America's First Daughter: A Novel(172)

But I knew before I looked.

It was Tom, having lumbered down from the nearby north pavilion where he was sleeping these days, his face red from cheek to jowl, with rage or liquor, or both. “Get out,” he barked at the laundry girls, and they darted past him in the doorway. Sally was slower to obey, her glance flicking to me. Only when I nodded did she tug at the bodice of her gown to make it straight, then gracefully ducked under my husband’s outstretched arms to make her exit.

We stood there then, my husband and I, the sound of the laundry bubbling and hissing in the cauldron behind him. Then Tom roared, “Who is he to you? William Short. That sanctimonious stock jobber. That morally bankrupt lecher. I saw you. I saw both of you.”

My heart leapt to my throat like a shot from a pistol and I could do nothing but brazen it out. “I can’t imagine what you mean.”

“You left your basket in the road,” Tom said, his teeth clenched together like an animal trap that had taken so long to spring it was now rusted shut. “Couldn’t fathom where you’d got to until I looked up at the garden pavilion. I saw you there, with him. In his arms. I saw it!”

Sweat broke across my brow and the nape of my neck, not only from the big fire under the cauldron nor even the heat of this stifling little room, but because guilt seared its way through me until I worried I might faint dead away. Haltingly, I began to say, “I wasn’t in his arms, Tom. You know he’s an old friend. A dear one. He offered me comfort and solace in a moment of need. That’s all.”

That was a lie. That wasn’t all William Short had offered me in my father’s garden pavilion. He told me he loved me. He’d tried to kiss me, too, but I’d turned away.

“Nothing carnal took place,” I insisted. “He was my suitor once. In France. But I spurned Mr. Short, then married you.”

I hoped it’d soothe his wounded pride.

It didn’t.

“William Short makes whores of other men’s wives.” These words carried such quiet fury that they frightened me more than if he’d shouted them. Tom came toward me, very slowly, very quietly, wrapping his big hand around my throat like Charles Bankhead had once done. Tom didn’t squeeze but merely held me there against the wall, slightly suspended, like a rag doll hanging from his string. “Short is infamous. His exploits are so well known he was too ashamed to make his home in Virginia. But you’re giving him what you won’t give me, isn’t that right?”

How absurd it was. Beggaring belief, even. At our age, for two men to be vying for a mother of eleven children. “Tom, you’re letting jealousy poison your mind! Don’t you realize the absurdity—”

“Tell me you haven’t bedded him. Go on. Lie to me, you convent-trained whore.”

My husband’s chest heaved with anger so deep and divisive that it seemed to open the very earth between us. It seemed to make strangers of us. And perhaps we were strangers now. For I was no longer the young wife who believed that her husband’s violence was her own fault.

And slowly, pulling from some reserve inside myself I didn’t know I had, I stood taller on my side of that chasm. “Whatever I am, Thomas Mann Randolph, you’re not worthy of.”

On that last, I broke free of him. But I didn’t run. I’d run from him when he’d tried to force himself upon me—run from him like Ann ran from her maniac of a husband.

But I was done running from Tom.

I walked out of that washhouse, even as my husband called after me. “I’ll have satisfaction, Martha. I’ll call him out!”

I snorted with bitter laughter, grateful to be certain of one thing. “William will never fight a duel with you.”

“If he won’t, it’s because he’s no Virginia gentleman.”

“No, Tom. He won’t duel you because you aren’t. Not anymore.”





WILLIAM AND I MET IN THE GROVE, a canopy of autumn leaves overhead, strangely reminiscent of that long-ago day he found me on the ground, having fallen from my father’s high horse.

“Patsy, say something.” Those words, too, were an echo of the past, but I was hearing them again now as he pleaded, “Your silence cuts me deeper than the sharpest rebuke.”

He was wrong. My words would cut him deeper, I knew. And I wished I could say anything other than what I’d come to tell him. But we weren’t young comrades amongst a tangle of saplings at the start of our journey any longer; we were grizzled veterans standing atop the rotting fruit of our long struggle. And so, with the stink from the leaves of my father’s chinaberry trees in my nos trils, I forced myself to speak, even as the words themselves left a painful sting on my lips. “I must ask you to leave Monticello.”

William reeled, as if he’d taken a blow. “I meant to comfort you and have made a fool of myself with unwanted attentions. I’ll leave, of course, if that’s your desire, but I promise I’ll never allow myself such a lapse. It will never happen again.”

I wanted it to happen again. I wanted that desperately. “You’re no fool, William, and your attentions are not unwanted. To the contrary, they’re temptations that my virtue is no proof against.” He startled, his expression lighting upon some hope that I was soon to dash. “But Tom saw us. He saw us in the garden pavilion. So you must go and never come back.”