By the time Tom came to bed that night, he was drunk. He wasn’t gentle. But before I could scold him for putting a tear in my nightclothes, he buried his face in my hair, sniffling and sobbing barely coherent apologies. Some part of me was horrified to see him weep like that, a big strong man curled up against me like a boy. But another part opened up to love him just a little.
His loss was altogether too familiar for me not to feel compassion. My mother had died years ago, but Tom’s pain was still fresh. So I held him without resentment while he sobbed how much he loved his mother, and how bitterly he resented his father for never having loved her at all. “Patsy, I regret every little neglect I ever made in my affection to my mother. No one will ever love me like she did.”
I knew that pain, so I stroked his back, realizing he now feared to lose what little of his father’s love he’d ever had.
That’s what Tom feared.
But as my husband fell asleep on my shoulder, my fears were entirely financial. I married him, in part, because he was the heir to Tuckahoe, as grand a place as there was in Virginia. But I’d seen greater estates fall to ruin in France. How Colonel Randolph’s lands would provide for his remaining unmarried daughters was already a matter of concern. As the eldest son, Tom would take the largest share, but how many more ways would the colonel have to divide his holdings if he had more children?
Because my husband’s inheritance—and what might be left of it—was a thing of peculiar interest to me now that I suspected I was soon to have a child of my own.
COLONEL RANDOLPH’S IMPENDING REMARRIAGE worked itself like a poison into my husband’s blood. My family opposed the idea of setting up housekeeping at Varina, but Tom was now more determined than ever. He’d gone ahead of me to get crops into the ground and expected me to join him soon. And I dreaded it, because it was a hot summer and I was swelling with child and didn’t want to live in such proximity to the Randolphs. . . .
“I don’t understand it,” Aunt Elizabeth said, sitting on the porch, teaching me some tricks of mending while we watched Polly play with the dogs in the summer sun. “You need a maid when you’re in this condition, Patsy. Every Virginia gentleman gives one to his daughter on her wedding day. Sally should be tending you. Is your father saving her for your sister?”
Perhaps it was having lived so long in Paris, where slavery had been abolished, or perhaps it was the strong emotions my pregnancy had drawn out of me, but every word of my aunt’s inquiry aggravated me. There seemed to be so much wrongness in it that I’d go mad trying to unravel it all. Sally was, after all, almost as much Aunt Elizabeth’s sister as Polly was mine. But my aunt never acknowledged the colored part of the family except by calling them that. And because such a thing was never acknowledged in polite company, I’d have to quiet the part of my mind that persisted in thinking about the connection.
As for her question, I knew my father had no intention of giving Sally away. Not to me. Not to anyone. Not ever. He’d made Sally a promise in France, and he was honor-bound to keep it, even now that their child was dead. So I shrugged. “Sally and I wouldn’t get on well. . . .”
“Still, your father only gave you field hands,” Aunt Elizabeth said, pushing the needle in deep. “You can’t trust them in the house. You need someone you know. Someone with intelligence and character.”
Someone with lighter skin, she meant. Someone who behaved more like a servant so as to uphold the polite fiction of it all. Someone in the family . . .
Utterly sickened by her implication, I blurted, “Papa intends to free James Hemings. And Mary is now living with Mr. Bell. I think Mr. Bell means to free her, and my father will help arrange that, too. You ought to know my father believes slavery is an injustice.”
“Your father and every cultured gentleman in Virginia,” Aunt Elizabeth said, not looking very impressed. She pursed her lips. “The world is how it is and no one can change it. Not even your father.”
She was wrong, I thought. Papa had already changed it. France had changed it. Liberty was spreading across the ocean and the whole world. And what about Mr. Short? He was a Virginia gentleman who had taken a principled stand on the matter, and surely other men would follow suit. My own husband professed to want only a small farmstead he could work himself, but in Vir ginia, slavery was a way of life, and it would have to be the way of my life. We couldn’t get by without the slaves, and my father said they couldn’t get by without us.
“Ask your father to give you Mary’s daughter, Molly,” Aunt Elizabeth said. “She’s a girl of almost fourteen now. She knows how a house should run and she’s not so pretty as Sally, so your father won’t mind parting with her.”
That shut me right up. And for more reasons than one.
When I said nothing, my aunt added, “With a child on the way and no proper homestead, you can’t get along without a maid. Especially not at Varina, where you’ll be the only woman. What with your husband in the field and you by yourself in some old shack, I’d worry about you night and day.”