It didn’t.
“William Short makes whores of other men’s wives.” These words carried such quiet fury that they frightened me more than if he’d shouted them. Tom came toward me, very slowly, very quietly, wrapping his big hand around my throat like Charles Bankhead had once done. Tom didn’t squeeze but merely held me there against the wall, slightly suspended, like a rag doll hanging from his string. “Short is infamous. His exploits are so well known he was too ashamed to make his home in Virginia. But you’re giving him what you won’t give me, isn’t that right?”
How absurd it was. Beggaring belief, even. At our age, for two men to be vying for a mother of eleven children. “Tom, you’re letting jealousy poison your mind! Don’t you realize the absurdity—”
“Tell me you haven’t bedded him. Go on. Lie to me, you convent-trained whore.”
My husband’s chest heaved with anger so deep and divisive that it seemed to open the very earth between us. It seemed to make strangers of us. And perhaps we were strangers now. For I was no longer the young wife who believed that her husband’s violence was her own fault.
And slowly, pulling from some reserve inside myself I didn’t know I had, I stood taller on my side of that chasm. “Whatever I am, Thomas Mann Randolph, you’re not worthy of.”
On that last, I broke free of him. But I didn’t run. I’d run from him when he’d tried to force himself upon me—run from him like Ann ran from her maniac of a husband.
But I was done running from Tom.
I walked out of that washhouse, even as my husband called after me. “I’ll have satisfaction, Martha. I’ll call him out!”
I snorted with bitter laughter, grateful to be certain of one thing. “William will never fight a duel with you.”
“If he won’t, it’s because he’s no Virginia gentleman.”
“No, Tom. He won’t duel you because you aren’t. Not anymore.”
WILLIAM AND I MET IN THE GROVE, a canopy of autumn leaves overhead, strangely reminiscent of that long-ago day he found me on the ground, having fallen from my father’s high horse.
“Patsy, say something.” Those words, too, were an echo of the past, but I was hearing them again now as he pleaded, “Your silence cuts me deeper than the sharpest rebuke.”
He was wrong. My words would cut him deeper, I knew. And I wished I could say anything other than what I’d come to tell him. But we weren’t young comrades amongst a tangle of saplings at the start of our journey any longer; we were grizzled veterans standing atop the rotting fruit of our long struggle. And so, with the stink from the leaves of my father’s chinaberry trees in my nos trils, I forced myself to speak, even as the words themselves left a painful sting on my lips. “I must ask you to leave Monticello.”
William reeled, as if he’d taken a blow. “I meant to comfort you and have made a fool of myself with unwanted attentions. I’ll leave, of course, if that’s your desire, but I promise I’ll never allow myself such a lapse. It will never happen again.”
I wanted it to happen again. I wanted that desperately. “You’re no fool, William, and your attentions are not unwanted. To the contrary, they’re temptations that my virtue is no proof against.” He startled, his expression lighting upon some hope that I was soon to dash. “But Tom saw us. He saw us in the garden pavilion. So you must go and never come back.”
“God,” William said, though the word carried with the sound of a profane curse. Color came to his cheeks, and he put a hand to the back of his neck. “I’ll speak to him. I’ll assure him of your blamelessness.”
“But I’m not blameless.” My heart cried out that I never wanted to part with him. That now, more than ever, I wanted to keep him near. “And you must go, because he means to call you out.”
An unexpected bloodlust filled William’s eyes. “Does he?”
“He thinks himself betrayed. Here under his own roof.”
“Your father’s roof,” William corrected, then blanched at his own words.
I didn’t have to explain to him the scandal of gentlemen with pistols meeting on my father’s lawn, only weeks before the arrival of Lafayette. And that was to say nothing of the fact that such a duel might very well end in blood and tragedy. I had no doubt whatsoever that my husband would try to put a bullet in William’s brain. Even if he missed—even if it was William whose aim was true—it’d make a widow of me and an orphan of my children.
“Please forgive me, Patsy. I should have never—”