America's First Daughter: A Novel (53 page)

Ellen stared gloomily out the window from a stealthy place behind the curtains. It was Sunday—the day of the week I distributed rations and heard the concerns of the slaves, but it wasn’t our people that made my daughter frown. “There’s a carriage. I suppose it’s another visitor trying to avoid paying an innkeeper at our grandpapa’s expense.”

I shared Ellen’s hostility toward the leeches and hangers, so I didn’t scold her even when, overhearing the visitor’s Bostonian accent, she rolled her eyes. “It wasn’t enough that we had to wine and dine that strange wandering dullard who walked the length of the country with nothing but one change of clothes to his name? In the face of so many other indignities, must we receive
Yankees,
too?”

Our visitor was Joseph Coolidge, a Harvard graduate who had just returned from a recent tour of Europe. “I’ve now come to see the greatest wonder in our own country,” he said. “The sage of Monticello.”

We’d heard it all before, albeit perhaps not from such a well-formed mouth. Mr. Coolidge was a handsome man, and it seemed to me that rather than charming my Ellen, the man’s beauty irritated her beyond reason. Snorting at him indelicately, she said, “You do realize, of course, that my grandfather isn’t a monument, but a man. One who cannot be prevailed upon by every stranger to—”

“You’re welcome here, Mr. Coolidge,” I broke in. “And while I can’t say my father is well enough today to receive you, I’ll be sure to give him your warmest regards.”

I’d become something of a palace chamberlain, a keeper of the gate. My father couldn’t possibly pass time with every stranger who came to the mountain, so I made excuses. To my surprise, however, Papa was eager to meet this stranger because he was from Boston. “Maybe he’ll have some news of Adams!”

In spite of the damage politics had done to their friendship, the two survivors of the Revolution reminisced and lived on each other’s memories. In truth, I sometimes feared that when John Adams died, my father would not be long in following.

At supper, which we took at several drop-leaf tables, arranged to accommodate everyone in a style half-French, half-Virginian, the conversation turned to poetry. And while my daughters engaged in every subject upon which their grandfather opined, Ellen was subdued.

“I fear my knowledge of poetry isn’t expansive enough to impress Miss Ellen,” Mr. Coolidge teased.

“Forgive me, sir,” my daughter said. “But you seem impressed enough with yourself for the both of us.”

“Ellen!” I cried. Her capacity to drive away suitors was now legendary but seemed hardly sufficient excuse for rude manners.

“It’s quite all right, Mrs. Randolph,” our visitor said. “I’ve done too much speaking tonight and not enough learning. Perhaps Miss Ellen would allow me to make up for this lack of gallantry by taking me on a tour through the gardens? If so, I promise to hold my tongue.”

“I’m a poor tour guide for the garden,” Ellen replied indifferently, and I remembered how I tried to put off her father in much the same way. “The garden was my sister Ann’s domain.”

She said her sister’s name with such sadness that Mr. Coolidge sobered. “Oh, dear. I’m afraid I didn’t know of her loss—”

“Oh, Ann isn’t dead,” Ellen replied. “Though she might as well be.”

A sharp look from me silenced her. The tensions in our family weren’t to be shared with outsiders. Not ever. And she knew it.

Mr. Coolidge cleared his throat. “Perhaps some music?”

Ellen frowned. “Music is my sister Ginny’s domain. Art is Cornelia’s—”

“And
your
domain, Miss Ellen?” He surprised us both, I think, with his persistence.

“My grandpapa’s book room,” she finally said.

“I’d very much like to see it,” he replied with a triumphant smile.

“I’m afraid you can’t,” Ellen said, with a triumphant smile of her own. “It’s part of my grandfather’s private suite of rooms. Strangers aren’t allowed beyond a peek through the glass panes, but if you’d like to borrow a book during your stay, I’m sure it can be arranged.”

It seemed that the crueler Ellen was, the better he liked her. Days later, at the end of his visit, he declared himself smitten. “That’s wonderful to hear,” I told the lovelorn young man. “But certainly yours has been a very short acquaintance for such a depth of feeling.”

With a smile, Mr. Coolidge replied, “Long enough to know my heart. Now I need merely win hers . . . then Ellen and I shall live our lives together, happily ever after.”

How simple he made it seem. The winning of hearts. Living together. Eternal happiness.

