Page 20 of America’s First Daughter
Chapter Nineteen
Monticello, 8 February 1791
To Thomas Jefferson from Thomas Mann Randolph Jr.
Patsy continues in very good health and would’ve written herself had I not prevented her from the fear of her being fatigued. The little one is perfectly well and increases in size very fast. We are desirous that you should honor her and us by conferring a name on her and have deferred the christening till we hear from you.
O UR DAUGHTER ARRIVED three weeks into the new year, a whole month early, leaving me fevered. But love cured me of that fever. Love for the little baby, bald and blue-eyed as she was, with a pink gurgling smile.
Because we were waiting on Papa for a name, the poor baby girl went without one for two whole months. But it was worth the wait. Papa chose Ann, after Tom’s dead mother.
Nothing could’ve pleased my husband more—except maybe a son of his own. The night of Ann’s christening, I rested in bed with Tom, the baby between us. My husband looked happy, and it made me want to find ways to make his happiness stick.
As the baby suckled, I whispered, “If it’s in God’s will to bless us, I’ll yet give you a boy.”
Planting a playful kiss on my bared shoulder, Tom’s eyes smoldered. “When can we start on that business, Mrs. Randolph?”
Though I wasn’t in any condition to entertain the notion, I smiled. “In due time, Mr. Randolph. In due time.”
With an uncharacteristic grin, he nodded, gently brushing our baby’s cheek. “For tonight then, I’ll content myself to be truly pleased with our Ann.”
He’ll be a good father, I thought, softening to him as I hadn’t allowed myself to before. We were a family now—a reality brought home to me more powerfully when my husband’s four young sisters fled to us en masse one cold day.
“We can’t stay at Tuckahoe anymore,” said Nancy, at sixteen, the oldest of the four. “Our father’s wife is a monster!” Nancy wept on Tom’s shoulder while he patted her back. “She slaps the little ones. She says it’d be a happier home without them, so I took them with me . . . not that our father cares one way or the other.”
The servants had ushered the younger girls into the kitchen for a spot of warm milk, and I was glad for them not to hear Nancy’s words, true though I believed them to be. “I’m sure Colonel Randolph loves you all very much,” I said, though I was sure of no such thing.
“No,” Nancy sobbed. “He loves only that vile woman.”
With baby Ann in the crook of my arm, I knelt before Nancy and grasped her hand. “Oh, he’s just enamored of her youth. In time, when the ardor fades—” I stopped speaking then, because Sally came in, setting down a tray of tea for us.
“It’ll be too late then,” Nancy cried. “My father insists that I marry the man he chooses or leave his house. But it’s her choice.”
I could guess which kind of man Gabriella Harvie Randolph might choose for her stepdaughter. Someone old and wealthy, on a faraway farm. So I persisted in my silence until Nancy sniffled and said, “Well, I left her a farewell gift anyway. I scratched the date of our mother’s death into a windowpane to remind Gabriella that no matter how many coats of white paint she puts in the parlor, she’s only the mistress of Tuckahoe because our mother is dead.”
“Oh, dear,” I said, imagining the trouble that might cause. Did all the Randolphs show their emotions so openly—going so far, even, as to enshrine them in glass? “Well, now you’ll have to stay with us until tempers cool.”
Nancy sobbed her gratitude. “I won’t be a burden to you. I won’t stay long. I’m not sure what to do with the younger girls, but Judith says I can live with her family at Bizarre plantation.”
At this, my husband stiffened. “No.”
Tom’s flat refusal surprised me. He must have surprised Nancy, too, because she whined, “Why ever not?”
Tom narrowed his dark eyes. “You know what I think of Richard Randolph.”
Curious. He’d never said anything about his brother-in-law to me.
My husband continued, “The Matoax Randolphs are scoundrels, every last one of them. Richard, Theo, and John. No. To say they’re scoundrels is too kind—and does a bit of injury to scoundrels.”
Nancy gasped. “But I’m so fond of Theo!”
The tension in Tom’s ticking jaw made it clear how hard he worked to keep his anger reined in. “All the more reason you can’t stay at Bizarre unchaperoned.”
Tom was being strangely unreasonable. If he couldn’t trust his own brother-in-law to look after Nancy, who could he trust? But my husband’s family had a knack for working him into a state.
He crossed his arms. “Richard Randolph isn’t a fit guardian for you, Nancy.”
Nancy blew on her tea. “He’s married to our sister.”
