The Emancipator's Wife

by Barbara Hambly

  “Where's she put you these days, Frances?” inquired Granny Parker of the second sister, who trailed along behind Elizabeth, holding her hand. “In the attic?”

  “I think I heard her tell Nelson to move a blanket out to one of the sheds,” provided Mary archly, which got another laugh. “That way she can rent out the room.”

  Frances, who had no sense of the ridiculous, only said, “Oh, no, ma'am, I share the small room at the top of the stairs with Ann.” But Betsey, making her way to her husband's side, stopped and stiffened with anger, and her narrowed gaze focused on Mary as if seeing her clearly for the first time in that very crowded day.

  Mary turned quickly, and looked around for her father. She had to catch him now, had to make it all right....I'll tell him I don't know what came over me—that was true enough....I'll tell him Bella Richardson said she deserved to have the pendant because her father is richer than Papa....And I...and I got so angry that I couldn't let that pass....

  She began to tremble as she nerved herself up for the interview.

  But the group of men had shifted, Ninian and Cash coming over to the knot of girls around Granny Parker, Ninian to put an arm around Elizabeth and Cash to sidle as close to Mary Jane Warfield as he could without her father seeing them. Mary slipped away as soon as she could, joining the group of girls who accompanied Elizabeth up to Frances's room, to collect the last of Elizabeth's things as the carriage that would take her and Ninian to White Sulphur Springs was brought to the door. The girls hugged Elizabeth as they mounted the rather narrow stairway, blocking the way completely with their wide mountains of petticoats: Frances and Meg were already in tears and Arabella Richardson was pretending to be.

  Mary saw Betsey emerge from the parlor and come toward them, and tried to get up the stairs before her, but there were simply too many girls in the way. Her stepmother reached out and caught the sapphire pendant in her hand, jerking so hard Mary thought either the ribbon or her neck would snap.

  “Why don't you tell me which is worse, Miss: to hold household in the face of needless expenditure, or to lie to tradesmen in order to get something you want?”

  She spoke in a level tone, but quietly, so quietly Mary wasn't sure, afterwards, how many of her friends heard. Mary's stomach gave one sickening heave under her tight-laced corsets and she felt her face grow cold. Then blood flamed to her cheeks and her throat and her chest, and she retorted, “At least I don't spy on people behind their backs!”

  With a gesture as smooth and swift as swatting a fly, Betsey dealt her a stinging box on the ear, and every girl on the stairway stopped dumb, staring down at the two of them at its foot. “You can go to your room, Miss,” said Betsey, “and stay there. I think I've seen enough of you for the day.”

  As Mary thrust her way blindly up through what felt like a patchouli-scented forest of petticoats, she heard the voices behind her, whispering questions....

  Whispering answers.

  She slammed the door of her room like a wordless curse flung at her stepmother, then stood hanging on to the handle, her knees trembling so hard she didn't think she could make it to the bed. Shame washed over her like the waves of a bottomless ocean.

  Shame and terror. She'll tell Papa. The words hammered the inside of her ribcage until she felt she would die if she did not scream.

  Liar. Liar. Mary Todd is a liar.

  The whole town would know about it and nobody would ever speak to her again.

  Her father...

  She felt sick, as if she were going to throw up. I didn't mean it. I only wanted something pretty!

  Thief. Liar and thief.

  Please, God, don't have everybody in town be whispering that. Papa will be disgraced, too. He'll never speak to me again.

  And then I really will die.

  Somehow she made it to the bed, and lay trembling, listening to the hushed whispers of the girls in Frances's room next door. Thief, liar. Mary dragged the pillow over her head, heedless of Mammy Sally's careful hours with the curling-irons. She lay that way for a long time, her mind blank to everything except dread and shame.

  Betsey would tell everyone. Betsey had practically announced it to all her friends, right there on the stairway. What would Eliza and Frances say? They'd never be able to hold up their heads at Ward's again, unless they joined in the cry against Mary....Mary knew exactly how those alliances worked. Her heart curled up at the thought, like a giblet in a dry oven.