But after thirty-four years of marriage, I now saw union between man and woman was the same as union among the states—as a series of debates and compromises that might hold it all together for a few more years, or end in a painful separation.

My husband, you see, had gone mad.

Both our defenders and our enemies will say his madness was always lurking in the savage wildness of his Randolph blood. I let them say it because it absolves me. Tom was always a man of temper, that much is true. But he was
driven
to madness. His callous father, his bad luck, his choice to marry the daughter of a great man. His sense of himself was always fragile, his spirit easily broken—but in the end, I think I’m the one who snapped it to pieces.

I’d argued against allowing our son to assume all our debts, but it seemed never to have occurred to Tom that our boy would take one look at the books and decide there was no hope for it but to sell everything, lock, stock, and barrel.

“So he means to sacrifice me!” My husband had come to confront me in my sitting room where I’d retired to write a letter to his sister Nancy, and where silhouettes of our children adorned the blue-painted wall. Holding a near-empty glass of liquor in his hand, the length of Tom’s body filled the doorway. His voice was low and dangerous. “Jeff says you support this decision.”

I laid my quill aside, tasting bitter indignation on my tongue. Why did it always come to this? To be forbidden from making decisions, asked for my advice only after the fact, and then blamed for it as if I’d made the trouble in the first instance? Sally had blamed me when my father took my advice about her son. Now Tom blamed me for agreeing with Jeff—and yet neither dilemma had been my making.

But my heart filled with agony for my husband, for I understood why he hated Jeff’s decision. I hated it, too, even as I advocated it. “I see no advantage in putting off the evil day to sell everything, Tom, for come it must, and with accumulating interest for every day that it’s delayed.”

Tom’s glass went hurtling across the room, where it shattered against the fireplace and fell into the fire. I cried out, but not before Tom was across the room and upon me, shaking me in his steely grip. “After all these years, in this one critical moment, you desert me. You want to see me unmanned, is that it? To witness the final humiliation of my losing my land?”

“Tom, land isn’t everything. There are many ways a man of your experience—”

“Land is everything! Without it, you’ll see me stripped of not only my honor and pride, but even my citizenship.”

Only men who owned fifty acres could vote or hold political office. Without property, Tom would lose even the fig leaf of status, and I felt his impotent rage burning through his skin into mine. He was still strong, so strong that I couldn’t squirm away. “Tom, we’re irretrievably ruined. But Jeff needn’t be. I’m thinking of our children’s future.”

“Just one child. Jeff. Your favorite. Our son has swindled me and yet, you’re choosing him over me.”

It was Ellen—always Ellen—who was my favorite, if a favorite must be named. But Jeff was no swindler. If anything, my son’s efforts to save something for the family were heroic. The creditors had given him a year to wind up the affairs of the estate and sell for the most profit possible. Our support was the least he deserved. The men in my family had conspired all my life to keep me from thinking in the language of money, but I knew enough to argue now. “Mortgages and deeds of trust embrace the whole of your property, and if the banks foreclose, they’ll sweep it all away and leave our son as burdened as your father left you.”

“That boy’s malice and greed will see him always secure. He’s trying to steal Edgehill from me.”

My lips thinned at such an unjust insult hurled at the son who could’ve easily abandoned us all. “Jeff has submitted so affectionately and cheerfully to the privations which we’ve cost him that he’s due nothing but gratitude. For when not distressed with our problems, he’s been distracted with managing his grandfather’s affairs.”

“
Now
we come to it,” my husband said, his words fumed with liquor, as he gave a baleful glance at the locked door between my sitting room and my father’s chambers. “Your father is your true worry. No one can ever shine so brightly in your eyes. He’s always your first concern. First and foremost. And you’ve been artfully persuaded that if I’m completely sacrificed, your father can be saved.”

I could make no sense of this. “My father’s plantations aren’t tied to your troubles—”

“I’m entitled to Monticello!” Tom shouted, his fingers digging so hard into my arms I was sure they’d bruise me. “For thirty years, I’ve worked his plantation, sat patiently at his table, indulged him in every way, asking no recompense, merely waiting my turn to one day be the master of my own family. But you’ll never have that, will you? You only serve one man—even if it means my ruin.”

