America's First Daughter: A Novel(24)
Before I could protest, she shook her head and pressed her fingers to her lips to hush me. She was delicate and beautiful like my little sister Polly. That’s what made me follow her back to the bedroom where she sat beside me until I could face the world again. Her name was Marie de Botidoux, but she couldn’t say my name. The closest she came was Jeffy. I liked the way it sounded on her tongue. And I was so desperate for a friend I would’ve let her call me anything at all.
THE NEXT AFTERNOON, the nuns made me draw in the parlor, imagining it to be some comfort to me. But I struggled with drawing—as I always had—my lines curving sadly down at each end, my strokes too bold on the paper, smudges on my fingers and clothes. It was in this state that my visitor found me. Deep in melancholy, I looked up slowly, believing that my eyes deceived me.
Could it be William Short, clutching at his hat?
I was so glad to see him that I rushed to embrace him with the exuberance of a Frenchwoman. “Mr. Short! Have you seen my papa?”
He gave a quick bow of his head. “The very reason for my visit, Patsy. Your father suffers of fever. He’ll be confined to his house for some days. I know you are apt to worry, so I thought to convey his warmest regards myself.”
I was unbearably grateful. He had seen us the day I was thrown from Caractacus, he understood as no one else did. He knew why I worried for Papa. But these were things that couldn’t be spoken aloud. My lower lip trembled and he must’ve seen it, for his eyes softened and he reached for my hand.
“Poor child. If it will comfort you, I’ll report to you on your father’s health every few days.”
The warmth and strength of his hand surprised me as much as steadied me. As his thumb slipped over my knuckle, I blinked up at him, reassured by the amiable smile on his well-bred, handsome face.
For a moment, I couldn’t help but study him, the only person who knew even a hint of my struggle with Papa. William Short’s countenance appeared more angular, more masculine, less boyish than it had been years before. He carried himself with a new confidence, too, one that made me glad he’d be serving at Papa’s side. “Thank you, of course. But . . . can’t I go to him, Mr. Short?”
“Don’t fret, Patsy. The thing that will best ensure his comfort and well-being is to know that you’re well cared for and thriving at your studies. If I can reassure him of this, he’ll rest easier.”
Alas, I’d presented myself in precisely the way that most vexed Papa. I’d received his new secretary in a slovenly state, smudging his hand with pencil dust. “I’m sorry, Mr. Short. I’ve dirtied your hand.”
He looked down and chuckled at the sight of my blackened fingers, the graphite smearing into the lines of his palm. “So you have.” Then mischief lit in his eyes as he reached to playfully smudge my nose with his thumb.
I giggled, which attracted the attention of sour-faced nuns. They scolded me, eyeing my green-eyed, sandy-haired visitor with a mixture of enchantment and disapproval. In French, I told them Mr. Short was a kinsman of my mother and as close to a son as my father had.
One hand pressing to his chest, Mr. Short startled at my diction. “I envy you, Patsy, for your French is so improved. I’ve been struggling to learn it, but now I have the solution. I’ll join the convent and live with you and all these pretty girls so that I may learn it quicker.”
His jest scandalized the nuns, who blushed and tittered and scowled at him in turn, before showing him out. But then, many women and girls blushed for the handsome Mr. Short. Even Marie—who blushed at nothing.
Indeed, I suspected his visit accounted for my sudden change in social fortune, for the girls made an effort to befriend me after that day. And each time one of them asked an innocent-sounding question about Mr. Short, it forced me to see him not as my family’s protector during our flight from the British, and not as my confidant, and not as Papa’s secretary, but as a bachelor in a city full of beautiful, forward women.
The thought disconcerted me for reasons I didn’t want to understand. At least Mr. Short remained true to his word, delivering regular updates about my father’s welfare and providing reassurance that I could devote myself to my studies and my life at the convent.
In that, Marie became my first true friend. We made an odd pair, Marie, who loved all the fine things a lady should love, and me, who longed to run outdoors. I’d been taught never to raise my voice in anger, but she was fierce tempered. Other girls were afraid to provoke her because she repaid them with such abuse as to make their ears bleed. And they were afraid to taunt me, too, because the moment she caught someone mocking my French or the unsophisticated style of my hair, Marie would launch into a tirade so fast and biting I could scarcely follow it.
When Elizabeth and Caroline Tufton, the nieces of the Duke of Dorset, the British ambassador to France, once dared suggest the American experiment would fail, the tongue-lashing Marie gave them for disrespecting me, my father, and the French assistance to the American cause was littered with forbidden insults. Curses like Casse toi! and Je t’emmerde! and Meurs, pute! exploded from her lips like bullets from a musket until both girls cowered, pleading they’d meant nothing by it.
I was so unused to someone rising to my defense that all I could do was gape. But Marie’s actions warmed my heart, too, because her friendship was the first thing I’d ever had that was mine alone, untouched by the grief and travails of the past few years. A few days later, the older Tufton sister presented me with a pretty crimson ribbon. I viewed it as a peace offering, just as their country had been forced to a peace treaty with mine. And my acceptance earned me two more steady friends.