“Martha,” Tom said a few mornings into our stay. He caught me with the servants in the kitchen where I was setting up housekeeping. The months of loss had taken a toll on me, and an even worse toll on us, and so I kept my eyes on the piles of dirt I was sweeping and my mouth closed. “Patsy,” he said when I didn’t look up. “Might I trouble you for a word?”
My husband had spoken sweetly to me ever since learning that my sister’s childbirth had come to grief. For my part, I’d scarcely answered him with a word more than was necessary. He’d kept me from my sister when she needed me. I wanted to fly to my sister now and comfort her, but having been disappointed before in doing what perhaps my anxiety only deemed a moral duty, I was afraid to indulge any hopes in the matter. “I’m listening, Mr. Randolph.”
My broom swished, swished, swished against the rough-hewn planks of the floor, highlighting the stretch of silence between us.
“Your father has advanced me the money to save Varina,” Tom said, sheepishly.
I swept harder, whacking the broom against the wall as I did it.
Tom heaved a great sigh. “How can I ever express my gratitude for his kindness? I was really on the point of ruin from my own neglect.”
I slammed down a dustpan and collected up the debris with more force than was strictly necessary. Then I yanked open a window and emptied the pan with a clatter.
Tom cleared his throat. “I knew all along that I should’ve sold my tobacco in full time to meet my debts. But a great price for that crop would’ve rendered us perfectly easy for life.” He stared at his feet. “I risked ruin with the hope of fortune but fear I’ve only procured embarrassments.”
It was the kind of frank admission of fault that Tom was, alone amongst the men I knew, capable of giving. And I worried he had beggared us for the rest of our lives. How long would he really be able to keep Varina, even with my father’s help? He should’ve sold that damned farm. Let it go. Started fresh. But that’s not what I really blamed him for. “My sister is ailing. Her breasts have risen and broke.”
And this is your fault because you wouldn’t let me go to her, was my silent accusation.
He frowned, not needing me to say it. “I’ll take you to Eppington, if you still want to go.”
We left that very day, and when I saw my sister half-dead in a fetid bed, I thought I might swoon away at the shock of seeing her so thin and frail. But my resentment of Tom was utterly eclipsed by my anger at yet another quack physician. This one had Polly confined to bed taking so much castor oil that she’d wasted away. “My poor Polly!”
“Maria,” she whispered with a faint smile, unable to lift her head from the pillow, but fluttering her eyes at me as if grateful that I’d finally come. Childbirth had ravaged her. Even beyond the grief of losing her baby, the damage done to her delicate body was like nothing I’d ever seen. The doctor murmured that she wasn’t the sort of woman God made for childbearing, to which my sister replied, “Patsy, rescue me. . . .”
I vowed I would—because I feared that under his regimen of mysterious elixirs she might never rise from her bed again. Fortunately, I wasn’t the only one stricken by the state of her.
Tom was adamant. “She needs to be up and out of that sickbed and her breasts need to be drained of the swelling.” Whether he was dissecting opossums, nursing our children through smallpox, or theorizing how to relieve a new mother’s breasts when her baby had died, my husband’s peculiar interest in science made me think he would’ve done better to pursue a career in medicine than farming. And I hoped that Jack Eppes would take my husband’s advice.
Unfortunately, Jack and Tom mixed like oil and water. Maybe it was because Tom seldom laughed at Jack’s jokes. Or maybe it was because Jack laughed too much at Tom, poking fun at his serious nature. Whatever the reason, Jack defended the physician as an old family friend. “We’re perfectly happy with his ministrations to my wife.”
“My apologies for intruding, then,” Tom said stiffly, sensing he’d pressed the matter as far as he could in another man’s house about another man’s wife.
But Polly wasn’t only the wife of Jack Eppes, she was also my sister. I wasn’t about to leave it alone.
That night, after the fire burned low, I left Polly in the care of her maid Betsy—another Hemings girl—and went to find Jack, where he was shutting up for the night. “My sister wants to stretch her legs. Breathe in fresh air. Get a little food into her without castor oil purging it. Surely you don’t want her confined forever, do you?”
“Oh, Patsy,” Jack said, giving me a genial pat. “I want her alive and well!”
Jack was smiling that glib smile of his, and I had the most unladylike urge to punch it from his face. He was supposed to take care of my sister. To love her and take seriously her ailments. The fact that he could smile at me like that while she wasted away hardened me. “If you truly want her alive and well, Jack, then understand that she can’t ever have more children.”