America's First Daughter: A Novel(16)
Papa drifted to the window, pinching the bridge of his nose. He still had his back to Dr. Gilmer when the physician took his leave.
With a worried glance at my father, Ursula hurried to see the physician out. As if Papa had commanded it, she promised to compensate Dr. Gilmer with some of her special bottled cider. I realize now that I wasn’t alone in trying to maintain the illusion that Papa was still master of his plantation—and himself.
Because Polly was still crying, I nuzzled her close. “Hush, it’s all over. Now we can go out and play.”
“No,” Papa said without turning. “You and your sisters must be confined for the next few weeks. Then we’re leaving Monticello.”
My gaze jerked up. “Leaving?”
“I’ve accepted an appointment to Paris to negotiate the end of the war.”
Scarcely anything he could’ve said would’ve surprised me more. I remembered his promise to my mother that he’d retire from public life. That he’d retire to his farm, his books, and his family, from which nothing would ever separate him again. Just two months before, hours before my mother’s death, he’d angrily refused his election to the Virginia legislature. But now everything had changed, and I was left to wonder if his promises had died with her.
I didn’t want to leave. Neither did I want Papa to go without us. “Must you serve, Papa?”
My father gave a curt nod but said no more.
In the days that followed, my sisters and I suffered from nothing more than boredom, cooped up when we would rather have been romping through piles of autumn leaves.
Then the illness came upon us, fast and merciless.
And all Papa’s cool reserve melted away. He held the pail for our vomit, wiped the fevered sweats from our brows, and offered hushed, soothing words. Often when I surfaced from delirious dreams, the sound of his violin or his soft, rasping tenor as he sang comforted me back to sleep. Having already taken the treatment, Papa would let no one else care for us, lest we spread the contagion. And he cloistered with us together in the small make shift infirmary, our world narrowing again to only one another. Our little surviving family of four.
As we shivered in our beds and groaned with aches, we couldn’t have asked for a more attentive nurse than our papa.
When any bitterness steals into my heart for the choices I’ve made in devotion to my father, I remember that even in the depths of his stupor and despair, he found it within himself to protect us the best way he knew how.
At some point in my delirium, I awoke to the soft, mournful strains of his violin. The notes ached with a sweet sadness. Forcing my eyes open, I lifted my head from a sweat-soaked pillow. “Didn’t the treatment work, Papa?”
He lowered his instrument. “The science is sound. It asks us to suffer a milder form of the illness to guard against the more virulent attack.” He explained more, but the words were beyond my reach and my head ached intolerably. I must’ve said as much, because he glanced up at the ceiling, closing his eyes. “Patsy, suffering strengthens our constitutions and builds inner fortifications so that we never fall prey to the same agony twice. We must take upon ourselves a smaller evil to defend against the greater evil. We must take upon ourselves a smaller pain in order to survive.”
I was too young, then, and too overcome with illness to realize that the agony he spoke of was not smallpox. But his words weren’t madness, and they stayed with me long after the fever had passed. Even now they help me understand why my father felt the need to rip us from our home and hasten away with such urgency.
It pained him to leave Monticello.
But what would have survived of him if he’d stayed?
Chapter Four
Ampthill, 26 November 1782
From Thomas Jefferson to Chastellux
Before the catastrophe that closed this summer, my scheme of life had been determined. I’d folded myself in the arms of retirement, and rested all prospects of future happiness on domestic objects. A single event wiped away my plans and left me a blank I had not the spirits to fill. In this state of mind an appointment from Congress required me to cross the Atlantic. My only object now is to hasten over those obstacles which retard my departure.
AFTER THREE MONTHS of searching every brine-scented port in the colonies, Papa couldn’t find a ship willing to undertake the perilous winter voyage through waters filled with enemy vessels. And more than a few ship captains muttered darkly at my father’s persistence, wondering if he was a man chasing after an icy death.
It shames me still that I cannot say they were wrong.
Indeed, I feared they had exactly the right of it. We’d left Polly and Lucy with Aunt Elizabeth at Eppington, and though I missed my sisters, I was glad they didn’t have to witness this latest manifestation of Papa’s grief. While my father no longer stared down his pistols in the dead of night, he braved the brigand-infested roads with a recklessness that terrified me.
I wondered if I’d been wrong to keep Papa’s secrets. I wondered if I ought to have confessed the full breadth of my fears to Mr. Short the day he came upon us in the woods. But now there was no one to whom I could turn. For Papa kept us always moving from city to city.
Everywhere we found brown and red brick buildings squeezed close together, jostling carriages on snow-covered cobblestone streets, docks burdened with goods waiting to traverse safe seas, and mobs of people. The cities of the new states blurred, one into another, until we returned again to Philadelphia, where bells rang and celebrants gathered around great bonfires blazing orange in the streets in celebration of the news.