America's First Daughter: A Novel (52 page)

I smiled, blandly, not wanting to tell him all the letters we’d exchanged since I took her part against
Randolph of Roanoke
.

“Nancy sent crayons for Cornelia,” Tom continued, rubbing the back of his neck. “And the girls tell me she sent you an extraordinary cup and saucer.” He turned, his muscles knotting tightly beneath his white shirt. “Martha, I know what you and your lady friends did for Jack Eppes during his campaign against John Randolph.”

My stomach clenched because I couldn’t be sure who my husband hated more. Jack or John . . . or me? “We did it for your sister. But it didn’t work.”

“Oh, it worked,” Tom said, turning to face me, again. “Mr. Morris took my sister’s side in the matter before he died, didn’t he?” Thankfully, that death couldn’t be blamed on Nancy—having come about due to Mr. Morris’s botched self-surgery with a whalebone to remove a blockage from his urinary tract. “My sister is a wealthy widow now, and she has you to thank. You kept the villain from doing real mischief.”

“But John Randolph won the election anyway,” I said, bitterly.

“Doesn’t matter. He’ll think twice before going after Nancy again. Besides, anyone could’ve beat Jack Eppes in that election. With the war over and Virginians so angry, Jolly Jack would never make a proper representation for popular rage.”

He didn’t use the word
jolly
in any complimentary way. Nevertheless, it was, I thought, a correct assessment. “I’m glad to have been any help.”

“You’re adept at influencing people, Martha,” he said, staring out the window at the mountain’s turning leaves, as if contemplating the bleak winter to come. “You’re clever at social discourse. You’d be an asset to me in the Governor’s Mansion.”

By that point, we’d lived apart for nearly two years, during which I’d learned to prefer loneliness to my husband’s hostility. I’d assumed he was happier without me. That’s what gave me pause. But Tom took my hesitation for something else, and snapped, “Martha, without you, I’ll lose this upcoming election and the salary that goes with it. You ought to do at least one of your duties by me, since I’m not holding you to the others.”

Our marriage bed, he meant, which irritated me enough to resist. “My father needs me here—”

“Are you his wife or mine? Sometimes, I wonder!”

I didn’t dignify the question with an answer. Instead, I fumed, no longer able to soothe my temper by reminding myself that ladies were never angry. “Are you so very unpopular a governor, Tom?”

He crossed his arms. “If I’m not now, I soon will be. Because I intend to introduce a bill for the emancipation and deportation of slaves in Virginia once they reach the age of puberty. I want to abolish slavery in Virginia.” The import of these words crashed down upon me like a house in collapse. Congress had just wrangled its way through an unhappy compromise to admit the new state of Missouri to the union while prohibiting slavery north of it. There was no cause of greater controversy, and now my husband wanted to take up the antislavery banner. “Martha, I decry the new morality which tolerates slavery in perpetuity.”

“As do I,” I said, swiftly, because I felt accused. “Of course.”

“Your father says the same, but he won’t lend his support to my proposition. His voice would carry enormous weight, but he says he must leave the accomplishment of ending slavery to the work of another generation.”

That startled me, though it oughtn’t have. For years, Papa had been asked to advocate more actively against slavery. William Short had all but begged him. Friends like the Coles who had sheltered us in our flight from the British all those years ago had tried to shame him into it. And now my father was old, tired, and often in ill health. Sometimes I believed the love of Virginians—the love of the nation—was all that sustained him. To throw his weight against the slaveholders of the South would surely be a struggle for him beyond his strength.

But as his daughter . . . I might serve as a symbol of his authority. And I realized with some astonishment that Tom was asking me to be just that. He was looking to me to help him tackle the moral problem of our time. And if he deserved my obedience in anything, it was in this.

But it would be more than obedience. For Tom’s request rekindled in me an old flame of Parisian idealism that I thought long snuffed out. I
wanted
to play a part in dismantling the system of pain and degradation that undermined our union. My father said that the work of ending slavery belonged to another generation. Maybe he was right.

Maybe it belonged to me and mine.