The only way to shield Monticello upon my father’s death was to leave it to trustees—a plan to which I’d given my consent, without realizing my husband would believe himself disinherited. “Tom, so long as the property is vested in me, you’ll always have a home. Papa is only using the law to protect me and the children—”

“
My
children! They aren’t the center of your life. Your father is.”

I might’ve denied it—it was my duty as a wife and mother to deny it. But in that moment, looking into the bloodshot eyes of a husband come utterly unhinged, a defiance rose up in me. I didn’t deny it. I only whispered, “You’re hurting me.”

That made him shake me harder. “How could I ever hurt you? You never feel a thing! You’re unmoved. You’re like
him
. Unbend ing as marble. A statue. What man of flesh and blood can live with that?”

What man, indeed? By any other measure, Tom would be counted a great man. By any other measure than my father’s.

“You’re
hurting
me,” I repeated.

Tom let me go all at once before making his retreat, his boots crunching on broken glass. He slammed the door, the sound exploding through the house. I remember that sound and the way it shook me to the marrow of my bones. I remember, too, that Tom slammed the door with such force that the frame cracked and the door bounced back open again.

Weeks later, it was still broken, and through that open door walked a man I’d longed to see for years.

Boston, 29 August 1824

To Thomas Jefferson from Lafayette

Here I am, on American ground. I will hasten to Monticello. How happy I will be to embrace you, my dear friend. And I know the pleasure will be reciprocated.

L
AFAYETTE HAD SURVIVED IT ALL
.

Two wars, the Reign of Terror, imprisonment, and even Napoleon. He was the last surviving general of the American Revolution, and President Monroe had invited Lafayette to celebrate the forty-seventh anniversary of the Battle of Brandywine, where he had been wounded in our cause.

During Lafayette’s triumphal tour, he paid a call upon John Adams, accompanied by John Quincy, the secretary of state. Lafayette also traveled with the widow of Alexander Hamilton, whom he still called his brother. And in anticipation of Lafayette’s reunion with my father, people were already flocking to our mountaintop.

Given my state of distress and the rage the mere sight of me evoked in my husband, I closeted myself up with the servants in my sitting room, planning menus and making lists of supplies that must be purchased, while my daughters tended to the locust swarm of visitors. I startled when a knock came at my door and instead of a servant—in walked a hallucination, or apparition, or miracle—I couldn’t decide which.

Not Lafayette, but William Short in the flesh.

“
Mon Dieu!
” I cried.

“
Cher Jeffy,
” he said, his green eyes twinkling with mischief at my convent nickname. “It’s been too long, Mrs. Randolph.”

Indeed, it had, I thought, rising to take his hands. A glance out the window at his fancy hired carriage and heavy baggage told me that William hadn’t come all the way from Philadelphia on mere impulse. So how did he take me so unawares? My father hadn’t warned me to expect him. Was Papa’s memory failing him or did he hope Mr. Short’s visit would be a happy surprise?

Suddenly, I clutched at my cap, overaware of my curls, which had, with age, gone from copper-red to reddish-brown. “Mr. Short, you’ve caught me in quite a state of dishabille!”

He drew my hand to his lips for a kiss. “Not as great a state of dishabille as a man with my proclivities desires.”

It was a highly inappropriate remark to direct to a lady, married or otherwise. The kind of remark only a Frenchman would make. I blushed like a schoolgirl, but we were surely both of an age to render harmless such flirtation. He studied me while I studied him, taking in the changes. I knew I was thicker about the middle, my face rounder. His hair had silvered, and laugh lines crinkled at the corners of his eyes. I found his presence more reassuring than I could admit.

“What happened here?” Mr. Short asked, motioning with his chin to the broken doorframe. “Don’t tell me your father is tearing all this down to start over again.”

“I would not discount the possibility when it comes to Papa and his projects, but Monticello is nearly perfected,” I replied, deciding upon evasion. “Johnny Hemings will send one of his apprentices to fix the door shortly.”

By
one of his apprentices,
of course, I meant Madison and Eston. But there felt to me something deeply disloyal in mentioning Sally’s sons to William, who knew their father was also mine. “We’re all being kept very busy in the preparations for Lafayette’s visit.”

Glancing at the array of little papers and notes stored in all the cubbies on my overflowing desk, not to mention the line of servants waiting with baskets outside my open window, he said, “So I see.”

