Mrs. Lincoln's Rival

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  The warden and the minister spoke over themselves in their haste to inform her they had made more suitable arrangements, and with Mr. French trailing along behind, they escorted her to a simply furnished but comfortable sitting room, which she gathered was reserved for dignitaries and was not the usual place visitors met prisoners.

  Before long a guard brought in a white-haired man, who shuffled with head bowed to stand before the warden. Kate’s smile faded as she took in a face lined with misery, a back stooped from grief and hard toil, scrawny limbs from which pale, weathered skin hung loosely, like an old, wrinkled suit that had once fit a younger, heartier man.

  Her throat constricted as the warden announced her and the prisoner lifted his head to regard her warily. She should have come earlier. She should have begged her father to have the documents signed first thing in the morning. She should have sped Honeysuckle from the capitol to the prison at her fastest clip rather than allow this poor man to suffer a single moment longer than necessary.

  “Would you like a chair, Miss Chase?” the warden asked.

  “Yes, indeed,” Kate quickly replied, “not for myself but for this gentleman.”

  Looking a trifle put out, at a nod from the warden the guard left the room and returned with a wooden chair, which he set down with an impatient flourish and gestured for the prisoner to take. After a moment’s hesitation, and after a murmur of encouragement from the minister, Mr. Malecki carefully seated himself, slowly folding up his bony limbs as if it pained him to move.

  Kate took a quick breath to steel herself before approaching him. “Mr. Malecki,” she said steadily, managing a warm smile, “it is my great honor to present to you this pardon from my father, the governor, which he offers with his regards and his certainty of your innocence.”

  The man’s watery, hooded eyes flicked from the document she held out to him to her face and back again. He did not move to take it from her.

  “Malecki,” the warden said sternly, “you owe this young woman the courtesy of a reply.”

  “He owes me nothing,” Kate said evenly, breaking the seal, unfolding the paper, and placing it in his hands on his lap. “This must be quite unexpected, sir, but I assure you, everything is in order.”

  She held her breath as his gaze skimmed the page, taking in the printed script, the official seal, her father’s angular handwriting. He looked up, his face a study in wonder. “I’m a free man?”

  “Yes, you are,” Kate assured him.

  Mr. Malecki glanced up at the warden. “But what about my—my new trial?”

  “Unnecessary now,” the minister told him, placing a hand on his shoulder.

  Trembling, Mr. Malecki looked around the room, tears welling up in his eyes. A raw, aching sob burst from him, and he crumpled, resting his elbows on his knees and burying his head in his hands. Involuntarily, Kate stepped back, and a moment later the warden was at her side, offering her his arm and murmuring that she need not remain to witness the upsetting scene. Before she could protest, he had ushered her from the room. A quick backward glance revealed the minister bent over the weeping man, and Mr. French jotting notes on his pad as he followed Kate and the warden into the hall.

  “That poor man,” Kate managed to say as the warden escorted her to the exit. “What will become of him? Does he have any family, any friends?”

  “No family in this country,” Mr. French remarked, flipping through his notepad. “Any friends he might have had before he went to prison must have forgotten him by now.”

  “Reverend Myers has arranged a room for him in the boardinghouse of one of his parishioners,” the warden assured her. “If, after a time, the old fellow can work, they’ll find him a job. Until then, the church will provide for him.”

  Kate nodded, somewhat relieved. She managed to compose herself by the time they reached the exit, where she thanked the warden and nodded politely to Mr. French, who threw her a rakish grin and said, “No, Miss Chase, it is I who thank you. This was truly a fascinating episode.”

  Kate studied him curiously for a moment, but her attention was snatched away when the warden cleared his throat. “Miss Chase,” he ventured, “I trust that you will assure your father that his wishes were carried out with the utmost expediency, and that you were protected at all times from any distress?”

  “Of course. The governor will be pleased to hear how efficiently and faithfully you carried out your duties. And you, Mr. French?” she asked, turning to him. “Would you like me to recommend you to my father too?”

  Mr. French frowned thoughtfully. “I suppose that wouldn’t hurt. Perhaps if you spoke well of me, he’d allow me to interview him someday.”

  “Perhaps,” Kate said faintly, keeping her smile in place. She nodded to both men and quickly turned to go, her knees trembling as she crossed the yard to the place where Honeysuckle waited, picketed and grazing.

  A newspaperman, she thought as she rode away. A particular breed of man her father declared was a blessing when they spoke well of one and a curse every other day. The warden must have invited him to the prison, for her father certainly would not have done.

  She decided not to mention Mr. French at home, and she fervently hoped that when he reviewed his notes and came to write his story, he would find nothing worth mentioning about her. But she knew her hopes were in vain. People always found something to say about Kate, for good or ill. Reviewing the scene at the prison in her mind’s eye, she took comfort in knowing that her behavior had been exemplary, that she had neither said nor done anything that would reflect badly upon herself or her father.

  That had not always been so.