  Daylight was fading from the windows when Mammy Sally knocked on the door. Mary snatched the pillow from her head. “Go away!” And, when Mammy knocked again and opened the door, “Don't you say a word to me! I don't want to talk about it!” She was shaking all over. Somehow that was almost worse than her father being disgraced for having a liar and a thief in his family: that every darky in town was going to be whispering her name in kitchens, tack-rooms, garden sheds. Did you hear what that Mary Todd did...?

  Mammy's eyebrows went up, but she only said, “Turn round, child, let me unlace you. No sense gettin' that pretty dress all creased up layin' on it.”

  Mary obeyed in silence, too angry—and too humiliated—to further humble herself by crying. When Eliza came up a few hours later Mary pretended to be asleep. When she did sleep, her dreams were of walking down Broadway hearing everyone she knew whispering behind her: Liar. Liar and thief.

  The next morning Mary stayed in her room. She heard the voices of the family going down to breakfast, but knew better than to even try it herself. All she'd need would be Betsey dragging out the whole story in front of them. She trembled at the thought of the upcoming interview with her father. He would ask her why she'd done it—with the look of hurt in his eyes, as he'd asked her about countless acts of disobedience over the years—and she had nothing, literally nothing, that she could tell him.

  She didn't know why she'd done it. Just thinking about saying that made her want to cry.

  But she wanted above all things to have it over with, done. He will never speak to me again, she thought, and the next moment, He has to say it's all right. He has to say it or I'll die.

  She strained her ears for the sound of his boots on the stairs, and wondered if she should pray. But she could think of nothing God would even consider granting her.

  Boots at the bottom of the stairs. Muffled voices, her father's and Betsey's. She held her breath: It's going to be now....

  I'll cry. He'll forgive me if I cry....

  Then, very dimly, the sounds of hooves in the street. A saddle-horse being brought around to the front of the house. The sound of the front door opening...“I'll be back on the first,” said her father's voice.

  The door closed. Betsey's light decisive step retreated to the parlor. A moment later, the sound of hooves rattled down Short Street as her father rode away.

  Mary sat up, her mouth literally ajar with shock and, a moment later, outrage. There would be no confrontation. No bargaining, no tears, no forgiveness.

  He had left without any of them. Without saying good-by.

  “She told him you weren't feeling well,” reported Eliza, when she came up an hour later after helping Betsey and Frances wash the good breakfast china—a task never relegated to darkies. “She said you were still asleep.”

  And SHE called ME a liar! The hairs on her head prickled with wrath.

  Her father was going to be gone for almost two weeks, and Betsey had taken it upon herself to step between them, and prevent them from even having the chance to say good-by.

  “What did she say to you yesterday, anyway?” asked Eliza, digging through her own little painted tin box for a ribbon to go in her yellow curls. “Is your ear all right?”

  Mary barely remembered Betsey hitting her in front of her friends. All she could think was, She told him in private. Of course—she doesn't want to hear the darkies in every kitchen in town saying, “That Mary Todd's a liar and a thief,” any more than I do. Not because she cares one single thing about me, but because of Papa's reputation at th
e Legislature and the bank.

  But she'd told him. Betsey wouldn't pass up the chance to drive the wedge more firmly between Robert Todd and his “real children.” She had taken him from Mary, and had driven Elizabeth from the house, Elizabeth who had been like a mother to Mary, to make way for her own children. She had struck Mary in front of all her friends, and had lied—lied to keep her husband away from his daughter before he rode back to Frankfort.

  Mary managed to whisper, “My ear is fine.”

  Later that day she made it her business to linger in the kitchen, and when Betsey's back was turned abstracted a handful of coffee-beans from the tin caddy that was usually kept locked. These she used to bribe Saul to procure for her a dozen live spiders, an astonishing number considering it was the middle of winter. The result was everything Mary had hoped it would be, Betsey's voice screaming wildly in the darkness a few minutes after bedtime—she was always too stingy to carry a bedroom candle—and Patty, who had her own reasons for disliking her mistress, reporting the next day in the kitchen that she'd found Miss Betsey standing on a chair naked as a jaybird, shrieking and trying to claw the confused arachnids out of her long unbraided hair.

