Page 27 of America’s First Daughter
Chapter Twenty-six
Monticello, 12 August 1802
From Thomas Jefferson to William Short
Will you not come and pass the months of August and September with us at Monticello? Make this place your home while I am here. You will find none more healthy, none so convenient for your affairs and certainly none where you will be so cordially welcome.
T HIS ISN’T THE FIRST TIME I’ve found William’s name while thumbing through my father’s papers. Not even the first time I’ve traced the lettering of his name with a bittersweet ache. Since our break in Paris, William continued to exchange letters with my father, though Papa was always prudent enough not to speak of them to me beyond the occasional Mr. Short sends his regards .
At the time, it had seemed perfectly natural that William would—upon finally returning to America—call upon his mentor. But I never knew, until finding this letter, that it was my father’s invitation that brought William back into my life.
And now that my father is dead, I’m left to wonder why.
That summer, my father came to Edgehill to fetch me in a fine carriage pulled by even finer horses. At the sound of wheels grinding up the road, I came flying out of the house, my daughters behind me, squealing with glee to see the kindly grandfather who sent them books and poems and other treats with every packet.
My children all loved him, and he loved each of them in return. And I nearly envied my children the sweet, playful side Papa always showed them. If I were to tell them that he’d once been a stony and remote father with exacting standards, they’d scarcely believe me. Why, watching him play the Royal Game of Goose with my children as we loaded up the carriage, I could scarcely believe it myself.
And I’d lived it!
“This visit is going to restore our spirits, Martha,” Papa said, boldly placing a smooch on my cheek when we were ready to leave. How I basked in his love and affection.
Tom and Jeff would follow our caravan on horseback, but I climbed into the carriage with my father. As the wheels rattled on, I said, “I’m relieved to see you’ve somehow come home without your presidential entourage. I hope we won’t have many visitors this summer.”
“Just the Madisons.” My father bounced little Ginny on his knee with genuine delight. “And one special visitor we’ve been waiting to see for a very long time: Mr. Short.”
It’d been nearly thirteen years since I left William Short in Paris. Thirteen years.
In that time, I’d taught myself to forget him. But when Papa told me that he was to visit with us, my practiced indifference unraveled. And I couldn’t decide if it was a blessing or a curse that my husband knew nothing about my anxieties at this reunion.
One evening, Tom asked, “So this Mr. Short, was he one of your suitors in Paris?”
I’d just finished playing the harpsichord for the Madisons and my fingers froze over the keys, unable to make my tongue move in answer. Fortunately, Papa rescued me by saying, “Oh, Patsy had a gaggle of suitors in Paris. Even the son of a duke, I seem to recall.”
I smiled gratefully at my father, but Mr. Madison’s face pinched in a sour disapproval far more affecting than it ought to have been from such a tiny little man. “Mr. Short has had a very storied career.”
Madison’s wife—whom everyone was encouraged to call Dolley—put her delicate hand on his arm and laughed until the careless plume with which she’d ornamented her hair shook with merriment. “They do say Mr. Short has a way with money, and he’s done the country a great service.” Then her eyes twinkled with the promise of juicy gossip. “But I’ve heard notorious stories about him living in open congress with his lover . . . a French harlot at that.”
Tom’s eyes widened.
My father winced.
I did not. “The Duchess Rosalie is no harlot.”
“Oh, you knew her?” Dolley asked me, leaning forward with rosy pink cheeks that matched the satin of her gown. “I suppose you’re quite right to hold her blameless. It’s Mr. Short who hasn’t made an honest woman of her. He’s allowed himself to be debauched away from the morals of his countrymen. I daresay, in returning to America, he’s likely found himself in another world. It’s good that he isn’t returning with the duchess on his arm or the stain on his honor would be more difficult to wash out.”
As painfully shy and withdrawn as my sister had become, this prompted her to break in with, “Perhaps we ought not judge them too harshly. I remember Mr. Short very kindly from our time in Paris.”
“Well, you would, you sweet dear,” Dolley said. “You give us all a good example to follow. We must be very kind to Mr. Short, for I fear our neighbors won’t be so forgiving.”
