America's First Daughter: A Novel(154)

Papa’s brilliant courtship with the public went on below stairs—but my world was suddenly and sharply confined to the warren of attic rooms at the top of the house. Oh, I saw and heard most everything, for Monticello was a noisy place, with creaky hinges and floorboards, and more than twenty family members in residence at any given time. My window overlooked the same expansive vista as my father’s did—but my room was at a higher elevation. I saw more. I saw the reality. I saw, every day, Mulberry Row and all the little nail-shop boys who worked from sunup to sundown for our happiness—which only fueled my sickness and melancholy.

One night, when Cornelia brought my supper up, she burst into tears. “Oh, Mother, you’re so very pale, and I’m such an unworthy daughter!”

“Why would you say such a thing?” I offered my arms, and when she came to me, I removed her cap and stroked her dark hair.

Cornelia cried, “How do you remember the numberless variety of orders and directions for the servants? I’m so tired of putting away the books and other things that seem to get everywhere all the time.”

“It becomes routine,” I assured her, knowing she longed to trade the keys and the cookbooks for her drawing paper and pencils. “You’ll get better at it.”

“Father doesn’t think so,” she said, wiping her eyes and reaching into her apron for a scrap of paper written in Tom’s hand. I worried that he’d written a stern reprimand, but instead, it was a poem about her housekeeping.

While frugal Miss Mary kept the stores of the House,

Not a rat could be seen, never heard was a mouse,

Not a crumb was let fall,

In kitchen or Hall:

For no one could spare one crumb from his slice

The rations were issued by measure so nice

But when spring arrived to soften the air,

Cornelia succeeded to better the fare,

Oh! The boys were so glad,

And the Cooks were so sad,

Now puddings and pies every day will be made,

Not once in a month just to keep up the trade.

It was such gentle teasing from Tom—and so unusually good-humored—that I laughed. But Cornelia wept inconsolably until Tom came to comfort her. Speaking soft words before sending her off, Tom closed the door and pulled a chair up beside our bed. Taking my hand in his, he said, “Your hands are so cold.”

“I’ll feel better in the morning,” I said, cheered by this unexpected husbandly affection.

“You’ve been saying that for some time.” He clasped my hand tighter and lowered his head. “The physician says you won’t survive another birth. And I’ve no intention of doing what my father did to my mother or what Jack Eppes did to your sister. It may be that we’re better off sleeping apart.”

Even as ill as I was, I didn’t want to sleep apart from Tom. For twenty-eight years, we’d lain together, and as much as I’d come to resent him in my bed, it pained me more to think of him never there again. “Oh, Tom, can’t we . . .” I trailed off, wondering what to suggest.

I hadn’t been willing to find an “agreeable Negress” to sate my husband’s needs when Dolley suggested it. That unwillingness had nearly cost me my life. But I heard from downstairs the violin of Beverly Hemings—now nineteen years old and a great favorite at Monticello—and it bolstered my resistance. Sally’s oldest son had my father’s freckles, his posture, and shared Papa’s love of music, science, and hot air balloons. The time was coming, I knew, for Sally’s son to be set free, and I dreaded explanations that would need to be made to friends, neighbors, and even my children. I’d found a way not to think of Sally’s children as my siblings—not to think much of them at all beyond a bone-deep guilt and sadness. A guilt and sadness I never wanted my children to feel.

That’s why I hadn’t taken Dolley’s advice, and nothing had changed. So I never found a suggestion. Now Tom made one of his own. “When Governor Nicholas vacates the office, I believe I’d be a good successor. I can be appointed to the post from the state legislature, and . . . the governorship comes with a salary. Money that can’t be lost to droughts or tobacco rot or Hessian flies. Money that’s certain.”

It was as close as my husband could come to admitting that the planter’s way of life that had sustained generations of Virginians in wealth and luxury was a lifestyle in utter decay. My father’s idealistic visions of an agrarian Republic where men’s wealth could be measured in land no longer reflected reality. At least not our reality.

Tom didn’t need my permission, but he seemed to be asking for it. “Richmond’s not so far that I can’t be at your side within a few hours’ hard ride. But I’d have my own bed there—in my own house.”

That might be the most important part, I thought. Tom would no longer be living under his father-in-law’s roof. No longer a man whose position was uncertain. He might no longer be thought of as Thomas Jefferson’s underachieving political and intellectual heir—and dependent, but rather, master of a mansion in Richmond and the entire state of Virginia.

“Of course you’d be a good successor,” I managed as I debated the wisdom of an even greater distance between us. Given the long tension between us, how could I do anything but support him?





Chapter Thirty-five