America's First Daughter: A Novel(85)
From that moment, I knew Gabriella would make life miserable for my husband and his siblings. They must’ve known it, too, because when it was time for us to leave, Tom’s youngest sisters clung to his legs and begged him to take them away with us.
“Now, girls,” I said gently. “Do your best to welcome your father’s new wife, and make Tuckahoe a place of happiness and contentment for everyone.”
But I felt a peculiar uneasiness on the road. And in the carriage, Tom turned to me and said, “I wasn’t apt to like her, but I never guessed Gabriella would be such a horrible woman.” So alone amongst the men, he hadn’t been ensnared by her beauty. And I adored him a little bit for it. Even more when he said, “You cannot imagine how I want to turn around, grab up my sisters, and carry them away with us.”
“I don’t have to imagine it. I feel it, too.”
His head jerked up and he stared. Then, all at once, heedless of who might see us through the carriage windows, he kissed me. He kissed me with such fierceness, such gratitude, such passion . . . that then and there, I promised myself for the hundredth time that I’d stop comparing him to William Short.
William had been pleasure and principles—in the end, he hadn’t understood the inexorable pull of family. Tom Randolph understood it, and because he did, a very real tenderness for him took root inside me right along with our babe already growing there. I might never love him; I was half-certain I could never fall in love again. But I was starting to feel something for Tom that might be deeper than love, if only I could find a name for it.
I WAS NEVER SO HAPPY to be back at Monticello as I was that autumn, when Papa returned from the capital. Dignity itself wouldn’t have stopped me from running into my beloved father’s arms, but I was too heavy with child to run.
Seeing me that way put a proud gleam in my father’s eye that warmed me from head to toe. But in putting his hand on my belly, that proud gleam faded to sadness, and I wondered if he was thinking of Sally’s little boy, dead and buried months ago.
When the news had finally reached him, he’d suffered his most violent headache yet, lasting nearly six weeks in duration, and with no one there to care for him. I wondered now what kind of reunion Papa and Sally might’ve had if she’d been here with the rest of the servants we’d summoned to welcome my father home. Instead, she was still with Polly at Eppington. I’d been slow to send for her when I learned my father would be coming—a mistake I’d never repeat after seeing Gabriella Harvie installed as mistress of Tuckahoe.
After witnessing the graceless way the new Mrs. Randolph claimed her position, elbowing poor Nancy out of the way, I believed myself to have been a fool for ever raising even the slightest objection to my father’s liaison with Sally.
I vowed to change my thinking in the matter. For I understood that the promise my mother exacted from my father not to marry was an act of maternal, not wifely, love. Perhaps remembering the remarriages of my grandfather Wayles before he had finally settled upon Elizabeth Hemings as his concubine, my mother had said she couldn’t bear to have a stepmother brought in over us.
It was no coincidence, then, that my father took up only with women he could never marry. Beautiful women who meant something to him without having to mean anything to us. Or women like Sally—a slave who could never push me or Polly out of my father’s home.
That night, when I sat down to play music with Papa in Monticello’s parlor, he grasped my hands and brought them to the light for inspection. “What’s this?” he asked of the state of my bruised knuckles and blistered thumbs.
“Just war wounds,” I said, remembering how I’d smashed those knuckles between two buckets while hauling water. “I’ve been fighting a battle against dirt and thirst at Varina.”
“Tom isn’t doing well for himself there?” he asked, the light of the fire highlighting the red of his hair.
Because I sensed in this some criticism of my husband, I said, “You wouldn’t blame him if you knew how little mercy he shows himself in trying to make a profitable farm. He’s strong, Papa, but he’s working himself near to death.”
My father smiled mildly, for he knew better than I did the hard work of plantation life. “No word, yet, on whether Colonel Randolph will sell him Edgehill?”
I shook my head, clenching my teeth to keep from saying something ugly about Colonel Randolph. Just then, Tom came in from some errand, his boots heavy on the floor. “Are you to make music for us, Patsy? I’ve never heard you sing.”
I preferred playing to singing, but Papa rescued me by announcing, “Tom, I regret imposing upon you, but I find myself in need of a favor. I supposed my appointment to France to be the last public office of my life. However, now my duties will keep me at President Washington’s side for an indeterminate time. And it pains me to see Monticello in this run-down state, my people still scattered to the winds.”
Sally, he meant, and I cursed myself again for not sending for her sooner.
Tom stood just behind me in my chair, his hand on my shoulder while Papa continued. “If you and Patsy would be willing to stay at Monticello through the winter and bring some order here, I’d be forever in your debt.”
The truth was that we’d be in his debt. It was an act of generosity—my father wanted to give us somewhere civilized to live while bringing our baby into the world. But in spite of my father’s exquisite diplomacy, Tom knew it for what it was. His hand squeezed my shoulder. “Mr. Jefferson,” he said, his tone just shy of indignant. “I don’t—”