What I feared was that William wouldn’t be forgiving. Had he ever forgiven me? I still had Marie’s letter—the one that said how angrily he’d denied loving me. I wondered if he was angry still. And I wondered, too, how he might look now, at the age of forty-three. I hoped he’d grown bald and portly. Certainly, he wouldn’t be as handsome as my own husband, whose beauty had only sharpened with years.
I was to find out for myself at the start of August, when William arrived in a carriage even more splendid than the president’s, with scarlet velvet curtains and gilt trim on the doors, driven by matching black horses with red plumes.
For a moment, watching William step down from the coach, I was transported in time and place. Paris, before the revolution, when such carriages went every day to and from Versailles. And when William flashed a grin, I could see, to my great disappointment, that he hadn’t grown soft or bald or portly. Nor did he even look as if he’d aged—his facial features remained boyish, even if there was a hint of silver in his sandy hair. In an embroidered blue tailcoat, a dangling gold watch fob, a newly fashionable top hat, and breeches tucked into tall riding boots, he gave every impression of a dignified courtier and man of importance. It was suddenly easy to imagine people calling him His Excellency, Mr. Short, the minister of the United States of America .
All the more when he stepped forward to greet my father and executed a very correct bow. “Mr. President,” William said, as if the words gave him delight and satisfaction to speak aloud.
At their long-awaited reunion, my father pulled into an embrace with the man he’d once considered his adoptive son, patting his back with so much vigor and affection that I thought I might weep. The two men who had been most important to me in my youth held each other by the arms, taking stock of one another after more than a decade, laughing at the joy of it.
William said, “President Jefferson, from the harbor all the way here, I’ve heard nothing but joyous thanksgiving. You’re very much in the public favor, sir.”
With his arms about William’s shoulder, my father replied, “I fear more confidence has been placed in me than my qualifications merit. I dread the disappointment of my friends.”
“Never that,” William replied, even though, in his case, I knew it to be a polite lie. Though he tried to disguise it, his eyes swept uncomfortably to the servants who ran forward to fetch his bags and water the horses. There was no mistaking his loathing of slavery, but it wasn’t in his nature to criticize his host. He was, after all, still a Virginian; diplomacy ruled him. And it’s because I knew that he was a diplomat, well practiced with words, that I startled when he lifted his green eyes to mine and said in French, “ Vous êtes une vision angélique, Madame Randolph!”
These were the first words we’d spoken to one another after thirteen years and an ocean of silence. I’d expected some tightness at the mouth that might hint of pain or regret. Instead, he’d made his eyes twinkle while comparing me to an angel, of all things.
Did he mean for his words to cut? Perhaps I’d been so eclipsed in his life, and in his heart, that he didn’t even remember he’d once pointedly praised me not as an angel but an Amazon . And I was suddenly swamped by the memory of that day, when he confessed to having stolen a lock of my hair to keep as a token—a memory so bittersweet that it was hard to speak the words, “Welcome home, Mr. Short.”
But I said it, and then it was done. The moment that had filled me with dread and anticipation was simply over, as if it were of no significance. Not even attended by the awkwardness that might have made it of some comforting consequence.
Instead, the awkwardness belonged to Sally Hemings. Seeing her on the portico with her two light-skinned, blue-eyed, freckled children clinging to her skirts, William made an elaborate and courtly bow. “What a delight to see you again, madame .”
We all froze in an awkward tableau, for William had acknowledged my father’s slave-mistress with a courtesy title, one accorded ladies or women whose marital status was unknown, as one might do in France when openly acknowledging a man’s mistress. At Monticello, my father kept quiet his relationship with Sally—such that even my children seemed unaware of it.
But, of course, William had been there when it started.
Thankfully, Sally was quick to bob an exaggerated curtsey like a French courtier, then adopted the strange sliding gait we’d all practiced at Versailles. “ Monsieur .”
Her antics broke the tension and allowed everyone to laugh, but I was unsteadied enough to miss a step going into the house. Tom noticed, catching me by the elbow and hugging me against his side with the fit of good humor that had struck him since his election to Congress.
“It seems Mr. Short will be amiable company,” Tom said, oblivious to the storm of emotions inside me. “The children certainly like him.”
