America's First Daughter: A Novel

by Stephanie Dray

  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?”

  OUR 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 overlooked 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.

  “WHY 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!”

  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.”