America's First Daughter: A Novel Read online

  I didn’t know if it was true but I knew better than to ask. What I knew was that in her final hours, my mother wanted the Hemingses near, and I was left to huddle by my Aunt Elizabeth’s knees with the heat of the fireplace at my back. I didn’t know what else I should do, but stayed silent for fear someone would usher me from the room if they remembered me there.

  Papa drew his leather chair close so that he could hold my mother’s hand. In a faltering voice, Mama told him everything she wanted done. She gave instructions for matters weighty and mundane. She was letting go of life, giving everything away. Even the little bronze bell she used to ring for servants, she gave to Sally, who pressed a cheek against her mistress’s hand.

  At last, my mother’s gaze fell upon me. Watch over your father when I am gone, her eyes said, but I still couldn’t believe that she’d go. “The children …” Mama wept.

  My throat went tight, and I desperately wanted my father to help her—to make matters right, as he always did. But Papa’s expression crumbled as if her sobs lashed against his spirit, and I knew with terrible certainty that not all things were in his power. Papa leaned to her, until their foreheads touched, their intimacy unbearably tender.

  We ought to have left them alone, but none of us could move. We were, all of us, riveted by my mother’s every halting word. She drew back and lifted three shaking fingers, spreading them for my father to see. “Three children we still have together,” she said, with great difficulty. “I cannot die happy if I know my daughters must have a stepmother brought in over them.”

  A sound of anguish escaped my father’s throat, as if he couldn’t bear the thought of any other woman. There was no hesitation in him when he took my mother’s limp hand to make his solemn vow. “Only you, Martha. I swear I’ll have no other wife. Only you, my love.”

  My mother’s chest hollowed in a long wheeze and tears squeezed from the corners of her eyes. She was beyond speech, but motioned as if she wished to write. At my mother’s gesture, Sally was quick to obey. The slave girl jumped to fetch the tray with the book and the inkwell. Then Sally pressed the quill pen into my mother’s unsteady hand. But my mother couldn’t hold it. In exacting promises from us, Mama had used all the strength left in her.

  Answering the silent plea in her eyes, my father wrapped his hand round her delicate fingers and finished writing the passage she began the day before.

  —and every time I kiss thy hand to bid adieu, every absence which follows it, are preludes to that eternal separation which we are shortly to make!

  At the sight of his handwriting in bold dark ink, my mother smiled. These were the words she wanted to leave for him. So he folded it and tucked it inside his coat against his heart, where he carried it the rest of his life.

  Then my mother closed her eyes and did not open them again. I held my breath as her chest rose, fell, rose, then fell, until she was still. Perfectly still. And the world went quiet.

  Her angelic beauty was bathed in the morning sunlight that filtered in from the tall window. Surely she had become an angel, I thought as tears blurred my vision and tightened my throat. My mournful cry broke free. The sound was echoed by my father, his eyes wide in a state of insensibility. And his cry was like the hollow howl of the grave.

  Rushing to his side, my aunt hurried to lead my father from the room before grief unmanned him before his slaves. I was numb watching them go. Then I remembered my promise. I followed, calling, “Papa!”

  He didn’t look back as my aunt rushed him to the little room where he did his writing. His long limbs became dead weight in my aunt’s sturdy arms. She could barely manage him; it was with the greatest difficulty that she tried to heave him into a chair. I ran to him, but my aunt blocked my way, snapping, “Leave him be, Patsy.”

  Though my mother lay dead behind me, I was beset with the most frantic need to go to my father. To watch over him. To obey my mother in the last thing she ever asked of me. “Papa!”

  In answer, his eyes rolled back and he collapsed into the chair.

  Then Aunt Elizabeth closed the carved wooden door and I was left completely, utterly alone.

  AT THE HEARTHS OF MONTICELLO, tearful slaves despaired that my mother was gone and my father might never awaken. If asked, they’d have sworn they despaired because they loved my mother and my father, and I believe that even now. But they must’ve also worried what would become of them if they lost the mistress and master of the plantation in one day. Would they be sold? Separated from one another? Scattered amongst the farms of Virginia and beyond?

