America's First Daughter: A Novel(72)

Inside her, she carried my little brother or sister. One I could never acknowledge and might never see born. At least the baby would be born in France—born free. That heartened me, and seeing glimpses of pain and anxiety in her amber eyes, my heart went out to her—the warmth of sympathy and concern a welcome balm from the cold ache of William’s absence.

“You won’t become destitute,” I promised with a small smile, twisting the ring Papa bought me from my finger and pressing it into her hand. “You keep this for a day you need it, but you won’t. I’ll send a letter to Marie and Madam de Tessé and the Duchess Rosalie to find a place for you as a lady’s maid. Until then, why not stay on here at the Hotel de Langeac? Mr. Short won’t put you out in the street—”

“James and I are going home with you to Virginia,” Sally said, stunning me into silence. “Your papa has made us an offer.”

My throat tightened. What offer could he have made them? Though they were his slaves, the Hemingses had the laws of France on their side, not to mention the laws of God. And I found it hard to imagine my dignified father bargaining with any slave, much less his own.

But then Sally convinced me. “We’ve been negotiating a treaty.”

A treaty. That did sound like my father, the minister to France. Recalling the duke’s wish to make an alliance with me, I could easily imagine Papa condescending to charm his enslaved lover, giving her the courtesies due an ambassador from a foreign land. “Oh?” I managed, weakly.

She lifted her chin, a hint of pride there. “Your father promises that if James goes back and teaches someone else all he’s learned in the kitchens of Paris, he’ll go free. And if I go back, your father will keep me and care for me well, till his death. He’ll free my babies, too, when they turn twenty-one, upon his solemn oath.”

Babies? As if there would be more. As if they meant to carry on indefinitely?

I nearly slapped her. My anger was so volcanic that it burned coherent thought from my mind. I wasn’t even sure why I was so angry, only that I was. “You want to be a slave all your life, Sally?” Past my strangled fury I choked out, “You want to be my father’s . . . whore?”

She brushed the wetness of her eyes away, as if it pained her for me to see her cry. “How am I to leave my family in Virginia, Miss Patsy? Never see my momma again? Knowing your father wants me, how could I refuse? He’s good to me, and I hate nothing like disappointing him. It hurts to disappoint him.”

Who knew the truth of that statement better than I did? And yet I stood there, shaking with a fury at her choice that I couldn’t comprehend, biting the insides of my cheeks to keep from howling with it. It was the wrong choice. Could she not see it? “You’re giving up your freedom!”

“I know it.” Her chest heaved with emotion beneath her pretty blue gown. “But women have to give hard thought to the men we’ll wind up with. Make a mistake and get a drunk, a spendthrift, a cruel man. A man who won’t keep his word. But your papa gives his word and nobody ever doubts it. You think I’m likely to find some better Frenchman? Or some better man at all? Or any man willing to have a woman carrying another man’s baby?”

Sally’s shoulders fell, and for just a moment, sympathy pierced my anger. She’d be with child, in a city full of upheaval, with no one to rely upon but her brother.

But then she said, “In marriage, man and woman become one, and that one is the husband.”

Did she think of herself as my father’s wife? The very thought of it sent fire through my blood anew and made sense of my rage. It sounded as if she believed that what passed between her and my father was a lifelong sacrament, when it was nothing but sin!

And while I stood there, wondering how to tell her that she’d never replace my mother, she straightened her shoulders and said, “He loves me, Miss Patsy.”

I did slap her then.

Sally shrieked and clutched her cheek. But I wasn’t moved to pity.

I’d given up William to save my father from dying of a broken heart, thinking that Sally was going to leave him and take his child with her.

Was my whole life in ruin because of this girl?

My rage grew even hotter toward my father. For his words about William’s fitness and his melancholy about Sally had brought me to the conclusion that I must give up what I wanted for myself and do my duty, and yet all the while Papa was making deals to ensure he’d make no sacrifice at all. Not now. And, very likely, not in the future, not as long as Sally chose to remain at his side. In my mind’s eye, I saw him on his knees before me, reaffirming his deathbed promise never to take another wife and pleading that his happiness depended on me—all to keep me from taking my vows.

And now I’d given up everything I’d ever dared to want for myself. The convent. My dearest friends. William.

Everything.

The room spun around me, and pressure built inside me that demanded release. I felt less in control of myself than ever before or at any time after. And so I did something that to this day I regret as much as slapping her. I hissed in her tear-streaked face what I knew to be a lie. “Papa doesn’t love you. And he never will.”





I’VE MADE A MISTAKE, I thought, imagining I could see England across the fog-covered waters of the channel.

There was still time to turn back. I could run back to William Short’s embrace and beg a thousand pardons for having left him. My father wouldn’t stop me. Not when he knew his honor was so tarnished in my eyes.