America's First Daughter: A Novel(94)

Nevertheless, I began flipping through the pages of papers published this past summer and fall. My eyes landed on one passage right away.

Cautious and shy, wrapped up in impenetrable silence and mystery, seated on his pivot chair, Mr. Jefferson is involved in political deception. . . .

I’d seldom heard a word of censure against my father. He’d been, here in America and in France, idolized by nearly everyone. I suppose that’s why my cheeks stung to read such pointed criticism. Rifling through pages so violently I might’ve torn them, I found another attack.

Had an inquisitive mind sought evidence of Mr. Jefferson’s abilities as a statesman, he’d have found the confusions in France. As a warrior, to his exploits at Monticello. As a mathematician, to his whirligig chair.

I frowned anew that anyone might blame the “confusions” in France upon Papa and not the royalists who bankrupted their country and left the peasants to starve. It embittered me, too, that we were to still suffer censure for our late-night flight from Monticello—where I suppose they believed we ought to have brandished pistols and pitchforks against the trained British dragoons, women and children, and all.

And what was their obsession with my father’s chair?

As a philosopher, his discovery of the inferiority of blacks to whites, because they’re unsavory and secrete more by the kidneys.

There I stopped, remembering that Sally had brought this to my attention. Perhaps if I’d not come of age in France, I wouldn’t have felt such an acute shame, but I couldn’t look at either Sally or Mary. I could only whisper, “Who wrote this? Do we know these men?”

Mr. Bell stepped down off his ladder. “Some say it’s the secretary of the treasury using different names.” Given all my father had said of Mr. Hamilton, I believed it. “But plenty of others agree with him. Not just northerners either. John Marshall is leading the Federalists here in Virginia, and now Patrick Henry is going over to that side, too.”

Patrick Henry. The very man who cried give me liberty or give me death, had spread the story of my father’s supposed cowardice in the face of British soldiers. Though I had only childhood memories of the famous orator, I’d long disliked Patrick Henry as my father’s political enemy. Now my anger was fueled anew.

“They’re calling on your father to resign,” Sally said, pulling me from my bitter thoughts. “They’re digging for an excuse, and the gossip about your kin—”

“Nancy Randolph hasn’t been under my father’s roof in nearly two years!” Quickly, I brought my fingers to my lips, as if to recall what I’d said, for it was a tacit admission that I believed my sister-in-law guilty.

Fortunately, if the Hemingses knew anything, it was discretion. Clutching one of the screeds against my father, Sally replied, “It doesn’t seem as if Federalist writers care much for facts or fairness.”

No, they didn’t. And if these men could work themselves up into such a furor over my father’s chair, what would they make of kin who lived in incestuous and adulterous union, and murdered a baby? Still, I tried to persuade myself that the scandal wouldn’t touch my family. “Surely, no one could think my father would tolerate the debauching. . . .”

There I trailed off. I couldn’t pretend in front of the Hemingses—no matter how discreet they might be—that nothing improper ever took place under my father’s roof.

For Sally Hemings was proof that, in fact, it did.





HONOR. IN VIRGINIA it wasn’t merely a matter of masculine pride—it was a matter of survival. Every loan for the farm, every advance of credit for seeds and foodstuffs, every public office and proposal of marriage depended on honor.

Men would fight and die for it.

And women would lie for it.

Which is why, whenever asked about the rumors about Nancy and Richard—as I was, more and more often that spring—I dismissed it as an absurd story having no merit.

If only others had done the same.

When Tom learned there were white witnesses, he flew into a rage that had him slamming about the house, heaping undeserved abuse on every servant he passed. And whenever he heard Richard’s name, he cursed in the most obscene manner possible. Egged on by his younger brother, Tom determined to ride out and rescue Nancy from the clutches of her seducer, who must be made to confess and suffer the loss of his honor.

Tom said it often, and to everyone who’d listen, which struck me as madness, for it fueled the gossip.

But then, the entire world had gone mad.

The new revolutionary government in France had charged Lafayette with treason. A galling notion—the very idea of Lafayette being a traitor to the revolution he helped start was an unjust, enraging indignity! More ridiculous and horrifying was that in attempting to escape arrest, Lafayette had been caught by counterrevolutionary forces, who also deemed him a traitor.

He was, as of the last news we had, in a dungeon awaiting execution.

Even consumed at Monticello with chores, child rearing, and family scandal, I couldn’t seem to shake the violence this news did to my faith in the revolution. What knaves had come to power in France that they could turn on Lafayette?

Perhaps the same sort of knaves who hounded my father in the papers, savaging his ethics, and twisting every word that flowed from his pen . . .

That’s why I wasn’t surprised when Papa wrote to tell me that he couldn’t resign for fear his enemies would say he was driven out of office or that Washington had no confidence in him. Or they’d say that he ran from public office like he ran from the British.