Chapter Thirty-Six

Philadelphia, one year later

"Your brother is dead."

Judy enunciated carefully, feeling the push of her tongue against her teeth, the air slip and slide between her lips.

How?

He wrote the question down, a scrawl with a stick of graphite he was only allowed to use when someone was in the room with him. She tried not to think about that.

"Consumption. In England."

England had brought her boys no good. Saint returned thinking he could run a plantation. He'd been expectant, hopeful. He should never have left Virginia. Tudor begged to go overseas, and Jack let him. Now, Tudor had died there, leaving Judy with no body to bury or funeral to plan. She had received a letter describing his illness, a box containing his clothes and a sheaf of debtors' notes.

Sorry.

Saint scribbled the word and stretched out his hands. His room was small and dark. A puddle of blankets lay on the pallet bed under the window. She suspected the chairs and the small table they sat at had been brought in for the occasion. It was as austere as a monk's cell. As he walked her to Saint's door, the warden said her son was quiet, and she had stifled a sarcastic retort. Peaceful was another word he used to describe him. She liked that more.

She leaned across the table to touch his hands but hesitated and pulled back.

"How are you?"

Well.

"What do you do here?" She hadn't meant to ask such a question, but the thought of him spending hours alone, lying on that bed with only the ceiling to stare at tormented her. He scribbled.

I walk. I talk with the doctor. I taught him to sign.

She glimpsed a ripple of pride in his face at that. Something of his younger self. He wrote some more.

I read.

Saint gestured at his bed, and she saw that underneath, there were stacks of volumes.

"They give you books?"

He wrote again. Nancy.

"My sister sends you these?"

He nodded.

She looked down at her hands for a moment, contemplating what she had come to suggest. "I could learn to sign. If you came home with me." She watched his expression as he read her lips. He didn't write his reply.

"No."

She hadn't heard his voice in so long, but it still shocked her with its deep, guttural intensity. He snatched up the pencil again.

Have no home.

Judy bit her lip, disappointment and anger jostling her thoughts. "Think about it. If you change your mind, write to me."

He nodded, but she knew he never would.

The journey back to Virginia sapped her strength. She replayed the visit time and again, thinking of other things she might have said, wondering if she could have changed his mind. She wanted her son to come home. From the moment the letter telling her of Tudor's death fell from her fingers, she longed for her older child. His "treatment" in Philadelphia had been arranged by Jack. That thought had consumed her. Jack arranged for Tudor to go to England and now he was dead. He had come between her and her children — it could not continue. But when she saw Saint, older, thinner, calmer and yes, more peaceful, than he had been in years, her hope wilted. She had lost him long ago. A deep well of despair opened in her chest.

At length, she arrived back in Farmville and her rented rooms, only a mile or so from where Bizarre had stood. She closed the door to the second bedroom, the room she had planned for her sons to stay in, sons who could not, or would not, come. Tudor would have no wife. There would be no grandchildren. She'd never feel the strength of his fingers on her shoulder again, never hear his voice.

Her days drifted. The weights that throughout her life had kept her hair pinned to the pillow and her bones too heavy to lift from the mattress in the morning returned with a vengeance. She spent hours praying and often forgot to eat. Misery was the only dish she needed, and she feasted on it without remission. She prayed for death.

On a dull day in October, Judy took a walk out to Bizarre in the pouring rain. Water saturated her bonnet, plastered her hair to her head, clamped her clothes to her skin. She stared at the ruin and tried to bring Dick's face to mind, but she couldn't see him. Happy memories, if she had any, were too deeply hidden, or she was too lost to find them. She walked home, let herself in and sat in her wet clothes by an unlit fire until the sun set. At some point, she roused herself, lit a candle and wrote a letter to her sister Nancy. She asked to be buried at Tuckahoe.

And then she prayed.

* * *

Nancy had not been to Tuckahoe in years, had not set foot in Virginia since she left Richmond, and it was only with written assurance from Tom and Patsy that Jack Randolph would not be present that Nancy agreed to attend her sister's funeral. He'd done his damnedest to smear her after their confrontation the year before. This would be a test of his success.

Tuckahoe was much as she remembered it from her youth, more than in those strange days she and Phebe had spent there when she first left Bizarre. Every room was crowded. There were Randolphs everywhere, familiar faces, changed by age, and new, lively voices, the next generation, milling around from room to room and up and down the great mahogany staircases as she had done so light-heartedly as a child.

"We should bring Gouverneur here when he is older," her husband said. Her arm was firmly tucked in his, an acknowledgment of her nervousness at meeting with so many of her family at once. After hearing the news of Judy's death, Nancy visited Saint in Philadelphia. They shed tears together. But he refused to come with her and Mr. Morris to Tuckahoe, and now, Nancy was glad of it. Saint did not need to be a spectacle for anyone; he was safe where he was and had the sense to know it. Just at this moment, she thought a small, quiet room with enough light to read a book by had a great deal of appeal, but her sister's last request was a burial here, with her family in attendance. Nancy had spent ten years at Bizarre, doing Judy's bidding in a desperate, silent effort at restitution. She did not stop now.

