America's First Daughter: A Novel

by Stephanie Dray

  Let him say it, I thought. Let it all out into the open, then. He could say that I abandoned him and I could answer that he forced a seventeen-year-old girl to make an impossible choice. Yet, in the end, what did it matter? I’d married another man. A man not nearly so charming or successful. But a good man. A man I loved. A man who would never have let me go.

  So I only said, “My father needs you now more than ever.”

  A horse nickered and stomped in the nearest stall, and William nodded. “I’ll be in Washington City when he gets there and stay with him at the President’s House. But I can’t stay at Monticello another day.”

  He didn’t say why, and perhaps he thought he didn’t need to.

  I cleared my throat. “You have my thanks. It comforts me to know that Papa will have you at his side with such infamy hanging over his head.”

  William straightened his waistcoat without acknowledging my thanks. “As I understand it, you and your sister will arrive in November. I’ll be gone by then to take care of some business in New York. So I’m afraid I’ll miss your debut into the political society of the capital, just as I missed your debut in Paris.”

  Why should he mention that? It sent a pang through my heart. “I remember nearly nothing of Paris except when you were with me.”

  I shouldn’t have said it and he shouldn’t have let his gaze drop to his feet, abashed. “I have regrets in life, Mrs. Randolph. One of them is the loss of a friendship between us.”

  “It was never snuffed out, Mr. Short, I assure you,” I said, remembering another conversation, a much different one we once had in a carriage house, a thousand miles away and at least as many years ago. Or so it seemed.

  “It was snuffed out,” he said. “I assure you it was. But now, I would prefer … or at least dare to hope that we might part in friendship, once so precious to me.”

  Then I realized, with a profound ache, what this was. “You’re saying good-bye.”

  “Think of it as only au revoir. I’ll be in Virginia next year. Perhaps we’ll cross paths.”

  He didn’t say it like a man who intended to cross paths with me. But he leaned forward to press two quick, chaste kisses upon my cheek in the French style. Then we stood awkwardly together while I reeled.

  Our bitter parting in France had weighed upon me all these years. I couldn’t bear to part bitterly again, so I was grateful that he’d asked for my friendship. I wanted to clasp his hands tightly and show him the full measure of my feelings, but our situation was already more irregular than I ought to allow. So I said, “Be well, Mr. Short. Be happy.”

  Then I turned to go.

  “Mrs. Randolph?”

  I turned to see him looking very wistful. “Your friend Mr. Madison once wrote that if men were angels there’d be no need for government. Remember, when you go to Washington City, that there’s no place for an angel in the capital.”

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  To Thomas Jefferson from “A Friend to the Constitution”

  This comes from a stranger but a friend. Know there is a plot formed to murder you before the next election. A band of hardy fellows are to have ten thousand dollars if they succeed in the attempt. They are to carry daggers and pistols. I have been invited to join them but would rather suffer death. I advise you to take care and be cautious how you walk about as some of the assassins are already in Washington.

  WE HEARD WHISPERS—sometimes dangerous whispers—even before our carriage rolled into Washington City, which was, at the time, neither a town nor a village, but more a cluster of brick and wooden houses connected by unpaved roads.

  Dusky Sally. Black Sal. African Venus.

  Salacious gossip about Papa’s preference for dark wenches was just another line of attack … though an enduring one, because it aroused carnal curiosity. But not everyone gossiped about my father’s mistress with malicious glee. The capital was still a southern place, built by slaves and filled with people who understood our ways. But it was also—at the moment—filled to the brim with Federalists eager to seize upon any reason to criticize my father.

  Some of them were still threatening his life, which led Polly and me to fret that he slept alone upstairs in the presidential mansion. The solitude seemed unsafe, for the Federalists resented my father’s presence in the largely unfurnished Georgian manor, which housed a mammoth and indecorous wheel of cheese—a gift from admirers for Papa’s commitment to the separation of church and state. The Federalists didn’t like the way Papa showed his defiance to the British crown by greeting their ambassador informally, in slippers. And they were appalled by my father’s insistence upon pell-mell seating arrangements that eliminated the status of rank and privilege.

