America's First Daughter: A Novel(152)
From Thomas Jefferson to Martha Jefferson Randolph
We’ve been weather bound at this place. Johnny Hemings and company will set off on Thursday. Our only discomfort is not being with you. The girls have borne it wonderfully. They’ve been very close students and I’m never without enough to do to protect me from ennui.
MY FATHER KNEW I’d go through his letters once he was dead. This letter is proof that he meant to spare me from having to burn more than I already have. The company my father mentions in reference to their Uncle Johnny were Sally’s sons: Beverly, Eston, and Madison.
They were almost always with Papa in those days, engaged in a grand project to build a new octagonal house at Poplar Forest, where we once hid from the British. My father fled there now for the same reason: to escape. To escape Monticello, which had become, in some respects, a glorified museum and inn.
Though it was a great expense, my father wouldn’t deny his hospitality to visitors. It seemed to him somehow undemocratic, or at the very least, un-Virginian. Strangers stopped without even a letter of introduction, expecting supper and a bed. Most of all, they desired to lay eyes on the former president, the sage of Monticello. And, of course, to satisfy their curiosity about Dusky Sally.
Under that scrutiny, Papa increasingly withdrew to Poplar Forest, where he could make plans for his new university and enjoy the sons Sally had given him.
But he never wrote their names down in any letter.
He knew better. And so did I.
Perhaps my father also absented himself to give Tom the illusion of being in command, hoping it might ease the strain on our marriage. And I made myself as obedient and accommodating as possible, even though Tom had scarcely a tender word for me. I missed the husband I’d known—temperamental and morose, but fiercely loving. And I despaired of having lost that love, possibly forever.
Meanwhile, from Washington came a steady report on Ellen’s beaux:
Mr. De Roth was “an insignificant little creature.”
Mr. Hughes was “a man of no family or connections.”
Mr. Forney was “aloof.”
Mr. Logan was “not at all clever.”
Though my daughter had success pricing the Scientific Dialogues for her grandfather’s library, she made no progress in finding a husband, and I couldn’t find it within myself to encourage her to try harder, given how miserable my own marriage had become.
I tried to count myself content that the love Tom once lavished upon me he now gave to our daughters. But it left me lonely even in a crowded house. I missed Ann unbearably and worried every day what her husband might do to her. As for Ellen, I wanted her to come home straightaway from her husband-hunting trip, but Papa sent her the profit from his tobacco so she could visit Baltimore and then Philadelphia. Which put me in a near depressive state until she returned to regale us with tales of her adventure.
“Everything’s so cheap and good in Philadelphia. And the people were most hospitable. Mr. Short came to see me, too,” Ellen said, working her polishing cloth over one of the silver goblets Papa bought our last summer in Paris.
Nearly the whole of Papa’s silver inventory lay spread out before us on a dining room table, and I looked up from the silver tumbler I’d been polishing, one from a set of eight that Papa had commissioned a silversmith to make per his own design. It must’ve been because Tom and I were so unhappy that I felt wistful to hear William’s name again. And surprised, too, that William had visited my daughter.
Papa had, indeed, given William an appointment that sent him to France and then Russia. But when Mr. Madison became president, he brought about an abrupt end to William’s diplomatic career. For spite, I suppose. No matter the cause, William’s return from Europe had been unheralded and shrouded in mystery. I only knew that he’d settled in Philadelphia—without his duchess—and I was painfully curious to know more.
“Mr. Short called upon you?” I asked, setting the tumbler aside.
“Twice, actually,” Ellen replied. “He took me to see the house you lived in with Mrs. Hopkinson when you were a little girl. It’s now occupied by trades people and has nothing to distinguish it. But I gazed on it with mixed feelings of pleasure and melancholy.”
I, too, had mixed feelings of pleasure and melancholy to think of the man I once loved squiring my daughter about Philadelphia, walking cobblestone streets I once walked, and telling her stories from my youth.
Ellen continued, “We also visited the spot where my grandfather lived as secretary of state. And I strained my eyes to get a distant view of his lodgings while vice president. I was gratified by the sight of these now humble buildings which recall those in whom my fondest affections are placed.”
The swell of my heart made it ache. William had done more than watch over my daughter. He’d taken her places that recalled me and my father. Places I was sure I’d never see again. But William gave these memories to my daughter, and it moved me beyond words to think he was still, after all these years, doing for me what I couldn’t do for myself.
Ellen would do well to find a man like him in the northern states where everything was so cheap and so good. I’d never say it out loud, certainly never in my father’s presence, but like Mrs. Nicholas, I, too, now prayed that none of my daughters would bury themselves in Virginia.
“WHY DOES ELLEN HAVE ALL THE FUN?” Ginny asked at my old harpsichord. She’d been playing song after song to entertain our company. And once our guests had retired, leaving only family and near-relations, she complained, “First her travels, now Grandpapa intends to take her to Poplar Forest. Not just Ellen, but Cornelia, too!”