Silence was my answer. And it stretched on so long that he needn’t have replied at all. I understood his silence as humiliation; he’d hoped to carry on with Sally without being found out. Maybe that’s why he’d wanted so desperately to send us back to Virginia, I thought, resentfully.
“There is a terrible hammering in my head,” he finally said in a voice that spoke of true pain. “I cannot begin to describe the agony.”
I made my way carefully to his bedside, sidestepping a round wooden table piled high with books. Was his agony caused by the headache or by the thought of losing his lover? Despite my anger, I’d seen the emotion on his face when he learned of Sally’s condition. He cared for her, maybe even loved her. If he’d been worried about the idea of her remaining in the chaos of Paris before, how much worse might his fears be now that she carried his child?
Pressing a hand to his forehead, I felt his skin warm and dry. There was no fever, but he groaned, as if my touch made it worse.
He didn’t leave his bed that day, nor could he leave it the next. Instead, he lay writhing on his mattress, put into torment by the slightest bit of light. He ate nothing, read nothing, and wanted to see no one but Sally.
And yet, Sally would not come.
I found her in the kitchen, and all but commanded her to go to him. But Sally stayed put, chopping onions the way her brother had taught us both to do, her eyes watering of it. And when I pressed her, we faced each other as if we were equals for the first time. Dropping her hand to her belly, she said, “I won’t go to him until he lets me and the child free.”
So it was the explicit grant of freedom she was holding out for. She hadn’t dared to demand freedom for herself when James did, but for her child, she’d found the courage to defy my father. To abandon him. To torment him, even, for now there was no question that he was ill.
So ill that I heard him retch on water. It was grief that had made him unable to open his eyes. Grief for how he’d tarnished his honor. An unwillingness to face a world in which he’d be vilified as a seducer of a girl in his charge, and the father of a mixed-race child he might never know if Sally left him to pursue life as a free woman, and I felt his naked fear of what might become of them on their own.
Three days my father lay in bed, shut up, alone, in despair.
Then four. Then five.
He called for me on the sixth.
There, in the near blackness of his room, he twined my fingers with his and said, “Patsy, let me tell you where King Louis went wrong. The king of France wants his people’s love so badly that he crushes them in his embrace. He won’t let them pursue happiness. He has to be forced to every compromise. I’ve seen enough tyrants in my time to learn from their mistakes, so I won’t thwart the rebellion of the young people in my household, even if it means I must lose the love and comfort of those dearest to me. You and William. Sally and James.”
With a gasp, I said, “Papa, you can never lose our love!”
No matter what I thought about his conduct with Sally, I loved my father dearly. So dearly that just as I’d hated Maria Cosway for rejecting my father, I now felt a festering resentment for Sally, too. It wasn’t the same, of course. This wasn’t Sally’s fault. But she knew how my father was suffering, and she didn’t need him to grant her freedom in France. She could take it and he couldn’t stop her. So why couldn’t she at least offer him a kind word before she left us?
“I will lose you,” my father said, with a melancholy sigh. “It’s the way of things, I know. I’m going out of life, and you’re all coming in.”
It horrified me to hear him say that he was going out of life. “Let me call for a doctor.”
Papa put his finger over my lips as if just the sound of my voice pained him. “I had this headache when your grandmother died. It’s a penance that must be endured. It reminds me that I’m past the prime of my life, and I must give way. The earth belongs to the living, and your generation has more life left than mine. Though I’ll be lost without you, I won’t stand in the way of you and William, even if it means I’ll lose what is most precious to me. When William asks for your hand, tell him yes with all your heart if that’s your desire.”
“Oh, Papa, you’ll never lose me,” I said, my heart filling with the bittersweet pain of happiness and gratitude, but also sorrow. Because though my father would never lose my love, if I married William, we’d never live together again.
My father must’ve known it, which made it all the harder for him to let me go. “But Patsy, I would ask this kindness of you. Come back with me to Virginia to settle Polly and say your farewells before returning to France for the wedding.”
I nodded, bringing his weak hand to my lips and kissing it, over and over.
But at my kisses Papa turned his face back to the pillow, as if he felt himself unworthy of them. “Would you—would you send Sally to me?”