“I’ll make sure a room is readied for you—”

“Oh, no. I’ve already picked one out. I’m staying in the room with the trellis wallpaper,” he said with a little incorrigible smirk. “I hear Madison favors it, and it amuses me to think of leaving my nail clippings there for him to find when he stays here. So don’t let me interrupt whatever you’re doing. . . .”

Fighting a smile that would only encourage him, I said, “I’m buying up all the eggs and vegetables the servants can provide me with from their own gardens.”

“Aren’t your father’s own gardens productive here?”

“Certainly! It’s only that Papa is a scientist who insists upon growing fifty different varieties of peas, and we must have some variety on our plates for the arrival of Lafayette.”

Mr. Short laughed. “Well, I hope I can be a help rather than a burden in the preparations.”

“Oh, William, you could never be a burden.”

But by evening, I knew that to be a lie. For it taxed me to hide our family troubles from him. Since the night Tom slammed out of my sitting room, my husband spoke not two willing words, sour and taciturn at any question addressed to him. Not even by the power of my father’s authority and conciliatory nature could my husband be compelled to stay sober. And that first night of Mr. Short’s visit, by the time the girls and I returned with the tea tray at seven o’clock, Tom was drunk.

Papa retired at ten o’clock every evening, and kept to this routine as religiously as he did his morning footbaths. But to discourage Tom’s drinking at the table, my father called an early evening. “I must meet the welcoming committee in the morning, so I’m afraid it’s time to retire.” Then, smiling at Mr. Short, he said, “Still, I’ll sleep easier tonight than in many years having set eyes upon you again, my friend.”

William smiled, rising to his feet to take his own leave, but my husband didn’t follow suit. Instead, taking another bottle of wine from the dumbwaiter, Tom asked, “Still a bachelor, Short?”

William was so famously a bachelor that we’d have assuredly heard if his status had changed. But he merely gave a rueful smile. “Alas, I’m still without a wife.”

“Lucky,” Tom murmured, pouring more wine.

My girls froze, their teacups half aloft. My boys stiffened in their seats at the far table, their biscuits left without a nibble—all looking to their older brother Jeff, whose eyes told them to keep their peace.

Meanwhile, my shame at Tom’s indictment was so acute that I couldn’t move from my place. The open insult to me, fallen so casually from the lips of my husband, came to me like a knife in the dark. I dared not look up from my tea, but merely set the cup back down so no one would see my hand tremble.

“
Unlucky,
yes,” Mr. Short replied at length, pretending to have misheard. “As you say, Randolph. Very unlucky. But perhaps that’s to put too much upon luck. I’m to blame by declaring myself for women who were too wise to marry me.”

My gaze locked on my teacup with the cornflower garland pattern, my stomach churning with upset. Mr. Short’s self-deprecating remark was to be understood as chagrin about his wayward duchess. But I understood it to include me.

And that was salt in the wound my husband had just opened.

Into the awkward silence, Septimia blurted, “Mr. Coolidge declared himself for Ellen. She says she can’t be persuaded to marry him, but I don’t believe her.”

“Tim! I can’t possibly marry Mr. Coolidge,” Ellen explained, as if to distract from the undercurrents. “Firstly, I’m an avowed spinster and will make an unreservedly excellent old maid. More importantly, Joseph Coolidge lives in Boston. I couldn’t possibly leave Mother and Grandpapa and the rest of you!”

In that moment, I let myself understand—really understand—why Ellen rejected all her suitors. Ellen was my companion, and my father’s nurse when I couldn’t be. Did she feel so bound to us that she’d turn away love, as I once did?

Into the wound went more salt.

Septimia chewed her bottom lip. “But if you truly love Mr. Coolidge, you have to marry him. Even if it takes you from us. Don’t you think so, Mr. Short?”

I dared not look at William during his excruciating hesitation. Finally, he said, “I’m the wrong man to ask. In my experience the heart is always torn between competing attachments. I once considered my fate a great tragedy, but now I think it a blessing. After all, I’ve known extraordinary love and have nephews to whom I look upon as sons.”

“Sons,” Tom snorted. “Everyone counts sons a blessing, but I assure you . . . daughters are a man’s only comfort in the end.”

The veins on Jeff’s good arm swelled as he clenched his fist. For months now, my eldest son had endured his father’s hostility. But his honor could finally stand no more. He glared at Tom. “Do you want to say what you mean, sir?”

