America's First Daughter: A Novel(40)

His sitting room door stood open, and I stepped into the room. “Papa?” Despite the warm glow from the fireplace, the room was empty. A noise sounded from Papa’s chamber, the door to which was ajar. Crossing to it, I inhaled to call his name again, but what I saw made the words die in my throat.

Sally stood in the center of the room, her back to me, Papa’s coat gripped in her hands. He was smiling softly at her, with an intimacy that stole the breath from me.

After a moment, Papa grasped the jacket from Sally. But, no, he didn’t grasp the material, he held her hands where they curled around the stiff collar. He studied her, as if he couldn’t quite comprehend the contours of her face.

And my heart thundered against my breastbone.

I was frozen there on the threshold of the room, not quite in, not quite out. I didn’t know what was happening, or why every fiber of my body screamed at me to look away. I should have. Or maybe I should have called out to make my presence known.

But I could do neither.

Papa was a tall man, and Sally was small. The way he stared down at her—the girl who looked so much like my mother—it wasn’t the stare of an old man, a humiliated lover, or a widower resigned to bachelorhood.

It was the stare of a man who contemplates damnation and salvation.

Slowly, as if even he wasn’t conscious of his movement, Papa leaned his face down to Sally’s. As his eyes fell closed, her head tilted back and he kissed her.

I could make no sense of the scene unfolding before me. She was a girl my own age. She was my mother’s sister, my own aunt. She was his slave. And though I knew—of course I knew—that Virginia plantation owners took slaves for mistresses, we’d been so long away from home, I couldn’t believe my own eyes.

He couldn’t be doing this. My mind rejected what I saw clearly until he pursued her lips with more ardor and drew Sally close against his chest. At that embrace, I choked back the cry that worked its way up from my breast, where my heart raced so hard I saw spots.

If Papa saw me . . . he mustn’t see me. Fingers pressed over my lips, I turned away from the private, heartbreaking moment and flew from the room.





Chapter Nine


IT WAS MY HASTE that made me stumble halfway down the stairs. Only a wild, wrenching grasp at the carved wooden rail saved me from a broken neck. Alas, the heavy fall of my feet echoed up the staircase and drew my father from his rooms.

“Patsy?” he called, peering over the bannister.

I froze, breathless, my belly roiling with shock and anger and revulsion. I ought to have pretended that I didn’t hear him say my name. I ought to have hurried on, leaving him with only the sight of my back. I ought never to have looked up at him over my shoulder.

But I did look up.

There on the landing my father loomed tall, a tendril of his ginger hair having come loose from its ribbon, his shirt worn without its neck cloth, the stark white linen setting off more vividly the red flush that crept up his throat. Was it shame for his behavior with Sally or . . . ardor?

On the heels of witnessing his behavior, the thought was so excruciatingly horrifying that heat swept over me, leaving me to wish I’d burn away to dust.

“Are you hurt?” Papa asked, hoarsely.

I couldn’t reply, my mouth too filled with the bitter taste of bile. Finally, I forced a shake of my head.

He glanced back to the door, then back at me, his hand half-covering his mouth. “Were—were you at my door just now?”

“No,” I whispered, as much as I could manage under my suffocating breathlessness. And how dare he ask if I’d been at his door when neither of us could bear the honest answer? Even if Papa didn’t know what I’d seen, he knew what he’d done.

He ought to have been downstairs with us, reacquainting himself with the little daughter who still didn’t remember him. He ought to have been sipping cider with the young man who fancied me, giving his permission to court. He ought to have been doing a hundred other things. Instead, he was preying upon my dead mother’s enslaved half-sister—and the wrongness of it filled my voice with a defiant rage.

“No, I wasn’t at your door.” I held his gaze, letting him see what he would.

My father paused on the precipice, clearing his throat, absently smearing the corner of his lips with one thumb. “Well—well . . . did you need something?”

As if my needs were at the forefront of his thoughts.

My fingers curled into fists as a lie came to me suddenly, and sullenly. “I was coming up to fetch my prayer book.” Surely he knew it was a lie, but I didn’t care. If he challenged me, I’d lie again, without even the decency of dropping my eyes. I’d lie because between a father and a daughter, what I’d witnessed was unspeakable. And I’d learned from the man who responded with silence to my letters about politics or adultery or the liberation of slaves. . . .

Papa never spoke on any subject he didn’t want to.

Neither would I.

“Are you certain you weren’t hurt,” Papa finally murmured, “. . . on the stairs?”

Rage burned inside me so hotly I thought it possible that my handprint might be seared upon the railing. I bobbed my head, grasped my skirt, and took two steps down before my father called to me again.

“Patsy?”

I couldn’t face him, so I merely stopped, my chest heaving with the effort to restrain myself from taking flight. “What?”