Ahead of us, my little cherubs all danced around William, who had a bag of half-melted chocolate drops for them. Chocolate drops . Another reminder for me, or simply a gift for the children? And why should it bother me that I didn’t know?
I was overaware of William every single day he spent with us that hottest of summer months. I tried desperately to stay away, but the sound of his laughter carried to me through the house wherever I went. I seemed to sense him even before he passed by the doorway of the blue sitting room where I taught my children. I knew when he took his seat at the supper table beside my father, before even turning to see. And that is how, without even having to look up, I knew it was he who had come upon me in my father’s garden that day.
“I think you’re avoiding me, Mrs. Randolph,” William said, bareheaded, shielding his eyes against the sun.
“I think I’m harvesting the garden, Mr. Short,” I said, from beneath the shadow of my straw hat, fretting that he should come upon me in my housedress, my hands covered in dirt. A Virginia gentleman would’ve pretended not to see the lady of the house hard at work—even if the garden was her sweet escape from the demands of everyone inside the house; a Virginia gentleman would’ve passed by without a word and waited to address me in polite company.
But perhaps the code of Virginia gentlemen no longer applied to William Short. “Not growing Indian corn this year?” he asked.
I plucked a squash for my basket, too nervous to do more than glance at him. “Are you missing it?”
“I’ve missed many things from Virginia,” he said, moving with gallantry to take the basket from me.
Feeling as if I must surrender it to him, I said, “You’ve been gone a very long time.”
“Seventeen years. Partly in service to my country, partly for powerfully personal reasons.”
I had no right whatsoever to ask about those powerfully personal reasons and I was determined to say nothing of his duchess. “You must find everything much changed.”
His eyes fell upon our enslaved gardener, Wormley Hughes, working with spade and hoe at the far end of the rows, and he frowned. “Some things not enough changed.” Then William turned his gaze to me. “And other things changed nearly beyond my comprehension. I daresay your friends in France won’t believe me when I tell them the girl who ran through the convent with her petticoats in the dirt is now a reserved and nurturing mother of five.”
He walked with me as I worked down a row. “Six if you count Tom’s little sister Jenny—and I always do. Of course, she’s of marriageable age now, and so very pretty I don’t doubt she’ll have her choice of suitors.” I rambled, unable to stop myself. “I’ll have to write more to my French friends.” Especially Marie, I thought. Marie, whose letter from a year ago I still had not answered, finding it too painful to acknowledge that we would never see one another again. “I will write the ones who I still have a way of finding. We’ve been very afraid for them since the revolution.”
His posture stiffened. “With good reason. I’m afraid your father was entirely too optimistic about the happenings in France. But I suppose it’s difficult for anyone who wasn’t there to imagine the horrors that have unfolded.”
“I thank God Lafayette has finally been released. Papa says it was your doing.”
“I wish that were true. Thank Monroe and Morris. I was merely a go-between, but I’m happy for Lafayette. And I wish others had been as fortunate.”
Then I knew that I must say something about his duchess, if only because it was beyond the bounds of decency not to. “Please know that it pained us to learn what befell the Duke de La Rochefoucauld during the September Massacres. My heart suffered for Rosalie to become a widow in such a tragic way. When you see her next, please convey my deepest sympathies and my hopes for her happiness.”
William stared, as if doubting my words. But there was no artifice in what I’d said. Though I harbored jealousy for Rosalie—I could never wish her unhappy. Or him.
At length, William must’ve seen the sincerity in my eyes, because he said, “If I see Rosalie again, I’ll give her your message.”
“ If you see her again?” I asked, unwisely, rashly.
At my question, his gaze slid away. “She and I have come to a crossroads. Three times I asked her to marry me and three times she’s refused. At first, in respect to her husband’s memory. Then because she couldn’t leave Madame D’Enville to the mercy of the Jacobins. And finally, because she’d rather be the dowager Duchess de La Rochefoucauld in blood-soaked France than simply Mrs. William Short anywhere else.”
I sensed more bitterness than truth. “You can’t mean that.”
“I’m perhaps being unjust to Rosalie. It’s simply been my misfortune to fall under the spell of women whose loyalties to family and country cannot be shaken by my love.”
