Chapter One

Tuckahoe, Virginia. March 1789

Death brought the family home to Tuckahoe.

Carriages swept up the lengthy driveway, and the plantation house echoed with the knock of hard heels, the thud of trunks and the opening and closing of doors. New scents filled the hallways. Rosemary and lavender, musk, cloves and bayberry.

Nancy, allotted a stool at the foot of Mother's bed, reached out and gripped her older sister Judy's hand. They were close in age, sixteen and fourteen — old enough to watch their mother leave them. Father sat by Mother's pillow, head bowed, a bead of sweat sliding from his temple. Opposite him, her oldest sisters, Molly and Lizzie, watched Mother intently, their eyes shifting from face to chest. Nancy turned to Judy, but her eyes were closed, and her lips moved in prayer. Nancy didn't want to pray. She wanted to send her stool flying and run from the room.

The heat from the fire, combined with the warm breath and bodies of so many family members, made her skin itch. She counted five jugs of narcissi. They were Mother's favorite, but in the claustrophobic heat, their yellow jauntiness turned her stomach. William's silent weeping didn't help. She glanced at Father, saw his jaw tighten with disgust at her brother's weakness. William was nearly twenty. A man. Never man enough for Father though. Tom, a year older, didn't cry but kept clenching and unclenching his hands. Nancy lifted her chin to gaze at a thin gap in the window drapes. The bones of her neck shifted and settled. She willed her mind to be as empty as the blue sky outside. If only she could pray as Judy could.

Of the children still at home, Judy was the sensible one. Where her sister sought approval and tried to do everything right, Nancy questioned and tested. Warned not to touch a hot kettle one day, Judy clasped her hands behind her back and nodded while Nancy sucked on the burn on her forefinger for a week. Everyone agreed on it. Judy was more obedient. Better. Less prone to hiding behind the smokehouse reading novels.

Nancy forced herself to look at the woman in the bed. Anne Cary Randolph had grown thin these last few months. Her collarbones were hollowed out, the ropey muscles in her neck protruded. Sharp lines creased her cheeks and dragged at the corners of a mouth unable to smile through the pain. Her eyes were closed. Mother had green eyes with a dark rim, eyes that could silence a room, discipline a slave, chastise a child or warn a husband but also glow with warm approval. Those eyes.

More silence. Puffs of air and supplication escaped Judy's lips. Lizzie leaned in. They waited, like drops of rain quivering on a pane of glass.

"She's gone," Molly said.

That night, in their bedroom, Nancy and Judy scratched their names and the date — March 16, 1789 — on the windowpane before curling up in each other's arms, tears on their pillow and in each other's hair.

The women of the family spent the first days sewing mourning clothes and to-ing and fro-ing between the kitchen and the storehouse. It would not do, Lizzie said, to let Old Cilla think grief distracted the family from plantation business. Molly and Lizzie cleaned their mother's body and laid her out in the parlor, sending Nancy and Judy scuttling for pitchers of water, towels, combs, rosemary leaves and tansy. More family and neighbors visited. In the gloom cast by dark walnut paneling, turned mirrors, and pulled drapes, Mother's face seemed to belong to someone else. Her high forehead, thin nose and cheeks turned porcelain white.

"Is she cold?" Nancy's ten-year-old brother, John, found his answer in the force of Father's hand across the back of his head. After that, they all stayed quiet.

"Naturally, your father will remarry," Aunt Page declared as the family walked back to the house after Mother's interment. She spoke to Molly, but plenty loud enough for Nancy to hear. "With my sister in the ground, the older girls must look to the future."

The Tuckahoe Plantation, one of Virginia's finest, sprawled over twenty-five-thousand acres of land dedicated to tobacco and wheat, worked by more than two hundred slaves. Aunt Page, their mother's youngest sister, was a frequent visitor. She was younger even than Molly, and by far the most approachable of Nancy's many aunts and uncles.

"Why would he remarry?" Nancy pulled her gaze from the bare fields waiting for tobacco seedlings and saw the older women exchange glances. "It's not a stupid question; Patsy's father has not."

"Apart from the obvious reasons? Or are you too young to comprehend me?"

"I'm not ignorant!"

"If you say so."

Nancy pulled up short, her hands on her hips.

"Please use the brains God gave you," her aunt said. "Think of the plantation. What happens now? Who looks after the slaves? Who takes the key for the storehouse? Who cares for the sick and knows when to call the doctor? Who runs the dairy? Tends the vegetable garden? The smokehouse?"

Nancy rolled her eyes — Mother had never set foot in the vegetable garden — but her expression only set Molly off.

"Our aunt is right. Who makes sure the chickens and the pigs are fed? Who checks the chimneys are swept and the glasses clean? Who salts the meat and dips the candles? Who counts the linens and orders the clothing for the five of you still at home? Every plantation needs a mistress. Tuckahoe is no different."

"What do you say, Judy?" Nancy looked over her shoulder, but her sister was gazing down the line of mourners trailing back to the house across ground still hard from a deep, late winter frost.

"What do I think about what?" Judy's cheeks were blotched in pink. Grief brought out the angles in her face, particularly the high cheekbones and short straight nose all the Randolph daughters shared.

"Oh, nothing. Or nothing to worry about now. You know, you'll need a cold compress before you meet him."

"Nancy! I don't think of such matters at a time like this."

"If you say so. Take my advice though. There's no question your Dick Randolph is the tallest and most handsome of Mr. Tucker's stepsons."