  Then, I understood none of this. I was too afraid for myself and my sisters, wondering what would become of us if we were left orphaned. Long after my aunt ushered us into bed and snuffed out the lanterns, my delicate little Polly cleaved to me and sobbed herself to sleep.

  I couldn’t sleep, however, until I heard my father rage.

  Mama always praised him for his reserved manner and thoughtful nature. But, like me, Papa hid a tempest inside. That’s why the violent orchestra of his grief from below the stairs was more soothing to me than the bone-deep drumbeat of my sadness. Papa vented what I couldn’t unleash without incurring the ire of my proper aunt, and so I fell asleep to the sound of shattering glass and splintering wood.

  It wasn’t the noise in the night that eventually awakened me, but the silence. Silence that stole into my room and pressed down cold on my chest, filling me with dread.

  It was silent the way Monticello was never silent.

  As if the whole plantation was afraid to breathe.

  Dread skittered down my spine and brushed away the last tendrils of sleep. Pushing back the bed linens, I disentangled myself from Polly. Then I put my bare feet on the wooden floorboards and felt the early autumn chill on my legs. I glided soundlessly down the stairs, drawn inexorably to Papa’s chamber, the only room where the candles still burned bright.

  I didn’t see him at first. My eyes searched him out amongst the clutter of his spyglass and surveyor’s theodolite and the other curiosities we children weren’t allowed to touch. Eventually I found him sitting on the floor, amidst the debris of his rage. He was as still as a marble bust. In profile, his strong, sharply curved jaw was clenched tight, and his eyes were fixed downward beneath a sweaty tangle of ginger hair.

  I watched him for several heartbeats, and he didn’t move. He was a statue in the spell of that terrible silence. A spell I was determined to break. “Papa?”

  He didn’t stir. He didn’t look up. He didn’t even twitch.

  I tried again, this time louder. “Papa!”

  He didn’t blink. He didn’t hear me. He didn’t see me. It was as if I was a spirit and the two of us stood on either side of an invisible divide. This wasn’t like the times my mother would tease him for letting his books swallow his attention until he forgot that he was hungry or thirsty. He wasn’t lost in a book, and the bleak look in his eyes was nothing I’d ever witnessed before—or since.

  I crept closer, thinking to tug at his linen shirtsleeve.

  Then I saw the pistol on the table next to him and froze.

  It shouldn’t have disturbed me. I’d seen the pistol there before; I’d watched him polish it many times. But that night, in the candlelight, the notches on the shiny barrel looked like the knuckles of an accusing skeletal finger pointing at my papa. And he stared back at that pistol. He stared and stared at it, as if the pistol had, in the terrible silence, become a wicked thing.

  A deadly, avenging thing.

  I wanted to shout a warning but the silence had bewitched us both and the cry died dry in my throat. I could say nothing. Yet, some internal force sent me gliding toward him, my feet barely touching the floor. Almost as if I floated to his side. My hand reached out and covered the pistol before he could take it.

  The smooth walnut grip felt cold and hard beneath my hand. Almost as cold and hard as my father’s bleak stare, suddenly fixed on me. I looked into Papa’s eyes and what I saw, I dare not trust myself to des
cribe.

  All at once, my father shuddered. He took a gulp of air as if he’d been drowning and pulled up suddenly from the water. “Is that my Martha?” he murmured, the spell broken. “My angel?”

  “Yes,” I said, for Martha was my given name, too. But I think it was my mother he saw in me. Perhaps that was only right, for I knew it was my mother who sent me to him, who made sure I kept my promise to watch over him. Still clutching the pistol, I knelt beside him. “Yes, Papa, I’m here.”

  Those were the last words we spoke that night, but we sat together for many hours, the pistol like ice in my hands, until the deathly oblivion passed. And I learned that night that the silence was not terrible. The silence was my mother’s gift to us. Ours to share. Ours alone.

  FROM THAT DAY FORWARD, I stayed at my father’s side. Huddled beside the iron-fitted oak chest containing bottles of spirits, I watched Papa walk the rough-hewn wood floors, his buckled shoes clicking with each step. He was on his feet, night and day, pacing incessantly, as if some solution would present itself to undo the tragedy of my mother’s death.