  She can't prove I did it, thought Mary, with a kind of burning complacency as she lay listening to the cries and thumps. She can't prove a thing.

  But Betsey didn't need or want proof. Despite the fact that Mary had sworn Saul to secrecy and dropped down the outhouse the candy-tin in which the spiders had been delivered, Betsey confined Mary to her room for the ten days intervening before her father's return from Frankfort—days of anxiety, loneliness, and alternating waves of defiance and agonizing shame.

  Worse still, she refused to let her have any books, not even the Bible. Only sheets to hem.

  So there was nothing to do but wait for her father's return.

  She wished there were something she could do to punish herself, so that he would forgive her. Wished there was some way she could go back in time and rub out everything that had happened since that Wednesday afternoon in Mr. Sotheby's store. Make it all not have happened, make everything go back to what it had been before.

  She knew she mustn't wish for Betsey to die before her father got home—she could just imagine what God would have to say if she prayed for it—but the thought was frequently in her mind.

  Sometimes, when she thought of what her father would say to her, she wished she could simply die herself.

  Her father came home just before suppertime on the first of March. Mary was so exhausted with shame, with remorse, with anger at herself and Betsey and all the world, that she started sobbing the moment she heard the hooves of his horse in Short Street, and was still weeping after supper, when Betsey came into her room—wordlessly and without knocking—and escorted her down to his study.

  “Your mother and I have been talking,” said Robert Todd, when Betsey had closed the door and went to stand beside him at his desk.

  Mary protested, “She's not my mother!” Then she clapped her hands over her mouth and stood, tears streaming down her face, looking from Betsey's stony countenance to her father's weary one. She saw in his eyes only a kind of tired peevishness. There wasn't even anger, she realized, with a sick shock of disappointment. Only that he didn't want to be troubled with the conflict between his first wife's children and their stepmother.

  He just wants everything to be all right, so he can be like his friends and not worry about it.

  The knowledge was like opening a beautifully-wrapped present and finding it empty. Like biting into a delicious-looking piece of cake that had been made without sugar or salt.

  And I'm the one who's hurting him.

  It seemed that there was nothing that she could do or feel that was not wrong.

  “Your mother and I have been talking,” he said again, and Mary flinched, waiting for the words of anger, of disappointment, of rejection. Liar. Thief. She wished she could shrink in on herself and disappear. Then he said, “And we've agreed that you're old enough now to go away to school.”

  Mary looked up. This was so unexpected that she was caught breathless, as if she'd stepped through her familiar bedroom door and found herself falling down the backyard well. Then the meaning of his words sank in, and her disappointment evaporated, her volatile spirits leaped.

  School...

  Mary had listened in hungry envy when the Reverend John Ward had spoken to his classes about the seminaries for higher education that girls could go to, in Philadelphia and New York. Meg Wickliffe—who at sixteen was almost finished at Ward's—said she might go to Sigoigne's very prestigious Female Academy in Philadelphia, next year or the year following, and Mary's soul had ached with the desire to go, too. To learn more of history than the Reverend and Mrs. Ward could teach. To have access to all the literature of England and France that she'd only just heard about...to learn to speak French properly, and maybe Italian, maybe even Latin like the boys.

  The sudden shift from shame and dread to the great longing of her heart was so unexpected that for the first few moments while her father was speaking, Mary only felt confused, as if she were dreaming. Betsey didn't tell him. She can't have told him....

  “...know that we don't have the money to send you to Philadelphia or New York. But Madame Mentelle at Rose Hill teaches a very fine course of studies....”

  Madame Mentelle! Mary's thoughts came crashing back to earth. She'd seen the tall, rangy Frenchwoman striding about Lexington's muddy streets in her hopelessly old-fashioned, high-waisted dresses. In the frame of her short-cropped hair her angular face and pale eyes had a decisive expression even more witchlike than Betsey's.

  Mary's glance shot to Betsey's face, and she understood. This was Betsey's way of getting her out of the house. Of having Robert Todd that much more to herself.