  “We’re going with Papa to a religious service,” I told my sister before our bags were even unpacked. Dolley advised we do so to dispel the notion that Papa was a godless man who meant to overrun the capital with mixed-race bastard children. And I was happy to take her advice, because my skills in the public arena were rusty, and because Dolley was more naturally attuned to politics than any woman I’d ever met.

  She dressed us in the right colors and most appropriate fashions, introduced us to the right people, and made certain we knew whom we should shun. In truth, with Dolley, I sometimes felt as if a canny and persistent sheepdog was herding us, nipping gently at our heels.

  But I had my own political instincts. I was accustomed to royal courts, but my father’s court wasn’t a royal one. Dolley had clearly given great thought to what an American court should be … and I began to do the same. So I set out quite deliberately to befriend the wives of newspapermen. And at dinner parties amongst hostile Federalists, I always singled out the most belligerent man for my attentions and kept him so busy in conversation that he couldn’t make mischief.

  A thing that much impressed Dolley Madison. “How is it that you manage to sniff out malice before the troublemakers say a word?”

  “I listen to what they do not say,” I told her.

  Papa used these dinners to enforce collegiality by never mixing Federalists and Republicans, limiting the guest list to twelve at a round table, and by keeping ladies present at all times. “Your father is very sociable,” a man said to me with a wry smile. “For a Republican.”

  It was John Quincy Adams, son of the former president. And though he was a Federalist, it wasn’t hard to smile at him, given I still harbored affection for his family. To that point, he’d seemed very much ill at ease at my father’s table, paying little attention to the chef’s creations, but staring longingly at the tray of dried fruit just out of his reach. And because he was the son of Abigail Adams, I was determined to put him at ease. Taking the liberty of slipping an apricot to him, I said, “Mr. Adams, I’m afraid I’m old enough to remember a time when there weren’t any Federalists or Republicans. A time when we were all simply Americans. Why it was your very own mother who helped choose my first real dress in Paris. You would’ve laughed to see the chaos of it!”

  “Do tell,” he said, and we laughed together the rest of the evening as I happily reminisced. I smoothed ruffled feathers when I could, most notably at a public function when my father gave accidental offense by overlooking an Irish poet.

  No one else seemed to have noticed the reddening face of the little man, but I quickly stepped forward to say, “Why, Mr. Moore, I’m afraid you’re so young and handsome that my father mistook you for a page boy!”

  Of course, at the time, I had no idea that Thomas Moore was responsible for fanning the flames of the Sally Hemings scandal with depraved poetry; I doubt my father knew either.

  But when it came to the English, Papa seemed to give offense quite deliberately.

  First, he invited to dinner both the British emissary and diplomats from France, with whom Britain was at war. Then, when dinner was called, I quite nearly panicked when my father casually escorted Mrs. Madison to the table instead of Mrs. Merry. I knew it would be considered by her husband, the British ambassador, to be an
utter breach of protocol. And I wasn’t wrong. He was as outraged as if a treaty had been broken. But unlike the matter of the overlooked poet, my father’s glance to me showed that he had done it with every intention.

  It was in the highest pique that the ambassador’s angry wife asked me, “How shall I address you, Mrs. Randolph? Do you prefer the distinction of being the president’s daughter or the congressman’s wife?”

  Given her fury, I carefully considered my reply. “Why I claim no distinction whatever, but wish only for the same consideration extended to other strangers.”

  She huffed as if I’d spat in her soup.

  But I couldn’t find it in myself to be sorry. I hadn’t forgotten that the British tried to capture and hang my father as a traitor. That they’d chased me and my family from our home, captured our slaves, and destroyed Elk Hill. That they’d taken the opportunity of the chaos in France to make such mischief that a power-mad Napoleon had risen. I might have to smile and pretend I didn’t know about the vile attacks of my own countrymen on my father’s presidency, but I didn’t have to pretend to be a monarchist just to accommodate the pride of the ambassador’s wife.

