I felt like a lady again for the first time since moving to Varina.
Once the vows were said and the celebration begun in the great hall, Nancy rushed to me, crying, “Citizen Patsy is going to make me an auntie!” I was glad to see her smile in spite of the awkward circumstance her father’s marriage created. Alas, the bride soon swept over to us before I could tell her so.
“My dearest new daughters,” Gabriella said.
I laughed, since we were all only a few years apart in age. But Gabriella laced a cloying arm through Nancy’s and announced, “The first thing I’m going to do is paint the parlor white so I’ll feel more at home at Tuckahoe. The black walnut walls are so gloomy!”
Nancy stiffened. “My mother chose them.”
“All the more reason, then,” Gabriella said, her eyes glittering with malice. “It’s important for everyone to know there’s a new mistress of Tuckahoe.”
Was she taking aim at Nancy, who would have to relinquish her mother’s keys? Or was it a barb aimed at me, because of Tom’s indiscreet remarks when Sally’s boy died?
Maybe it was meant for both of us.
The bride batted her lashes. “Patsy, everyone says you’re so worldly, so tell Nancy how it works. Perhaps she’ll listen when you say that unless she’s planning a trip to Paris, she’ll never have a better chance to snag herself a wealthy husband than at this wedding. And she can’t live at Tuckahoe forever.”
From that moment, I knew Gabriella would make life miserable for my husband and his siblings. They must’ve known it, too, because when it was time for us to leave, Tom’s youngest sisters clung to his legs and begged him to take them away with us.
“Now, girls,” I said gently. “Do your best to welcome your father’s new wife, and make Tuckahoe a place of happiness and contentment for everyone.”
But I felt a peculiar uneasiness on the road. And in the carriage, Tom turned to me and said, “I wasn’t apt to like her, but I never guessed Gabriella would be such a horrible woman.” So alone amongst the men, he hadn’t been ensnared by her beauty. And I adored him a little bit for it. Even more when he said, “You cannot imagine how I want to turn around, grab up my sisters, and carry them away with us.”
“I don’t have to imagine it. I feel it, too.”
His head jerked up and he stared. Then, all at once, heedless of who might see us through the carriage windows, he kissed me. He kissed me with such fierceness, such gratitude, such passion . . . that then and there, I promised myself for the hundredth time that I’d stop comparing him to William Short.
William had been pleasure and principles—in the end, he hadn’t understood the inexorable pull of family. Tom Randolph understood it, and because he did, a very real tenderness for him took root inside me right along with our babe already growing there. I might never love him; I was half-certain I could never fall in love again. But I was starting to feel something for Tom that might be deeper than love, if only I could find a name for it.
I WAS NEVER SO HAPPY to be back at Monticello as I was that autumn, when Papa returned from the capital. Dignity itself wouldn’t have stopped me from running into my beloved father’s arms, but I was too heavy with child to run.
Seeing me that way put a proud gleam in my father’s eye that warmed me from head to toe. But in putting his hand on my belly, that proud gleam faded to sadness, and I wondered if he was thinking of Sally’s little boy, dead and buried months ago.
When the news had finally reached him, he’d suffered his most violent headache yet, lasting nearly six weeks in duration, and with no one there to care for him. I wondered now what kind of reunion Papa and Sally might’ve had if she’d been here with the rest of the servants we’d summoned to welcome my father home. Instead, she was still with Polly at Eppington. I’d been slow to send for her when I learned my father would be coming—a mistake I’d never repeat after seeing Gabriella Harvie installed as mistress of Tuckahoe.
After witnessing the graceless way the new Mrs. Randolph claimed her position, elbowing poor Nancy out of the way, I believed myself to have been a fool for ever raising even the slightest objection to my father’s liaison with Sally.
I vowed to change my thinking in the matter. For I understood that the promise my mother exacted from my father not to marry was an act of maternal, not wifely, love. Perhaps remembering the remarriages of my grandfather Wayles before he had finally settled upon Elizabeth Hemings as his concubine, my mother had said she couldn’t bear to have a stepmother brought in over us.