“Only because we had no choice but to let him marry her!” Tom’s sudden shout was so unexpected that I jumped and baby Ann wailed in my arms. I rose to rock and console her. Meanwhile, Tom seethed. “Richard purposefully got Judy into a delicate condition—”
Tom’s gaze cut to my face, and he swallowed his words, as if belatedly recalling my presence in the room. Or perhaps it was the sight of my mouth hanging agape that gave him pause. Rich ard and Judith’s wedding had seemed a happy one, without a trace of distrust or discontent, and Judy had borne no child. So why did Tom think . . . ?
I didn’t know. But I did know that appearances could be deceiving, and Virginians are better at hiding their troubles than just about any other people on earth. So, I snapped my mouth shut again.
“Oh, Tom,” Nancy said, waving her handkerchief in dismissal. “Judy and Richard aren’t the first country lovers to fall into bed before they said vows. Why, you and Patsy—”
“Did no such thing!” Tom roared, a vein throbbing at his temple. “I’ll thank you to apologize.”
Nancy paled. “Oh, Patsy, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”
“It’s quite all right,” I said, though I was sure she meant exactly what Tom feared she did.
Nancy turned her eyes back to Tom. “Richard did marry Judy, and no child came about in the end, so what difference does it make?”
Tom’s eyes bulged. “What difference ? That you could ask is a demonstration of why you’re not going to Bizarre. And that’s the end of it.”
That wasn’t the end of it. When Tom stomped off to attend one of the many chores my father set for him, Nancy pleaded with me. “Patsy, won’t you soften my brother to my situation? My prospects for love and marriage are better at Bizarre.”
I saw her predicament. Without Colonel Randolph’s protection, all Nancy had was youth and looks. I didn’t blame her for being terrified of becoming either the wife of a man she loathed or a spinster, dependent on all her relatives.
That night, I asked Tom, “You won’t send all your sisters back to your stepmother’s care at Tuckahoe, will you?”
He rubbed at his face with both hands and blew out a sigh. “Gabriella Harvie is evil incarnate.”
I nodded. “Your father must be blinded by her beauty.”
“She’s not beautiful,” Tom grumbled. “There is nothing inter esting about her face or manner whatsoever.” Oh, but Gabriella was beautiful. So it warmed my heart that Tom couldn’t see it. But then, he never even liked trees in all their showy foliage. “You cannot imagine how I want to keep my sisters from her, but how—”
“Let them stay here with us as long as they like,” I said.
His head jerked up and he stared. “Patsy, your days and nights are already occupied with caring for a newborn baby. How will you manage all our sisters, a gaggle of motherless girls ranging from the ages of four to sixteen?”
“I’ll manage it somehow,” I said. “And meanwhile, we might as well let Nancy stay at Bizarre, where she’ll have a better chance at finding a suitable husband than here, where we’ll be caught up in caring for all the girls.”
All at once, Tom kissed me. A kiss full of gratitude and urgency. And it reminded me of the kiss he’d given me when I’d first voiced my concern for his sisters. In the carriage. His love and concern for his sisters, whom no one else in the world cared for, made me love him yet a little more.
Tom understood the need to protect your family, something that had always been so important to me. As a new babe grew in my belly, I thought perhaps the thing for Tom I felt that was deeper than love might be dedication .
And it was because of that emotion that I changed his mind, and in the end, Nancy had her way.
A thing that gave us all much cause to regret.
“W HY, MY DEAREST DAUGHTER , you’ve brought forth a reformation here at Monticello,” Papa said, approving of the way I’d organized the larder. He’d come home that autumn to dote upon me and my baby girl, but had kind words for Tom, too, and the way he’d managed things.
This paternal praise fell on Tom like rain on dry, drought-ridden fields; my husband swelled with such pride that I began to wonder if he’d ever heard a kind word in his life. But we weren’t the only ones hanging upon my father’s every kind word. . . .
Sally Hemings put on her best dress for Papa’s homecoming, and I watched—while pretending not to watch—the reunion between my father and his lover, the first since the death of their child. But neither Papa, nor Sally, gave my prying eyes satisfaction. In fact, for some curious reason, my father kept a scrupulous distance from her.
There were no flirtatious glances and—as if by silent assent—Sally no longer tended my father’s chambers. It was her older brother Martin who brought a daily bath of cold water for my father’s feet. I wondered if perhaps they were just keeping their affair secret, given all the girls now living in our house. In Paris they’d kept it secret . . . until they couldn’t. Papa had been shamed to be thought a seducer, but he was infatuated then. Maybe now the shame was stronger than the infatuation. Or maybe their sadness over the baby’s death had extinguished the fire of ardor between them completely.
