America's First Daughter: A Novel(76)

I cringed because though I’d brought back from Paris some fripperies for his sisters Nancy and Judith, I’d quite forgotten him. “I’m afraid I’ve no gift for you in return and know little of poetry.”

“It’s about my late mother,” he said, and my heart filled with sorrow to know that the lady who had once taken me into her herb garden to teach me about liberty tea had perished. “Given the loss of your own mother, I thought it might speak to you.”

It did, I confess. I’d thought myself quite the most miserable person in the world, but Tom’s verse of grief for his mother reminded me that there were worse pains in this world than romantic heartbreak.

Before I could tell him so, Polly raced in, the puppies we’d finally found after that grisly day on the cliffs of England nipping at her heels. “Come on, Patsy,” she cried. “You and Tom, come skate with us on the big pond!” Near the end of the trail, she and the Carr brothers ran about, making a little war game with snowballs.

They wanted me to enjoy myself, but Tom didn’t seem to mind that I couldn’t smile. When I hit a patch of ice that sent me down hard, knocking the wind from my lungs, he lay down beside me, staring up at the clouds.

I remembered William when we fell together in the snow. The way his little finger had clasped mine, and the way I’d felt, so innocently, as if our hearts had touched. And then, that night, I’d seen Papa and Sally. . . .

That was, I think, the very last moment I was an innocent. Now, when my belief in the sweetness and goodness of romantic love was so tarnished, I feared Tom Randolph would whisper sweet things in my ear just as likely to melt away to nothing.

But there was no playfulness or guile in Tom. In truth, he was as different from William as could be. Instead of whispering sweet words, he pressed his whole body against me in such a reckless manner that I could feel his desire.

Desire. Could a man as handsome as Tom Randolph possibly want me?

There was no mistaking the predatory gleam in his eye. His excitement, his fears, his happiness and pains were always very close to his skin. And now they were close to mine.

Feeling the creep of his fingers into my cloak, I asked, “What are you doing?”

“I want to kiss you,” he replied hoarsely. “I want very much to kiss you and beg your leave to do so.”

My heartbeat kicked up in offense. “Tom, we scarcely know one another.”

“To the contrary, we’ve known each other since we were children. But we’re not children anymore. I’m twenty-one and you’re seventeen and there’s nothing to stop us from doing as nature demands.”

As nature demands . . .

I told myself that Tom’s sudden interest in me had to do with his admiration for my father. I told myself that by my indifference to him, I’d inadvertently set myself up as the fox to his hound. But I think the truth was that his blood ran hot at the sight of me sad and helpless and mired in the snow. And another truth was that his lustful gaze promised me obliteration. Obliteration of thought, of pain, of doubt.

So when he bent to kiss me, I didn’t turn away.





“SAY YOU’LL MARRY ME, PATSY.” The demand came between panting breaths in the dark of the little schoolhouse at Tuckahoe where Tom and I had stolen away to exchange fevered kisses that made me forget everything.

Only a week had passed since that first, reluctant kiss, and my reluctance hadn’t entirely faded. But his kisses appealed to me for a new reason, a darker reason, a carnal reason. They made my body burn. It mattered not that I didn’t desire the reaction. With his mouth on my skin and his hands skimming over my bodice, I almost felt as if I were possessed.

Tom Randolph kissed with the same demonic ferocity that he rode—his mouth urgent on mine, his grasp rough, his taste like sweet destruction, razing every other thought in my mind, making me forget I had a mind at all.

That’s what I wanted more than anything else, so I tried to hush him with another kiss, hoping it would be as annihilating as the last. But he took hold of my coat in his fists as if he might tear it open, and made me look at him in the dim light of the lantern. “I want more than kisses, Patsy. I want you. And I cannot be content until I have you. So say that you’ll marry me.”

The reality of it all came rushing to me then. The fact that I’d quite scandalously lost my head in the arms of a veritable stranger, in a schoolhouse built by my own grandfather. In the distance, I could hear the music of the wedding party in the main house beyond.

I’d accompanied Tom to see his sister Judith of the Tuckahoe Randolphs sweep down the elegant carved walnut staircase of her father’s home and pledge her life to Richard Randolph of Bizarre plantation. The groom and his brothers were all swaggering southern boys who loved pranks and politics and tobacco. They each asked me to dance, which displeased Tom enormously. That I wasn’t tripping over myself for his attention, like the other country girls, seemed to fuel in him something akin to fury. Indeed, between bites of a feast that included oysters, lobsters, tarts, and apple pies, I felt the heat of Tom’s gaze, urging me to go off with him away from the oppressive house into some secluded place.

But I didn’t go until Richard Randolph used the occasion of his wedding to decry the sins of his ancestors, announcing that bringing slaves into the country was a “violation of the inherent, unalienable, and imprescriptible rights of man.”