America's First Daughter: A Novel(139)
Tom was appalled by the very idea that any sister of his should seek employment, but given Nancy’s ruined reputation, she had few options. Tom was a Randolph; he saw himself as wealthy landed gentry even if our house at Edgehill had fallen to pieces in our absence. It needed repairs and plaster if it was to prove good against any kind of weather. And with the new baby, Edgehill felt smaller and more cramped than ever.
That’s to say nothing of the drought. The oats were lost. The peaches and cherries, too. We might only have another sickly wheat crop and apples. We weren’t in any position to support his sister, so Tom gave Nancy money—more than we had to give—and let her go off to Richmond.
Before climbing into the carriage, Nancy gave me a quick hug and whispered, “Try not to worry about the duel. The Randolph temper burns hot, but sometimes burns itself out.”
I hoped she was right, but when my husband returned from Richmond, he was in a worse state than before. He considered it his sacred duty to care for his sisters and felt unmanned by his inability to do so. And when I found my husband in the yard sighting his pistols and practicing his paces, I realized his temper wasn’t going to burn out. He was going to kill or be killed, and I could no longer keep my peace. “So you’re going to let him murder you and leave me a widow?”
Tom turned on me. “You think I’ll fail at this like I’ve failed at everything. It’s a wonder you don’t want me dead.”
Given how happy we’d been only months before, this caught me utterly by surprise. “Tom, how could you ever think that I wish such a thing? What would I do without you?”
Tom gave a bitter twist of his beautiful mouth. “Turn to your father like you always do. He can do no wrong in your eyes, whereas I. . . .”
“Well, my father found a way to avoid a senseless duel, didn’t he?”
I shouldn’t have said it. Should never have taken that tone. And the reward for my foolishness was a resounding slap to the face. It didn’t knock me to the ground. It wouldn’t bruise me. But because it made me feel like both a desperate wife and a chastened child I stood there gawping in shock, holding my face where it turned red.
My husband hadn’t struck me since the last time he was in a fit of rage inspired by one of the Randolph brothers of Bizarre. And now Tom seemed just as shocked as I was, his eyes filling with shame at the sight of me holding my stinging cheek. With tears in his eyes, he shouted, “God dammit, Martha. Look what you’ve made me do! Look what you made me do.”
He never dueled John Randolph.
But it wasn’t because of my father’s letter, or my pleas, or because good sense prevailed. It was because he’d struck me, in spite of his promise never to do so again. He’d dishonored himself in his own eyes and, in so doing, lost all appetite for a duel of honor. I knew this, deep down where we know such things about the men we marry, and counted it well worth the price. I would’ve provoked him to strike me a thousand times to keep him from dooming our family to utter ruin.
But the price I didn’t understand was one exacted from Tom’s soul. For he was never without his pistols ever after, and I feel certain he was keeping a bullet ready for himself.
He had inside him the kind of wound that left a man staring at pistols in the night. The kind of wound that left a man without a head, lying on the ground with a gun in his hand. The kind of wound the men in my life all seemed to suffer. And for the first time, I wondered if those wounds were put there by God or if it was something about me that brought them about.
Washington City, 2 July 1807
A Proclamation by Thomas Jefferson
During the wars among the powers of Europe, the United States of America have observed neutrality. At length a deed, transcending all we’ve hitherto seen or suffered, brings our forbearance to a necessary pause. A frigate of the United States, trusting a state of peace, has been attacked by a British vessel of war. This was not only without provocation, or justifiable cause, but committed with the avowed purpose of taking by force, a part of her crew.
An attack. An insult. An act of war.
Publicly, my father prepared for battle. Privately, he confided we weren’t ready.
The fate of our nation was, as always, caught between England and France, and my father no longer harbored a preference for either, observing, “France is a conqueror, roaming over the earth with havoc. And Britain is a pirate, spreading misery and ruin over the ocean. Fortunately for us, the Mammoth cannot swim nor the Leviathan move on dry land. And if we keep out of their way, they cannot get at us.”
Thus came about the Embargo Act of 1807.
Did Papa know he put the fate of the nation in the hands of its ladies? If we couldn’t buy tea, clothes, or goods from overseas, then wives and daughters would have to make them at home. And if women weren’t willing, the embargo would fail. After all, what did men know about making homespun?
I set about straightaway to oversee the production of cloth both at Edgehill and Monticello, where we transformed the stone workmen’s house into a weaver’s cottage. And in this endeavor, I found an ally in Sally Hemings, who’d always been a talented seamstress and whose six-year-old daughter, Harriet, was becoming one, too. I tried never to think that fair and freckled Harriet was my sister, but was pleased at how well the girl took to the spinning jennies and was so impressed by her deft use of the flying shuttle on the clattering loom that I could scarcely pull my attention away when Sally said, “With the help of the women who don’t get put in the ground come harvest, we can make a thousand yards of cloth by springtime.”