America's First Daughter: A Novel(156)

“It’s Jeff,” Ellen cried, her eyes flitting with fury to her older sister. “Your worthless malignant husband stabbed our brother!”

As my heart leapt into my throat, the napkin fell from my father’s hand. Papa rose to his feet at once. “Where?”

“Charlottesville,” Bacon answered. “They came to blows in the courthouse square. I had them carry your grandson inside Leitch’s store and put him upon a bale of blankets, but . . . he can’t be moved. He’s bleeding badly and the physician doesn’t expect him to live until morning.”

Those words ringing in my head in all their horror, my legs went out from under me. The next moment, I was on the floor staring up at the fireplace where fickle Fates carved in Wedgwood danced in blue mockery before my eyes.

“Loosen her stays,” Ellen insisted while my other daughters crowded around me, fanning my face.

In my continued illness from childbirth, I’d swooned away like some delicate damsel when all I wanted was to get to my son. “Jeff,” I gasped. Servants rushed in to help and all the while I kept saying, “Tom, please take me to Jeff.” But Tom wasn’t there. My husband, the new governor of Virginia, lived now in Richmond, a thing I’d somehow forgotten in the fog of my terror. “A carriage—someone get me a carriage. I must go to my son!”

“No, Martha.” The long absent steely edge of fatherly command returned to Papa’s voice. “If Charles is on a drunken rampage again, he’ll come here next for Ann.”

“He can’t have done this,” Ann sobbed. “Charles isn’t drinking anymore. He wouldn’t stab my brother for no reason!”

“He is drinking again, Mrs. Bankhead.” Bacon accepted a glass of water and chugged it down. “He literally rode his horse into a tavern. Your brother confronted him. Jeff said something to him about abusing you, and Mr. Bankhead sprang on him with a knife. I had to pull your husband off your bleeding brother myself.”

Ann backed away from the truth of Bacon’s words. “Not for my sake. This can’t have happened for my sake!”

As deeply as I felt her anguish, I could think of nothing but Jeff. I struggled into a sitting position and grasped at Ellen’s shoulder. “Get the carriage.” The elegant arched room spinning around me, I looked up at Papa, then to Bacon. “Get the carriage now. Please!”

“Patsy, you’re not well enough,” my father snapped, using my childhood name to command me. “Stay with the girls. Bolt the doors. Hide if Charles comes. I’ll post Burwell, Beverly, and Bacon to stand guard over you.”

Ellen rose and stepped in front of my father. “You’re not riding out by yourself, are you?”

“Fetch my horse,” he instructed the servants in a tone that brooked no opposition. “Eagle.”

Eagle was a far more accommodating mount than the spirited Caractacus had been, but still we worried. The servants wouldn’t oppose Papa, but Ellen did. “Grandpapa, it’s cold and dark. You can’t go galloping into the winter night!”

But that’s exactly what my seventy-five-year-old father did, hurtling himself up into the saddle like a man half his age, applying the whip, and, with only the moon as his guide, disappearing in a clatter of hooves off into the snowy forest.





THEY BROUGHT MY SON HOME IN A WAGON, my heart breaking with each turn of its wheels on the icy road. The servants rushed to lift the makeshift stretcher upon which my boy lay covered in dried blood, one limp hand dragging in the snow.

Jeff was still alive, but barely. We had him carried into the bedroom opposite my sitting room, onto the alcove bed, which the girls stripped of its damask bedspread. He’d been stabbed in the hip and arm. He’d lost so much blood that he was as pale as a newborn babe, and I still remembered Jeff that way. My father’s little namesake, the baby who made me realize for the first time that I loved my husband. The little boy who, from his first breath, embodied hope for my family.

If he died, so would everything hopeful or loving in me.

While the physician rebandaged Jeff’s wounds, servants got a fire burning and warmed sherry for him. Meanwhile, my daughters crowded in the doorway. “I hope Charles swings for this,” Cornelia said, her dark eyes flashing with the Randolph. “I hope he’s tried and convicted and that I’m there to witness him at the end of a noose!”

Ann recoiled, sobbing into a handkerchief. “You don’t mean that. He’s the father of my children. Surely you don’t mean that!”

“Of course she doesn’t,” I said, very calmly. My daughters were Randolphs; their tempers ran hot. But mine ran cold. “A trial would cause a sensation and bring shame down upon your grandfather’s good name. Instead, we’ll hire a keeper to prevent mischief, lock Charles in a room with all the whiskey he desires, and let him finish himself off.”

My words made Ann shudder. She eyed me with scarcely disguised horror, backing away, as if she had apprehended a monster in me she’d never known dwelt there before.

But I meant every word. I’d done my daughters no favors hiding behind feminine virtues, allowing men to do as they pleased with little more than sarcasm and secrecy for protest. Seeing my son half-dead, something changed in me—my willingness to obey, my willingness to accept, to let the men handle it was gone.