“You are.” I brought my lips to his brow, like I was soothing a babe.
But he drew back with a shudder. “You know better than anyone that I’m not worthy of love. You’ve always held yourself back because you see what’s in me—this darkness. This melancholy and temper that slips its reins. I think my father must’ve seen it, too. Must’ve known that something was broken in me, like dogs know there’s something wrong with a pup.”
At the sight of tears in his reddened, swollen eyes, I brought my forehead to touch his, whispering, nose to nose. “There’s nothing wrong with you, Tom Randolph.”
A sob escaped him. “Then why would my father do such a thing to me?”
For spite, I thought. But it wouldn’t help Tom to know his father was a spiteful worm, lower than dirt. When a man knows that he’s come from nothing he may never aspire to better. So I said, “Your father was very ill. To do such a thing, in the end, he must’ve been quite out of his senses.”
A spark of hope lit in Tom’s eyes. “Do you think so?”
I nodded, firmly. Convincing myself as much as him. “I do. Why, any right-minded person might suspect your father’s widow stood over the bed and held the pen in the dying man’s hand.”
I was sowing discord amongst the living when it was the dead who was to blame, yet, in my estimation, the Harvies had stolen my children’s birthright, and I wasn’t apt to be charitable.
Meanwhile, Tom choked back another sob. “I should’ve been here. I should’ve been here sooner.”
I was to blame for that. I was the one who hated Varina. I’d hounded him to move to my father’s mountain, thinking it was the best place for my children. Was I wrong to have done it? “You went to him the moment you heard,” I reminded him, stroking his hair, still marveling at the thickness of it between my fingers.
Since the day Tom struck me, I hadn’t felt the stirrings of arousal and desire, so I was surprised to feel them now, stronger than ever. Tom was so vulnerable that I remembered how sweet he could be. How much pleasure we’d found in one another. How he’d driven away my pain and heartbreak with the sheer force of his desire.
Now I wanted to do the same for him.
He’d accused me of holding myself back from him, and I had. There still seemed something too dangerous in admitting that I loved him, so I tried to show him, kissing him with a brazenness I’d never dared before.
At my kiss, Tom tugged me closer and pressed his mouth on mine with a mad, desperate urgency. The abandoned schoolhouse was hardly the place a gentleman ought to make love to his wife. But it’d been here in this very schoolhouse that he’d asked me to marry him, and the emotions of the moment ran so high that I cared nothing for propriety. I welcomed my husband’s roaming hands and plundering mouth, wanting him to find in me some balm for his pain. And when my hands opened his shirt and my palms skidded down his chest, I took deep satisfaction in the way he groaned, as if my touch was a mercy.
“You’re all I have, Patsy,” he whispered. “All I have now . . .”
THAT WINTER, my father limped home from his battles with the secretary of the treasury, battered and bruised in spirit, desiring to give up the work of government forever. He had resigned and retired.
It was, of course, what my sister and I wanted most.
We wanted our father home. We didn’t want to share him with the world anymore, and we both believed he’d be happier as the simple gentleman farmer he professed to be.
But when Papa returned to Monticello, it wasn’t with the high spirits of a man finally freed from public duty. Oh, he nattered excitedly about the price of wheat and molasses, sheep and potatoes, and seemed to be eager for the spring thaw. But I knew him too well not to notice the tension leaking out the edges of his daily routine.
On his third day home, he and Polly came in from a ride, and Sally Hemings was there in an instant, eager to attend him. I suppose that after years of living under Tom’s authority while steering clear of me, Sally was as grateful as I was for Papa’s return as unquestioned master of the plantation.
Perhaps she was also eager to repair whatever had been ruptured between them, which had made her status on the plantation uncertain. But when Sally reached for my father’s coat, he nearly jolted at the brush of her fingers at his neck. And when she stooped to take his muddy riding boots, Papa stopped her. “That’s all right, Sally. I’ll do it.”
Her lower lip wobbled and she bolted away, disappearing somewhere into the recesses of the house.
“What the devil was that about?” The look of bewilderment on my father’s face might’ve been comical were the cause for Sally’s distress not so plainly obvious.
“She’s a woman who wants to please you,” Polly said, her cheeks pink with the cold. “Can’t you see that, Papa?”