“What the devil are you doing?” he shouted after me. “Patsy, you can’t go riding off into the night. It’s dusk. I’ll take you to your father in the morning.”
“Monticello is only a few miles,” I said, kicking my heels into the horse’s side. Tom shouted for his own horse as I galloped off, but I never looked back. Instead, I rode with the sureness of the trained horsewoman I’d nearly forgotten I had inside me, racing up Papa’s mountain like Jack Jouett did in raising the alarm that the British were coming. Breathless by the time I swung down in front of my father’s house and still stinging from the lash of tree branches, I hurried into the entryway. “Sally?” I called, but heard no answer. And in a place like Monticello, where it was never quiet, I found myself instantly alarmed.
I found Papa—secretly returned from Washington City—alone at his table with a glass of sherry, perusing a box of curiosities from Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, whom he’d sent on a grand expedition. Inside the chest were the preserved skeletons of all manner of creatures. Wolves, weasels, and elk. And I had a sudden memory of my father in his much younger days, feverishly scribbling down the correct way to preserve dead birds.
“Patsy.” He shook his head, as if he wished I hadn’t come.
I fought for both breath and composure. “Papa. You can’t just send me a letter like that and—”
“Spoken words fail me where my pen rarely does.”
I held the back of a gilded chair for steadiness. “You cannot mean to fight a duel.”
Just the summer before, my father’s old nemesis had died in a duel. Alexander Hamilton was dead before the age of fifty, and it was my father’s vice president who killed him.
Hamilton—whose reputation had also been sullied by the revelation of an affair with a married woman—had tangled with Aaron Burr, who demanded satisfaction upon a field of honor. And as if seeking an end to his life, Hamilton dueled upon the very same spot where his son had died, using the very same pis tols. Blood for reputation. Blood for honor. And now my father intended to follow in his footsteps. “You’re the president of the United States. Surely you don’t intend to dignify—”
“It’s true, Patsy,” my father broke in. “I did try to seduce Mr. Walker’s wife. It happened before you were born or conceived. Before your mother. I regret that you should have to know the truth of it.”
After all the other truths to which I was privy, did he really think this truth would matter to me? He clearly condemned himself, because his posture was stiff, tortured, and guilty indeed. Guiltier, I think, than when I asked him to deny Sally Hemings. He believed he had a right to his relationship with Sally. In some ways, he’d become defiant about it—allowing her to name their new baby James Madison Hemings, after both her beloved brother and my father’s closest political ally.
If Papa felt shame for Sally anymore, he never showed it. But this matter with Mrs. Walker was something else altogether because he had lied to me. He had told me that his quarrel with the Walkers had arisen over money matters, a thing I had repeated, unwittingly fanning the flames of the scandal. Now he stood shamed for that, and I could see, in the bleakness of his eyes, that he feared an irreparable breach between us.
Poor Papa. Didn’t he know that a breach between us was not possible?
Taking a deep breath, I pulled the crinkled letter from the bosom of my dress where I’d tucked it away. “What matter can it possibly make that it’s true? I’m happy to throw your confession on the fire and forget such an incident. As you should.”
Papa gave a slight shake of his head. “For years, I’ve tried to suppress the stories. Alas, they’re in the papers now, saying I made a cuckold of Mr. Walker. He’s demanding satisfaction.”
What a farce to imagine my elderly father taking up his pistols to duel with the elderly Mr. Walker over a matter nearly forty years in the past. “Let Mr. Walker demand satisfaction. You don’t have to give it to him.”
My father downed his sherry in one gulp—something I’d never seen him do before. “Mr. Madison has already attempted to negotiate a peaceful resolution. I’m afraid it cannot be escaped this time.”
This was madness. We lived in a world where a sitting vice president had murdered the former secretary of the treasury. That my father should open himself up to die the same way, shot over some trivial matter—was tempting fate’s sense of irony.
But I had judged Alexander Hamilton to be an intemperate man. My father was, in almost all matters, a man of cool reason. How could he let himself be goaded to such foolishness? Perhaps he didn’t require much goading. Once, I’d put myself between him and his pistols. Perhaps now that my sister was dead, he was still, after all this time, trying to keep an appointment with them.