Yet I couldn’t let myself hope for it, not even for a moment, because I saw his hands reach to pluck up more grass, this time violently. And I remembered what he’d said in the heat of anger when we argued in Paris. That Virginia is stained in the evil of slavery, impossible debts and a way of life that can’t last. “But you don’t care to make a home at Indian Camp.”
He crossed his legs at the ankle, so that the steel buckle of his shoe glinted in the light. “I suggested to Mr. Jefferson an experiment of sorts. That he should rent out my Indian Camp property to tenant farmers. Part of the acreage to free white men. Part to free black men. As an experiment.”
“An experiment?”
“I hoped to prove something to him about the potential for emancipation,” he said, watching some of the slave children play with my own little ones on the lawn. Amongst those children was Sally’s pretty Harriet. And William swallowed. “Consider, for example, the perfect mixture of the rose and the lily. I’ve suggested to your father, too, that the mixture of the races is our surest path to doing away with racial prejudice. But his unwillingness to pursue my experiment at Indian Camp, nor even acknowledge my argument, tells me that an honorable life cannot be made in Virginia. Because if a man in your father’s singular situation cannot do it—if an icon of liberty cannot do it—I must conclude it cannot be done here at all.”
I blinked into the sun. Then blinked again. William had always favored the abolition of slavery, but what he spoke of now went far beyond the sentiments of even the most adventurous thinker on the matter I had ever met. I could not think his mention of my father’s singular situation, with regard to race mixing, was an accidental mention. But I wasn’t a naive girl any longer who could muse on such matters with impunity, and he should’ve understood that our southern silence about the color line wasn’t one I’d break even for him. “So you’ll sell Indian Camp. Can you afford to?”
A breeze blew, and his hands let loose the grass, which floated away. “I can afford a great many things now, Patsy. Even excluding the value of Indian Camp and my lands in Kentucky, not to mention the sums still outstanding from the State Department, I estimate my fortune at nearly a hundred thousand dollars.”
It was a very large sum. So large, in fact, that I went numb from the tip of my nose down to my tongue, and sat there stunned, like a felled ox.
At my silence, he continued, “It’s ill-mannered to speak of money in the presence of ladies, but I bring it up to set your mind at ease about the loan I’ve made to your father. I don’t want him to feel honor-bound to repay it when I can see plainly that his fortunes have fallen here.”
I took instant umbrage, and would have objected that of course the state of reconstruction only made it look as if my father’s fortunes had fallen, but I was too stunned by something else he’d said. “You made a loan to my father?” How had it come to pass that the man my father had once lectured about gold not falling from the sky had come to be our creditor?
In soft tones that somehow still assaulted my disbelieving ears, he explained, “I—I’m so sorry. I was sure you knew. Yes, I made a loan for his nail factory here at Monticello and a flour mill. But personal exigencies have prevented him from repaying the loan with what profits he has taken from those enterprises.”
I could guess at the personal exigencies that occasioned my father’s inability to pay. Papa had advanced money to my husband to pay the mortgage on Varina. Had divided up his properties to make another gift to keep us with a roof over our heads. All along I’d been so very grateful to my father for saving us from ruin, never suspecting Mr. Short was our savior. William Short, who had somehow accumulated a fortune without putting his shovel in the dirt.
Though it was unladylike for me to ask, improper in every way, William had been the only person to whom I’d ever spoken in frankness. And thirteen years of separation didn’t change this. “How—how much does he owe you?”
Though I’d wager he knew the exact sum down to the cent, he said, “Somewhere in the order of fifteen thousand dollars. I’ve offered to forgive the debt entirely, but your father won’t hear of it. So I must rely upon you to persuade him not to let pride be the cause of his impoverishment.”
“I’ve no knowledge or involvement in my father’s finances,” I said, which was only the proper way of it, but somehow, in light of this man’s expectations of me, felt like a shameful confession. “He never speaks of them to me.”
William nodded. “Nevertheless, I have no other avenue of appeal because no one has more power or influence over the president than you do.”
I wondered if I ought to feel flattered or terrified to believe it. It was a fact that my bond with my father was strong enough that even sometimes Polly complained of it, gently accusing Papa of loving me better. And though only Sally Hemings was allowed to freely roam his private chambers, whenever he returned from the capital, he didn’t race back to Sally, he came straightaway to Edgehill to get me.