My mouth went dry at this very soft, but very earnest, remonstration. I thought to offer some apology, some explanation that might undo the pain I’d caused him in leaving France. “Oh, William—”
“Please don’t,” he said, cutting me off. By using his given name, I’d abandoned the propriety and formality without which our conversation might be a guilty thing. An offense to my husband and my father, both. And it seemed more than he could bear. “It’s the fate of diplomats—a natural hazard of foreign service. But as I said, Rosalie and I have come to a crossroads. Your father has made plain to me that we cannot go on as we have been.”
“My father?” I couldn’t imagine Papa in frank discussion about . . . well, almost anything. But certainly not matters such as illicit mistresses.
William nodded. “When your father was elected president, I hoped, at long last, to secure the position as minister to France that I’ve coveted. Your father, however, informed me that such an appointment is now quite impossible for I’ve been too long absent from our country to represent its sentiments. So I’ve come home.”
He was wounded; I could see that. Nor could I blame him. Though I was certain my father had good reasons, the result struck me as profoundly unjust. William had spent the better part of nearly two decades toiling for his country overseas, sometimes in dangerous places, deftly securing our nation’s credit, making endless intelligence reports to better our position and save us from war. For it to be implied to such a man that he was somehow not enough American to represent his country . . . William must’ve seen it as the grossest ingratitude.
I wished that I could think how to soothe his hurt feelings, but instead, I asked, “How long will you stay in America?”
He shifted the basket between his hands and looked again across the garden. “Until a solution presents itself. There are apparently those who disapprove of my conduct in France and will thwart my appointment to any diplomatic post.”
William could win them over, I thought. He was as charming as he’d ever been. More charming, I thought, when he finally reached for a vine to help me with my forgotten harvest and said, “I’ve much mending of fences to do in Virginia, where it seems I’ve been replaced entirely.”
Wary of his closeness, I wondered if he knew that there’d been a small secret place in my heart that I’d always kept for him. I loved my husband, but Tom had never taken William’s place up entirely. “No one could replace you.”
His eyes twinkled with amused outrage and he lowered his voice to an intimate whisper. “The young and heroic Meriwether Lewis certainly has. Your father dotes on his new secretary with a fatherly affection I once believed he reserved only for me.”
I’d caused the breach between my father and William. Still, his jest snipped the tension. I began to laugh. Then we laughed together. “Meriwether Lewis is no William Short,” I declared.
My father had always cultivated an endless stream of protégés, but William had been the first and best of them. For unlike the others, he had a most personal acquaintance with my father’s faults and was devoted to him anyway.
Even having been snubbed for the appointment that would’ve crowned his career and maybe even won over his lady to marriage, still here he was, paying homage to my father at Monticello. “I don’t believe you ever need worry of being replaced, William. Papa always says that those we loved first, are those we love best.”
William smiled very softly then. In a way I hoped meant that we could still be friends. “Come, Patsy. You’re getting pink. Let’s take some shade in one of your father’s porticoes.”
“We’re likely to trip over a workman’s hammer and come away covered in plaster dust,” I protested, since Monticello’s renovations were endless.
“Here then,” he said, guiding me under the sheltering leaves of a cherry tree at the far end of the garden and setting down the basket by my feet. He offered his forearm to help me lower to a seat against the trunk, which I took with as much elegance as my housedress and apron would allow.
“So what will you do until some foreign post is offered?” I asked.
He took a seat beside me but angled away, so that no one who might come upon us could think it an impropriety. With our backs to the tree, side by side, I couldn’t see his face, but only his hands as he plucked a blade of grass and rolled it between his clean, elegant fingers. “I suppose I must find somewhere to live. Some years ago I prevailed upon your father to manage my investments while I was away. With that money he purchased for me some land called Indian Camp. Very fertile, he says. Very advantageous lands here in Albemarle County.”
Here in Albemarle. Where we might be neighbors.
Yet I couldn’t let myself hope for it, not even for a moment, because I saw his hands reach to pluck up more grass, this time violently. And I remembered what he’d said in the heat of anger when we argued in Paris. That Virginia is stained in the evil of slavery, impossible debts and a way of life that can’t last . “But you don’t care to make a home at Indian Camp.”