  There’s no place for an angel in the capital, William had said.

  And I wasn’t here to be my father’s angel, but his Amazon.

  “I CAN’T DO IT ANYMORE,” Maria said, peeping out the wide, paneled door. “I can’t go out there. The salon is filled with ladies and gentlemen!”

  “My dear,” Dolley chirped, fastening a green satin ribbon under my sister’s bosom. “That’s the point of a New Year’s Eve gala. An open invitation to the President’s House is meant to make everyone in Washington feel welcome.”

  But my sister’s expression was one of undiluted panic. “I can’t bear another party with these sophisticated strangers. They think me quite backward!”

  “Nonsense,” Dolley said, tugging the ribbon tight. “They think you’re very beautiful.”

  My sister was a beauty—especially in a white neoclassical dress that bared her arms and stretched tight over her bosom with ornate gold pins at each shoulder. And she was still pale enough from her ordeals in childbirth to make her resemblance to a Roman statue complete. “People only praise me for beauty because they cannot praise me for anything better,” Polly said. “Patsy is suited to this. Not me.”

  My sister had a distressing habit of comparing herself unfavorably to me—determined that my father mustn’t love her as much. I harbored a suspicion that my Aunt Elizabeth had put this notion in her mind, and I was determined to stomp it out, but Dolley wasn’t to be distracted by family jealousies. Clucking about us in her exotic silks, she said, “Nonsense. You and your sister are both beautiful and suited for society.”

  It was a lie, of course, with regard to my beauty. I’d always been more handsome than beautiful, but I looked dignified and elegant in my gown of deep blue with long white gloves. This was to be our first truly formal occasion at the President’s House at which we’d be expected to stand in as hostesses. And I knew my sister’s anxieties were not to be soothed with compliments. “Won’t you give us a moment?” I asked, smiling at Dolley.

  Dolley bobbed her head. “Just don’t dally too long or the whole schedule might be thrown off. You don’t want your father to have to serve melted ice cream, do you?”

  With that, she ducked out the door, and I took my sister’s hands in mine. They were cold. Shaking. “My sweet sister, you’ve done so well up until now.”

  “How can you bear it?” Polly asked, biting her lip. “Just this morning, I heard two women talking about Papa and Sally’s imaginary son, President Tom, who intends to come live at the President’s House. Everyone is saying that you and I must weep to see a Negress take the place of our mother. Maybe you don’t hear these whispers, but I do. While you’re chatting with the ladies, I’m quiet in the corners, and I hear what they say.”

  “They can go on saying it like the rot-mouthed buzzards they are,” I replied. “Because they’re never going to get the satisfaction of seeing Papa run out of office. They’re never going to see us with our heads bowed, do you hear?”

  My sister nodded, swallowing with difficulty, as if the humiliation was choking her.

  “Besides, we’re not doing this only for Papa,” I reminded her. “It’s for our whole family. You’re a congressman’s wife now. We both are. Representative Jack Eppes is out there waiting for you. Waiting for you to take his arm so he can proudly show you off.”

  That revived her flagging spirits a bit, and so we went out together that New Year’s Eve into the throngs of my father’s party, a lavish entertainment given at his own expense. And I’d scarcely turned a corner before I saw the most handsome man I’d ever seen in my life.

  My breath caught at his dark hair, touched only slightly by silver. His tall distinguished form, trim in a suit of fawn trousers and a black tailcoat with gold piping. My knees went a little weak at the familiar slope of his shoulders and the dark flashing eyes that I knew so well.

  By God, Congressman Thomas Mann Randolph was a sight.

  He was my husband of more than a decade, but I hadn’t seen him like this since before his father died. Winning the election had changed something in him. Gave him a renewed sense of confidence, a straighter posture, clearer eyes. Watching people flock around my husband made me wonder what kind of man Tom might have become ten years sooner if his father hadn’t discouraged his education. And I was ever so glad that I hadn’t discouraged him from running for Congress, even though I’d been sorely tempted.