  He wouldn’t touch the trays of food brought to his room, for he had no appetite. My aunts tried to put baby Lucy in his arms, but he wouldn’t hold her, for she was the squalling infant that had hastened my mother’s death. And when Polly came to the door, my father became unsteady on his feet, as if he might swoon away, for my little sister so closely resembled my mother. It was the same reason, I think, he could not even bear the sight of Sally Hemings; the set of her mouth and shape of her eyes appeared familiar even then and greatly disturbed him.

  Papa would have only me at his side.

  Maybe it was because I was long and lanky like a boy, with ginger hair just like his, that he chose me to be his constant companion. Or maybe he sensed in me more than a daughter. A kindred spirit in the darkness.

  Whatever the reason, mourning forged us together like hot metal under a smith’s hammer. I was afraid to leave him for fear that if I did, I would be motherless and fatherless. I think he feared it, too.

  Only I could coax him out of the house to bury my mother beneath the great oak tree in Monticello’s graveyard, where my father blinked unseeingly into the afternoon sun and Aunt Elizabeth tried to offer comfort. “Our Martha has found a happier station. She’s in heaven, now. Alas, until we join her we all must attend ourselves to this life.”

  My father’s frown made it clear he didn’t believe a word of it, but he avoided arguments, with silence, whenever possible. Still, he knew he must say something, for my mother’s kinsmen had gathered to pay their respects. His voice caught with emotion. “If there is, beyond the grave, any concern for this world, then there’s one angel who must pity the misery to which life confines me. I’m in a stupor of mind that has rendered me as dead to the world as she whose loss occasioned it.”

  These words hushed not only the small crowd of stooped slaves, but also the stern-faced men in powdered wigs and their weepy women in bonnets. The depths of my father’s despair seemed to shame them. And him. Papa said nothing more during Mama’s funeral, but together, we read the words carved on her tombstone. Not a quote from the Bible, but from Homer’s Iliad:

  NAY IF EVEN IN THE HOUSE OF HADES THE DEAD FORGET THEIR DEAD, YET WILL I EVEN THERE BE MINDFUL OF MY DEAR COMRADE.

  Below that, a simple accounting of her:

  TO THE MEMORY OF MARTHA JEFFERSON,

  DAUGHTER OF JOHN WAYLES;

  BORN OCTOBER 19TH, 1748, O.S.

  INTERMARRIED WITH THOMAS JEFFERSON JANUARY 1ST, 1772

  —TORN FROM HIM BY DEATH SEPTEMBER 6TH, 1782

  THIS MONUMENT OF HIS LOVE IS INSCRIBED.

  The slaves used ropes to lower my mother’s coffin into the ground and then shoveled earth over her, rivers of sweat running down their black faces. Then she was gone from us. Truly gone.

  One of our neighbors murmured, “Poor Mrs. Jefferson, another victim of the British. Her death is the aftermath of fright …”

  As if struck guilty by those words, my father stumbled toward her grave. Was it the fault of the British? Had our flight from Monticello and fearful hiding from enemy soldiers stolen my mother’s life? And would we have been forced to hide if Papa had not been a revolutionary?

  Papa’s stricken expression told me that he counted himself to blame.

  It was Mr. Short and I who steadied Papa, even when my father tried to push away from our assistance. When Papa found his footing again, he uttered the briefest niceties to my mother’s kinsmen, before retreating up the long path to the house, forcing me to chase after him.

  Straightaway, he sat down at the table where the pistol still rested, but he didn’t touch it. Instead he took up his Garden Book. He hadn’t made entries since summer. But in the moments after my mother’s burial, I watched him write feverishly, scratching ink to paper with each hasty stroke. Curious, I peered over his shoulder, wondering what he was so keen to record, now of all times… .

  I was shocked by what I saw.

  W. Hornsby’s Method of Preserving Birds

  In painstaking detail, my father wrote … a macabre description of how to preserve dead birds in salt and nitre, mortar and pepper.

  I clasped a hand to my mouth. Is this what my aunts did to my mother before setting her to rest in her coffin?

