Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Twenty-nine
Washington, 23 January 1804
To Martha Jefferson Randolph from Thomas Jefferson
The snow is still falling with unabated fury. I expect Mr. Eppes will leave in order to be with Maria at the knock of an elbow in February. On Friday Congress gave a dinner on the acquisition of Louisiana. As much as I wished to have yourself and sister with me, I rejoice you weren’t here. The brunt of the battle falls on the Secretary’s ladies, who are dragged into the dirt in every federal paper. You’d have been the victims had you been here, and butchered more bloodily. Pour into the bosom of my dear Maria all the comfort and courage which the affections of my heart can give her, and tell her to rise superior to fear for our sakes.
M Y SISTER’S CHILDBIRTH was no knock of an elbow.
As the bloody child tore itself out of her, Polly’s screams drowned out the howling winter wind. Though I was scarcely recovered of giving birth myself, I held my sister’s hand, mopped sweat from her brow, and coaxed her to breathe when she was too tired to do even that. When the childbed fever ravished her, she had no milk for the child either, so I took my sister’s newborn to my breast with my own. Two precious baby girls. Mine dark-haired, dark-eyed, and plump as a piglet. My sister’s pale, ghostly, and fragile as a flower. I cradled them both in my arms until I was so tired and sore and weary I could no longer feel my arms at all.
But still I held the baby girls. Because it was the only thing I could do for my sister, who tossed and turned in pain that radiated from her empty womb, while she whispered, “Jack . . . where’s Jack?”
I suppose he must’ve set out from Washington City as soon as he got my letter, but it wasn’t until almost the end of February that Jack Eppes walked his half-frozen horse up the road. My son ran out to take the reins, and Jack took giant strides into the house. “Is she—”
“She’s asking for you,” I said, and watched him dash to her, leaving puddles of muddy snow on the wooden stairs in his wake. My sister loved him, and his kisses on her forehead brightened her mood. She seemed happier still to see him take his newborn daughter from my arms and cradle her in his own.
And I began to hope.
At least, until the morning she rasped, “Patsy, take me home.” Perhaps she meant Eppington. I couldn’t be sure. But a journey that far would certainly kill her. Monticello was closer. The air was healthier there. And we could dose her with my father’s sherry. Yes, I decided. Now that the spring thaw had come, we’d take her home to Monticello.
She couldn’t sit a horse, nor could I risk her in a bouncing carriage. So we put her down upon a litter, and slaves carried her the entire four-mile journey. Jack and I followed on foot with all the children, splashing across a muddy stream, and scrambling up a thorny and overgrown mountain path with a fierce determination to make my sister well.
Dear God, I prayed. Make her well.
But I’d prayed this prayer before and reneged upon my bargain with God, and I feared retribution was now at hand.
“Make your sisters keep up,” I said to my eldest.
“Momma, they won’t do as I say unless I holler,” Ann said. “And you told me a lady should never holler.”
Maria whispered from the stretcher upon which she was being carried. “Your momma never has to holler to get anyone to do her bidding. She just fixes you with that sensible gaze, speaks in dulcet tones, and you’re simply overcome by the superiority of her rank.”
I was so unbearably relieved to hear my sister in good humor that I didn’t take umbrage. And more relieved to see Sally come running out into the dreary spring weather to greet our ragtag band of refugees. I’d sent word ahead, so she’d made up a bed for my sister on the main floor, complete with budding spring flowers in a vase on the side table. Wearing an old housedress with her dark hair braided straight down the back, Sally took the children from my arms, then helped me wash my sister of the sweat and grime of our journey before tucking her into bed.
“You’re giving us a terrible fright,” Sally scolded my sister.
“Papa,” my sister said, softly. “Is he . . .”
“He’s riding from Washington City right now,” Sally said. “So we can have a happy reunion.”
“Is Papa coming?” my sister asked, as if she hadn’t heard.
Sally and I did everything for her, in silent conspiracy that no one else should. When my father finally arrived, Maria wanted to be dressed and upright. For twelve days, every morning she woke up and declared that she was on the mend. But on the twelfth night, her fever burned so hot and her pain was so great that she couldn’t speak without her lips trembling on every word.
That’s when she pleaded with Sally and me to dose her with double the laudanum. I knew then that she was dying, well and truly. So did Sally, who looked to me, those hard amber eyes finally softening with anguish. It was Sally who had seen my sister safely across an ocean. Sally who was, in some ways, a sister to her, too.
But I was the one who held the bottle of laudanum.
“Please,” my sister begged, writhing in pain. And when I gave it to her, she sighed softly at my brimming tears. “Courage, Patsy. We mustn’t cry. We must be of good cheer. Our papa is burdened with such sorrows that we must never burden him with our own.”
Those words broke my heart.
Snapped it in two.
For they were my words, spoken after my mother’s death, when we were both still little girls. Words I hadn’t thought she remembered. Heavy words that I had pressed on her delicate shoulders and made her carry all her life.
