After winning another game, Ellen announced, “Mr. Short, you’re paying too much homage to your queen. But I’ll allow you to avenge yourself with one last game.”
“I’m content to leave the field in ignominious defeat,” William said.
She clasped her hands together. “I fear your years in Philadelphia have turned you into a Yankee! No Virginia gentleman, born and bred, would bow so easily.”
A Yankee. It no longer had the same bite on her tongue as it did the day Joseph Coolidge came to our door. That’s how I knew that my Ellen was in love. In love with a man she wouldn’t marry because she feared to abandon me.
That night, I took her chin and made her look into my eyes. “If you can be happy with Mr. Coolidge, then marry him. You must go and be happy.”
Her long dark lashes fluttered with surprise. “But I’m accustomed to spinsterhood. And my duty—”
“Don’t let duty chain you,” I said, though it would break my heart to lose her. “Not to me, not to your father, not even to your grandfather.”
Ellen blinked, her brow furrowed. “But I wish to do as you’ve always done, Mama.”
My heart sank at the sentiment, sweet as it was. There had been sacrifice enough for duty. Ellen deserved to make the choice I hadn’t been able to. I grasped her hands. “No, Ellen. You’ve done your duty. It’s time to consider your own happiness.” For I was determined that my precious daughter, the one I clung to the way my father clung to me, would well and truly find it.
I AWAKENED TO THE SILHOUETTE of a man in my bedroom doorway. It was my husband, drunk and ornery. He stumbled into my closet—where he must’ve still expected to find a bed. Smashing instead into trunks and hatboxes, he uttered a dark curse.
“Tom?” I asked, not fully awake.
He never answered. Instead, he followed my voice in the dark, then hefted his body onto the bed, climbing atop me. “You’re my wife,” he snarled, yanking down the blankets.
“You’re drunk,” I accused, pushing him away.
“So you’re the wife of a drunk,” he said, forcing upon me a rough, wet kiss.
I didn’t want him. Not like this. Not angry and rough and stinking of wine. “No, Tom. We decided—”
My words were cut off by a blow to the face.
I tasted blood and anger, even as my head swam with terror and shock and pain.
“You decided,” Tom said, pinning my arm and getting his knee between mine.
I might’ve cried or pleaded or used feminine wiles to prevail upon him to let me go. But I did none of those things. Instead, when he tugged at his trousers to free himself, I freed myself with an upward jerk of my knee.
Unsteady from drink, he toppled from me, howling in pain. I rolled out of the bed, my bare feet pounding on the floor as I ran. He gave chase, knocking pictures from the wall, tripping over a small table in the hall, sending knickknacks clattering to the floor.
Hearing the commotion, Ellen flung open the door to her room while children stumbled down the stairs from their rooms above. Crowding around me, the children whimpered in confusion, and George began to cry. Tom glared at me where I stood within the refuge of my children’s arms. There was something akin to pure hatred in his eyes. By Tom’s accounting, he’d been rejected by everyone in his life. His father, my father, the legislators and voters of Virginia . . . and me.
This refusal of him was another betrayal. But he didn’t pry me away from our children to force himself upon me. Instead, without a word, he lumbered back down the stairs. And I didn’t follow or even call after him.
Instead, I found myself grateful that William’s lodging on the first floor had kept him from being witness to yet another humiliation.
Chapter Thirty-nine
I FELL OUT OF BED,” I said to explain my bruises.
Sipping chocolate, Papa sighed. “You wouldn’t have fallen from an alcove bed.”
I nodded absently, grateful that my children said nothing of their father’s rampage. They all joined into the conspiracy of silence. But William Short wasn’t fooled for a moment. He was unusually subdued as we took our chocolate from my father’s favorite urn. His face as serious and stoic as the plaster busts hovering over us of Washington, Franklin, and Lafayette.
And later, once my increasingly frail and elderly father found his ease in his campeachy chair, William followed me on my rounds beneath the mulberry trees, delivering rations to slave cabins. “Your husband mistreats you.”
I could say nothing. I could only hurry along the road, hoping our people would swarm around me for their parcels and force William to some other subject.
But he was, as always, a dogged man. “Did he strike you?”
“William, leave it be,” I said, picking up my pace, suddenly desperate to flee. To escape his infernal prying into facts.
William darted in front of me, blocking my path. “I thought you loved him.”
One look into William’s eyes and I came undone. All the emotions—the anger, the bitterness, the fear—everything I’d so carefully wound tight into my pleasant and placid smile now unraveled.