America's First Daughter: A Novel(157)

When the doctor went out, I went in. On a moan, Jeff tried to rise up on the arm that wasn’t nearly severed from his shoulder. And I snapped, “You lay back down! Jane will be here soon or we’ll take you to her when you’ve recovered.”

“My arm.” Jeff groaned, falling back against the pillow. “The doctor says I’ll never be able to use it again.”

I held my breath, trying to imagine my boy maimed. My strong son with his broad back who prided himself on his ability to outwork his father . . . diminished forever in his abilities. And I didn’t care so long as he lived. Stroking his hair, I murmured, “My precious Jeff.”

He gritted his teeth. “Where’s Bankhead?”

“He’s been arrested for attacking you.”

“He didn’t attack me.” Jeff closed his eyes in an excess of emotion that might’ve been shame. “When grandfather found me lying in my own blood, he bent his head and wept. He wept for me, and I couldn’t disappoint him. I couldn’t tell him the truth.” Jeff cried in anguish. “I struck the first blow. I swung down off my horse with my whip and advanced on Bankhead. We quarreled about some things he said about my wife, and I swore that if he did violence to my sister again I’d beat him down like a slave. He shouted that he could kill Ann dead and there wasn’t anything I could do to stop him. So I hit him with my whip and I remember nothing else till Bacon was pulling us apart.”

“Oh, Jeff,” I said, one hand to my cheek.

“Charles isn’t guilty. I am.”

“You’re guilty of nothing,” I whispered. I didn’t care what the law might say. I never felt prouder of my son and wasn’t about to let him think he’d brought this misery upon himself. “Jeff, you’re remembering it wrong. Your pain is bending your mind. Rest easy with a clear conscience. Overseer Bacon says Charles attacked you.”

And I vowed that Bacon would keep on saying it.

When the laudanum did its work and Jeff drifted to sleep, I ought to have been too weary to stand. But anger is a kind of fuel, and I went in search of my father. I found him in the greenhouse, near a carelessly abandoned stack of clay pots and digging tools, feeding seeds to his newest mockingbirds, who serenaded him with a French tune.

“What are you doing out here, Papa?” I asked, rubbing my arms against the cold.

Looking over the dried-out stalks the gardener had yet to prune for next year’s planting, he murmured, “It’s winter. A time when everything we’ve planted withers and dies on the vine.”

No. I would not hear it. I would not. Choking back tears, I said, “Jeff is strong. He’ll live.”

My father hung his head. “Ah, Patsy. What tragedy that two young men of my own family have come to this.”

“They aren’t both family,” I snapped. “Vows were said, but if Charles were Ann’s husband in truth, would he put hands on her the way he does?”

I waited for my father to utter some optimistic platitude, but his shoulders slumped. “I fear she’ll meet her end at his hands unless we keep her here.”

“She won’t go back with him,” I insisted. “Not after this. We won’t let him take her.”

But by morning, Ann was gone.





“DON’T TELL ME I CAN DO NOTHING!” my husband shouted, love for his son showing itself as pure, unadulterated fury. “I’m the governor of the goddamned state.”

Charles had made bail and fled the county, taking Ann and our grandchildren with him. And having returned from Richmond to hear this, Tom was an inferno. “I wish I’d caved in his skull, even if it ended in my swinging from the gallows.”

A savage part of me understood just how he felt, but I wouldn’t trade my husband’s life for Bankhead’s blood. We were promised that if Charles set foot in Albemarle, he’d be jailed. Meanwhile, neighbors were feeding a steady stream of gossip and my poor son begged us to let the matter drop. It was because Jeff carried guilty secrets with less alacrity than I’d always done, but my daughters all believed it was a gallant gesture to protect Ann. And they privately blamed her for taking Charles’s part with a ferocity only sisters can. Cornelia confided that if justice wasn’t served, she hoped never to see Mr. or Mrs. Bankhead ever again.

Though I had a babe still in diapers to care for, little children who ran about like wild things, and a plantation full of ser vants to manage, I spent that spring and early summer dedicated entirely to helping Jeff use his arm again. Jeff tried riding, but couldn’t do it without assistance. Each night, he’d collapse in my sitting room, suffering, inside and out. “It’s no use.” He stared with withering scorn at the offending limb. “I’m maimed.” And when his wife pressed a cloth to his forehead he shouted, “Leave it alone, Jane! I’m good for nothing.”

When she scurried from the room, Jeff sulked in my chair.

A boy might rightly expect coddling from his mother—to be taken against her soft bosom to weep at cruel fate. But it was a soft heart that brought my family to this place. “How would you feel if you heard your father speak to me that way?”

Jeff’s eyes blazed. “I have heard him speak to you that way.”

There was no use denying it. “Well, I suppose you have, but the way you hollered at Jane just now . . . that’s how your sister’s husband behaves. Except that you’re sober and don’t have the excuse of Charles’s madness.”