No note to or from Sally has ever been found. That may be because Sally wasn’t literate, or because Jefferson never wrote her, or because someone made sure such letters vanished—and if so, that someone was assuredly his daughter Patsy. If Sally Hemings was with child upon her return from France, no evidence of that child remains—which left us to incorporate the contemporary rumors that the child was a boy and named after the president. And the Jefferson family would have had many reasons to keep all of this quiet, including a little-known fact that sexual congress between a man and his wife’s sister held the taint of incest until the nineteenth century.
As with most works of historical fiction, the most outlandish bits are the true ones. Patsy did, indeed, want to be a nun—an ambition frustrated by her father. Newly released private letters shared with the Thomas Jefferson Foundation reveal that she was also highly sought after by the eligible bachelors of Paris, including the Duke of Dorset who offered a diamond ring. The unsigned love poem we attributed to William Short is real but may have come from any one of her suitors, or possibly one of her convent friends, who, like Marie, expressed utter despair at her departure.
Patsy did give suspicious testimony after the scandal at Bizarre plantation. The colorful characters in that strange case are all drawn from history. The duels and threatened duels are all a matter of public record. Bankhead did beat his wife, Ann, at Monticello. He was set upon by Tom with a fire poker. He did stab Jefferson Randolph and live as a fugitive, even as the family sought to quiet matters, and Patsy mused on ways to let him finish himself off. Harriet and Beverly Hemings were permitted to “run away” from Monticello. Lafayette did, in fact, bow to Patsy Jefferson on that fateful day he escorted the king to Paris. And did also praise her publicly upon his return to America.
Tom tormenting Patsy in her time of grief and instigating grave site drama is a matter of record. And while we cannot know what Jefferson’s daughter saw when she came upon her father the night of her mother’s death—for she wrote that she dared not describe it—Jefferson’s letters reveal that he was suicidal at this time.
Pistols didn’t seem a far stretch and dovetailed nicely into the equally strange-but-true encounter he’d later have with a man who’d just blown off his head.
As for Patsy’s estrangement from her husband, it’s impossible to know whether Tom beat her, but we know that he beat her children. And those same children said that she suffered from his sullen moods and angry fancies. It is our belief that his documented behavior fits the pattern of a classic abuser, so we adopted that interpretation and faithfully followed the chronological deterioration of their marriage, stemming largely from financial problems, alcohol, resentments, and possible mental illness.
But we couldn’t help but notice that Patsy’s daughter Ellen mysteriously blamed the marital trouble—in part—upon Tom’s hatred for Patsy’s best friends.
William Short might’ve been one of them.
We confess to a reckless disregard for the almanac and a certain ruthlessness in condensing our heroine’s story. Patsy’s life was a long and full one, shared with one of the most iconic men of all time, a man who wrote so many letters that we know where he was, and what he was doing, almost every day of his adult life. In fact, some of his biographers required several volumes to tell the tale. Entire books are dedicated to the flight from Monticello and the Paris years alone. And because Patsy’s life was so tied up in her father’s, it was a challenge to tell her story in the space of a novel.
Extremely painful omissions had to be made. There simply wasn’t enough room to explore all the fascinating people in Patsy’s life, like the colorful Aunt Marks and the omnipresent Priscilla Hemings. Nor was there space for all the details of Patsy’s political and family circumstances, or even all the important contemporary events she witnessed.