Colonel Randolph’s retreating form. “We’ll take our tea in the garden when Judith visits. This way we won’t call attention to ourselves and give him a reason to scold us.”

“I’d rather take tea inside,” Polly complained. “Otherwise bees will buzz around our biscuits!”

Nancy huffed. “It’s a tea for
ladies
. You’ll take your biscuits in the kitchen with your maid.”

Though I bristled at Polly being excluded, I wanted desperately to be embraced by my husband’s family, so I didn’t raise a fuss. Still, I feared what I’d do or say if my father-in-law vented his temper on Polly, so I told her, “Keep out of the colonel’s way.”

Then I went with Nancy to meet her sister in the drive. When Judith stepped out of her husband’s carriage, she cried, “Why Martha! If I’d known you were going to marry my brother, I’d have waited to make it a double-wedding.”

Nancy scoffed, leading us to the tea table set up in the garden. “Oh, Judy. As if you could wait.” When Judith glared, she added, “I’m just saying you’re too vain to share your day with anyone else!”

“Well, I might have—” Judith broke off, stooping to pull some plants up by the root. “You’re a disaster as a housekeeper, Nancy. Just look what you’ve let happen to Mama’s herb garden. It’s overrun with weeds!”

Nancy cried, “How am I to know the difference between the herbs and weeds?”

Judith sniffed imperiously. “Well, if you paid attention to the medicinal arts instead of burying your nose in tawdry romance novels . . .”

I took my seat on a lawn chair, disheartened to hear the way my husband’s sisters bickered, smiling as though they were just teasing, but with a nasty undercurrent. And I was downright scandalized when Judith pointed to a patch of greenery and said, “If you’d had some clippings of
that,
Patsy, you wouldn’t have had to marry my brother in such haste.”

My mouth fell quite agape. “I beg your pardon?”

“Gum guaiacum,” Judy chirped. “Part of my mother’s special recipe for easing colic, but it’s also known to bring on a woman’s flow. So if you feared you were with child—”

“I
beg
your pardon,” I said, again, this time more sharply.

“Oh, don’t take offense,” Judith cooed. “You’re married now, and all the gossip in the world can’t undo that.”

With a flail of my hand that nearly upset the tea service, I cried, “What gossip?”

Judith put a hand to her hip. “You were scarcely betrothed to my brother a month. It’s only natural for everyone to speculate.”

“
Judy,
” Nancy said, in harsh reprimand.

“Oh, I’m not judging.” Judy lowered onto a seat beside me. “I confess I’m nothing short of pleased at the outcome. I always feared Tom would marry one of those pretty, empty-headed girls who titter behind their fans at the mere sight of him. I never thought he’d take a sensible bride. Why, Patsy, I don’t care how you landed my brother, only that you did! Never mind if people start counting back the months from when your first child is born.”

My first child. The thought of it nearly stunned me into silence. I knew, of course, it was the duty of a wife to give her husband children. But the reality that I might have a baby growing inside me hadn’t struck me until that very moment. Of course, if I
was
with child, there was nothing scandalous about it, and the gossips could count backward all they liked.

S
ALLY’S BABY DIED AT
T
UCKAHOE
.

One spring morning, Sally came to me in a panic, holding her infant against her breast. “He won’t suckle and he’s coughing something terrible.”

We went to Colonel Randolph for help, but he didn’t care one whit about a slave girl’s baby. He didn’t want to send for a doctor, and though there was a cupboard full of dried herbs and medicines, Nancy didn’t know what any of them were for.

Only my husband offered any real help. A student of science who had learned medicine at the University of Edinburgh, he put his ear to the little baby’s chest. By the fire in the front parlor, cramming his long body into a small rocking chair, he cradled the infant boy, trying to get him to suck at milk from a cloth. But whatever ailed Sally’s baby, the poor little boy wasted away fast. And when he stopped breathing, Sally gave a howl that echoed through that big plantation house like wind in a dead winter forest.

I’d never heard her make a sound like that. Never before or since. And in spite of the coolness between us since Paris, I found myself holding her tight in my arms, as if I could keep her from flying apart.

“Poor little baby,” Polly sobbed.

Poor little baby, indeed. My poor little cousin, brother, and neither. I was to look after him. Both him and Sally. Papa had entrusted them to me. Now my father’s son was gone without ever having become a man, and there was nothing we could ever say to comfort his mother.

Sally Hemings had returned to Virginia, to slavery, to this life—all for the sake of my father and this baby. Now my father was off serving the president and their baby was gone. She’d made choices she could never take back. Choices none of us ever could. And I had to fight off my own tears to stay strong for her and my sister both.

“What’s all this carrying on?” Colonel Randolph shouted when he heard our lamentations echoing throughout the halls. When Tom told him, his father snorted with a dismissive flick of his hand. “Put a buck on that girl in a few weeks and she’ll breed another.”

At those words, my chin snapped up. I gave Colonel Randolph a look that could’ve set his whole house on fire, hoping to make him ashamed of himself. It didn’t mean anything to him to see Sally in pain, but it meant something to us. It meant something to me.

Sensing a brewing rebellion in his parlor, Colonel Randolph snapped, “Do something about your womenfolk, Tom.” Then he stalked away.

Choked with tears, Sally asked, “Where will we bury my baby? Can’t leave him with strangers.”

