America's First Daughter: A Novel(96)
I’m not sure what I’d have said had the door not flown open. But open it did, and there stood Sally, her kerchief tight on her head, her brow furrowing as she took in the scene.
“What do you think you’re doing, Sally?” Tom snapped. “No one called for you.”
She ought to have fled, but when her majestic eyes found me sprawled on the floor, she stubbornly set her jaw. “Thought I heard something fall . . . you all right, Miss Patsy?”
I couldn’t bear for Sally to know how I’d been disciplined by my husband. That he’d struck me, just as I’d once struck her. “Perfectly fine,” I said over the lump in my throat. “These long and clumsy legs of mine get tangled up sometimes. Tripped over that basket.”
If she knew I was lying, she gave nothing away. Pushing past my husband, she said, “I’ll help you up.”
But gently taking my forearms, Tom said, “No need. I have her now.”
I WAS ALMOST GLAD THAT HE’D HIT ME.
Glad because it absolved me of my guilt.
I’d fretted about my father’s reputation, but I’d given too little thought to Tom’s. I deserved to be slapped to my senses. Everyone would have thought so. Besides, the incident seemed to have shaken Tom to his foundations. The man who said his honor wouldn’t countenance a lie hadn’t contradicted the story I told Sally. He’d taken me to our bedroom and suffered no one else to tend me, bringing me a cold wet cloth for my face and my supper tray with a bouquet of springtime flowers from the gardens.
Now he sat at my bedside, kissing my hand again and again, wetting it with his tears. “Forgive me, Patsy, though I don’t deserve it. Please, forgive me for lifting a hand against you. What a wretched man I am. Heartless, just like my father.”
“You aren’t wretched or heartless,” I said softly, reminding myself that I’d no right to speak to him the way I did and that he had every right to correct me for it. “I’ll gladly forgive your lifting a hand against me if you forgive me for having given such offense to have occasioned it.”
His voice was still shaky, his thumb reaching to brush the rising bruise underneath my eye. “There’s nothing you could say to justify my leaving such a mark on you. I’ve hurt you. My adored wife.”
Though my cheek still throbbed, I said, “It’ll heal and be forgotten.”
His expression crumbled again, with anguish and self-loathing. “No. I’ll never forget it. And it’ll never happen again. I’ll never again betray the sacred charge your father put in me in giving you over into my authority. A husband ought to be kind and indulgent with his wife. To protect her from harm. It won’t happen again, Patsy.”
I believed him.
His tortured expression would have been enough to convince me, but his behavior after confirmed it. For Tom never again spoke of dueling with Richard Randolph and resolved to be the peacemaker in his family. He didn’t even rise to the bait when Richard published a screed in the General Advertiser proclaiming his innocence and condemning his accusers without naming them. Everyone in Virginia knew he was slinging mud at my husband, but Tom kept his peace, determined not to give himself over to rage again.
And I loved him more for it. Watching him struggle against undeserved abuse from such a villain made me forgive him, truly. But then, I was prone to forgiveness in the aftermath of Richard Randolph’s wretched newspaper notice. Especially since the very same issue announced the execution of the king of France.
In truth, this news was more of a blow than the one my husband had dealt me. I never thought the French would put King Louis to the guillotine. The revolutionary men in my father’s parlor in Paris never even suggested it. Perhaps with France at war with its neighbors, the revolutionaries feared to hold the king captive when his very life encouraged enemies to attack them. And King Louis was guilty of all the crimes they accused him of.
But even believing that, the account in the paper made my fingers rise up to my own throat as I fought back the horror of imagining the blade slicing through it. Who were these Jacobins who had condemned Lafayette a traitor and killed the king? And would they come next for the friends I left behind in France, like Marie?
Until this news, Papa and I had held in contempt those who complained of the revolution’s excesses. They hadn’t witnessed all we’d witnessed in France. But the men who had seized the reins there now, could they be the same men that Papa and I had known and admired? Surely not.
Papa could explain it, I was sure. And I was near desperate to have him home—especially when he wrote that the news of Richard and Nancy’s disgrace had reached him all the way in Philadelphia.
The damned story would not die. The slaves wouldn’t let it. And every white man in Virginia who ever resented the haughty Randolphs called for justice. By the time April wildflowers were in bloom at Monticello, Richard sat in a Cumberland County jail, accused of fathering a child on his wife’s sister and murdering the babe.
And I was called to testify.
Chapter Twenty-one
THE CUMBERLAND COURTHOUSE WAS PACKED, cheek to jowl, between old wooden walls. “Jefferson’s daughter,” someone said as I entered, and the courtroom erupted, every gawker and gossip-monger in the county craning their necks to get a better look.
“Mrs. Randolph!” someone else cried, but beneath the white satin bow and broad rim of my fashionable hat, I kept my eyes on the magistrates—sixteen men in powdered wigs in whose hands the fate of my family’s reputation now resided.