America's First Daughter: A Novel(110)
“By which time it will all have rotted, with my luck!” Tom’s shout reverberated throughout the house. Then he turned and smashed the wood window frame, sending a crash of icicles down from the impact. He kept punching and punching with his fist until I feared he might break his hand, or the window, or both.
“Tom!” I cried, and from somewhere in the house, I heard one of the older children whimper. My heart hurt to think they might live in fear of their father’s temper. I thought it might do us some good to go somewhere. Get away from our troubles for the Christmas holiday, as we’d done the year before. We’d been happy dancing in Charlottesville. Maybe we could be happy somewhere Tom didn’t feel the walls closing in on him.
When he finally stopped punching, I appraised his bleeding knuckles and said, “We should go to Eppington for the holiday. I want to be with Polly for her lying-in.”
My sister was pregnant for the first time, and it was only natural that I’d want to be with her, but Tom gave me a baleful stare. “You’re going nowhere, Martha. You’re scarcely out of childbed yourself.”
It wasn’t true. Cornelia was nearly five months old. Old enough to travel. So I argued, “I’m worried for my sister. You know she’s prone to illness. Always too sick to come to visit us or to have visitors.”
Tom snorted. “So says Jack Eppes.”
He had a point. Papa had gone from persuasion to pleading to bribery when it came to luring Jack to bring my sister for a visit, but we hadn’t seen her in nearly two years. “She’s all I can think about, Tom.”
“All I can think about is tobacco.”
“There’s nothing you can do about the tobacco. Nothing but brood.” Working myself up into a true lather, I said, “My mother died in childbirth, and Polly has her frame. I have a moral duty to be with my sister now.”
“It’s only your anxiety that makes it so,” Tom said, pacing. Oh, the irony of Tom accusing me of being overly anxious! But before I could protest, he announced, “You’re not going, Martha, and that’s the end of it.”
I wanted to argue, but there was something inside my husband that kept twisting and twisting in on itself, and it left him wound so tight I was afraid he might strike me if I dared to argue. Instead, I went downstairs with him and helped dress Jeff.
I got one shoe on my son just as he removed the other, which exasperated me, because he needed his shoes and a breakfast of bread and milk before he could make the two-mile walk to school. And while I tried to wrestle him into his shoes, my squirming son delivered an accidental kick to my belly. I cried out in surprise at the pain, which set my already-furious husband off like a powder keg.
Tom grabbed our boy and shook him, screaming in his face, “You ever kick your mother again and I’ll beat you bloody! Do you hear? I’ll beat you down until you can’t ever get up again.”
“Tom!” I struggled to pull a wailing Jeff from his father’s grasp. “Stop! It was an accident!” But my husband’s hold seemed to tighten the more I fought him. “Tom, please!”
The next thing I knew, Jeff was in my shaking arms, the unexpected shifting of his weight against me making me stumble back. Meanwhile, Tom paced, tugging at his hair with one hand. “He should learn proper respect for his mother!”
The time he’d struck me, maybe I’d deserved it, but I knew from the depths of my soul that my sobbing little boy had done nothing to earn such rough treatment. As I cuddled him close, my heart ached in my chest, and my stomach soured and burned.
Because I knew that day that more than just our financial affairs were falling apart.
SEEKING TO ESCAPE THE TROUBLES UNFURLING AT VARINA, I unwittingly brought my children to a tragedy at Monticello. For the winter of 1799 was a reaper of souls in Albemarle.
Mammy Ursula’s husband and son, affectionately known as the Georges, died of some mysterious ailment. Then my father’s old personal servant, Jupiter, came down with it, too. He believed himself poisoned and, against all advice, went to the same black conjure doctor who had treated the Georges.
I learned of it after a commotion outside, where my daughter had been playing in the dusting of snow with the slave children, all of whom called for me in a panic. Sally and I both flew out of my father’s house to witness a sight I’d never forget.
Jupiter had fallen to the cold and muddy road in front of the new carriage house on Mulberry Row, twitching in a convulsion fit so strong that it took three stout men to hold him. Catching Ann up by the arms, I tried to quiet her sobs. “What’s happened?”
“He took a dram, Mama,” she said, clinging to me.
“The conjure doctor gave him something that would kill or cure,” Sally said, bitterly, for the doctor had done the same for the Georges, both dead now.
“Take the children away,” I told Sally quietly, trying to keep my wits about me. Then, to the men holding Jupiter down as he writhed in pain, I commanded, “Take him to a bed. And tell me where this doctor can be found.”
“He’s long gone, mistress,” Ursula answered. “Absconded two and a half hours ago, after giving Jupiter the potion.”
I paced, my skirts dragging as the men lifted up Jupiter’s twisted form, his eyes bulging so that we could see the whites, a bloody froth dripping from his lips down the black skin of his neck and into his woolly hair. My heart broke at the sight. I wanted to rail at the servants for trusting such a butcher, but more than that, I wanted Jupiter to be well.