America's First Daughter: A Novel(178)
He reached for our son’s bad arm, as if to wrench it, and I stepped between them. “Tom, you can never want for a home while my father possesses one. And our son won’t leave you—”
“I’ll take nothing from a thief.” Tom trembled like a man swept up in a storm, clutching at his chest, all the color gone from him. Then he limped away.
To escape the prying eyes of onlookers, I hastened to the carriage, murmuring, “He’s ill.” For I knew no other name for it. “His health’s failing from excessive anxiety of mind.”
Handing me into the carriage, Jeff said, “I cannot have yours doing the same, so I’ve made arrangements with a common friend to assist him. He won’t accept help from me, but he’ll take it from a friend, and I’ll reimburse that man for his pains.”
I grasped his hand, grateful beyond measure. This’d been no easier on Jeff than on any of us, but he’d borne it. “Your father won’t appreciate it, but I do.”
The tapestry of my life was unraveling, one strand at a time.
Once the grandeur and radiance of Lafayette’s visit was gone, I looked around me and saw everything at Monticello in disrepair. The paint flaked off the walls and railings and molding. The roof let in melting snow and rain. My father, so proud of his house, so fastidious and attentive to its appearance, didn’t seem to notice, and I told myself that Jeff had been too busy with the calamity of my husband’s bankruptcy to give my father’s estate his attention.
But that winter one of my father’s loans had come due . . . and Papa couldn’t pay.
“What can you mean that he can’t pay?” I asked Jeff as the carriage jostled us along, having relied upon my father’s promises to look after me and the children, no matter what befell my husband’s fortunes.
“Grandfather overestimated the value of his holdings,” Jeff told me, gravely. “Monticello is difficult to make profitable. Water and supplies must be hauled up. The house itself requires an enormous amount of firewood to heat it. There’s the expense of supporting the Negroes. We’ll have to move the family to Poplar Forest.”
I didn’t understand what he was saying.
And he braced himself, continuing on. “We’ll take with us only the necessary furniture and a small household of servants. Then we’ll sell or rent the whole of Monticello and auction as many Negroes as we can to pay the debts.”
The blood drained from me so suddenly I sank into the cushions of the carriage in a near swoon. This had already been the ugliest day of a life filled with its share of ugly days, and this blow nearly stopped a heart that was already broken.
Leave Monticello? It’d been the constant star, the steady anchor in all our troubles. Surely Jeff was overstating the financial situation in which we found ourselves. “But the price of crops will go up. They do. Up and down.”
“Mother,” Jeff said, covered in a sweat in spite of the cold. “You’ve no notion of the debts Grandpapa has acquired. More than my father’s debts. More by far. And the crisis is at hand. To delay it will be complete ruin only a few years down the road, without a home to shelter you or the children.”
I couldn’t fathom selling Monticello. It’d be a bitter sacrifice to leave its comforts, but nothing compared to the anguish of seeing my father turned out of his house and deprived in his old age of the few pleasures he was still capable of enjoying. “Have you told your grandfather this plan? It’ll kill him!”
And it nearly did.
I was there, holding my father’s hand, when Jeff delivered the news, and the shock was as dreadful as we foresaw. My father—my strong, giant of a father—began to weep. “I’ve lived too long. My death can only be an advantage to my family now.”
“You’re very wrong!” I cried, for his death was the thing I most feared all my life.
My son, always pragmatic, echoed my horror but explained the financial reality, too. “Grandpapa, even independent of our love for you, your death under existing circumstances would be a calamity of frightful magnitude. Your life isn’t only precious to our hearts, but necessary to the interests of your daughter and grandchildren.”
What he meant was that just by living, my legendary father cast a shield over us all. While he was alive, the most ruthless of our creditors wouldn’t dare to strip us bare.
They say tragedies come in threes. There was first the auction of Edgehill. Next the blow that we might lose Monticello. And then my daughter Ann came to us in the dead of winter, battered, bleeding, and bruised.
ANN STAGGERED INTO MONTICELLO clutching a threadbare shawl too small to cover her swollen stomach. She’d been badly beaten—her eye half-shut with swelling, bleeding scrapes on her elbows and knees. Ann wasn’t very heavy, even with her rounded pregnant belly; she was nothing but shivering skin and bones. “I can’t stay with Charles,” she said, weeping, as if we were in any doubt. And when we got her in front of a fire, she said, “He’ll kill me. I fear he’s already killed the baby in my womb. Please don’t tell Jeff I’m here. He’ll convince Grandpapa to turn me out, and I’d deserve it. I’d deserve it.”
“Never,” I said, rocking her as if she were still a small child. “Jeff’s in Richmond on your grandfather’s business, but even if he were here, he wouldn’t turn you out. Nor would your Grandpapa ever hear of it. You’re safe here, my precious Ann.”