  Doubly glad when he saw me in my beautiful gown and his eyes smoldered with hunger. “I do declare, Mrs. Randolph, you’re going to make me the subject of envy tonight.”

  I was the daughter of a public man; I hadn’t wanted to be the wife of one, too. But if politics was the arena in which my husband might finally come into his own, I was grateful for it.

  For the first time in years, I harbored true hope for my husband’s future. It was a new year, a new chapter, a new era. And when Tom settled upon me that night with kisses that tasted of champagne, I found myself unexpectedly eager for him.

  MY SISTER WAS PREGNANT AGAIN, AND SO WAS I.

  “Patsy, I believe you could give birth accidentally if you sneezed,” my sister teased, but there was an edge to it, because she was afraid. And while our husbands were in Congress, I was determined not to let my sister out of my sight, which was why we’d left our menfolk in Washington City and come home to Virginia, to Edgehill, together to have our babes.

  Before the weather turned too cold, we went together into Charlottesville to shop for tumblers, wineglasses, and some groceries. Normally, we’d have taken our maids, but given the size of my belly I wanted more room in the carriage.

  On the road, my sister asked, “Are you hoping it’s a boy?”

  “A son would be helpful to Tom, but I think in his secret heart, he prefers daughters.”

  “I hope mine is a boy. Then Francis will have a brother and maybe Jack won’t feel as if he needs more children.”

  My jaw tightened at that, trying to bite back harsh words for my sister’s husband. Why was it that women were expected to restrain our every passion for the sake of propriety, but men couldn’t do it even for the sake of the women they loved? I knew that in getting another child on my sister, Jack had done only what a husband has every right to do. But the last two had almost killed her, and she was terribly afraid. Polly would never blame Jack; no one would.

  But I was her sister—and I blamed him.

  “I think Betsy Hemings might have him,” my sister said.

  I dragged my eyes from the chariot window to fix them on her. “Who?”

  “Jack,” she said, as if I were quite a dullard. “I think my maid would welcome him into her bed, but I don’t think my husband would put a hand on her unless I was dead.”

  I stared in numb shock at what she was implying—no, what she was saying outright.

  “Jack is t
he best beloved of my soul,” she continued, furrowing her brow. “So it hurts to think of him with another woman. But if I should die in childbirth, Betsy might be a comfort to him. Better for my children, too.”

  “Maria!” I cried so savagely that the baby inside me kicked.

  I didn’t want my sister thinking this way. Not about dying and not about making another Hemings slave-mistress. But she was thinking of my mother’s example when she said, “If I die in childbirth, I don’t want a Gabriella Harvie over my children. Better that Jack should take a concubine. I’m not brave enough to broach it with him, but if I were a good mother, I’d at least plant the idea in Betsy’s head. Maybe I should mention it to her mother.”

  Betsy’s mother was, of course, Mary Hemings Bell, the proprietress of the store we were to shop in.

  “Have you lost your wits?” I asked, having half a mind to tell the driver to turn the carriage back around. Fortunately, my sister seemed to have abandoned the idea by the time we reached Main Street.

  Polly and I, both round as eggs, waddled our way into Mary Bell’s store, just in time to hear a man at the counter say, “Chocolate drops.”

  I confess, even if I hadn’t been flustered already, I was in no way prepared to see William. My hands went straightaway to my bonnet to make certain it wasn’t askew, but my sister let out a girlish squeal. “Mr. Short! Whatever are you doing back in Virginia? Why last we heard, you’d gone off to New York, and then Kentucky to see your brother.”

  “Been there and back again,” he replied with a tight smile, holding up three fingers to the proprietress to indicate how many bags of chocolate drops she should make for him. “Now I’m on my way to Richmond.”

  “Why didn’t you send word?” my sister asked. “We’re staying at Edgehill. You should winter with us there, like old times.”

  I knew perfectly well why he didn’t send word. We’d said farewell at Monticello a year ago. He hadn’t intended to see me again, I thought. Certainly, not so soon. And as much as I might welcome William’s company, it’d be beyond inappropriate to have him stay with us while our menfolk were away.