America's First Daughter: A Novel(167)

That made him shake me harder. “How could I ever hurt you? You never feel a thing! You’re unmoved. You’re like him. Unbend ing as marble. A statue. What man of flesh and blood can live with that?”

What man, indeed? By any other measure, Tom would be counted a great man. By any other measure than my father’s.

“You’re hurting me,” I repeated.

Tom let me go all at once before making his retreat, his boots crunching on broken glass. He slammed the door, the sound exploding through the house. I remember that sound and the way it shook me to the marrow of my bones. I remember, too, that Tom slammed the door with such force that the frame cracked and the door bounced back open again.

Weeks later, it was still broken, and through that open door walked a man I’d longed to see for years.





Chapter Thirty-eight


Boston, 29 August 1824

To Thomas Jefferson from Lafayette

Here I am, on American ground. I will hasten to Monticello. How happy I will be to embrace you, my dear friend. And I know the pleasure will be reciprocated.

LAFAYETTE HAD SURVIVED IT ALL.

Two wars, the Reign of Terror, imprisonment, and even Napoleon. He was the last surviving general of the American Revolution, and President Monroe had invited Lafayette to celebrate the forty-seventh anniversary of the Battle of Brandywine, where he had been wounded in our cause.

During Lafayette’s triumphal tour, he paid a call upon John Adams, accompanied by John Quincy, the secretary of state. Lafayette also traveled with the widow of Alexander Hamilton, whom he still called his brother. And in anticipation of Lafayette’s reunion with my father, people were already flocking to our mountaintop.

Given my state of distress and the rage the mere sight of me evoked in my husband, I closeted myself up with the servants in my sitting room, planning menus and making lists of supplies that must be purchased, while my daughters tended to the locust swarm of visitors. I startled when a knock came at my door and instead of a servant—in walked a hallucination, or apparition, or miracle—I couldn’t decide which.

Not Lafayette, but William Short in the flesh.

“Mon Dieu!” I cried.

“Cher Jeffy,” he said, his green eyes twinkling with mischief at my convent nickname. “It’s been too long, Mrs. Randolph.”

Indeed, it had, I thought, rising to take his hands. A glance out the window at his fancy hired carriage and heavy baggage told me that William hadn’t come all the way from Philadelphia on mere impulse. So how did he take me so unawares? My father hadn’t warned me to expect him. Was Papa’s memory failing him or did he hope Mr. Short’s visit would be a happy surprise?

Suddenly, I clutched at my cap, overaware of my curls, which had, with age, gone from copper-red to reddish-brown. “Mr. Short, you’ve caught me in quite a state of dishabille!”

He drew my hand to his lips for a kiss. “Not as great a state of dishabille as a man with my proclivities desires.”

It was a highly inappropriate remark to direct to a lady, married or otherwise. The kind of remark only a Frenchman would make. I blushed like a schoolgirl, but we were surely both of an age to render harmless such flirtation. He studied me while I studied him, taking in the changes. I knew I was thicker about the middle, my face rounder. His hair had silvered, and laugh lines crinkled at the corners of his eyes. I found his presence more reassuring than I could admit.

“What happened here?” Mr. Short asked, motioning with his chin to the broken doorframe. “Don’t tell me your father is tearing all this down to start over again.”

“I would not discount the possibility when it comes to Papa and his projects, but Monticello is nearly perfected,” I replied, deciding upon evasion. “Johnny Hemings will send one of his apprentices to fix the door shortly.”

By one of his apprentices, of course, I meant Madison and Eston. But there felt to me something deeply disloyal in mentioning Sally’s sons to William, who knew their father was also mine. “We’re all being kept very busy in the preparations for Lafayette’s visit.”

Glancing at the array of little papers and notes stored in all the cubbies on my overflowing desk, not to mention the line of servants waiting with baskets outside my open window, he said, “So I see.”

“I’ll make sure a room is readied for you—”

“Oh, no. I’ve already picked one out. I’m staying in the room with the trellis wallpaper,” he said with a little incorrigible smirk. “I hear Madison favors it, and it amuses me to think of leaving my nail clippings there for him to find when he stays here. So don’t let me interrupt whatever you’re doing. . . .”

Fighting a smile that would only encourage him, I said, “I’m buying up all the eggs and vegetables the servants can provide me with from their own gardens.”

“Aren’t your father’s own gardens productive here?”

“Certainly! It’s only that Papa is a scientist who insists upon growing fifty different varieties of peas, and we must have some variety on our plates for the arrival of Lafayette.”

Mr. Short laughed. “Well, I hope I can be a help rather than a burden in the preparations.”

“Oh, William, you could never be a burden.”

But by evening, I knew that to be a lie. For it taxed me to hide our family troubles from him. Since the night Tom slammed out of my sitting room, my husband spoke not two willing words, sour and taciturn at any question addressed to him. Not even by the power of my father’s authority and conciliatory nature could my husband be compelled to stay sober. And that first night of Mr. Short’s visit, by the time the girls and I returned with the tea tray at seven o’clock, Tom was drunk.