Under the table, I put a hand on my son’s knee, silently pleading with him to swallow his bile. He could do it, I knew. But Tom’s dark eyes flashed savagely. “If you were any kind of son, you’d leave me a few acres on Edgehill for a vineyard or a sawmill.”

I gasped that Tom would broach our financial troubles in front of a guest—even William. Perhaps especially him.

“I’m the kind of son who won’t lie to you,” Jeff shot back, shoving from the edge of the table. “I can’t leave you even an acre. If we somehow manage to keep Edgehill in the family, I’d need the whole of it to produce tobacco—”

“And to produce Negroes,” Tom accused.

Jeff winced. “Do you want to leave your wife and children with nothing for their survival but the charity of my grandfather? Is that what you want?”

Tom stumbled to his feet as if ready to beat my boy, and my daughters let out terrified cries. “
Gentlemen,
” our guest interrupted, white-faced with anger, and with an authority few men but my father possessed. “It’s unseasonably warm in here,” William said with calculation, like the diplomat he’d once been. “I’ll escort the ladies outside where the cool mountain air may calm and soothe.”

It ought to have shamed them. Both of them. If a quarrel was inevitable, it ought to be taken outside. Instead, my children and I were forced to flee our tables while the argument raged on. And somehow, I found myself on the winding flower walk in the glow of the setting sun, staring at showy scarlet plumes of cockscomb and golden marigolds, fighting back the tears that burned behind my eyes.

Ann, my beautiful eldest daughter whom I sometimes despaired of ever seeing again, had planted those flowers. And now the rest of my family was splintering apart, with my oldest and dearest friend as a witness.

“How much is the debt?” William asked.

I couldn’t tell him. Not even as furious with Tom as I was. It would’ve been a disloyalty. “It doesn’t matter. It’s no excuse for what you were forced to witness. I apologize—”

“Don’t
you
apologize,” William broke in, with a sharp edge of anger. “Mr. Randolph is shockingly disrespectful to you. I cannot imagine your father would countenance it.”

“He wouldn’t. He doesn’t,” I insisted, trying to find the words to explain. “It’s simply that Tom feels abandoned. As I recall, you were once just as angry with me and for the same reason.”

William must’ve known that Marie reported back his long-ago furious renunciation of our love. He couldn’t deny it. Instead, he asked, “Is it true that your son intends to use his father’s property as a slave breeding farm?”

I swallowed, shaking my head. I might’ve lied to him, as we lied to visitors and to ourselves all the time. We pretended that our slaves were treated like family. That they were never abused. That whips were wielded justly. That violence—true violence—was not done to them at our whim. I had deceived myself about this for years. But it wasn’t in me to deceive him. “I don’t know what Jeff intends in that regard.”

It was a mortifying admission, one that revealed the ugliness beneath the glow of all the pretty flowers. An admission far uglier than I’d allowed myself to accept before. William paused beside spires of lavender and pinched the bridge of his nose, a gesture that filled me with overwhelming shame.

No one else could’ve made me feel shame for it. I’d never,
could
never, condemn the men in my life who relied upon slavery, especially when my lion of a father believed himself impotent against the evil and my idealistic husband had been politically ruined for his efforts to stop it. But I was now standing beside the man who had offered me a different reality, a different life, from which I had turned away. And I felt some shame and regret for that, too.

O
N THE ELEVENTH OF
S
EPTEMBER
, in her best dress, Virginia made her bridal procession—not at her father’s home of Edgehill, but at Monticello. And awaiting her upon the grass-green floor of the entry hall was her happy groom, Mr. Trist.

My new son-in-law beamed with joy as he spoke his vows, and we all sighed happily when my sweet Virginia spoke hers. Everyone but Tom, that is. He stood stiffly at my side, as if he were merely a guest and not the father of the bride. He delegated all those responsibilities to her grandfather, saying that he didn’t wish to ruin the wedding with his malaise. I think he recognized in himself the malignant spirit that had broken free and meant only to shield Ginny from it.

But our poor daughter kept searching out her sullen father’s eyes in the crowd, pleading a smile from him. And it seemed to take all the strength Tom had just to lift the corners of his mouth. He didn’t laugh or mingle in conversation. He didn’t dance. And he didn’t offer toasts—though he drank deeply whenever they were offered. So, for the bride’s sake, I tried to be happy enough for both of us.