  She, Mary, had handed her the wherewithal to convince him to do it....

  And because of the pendant—because of the falsehood she had told—she couldn't even protest.

  “You'll like it there,” said her father, with encouraging cheer.

  How do you know?

  She managed to say, “Yes, Papa. Thank you, Papa.”

  He held out his arms to her, and Betsey moved aside a half step, as if giving permission for Mary to sit on her father's knee. “That's my little girl,” he said, rocking her, holding her—taking comfort, she felt, though it was something never said between them, in her nearness and her unquestioning love.

  Betsey didn't tell him, Mary thought again, disbelieving. Her heart ached with gratitude—not to Betsey, but to God.

  Betsey was getting exactly what she wanted, spiders notwithstanding.

  Mary was still her father's little girl, his child for whom he could make everything all right without effort when she wept, and not a liar and a thief.

  But the price of that miraculous salvation was exile.

  “Mary,” said her father's deep voice in her ear, “I want you to apologize to your mother for what you did.”

  Mary nodded, and at his urging slipped down off his knee. She curtsied to Betsey, whispered, “Ma, I'm so sorry.”

  Betsey's face was enigmatic. “I accept your apology, Mary. We will say no more of it.” A formula? A promise? A simple acknowledgment that certain things were best kept quiet for the good of the family's reputation? Mary's eyes searched her stepmother's face briefly, then fell before the cold gaze. Betsey had kept her secret, and Mary, now, was obliged to keep it, too. The shame of being caught in a lie—of being trapped by her lie—burned in her like the scar of a red-hot knife, sealed in her secret heart. She knew she would never, ever speak of what she had done.

  Not even to obtain forgiveness.

  “Run along now,” said Betsey, “and tell Chaney to give you some supper.”

  As Mary backed from the little book-crammed study she saw her stepmother take the place she had had moments ago on Robert Todd's knee. “Well,” said Betsey, as Mary shut the door, “now maybe we'll have some peace.”

/>   CHAPTER SEVEN

  ROSE HILL WAS A LOW, RAMBLING HOUSE BUILT IN A GROVE OF locust trees, out on the Richmond Pike. From earliest childhood Mary would pass the place when she'd ride her pony to Mr. Clay's graceful stucco house at Ashland, which stood nearby. She'd seen Madame Mentelle in town, too, and had overheard Betsey and her bosom-bow Sophonisba Breckenridge talking about her—“virago” and “bluestocking,” and “very well educated I suppose, but those dresses she wears...” The roll of Sophy's eyes had been worth a thousand words. “I'll bet that poor husband of hers lives under the cat's foot.” And the two women had giggled like malicious girls.

  Now the tall Frenchwoman stood at the top of the front door's three brick steps: “Dulcie will show you where to put Miss Mary's things,” she told Nelson, as the old coachman unstrapped the trunk from the back of the carriage. The slave woman of whom she spoke stepped down to help Nelson carry in Mary's many boxes, and Madame herself glanced sidelong at Mary, her pale eyes unreadable. “Take the books into the library. La bibliothèque de votre père, c'est renommé ici à la ville.” Her French was so fast, and so slurred, that Mary had to grope for the words addressed to her, picking the sentence apart.

  La bibliothèque...the library...de vot' père...your father's library...

  “Merci, Madame,” she replied carefully, meeting that disconcerting gaze unflinchingly. Understanding that this woman was testing her—probing to see how much work her French would need to achieve the proficiency of a truly accomplished young lady, she went on in that language. “Papa says you are a scholar.”

  Madame winced, as at the scraping of a nail on tin. “Une scholaira? This isn't Latin! I was afraid all you'd learned here was American French. Good God, the Chickasaws speak it better than those imbeciles at Ward's.”

  Mary's spine stiffened, for she liked the Reverend Ward and his wife. “Maybe the Chickasaws learned it while selling American scalps to the French before the Revolution,” she retorted.

  Madame's eyebrows shot up at this impertinence. Then, slowly, she smiled, revealing long yellow teeth like a horse's. “From what I hear, your grandfather kept the local market in such commodities fairly scanty.”