America's First Daughter: A Novel(132)

The nostalgic horror of it all sent my father stumbling back, fleeing into another room while weeping into his handkerchief. But I stood there, deaf and dumb as a stone while everyone else wept. I couldn’t accept the loss of my sister—my beloved sister—who was my child before I had any others.

My little Polly.

The loss of her couldn’t be borne. And I couldn’t make myself let go of her baby when Jack reached for the child. Jack wanted his daughter. It was only natural. His wife was dead and this baby, her namesake, was a living connection to her. So I ought not to have hated him for tearing the infant away from me.

But I did. Oh, I hated Jack Eppes.

And when he took that child from me, I thought my knees might buckle. But Sally’s hand slipped into mine, squeezing tight, as if to keep me upright. And we stood there by Polly’s bed like two honor guards, determined that no one else but us would prepare my sister for burial.

I washed her hair, dried it, then combed it to the grim music of the carpenter’s hammer outside, as he made her coffin. Sally found a pretty dress for my sister to wear. I gathered a bouquet of spring flowers and returned to find Sally mending my sister’s garments in the places they’d been worn, swiping at her eyes so that she could see her own needle.

They were all crying. The servants. The menfolk. The children.

But I didn’t cry. I didn’t cry because my sister had bade me not to. I didn’t cry when they put my sister in her coffin. I didn’t cry when they lowered her into the ground near my mother. I didn’t cry when they shoveled dirt on top of her.

Nor did I cry when my father clutched at me by the fireplace, murmuring, “I’ve lost the half of all I had! Now it all hangs on the slender thread of a single life. On you, Patsy. Only you.”

He no longer had the strength, I think, to rage violently in his grief. There’d be no smashed glass, no overturned lamps, no splinters of tables left in his wake. And no pistols, so long as I was there. It was as it had been at the beginning. Papa and I were forged together in sadness, and were still forged, such that no other person in this world was so dear. My life, too, was suspended by the slender thread of his. So I understood the truth of what he was saying.

And yet, it was not the whole truth of it either.

I had a family and he had his mistress, and with her, they had children. And I was never so grateful for Sally as I was that night when she relieved me at my father’s side.

I began to retch the moment I returned to my room. I heaved drily into a pail that my husband held under me, nothing coming up. Alarmed to see me in such a state, Tom said, “Let me get you into bed.”

“No,” I said, refusing to let him tend me. I couldn’t lean on him. I was in too much pain. I could neither sit nor lie down anywhere without agony. Instead, I paced, panting like a horse that’d been run too hard, until I was struggling for every breath the way my sister had struggled for hers.

“My poor Patsy,” Tom said. “You’re having a fit of hysterics.”

Dragging in a ragged, desperate breath, as I tried to escape the cage of his arms, I snapped, “It’s nothing of the sort. I ate radishes and milk together for supper, both of which are unfriendly to my stomach.”

“It can’t be healthful to hold the pain the way you do. You’re a woman. There’s no shame in your tears. You need a good cry on my shoulder, Patsy.”

“Would you mind terribly fetching me some peppermint?”

With a frown, he sighed, then went down the stairs. I shut the door behind him, gasping, suffocating in my own garments and struggling to tear them off. Something finally tore inside me, too, and I began to sob.

I sobbed as I’d never sobbed before, falling to my knees amidst the shreds of my garments, shattered by the knowledge that I’d never see my sister again. She’d been twenty-five years old, now gone from me forever. And it was a pain like nothing I’d ever felt before—one I scarcely knew how to survive.





“IT’S SO HARD TO LOSE A SISTER,” Nancy Randolph was saying.

She’d come to Edgehill ostensibly to offer her help in my time of grief. Now she was trying to draw me out past the usual pleasantries because the Randolphs seemed to want to speak about everything.

But I was a Jefferson and I could scarcely hear my own infant daughter Mary’s name spoken aloud without bleeding anew for the sister I’d named her after. Condolences came from all over the country. We even received one from Abigail Adams. But I didn’t want to think about the loss, couldn’t bear to think about it, so I just stood there, hanging laundry while my infamous sister-in-law nattered on, insensible to the fact that I was barely listening.

“I know it’s not the same,” Nancy said. “But I’ve lost my sister Judy, as sure as if she’d died. Truly, I have. She harbors nothing but bitterness against me now.”

I imagine I might be bitter, too, if my sister had fornicated with my husband, then killed the bastard born of that incestuous union, and exposed us all to scandal and poverty. Nancy had no one left alive to blame but herself.

So I said nothing. Just hung a petticoat on the line.

Handing me another wet petticoat from the basket, Nancy said, “John’s causing mischief between us.”

John Randolph, she meant. The only surviving brother at Bizarre. John was a sharp-tongued dandy who’d lately taken to calling himself Randolph of Roanoke. I disliked him immensely because he’d also taken to criticizing my father’s presidency. But I didn’t see how he could be to blame for the estrangement of Nancy and Judith, and I said so.