America's First Daughter: A Novel(92)

And that was to say nothing of a dead baby!

When Nancy looked to Richard for help, my husband’s rage worsened, his knuckles going white. Tom turned to Richard, too, and I thought he might commit murder then and there.

But just then, Judith gave a bitter laugh. “It’s just slave talk. This is what happens when we hold Negroes in bondage. I imagine this dreadful rumor is being spread by Mr. Harrison’s slaves to embarrass him. Or to urge him to be a better, more benevolent father over them.”

Judith’s explanation had merit. Mr. Harrison was known as a cold and heartless slave master. His slaves very well might want to call his honor and authority into question. I glanced at Tom, hoping he’d calm himself. But my husband’s jaw was so tight I thought he’d chip a tooth if he tried to speak.

He didn’t speak. Not a word. Only later that night, on the pillow beside me, did he finally ask, “It’s too preposterous a tale about Nancy to be believed, isn’t it?”

“Entirely preposterous.” Silently, I counted back the months. “Why, in order for it to be true, she’d have got with child when last we visited here!”

Besides, I couldn’t imagine how any woman could hide a pregnancy. Sally hadn’t been able to hide it. When I was fat with my own two babies, there wasn’t a person alive I could’ve fooled. And even if Nancy could hide such a thing, I couldn’t imagine anyone killing a baby. Certainly not my own kin.

“Don’t think on it another moment, Tom. We’ll put it out of our heads,” I said, stroking his arm.

That’s precisely what I aimed to do. Especially since I was nursing the newborn and worrying for my daughter, whose tummy troubles brought her whimpering into our bed in the wee hours of the morning. Laying her against the warmth of her father’s strong shoulder, I took a candle from the bedside and padded barefoot down the stairs to search out some peppermint for her to gnaw on.

The kitchen at Bizarre was much the same as I’d left it, but when I opened the canister where I expected to find peppermint, I found something else. With a mounting sense of dread, I recognized it as gum guaiacum—the very thing Judith once said could get rid of an unwanted child.

I stood there, staring into the depths of that shadowy canister, trying to deny the truth of what I was seeing. Then a question came out of the dark. “What are you looking for, Patsy?” Nancy’s sharp profile emerged from the shadows, startling me. And the sight of her in her nightclothes, hair unkempt, as if she’d just tumbled from a man’s bed, made my heart hard.

Rounding on her, I whispered, “Who was it? Who was the father?”

Nancy turned so that her face fell into the shadows. “I don’t know what you’re saying.”

I brought the candle closer, wanting to see the truth in her eyes. “Was it Theo, God rest his soul?” It couldn’t have been freakishly boyish John, whose impotence made it impossible. That left Theo as the least horrifying possibility. If spirited young Nancy had fallen in love with sickly Theo . . . if he’d meant to marry her but died before he could . . .

“There was no baby,” Nancy hissed, still turned away.

I wanted to believe her, truly I did. But if she was telling the truth, why couldn’t she meet my eyes? “Then it was Richard?” I asked, appalled. Their union would be considered not merely adulterous but also incestuous.

Still, there was a worse possibility—one that might explain the determination of slaves to spread the gossip even under threat of their master’s whip. I took another step closer, my own voice trembling. “Or was it a Negro slave?”

Nancy’s jaw snapped shut, and she finally dared to meet my eyes, hers burning like coals. “I said there was no baby, Patsy. Do you hear me? There was no baby!”

I didn’t know if she was lying to me or lying to herself.

I only knew she was lying.

Every hair lifted on the nape of my neck at her desperation, hoping it was only the kind of desperation that would drive a terrified, unmarried girl to abort her baby and not the kind that might allow her lover to chop up that baby once it was born. “Oh, Nancy,” I said, nearing tears for the dead child and the pain this would cause her family—and how it would destroy my husband.

She grabbed my arm like a drowning woman. “Say you hear me. There never was a baby.”

There never was a baby. Just like my father had never wanted to kill himself, never taken a married woman as his lover, and never conceived a child with Sally Hemings.

“I hear you, Nancy,” I said, bitterly. “I hear you.”





Chapter Twenty


Philadelphia, 12 November 1792

From Thomas Jefferson to Martha Jefferson Randolph

I have nothing to tell you but that I love you dearly, and your dear connections, that I am well, as is Maria. I hope your little one has felt no inconvenience from the journey, that Ann is quite recovered, and Mr. Randolph’s health good. Yours is so firm, that I am less apt to apprehend for you: Still, however, take care of your good health, and of your affection to me, which is the solace of my life.

WANTING TO PROTECT MY HUSBAND’S GOOD HEALTH, I said nothing to him about the gum guaiacum or my confrontation with his sister. It wouldn’t have done him any good, and may have done a great deal of harm.

If it became known that Nancy had been pregnant, the prospects of her entire life would be forever diminished. She’d find it nearly impossible to secure a husband. She’d become a spinster, forever a financial burden on the family without any place to call her own. So, I told myself to be kind to Nancy, that she’d been preyed upon by a man who ought to have known better. That she was a victim of error if not slander, and it’d be best to carry her away from here.