America's First Daughter: A Novel(126)

We’d long ago patched up our quarrel and reached accommodation. When I was away, Sally was mistress of Monticello, but when Papa returned with his entourage of guests, she made herself scarce, giving way to my sister and me, certain not to intrude on our time with Papa. In recent years, whenever Sally and I crossed paths, it was always a pleasant, cordial encounter. Sometimes even an affectionate one.

But in the days after the story broke, such a chill descended between us that I worried to touch her, lest I find myself bitten with frost. And at the precise moment Sally Hemings ought to have made herself invisible, she was at my father’s side every moment of the day, serving his food, doing his mending, massaging at the damaged hands and wrists he needed for his writing.

And her mixed-race children were at his knee, alongside mine.

Sally was—by nature or practice, I could never tell which—amiable and eager to please, but she was never a simpering coward. She could, in a crisis, carry herself like an amber-eyed queen, wreathed in a mantle of golden dignity that left her quite beyond reach. And she’d let me know—with a tight-lipped stare as she removed her lace mobcap at the end of the day—that she resented my suggestion to put her out of the way.

“She must be terrified,” Tom said as he turned to place two pumpkins into the barrow.

“What do you mean?” I asked, kneeling over a vine.

My husband glanced at me and narrowed his eyes. “She must be terrified your father is going to sell her and the children away. Pained, too, by the things they’re saying in the newspapers.”

And at that moment, I felt suddenly shamed. Whoever had been telling tales to the newspapers knew how many times Sally had been pregnant, but not how many of her children had survived. Knew that she was pregnant in France, but not that her son had died. To anger whites about the president’s black son, the papers were saying that Sally’s first boy grew up to be a man, and was now strutting about the plantation like a gentleman born to the manor. My heart seized at the thought of how much Sally must’ve wished her eldest son had lived to do just that. For Sally, these revelations must have been a torment.

And it was my husband who had to remind me of that simple fact. I’d worried for my father’s reputation; William had worried about the principles of the matter. Only Tom had given any care to the pain of an enslaved woman. My husband understood fear and sadness and suffering, and because he did, my heart filled with love for him. It made it easier to content myself with being his wife when William Short was sleeping under the same roof.

Easier still, when William began his preparations to leave Monticello.

He didn’t bother making pleasantries when I found him at the carriage house, placing his gentleman’s grooming kit on the seat of his chariot. “He’s not going to reply to the revelations in the papers, is he, Patsy?”

I knew—could see in his every gesture—that William was disappointed that my father would never serve as the champion of equality that he wanted him to be. But William’s ideals were wild-eyed. It was a comfort to know he hadn’t changed and that he wasn’t afraid to challenge Papa, but it angered me to see how eagerly he wanted to be off.

“So you’re going to abandon us again?”

William bristled at my question, spinning to face me. “You can ask me that?”

Let him say it, I thought. Let it all out into the open, then. He could say that I abandoned him and I could answer that he forced a seventeen-year-old girl to make an impossible choice. Yet, in the end, what did it matter? I’d married another man. A man not nearly so charming or successful. But a good man. A man I loved. A man who would never have let me go.

So I only said, “My father needs you now more than ever.”

A horse nickered and stomped in the nearest stall, and William nodded. “I’ll be in Washington City when he gets there and stay with him at the President’s House. But I can’t stay at Monticello another day.”

He didn’t say why, and perhaps he thought he didn’t need to.

I cleared my throat. “You have my thanks. It comforts me to know that Papa will have you at his side with such infamy hanging over his head.”

William straightened his waistcoat without acknowledging my thanks. “As I understand it, you and your sister will arrive in November. I’ll be gone by then to take care of some business in New York. So I’m afraid I’ll miss your debut into the political society of the capital, just as I missed your debut in Paris.”

Why should he mention that? It sent a pang through my heart. “I remember nearly nothing of Paris except when you were with me.”

I shouldn’t have said it and he shouldn’t have let his gaze drop to his feet, abashed. “I have regrets in life, Mrs. Randolph. One of them is the loss of a friendship between us.”

“It was never snuffed out, Mr. Short, I assure you,” I said, remembering another conversation, a much different one we once had in a carriage house, a thousand miles away and at least as many years ago. Or so it seemed.

“It was snuffed out,” he said. “I assure you it was. But now, I would prefer . . . or at least dare to hope that we might part in friendship, once so precious to me.”

Then I realized, with a profound ache, what this was. “You’re saying good-bye.”

“Think of it as only au revoir. I’ll be in Virginia next year. Perhaps we’ll cross paths.”