When Papa readied to leave again for Philadelphia—this time to take my little sister and our cousin Jack Eppes with him—Sally and I found ourselves standing on the front steps together to say farewell. Papa gave her a chaste hug good-bye and I heard her sigh. She’d given my father her freedom and a son. Now both were lost to her . . . and perhaps he was, too.
Understand that at eighteen years old, Sally Hemings was more beautiful than ever. Men flirted with her, but I never saw her encourage them, and I had the sense that even if we hadn’t been watching, she never would. I believed that my father was the only man she wanted, and he’d just left her on the steps without so much as a kiss.
I would have sighed, too. And my sympathy for Sally overcame the pang of jealousy that my sister would be living in some tidy town-home in the nation’s capital with Papa. Hopping up into the carriage, my sister reminded me, “You had Papa to yourself in Paris for a long time. Now it’s my turn!”
Conceding, I kissed her nose. “Don’t be too lazy to write, little Polly.”
“Call me Mary, now. Or Maria, if you must.” She wouldn’t have suggested that name if she remembered Maria Cosway, but that woman was an ocean away now, rumored to have abandoned her husband and their newborn daughter to join a convent.
Inhaling the milk scent of my own daughter’s cheek, I couldn’t imagine life without her, much less becoming a nun. If love had shaken my faith in a convent vocation, motherhood had shattered it completely. So I banished all thoughts of Maria in the convent, and as my sister tucked herself into the carriage next to our father, I cried, “Adieu, Papa. Adieu, Maria.”
Sally and I stood there together until the carriage rolled out of sight.
Then it was time to deal with Tom’s sisters.
With the hickory smoke of November rising from smokestacks at every farm, we took Nancy, according to her wishes, to live at Bizarre plantation in Cumberland County. There was nothing especially bizarre about the modest two-story house that sat atop a giant slab of cut stone, though the people who lived there were a bit strange.
Theo Randolph was a thin, sickly young man whose nervous disorder required a dependence on laudanum. Or so he said. Then there was his flamboyant brother John, whose youthful appearance belied his years as a result of a childhood illness. An illness some said occasioned his high voice, dramatic manner, and impotence with women.
Richard and Judith—the master and mistress of the plantation—seemed ordinary enough, but there didn’t seem to be much planting going on here, where they believed themselves far too genteel to embrace any other profession. Tom, grumbling that one of the Randolph brothers of Bizarre had been expelled from school, added, “I feel like I’m leaving her in a bawdy house!”
I tried to soothe him. “Why don’t we take them up on their offer to winter over here?”
As Tom held our daughter’s little arms, teaching her to walk, he grumbled again. “They didn’t mean for us to take them up on it.”
“Nevertheless, they can’t refuse now that they’ve offered. We can help the girls settle in and ease your worries.”
Tom eyed me, as if stunned by the devious turn of my mind, but agreed. And during those blustery cold months, I helped set up housekeeping, since Judith was heavy with her first child. We ended up staying for nearly three months in all, Tom watching—like a hawk—Theo’s every move toward our virginal Nancy.
If only he’d been watching Richard.
I scarcely took notice of the way Nancy giggled whenever our host said something amusing. Or the way, when Richard hugged her, they embraced too long. Holding hands briefly before bed. Whispering in one another’s ear. I suppose I noticed all these things but dismissed them as Nancy’s gratitude to her brother-in-law for taking her in when her own father was so utterly indifferent to her.
“Tom, truly. Neither John nor Theo has an eye for Nancy. And Richard’s watching out for her. You see how attentive he is,” I said as we prepared for bed one night.
I should’ve been more suspicious. I should’ve wondered what those whispers and giggles meant, but by February I was distracted and bursting with happy news. “Mr. Randolph, I’m going to give you the son you so desire.”
Tom lifted me up, clasping me against him, spinning me round, and in our joy, we left Bizarre plantation without suspecting a thing.
Monticello, 9 September 1792
From Thomas Jefferson to President George Washington
I was duped by the Secretary of the treasury and made a tool for forwarding his schemes, not then sufficiently understood by me; and of all the errors of my political life this has occasioned me the deepest regret. That I have utterly, in my private conversations, disapproved of the system of the Secretary of the treasury, I acknowledge. His system flows from principles adverse to liberty, and is calculated to undermine and demolish the republic.
The summer just before he wrote this letter, Papa returned to Monticello in a state of agitation, telling of all the indignities he’d suffered at the hands of the cunning and ambitious secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton.
