Jeff was so burdened with his own growing family and managing my father’s plantation that there’d never be any opportunity for him to become a man of letters, a thing for which he felt an acute lack. Perhaps one of my younger sons might attend the university my father was founding in Virginia, but until then, our hopes for the next generation of intellectuals rested upon Polly’s son.
My daughters, meanwhile, were likely to end up spinsters. Nothing came of their season in Richmond during which the men allegedly considered them altogether too educated in the male arts and not enough in the womanly ones. In the end, only a single offer of marriage was made—and it was worse than none at all. The offer came from Nicholas Trist, a neighbor, the son of a friend, an idealistic but penniless boy of seventeen who wanted to marry my penniless daughter Virginia of the same age. Though I’d married at seventeen—or maybe because I did—I thought them both too young to be entangled by an engagement that would decide the happiness, or wretchedness, of their lives.
Inexplicably, the young suitor, who aspired to be a diplomat, addressed his request to me, rather than to Tom. And so from my sickbed, I composed a short note, entreating him to learn more of the world before judging whether Ginny was vital to his happiness. It’d buy time, I hoped, for my daughter to seek an older, more established man with whom to build an easier life—if such a thing could be had in Virginia, where the price of cotton had fallen nearly 25 percent in a single day. The irony wasn’t lost on me that in warning away my daughter’s suitor, I was doing exactly as my father had done to me and William, but I better understood my father’s position now and felt a pang of sympathy.
It was February before I was able to get out of bed and go below stairs. And the first full day I spent upright was on account of a special occasion. There was to be a reunion at Monticello, as we were expecting Ann and her reportedly now-sober husband to dinner. So I summoned my girls down from the attic cuddy they had fashioned into a salon for themselves, where they were happier to contend with wasps and rafters than with Papa’s guests. Then I had one of the servants carry down for me a comfortable but worn gilded chair from France to the kitchen, where I held my Le Cuisinier Royal cookbook open to my handwritten notes.
Amidst the shiny copper pots and sooty walls of the kitchen, Ginny moped in like a kicked puppy, having apparently surmised that I’d thwarted her nascent courtship. Nicholas Trist would never have been so bold as to declare his feelings to her without my blessing. But I remembered the artful games William and I had played and knew such matters could be understood without being spoken.
In any case, if Ginny was nursing a broken heart, she was too much a Jefferson and not enough a Randolph to say so. Instead, she sulked. “I don’t see what the point of learning this is. A few months of housekeeping badly done aren’t going to give me one useful acquirement, not even the industrious habits which would enable me to spend my future more profitably. I’d rather read than sew or keep house.”
With a sharp look at her sister, Ellen said, “Which will profit you not at all. Taking turns means we can each learn what we need to be useful wives, then go with Grandpapa to study like men do, for gratification and because it’s the most agreeable way of passing time.” Then Ellen rounded on me. “And, Mother, your insistence on supervising is defeating the purpose of giving you rest.”
“I’ve been resting for nearly a year. I’m quite weary of rest,” I complained, as the cook and the servants who did the arduous work here all bustled about. “Besides, the less occupation we have, the less we’re disposed to do.”
That day, I rode the girls like an overseer, right up until the great clock reached the dinner hour according to the gong at the top of the house.
“Charles is coming along soon!” Ann chirped, having arrived ahead of him. “He had to stop first in Charlottesville at the store.”
My daughter Ann had turned into a scarecrow since I’d seen her last. She and the grandchildren lived poorly; their threadbare clothes and worn shoes told the tale. And an hour later, Bankhead still hadn’t arrived. Jeff was late, too. So late that Papa didn’t want to hold supper any longer.
Finally, at evening, the dogs barked at a rider galloping madly up our road. Burwell went for the door, but Ellen also raced for the entryway with unladylike haste.
I tried to follow but was such an invalid that the blood drained from my head; I nearly toppled Ann when she tried to steady me. “Mother, careful! You’re not well, yet.”
“It’s only a visitor,” Papa said.
But I never remembered anyone riding a horse that violently to deliver good news. And Ellen returned to the dining room, ashen, overseer Bacon behind her, sweating and breathless from his ride.
“It’s Jeff,” Ellen cried, her eyes flitting with fury to her older sister. “Your worthless malignant husband stabbed our brother!”