It seemed the whole of Richmond had turned out for the funeral, and others had traveled from as far away as Williamsburg and Charlottesville. Mother had been the oldest of nine siblings, and Virginia was full of families that had intermarried in the century since their forebears had sailed to the New World from England. Carys, Randolphs, Pages, Blands — a tapestry of cousins with familiar names indicative of lineage and privilege. Molly and Lizzie were hard-pressed to find places for their guests to sleep, even in a house as large as Tuckahoe, and Father shared his room along with everyone else. That night, the Randolph children gave up their beds and lay down on mattresses, cloaks, and blankets. They slept in chairs and under tables, wherever a scrap of space could be claimed. But before rest, there was hospitality. Their slaves laid out the dining room with pork with pease pudding, roasted woodcock and mutton ragout. The men gathered there first, with the womenfolk keeping to the parlor, but as the rum and brandy began to flow, the younger crowd relaxed and mingled in the Great Hall, while older men grumbled about the price of tobacco, and married women discussed their children.

* * *

Judy told herself not to seek out Dick Randolph, even as she scanned each room for his curling brown hair and wide smile. She thought of his letters, tied in red ribbon and locked in a wooden box beneath her bed. The key hung on a chain around her neck, keeping them safe from Nancy's prying eyes.

She felt him before she saw him. Dick touched her arm, his breath warmed her ear. "I'm so sorry for your loss, Miss Randolph."

"Thank you." She offered her hand and for a moment, thought he might raise it to his lips.

"We all wished to convey our condolences." Dick gestured toward his younger brothers. "The loss of our own mother last year is still hard to bear, especially for Jack."

"It must be. Now, I begin to know what you have been through. I worry for all my younger siblings."

"They're too young to be without a mother. You know, my father died when I was five. I barely remember him, and Theo and Jack not at all."

"It will be the same for Harriet and Jenny. John and Jane will remember her, but — oh, I don't know how we will go on." Her voice broke. She took the handkerchief Dick handed her and pressed it to her face, struggling for composure.

"Dear God, I have made you upset! That wasn't my intention! Please." He gripped her elbow. "Let's step outside for a moment. The fresh air will help."

* * *

"Where do things stand with those two?" Aunt Page asked as Judy and Dick Randolph slipped out through the west door. "They must have met less frequently since Mr. Tucker moved the family to Williamsburg."

Nancy nodded. When Dick's mother was alive, the family — comprising her three sons with John Randolph, and another five children from her remarriage to Mr. Tucker — had lived at Matoax, a large plantation south of Richmond. Dick Randolph had ridden to Tuckahoe regularly. Coming to see Tom and William, he'd claimed.

"Mr. Tucker has his eye on them." Aunt Page tipped her head toward a tall, hawk-nosed man with sandy hair swept back from his high forehead, standing at a nearby window.

"You know he wrote to Mother?" In the fall, after the move to Williamsburg, Dick had declared himself to Judy and requested an interview with Father. Judy shared little, but their mother never shied away from expressing her opinions about her daughters' duties and marriage prospects. "She replied immediately."

"Not favorably, I imagine."

"No. She said Judy was too young. But Dick was allowed to write. She had to show Father her replies."

"Your mother was sixteen when she married your father. Only seventeen when Molly was born. She was adamant Molly didn't marry until she was eighteen at least." They both glanced at Molly's husband, David Meade Randolph. Nancy had been known to imitate his braying laugh, although never in front of his wife. "And then she tried to make Lizzie wait until she was twenty but . . . well, let's just say your sister was determined."

Determined. That was one word for it. Their brothers had taken great pleasure in teasing Nancy and Judy about how Lizzie ensured her marriage took place.

"She receives letters from Dick Randolph then?" Aunt Page continued. "And responds?"

"I believe so, but don't ask me for details. She's so secretive and dull about it. She barely lets me mention his name. If I was as lucky as she, I'd never stop talking about it."

"That I can believe."

Nancy shrugged this off. "I wonder what will happen between them. Now Mother is gone."

But Aunt Page bustled off without bothering to reply, and Nancy took a last glance outside. Judy and Dick Randolph were so disappointing. They remained within clear sight, sitting on a bench with space for at least two people to fit between them. It wasn't the time or place for anything more, but she longed to see some token of their romance — their fingers touching, their heads leaning in. How else were they supposed to tell each other they were drowning in love?

"I'm sorry to be here in such sad circumstances, Miss Nancy." Mr. Tucker, Dick's stepfather, offered her his arm. "You were brave today, as I hear you have been every day since your mother's passing. I cannot mend your pain, but its point will blunt in time."

"Will it? Is it strange of me to hope it will not? The idea of not hurting at this loss seems even worse than living with it."

"There are as many ways to grieve as there are mourners." He patted her hand. "One day at a time."

They spoke for a few moments of Williamsburg before Nancy excused herself to see how her little sisters fared. Her face grew warm as she approached Dick's younger brothers standing by the arch to the south hallway. Long-limbed and awkward-looking, Jack Randolph was a year older than her — a pale, thin youth with a small, girlish mouth and a dimple on his chin. Theo, the middle brother, was shorter, thickset, with a heavy jaw. More handsome than Jack, although nothing like as attractive as Dick, Theo pushed a hand through his dark hair as Nancy passed. Did their eyes follow her? Then the sound of Jenny crying reached her. She swooped down to where the little girl grumbled by the sitting-room fireplace, took her in her arms and murmured a favorite lullaby. All thought of the Randolph brothers vanished in concern for her motherless sibling.

In the following weeks, Nancy and Judy spoke of their mother often. Without her, the house was altered. Mother was never one for outward affection, but they missed her presence, from her critical eye upon their clothes and hair, to her many rules and precepts. Nancy longed to think of other things and push the hurt and strangeness into a corner, but reminders were everywhere.

It was soon obvious that Old Cilla managed the household well enough for Molly and Lizzie to return to their own homes. With their absence, the girls' days lacked structure. They felt it, like a loosening of stays or of hair unpinned.

Spring turned to summer. Dick Randolph became a frequent visitor.