America's First Daughter: A Novel

by Stephanie Dray

  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. Unbending 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.

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  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.

  LAFAYETTE 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 lik
e 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.

  ON THE ELEVENTH OF SEPTEMBER, 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.

  It wasn’t difficult. For nearly six years, Mr. Trist had been constant in his attachment to Ginny. They’d resisted all our attempts to discourage their love until we were simply forced to acquiesce to its power. Theirs was not a marriage for money or advantage, but born of long friendship, shared troubles, and a true meeting of hearts. They might live poor as church mice all their lives, but their romance was perfectly obvious to everyone. And when the bride and groom pledged themselves to one another, their voices trembling with emotion, it wasn’t Tom who gazed at me with wistful remembrance of our wedding day.

  Instead, I felt William’s gaze upon me, as if imagining the wedding we’d never had.

  Glancing furtively at him over the punch bowl and floral arrangements, I found myself snared by his wistful smile. I remembered that, like my new son-in-law, he, too, was once an aspiring diplomat that everyone feared would be penniless. My eldest daughter had married a man more like her father than I wished to contemplate, but Ginny was taking
the risk I never took.

  Later, William sat beside me to listen when Papa gifted Ginny with a gilded cittern guitar with which she serenaded her new groom. Love endures, I thought, then tried to shake the thought away. But it was a thought that stayed with me well into the night.

  THEREAFTER, TOM ABSENTED HIMSELF FROM MONTICELLO. He didn’t come for dinner, nor take tea in the early evening. It was only after the music was played and our guests had retired that he returned—hiding away in the north pavilion, refusing my company.

  I knew my husband was in pain, shattered to atoms in body and spirit. I hurt for him. I wanted to reassure him of my love, of my father’s love, of his family’s love—even Jeff’s love. But the only thing Tom wanted from me was to persuade Jeff to leave the creditors unpaid. And, for the sake of our children, that was the one thing I wouldn’t do.

  “Where do you think he goes during the day?” Ellen murmured as the younger children ran inside the house ahead of us, their feet pitter-pattering across the cherry and beech wood parquet floor.

  I suspected Tom actually went to Charlottesville to drink in the taverns, but couldn’t bear to tell even Ellen as much. “I’m sure I don’t know.”

  Ellen leaned against one of the columns of the west portico. “I can bring my father a tray tonight. He’s made a recluse of himself in the north pavilion, but he might open the door for me. If not me, then Septimia.”

  Yes, he might open the door for Septimia because she was a child, but I didn’t intend to use her in such a way. “Your father has always suffered dark moods. Then he comes out of them. He always comes out of them. So we must give him privacy.”

  From the parlor, where he’d been setting up a chessboard, my father called, “Ah, Ellen, come play!” Papa was inordinately proud of both his granddaughter and his chess set—a gift from the French court. “I’ve been telling Mr. Short that if you’d been born a man, you’d have been a great one. So show him how you’ve learned to use my chessmen.”