And I fled.
Dropping the basket in the road, I took hold of my skirts and hurried away from him down the hill into the vegetable garden, for it seemed the most likely avenue of escape, past rows of artichokes and beans and brown Dutch lettuces.
I didn’t think he’d follow me, because it meant sinking his well-made shoes into the autumn muck. But he more than followed. He chased. “Patsy,” he cried, taking the liberty of using my childhood name. And when we reached the garden pavilion, he took the further liberty of grasping my wrist before I could close the glass-paned door in his face. Again, he insisted, “I thought that you loved him.”
“And I thought you loved Rosalie,” I shot back. “So love has carried neither one of us to the destination we wished.”
Startled, he let go of me, and I retreated inside the square little fortress lit by tall windows on every side. My father had built it so that he might peacefully survey the whole of his world in any direction, but I tucked myself into a corner, feeling vulnerable and exposed.
At length, William mustered the courage to step inside, rubbing his face in his hands. “Rosalie said she wouldn’t marry—she feared for her husband’s reputation, she feared to leave her elderly relations, she feared to leave her country. But the truth was, she simply wouldn’t marry me. When last in France, I learned that she’d married the Marquis de Castellane, an aging nobleman of some prestige. So trust me when I say that I understand perfectly what it is to love someone who can never give you what you want or deserve.”
I withdrew farther into the corner, wrestling the sob that threatened to overtake me. He stood beside me, our hands brushing where they dangled. We touched, skin to skin, an unmistakable intimacy as his finger linked, softly, tenderly, with my own.
And a longing I’d buried so long ago coiled within me anew, very much alive. We breathed in perfect harmony, bound again, finger to finger, even as we ached for more. And I felt the strength and comfort which I’d not experienced this way in more than thirty years.
His voice was a whisper. “I loved Rosalie, yes. But I loved you first, Patsy. Always have loved you. Always will.” He turned to me, touching my bruised lip very gently, right where it hurt, a very tender gesture.
Then he moved in, lowering his head as if he meant to kiss me.
And it took every bit of strength in me to turn away.
“WHO IS HE TO YOU?”
The growled words startled me, coming from behind me in the washhouse where I’d come in the cool of the evening to search out some missing stockings. Sally was there, having set soiled clothing to boil in a copper cauldron outside. Sally disliked when my daughters and I visited the dependencies, where the slaves did their work, for my father’s concubine ruled here, in her quiet and competent way. Perhaps that’s why she turned her head with scarcely disguised imperiousness to see who was stooped in the low doorway.
But I knew before I looked.
It was Tom, having lumbered down from the nearby north pavilion where he was sleeping these days, his face red from cheek to jowl, with rage or liquor, or both. “Get out,” he barked at the laundry girls, and they darted past him in the doorway. Sally was slower to obey, her glance flicking to me. Only when I nodded did she tug at the bodice of her gown to make it straight, then gracefully ducked under my husband’s outstretched arms to make her exit.
We stood there then, my husband and I, the sound of the laundry bubbling and hissing in the cauldron behind him. Then Tom roared, “Who is he to you? William Short. That sanctimonious stock jobber. That morally bankrupt lecher. I saw you. I saw both of you.”
My heart leapt to my throat like a shot from a pistol and I could do nothing but brazen it out. “I can’t imagine what you mean.”
“You left your basket in the road,” Tom said, his teeth clenched together like an animal trap that had taken so long to spring it was now rusted shut. “Couldn’t fathom where you’d got to until I looked up at the garden pavilion. I saw you there, with him. In his arms. I saw it!”
Sweat broke across my brow and the nape of my neck, not only from the big fire under the cauldron nor even the heat of this stifling little room, but because guilt seared its way through me until I worried I might faint dead away. Haltingly, I began to say, “I wasn’t in his arms, Tom. You know he’s an old friend. A dear one. He offered me comfort and solace in a moment of need. That’s all.”
That was a lie. That wasn’t all William Short had offered me in my father’s garden pavilion. He told me he loved me. He’d tried to kiss me, too, but I’d turned away.
“Nothing carnal took place,” I insisted. “He was my suitor once. In France. But I spurned Mr. Short, then married you.”
I hoped it’d soothe his wounded pride.