America's First Daughter: A Novel(111)

I tended him myself. Nine days he languished and never recovered, not even to speak his last words to anybody. Horrified by my failure to protect our people, I was relieved to see Tom ride up to the house. Our troubles seemed suddenly quite small with death all around us. “I should think this doctor’s murders sufficiently manifest to come under the cognizance of the law,” I told Tom, wanting justice.

I wrote the same to my father.

But my rage all came to nothing. My menfolk raised no fuss. I suppose they were all hoping that winter’s reaper of death had absconded away with the murderous doctor, and didn’t want to call either back. Alas, nature demanded more payments that winter.

Sally’s newborn daughter died.

Polly’s baby died.

George Washington died, too.

Such was the bitter partisanship of the day that my father didn’t feel he’d be welcome at the funeral for his friend, our first president, the great Virginian whose Federalist followers mourned him like the king they wished him to be.

And I cared nothing about it, because all I could think of was the poisoned slaves I hadn’t been able to help, and my poor grieving sister, so far from me.

Thanks to Tom, I hadn’t made it to her lying-in. And I learned about her baby’s death back at Edgehill as winter gasped its last cold breaths. The house Tom built for us was no architectural marvel; it was just a box, no wider than forty feet and two stories high. But it was the first thing we had without the taint of Colonel Randolph on it.

Alas, the windows were done badly, and the insides had been spattered with rain and wind and mud come up from the cellar. For days after we arrived, I cleaned from dawn ’til dusk, sweeping and scrubbing until my hands were raw and cracked, while Tom worked at repairing the windows.

“Martha,” Tom said a few mornings into our stay. He caught me with the servants in the kitchen where I was setting up housekeeping. The months of loss had taken a toll on me, and an even worse toll on us, and so I kept my eyes on the piles of dirt I was sweeping and my mouth closed. “Patsy,” he said when I didn’t look up. “Might I trouble you for a word?”

My husband had spoken sweetly to me ever since learning that my sister’s childbirth had come to grief. For my part, I’d scarcely answered him with a word more than was necessary. He’d kept me from my sister when she needed me. I wanted to fly to my sister now and comfort her, but having been disappointed before in doing what perhaps my anxiety only deemed a moral duty, I was afraid to indulge any hopes in the matter. “I’m listening, Mr. Randolph.”

My broom swished, swished, swished against the rough-hewn planks of the floor, highlighting the stretch of silence between us.

“Your father has advanced me the money to save Varina,” Tom said, sheepishly.

I swept harder, whacking the broom against the wall as I did it.

Tom heaved a great sigh. “How can I ever express my gratitude for his kindness? I was really on the point of ruin from my own neglect.”

I slammed down a dustpan and collected up the debris with more force than was strictly necessary. Then I yanked open a window and emptied the pan with a clatter.

Tom cleared his throat. “I knew all along that I should’ve sold my tobacco in full time to meet my debts. But a great price for that crop would’ve rendered us perfectly easy for life.” He stared at his feet. “I risked ruin with the hope of fortune but fear I’ve only procured embarrassments.”

It was the kind of frank admission of fault that Tom was, alone amongst the men I knew, capable of giving. And I worried he had beggared us for the rest of our lives. How long would he really be able to keep Varina, even with my father’s help? He should’ve sold that damned farm. Let it go. Started fresh. But that’s not what I really blamed him for. “My sister is ailing. Her breasts have risen and broke.”

And this is your fault because you wouldn’t let me go to her, was my silent accusation.

He frowned, not needing me to say it. “I’ll take you to Eppington, if you still want to go.”

We left that very day, and when I saw my sister half-dead in a fetid bed, I thought I might swoon away at the shock of seeing her so thin and frail. But my resentment of Tom was utterly eclipsed by my anger at yet another quack physician. This one had Polly confined to bed taking so much castor oil that she’d wasted away. “My poor Polly!”

“Maria,” she whispered with a faint smile, unable to lift her head from the pillow, but fluttering her eyes at me as if grateful that I’d finally come. Childbirth had ravaged her. Even beyond the grief of losing her baby, the damage done to her delicate body was like nothing I’d ever seen. The doctor murmured that she wasn’t the sort of woman God made for childbearing, to which my sister replied, “Patsy, rescue me. . . .”

I vowed I would—because I feared that under his regimen of mysterious elixirs she might never rise from her bed again. Fortunately, I wasn’t the only one stricken by the state of her.

Tom was adamant. “She needs to be up and out of that sickbed and her breasts need to be drained of the swelling.” Whether he was dissecting opossums, nursing our children through smallpox, or theorizing how to relieve a new mother’s breasts when her baby had died, my husband’s peculiar interest in science made me think he would’ve done better to pursue a career in medicine than farming. And I hoped that Jack Eppes would take my husband’s advice.