  Mama was delicate; my father used to tease that she had the bones of a bird. I think he would’ve preserved her for all time, if he could have. He would’ve used salt and nitre, mortar and pepper, or any other means to keep some part of her with him. But he had only her belongings, her letters, the little scrap of paper still tucked against his heart … and her daughters.

  Could that ever be enough?

  Just then a knock came at the door. My father did not look up from his writing table. Papa continued to scratch notes about dead birds—and I was suddenly vexed that our servants let anyone into the house when Papa was in such a state.

  Aunt Elizabeth must have been similarly vexed, for I heard her address our visitor on the other side of the door. “Mr. Short, he cannot receive you. I fear he has lost his wits.”

  Mortified, I pressed my hot cheek against the cool door and heard Mr. Short chastise my aunt in no uncertain terms. “Never say it! Or you’ll inspire every man of Tory sympathies left in the country to crow that the author of the Declaration of Independence has gone mad.”

  Papa couldn’t be mad. I wouldn’t let him go mad. He was writing about birds, but at least he was writing again. Though the sight of my sisters still disturbed him, he was eating again, too. Little nibbles, here and there. And that night, when he collapsed onto his pallet in exhaustion, I stroked Papa’s red hair, singing softly a song my mother used to sing to soothe him.

  I made sure he was asleep before finding my way to my little sister in our bed. “Courage, Polly,” I whispered to soothe her tears, bolstering myself as much as her. “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.”

  Chapter Three

  WE ROAMED AIMLESSLY on horseback through the dense, mountainous woods that, themselves, seemed to have taken on Papa’s sorrow. A misting rain remained after a night’s steady showers, and the branches hung heavy. Turning leaves sagged and droplets splashed to the ground, as if the forest grieved with my father. For him. I wiped moisture from my face with a gloved finger, but I was glad for the rain, because I resented the sun as a liar.

  No matter how much it shined, there was no light at Monticello.

  Since my mother’s burial, my father and I had taken many long solitary rides like this, but he got no better. I’d promised myself that I wouldn’t let him go mad, but I’d come to understand that my mother was gone forever, and my father was only one step out of the prison of madness her passing created.

  On that particular day, Papa’s arms rested listlessly around my waist; I wished he’d held me tighter. Not because I feared Caractacus, but because I craved proof that Papa actu
ally saw me, actually knew I was there with him. I missed the warm strength and protection of his embraces.

  He was behind me on the broad back of the stallion, but I missed him as if he were the one in the grave. The thought made me bite down on the inside of my cheek until the tang of iron spilled onto my tongue. The curious taste, more than the pain, helped me resist the urgent pressure of my tears. My mother bade me not to grieve, and before my Aunt Elizabeth’s recent departure she had encouraged me to be strong. As for Papa, it’d been hard enough to coax him out of his confinement. I knew that I mustn’t cry.

  Caractacus’s hooves thudded against the wet ground, and occasionally he gave a low nicker. The trees creaked under the weight of the recent deluge and in the distance, the hammering of a tenacious woodpecker echoed. And yet, it was quiet. That special quiet. My father’s quiet and mine.

  The memory of how we sang together at Poplar Forest, when we were hiding from the British, swamped me. The contrast was so sharp, I shivered, the dampness of my hair, bodice, and skirts pressing a chill into my skin, as I came to understand that we’d never laugh or sing like that again.

  Papa tugged at the reins, directing Caractacus down a diagonal cut between the trees. The horse snorted and blew at the steep decline, but obeyed with a steady hoof. All at once, Papa let out a shuddering breath, the sound that was always the prelude to the wild grief to follow.

  Please, no. Not again, I thought, a knot in my belly.

  But this moment always came. Every single ride. Nothing I ever did stopped it, or made it end any faster. Papa’s chest and arms trembled behind and around me, and his breathing hitched in starts and stops. Then the sob burst out of him and his forehead fell heavily on my shoulder.

  Unending moans poured out of him. Their violence pounded against my heart, causing an ache there. He squeezed me until I struggled to breathe. He cried so hard and so much, the desolation of his grief made its way through my rain-soaked frocks to the chilled skin beneath. His words were a mournful jumble, but the hoarse pleading, interspersed with agonized wails, made his lamentation understandable to any living soul.