More than an achievement. A triumph. A secret triumph.
For years now—sometimes for eight to ten hours a day—I’ve scoured every letter, every record book, every receipt and scrap of paper in my father’s possession. I’ve burned some. In other instances, I took a razor to cut words away, just as my father once cut away what he believed to be untrue in the Bible. Eventually I entrusted the political letters to my daughters, whose eyes were better suited to such work, and kept the personal letters for myself. In the end, the collection will bear my son’s name as editor, but the work is mine.
And I feel both gratified and damned by it.
I must leave Monticello now, and I feel an unbearable sadness, such that I might be better off to lie down and die. After all, I cannot feel at home or happy anywhere else. And when I think of what might be done with the place—that it might be transformed into an inn or a boardinghouse—it seems like profaning a temple. I’d rather the weeds and wild animals that are fast taking possession of the grounds should grow and live in the house itself than see my father’s home turned into a tavern.
Indeed, there’s a part of me that might be gladdened by the sight of the house wrapped in flames, every vestige of it swept from the top of the mountain.
I’m there on the terrace, watching the men load up the wagon, wondering where I might get a torch to set Monticello ablaze, when I hear the jingle of a carriage coming up the road. More marauders, no doubt, come to chip off a piece of red brick from the house or snatch away a broken rail as a keepsake.
I don’t turn to greet them. My eyes are for the men who lift each crate of my father’s papers, as I warn them with crossed arms and an unfeminine scowl that their cargo is precious.
“Patsy, you’re going to catch your death, standing here in the cold.”
The voice pulls me from my dark thoughts. I know it intimately. And I turn to see a face at once familiar, beloved, and impossible. “William?”
“I didn’t mean to startle you.” He tucks a top hat under his arm, taking in a deep breath of cold mountain air. “Did you really think you’d never see me again?”
In truth, I was sure I’d never see him again, and now I half wonder if he is only the conjuring of a mind bent with secrets and sadness.
“You’re shivering.” He removes his long dark coat with its high shawl collar and wraps it around my shoulders. The warm brush of his hands against my neck nearly convinces me he’s here.
“I—I cannot invite you in to sit, Mr. Short, for there are no chairs. We close up today. Why have you come all the way from Philadelphia?” He cannot want a memento, though I’d find something to give him if he does, for he has as much right to a token of Thomas Jefferson as any man alive. “You cannot still have business in the area.”
“Urgent business,” he says, with a meaningful stare. “I’m told there’s an effort afoot to purchase Monticello for you, Patsy.”
After all our struggles, there’s some chance to keep Monticello? I’m afraid to believe it. There’ve been too many false hopes. “But who—”
“It isn’t important who. What’s important is that I’ve come to put a stop to it.”
I can make no sense of this whatsoever. It’s hard enough to credit that I have an anonymous benefactor, but nearly impossible to believe William would stand in the way of anyone helping me. Have I finally turned him so thoroughly against me?
It’s been years since, in tearful confessions of love and longing, we said our good-byes. But now he’s here again, to witness my violent parting from this place. Has he come to take some pleasure in it?
No, I cannot think it of him. “But you were behind the donations from Philadelphia,” I murmur, remembering the receipts I found in my father’s papers. “Money in your own name and more than that, too.”
His eyes fall to his feet. “Not enough, it would seem.”
“Much more than was expected of you . . . or Philadelphia for that matter. I’m sometimes left to wonder why my father’s own Virginia, which has most benefited by his talents and virtues, has given him a grave, and left others to give bread to his children. And now all he built here will crumble to dust.”
“So what if it does?” William asks.
I startle, thinking I’ve misheard. But the grim line of his mouth tells me that I haven’t. And I’m appalled. “You cannot mean that. I cannot believe that you, of all people—”
“This house isn’t your father’s greatest work. This is a plantation. And it ought to be abandoned, for it was, even at its height of beauty, built on ugliness—”
“How dare you,” I say, wanting to slap him.
Am I fated to have the men I’ve loved torment me in my weakest moments? Tears sting the corners of my eyes, my heart hammering painfully beneath my breast. Much as it did all those years ago when he confronted my father in the woods.
And William is no less relentless now.
His words run over mine. “This is a place impractical and cruel—”