America's First Daughter: A Novel(80)

Though I bristled at Polly being excluded, I wanted desperately to be embraced by my husband’s family, so I didn’t raise a fuss. Still, I feared what I’d do or say if my father-in-law vented his temper on Polly, so I told her, “Keep out of the colonel’s way.”

Then I went with Nancy to meet her sister in the drive. When Judith stepped out of her husband’s carriage, she cried, “Why Martha! If I’d known you were going to marry my brother, I’d have waited to make it a double-wedding.”

Nancy scoffed, leading us to the tea table set up in the garden. “Oh, Judy. As if you could wait.” When Judith glared, she added, “I’m just saying you’re too vain to share your day with anyone else!”

“Well, I might have—” Judith broke off, stooping to pull some plants up by the root. “You’re a disaster as a housekeeper, Nancy. Just look what you’ve let happen to Mama’s herb garden. It’s overrun with weeds!”

Nancy cried, “How am I to know the difference between the herbs and weeds?”

Judith sniffed imperiously. “Well, if you paid attention to the medicinal arts instead of burying your nose in tawdry romance novels . . .”

I took my seat on a lawn chair, disheartened to hear the way my husband’s sisters bickered, smiling as though they were just teasing, but with a nasty undercurrent. And I was downright scandalized when Judith pointed to a patch of greenery and said, “If you’d had some clippings of that, Patsy, you wouldn’t have had to marry my brother in such haste.”

My mouth fell quite agape. “I beg your pardon?”

“Gum guaiacum,” Judy chirped. “Part of my mother’s special recipe for easing colic, but it’s also known to bring on a woman’s flow. So if you feared you were with child—”

“I beg your pardon,” I said, again, this time more sharply.

“Oh, don’t take offense,” Judith cooed. “You’re married now, and all the gossip in the world can’t undo that.”

With a flail of my hand that nearly upset the tea service, I cried, “What gossip?”

Judith put a hand to her hip. “You were scarcely betrothed to my brother a month. It’s only natural for everyone to speculate.”

“Judy,” Nancy said, in harsh reprimand.

“Oh, I’m not judging.” Judy lowered onto a seat beside me. “I confess I’m nothing short of pleased at the outcome. I always feared Tom would marry one of those pretty, empty-headed girls who titter behind their fans at the mere sight of him. I never thought he’d take a sensible bride. Why, Patsy, I don’t care how you landed my brother, only that you did! Never mind if people start counting back the months from when your first child is born.”

My first child. The thought of it nearly stunned me into silence. I knew, of course, it was the duty of a wife to give her husband children. But the reality that I might have a baby growing inside me hadn’t struck me until that very moment. Of course, if I was with child, there was nothing scandalous about it, and the gossips could count backward all they liked.





SALLY’S BABY DIED AT TUCKAHOE.

One spring morning, Sally came to me in a panic, holding her infant against her breast. “He won’t suckle and he’s coughing something terrible.”

We went to Colonel Randolph for help, but he didn’t care one whit about a slave girl’s baby. He didn’t want to send for a doctor, and though there was a cupboard full of dried herbs and medicines, Nancy didn’t know what any of them were for.

Only my husband offered any real help. A student of science who had learned medicine at the University of Edinburgh, he put his ear to the little baby’s chest. By the fire in the front parlor, cramming his long body into a small rocking chair, he cradled the infant boy, trying to get him to suck at milk from a cloth. But whatever ailed Sally’s baby, the poor little boy wasted away fast. And when he stopped breathing, Sally gave a howl that echoed through that big plantation house like wind in a dead winter forest.

I’d never heard her make a sound like that. Never before or since. And in spite of the coolness between us since Paris, I found myself holding her tight in my arms, as if I could keep her from flying apart.

“Poor little baby,” Polly sobbed.

Poor little baby, indeed. My poor little cousin, brother, and neither. I was to look after him. Both him and Sally. Papa had entrusted them to me. Now my father’s son was gone without ever having become a man, and there was nothing we could ever say to comfort his mother.

Sally Hemings had returned to Virginia, to slavery, to this life—all for the sake of my father and this baby. Now my father was off serving the president and their baby was gone. She’d made choices she could never take back. Choices none of us ever could. And I had to fight off my own tears to stay strong for her and my sister both.

“What’s all this carrying on?” Colonel Randolph shouted when he heard our lamentations echoing throughout the halls. When Tom told him, his father snorted with a dismissive flick of his hand. “Put a buck on that girl in a few weeks and she’ll breed another.”

At those words, my chin snapped up. I gave Colonel Randolph a look that could’ve set his whole house on fire, hoping to make him ashamed of himself. It didn’t mean anything to him to see Sally in pain, but it meant something to us. It meant something to me.