America's First Daughter: A Novel(91)

She reached up her hands for her baby brother, and Tom knelt down to give her a closer introduction. In that moment, seeing the three of them together and happy, I felt suddenly overcome by a pang so deep in my heart that it undid me. Grasping at my chest and swallowing hard over my confused emotions, I realized what had happened.

Why, somehow, I’d fallen in love with my husband.

It wasn’t a sweet, dreamy love that made my heart skip. It didn’t make me want to shout and spin pirouettes on my toes. It was some other kind of love, so quiet it snuck up on me in the shadows. Nevertheless, it was as real as any love I’d ever felt, and my eyes misted over to feel it.

Tom peered up at me. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing at all,” I said, resolving to be so kind to him that he’d never need any other family but ours. And what a family it was. My son was a remarkably fine boy. Smaller than my daughter had been at his age, but healthier. So much so that, within a few weeks, we felt confident in taking little Jeff out into the world for a visit to Bizarre.

Given the news about Gabriella Harvie’s baby boy, I expected to find the Randolph sisters in a state and braced for the gnashing of teeth. But we found our hosts quietly melancholic. Judith smiled to see us, but it was a brittle smile. And Richard was wound tight as a drum as he told us about the recent death of his younger brother, Theo. Tom and I had already heard it was the laudanum that did him in. That, in the end, the young man had been a skeleton, unable even to walk on his own. But as we sat around the parlor at Bizarre, Richard insisted, “It was tuberculosis.”

My husband’s gaze flicked to his sister Nancy, who hadn’t found a husband yet and who wasn’t likely to find one, looking as frail as she did now. Her skin was like paper and she was unable to muster even a brittle smile. Indeed, the back of the settee appeared to be all that held her upright. I knew Tom was imagining what sort of mischief she’d gotten herself into here at Bizarre.

Was she taking laudanum, too?

“Nancy hasn’t been feeling well,” Richard said, putting a comforting hand upon her knee. The gesture was so intimate that Tom went rigid, a shadow over his eyes. And in spite of my happily gurgling baby boy, and Ann’s giggles as she ran about the house, the air went thick with tension.

So thick that I actually startled when someone banged on the front door.

None of the house servants went to answer it, but Judy got up and peered out a window at an angle from which she couldn’t be seen. Going pale, she said, “It’s our neighbors.”

“Well, aren’t you going to let them in?” I asked, anxious as any southern woman to the dictates of hospitality. Of course, if I’d known what the neighbors had come to say, I’d have barred the door myself!

The Harrisons hadn’t come on a social visit. Indeed, while her husband glowered, Mrs. Harrison left her bonnet on, though she tugged nervously at the pink ribbon holding it to her head. Standing just inside the room, as if she intended an abrupt exit, she finally said, “The rumor is still being passed around, Miss Nancy. We thought you ought to know.”

“What rumor?” my husband asked.

Mr. Harrison continued to glower, but to answer Tom, Mrs. Harrison chirped nervously, “The slaves are saying that the night your sisters and your brother-in-law stayed as guests in our home, Richard was seen taking a bundle out to the woodpile, and—” She glanced at Nancy’s belly, fluttering a bit in her unease.

Before she could continue her thought, Mr. Harrison cut her off with a blunt, “They’re saying Miss Nancy gave birth to Richard’s bastard and that he chopped it to pieces.”

Shooting to his feet, Richard cried, “Slander!”

Richard’s outrage was so convincing that I put a hand on Tom’s arm to still him. But my husband, too, shot to his feet. And he was plainly not convinced.

Richard insisted, “That’s a damnable lie.”

“Is it?” Mr. Harrison shot back. “You drag your whoring to my house and stain my name—”

“Please,” his wife begged of him, as if she might swoon away at the unpleasantness. And when her husband quieted, she added, “Nevertheless, you should know it’s being said. The servants claim they heard screams in the night and found bloody sheets in Miss Nancy’s bed.”

Nancy’s pretty big eyes rounded with fear or outrage; I couldn’t say which. “They were groans. Not screams. I was ailing from womanly troubles and pains in the abdomen. I’ve always suffered from colic. My sisters can tell you that’s true. Isn’t that right?”

“Of course it’s true,” I said, reflexively. “She’s always had terrible colic.” She’d never had colic in her life as far as I knew, but what else could I say as my husband went from red to purple?

The moment the Harrisons uttered some stilted courtesy and took their leave, Tom whirled on Nancy, grabbing her by the arms and pulling her to shaky feet. “Were you seduced, sister?”

Tears filled Nancy’s eyes. “There was never any baby. Someone’s telling lies!”

My husband didn’t believe it. He shook her, that familiar angry vein pulsing in at his temple. I’d never seen him so angry before, but I understood the cause. Not just the fear that young Nancy had been exploited by the man to whom we’d entrusted her care, but also that if her honor had been sullied by a baby begot out of wedlock, it’d sully Tom’s honor, too.