I nearly slapped her. My anger was so volcanic that it burned coherent thought from my mind. I wasn’t even sure why I was so angry, only that I was. “You want to be a slave all your life, Sally?” Past my strangled fury I choked out, “You want to be my father’s . . . whore?”
She brushed the wetness of her eyes away, as if it pained her for me to see her cry. “How am I to leave my family in Virginia, Miss Patsy? Never see my momma again? Knowing your father wants me, how could I refuse? He’s good to me, and I hate nothing like disappointing him. It hurts to disappoint him.”
Who knew the truth of that statement better than I did? And yet I stood there, shaking with a fury at her choice that I couldn’t comprehend, biting the insides of my cheeks to keep from howling with it. It was the wrong choice. Could she not see it? “You’re giving up your freedom!”
“I know it.” Her chest heaved with emotion beneath her pretty blue gown. “But women have to give hard thought to the men we’ll wind up with. Make a mistake and get a drunk, a spendthrift, a cruel man. A man who won’t keep his word. But your papa gives his word and nobody ever doubts it. You think I’m likely to find some better Frenchman? Or some better man at all? Or any man willing to have a woman carrying another man’s baby?”
Sally’s shoulders fell, and for just a moment, sympathy pierced my anger. She’d be with child, in a city full of upheaval, with no one to rely upon but her brother.
But then she said, “In marriage, man and woman become one, and that one is the husband.”
Did she think of herself as my father’s wife? The very thought of it sent fire through my blood anew and made sense of my rage. It sounded as if she believed that what passed between her and my father was a lifelong sacrament, when it was nothing but sin!
And while I stood there, wondering how to tell her that she’d never replace my mother, she straightened her shoulders and said, “He loves me, Miss Patsy.”
I did slap her then.
Sally shrieked and clutched her cheek. But I wasn’t moved to pity.
I’d given up William to save my father from dying of a broken heart, thinking that Sally was going to leave him and take his child with her.
Was my whole life in ruin because of this girl?
My rage grew even hotter toward my father. For his words about William’s fitness and his melancholy about Sally had brought me to the conclusion that I must give up what I wanted for myself and do my duty, and yet all the while Papa was making deals to ensure he’d make no sacrifice at all. Not now. And, very likely, not in the future, not as long as Sally chose to remain at his side. In my mind’s eye, I saw him on his knees before me, reaffirming his deathbed promise never to take another wife and pleading that his happiness depended on me—all to keep me from taking my vows.
And now I’d given up everything I’d ever dared to want for myself. The convent. My dearest friends. William.
Everything.
The room spun around me, and pressure built inside me that demanded release. I felt less in control of myself than ever before or at any time after. And so I did something that to this day I regret as much as slapping her. I hissed in her tear-streaked face what I knew to be a lie. “Papa doesn’t love you. And he never will.”
I’VE MADE A MISTAKE, I thought, imagining I could see England across the fog-covered waters of the channel.
There was still time to turn back. I could run back to William Short’s embrace and beg a thousand pardons for having left him. My father wouldn’t stop me. Not when he knew his honor was so tarnished in my eyes.
Indeed, it seemed as if Nature herself commanded me to turn back, because the bumpy earth had split the axle of our phaeton and broke the wheels of our carriage to slow us down. Then the most tempestuous weather we’d ever seen trapped us with a storm of wind and squall, the fury of which was an echo of all the turmoil inside me.
But William hadn’t tried to stop me from going. He’d never even said good-bye. And so this was an ending, I told myself. Turning away from the view, I knew I wouldn’t—couldn’t—look back. But neither could I go forward, for this storm blew for nine days until the only way Papa could calm my little sister was to promise her a puppy.
Papa said, “Come search out shepherd dogs with me, Patsy.”
Why don’t you take your lover? I let the silent question show in my sullen eyes. Then, furiously, I grabbed my coat with an insolent stare. Numb with heartbreak, I scarcely felt the chill of the rain or the blow of the wind when we went clambering the cliffs. Though Papa tried to engage me in conversation, I said next to nothing as we walked together for hours, nearly ten miles in all.
It was a fruitless, awkward search. I had too much dignity to pretend there was nothing wrong between us. My father knew what weighed upon my heart and I knew what weighed upon his. And at long last, I decided that if we were going to quarrel, why not do it here in the howling wind?