And they were also the last words I ever heard my sister say.
S ALLY AND I WERE BOTH WITH MY SISTER in the early morning, when the nightmare scene of my mother’s death played itself out again. The frail and delicate beauty, pale and gasping upon her pillow. The grieving husband, weeping against her hand. Hemings servants gathered round. And me—in my Aunt Elizabeth’s place—holding my sister’s newborn daughter at the precise moment she was made an orphan in my arms.
The nostalgic horror of it all sent my father stumbling back, fleeing into another room while weeping into his handkerchief. But I stood there, deaf and dumb as a stone while everyone else wept. I couldn’t accept the loss of my sister—my beloved sister—who was my child before I had any others.
My little Polly.
The loss of her couldn’t be borne. And I couldn’t make myself let go of her baby when Jack reached for the child. Jack wanted his daughter. It was only natural. His wife was dead and this baby, her namesake, was a living connection to her. So I ought not to have hated him for tearing the infant away from me.
But I did. Oh, I hated Jack Eppes.
And when he took that child from me, I thought my knees might buckle. But Sally’s hand slipped into mine, squeezing tight, as if to keep me upright. And we stood there by Polly’s bed like two honor guards, determined that no one else but us would prepare my sister for burial.
I washed her hair, dried it, then combed it to the grim music of the carpenter’s hammer outside, as he made her coffin. Sally found a pretty dress for my sister to wear. I gathered a bouquet of spring flowers and returned to find Sally mending my sister’s garments in the places they’d been worn, swiping at her eyes so that she could see her own needle.
They were all crying. The servants. The menfolk. The children.
But I didn’t cry. I didn’t cry because my sister had bade me not to. I didn’t cry when they put my sister in her coffin. I didn’t cry when they lowered her into the ground near my mother. I didn’t cry when they shoveled dirt on top of her.
Nor did I cry when my father clutched at me by the fireplace, murmuring, “I’ve lost the half of all I had! Now it all hangs on the slender thread of a single life. On you, Patsy. Only you.”
He no longer had the strength, I think, to rage violently in his grief. There’d be no smashed glass, no overturned lamps, no splinters of tables left in his wake. And no pistols, so long as I was there. It was as it had been at the beginning. Papa and I were forged together in sadness, and were still forged, such that no other person in this world was so dear. My life, too, was suspended by the slender thread of his. So I understood the truth of what he was saying.
And yet, it was not the whole truth of it either.
I had a family and he had his mistress, and with her, they had children. And I was never so grateful for Sally as I was that night when she relieved me at my father’s side.
I began to retch the moment I returned to my room. I heaved drily into a pail that my husband held under me, nothing coming up. Alarmed to see me in such a state, Tom said, “Let me get you into bed.”
“No,” I said, refusing to let him tend me. I couldn’t lean on him. I was in too much pain. I could neither sit nor lie down anywhere without agony. Instead, I paced, panting like a horse that’d been run too hard, until I was struggling for every breath the way my sister had struggled for hers.
“My poor Patsy,” Tom said. “You’re having a fit of hysterics.”
Dragging in a ragged, desperate breath, as I tried to escape the cage of his arms, I snapped, “It’s nothing of the sort. I ate radishes and milk together for supper, both of which are unfriendly to my stomach.”
“It can’t be healthful to hold the pain the way you do. You’re a woman. There’s no shame in your tears. You need a good cry on my shoulder, Patsy.”
“Would you mind terribly fetching me some peppermint?”
With a frown, he sighed, then went down the stairs. I shut the door behind him, gasping, suffocating in my own garments and struggling to tear them off. Something finally tore inside me, too, and I began to sob.
I sobbed as I’d never sobbed before, falling to my knees amidst the shreds of my garments, shattered by the knowledge that I’d never see my sister again. She’d been twenty-five years old, now gone from me forever. And it was a pain like nothing I’d ever felt before—one I scarcely knew how to survive.
“I T’S SO HARD TO LOSE A SISTER ,” Nancy Randolph was saying.
She’d come to Edgehill ostensibly to offer her help in my time of grief. Now she was trying to draw me out past the usual pleasantries because the Randolphs seemed to want to speak about everything .
But I was a Jefferson and I could scarcely hear my own infant daughter Mary’s name spoken aloud without bleeding anew for the sister I’d named her after. Condolences came from all over the country. We even received one from Abigail Adams. But I didn’t want to think about the loss, couldn’t bear to think about it, so I just stood there, hanging laundry while my infamous sister-in-law nattered on, insensible to the fact that I was barely listening.
“I know it’s not the same,” Nancy said. “But I’ve lost my sister Judy, as sure as if she’d died. Truly, I have. She harbors nothing but bitterness against me now.”
I imagine I might be bitter, too, if my sister had fornicated with my husband, then killed the bastard born of that incestuous union, and exposed us all to scandal and poverty. Nancy had no one left alive to blame but herself.