T
HE
G
OVERNOR’S
M
ANSION WAS A MESS
. My husband had been living like a lonely bachelor. Everything was in disorder, windows unwashed, carpets unshaken. I couldn’t find a square inch of the place not coated in a layer of dust. That was the first thing I set right that Christmas season. Then, of course, was the matter of sociability.

Tom was thought to be an irascible hermit by Virginia legislators, so I determined we’d make the rounds of parties and dinners and holidays balls. I acquired for these functions a beautiful white crepe robe, a lace turban and ruff, and looked fashionable for the first time in more than a decade.

I’d played the part of first lady for my father. Now I played that role for Tom. I went with him to academic lectures, to see an exhibit of jaguars and elephants, and together we strolled the cobblestone streets where we might be noticed by newspapermen. On his arm, I smiled so persuasively I almost convinced myself that we were happy.

But that illusion came unraveled after a supper at the Governor’s Mansion one evening in early December. “Your turban is very becoming,” said a courtly gentleman, David Campbell, a dashing man of great political future, who knew my husband from their service during the war. “It’s as though you mean to become the incarnation of Dolley Madison.”

I smiled, flattered. “I can think of no better lady to emulate.”

“Can’t you? I suppose you hope to be as popular.”

I sensed in him some hostility, and wondered at his angle. “I hope to be anything that will do honor to my husband.”

Mr. Campbell sipped coolly from his glass. “You’re going to get him reelected.”

I smiled more brightly. “Oh, Governor Randolph’s own conduct will secure his reelection for him, not mine. His ideas are right-thinking, courageous, and worthy of the greatest consideration.”

Mr. Campbell raised a brow. “You’re going to stand loyally beside him? I suppose you owe him that much.”

My head tilted as I tried to form a genial reply. “As do all his friends.”

“It wasn’t his friends who destroyed his military career.”

My smile froze upon my face, so shocked was I to be confronted on such a matter. “I beg your pardon, sir.”

Mr. Campbell’s eyes were cold, though he spoke with a chuckle. “You ought to beg your husband’s pardon.”

I
had
begged my husband’s pardon. I’d begged it a hundred times. But never did I think Tom would confide our troubles to an outsider, especially when no one need ever have known that I took part in his reassignment. Tom might have spared himself the greater part of the humiliation he felt if only he’d kept quiet about it!

But alas, self-command was never one of Tom’s virtues. And in that moment, I feared it wasn’t going to be mine. “Mr. Campbell, during my visit I’ve become acquainted with a number of rare creatures. They’re my favorite curiosities. So I’m afraid you must excuse me, as I’m in search of that rare creature still left in Richmond called a gentleman.”

With that, I left him.

Mr. Campbell later wrote that I was cold, vain, and sarcastic.

But I was satisfied, there in the crowded gallery on the cold winter day when my husband was reelected to the governorship, feeling within myself a stoic satisfaction in my duty well done.

Would that I could’ve been as effective when it came to my husband’s policies. Papa had worked the levers of power with geniality and personal charm, but he’d always properly gauged the public mood. I remembered a time no gentleman of Virginia would ever
advocate
for slavery, even if none of them took steps to change it. But that was all changed now within a generation. My husband’s proposal to emancipate the slaves was met with fierce and bitter opposition, even though it promised to compensate slave owners for the loss of their property. No matter what Tom said to the legislators and no matter what I said to their wives, our efforts to cleanse Virginia of slavery fell upon deaf ears.

For Virginians now argued that slavery was a moral good, encouraged by the Bible. I thought it had more to do with the fact they were discovering that slaves were more than an asset in and of themselves; they could be
bred
. They could be bred for sale to barbarous plantations in Georgia and South Carolina. Though Tom was ready to empty the state’s treasury to bring about an end to the evil, the gentry resisted the antislavery movement as nothing but northerners bent on consolidating power by taking advantage of the virtuous feelings of the people.

I was ashamed of Virginia that year.

Tom’s proposal would’ve failed even if my father had supported it. But because it failed
without
Papa’s support it further embittered Tom.

