And yet, it was not the whole truth of it either.
I had a family and he had his mistress, and with her, they had children. And I was never so grateful for Sally as I was that night when she relieved me at my father’s side.
I began to retch the moment I returned to my room. I heaved drily into a pail that my husband held under me, nothing coming up. Alarmed to see me in such a state, Tom said, “Let me get you into bed.”
“No,” I said, refusing to let him tend me. I couldn’t lean on him. I was in too much pain. I could neither sit nor lie down anywhere without agony. Instead, I paced, panting like a horse that’d been run too hard, until I was struggling for every breath the way my sister had struggled for hers.
“My poor Patsy,” Tom said. “You’re having a fit of hysterics.”
Dragging in a ragged, desperate breath, as I tried to escape the cage of his arms, I snapped, “It’s nothing of the sort. I ate radishes and milk together for supper, both of which are unfriendly to my stomach.”
“It can’t be healthful to hold the pain the way you do. You’re a woman. There’s no shame in your tears. You need a good cry on my shoulder, Patsy.”
“Would you mind terribly fetching me some peppermint?”
With a frown, he sighed, then went down the stairs. I shut the door behind him, gasping, suffocating in my own garments and struggling to tear them off. Something finally tore inside me, too, and I began to sob.
I sobbed as I’d never sobbed before, falling to my knees amidst the shreds of my garments, shattered by the knowledge that I’d never see my sister again. She’d been twenty-five years old, now gone from me forever. And it was a pain like nothing I’d ever felt before—one I scarcely knew how to survive.
“IT’S SO HARD TO LOSE A SISTER,” Nancy Randolph was saying.
She’d come to Edgehill ostensibly to offer her help in my time of grief. Now she was trying to draw me out past the usual pleasantries because the Randolphs seemed to want to speak about everything.
But I was a Jefferson and I could scarcely hear my own infant daughter Mary’s name spoken aloud without bleeding anew for the sister I’d named her after. Condolences came from all over the country. We even received one from Abigail Adams. But I didn’t want to think about the loss, couldn’t bear to think about it, so I just stood there, hanging laundry while my infamous sister-in-law nattered on, insensible to the fact that I was barely listening.
“I know it’s not the same,” Nancy said. “But I’ve lost my sister Judy, as sure as if she’d died. Truly, I have. She harbors nothing but bitterness against me now.”
I imagine I might be bitter, too, if my sister had fornicated with my husband, then killed the bastard born of that incestuous union, and exposed us all to scandal and poverty. Nancy had no one left alive to blame but herself.
So I said nothing. Just hung a petticoat on the line.
Handing me another wet petticoat from the basket, Nancy said, “John’s causing mischief between us.”
John Randolph, she meant. The only surviving brother at Bizarre. John was a sharp-tongued dandy who’d lately taken to calling himself Randolph of Roanoke. I disliked him immensely because he’d also taken to criticizing my father’s presidency. But I didn’t see how he could be to blame for the estrangement of Nancy and Judith, and I said so.
“I’ll tell you how,” Nancy explained. “John falsely accused me of carrying on with slaves in my sister’s house as if I lived in a tavern. He’s saying I poisoned Richard, and he’s giving Judith the excuse she needs to turn me out.”
For years now, I’d held my tongue about the scandal at Bizarre, even though my blood still ran cold at the thought of a dead baby hidden under a woodpile. Now, with grief eating me alive, I couldn’t hold my tongue one moment longer. “Does Judy need an excuse, Nancy? We all know the kind of desperate acts you’re capable of!”
Nancy drew back, pale as the petticoat on the line. “I thought—I thought you knew the truth, Patsy. I thought that’s why, at trial . . . that’s why you said . . .” My blood ran even colder at the thought of her lying to me again after all these years. So I said nothing. But Nancy sputtered, “You think I’m guilty. You think I killed my baby. But if you believed I was guilty, then why—”
“I didn’t want to see you hanged,” I said, very quietly.
Nancy let out a cry, as disconsolate as if I’d turned against her before the entire tribunal. “You don’t understand, Patsy. I wanted to confess from the start, but Richard wouldn’t let me. He wanted to protect me. It’s true that I surrendered my virtue to the man I loved. It’s true. But I did nothing to harm the child, and neither did Richard. I swear it.”