Introductions were the order of the day. Since her marriage, Nancy had corresponded with most of the family now gathered at their old family home, but she and Mr. Morris had avoided the ritual post-wedding tour of relations, choosing to center their lives in New York and Washington. At least he knew Tom and Patsy.

Tom, nowadays, looked strangely like their father, with the same fine hair, the same coloring, the same elongated face that suggested a somber cast of mind. Patsy had aged, as they all had, but still held her head high, a woman confident of her place and importance. They greeted Nancy and her husband with great cordiality and friendliness. Those cold days after Dick's trial were a distant memory, and she was glad that Jack's attempts to raise the ghosts of the past appeared to have fallen on stony ground. Any resentment she'd harbored after they refused to take her in when she left Bizarre was long forgotten. Richmond and Newport were the trials that had led her to Fairfield and Morrisania, after all.

William was there, suffering from a bad back and much thinner on top than he had been the last time they met. How strange to observe all these signs of aging in family she once knew so well. Molly nodded but kept her distance with her odious husband standing stiffly at her side. Lizzie embraced her, smelling of lavender and oranges, her face plump and hearty, rather at odds with the sad nature of the occasion. Gabriella made a great fuss of Mr. Morris, thrusting forward her son for his approval. Nancy was glad to see the second Thomas Mann Randolph favored his mother rather than their father. She smiled at him, though, for he was only young, and the fault of his birth in her siblings' eyes was something she viewed rather less harshly since the birth of her own son.

Randy and Mary Harrison had barely changed, and Mary, one of Judy's closest friends, struggled to keep her emotions in check. Her cheeks and eyes were pink, and she twisted a handkerchief in her hands. Maria Peyton saw Nancy and moved swiftly in a different direction. As she talked with her younger siblings, Nancy wondered who the portly, red-faced man standing with Mary Harrison might be until, in the tip of his head to empty his glass, Nancy recognized Archie Randolph. Her hand tightened on Mr. Morris's arm. She'd been right not to take Archie, although her life might have been far easier had she done so.

One person she was happy not to find in attendance was Aunt Page. A quiet inquiry with Lizzie confirmed that their mother's sister was unwell and had sent her regrets at missing seeing her niece put to rest. Nancy was glad. A forgiving nature was all well and good, but it would take a better woman than she to forgive her aunt's damning testimony at the Cumberland courthouse. That she had told the truth, that Nancy had been pregnant, although so vehement in her denials that she had almost convinced herself of her own lie, did not change her sense of betrayal.

Nancy saw Mr. Tucker, alone by a window in Tuckahoe's Great Hall, and made her way over.

"I saw you stand like this at my mother's funeral. And never forgot the words of comfort you gave me."

His face, thinner, more lined but essentially the same, glowed with pleasure. "What did I say to you, Nancy? Might my wisdom have some value again today?"

"You said the pain would blunt in time. And it did. Although, when I look back now, I see that we lost a great deal when we lost our mother."

"You all did. Perhaps you and Judy particularly."

"Is that why you have always been so good to me? Writing cheerful letters, listening to my woes and concerns?"

"I treated you for what you were — one of my family. Although I fear I did a better job for you than for your poor sister. You both have borne unhappiness. I wish I might have seen a way to ease hers better than I did."

"At least you were not the cause of it. I wish I could say the same." He took her hands and squeezed them. Tears threatened. "Losing someone who has always been there is hard," she said quietly. "Even when we loathed each other, we were always there. I can't believe she's gone. I imagine I'll go home, and then one day, perhaps in a month or so, Judy will write that you've forced your carriage upon her, and she's packing to come to Morrisania again so she can see how Gouverneur is grown. But she will not. She is gone, and Tudor is gone, and Saint is happier away from family than with us. She and I will never talk again, and I'll never know if she forgave me, really forgave me, for what happened to us."

"Now, now." Mr. Tucker's voice was low, and his warm, fatherly hands still cradled hers. "Judy made peace with what happened long ago, don't you think? You wrote me so yourself after her visit and Tudor's illness. You don't want to believe me, but listen to your own words. What happened to us, that's what you just said. What happened at Bizarre and Glentivar happened to you too, Nancy. You were always a victim, to my understanding, and my son, Dick—"

"Theo," she whispered. "It was Theo."

He looked sadly into her eyes. "Dick or Theo," he said with slow deliberation, "it is all one to me. The person that needs to forgive you, Nancy, is not Judy. It is yourself."

"But how can I?"

"Talk to your husband, Nancy. Really talk to him. Morris is a sensible man, and he'll listen."

"I'm not sure I can."

"Find a way."