America's First Daughter: A Novel(105)
“He’s already a free man in all but name,” Papa groused.
I was a little vexed that my father, who had penned so many lines about liberty, might be surprised a man might not be content with freedom in all but name. When Papa grudgingly granted Bob’s request, I resolved to make peace in that quarter if I could.
Because at long last, we had my father happy and contented at home. And we aimed to keep him there.
Chapter Twenty-three
Monticello, 27 April 1795
From Thomas Jefferson to James Madison
My retirement from office had been meant from all office high or low, without exception . . . the little spice of ambition, which I had in my younger days, has long since evaporated, and I set less store in a posthumous than present name.
TWO YEARS AFTER MY FATHER wrote these words, he lost the election for the presidency of the United States. My sister and I believed this to be an utter calamity, but not because he had lost the presidency. It was a calamity because, through a quirk in our system, having won the second highest number of votes, he would now be obliged to serve as vice president to John Adams—the very man he’d run against, and whose political sentiments he opposed.
We urged him to refuse the office for fear he’d again be the subject of scrutiny, censure, and newspaper attack. He’d again have to leave his plantation and his people and his family. And this time, he wouldn’t even have James to look after him, for Sally’s brother had since quit the plantation with his freedom to travel the world.
Sally didn’t like the idea of my father returning to public office any better than we did. The three of us sulked, as if the combined weight of his womenfolk’s displeasure might bring my strong father to his knees.
But in the end, Papa said he feared to weaken our fledgling system of government by refusing the office, and he wouldn’t be moved on this point.
In all, my father’s retirement had lasted only two eventful years during which it seemed every friend of liberty we’d known in France was either dead, jailed, or in exile. And we’d been consumed with tumult and tragedies closer to home. Polly fell through the rotting floorboards into the cellar of my father’s half-demolished house, upon which he’d begun more ambitious renovations. Miraculously, there wasn’t a scrape on her, but others didn’t fare as well. At Bizarre, Richard Randolph died, quite suddenly, of some mysterious ailment, leaving Judith and Nancy in dire straits.
And I lost a child—a little angel named Ellen, not even a year old.
She had apple cheeks and the longest toes of any baby I ever saw. I held her in my arms as she struggled for her last little gasps through lips tinged with blue. And when she closed her eyes for the last time—the tiny veins beneath her porcelain skin pulsing once, twice, then no more—the grief was unfathomable. The pain was like a burr, the kind that only digs deeper when you try to pluck free of it. So I just let the pain dig into me deep, where I keep it to this day, since I couldn’t keep my baby girl.
But after we buried her, the grief put Tom into a nearly hopeless state. My husband was struggling with what the doctors called a nervous condition. He took mineral water at the hot springs, but I knew it’d do no good. After all, no magic elixir was going to transform him into the master of Tuckahoe, and we could never be happy at Varina, where we’d moved to build up Tom’s only inheritance.
And oh, how I hated Varina.
Not because it was filled with memories of that first miser able summer we spent as newlyweds. Not because there weren’t enough rooms for the children and our servants. No, I hated Varina because whenever Tom came home from overseeing the fields, he’d stand on the porch with a glass too-full of whiskey, his eyes on the blue horizon, as if he could see his father’s malevolent ghost hovering over the childhood home at which we’d never again be welcome.
As if he sensed Colonel Randolph looking down on us, standing in judgment.
And I hurt for my husband. Truly, I did.
Tom seldom spoke of the lawsuit he was fighting with his father’s creditors, but it weighed on him. My husband was likely to lose, which would saddle us with even more of Colonel Randolph’s debt. I would’ve sold bloody Varina and left everything having to do with Colonel Randolph behind, but Tom couldn’t stomach it, which meant that my husband’s only hope of paying the mortgage was to get in a few good crops, and sell them at a profit—a nearly impossible feat, given British tariffs on our goods.
That’s why I was so alarmed when Tom announced, “I’m going to stand for the state legislature.”
He was standing on the porch, deep in his cups, so I wasn’t entirely sure he meant it. And I didn’t like the idea at all. Tom was a better farmer than most, but inconstant with his attention to his own plantations—always distracted on some errand for my father. It was so much worse now with Papa away in the capital. Polly had come to live with us at Varina, which meant Tom and I were both struggling to make a functioning household with our sisters and our little children underfoot. I didn’t know how we’d manage it if Tom took on public duties besides. “What of . . . what of the farmsteads?”
My husband squinted. “Patsy, I’ve always wanted to serve in public office. That’s why I went to Edinburgh. It’s why I admire Mr. Jefferson so much. My father never thought I could do it. He wanted me here, digging in the dirt . . . but it’s these little specks of land which prevent mental effort and accomplishment in youth.”