He crossed his legs at the ankle, so that the steel buckle of his shoe glinted in the light. “I suggested to Mr. Jefferson an experiment of sorts. That he should rent out my Indian Camp property to tenant farmers. Part of the acreage to free white men. Part to free black men. As an experiment.”
“An experiment?”
“I hoped to prove something to him about the potential for emancipation,” he said, watching some of the slave children play with my own little ones on the lawn. Amongst those children was Sally’s pretty Harriet. And William swallowed. “Consider, for example, the perfect mixture of the rose and the lily. I’ve suggested to your father, too, that the mixture of the races is our surest path to doing away with racial prejudice. But his unwillingness to pursue my experiment at Indian Camp, nor even acknowledge my argument, tells me that an honorable life cannot be made in Virginia. Because if a man in your father’s singular situation cannot do it—if an icon of liberty cannot do it—I must conclude it cannot be done here at all.”
I blinked into the sun. Then blinked again. William had always favored the abolition of slavery, but what he spoke of now went far beyond the sentiments of even the most adventurous thinker on the matter I had ever met. I could not think his mention of my father’s singular situation, with regard to race mixing, was an accidental mention. But I wasn’t a naive girl any longer who could muse on such matters with impunity, and he should’ve understood that our southern silence about the color line wasn’t one I’d break even for him. “So you’ll sell Indian Camp. Can you afford to?”
A breeze blew, and his hands let loose the grass, which floated away. “I can afford a great many things now, Patsy. Even excluding the value of Indian Camp and my lands in Kentucky, not to mention the sums still outstanding from the State Department, I estimate my fortune at nearly a hundred thousand dollars.”
It was a very large sum. So large, in fact, that I went numb from the tip of my nose down to my tongue, and sat there stunned, like a felled ox.
At my silence, he continued, “It’s ill-mannered to speak of money in the presence of ladies, but I bring it up to set your mind at ease about the loan I’ve made to your father. I don’t want him to feel honor-bound to repay it when I can see plainly that his fortunes have fallen here.”
I took instant umbrage, and would have objected that of course the state of reconstruction only made it look as if my father’s fortunes had fallen, but I was too stunned by something else he’d said. “You made a loan to my father?” How had it come to pass that the man my father had once lectured about gold not falling from the sky had come to be our creditor?
In soft tones that somehow still assaulted my disbelieving ears, he explained, “I—I’m so sorry. I was sure you knew. Yes, I made a loan for his nail factory here at Monticello and a flour mill. But personal exigencies have prevented him from repaying the loan with what profits he has taken from those enterprises.”
I could guess at the personal exigencies that occasioned my father’s inability to pay. Papa had advanced money to my husband to pay the mortgage on Varina. Had divided up his properties to make another gift to keep us with a roof over our heads. All along I’d been so very grateful to my father for saving us from ruin, never suspecting Mr. Short was our savior. William Short, who had somehow accumulated a fortune without putting his shovel in the dirt.
Though it was unladylike for me to ask, improper in every way, William had been the only person to whom I’d ever spoken in frankness. And thirteen years of separation didn’t change this. “How—how much does he owe you?”
Though I’d wager he knew the exact sum down to the cent, he said, “Somewhere in the order of fifteen thousand dollars. I’ve offered to forgive the debt entirely, but your father won’t hear of it. So I must rely upon you to persuade him not to let pride be the cause of his impoverishment.”
“I’ve no knowledge or involvement in my father’s finances,” I said, which was only the proper way of it, but somehow, in light of this man’s expectations of me, felt like a shameful confession. “He never speaks of them to me.”
William nodded. “Nevertheless, I have no other avenue of appeal because no one has more power or influence over the president than you do.”
I wondered if I ought to feel flattered or terrified to believe it. It was a fact that my bond with my father was strong enough that even sometimes Polly complained of it, gently accusing Papa of loving me better. And though only Sally Hemings was allowed to freely roam his private chambers, whenever he returned from the capital, he didn’t race back to Sally, he came straightaway to Edgehill to get me.
“You’re too kind, William. Both to my father and to me.”
