America's First Daughter: A Novel(103)

Since the day Tom struck me, I hadn’t felt the stirrings of arousal and desire, so I was surprised to feel them now, stronger than ever. Tom was so vulnerable that I remembered how sweet he could be. How much pleasure we’d found in one another. How he’d driven away my pain and heartbreak with the sheer force of his desire.

Now I wanted to do the same for him.

He’d accused me of holding myself back from him, and I had. There still seemed something too dangerous in admitting that I loved him, so I tried to show him, kissing him with a brazenness I’d never dared before.

At my kiss, Tom tugged me closer and pressed his mouth on mine with a mad, desperate urgency. The abandoned schoolhouse was hardly the place a gentleman ought to make love to his wife. But it’d been here in this very schoolhouse that he’d asked me to marry him, and the emotions of the moment ran so high that I cared nothing for propriety. I welcomed my husband’s roaming hands and plundering mouth, wanting him to find in me some balm for his pain. And when my hands opened his shirt and my palms skidded down his chest, I took deep satisfaction in the way he groaned, as if my touch was a mercy.

“You’re all I have, Patsy,” he whispered. “All I have now . . .”





THAT WINTER, my father limped home from his battles with the secretary of the treasury, battered and bruised in spirit, desiring to give up the work of government forever. He had resigned and retired.

It was, of course, what my sister and I wanted most.

We wanted our father home. We didn’t want to share him with the world anymore, and we both believed he’d be happier as the simple gentleman farmer he professed to be.

But when Papa returned to Monticello, it wasn’t with the high spirits of a man finally freed from public duty. Oh, he nattered excitedly about the price of wheat and molasses, sheep and potatoes, and seemed to be eager for the spring thaw. But I knew him too well not to notice the tension leaking out the edges of his daily routine.

On his third day home, he and Polly came in from a ride, and Sally Hemings was there in an instant, eager to attend him. I suppose that after years of living under Tom’s authority while steering clear of me, Sally was as grateful as I was for Papa’s return as unquestioned master of the plantation.

Perhaps she was also eager to repair whatever had been ruptured between them, which had made her status on the plantation uncertain. But when Sally reached for my father’s coat, he nearly jolted at the brush of her fingers at his neck. And when she stooped to take his muddy riding boots, Papa stopped her. “That’s all right, Sally. I’ll do it.”

Her lower lip wobbled and she bolted away, disappearing somewhere into the recesses of the house.

“What the devil was that about?” The look of bewilderment on my father’s face might’ve been comical were the cause for Sally’s distress not so plainly obvious.

“She’s a woman who wants to please you,” Polly said, her cheeks pink with the cold. “Can’t you see that, Papa?”

“She does please me,” he protested, looking between us. “I found no fault in her. I said nothing harsh whatsoever.”

My sister put a hand on her hip, addressing my father as no one else dared. “You didn’t have to say it, Papa. You don’t let her do anything for you. Not even pour your tea.”

My father gave a little snort. Then, as if to make us forget the scene with Sally, he asked me, “Isn’t Mr. Randolph coming down?”

“Tom’s not hungry.” Or at least, that’s what he said whenever I tried to take something up to him. He’d taken ill after his father’s death and was now unable, or unwilling, to rise from our bed. But it was an erratic illness.

One day, Tom would be so low in spirits he couldn’t muster the energy to rise and shave his own cheek. The next day, he’d be up before dawn working on threshing machines at such a fevered pace he’d forget to come to bed entirely. It’d been that way for weeks.

I worried for him.

Since he wasn’t hungry, I had some strong tea sent up with white sugar—some of the few goods that could still be bought with cash, for the smallpox outbreak and want of commerce had rendered the whole of Virginia a place of only barter and trade.

But when he refused it, I went up myself to coax him. “At least drink a little tea, Tom. Then maybe you’ll want supper with us tonight. Asparagus has finally come to our table and pairs nicely with eggs.”

The toll on him was evident; it hollowed out his beauty and made his eyes sink into his head. “I can’t keep anything down,” Tom insisted, bunching the quilt under his chin and turning away toward the wall. When he did, I saw his ribs beneath the broad expanse of his muscular back. He was wasting away while trying to make sense of who he was if he wasn’t his father’s heir.

Wasting away to the nothing he feared he’d become.

And I didn’t know what I could say, or do, to help him.

When I went back down, my father asked, “Is he feeling any better?” I gave a quick, distressed shake of my head and Papa frowned. “You know that you’re both welcome to stay here at Monticello as long as you like.”

“We’re so grateful,” I replied, wishing that my husband could see that even if his own father had never valued him, mine did. But Monticello wasn’t Tuckahoe. My husband had been hurt and humiliated by his father’s last wishes. What Tom wanted now was to make his own lands profitable, because the longer he lived in another man’s house and managed another man’s farm, the more he doubted his worth as a man.