America's First Daughter: A Novel(69)

Pressing a hand to his forehead, I felt his skin warm and dry. There was no fever, but he groaned, as if my touch made it worse.

He didn’t leave his bed that day, nor could he leave it the next. Instead, he lay writhing on his mattress, put into torment by the slightest bit of light. He ate nothing, read nothing, and wanted to see no one but Sally.

And yet, Sally would not come.

I found her in the kitchen, and all but commanded her to go to him. But Sally stayed put, chopping onions the way her brother had taught us both to do, her eyes watering of it. And when I pressed her, we faced each other as if we were equals for the first time. Dropping her hand to her belly, she said, “I won’t go to him until he lets me and the child free.”

So it was the explicit grant of freedom she was holding out for. She hadn’t dared to demand freedom for herself when James did, but for her child, she’d found the courage to defy my father. To abandon him. To torment him, even, for now there was no question that he was ill.

So ill that I heard him retch on water. It was grief that had made him unable to open his eyes. Grief for how he’d tarnished his honor. An unwillingness to face a world in which he’d be vilified as a seducer of a girl in his charge, and the father of a mixed-race child he might never know if Sally left him to pursue life as a free woman, and I felt his naked fear of what might become of them on their own.

Three days my father lay in bed, shut up, alone, in despair.

Then four. Then five.

He called for me on the sixth.

There, in the near blackness of his room, he twined my fingers with his and said, “Patsy, let me tell you where King Louis went wrong. The king of France wants his people’s love so badly that he crushes them in his embrace. He won’t let them pursue happiness. He has to be forced to every compromise. I’ve seen enough tyrants in my time to learn from their mistakes, so I won’t thwart the rebellion of the young people in my household, even if it means I must lose the love and comfort of those dearest to me. You and William. Sally and James.”

With a gasp, I said, “Papa, you can never lose our love!”

No matter what I thought about his conduct with Sally, I loved my father dearly. So dearly that just as I’d hated Maria Cosway for rejecting my father, I now felt a festering resentment for Sally, too. It wasn’t the same, of course. This wasn’t Sally’s fault. But she knew how my father was suffering, and she didn’t need him to grant her freedom in France. She could take it and he couldn’t stop her. So why couldn’t she at least offer him a kind word before she left us?

“I will lose you,” my father said, with a melancholy sigh. “It’s the way of things, I know. I’m going out of life, and you’re all coming in.”

It horrified me to hear him say that he was going out of life. “Let me call for a doctor.”

Papa put his finger over my lips as if just the sound of my voice pained him. “I had this headache when your grandmother died. It’s a penance that must be endured. It reminds me that I’m past the prime of my life, and I must give way. The earth belongs to the living, and your generation has more life left than mine. Though I’ll be lost without you, I won’t stand in the way of you and William, even if it means I’ll lose what is most precious to me. When William asks for your hand, tell him yes with all your heart if that’s your desire.”

“Oh, Papa, you’ll never lose me,” I said, my heart filling with the bittersweet pain of happiness and gratitude, but also sorrow. Because though my father would never lose my love, if I married William, we’d never live together again.

My father must’ve known it, which made it all the harder for him to let me go. “But Patsy, I would ask this kindness of you. Come back with me to Virginia to settle Polly and say your farewells before returning to France for the wedding.”

I nodded, bringing his weak hand to my lips and kissing it, over and over.

But at my kisses Papa turned his face back to the pillow, as if he felt himself unworthy of them. “Would you—would you send Sally to me?”

I knew what it cost him to ask that of me. To ask me to fetch his mistress. The mother of his child. The woman he had plainly fallen in love with.

His head. That is what he said ailed him. But it was his heart. How many times had I seen this before? The passionate heart he always forced to submit to his surpassing intellect. His heart, like all of France, was in rebellion against its ruler.

And that’s why he asked again so sheepishly for her. “Tell her to come to me. Unlike King Louis, I’ll treat fairly with her.”

He meant to give her up, too, then. Though he felt abandoned and unloved, he meant to give us all the freedom we desired.

And I worried it would destroy him.





Chapter Fifteen


Paris, 17 July 1789

From Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Paine

A more dangerous scene of war I never saw in America than what Paris has presented for five days past.

THE BASTILLE HAD FALLEN and Paris was aflame. Men had been beheaded, their corpses dragged before the mob, and tens of thousands of citizens now marched about with pistols, swords, pikes, pruning hooks, and scythes. The only hope of peace rested upon the shoulders of Lafayette, who had assumed command of the National Guard.

And our tree was gone. The one William had carved. It’d been smashed by cannon fire or hacked to pieces by the hordes of angry citizens in the streets, I knew not which. There I stood at the balcony window, staring down at its fractured stump, mesmerized by the violent destruction of something so dear to me—and the city in which it was born.