America's First Daughter: A Novel(121)



I wished that I could think how to soothe his hurt feelings, but instead, I asked, “How long will you stay in America?”

He shifted the basket between his hands and looked again across the garden. “Until a solution presents itself. There are apparently those who disapprove of my conduct in France and will thwart my appointment to any diplomatic post.”

William could win them over, I thought. He was as charming as he’d ever been. More charming, I thought, when he finally reached for a vine to help me with my forgotten harvest and said, “I’ve much mending of fences to do in Virginia, where it seems I’ve been replaced entirely.”

Wary of his closeness, I wondered if he knew that there’d been a small secret place in my heart that I’d always kept for him. I loved my husband, but Tom had never taken William’s place up entirely. “No one could replace you.”

His eyes twinkled with amused outrage and he lowered his voice to an intimate whisper. “The young and heroic Meriwether Lewis certainly has. Your father dotes on his new secretary with a fatherly affection I once believed he reserved only for me.”

I’d caused the breach between my father and William. Still, his jest snipped the tension. I began to laugh. Then we laughed together. “Meriwether Lewis is no William Short,” I declared.

My father had always cultivated an endless stream of protégés, but William had been the first and best of them. For unlike the others, he had a most personal acquaintance with my father’s faults and was devoted to him anyway.

Even having been snubbed for the appointment that would’ve crowned his career and maybe even won over his lady to marriage, still here he was, paying homage to my father at Monticello. “I don’t believe you ever need worry of being replaced, William. Papa always says that those we loved first, are those we love best.”

William smiled very softly then. In a way I hoped meant that we could still be friends. “Come, Patsy. You’re getting pink. Let’s take some shade in one of your father’s porticoes.”

“We’re likely to trip over a workman’s hammer and come away covered in plaster dust,” I protested, since Monticello’s renovations were endless.

“Here then,” he said, guiding me under the sheltering leaves of a cherry tree at the far end of the garden and setting down the basket by my feet. He offered his forearm to help me lower to a seat against the trunk, which I took with as much elegance as my housedress and apron would allow.

“So what will you do until some foreign post is offered?” I asked.

He took a seat beside me but angled away, so that no one who might come upon us could think it an impropriety. With our backs to the tree, side by side, I couldn’t see his face, but only his hands as he plucked a blade of grass and rolled it between his clean, elegant fingers. “I suppose I must find somewhere to live. Some years ago I prevailed upon your father to manage my investments while I was away. With that money he purchased for me some land called Indian Camp. Very fertile, he says. Very advantageous lands here in Albemarle County.”

Here in Albemarle. Where we might be neighbors.

Yet I couldn’t let myself hope for it, not even for a moment, because I saw his hands reach to pluck up more grass, this time violently. And I remembered what he’d said in the heat of anger when we argued in Paris. That Virginia is stained in the evil of slavery, impossible debts and a way of life that can’t last. “But you don’t care to make a home at Indian Camp.”

He crossed his legs at the ankle, so that the steel buckle of his shoe glinted in the light. “I suggested to Mr. Jefferson an experiment of sorts. That he should rent out my Indian Camp property to tenant farmers. Part of the acreage to free white men. Part to free black men. As an experiment.”

“An experiment?”

“I hoped to prove something to him about the potential for emancipation,” he said, watching some of the slave children play with my own little ones on the lawn. Amongst those children was Sally’s pretty Harriet. And William swallowed. “Consider, for example, the perfect mixture of the rose and the lily. I’ve suggested to your father, too, that the mixture of the races is our surest path to doing away with racial prejudice. But his unwillingness to pursue my experiment at Indian Camp, nor even acknowledge my argument, tells me that an honorable life cannot be made in Virginia. Because if a man in your father’s singular situation cannot do it—if an icon of liberty cannot do it—I must conclude it cannot be done here at all.”

I blinked into the sun. Then blinked again. William had always favored the abolition of slavery, but what he spoke of now went far beyond the sentiments of even the most adventurous thinker on the matter I had ever met. I could not think his mention of my father’s singular situation, with regard to race mixing, was an accidental mention. But I wasn’t a naive girl any longer who could muse on such matters with impunity, and he should’ve understood that our southern silence about the color line wasn’t one I’d break even for him. “So you’ll sell Indian Camp. Can you afford to?”

A breeze blew, and his hands let loose the grass, which floated away. “I can afford a great many things now, Patsy. Even excluding the value of Indian Camp and my lands in Kentucky, not to mention the sums still outstanding from the State Department, I estimate my fortune at nearly a hundred thousand dollars.”

Stephanie Dray & Lau's Books