America's First Daughter: A Novel(171)

My words were cut off by a blow to the face.

I tasted blood and anger, even as my head swam with terror and shock and pain.

“You decided,” Tom said, pinning my arm and getting his knee between mine.

I might’ve cried or pleaded or used feminine wiles to prevail upon him to let me go. But I did none of those things. Instead, when he tugged at his trousers to free himself, I freed myself with an upward jerk of my knee.

Unsteady from drink, he toppled from me, howling in pain. I rolled out of the bed, my bare feet pounding on the floor as I ran. He gave chase, knocking pictures from the wall, tripping over a small table in the hall, sending knickknacks clattering to the floor.

Hearing the commotion, Ellen flung open the door to her room while children stumbled down the stairs from their rooms above. Crowding around me, the children whimpered in confusion, and George began to cry. Tom glared at me where I stood within the refuge of my children’s arms. There was something akin to pure hatred in his eyes. By Tom’s accounting, he’d been rejected by everyone in his life. His father, my father, the legislators and voters of Virginia . . . and me.

This refusal of him was another betrayal. But he didn’t pry me away from our children to force himself upon me. Instead, without a word, he lumbered back down the stairs. And I didn’t follow or even call after him.

Instead, I found myself grateful that William’s lodging on the first floor had kept him from being witness to yet another humiliation.





Chapter Thirty-nine


I FELL OUT OF BED,” I said to explain my bruises.

Sipping chocolate, Papa sighed. “You wouldn’t have fallen from an alcove bed.”

I nodded absently, grateful that my children said nothing of their father’s rampage. They all joined into the conspiracy of silence. But William Short wasn’t fooled for a moment. He was unusually subdued as we took our chocolate from my father’s favorite urn. His face as serious and stoic as the plaster busts hovering over us of Washington, Franklin, and Lafayette.

And later, once my increasingly frail and elderly father found his ease in his campeachy chair, William followed me on my rounds beneath the mulberry trees, delivering rations to slave cabins. “Your husband mistreats you.”

I could say nothing. I could only hurry along the road, hoping our people would swarm around me for their parcels and force William to some other subject.

But he was, as always, a dogged man. “Did he strike you?”

“William, leave it be,” I said, picking up my pace, suddenly desperate to flee. To escape his infernal prying into facts.

William darted in front of me, blocking my path. “I thought you loved him.”

One look into William’s eyes and I came undone. All the emotions—the anger, the bitterness, the fear—everything I’d so carefully wound tight into my pleasant and placid smile now unraveled.

And I fled.

Dropping the basket in the road, I took hold of my skirts and hurried away from him down the hill into the vegetable garden, for it seemed the most likely avenue of escape, past rows of artichokes and beans and brown Dutch lettuces.

I didn’t think he’d follow me, because it meant sinking his well-made shoes into the autumn muck. But he more than followed. He chased. “Patsy,” he cried, taking the liberty of using my childhood name. And when we reached the garden pavilion, he took the further liberty of grasping my wrist before I could close the glass-paned door in his face. Again, he insisted, “I thought that you loved him.”

“And I thought you loved Rosalie,” I shot back. “So love has carried neither one of us to the destination we wished.”

Startled, he let go of me, and I retreated inside the square little fortress lit by tall windows on every side. My father had built it so that he might peacefully survey the whole of his world in any direction, but I tucked myself into a corner, feeling vulnerable and exposed.

At length, William mustered the courage to step inside, rubbing his face in his hands. “Rosalie said she wouldn’t marry—she feared for her husband’s reputation, she feared to leave her elderly relations, she feared to leave her country. But the truth was, she simply wouldn’t marry me. When last in France, I learned that she’d married the Marquis de Castellane, an aging nobleman of some prestige. So trust me when I say that I understand perfectly what it is to love someone who can never give you what you want or deserve.”

I withdrew farther into the corner, wrestling the sob that threatened to overtake me. He stood beside me, our hands brushing where they dangled. We touched, skin to skin, an unmistakable intimacy as his finger linked, softly, tenderly, with my own.

And a longing I’d buried so long ago coiled within me anew, very much alive. We breathed in perfect harmony, bound again, finger to finger, even as we ached for more. And I felt the strength and comfort which I’d not experienced this way in more than thirty years.

His voice was a whisper. “I loved Rosalie, yes. But I loved you first, Patsy. Always have loved you. Always will.” He turned to me, touching my bruised lip very gently, right where it hurt, a very tender gesture.

Then he moved in, lowering his head as if he meant to kiss me.

And it took every bit of strength in me to turn away.





“WHO IS HE TO YOU?”

The growled words startled me, coming from behind me in the washhouse where I’d come in the cool of the evening to search out some missing stockings. Sally was there, having set soiled clothing to boil in a copper cauldron outside. Sally disliked when my daughters and I visited the dependencies, where the slaves did their work, for my father’s concubine ruled here, in her quiet and competent way. Perhaps that’s why she turned her head with scarcely disguised imperiousness to see who was stooped in the low doorway.