At dinner—a meal put together with the freshest vegetables from my new garden—my husband asked, “What kind of fool is this Mr. Hamilton?”
My father set down his spoon and mopped sweat off his brow with a napkin. The infernal heat of that summer had been so stifling that we hadn’t been able to sleep comfortably even with every door and window open. But it wasn’t the heat that vexed him. “The secretary of the treasury is no kind of fool at all. He is a colossus.”
Never had I heard of my father speak of a man this way. Half in awe, half in mortal dread. And because there was a crowd at our table, including my Carr cousins, in thrall with his every word, my father continued. “We are daily pitted in the cabinet like two cocks.” Papa shook his head and pushed away his plate. “I’ve confronted the president, who assures me there are merely desires but not designs for a monarchy.”
A moment of appalled silence fell upon the table as we considered the president’s most unsettling—and scarcely reassuring—reply. None of us wanted to believe our liberty to be in so much danger, but Papa’s sense of betrayal at the way his compatriots had twisted the revolutionary spirit to which he’d best given voice was clear. And seemingly warranted.
“What will you do?” Tom asked, his brow furrowed and eyes serious.
“I’ll resign.” Before anyone could protest, Papa added, “No man has ever had less desire of entering into public offices than me. Only the war induced me to undertake it. Twice before I’ve refused diplomatic appointments until a . . . domestic loss . . . made me fancy a change of scene. Now I want nothing so much as to be at home.”
A domestic loss.
Papa still couldn’t speak of it, I realized. Even in the privacy of his home, even so near to the anniversary of her death, he couldn’t speak of my mother’s passing except as a domestic loss.
I forced a smile and chirped, “We’ll be so happy to have you home for good, Papa. We’ll be together. Everything we always wanted.” And, at long last, it would be everything Mama had always wanted, too.
Of course, I had no way of ensuring that would come to pass without my husband’s consent. But Colonel Randolph had finally agreed to sell Edgehill to us, and I believed, deep in my heart, that Tom would be happier living nearer to my father than his own.
I became more sure of it in early August when we received news that Colonel Randolph’s wife had given him a brand-new baby. A boy named Thomas Mann Randolph —same as my husband.
If I hadn’t hated Colonel Randolph before that moment, I did then, because Tom took it hard, like a bullet to the heart.
It wasn’t uncommon to name a baby after a sibling . . . if they’d died . From which Tom inferred that his father wished he’d never been born. “I’ve been erased,” Tom said, staring bleakly out the open parlor window with a glass of liquor dangling precariously from one hand. Then he drained it, his throat working hard to swallow the poison down. “ Replaced .”
With the imminent birth of our own new baby, I was too overcome by my belly and the stifling August heat to rise swiftly up from my chair to comfort him. It was Papa who put a hand on Tom’s shoulder and said, “Nursing this wound can’t remedy the evil, and may make it a great deal worse. Don’t let it be a cankerworm corroding eternally on your mind. Forgive your father, because Colonel Randolph surely meant nothing but to indulge his new wife in this.”
That was putting a shine on manure, and my husband surely knew it.
But then my father added, “You have your own family now, and a new baby to arrive any day. How can anything cloud the joy of that? If you have your wife and children, you have the keystone to the arch of happiness.”
Tom looked down for a long moment. He gave a single nod, but I didn’t miss the sadness that deadened his eyes. And despite my father’s attempt to comfort Tom and make him see all the things he had around him, I feared it was a wound from which my husband might never recover.
I worried over it until my son was born a few weeks later, fearing even as I held him in my arms that Tom would name the child after Colonel Randolph, either from tradition or from provocation, and make his own wound even deeper. But taking our cherub into his own strong arms, Tom proudly named him, “Thomas Jefferson Randolph. We’ll call him Jeff for short.”
I gasped with delight, knowing how much it would please Papa. “Oh, Tom!”
“You’ll be the only one with that name,” Tom promised the boy as he hugged him close against his broad chest. Then little Ann came running into the room to hug Tom’s knees. Chuckling, Tom settled his big hand on Ann’s head and smiled down at her. “You’re a big sister now, Miss Randolph.”
She reached up her hands for her baby brother, and Tom knelt down to give her a closer introduction. In that moment, seeing the three of them together and happy, I felt suddenly overcome by a pang so deep in my heart that it undid me. Grasping at my chest and swallowing hard over my confused emotions, I realized what had happened.
Why, somehow, I’d fallen in love with my husband.