It also revealed my father’s paralysis on the matter of slavery, a paralysis brought about by his true intimacy with it. For there was one “wolf” Papa could neither safely hold nor safely let go.

The last time I saw Beverly Hemings was at Christmas the next year, just before he took his violin outside into the snow to play holiday songs for the slaves on Mulberry Row. Shortly thereafter, he left Monticello and didn’t return.

I was there when my father grimly took up his pen and listed Beverly as a runaway in his record book. “I’ll send his sister to him on a stagecoach with enough money to establish herself.” Papa said, eyeing me, as if anticipating some objection to the money he meant to give his illegitimate children.

I put my hand atop his withered one. “You’re a kind and generous father.”

He looked away, and my heart broke for him. Because I could imagine the pain I’d feel to send my children away, knowing I’d never see them again. But I believed it
was
a generosity to part with Beverly and Harriet this way. Beverly might never be known as a gentleman, but Harriet had a good chance of becoming a gentleman’s wife. She’d come of age in a genteel household and could both read and write. She’d been trained in the womanly arts of spinning and sewing and keeping house. She was more beautiful than her mother had been, which meant that so long as Harriet disavowed all connection to the Hemingses of Monticello, she might do better than my own daughters in securing her future.

And in the end, I was right about Sally. Her fierce determination that her children should be free overcame all other instincts. I saw her on the terrace, her arms round her only surviving daughter’s neck. When they finally parted, Sally stood there, staring after her daughter’s carriage, knowing it was likely to be the last time she ever laid eyes on her. Then Sally quietly walked to her room by the dairy and shut herself inside.

For weeks, Sally didn’t take meals nor did she answer the door when her youngest two sons knocked, nor even when my father sent for her. She pled illness, and my father pretended to believe her. For with the departure of Beverly and Harriet, our gentler way of life was more fiction than it had ever been before.

Monticello, 26 January 1822

From Thomas Jefferson to Alexander Keech

It’s not in my power to give you a definite idea of when our University may be expected to open. We shall be truly gratified should it become an instrument of nourishing those brotherly affections with our neighboring states which it is so much our interest and wish to strengthen.

W
HAT A PAIR
of schoolmasters we’ve become,” my father said when my youngest boys dragged their school desks from my sitting room into a circle round his stuffed leather chair for a Latin lesson. Having recently taken a fall that put his arm in a sling, and with the winter weather harder on his bones than it used to be, Papa was housebound.

The weather kept visitors away, so during our quiet winter respite, we made a little university out of Monticello. And because Sally was less and less at my father’s side since her eldest children left Monticello, Papa looked increasingly to me for his happiness.

I enjoyed every moment of our harmonious idyll, but when spring thawed our mountain, Papa was restless and called to Burwell. “I want my horse.”

We’d always relied upon Sally to quietly and sweetly dissuade Papa from folly, but the competent and devoted Burwell was too pliant, leaving only me to protest my elderly father’s insistence upon riding. “At least take a servant with you!”

“I’ve been roaming this country since I was a boy. No one knows these lands better than me.” Soon after, he was up and into the saddle, riding off with the air of power he still carried with him even at his age.

That busy day saw me chasing after my recalcitrant boys, who insisted on pelting one another with chinaberries from their grandfather’s ornamental trees. Ranging in age from five to seventeen, my four rowdies were as noisy and dirty as the half-alligator, half-horse men that infested our western country. They kept me so busy that the great clock chimed the dinner hour before I realized my father wasn’t home.

In the parlor, Cornelia looked up from the architectural rendering of my father’s university and dusted her fingers. “I’ll ride out and look for him.”

“Let your brothers go.” But before I could call them, we heard a commotion near the terrace where my father, frail, soaking wet, and muddy, was being helped up the stairs by Sally’s sons. Papa’s good arm was draped over an adolescent Eston, who in the light of that early spring evening looked much like my father in his youth. Supporting my father on the other side was eighteen-year-old Madison.

My tongue let loose before I could measure myself. “What the devil happened?”

