America's First Daughter: A Novel(93)

We’d take Nancy with us. Maybe to Charlottesville, where we could marry her quickly before the rumor spread. But Nancy would have none of it. “If I go, it’ll only feed the gossip.”

“Nonsense,” I said, folding my own clothes for the trunk as my maid was nowhere to be found. “No one in Albemarle will have heard about this.”

I was determined to drag Nancy away if necessary, but Judith surprised me by making herself the most formidable obstacle to my plans. She went directly to my husband and said, “If you take Nancy, it’ll reflect poorly on Richard. It’ll look as though you don’t trust your own brother-in-law.”

Knowing Richard had seduced Judith before their marriage, I guessed my husband wouldn’t find this argument compelling. Tom snapped, “How can it be unmannerly to take my own sister home with me?”

Then Richard’s brother John intervened. “Now Toooom,” he drawled, smoothly stretching out his name. “If you take Nancy, it’ll look as if you don’t believe her innocence.” If there was anyone at Bizarre we were certain hadn’t seduced Nancy, it was John. Stunted but more effusive than a Frenchman, he was as persuasive as a serpent in the Garden of Eden, so we left Nancy there.

We were quiet on the way home, but for little Ann, whimpering at every bump in the road, unable to keep down her breakfast of milk-soaked biscuit. The journey should’ve only taken hours, but with our girl spitting up and our boy fussing at my breast, it seemed like days. I was already weary when we rolled up to the mountaintop and saw Sally on the front portico, her amber eyes intent on me.

“Miss Patsy,” she said with an urgency that told me she’d been waiting. Though every other slave on the plantation now called me Mistress Randolph, Sally rarely did, either a sign of her intimacy with me or our complicated history. Waiting until Tom had gone in the house with the babies, she rushed up to me. “There’s a rumor in Charlottesville about your Randolph kin—about Miss Nancy.”

That the news had traveled so far, so fast, surprised me. But it shouldn’t have. In slave society, families on one plantation almost always had kin on another. Slaves hired out, they traveled as messengers, worked as boatmen and coach drivers, and saw one another at church. If they wanted to get word to each other, they could. What should have surprised me was the insistence of the slaves telling this tale, even under threat of their master’s whip.

With a weary sigh, I nodded. “We’ve heard it, Sally. It’s just Mr. Harrison’s people telling a malicious story and they’ll be punished for spreading it.”

Sally gave a quick shake of her head, her bronze fingers tightening into fists. “At least twelve of Mr. Harrison’s people claim to know something of it personally. Maids saw Miss Nancy naked and big with child. Some heard her scream at night. Some saw Richard Randolph go into her room. And there’s a bloodstained wood shingle.”

So Richard had apparently taken no care to shield his sins from their eyes. Such indiscretion might be that of a man who wished to help his sister-in-law in need. Or in a man who was guilty.

Either way, it was the act of a fool.

Sally leaned in. “White folk are talking, too. Mr. Page says he’s seen Richard Randolph’s familiarity with Miss Nancy, kissing and hugging on her. Nancy’s aunt says she saw her in a state of undress . . . that she was with child. And the white housekeeper saw bloody sheets the next day.”

White witnesses. That changed absolutely everything. I glanced nervously at the house, hoping Tom was well out of earshot.

Sally lowered her voice to a whisper. “I heard it at Mr. Bell’s store. My sister Mary thought it might touch on us, here at Monticello, given that Miss Nancy stayed here for a time. And given what people are saying about your father.”

That stopped me cold. “What are people saying about Papa?”

Sally’s pretty dark lashes swept low. “You haven’t seen the gazettes?”

Most of the Hemingses could read and write, though how they’d learned, I’d never asked. Still, it surprised me a little that they’d been following matters in the papers. “Let me see them.”

“We haven’t any papers here,” Sally said. “They’re all down at Mr. Bell’s store. But it’s dreadful. In the press, Master Jefferson is being attacked for everything from intrigue to dishonor.”

Fury washed through me. I was already road weary and worried for my husband’s state. And now to learn Papa had been attacked! Despite my exhaustion, I got back in the carriage and summoned Sally to follow, telling the driver, “To Charlottesville, straightaway.”





MR. BELL’S STORE stood on the corner of Main Street. Boxes and barrels crowded together in the middle of the wood plank floor while tins and glass bottles and blue-painted plates lined the shelves. The scent of lavender wafted down from baskets hanging on the eaves overhead so that, tall as I was, I had to stoop to get to the counter where Mary Hemings busied herself boxing up a pipe for a customer, who replied, “Thank you, Mrs. Bell.”

Mary wasn’t Mr. Bell’s wife, but given the way Thomas Bell smiled at her from where he stacked goods on a high shelf, he was plainly smitten. Everyone in Charlottesville seemed willing to accept the arrangement, and I was happy to do the same.

Sally sorted through stacks of pamphlets and pulled free some copies of the Gazette of the United States. Handing them to me, she warned, “It’ll sicken you.”