So I said nothing. Just hung a petticoat on the line.
Handing me another wet petticoat from the basket, Nancy said, “John’s causing mischief between us.”
John Randolph, she meant. The only surviving brother at Bizarre. John was a sharp-tongued dandy who’d lately taken to calling himself Randolph of Roanoke . I disliked him immensely because he’d also taken to criticizing my father’s presidency. But I didn’t see how he could be to blame for the estrangement of Nancy and Judith, and I said so.
“I’ll tell you how,” Nancy explained. “John falsely accused me of carrying on with slaves in my sister’s house as if I lived in a tavern. He’s saying I poisoned Richard, and he’s giving Judith the excuse she needs to turn me out.”
For years now, I’d held my tongue about the scandal at Bizarre, even though my blood still ran cold at the thought of a dead baby hidden under a woodpile. Now, with grief eating me alive, I couldn’t hold my tongue one moment longer. “Does Judy need an excuse, Nancy? We all know the kind of desperate acts you’re capable of!”
Nancy drew back, pale as the petticoat on the line. “I thought—I thought you knew the truth, Patsy. I thought that’s why, at trial . . . that’s why you said . . .” My blood ran even colder at the thought of her lying to me again after all these years. So I said nothing. But Nancy sputtered, “You think I’m guilty. You think I killed my baby. But if you believed I was guilty, then why—”
“I didn’t want to see you hanged,” I said, very quietly.
Nancy let out a cry, as disconsolate as if I’d turned against her before the entire tribunal. “You don’t understand, Patsy. I wanted to confess from the start, but Richard wouldn’t let me. He wanted to protect me. It’s true that I surrendered my virtue to the man I loved. It’s true. But I did nothing to harm the child, and neither did Richard. I swear it.”
“Do you forget that I saw the herbs?”
Nancy blinked. “You can’t think they were mine! It was always Judith who had my mother’s way in the garden. I was never any good with herbs.” That was true, and the whole world realigned under my feet as I remembered it. Tears spilled over Nancy’s cheeks, her lips trembling. “Judith notices everything. Always has. She knew I was pregnant before I did. She put the gum in my tea. I didn’t know what I was drinking, Patsy.”
Had Judith noticed—from the start—her husband’s attraction to her sister? Had she given her sister the herbs to be rid of her husband’s bastard?
As I asked myself these questions, Nancy was near hysterical, more than a decade’s worth of anguish bubbling to the surface. “When you testified that you gave me the gum for an upset stomach, I thought it was because you didn’t want anyone to know what Judith had done.”
In shock, the freshly laundered undergarment fell from my grasp into the dirt, but I didn’t stoop to retrieve it. Instead, I shivered, wondering if I’d somehow saved the wrong sister from the gallows. “But she defended you, Nancy. She defended both of you.”
“How else was she to cover up the crime of killing my baby?” Nancy asked. “Judy wanted both of us to pay. Me and Richard, both. You have no idea what it was like returning to that house. Richard finally told her he intended to divorce her. And lo and behold, two days later he was dead of cramps in his stomach. But John blames me for bringing disgrace on the family, and I think she has him convinced that if Richard was poisoned it was my doing.”
Richard Randolph’s death had been strange. But then, everything about the people of Bizarre plantation specifically, and Tom’s family generally, was strange. Still, I couldn’t wrap my mind around it. “What you’re saying, Nancy! If you suspect these things of your own sister, why did you stay with her at Bizarre all this time?”
Nancy gave a bitter laugh. “I’m a spinster sister with a blackened name. I had nowhere else to go. The Harvies would never have me at Tuckahoe. I knew you’d never have me in your household. Besides, how was I to leave until one of my brothers came for me? Judith reads all my letters coming or going. No one visits Bizarre since the scandal. Even those willing to associate with me, Judith keeps away, claiming pecuniary embarrassment. Every night, Judith takes out her Bible and makes me pray forgiveness for every little gift or kindness Richard ever bestowed on me. She employs me with drudgery every day and locks me in my bedroom at night. I’ve been so guilt ridden, I could hardly complain. I felt . . . I felt as if I deserved it. Especially since now I’m nothing but an object of charity.”
I didn’t want to believe her. I didn’t want to believe a word. Yet, it had the ring of truth to it. And tenderness for Nancy stole over me at the thought she’d been silently suffering. We’d been taking care of Tom’s younger sisters for years and I didn’t know how we’d afford another, or how our reputation would endure the scandal, but I said, “Stay here for a spell, Nancy.”
Smearing tears with the back of her hands, Nancy said, “You can’t mean it.”
“I do.”
It took her a moment to believe me. When she did, she threw her arms around my neck. “You’re so kind. My brother is so fortunate to have you for a wife. Never did there exist a more excellent woman! And you won’t be sorry. I’ll be a helper for you. And a sister in truth. A new sister for the one you lost.”