  Two years before, newly liberated from Miss Haines’s School in Manhattan, she had come to Columbus, exultant with freedom—from the headmistress’s demands, from loneliness, from the strictures of childhood. She had craved attention, admiration, love—things her pious and preoccupied father offered in frustratingly minute quantities. He relentlessly admonished her for her faults, reminded her that her days on earth were limited, and urged her to pursue perfection—ceaselessly demanding, forever unsatisfied. Was it any wonder that her heart and imagination were captivated by a man who admired her exactly as she was, who thought her perfect already?

  He was a young man, though nearly ten years older than she, wealthy, handsome, and recently wed to a lovely woman from a prominent Columbus family. Of course Kate was flattered when he paid attention to her whenever they met in society. Conversations in the midst of a watchful crowd led to earnest confidences shared in secluded nooks. He began calling on her at home while her father was away, and then, more boldly, taking her on drives throughout the city, heedless and unmistakable in an open chaise. Their illicit meetings went on so long and so publicly his wife inevitably learned of them. Whether she confronted her husband Kate did not know, but rumors whispered that the heartbroken wife would visit friends who lived across the street from the Chases and watch through the window day after day, tears streaming down her cheeks, as her husband helped the glowing young girl into his carriage and drove off with her alone.

  When Aunt Alice told Kate’s father, he scolded her so terribly that she wept, but she could not give up her admirer. Once she had experienced the heady rush of his limitless praise and adoration, the dizzying excitement of his presence, the terrifying allure of the forbidden, she could not go back to the dull, colorless, ordinary days she had known all her life before him.

  She let him kiss her once, no more, but it was enough. He boasted to his friends of his familiarity with her, and unkind but not unprovoked gossip swirled about her. Furious, her father forbade her to see him again, shouted down her tearful pleas, and threatened to send her away to live with relatives until the scandal could be forgotten. Heartbroken, without a single sympathetic friend, she yearned for her admirer and lived for the days her father traveled away from the city and she could do as she pleased, free f
rom his condemning scrutiny.

  One day it was announced in the papers that her father intended to travel to Washington City, but on the appointed day he did not go, and so he was in his study reading when the man arrived to take Kate riding. Alarmed by the sound of the governor’s footfalls in the hall, he scrambled beneath a sofa, where Father quickly found him, hauled him to his feet, and beat him soundly with the whip from his own buggy, rendering him so bruised and bloodied that he could not go out in public for several days. He never again appeared on the Chases’ doorstep, and when Kate plummeted into a dark pit of melancholy, forlorn and abandoned, her father sent her east to stay with family until she came to her senses.

  After many long weeks, separation and silence from her would-be lover accomplished what all her father’s warnings and punishments had not. Remorse overcame her, and shame, and regret, and when she thought of the anguish she had put his poor wife through she could hardly bear it. Time passed, and whenever Kate thought back on those strange, intoxicating times, she remembered feeling passion and desire and love, but she could not summon up those feelings anew. She did not know what had come over her, why she had risked her reputation, her father’s respect, and all her future happiness upon someone who, it must be said, was no more than an ordinary man. In fact, his behavior marked him as worse than an ordinary man, for he had been willing to sacrifice two innocent women to his carnal desire—and he had left one less innocent than before.

  Kate knew her father would be displeased to find her the subject of gossip once again, even if it were inspired by a good deed done on his own behalf rather than the reckless actions of a foolish girl who thought she was in love.

  • • •

  More than a week later, just as Kate had stopped dreading the delivery of the morning paper and had begun to hope that Mr. French would write nothing of the events at the prison, or that he had already done so but had not mentioned her role in them, her father came home from the capitol agitated and scowling. She felt herself shrinking inwardly as she waited for the storm to burst, wondering whether he would reprimand her at dinner in front of Nettie and their aunt or if he would take her aside and scold her alone. She hardly knew which she would prefer.

  He chose breakfast the next morning, slapping upon the center of the table a newspaper folded open to the headline, “A Pardon Scene—Miss Chase.” As he lectured her on the dangers of putting herself forward in public, she nodded, half-listening, as she read the article, fearing the worst. “On Saturday afternoon,” Mr. French had written after a brief account of the unnamed prisoner’s ordeal, “Governor Chase’s daughter, a fair and noble girl of seventeen or eighteen summers—and who in her person proves that the generally accepted truth that ‘great men never have great sons,’ does not reach daughters—takes the Pardon and makes her way to the Prison.” A dramatic and somewhat embellished description of the prisoner’s response to his pardon followed, and the piece concluded on a note of apology: “The fair and modest heroine, I know will shrink from this public recital; but one cannot forbear telling so beautiful an event.”

  “That wasn’t as dreadful as I had feared,” Kate said as she passed the newspaper on to her aunt. At one warning glance from her father, she quickly amended, “Although I do shrink from publicity, and I wish the reporter had shown forbearance.”

  “A lady should strive to keep her name out of the papers,” her father admonished. “She should be mentioned only upon the occasions of her marriage and of her death.”

  “Twice more only for me, then,” Kate replied cheerfully, immediately regretting it when her father’s scowl deepened. “Father, you must know that I didn’t seek out this attention.”

