My mouth went dry at this very soft, but very earnest, remonstration. I thought to offer some apology, some explanation that might undo the pain I’d caused him in leaving France. “Oh, William—”
“Please don’t,” he said, cutting me off. By using his given name, I’d abandoned the propriety and formality without which our conversation might be a guilty thing. An offense to my husband and my father, both. And it seemed more than he could bear. “It’s the fate of diplomats—a natural hazard of foreign service. But as I said, Rosalie and I have come to a crossroads. Your father has made plain to me that we cannot go on as we have been.”
“My father?” I couldn’t imagine Papa in frank discussion about . . . well, almost anything. But certainly not matters such as illicit mistresses.
William nodded. “When your father was elected president, I hoped, at long last, to secure the position as minister to France that I’ve coveted. Your father, however, informed me that such an appointment is now quite impossible for I’ve been too long absent from our country to represent its sentiments. So I’ve come home.”
He was wounded; I could see that. Nor could I blame him. Though I was certain my father had good reasons, the result struck me as profoundly unjust. William had spent the better part of nearly two decades toiling for his country overseas, sometimes in dangerous places, deftly securing our nation’s credit, making endless intelligence reports to better our position and save us from war. For it to be implied to such a man that he was somehow not enough American to represent his country . . . William must’ve seen it as the grossest ingratitude.
I wished that I could think how to soothe his hurt feelings, but instead, I asked, “How long will you stay in America?”
He shifted the basket between his hands and looked again across the garden. “Until a solution presents itself. There are apparently those who disapprove of my conduct in France and will thwart my appointment to any diplomatic post.”
William could win them over, I thought. He was as charming as he’d ever been. More charming, I thought, when he finally reached for a vine to help me with my forgotten harvest and said, “I’ve much mending of fences to do in Virginia, where it seems I’ve been replaced entirely.”
Wary of his closeness, I wondered if he knew that there’d been a small secret place in my heart that I’d always kept for him. I loved my husband, but Tom had never taken William’s place up entirely. “No one could replace you.”
His eyes twinkled with amused outrage and he lowered his voice to an intimate whisper. “The young and heroic Meriwether Lewis certainly has. Your father dotes on his new secretary with a fatherly affection I once believed he reserved only for me.”
I’d caused the breach between my father and William. Still, his jest snipped the tension. I began to laugh. Then we laughed together. “Meriwether Lewis is no William Short,” I declared.
My father had always cultivated an endless stream of protégés, but William had been the first and best of them. For unlike the others, he had a most personal acquaintance with my father’s faults and was devoted to him anyway.
Even having been snubbed for the appointment that would’ve crowned his career and maybe even won over his lady to marriage, still here he was, paying homage to my father at Monticello. “I don’t believe you ever need worry of being replaced, William. Papa always says that those we loved first, are those we love best.”
William smiled very softly then. In a way I hoped meant that we could still be friends. “Come, Patsy. You’re getting pink. Let’s take some shade in one of your father’s porticoes.”
“We’re likely to trip over a workman’s hammer and come away covered in plaster dust,” I protested, since Monticello’s renovations were endless.
“Here then,” he said, guiding me under the sheltering leaves of a cherry tree at the far end of the garden and setting down the basket by my feet. He offered his forearm to help me lower to a seat against the trunk, which I took with as much elegance as my housedress and apron would allow.
“So what will you do until some foreign post is offered?” I asked.
He took a seat beside me but angled away, so that no one who might come upon us could think it an impropriety. With our backs to the tree, side by side, I couldn’t see his face, but only his hands as he plucked a blade of grass and rolled it between his clean, elegant fingers. “I suppose I must find somewhere to live. Some years ago I prevailed upon your father to manage my investments while I was away. With that money he purchased for me some land called Indian Camp. Very fertile, he says. Very advantageous lands here in Albemarle County.”
Here in Albemarle. Where we might be neighbors.