“Fell in the river,” Papa said, and nothing more than that. He was shaken, but he didn’t seem injured. Though when we finally sat down together at the table for a meal that had gone cold, he explained, “The horse fell upon me and pinned me under the water. I’m mortified that if I’d drowned on that shallow spot, everyone would think I’d committed suicide.”

I gasped. “
That’s
what mortifies you?”

Papa’s raised his now bushy white eyebrows. “What’s Hamilton remembered for? That he died in a senseless duel with a traitorous madman. My days are waning, and it would mortify me to perish in an unbefitting way.”

His mind was on legacy . . . and the family he’d leave behind.

That evening he said, “Patsy, arrangements must be made in the case of my death. I must know you’ll be taken care of. I fear Tom won’t be able to provide for you, and whatever I leave will be swallowed up by his creditors.”

I didn’t want to speak of it—could scarcely bear the thought of life without him. “Give what you like to the children and don’t worry for me.”

“You are my primary worry. Ann has already been provided for monetarily if she should get free of her husband, and I’ve made provisions for Jeff in part . . . the remainder of my holdings will be divided amongst the other children, but you’ll have a life estate in Monticello so that you may always have a home here.” My heart hollowed at the thought of living at Monticello without Papa. And into the space of my mournful breath, he added, “We’ll have to see the younger boys into professions. Medicine and the law.”

He was more of a father to the boys than my husband had been. We all basked in Papa’s unfailing kindness. My father could be an exacting man, but he was predictable and steady. I knew how to make him contented. Would that I knew how to do the same for Tom, because in the winter of that year, after three increasingly contentious terms as governor, Tom was finally coming home.

We hadn’t shared a bed in years, and though there was no longer danger of children, I greeted the prospect of his return with acute anxiety. Alcove beds were one of my father’s favorite space-saving innovations, and Papa didn’t understand why I wanted to be rid of mine. I couldn’t tell him that I didn’t want to be trapped between Tom’s body and the wall. Instead, I prevailed upon Papa, night and day on the subject of converting my alcove to a much-needed closet, until he finally lapsed into a dignified but resigned silence that I decided to take as consent to do as I pleased.

Upon setting down his satchel in my renovated bedroom, Tom said, “You’ve changed it.”

These were the first words he spoke upon his return. His spine was stiff as he took in the closet filled with floral hatboxes where our bed used to be. He noticed the lace valances, too, which I’d fashioned from the scraps of an old dress long ruined, and how they now framed the view I enjoyed each day upon waking, in all its bittersweet majesty.

“Do you like it?” I asked of the feminine touches I’d put on this room to make it mine.

“My writing table is gone,” Tom said, quite peevishly. “I see everyone has gotten along here quite well without me. I shall now feel even more the intruder.”

Having predicted this very glum prognostication, I said, “Nonsense. I have a surprise for you that I hope will make you feel as if you have a place of your own.”

We walked together to the north pavilion, where I’d had the slaves move my husband’s writing table. “What’s this?” he asked, genuinely surprised at the neat rows of books upon the shelves, where I’d carefully ordered his science and agricultural journals.

“It’s a study for you. A place for you to read and write in solitude when the noise of the children grows too much. A place to escape Papa’s guests. Your very own sanctuary.”

A sanctuary as far away from my own bedroom as it was possible to get on this plantation. It was a fact not lost on him as he eyed the chaise. “Where you should like me to sleep, I gather.”

I think he meant to shame me, to make me feel as if I were refusing his love, when, for years now, he’d been refusing mine. “I’d like you to stay wherever you can be made happy, Tom. It would mend much between us if you could be happy beside me, but if you can’t, then you should sleep here.”

Tom’s chin jerked up. I thought he might upbraid me, but instead a flash of anguish crossed his face. “Dear God, Martha. Don’t you know that beside you is the only place I’ve
ever
been happy?”

O
UR RECONCILIATION, TENTATIVE AND FRAGILE
, bolstered my health. I still suffered the aches that’d plagued me since giving birth to George. But I resorted to a charcoal remedy and rebelled completely against the household management of my daughters. My spirits were also brightened by my friendship with Dolley, who brought with her into every room a constant sunshine of the mind.