“I would be kinder, if I could,” was his reply. Then, after a few moments of silence, he added, “Your children are wonderful.” William breathed in sharply, then snapped off his succinct evaluation. “Jeff seems a very robust little fellow. Ann and baby Ginny are sweet enough to rot teeth. Your Ellen is very clever. But I see the essence of you in Cornelia’s eyes. That little girl isn’t all she seems to be.”
I smiled. “I’m afraid I’ve become exactly what I seem to be.”
He gave a dubious laugh. “And I’m afraid that I have become an old bachelor, with nothing to show for my efforts but the adoration of other men’s children. I suppose I’ll have to take more of an interest in my nephews.” With a comedic sigh that in no way disguised the seriousness, he added, “In the meantime, I suppose I must now leave you to your gardening and sow seeds of my own. We dine with Mr. Madison tonight, and, as your father has made plain to me, I must reacquaint myself with our countrymen.”
I must reacquaint myself with our countrymen. . . .
William had said this lightly, but at supper that night, it became manifestly evident that my father wasn’t wrong to have insisted upon it. The unique situation of my father’s house being unfinished—the expense of the redesign project Papa had conceived upon our return from Paris combined with his frequent absences to make the rebuilding of a large portion of Monticello an unending affair—led to an informality that permitted women to remain in the dining room after the men began to drink, and I was present to witness an argument.
It began amiably enough, with the Virginia gentlemen all sipping wine and peppering William with questions about Europe. They wanted to know especially of Napoleon Bonaparte, the new First Consul of France, which now modeled itself even more closely after ancient Rome. William harbored some admiration for the sense of order restored by Bonaparte, but warned against embracing the brilliant revolutionary general, given his hunger for power.
This quickly turned into a disagreement about the nature of French diplomacy, pitting Mr. Short’s cynicism about French revolutionaries against Mr. Madison’s faith in their good intentions, leaving Madison to simmer like a teapot, growing more florid by the moment. The conversation went from bad to worse when the subject turned to finances. My father and Mr. Short agreed that the James River Canal Company was an opportunity for profitable investment. I confess I was distracted in that moment, scolding Jeff for running past the tables, so all I caught was Mr. Short making the wry remark, “No doubt the Virginia legislature will attack the canal company as soon as the dividends begin to excite envy.”
A scandalized silence followed until Jack Eppes cried, “An outrageous accusation!”
My husband, thankfully, only set down his glass. “Why ever would you say such a thing, Mr. Short?”
Mr. Madison accused, “Because he’s thrown in with the stock jobbers and paper men.”
It was so chilly a remark, filled with such disdain, that it couldn’t be dispelled by the thin smile that followed. Good southern Republicans were planters. Northern Federalists were stock jobbers and paper men. Virginians were suffering financially, suffering badly, but William had profited. I understood the unspoken assessment of the secretary of state, my father’s closest political friend and ally. Madison was saying that William Short wasn’t one of us anymore.
Though William ignored the insult and quickly steered the conversation to more pleasant topics, I worried for his reputation, not to mention his future as a diplomat at Mr. Madison’s Department of State. And I worried for the disruption of our domestic tranquility when Tom was still brooding about the discussion that evening.
As we checked on the children in the nursery, he murmured, “This country is so divided.”
“Yes,” I said, though a part of me wondered if it was ever thus.
“Mr. Madison and Mr. Short . . . they’re accomplished men. Lawyers. Jack fits with them better than I do. I feel like the proverbially silly bird who can’t feel at ease amongst the swans.”
Had I somehow betrayed my feelings for William in a way that brought Tom’s insecurities about? Lacing my fingers with his, I said, “You really are a silly bird if you think Jack Eppes is better than you in any way at all. You’re more thoughtful than he is, and the country needs men like you, Congressman Randolph. My father needs you.”
I did mean that, even though the thought was eclipsed the next day when I came across the strangely nostalgic scene of William Short in the hallway, lurking near Papa’s door like he used to in my father’s times of trouble.
In his hand, he held folded pages, newsprint upon his fingers.
Another man—any other man—would’ve told me it wasn’t fit for ladies to read. But William merely reddened, saying, “You need to see this, Patsy. Though you won’t thank me for showing you.”