Trying to take the tiny body from Sally, Nancy Randolph said, “He won’t know any different. Why, a little baby like this was only in this world for a few breaths. He won’t remember anything in heaven. It’ll be as if he was never here at all.”

My sister-in-law meant to comfort, but Sally recoiled from Nancy as if she were the devil. It was Tom who had to reason with her. “Sally, your boy won’t be buried amongst strangers. When my father passes on, I’ll be master of Tuckahoe and Patsy will be mistress here. We’ll be buried here and our children, too. With your baby nearby.”

That’s what it took to make Sally surrender her baby for burial. And I felt a flare of pride in my husband. He wasn’t good at laughter and levity—what he did best, he did in the dark—but there was a decency about him.

He said those words to ease the heart of a grieving mother. But when those words got back to Colonel Randolph, they did more damage than I could’ve imagined.

Maybe it was Nancy who ran telling tales, but it could’ve been any of the miserable souls in that big old house. Whoever reported the conversation must’ve made Tom’s words sound ugly and entitled, like we were wishing for Colonel Randolph’s demise.

That night in the dining room, my father-in-law eyed Tom over a glass of liquor and said, “You and your fancy new convent-educated wife have made yourselves quite at home here at Tuckahoe.”

“We’re very grateful for your hospitality, sir,” Tom replied, stiffly. “Now that the snows are gone, we’ll take Miss Polly to Eppington and make our rounds.”

Colonel Randolph threw back a gulp of the amber liquid and gestured to a slave to refill his goblet, then he held out his hands, as if in question. “When Mr. Jefferson asked you to call on his relations, did he leave you any horses to take you there or did he expect you to take mine?”

An awkward tension, one that was sadly common at Tuckahoe, settled over the room like the air growing heavy before a storm. Tom swallowed. “I suppose with all the excitement of the wedding, we didn’t give it much thought.”

Colonel Randolph sneered. “Well, that is a conundrum for you then, isn’t it?”

It wasn’t about the horses. And to this day, I’d argue that it wasn’t even about our sense of presumption. The truth was, that for some reason I could never surmise, nothing Tom or his siblings ever did satisfied or pleased that old man.

“Your new father-in-law is the sort of man who assumes every thing will all work out,” Colonel Randolph continued. “Sunny disposition, those Jeffersons. But ice water in their veins.”

It was an insult. To me, to my father, and to Tom. For a moment, I thought my husband might actually raise a fist to his father; instead, an emotional chill settled between father and son beyond even that which was there before.

Tom was still seething by the time we went to bed. “We’re moving to Varina, straightaway.”

“Aren’t we going visiting at Eppington?” I asked, pouring water into a basin to wash my face and hands.

“Your sister and Sally can stay there, but we’re going to Varina to make a home. Better than relying upon the generosity of my father one more day!”

I wondered if Tom had given this plan enough thought. I didn’t know if there was time to get crops in the ground at Varina. I didn’t even know if there was a habitable home there, and without my sister or a maid, what would I do? Why, the only things James Hemings had taught me to cook were French delicacies. “I’m very much averse to this plan. I thought you intended to buy Edgehill from your father and settle near Monticello?”

“My father’s in no mood to sell anything to me right now,” Tom snapped. “And I didn’t ask your opinion on the matter.”

I’d lived too long with Frenchwomen to lower my eyes and apologize for daring to have thoughts on the matter of where I should live. But I didn’t want to quarrel. So I used the charms I’d learned in the ballrooms of Paris, and the more natural ones I was only beginning to discover in myself. “Well, if you find it necessary to go to Varina,” I began, crawling into bed and reaching for him under the blankets, “I will, of course, comply.”

“Yes,” he said, gruffly, touching his nose to mine. “You will.”

But the touch of my fingers turned the heat of his anger into a different kind of heat, which I found gratifying. Tom was an ardent lover, easily distracted by pleasure. So I forced a wide, sweet smile. “It’s my desire and duty, after all, to please you.”

The edge of Tom’s anger melted away as he glanced at me from beneath lowered lids. “You do, Mrs. Randolph. You please me very well.”

Later, spent of seed and rage, he laid his head back on the pillow and spoke softly. Regretfully. “I shouldn’t have been harsh with you. It’s only . . . I’ll always be a boy under his roof, Patsy. That’s why we have to go to Varina. Can’t stay here another day or it’ll come to blows.”

It seemed an exaggeration, but I suppose family quarrels never look the same from the outside as they do from within. I was only starting to understand the Randolphs; I wasn’t privy to the thousands of injuries they’d done one another, real and imagined. It just seemed to me a silly quarrel over horses between a controlling father and his headstrong son.

Would that it had been.

The next morning, I found Sally staring out the window in the direction of the woods where we put her baby in the ground. An unmarked grave at the edge of the tree line—not far from the Randolph family cemetery—where the ground was carpeted in blue wildflowers.

Softly, I asked, “Should I write to Papa?”

Her eyes still vacant with shock and grief, Sally gave a quick shake of her head. “I’ll get word to him through my brothers.”

I’m ashamed to say how relieved I was to hear it, because I didn’t have the first idea of how to tell my father. That was the way of it in Virginia; for all the things we never said aloud, there were even more we never put to paper.