To Be Remembered as Time of Love Allow...

"Liahnan Sidhe..."

"I want a trouble-maker for a lover,

blood spiller, blood drinker,

a heart of flame,

who quarrels with the sky and fights with fate,

who burns like fire on the rushing sea.”

~ Rumi

~~~

“Liahnan Sidhe…”

Paris-November 1787, Ile de la Cite, Hotel Dieu

Flashback-Paris, October 1787, L’Fiege’s apartments

Caroline…

~~~

Looking back on that night, across the span of the month which had followed, Caroline knew, it was weeping, ultimately that triumphed. 

All her mad rage, the explosive anger from before, striking at him, reaping small vengeance for the violence he might have committed, before curbing his rabid passion, had been exorcised out of her in the moments following their coupling.

Sorrow snuck past adamant will. 

Her head still resting upon his chest, the wind-up clock set above the mantle of the fireplace, ticking away the minutes to dawn, echoed the sound of his drowsing breath, as he dropped off.

Her eyes stilled on the gloom-shrouded mural, the air moving through her nostrils heavy with the musk of their sex-play, clinging to the sheets.

“Manes,” fingers grazing, wandering along the length of her tresses, Thomas’ voice grew softer, barely audible, faint rumble stirring against her cheek, felt through the shallow definition of muscle above his beating heart. “Your tears,” he whispered,” chest rising and falling in deeper sleep, “they’re scalding—“, hand slipping from her hair, aside, into the disarray of blankets about their limbs, as easily as he slipped into dream.

That was the first time he ever mentioned his awareness of her voiceless, bitter remorse. 

Then, she usually didn’t remain curled in his embrace. 

She chose to retreat, instead, to the other side of the bed, turned away from him, so the little Scotch doctress could conceal the traitorous, silent tears soaking into her pillow.

That night, though, in the darkness of the room, features silhouetted by indistinct shadows of gray deepening with the out-tide hours after midnight, she let her fingers gently trace the firm-boned jaw, the soft line of his lips. She didn’t need light to know his face, slack and tractable now to her toying caress, high forehead, eyebrows bristly to her touch, how the lines of thought, marked engravings in the skin around his mouth, drew those brows together in subtle concentration, eased in sleep, made him younger, less encumbered by worry, doubt, and reflection.

Caroline wasn’t sure Thomas Jefferson, for all his insight, his accomplishments, his intellect, his sweetness even, could have understood from where her silent, seeping tears brewed.  His interpretation of human-nature, particularly women, was so childlike at times, in its simplicity. He had never learned one could not simply possess everything which crossed one’s path, or snared one’s heart, even when they felt they had given in equal, or greater measure, of their own affection.

But that sweetness had disarmed her over the spring, taken what had been a platonic, sibling-like relation for over two years, rueful as she ever was toward her own brother, comfortable mocking, cajoling, casual irreverence—suddenly sent them falling into what her grandmother had often warned against.