In short, that first year after Tom’s retirement from the governorship was a happy one.

I think that’s why its end was so devastating.

On the morning of her birthday in January of 1824, Septimia raced down the narrow staircase—certain her father had brought something special back for her from a recent business trip to Richmond. “What do you think it is, Mama? Could it be a new pet? Maybe a songbird of my own, like Grandpapa’s?”

As the family gathered round, Tom was near manic in his merriment. He had gifts for Septimia and stories of new curiosities in Richmond, including an Egyptian mummy. “It’s wrapped in dusty old bandages, preserved eternally, the insides having been scooped out.” Tom’s description set the children mad upon the subject of the mummy, hoping they could see it for themselves. Then Tom reported, “There’s a new Unitarian minister, too.”

The children wanted to hear him speak, which exasperated me. “Haven’t we done enough already to scandalize the neighbors? We already stand suspected in religious matters for shunning their revivals. To do so in favor of a Unitarian . . .”

But my concerns had no place amongst the frivolity of a birthday party, and Ellen rightfully twitted me for it. “Mama wants to go to a revival!”

Laughing, I said, “Heaven forbid. I cannot bear the ranting.”

“But think of the amusement,” Ellen smirked, taking a bite of gingerbread.

Throughout our little celebration in the bright parlor, my husband maintained great cheer and humor—virtues not amongst his chief traits. I didn’t take it as an ominous sign until he over looked the misbehavior of our sons at the table. You see, Tom indulged our daughters to the point of criminality, but never our sons, so I found myself wary. When the cakes were eaten and the children put to bed, I found Tom in the solitude of his study, hunched over in his chair, head in his hands.

“Tom?” I asked.

He never looked up. Perhaps he could not.

“Martha, there’s something I must tell you.” And with those ominous words, he explained, in halting words, the derangement of his financial affairs.

“How much is owed?” I asked, sure that if I knew the number, it’d make it more solid and less frightening.

“Thirty thousand,” he murmured.

I barely suppressed a gasp.

How wrong I was. Knowing the number made it worse.

A debt of twenty thousand had ensured that my father would never know true security again—but
he
had resources in his possession. What did Tom have? Only Edgehill and Varina, the latter of which he’d been unable to sell.

Though he was a Randolph, a former congressman, a three-term governor, and the inventor of the furrowing style that had been adopted in nearly every farm in Virginia—he was fifty-five years old. He could never pay back that debt in his lifetime; he’d end up leaving it to our sons . . . and only if the creditors didn’t call in the loans first.

The truth was, my husband was ruined.

Finally and utterly ruined.

After years of struggle and loss, of financial instability, Colonel Randolph’s long shadow had finally swallowed Tom up. I went to him where he sat bent and miserable, and stroked his hair as he buried his face against my belly. “You mustn’t reproach yourself, Tom. You’ve rarely spent even the fourth of your income, nor ever the half of it in any year. Our expenses are small and your profits would’ve maintained our whole family in affluence were it not for . . .”

I trailed off, wondering what it was. Bad luck? His father’s spite? I didn’t know, but Tom wept in my arms as he’d done all those years ago when we were first married, when he’d loved me so fervently . . . and so blindly. His financial ruin was a profound humiliation to him, I knew. But we were more fortunate than most. My father would provide for the children; they’d always have a roof over their heads and food on their table.

“I had to go to Jeff,” Tom blubbered. “The shame of going to my own son for help. But he’s going to take on my debts because they won’t foreclose on him. Creditors are more apt to be lenient with Jeff. He still has his youth, and he’s the grandson of Thomas Jefferson.”

It was a sensible argument, and yet, I was horrified. How could we expect Jeff to risk it? I argued against it. I
railed
against it. But in the end, the men in my family negotiated together in private the instrument that put the burden of the whole family upon Jeff’s shoulders.

“W
HY WON’T ANYONE
let us do something to support ourselves?” Cornelia sniped, sighing over the figures in my account book. “I suppose not until we sink entirely will it do for the granddaughters of Thomas Jefferson to take work in or keep a school!”