America's First Daughter: A Novel(86)
“I realize, of course, that I couldn’t ask you to toil here on my account forever,” Papa said quickly to soothe stung pride. “Not when you want a place of your own. But perhaps, in small repayment for your help, I could go to Tuckahoe and talk with your father about securing Edgehill for you. Perhaps his happy nuptials will put him in a mood to agree.”
At that moment, the gratitude I felt for my father was sweeter than jelly on fresh bread, hot from the oven. For a long moment, Tom didn’t reply, and I felt that I might burst in waiting for his answer.
Finally, Tom’s hand relaxed again and he gave a small bow. “I’m your humble servant, Mr. Jefferson, as always.”
Happiness welled in my chest. Farewell Varina.
I was to be, for the first time in my life, the mistress of Monticello.
ON A RIBBON WORN ROUND MY GROWING BELLY, I wore the keys to all the cabinets and storerooms at Monticello. And as a woman soon ready to birth a babe, I was in a frenzy to put the house right. I counted and polished my father’s silver like my mother had done before me. I kept close records of everything coming in and out of the kitchen. I brined meat in a big wooden salting barrel. I went a thousand times a day from the storehouse, to the washhouse, to the orchard, to the garden, to the kiln, then back to the storeroom again, navigating my way among sacks of grain and loaves of sugar and boxes of supplies.
And, of course, I found myself in command of the house servants—doling out their rations of cornmeal, fish, and pork. In France, when Sally was our maid, I’d not hesitated to direct her, but now that she’d returned to Monticello in my father’s absence, what was she? Fortunately, Sally took on mending and cleaning without having to be told, and so we settled into a silence all our own.
I’d lost a friend in her, without realizing that I’d had one. I tried never to show just how much I missed Paris and our friends there, great and small. Still, I did long for them. More than I would, or could, ever say. Which is why I nearly swooned when, as the Indian summer gave way to the first bite of winter, a letter from Marie de Botidoux came to the house.
The packet had taken some time to arrive because the post was in a shambles. Now, moving as fast as my belly would allow, I made for the parlor, my little sister trying to snatch the thick paper from me, crying, “I want to read Marie’s letter!”
Fortunately, my height made it easy to keep it from her reach. “It’s not for you, Polly.”
“Well, then, fine,” she fumed. “But I’m too grown-up to be called Polly—if you’re going by Martha, I want to be Mary.”
I lowered myself into an armchair. “If you’re so grown-up, go see if Mammy Ursula needs you to read out a recipe, then study Spanish so I don’t have to tell Papa how lazy you’ve been.”
Once she’d skulked off, I held the letter close, realizing that I might never see my friend again in the flesh. I was careful with the wax seal and reverently unfolded the page, grateful for the news from France.
Mirabeau—who had worked with my father and Lafayette to draft the Declaration of the Rights of Man—was dead. The French tricolor flag was officially adopted. Hereditary titles had been abolished. Catholicism would no longer be the religion of the state. Finally, the king tried to escape and rouse Prussia and Austria to restore the monarchy by force of arms, but was captured by the revolutionaries before he could do so.
And I couldn’t find it in myself to feel sorry.
Who but Papa would understand this news as I did? We’d returned to a country much transformed by six years of relative peace. America’s war of independence was already, for some, a distant memory—the extraordinary sacrifices now an unpleasant recollection, easily buried under the business of rebuilding ordinary lives.
People forgot the fragility of our enterprise as a new nation, and sometimes forgot, too, how much we owed France for it. But it was different for my father and me. We’d gone from one revolution to another, leaving America flush with victory only to find ourselves ensnared in the same struggle for liberty on a distant shore.
For us, the revolution had never ended.
Papa’s words had shaken the world, but if liberty failed in France, it could still fail in America, too. Then everything we’d sacrificed would be for naught. However, letting my eyes caress each cherished word of Marie’s letter, it wasn’t only the politics that pained me—there were also the lines she penned of William Short.
According to Marie, he had despaired my leaving France. So much so that when she asked after his feelings for me, William angrily renounced them. Marie didn’t believe him; she wrote that she thought he still loved me. But this was long ago. It had been just over a year since I’d left him, and now I was great with another man’s child.
It doesn’t matter any longer, I told myself.
Nevertheless, my mind was still in a fog of regret when I stumbled upon my husband in the greenhouse, some unrecognizably bloody animal hacked to pieces on a butcher block under his hands. “What can you be doing?” I asked, tugging my shawl around me.
“Dissecting a dead opossum,” Tom replied, as if there were nothing odd about it at all. The kill was fresh, judging by the steam still rising off the remains of the carcass in the chilly air. “Your father has engaged in a debate with someone about the creature, and asked me to perform some experiments and observations to keep in a diary along with meteorological readings.”