It wasn’t a sweet, dreamy love that made my heart skip. It didn’t make me want to shout and spin pirouettes on my toes. It was some other kind of love, so quiet it snuck up on me in the shadows. Nevertheless, it was as real as any love I’d ever felt, and my eyes misted over to feel it.
Tom peered up at me. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing at all,” I said, resolving to be so kind to him that he’d never need any other family but ours. And what a family it was. My son was a remarkably fine boy. Smaller than my daughter had been at his age, but healthier. So much so that, within a few weeks, we felt confident in taking little Jeff out into the world for a visit to Bizarre.
Given the news about Gabriella Harvie’s baby boy, I expected to find the Randolph sisters in a state and braced for the gnashing of teeth. But we found our hosts quietly melancholic. Judith smiled to see us, but it was a brittle smile. And Richard was wound tight as a drum as he told us about the recent death of his younger brother, Theo. Tom and I had already heard it was the laudanum that did him in. That, in the end, the young man had been a skeleton, unable even to walk on his own. But as we sat around the parlor at Bizarre, Richard insisted, “It was tuberculosis.”
My husband’s gaze flicked to his sister Nancy, who hadn’t found a husband yet and who wasn’t likely to find one, looking as frail as she did now. Her skin was like paper and she was unable to muster even a brittle smile. Indeed, the back of the settee appeared to be all that held her upright. I knew Tom was imagining what sort of mischief she’d gotten herself into here at Bizarre.
Was she taking laudanum, too?
“Nancy hasn’t been feeling well,” Richard said, putting a comforting hand upon her knee. The gesture was so intimate that Tom went rigid, a shadow over his eyes. And in spite of my happily gurgling baby boy, and Ann’s giggles as she ran about the house, the air went thick with tension.
So thick that I actually startled when someone banged on the front door.
None of the house servants went to answer it, but Judy got up and peered out a window at an angle from which she couldn’t be seen. Going pale, she said, “It’s our neighbors.”
“Well, aren’t you going to let them in?” I asked, anxious as any southern woman to the dictates of hospitality. Of course, if I’d known what the neighbors had come to say, I’d have barred the door myself!
The Harrisons hadn’t come on a social visit. Indeed, while her husband glowered, Mrs. Harrison left her bonnet on, though she tugged nervously at the pink ribbon holding it to her head. Standing just inside the room, as if she intended an abrupt exit, she finally said, “The rumor is still being passed around, Miss Nancy. We thought you ought to know.”
“What rumor?” my husband asked.
Mr. Harrison continued to glower, but to answer Tom, Mrs. Harrison chirped nervously, “The slaves are saying that the night your sisters and your brother-in-law stayed as guests in our home, Richard was seen taking a bundle out to the woodpile, and—” She glanced at Nancy’s belly, fluttering a bit in her unease.
Before she could continue her thought, Mr. Harrison cut her off with a blunt, “They’re saying Miss Nancy gave birth to Richard’s bastard and that he chopped it to pieces.”
Shooting to his feet, Richard cried, “Slander!”
Richard’s outrage was so convincing that I put a hand on Tom’s arm to still him. But my husband, too, shot to his feet. And he was plainly not convinced.
Richard insisted, “That’s a damnable lie.”
“Is it?” Mr. Harrison shot back. “You drag your whoring to my house and stain my name—”
“ Please, ” his wife begged of him, as if she might swoon away at the unpleasantness. And when her husband quieted, she added, “Nevertheless, you should know it’s being said. The servants claim they heard screams in the night and found bloody sheets in Miss Nancy’s bed.”
Nancy’s pretty big eyes rounded with fear or outrage; I couldn’t say which. “They were groans . Not screams. I was ailing from womanly troubles and pains in the abdomen. I’ve always suffered from colic. My sisters can tell you that’s true. Isn’t that right?”
“Of course it’s true,” I said, reflexively. “She’s always had terrible colic.” She’d never had colic in her life as far as I knew, but what else could I say as my husband went from red to purple?
The moment the Harrisons uttered some stilted courtesy and took their leave, Tom whirled on Nancy, grabbing her by the arms and pulling her to shaky feet. “Were you seduced, sister?”
Tears filled Nancy’s eyes. “There was never any baby. Someone’s telling lies!”
My husband didn’t believe it. He shook her, that familiar angry vein pulsing in at his temple. I’d never seen him so angry before, but I understood the cause. Not just the fear that young Nancy had been exploited by the man to whom we’d entrusted her care, but also that if her honor had been sullied by a baby begot out of wedlock, it’d sully Tom’s honor, too.
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.”