Though my cheek still throbbed, I said, “It’ll heal and be forgotten.”
His expression crumbled again, with anguish and self-loathing. “No. I’ll never forget it. And it’ll never happen again. I’ll never again betray the sacred charge your father put in me in giving you over into my authority. A husband ought to be kind and indulgent with his wife. To protect her from harm. It won’t happen again, Patsy.”
I believed him.
His tortured expression would have been enough to convince me, but his behavior after confirmed it. For Tom never again spoke of dueling with Richard Randolph and resolved to be the peacemaker in his family. He didn’t even rise to the bait when Richard published a screed in the General Advertiser proclaiming his innocence and condemning his accusers without naming them. Everyone in Virginia knew he was slinging mud at my husband, but Tom kept his peace, determined not to give himself over to rage again.
And I loved him more for it. Watching him struggle against undeserved abuse from such a villain made me forgive him, truly. But then, I was prone to forgiveness in the aftermath of Richard Randolph’s wretched newspaper notice. Especially since the very same issue announced the execution of the king of France.
In truth, this news was more of a blow than the one my husband had dealt me. I never thought the French would put King Louis to the guillotine. The revolutionary men in my father’s parlor in Paris never even suggested it. Perhaps with France at war with its neighbors, the revolutionaries feared to hold the king captive when his very life encouraged enemies to attack them. And King Louis was guilty of all the crimes they accused him of.
But even believing that, the account in the paper made my fingers rise up to my own throat as I fought back the horror of imagining the blade slicing through it. Who were these Jacobins who had condemned Lafayette a traitor and killed the king? And would they come next for the friends I left behind in France, like Marie?
Until this news, Papa and I had held in contempt those who complained of the revolution’s excesses. They hadn’t witnessed all we’d witnessed in France. But the men who had seized the reins there now, could they be the same men that Papa and I had known and admired? Surely not.
Papa could explain it, I was sure. And I was near desperate to have him home—especially when he wrote that the news of Richard and Nancy’s disgrace had reached him all the way in Philadelphia.
The damned story would not die. The slaves wouldn’t let it. And every white man in Virginia who ever resented the haughty Randolphs called for justice. By the time April wildflowers were in bloom at Monticello, Richard sat in a Cumberland County jail, accused of fathering a child on his wife’s sister and murdering the babe.
And I was called to testify.
Chapter Twenty-one
THE CUMBERLAND COURTHOUSE WAS PACKED, cheek to jowl, between old wooden walls. “Jefferson’s daughter,” someone said as I entered, and the courtroom erupted, every gawker and gossip-monger in the county craning their necks to get a better look.
“Mrs. Randolph!” someone else cried, but beneath the white satin bow and broad rim of my fashionable hat, I kept my eyes on the magistrates—sixteen men in powdered wigs in whose hands the fate of my family’s reputation now resided.
I made my way through the crowd with the gliding gait I had learned at the Court of Versailles, my skirts swishing, white lace upon blue-ruffled petticoat, while whispers flew from one row of wooden benches to the next.
Is her gown from Paris?
She’s wearing a revolutionary cockade!
What will she say?
I knew the lawyers for the defense. The fire-breathing Patrick Henry and the grim-faced John Marshall. Federalists. Both men nodded to me respectfully, as if they thought I didn’t know them to be my father’s enemies. As if those glory-seeking creatures thought to convince me, for even one moment, that they wouldn’t use whatever happened in the trial to tarnish my father in the papers if they could.
I smiled serenely as I was called to stand beneath the drape of red, white, and blue—the colors of both beloved flags I’d seen waved to champion the cause of freedom. Pushing artfully coiffed copper ringlets of hair from my face, I looked out into a crowd of old Virginia gentry in fine coats and breeches, frontier planters wearing hunting shirts and homespun, and housewives in mobcaps and bonnets.
Some were friendly. Others were eager to see the Randolphs fall.
Offered a leather-bound Bible on which to swear, I was informed that the charge was murder. A fact I knew all too well. Murder of an infant, punishable by death. As my hand hovered above the Bible, I glanced at the accused. My sister-in-law and her vile seducer. Richard looked smug, but Nancy trembled.