America's First Daughter: A Novel(112)

Unfortunately, Jack and Tom mixed like oil and water. Maybe it was because Tom seldom laughed at Jack’s jokes. Or maybe it was because Jack laughed too much at Tom, poking fun at his serious nature. Whatever the reason, Jack defended the physician as an old family friend. “We’re perfectly happy with his ministrations to my wife.”

“My apologies for intruding, then,” Tom said stiffly, sensing he’d pressed the matter as far as he could in another man’s house about another man’s wife.

But Polly wasn’t only the wife of Jack Eppes, she was also my sister. I wasn’t about to leave it alone.

That night, after the fire burned low, I left Polly in the care of her maid Betsy—another Hemings girl—and went to find Jack, where he was shutting up for the night. “My sister wants to stretch her legs. Breathe in fresh air. Get a little food into her without castor oil purging it. Surely you don’t want her confined forever, do you?”

“Oh, Patsy,” Jack said, giving me a genial pat. “I want her alive and well!”

Jack was smiling that glib smile of his, and I had the most unladylike urge to punch it from his face. He was supposed to take care of my sister. To love her and take seriously her ailments. The fact that he could smile at me like that while she wasted away hardened me. “If you truly want her alive and well, Jack, then understand that she can’t ever have more children.”

A planter needed sons and it was a wife’s duty to produce them. I considered it my duty, certainly, but my mother had considered it hers, too, and died trying. “My sister wasn’t made for it, Jack. You take one honest look at her, and you’ll know it’s true—”

“What am I supposed to do about it if it is?” he asked, an edge of anger in his voice. And maybe he had a right to be angry with me. This was an interference of the highest order, but in the past months, I had not been vigilant enough.

“Stay off her,” I said. “For the love of God, Jack. Stay off her.”

He stared at me a moment, shocked, but then all the masks fell away and he hung his head, as if in shame. I put a hand on his shoulder, to soothe him, and was rewarded with Jack’s teary nod.





PAPA WAS DEAD.

Or so it was reported that summer, when the presidential campaign for the election of 1800 was in full swing and the newspapers were hard at work with vile slanders. My father was said to be dead, an atheist, and a coward. President Adams was said to be a tyrant and a criminal. My father was said to be “a swindler begot by a mulatto upon a half-breed Indian squaw.” President Adams was said to be a hermaphrodite.

It would’ve been laughable if the stakes weren’t so high.

Indeed, I worried that my poor sister would hear the news of my father’s passing before we could tell her the truth, and that it might stop her frail heart. It vexed me that she wasn’t with us at Monticello, where Papa desired us all to join him. Jack Eppes had promised they’d come, but now he pled the excuse of the harvest, even though we all knew perfectly well my sister would be of no use to him on the farm. If Jack had let her come with us, I wouldn’t have to fret for her like I did. Or, at the very least, I’d have someone other than Sally with whom to share my amazement at the circus in my father’s house that summer. . . .

Though we lived in the same house, I scarcely saw Papa, for he was always in a crowd. Politicians, financiers, and newspapermen flocked to our mountaintop to pay court to the man they wanted for their next president. They behaved as if he belonged to them, and I suppose he must have. But at night, when he retired to his private chambers, he belonged to Sally. For even though we had a house full of guests, he’d recklessly got her with child again by autumn.

And while Sally tended to Papa, I was left to cater to my father’s guests—men and their wives who hadn’t waited on an invitation, but nevertheless, needed to be fed and offered every hospitality. They ran over us like locusts, and it reminded me of the weeks we were under siege by the British, and the legislators gathered together at Monticello to avoid capture. There were no dragoons hunting us now, but there may as well have been for all the chaos. As if, in campaigning for the presidency, they were bringing about a new revolution.

For my part, I wanted none of it.

If only Papa’s candidacy had been the most troubling thing we faced.

In early September, alarming news reached us from our longtime friend and neighbor, Mr. Monroe, now the governor of Virginia.

“I’ve just received word,” Papa said, indicating a letter he held in a shaking hand, and a crowd drew round him in the entryway. “The planned slave insurrection in Henrico has been clearly proved. Ten Negroes have already been condemned and executed, and there are upward of forty more to be tried.”

While the crowd of men murmured at the news, I held my breath. News of a possible slave rebellion near Richmond had reached us days before, but the terrifying specifics of the plot were just now becoming clear.

Varina was in Henrico County. Had Tom’s slaves been involved? And what if Tom had been at Varina when the violence began?

“As many as forty more you say?” one of the men asked, as if startled to learn so many slaves would be willing to take up against their masters in concerted effort. To imagine slaves killing whites and setting fire to the Virginia countryside—not in far-off Haiti, but actually here—was a thing of which not a few slaveholders’ nightmares were made.