“Tom!” I struggled to pull a wailing Jeff from his father’s grasp. “Stop! It was an accident!” But my husband’s hold seemed to tighten the more I fought him. “Tom, please!”
The next thing I knew, Jeff was in my shaking arms, the unexpected shifting of his weight against me making me stumble back. Meanwhile, Tom paced, tugging at his hair with one hand. “He should learn proper respect for his mother!”
The time he’d struck me, maybe I’d deserved it, but I knew from the depths of my soul that my sobbing little boy had done nothing to earn such rough treatment. As I cuddled him close, my heart ached in my chest, and my stomach soured and burned.
Because I knew that day that more than just our financial affairs were falling apart.
SEEKING TO ESCAPE THE TROUBLES UNFURLING AT VARINA, I unwittingly brought my children to a tragedy at Monticello. For the winter of 1799 was a reaper of souls in Albemarle.
Mammy Ursula’s husband and son, affectionately known as the Georges, died of some mysterious ailment. Then my father’s old personal servant, Jupiter, came down with it, too. He believed himself poisoned and, against all advice, went to the same black conjure doctor who had treated the Georges.
I learned of it after a commotion outside, where my daughter had been playing in the dusting of snow with the slave children, all of whom called for me in a panic. Sally and I both flew out of my father’s house to witness a sight I’d never forget.
Jupiter had fallen to the cold and muddy road in front of the new carriage house on Mulberry Row, twitching in a convulsion fit so strong that it took three stout men to hold him. Catching Ann up by the arms, I tried to quiet her sobs. “What’s happened?”
“He took a dram, Mama,” she said, clinging to me.
“The conjure doctor gave him something that would kill or cure,” Sally said, bitterly, for the doctor had done the same for the Georges, both dead now.
“Take the children away,” I told Sally quietly, trying to keep my wits about me. Then, to the men holding Jupiter down as he writhed in pain, I commanded, “Take him to a bed. And tell me where this doctor can be found.”
“He’s long gone, mistress,” Ursula answered. “Absconded two and a half hours ago, after giving Jupiter the potion.”
I paced, my skirts dragging as the men lifted up Jupiter’s twisted form, his eyes bulging so that we could see the whites, a bloody froth dripping from his lips down the black skin of his neck and into his woolly hair. My heart broke at the sight. I wanted to rail at the servants for trusting such a butcher, but more than that, I wanted Jupiter to be well.
I tended him myself. Nine days he languished and never recovered, not even to speak his last words to anybody. Horrified by my failure to protect our people, I was relieved to see Tom ride up to the house. Our troubles seemed suddenly quite small with death all around us. “I should think this doctor’s murders sufficiently manifest to come under the cognizance of the law,” I told Tom, wanting justice.
I wrote the same to my father.
But my rage all came to nothing. My menfolk raised no fuss. I suppose they were all hoping that winter’s reaper of death had absconded away with the murderous doctor, and didn’t want to call either back. Alas, nature demanded more payments that winter.
Sally’s newborn daughter died.
Polly’s baby died.
George Washington died, too.
Such was the bitter partisanship of the day that my father didn’t feel he’d be welcome at the funeral for his friend, our first president, the great Virginian whose Federalist followers mourned him like the king they wished him to be.
And I cared nothing about it, because all I could think of was the poisoned slaves I hadn’t been able to help, and my poor grieving sister, so far from me.
Thanks to Tom, I hadn’t made it to her lying-in. And I learned about her baby’s death back at Edgehill as winter gasped its last cold breaths. The house Tom built for us was no architectural marvel; it was just a box, no wider than forty feet and two stories high. But it was the first thing we had without the taint of Colonel Randolph on it.
Alas, the windows were done badly, and the insides had been spattered with rain and wind and mud come up from the cellar. For days after we arrived, I cleaned from dawn ’til dusk, sweeping and scrubbing until my hands were raw and cracked, while Tom worked at repairing the windows.