  “The press is a tool to be used judiciously to achieve a worthy goal,” her father said, rapping on the table for emphasis. “Do not let it use you.”

  “I had no idea Mr. French was a newspaperman until it was too late,” Kate protested. “I thought he was a clerk.”

  “He should have identified himself,” Aunt Alice said. “He should have made his intentions clear from the beginning.”

  Kate threw her a grateful look.

  Her father heaved a sigh of resignation. “You must be more cautious in the future,” he scolded, but more gently than before. “Anything you do or say could be remarked upon by others. You must be irreproachable, not only in your conduct but also in your private thoughts, though only you and God will know them.”

  “I understand,” Kate replied, and she promised to do all she could not to displease him again.

  The meal ended, and Father disappeared into his study to read pending legislation and write letters. Kate knew better than to attempt to cajole him into a game of chess, but she was pleased when, as he called the family together for their customary evening prayers, he smiled fondly to show her that all was forgiven. “Would you put the Bible away, my dear Katie?” he asked afterward, and she knew it was his way of telling her that she had not lost his trust.

  Alone in his study, she hesitated before returning the holy book to its shelf, and instead turned to the family memoranda her father recorded in the blank pages bound in at the end. She had read the passage noting the day of her birth so often that the book fell open readily at the proper place, and almost involuntarily, she read again the lines that were forever engraved upon her memory.

  “The babe is pronounced pretty,” her father had written mere hours after she had taken her first breath. “I think it quite otherwise. It is, however, well formed, and I am thankful. May God give the child a good understanding that she may know and keep his commandments.”

  It had not taken her long to disappoint him, Kate reflected, and she had spent nearly every day afterward trying to make up for it. Someday, perhaps, she would.

  Gently she closed the Bible and returned it to the shelf.

  Chapter Two

  * * *

  MARCH–APRIL 1860

  I

  n the months that followed, Kate redoubled her efforts to make herself indispensable to her father, and when she proved to be efficient, intelligent, and more devoted to him than any clerk or secretary he could ever hire, he entrusted her with more, and more important, duties. She managed his correspondence, scheduled appointments, attended official functions, and offered a willing ear when he needed to privately air his grievances with the legislature or party politics, or when he practiced a speech. Though in writing he was an eloquent rhetorician with moments of brilliance, he was less confident in speechmaking. His handsome face and tall, powerful form gave him a majestic presence when he stood before an audience, but he spoke with a slight though unmistakable lisp and his voice had a deep, throaty quality that rendered him too self-conscious to achieve the air of effortless eloquence. Diligent practice helped, and so did Kate’s tactful reviews.

  Kate relished the role of his official hostess, which her more reserved Aunt Alice gladly ceded to her. Dressed in flattering gowns, her hair parted in the center and gathered in a simple, elegant knot at the base of her graceful neck, she presided over receptions and dinners and teas for legislators, political friends, potential allies, and influential businessmen and editors traveling through Ohio. Gatherings at her father’s house became renowned for their elegant surroundings, convivial atmosphere, and stimulating conversation, and the consensus was that the governor owed all due credit to his eldest daughter. She was confident and outgoing where her father could seem aloof, and she wielded tact and charm with the skill of an experienced diplomat in fraught situations where her father tended to trample unwittingly over other people’s feelings. Though her father still dispensed criticism freely but held on as tightly to praise as a miser did coin, she knew he appreciated her efforts, and she glowed with happiness when she saw how puffed up with pride he became whenever his colleagues commended her to him.

  Kate became the lady of the house in fact as well as practice in the sorrowful aftermath of Aunt Alice�
�s death.

  On a frosty evening in mid-February 1859, she and her father were in his study, contemplating his political future over a game of chess. A month before, he had received a discouraging letter from a longtime friend and trusted political ally, Mr. Gamaliel Bailey, former editor of Cincinnati’s abolitionist paper the Philanthropist turned publisher of the National Era in Washington. After observing the ebb and flow of public opinion and studying the signs of the times, Mr. Bailey had concluded that although there was no man he would rather see in the presidential chair than Salmon P. Chase, he thought it best to support New York senator William H. Seward for the presidency in 1860.

  “Bailey himself admits that Seward and I are the two most prominent men of the Republican Party,” her father said mournfully, still brooding over the letter, which lay unfolded on the table beside the chessboard. “But Seward is older than I, he emphasizes, as if that matters. How can age alone be reason to prefer one candidate to another, especially when the other is not only eminently qualified but also a longtime friend?”

  Kate shook her head sympathetically, her fingertips resting on a pawn. “I had always credited Mr. Bailey with sounder judgment.”

  “So had I, until now. How can he concur with Seward’s friends that it is ‘now or never’ with him, and that ‘to postpone him now is to postpone him forever’? And then to attempt to conciliate me with assurances that I, the younger man by seven years and still in the prime of life, will have many more opportunities to seek the presidency”—Father shook his head—“it is ridiculous.”