The Emancipator's Wife

by Barbara Hambly

  “We shall speak to Madame Mentelle about modifying Mary's course of study, but I see no reason why she cannot continue to attend. I've heard wonderful things of her there, and of course her French has improved tremendously.”

  Of course, thought Mary. She doesn't want me here.

  She desperately hoped her father would come in and see her, maybe sit on the edge of the bed and hold her hand a little. But he didn't.

  “We'll keep you informed of Mary's progress, Dr. Warfield.” Tongue click. “Now we really must be getting back—folks will wonder what's become of us....” The voices trailed away down the stairs.

  Hooves and the jingle of carriage-harness in the street, dimly perceptible even through the shut curtains, the closed windows.

  Mama wouldn't have left me alone, thought Mary, grief welling up in her, almost worse than the pain. Mama wouldn't have sent me away—or made me share a room with her cousin. She barely remembered her mother, barely remembered sitting on her lap, enfolded and safe, in the days before Levi came along. But the memory was precious. After Levi's birth—and then Ann's and George's—her mother had had little time to give to her. But what she had had, Elizabeth Parker Todd had given. As always when she felt sick and alone, Mary tried to picture what life would be like now if her mother had not been carried out of her room like that in the dead of night, never to return again.

  The anger she felt made her head hurt worse, swamping her grief in pain.

  After a little time soft bare feet creaked on the hall floor, and Mammy Sally came in, bearing a cup that smelled sharply and sweetly of hot ginger and sugar. Mary drank it thirstily, and lay back in the darkness while those warm strong hands unbraided her hair, gently brushed out the long, heavy curls. She whispered, “Thank you,” and slipped over into sleep.

  THAT WAS ALMOST THE LAST OCCASION ON WHICH MARY STAYED IN that small room. The following Saturday, when Nelson brought her home for dinner, her father announced that he had “closed the deal” on Palmentier's Tavern on Main Street, and would be converting it into a house for the family—he cast a significant eye at Betsey as he spoke, and she simpered in acknowledgment of what the novelist Mrs. Radclyffe would have called the “token of his affection” that currently swelled the front of her white lawn gown. You didn't even ask us, thought Mary resentfully, as Eliza gasped, “May I have my own room?” and Betsey heaved a visible sigh of relief.

  “Now maybe we'll be able to entertain properly.”

  Robert Todd said quietly, “Now maybe my family can come and go from our own front door without crossing paths with coffles of Mr. Pullum's slaves.”

  And young Mr. Presby the tutor said, “Amen.”

  Mary glanced sharply at her father from beneath her lashes, then across at Elliot Presby, the theology student who hailed from some tiny rock-ribbed village in New England. Bespectacled, skinny, with a face like a saint who's just bitten a sour lemon, young Mr. Presby had little that was good to say about the South or Southerners, and on more than one occasion had reacted to Mary's teasing with sharp anger.

  Above all he detested the institution of slavery, and looked upon all slaveholders—including Mary's father—with ill-concealed disapproval. When she was younger Mary had teased him mercilessly, but now she was more and more conscious herself of the brick-walled yard on the corner near her father's house, of the men and women who sat on benches under Pullum's awnings out front, with chains around their ankles....

  And of old Nelson's silence when he drove her past the place on the way to and from Rose Hill.

  Cash Clay had returned from his year at Yale an abolitionist, afire to end slavery, or at least forbid the importation of more slaves to Kentucky. According to Frances, after Mary had left the political-speaking Nate Bodley had attempted to cane Cash over it.

  Of course it isn't the same with our people, thought Mary, watching as Pendleton circulated the table with a platter of boiled ham. The darkies were slaves, yes, in that they were legally her father's property—or more properly Granny Parker's property—but she knew he treated them well. Slavery in Kentucky wasn't at all like slavery in the deeper South. She'd been in and out of the kitchen all her life, listening to Nelson tell his stories, or watching Mammy Sally make her custards for the children, as lovingly as if they were her own.

  Her father would never sell Nelson or Mammy Sally or Jane or even grumpy old Chaney. They were part of the family.

  And where would they go if they didn't live with us? That was something that had always bothered her about Cash's wild insistence that all slaves be freed immediately, for their own good and that of the owners' souls. What would they do? Who would take care of them?

  Then she thought, If we move down to Palmentier's Tavern, it will be harder for Jane and Saul to meet. It was only a few streets up from Main Street to Granny Parker's big house, of course; but she knew Granny Parker was strict about keeping her people at their duties, as was Betsey.

  And she, Mary, had been consulted about the move no more than had been the slaves.

  Why should I care? she wondered, as Nelson drove her back to Rose Hill early Monday morning, with the horses' breath and her own a faint mist in the chill. It isn't as if it were my home anymore. She had shared a bed with Eliza, because Ann had taken over her old bed. Though they all laughed and giggled as they always did when she came home, she felt like an interloper. Ann and Eliza had to move their things around to admit her, cheerfully as they always did. But she felt, as she always felt, that things went on without her. That if she did not return, she would not be much missed.

  Still, the thought of complete strangers sleeping in that bedroom, of another family reading the newspaper by lamplight in the study where she had read on those rare, precious evenings with her father, filled her with desolation. As if she were invisible, and no one cared if she lived or died. She stayed away from the house on the Saturday when the furniture was moved, joining instead with Meg and the Trotter sisters, with Mary Jane and her sisters Julia and Caroline, and her other friends from Ward's, to gather hickory-nuts in the woods along the Richmond Pike.

  It was a warm day at summer's end. The leaves of the maples had begun to turn and the air within the woods felt heavy, mysterious with the coming of the year's change. The girls were joined by several of Meg's numerous beaux—Nate Bodley, Jim Rollins, Buck Loveridge, and a few others, sons of the local planters or the gentlemen of the town—and there was a great deal of laughter and chasing around the laurel thickets among the trees, under the benevolent eye of Isabelle's widowed Aunt Catherine. Mary, with her curls bobbing under a new hat of pink straw and a new dress of pink-sprig voile, flirted with Nate and let him hold in his handkerchief the nuts she gathered, a curiously exhilarating experience. In the dappled green light his handsome face looked different, gentler than it did when she'd seen him among the cronies at the political speakings. His brown eyes caressed her when he called her “Miss Mary,” and she realized, for the first time in her young life, that something might lie beyond flirting.

  That instead of the delight in being the center of attention in a ring of young men held by her saucy wit, she might draw to her a single man, who would love her as Saul loved Jane.

  It was a revelation to her, and one that confused her, as she had lately been confused by the stirrings in her body of feelings she didn't understand. She pulled her hands away from Nate and he chased her, laughing, through the sun-dappled woods.

  They came out of the undergrowth to see Cash Clay sitting alone in the clearing, his long legs stretched out on the grass, hulling the hickory-nuts the others had gathered, striking them on an outcrop of rock. Nate and Mary stopped, unseen, for at that same moment Mary Jane came into the clearing by herself, her bonnet gone, her fair hair undone and lying over her shoulders. She was looping it up and working a hair-pin into it when she saw Cash; Mary caught Nate by the sleeve and tugged him deeper into the laurel, touching a finger to her lips. Nate nodded, his eyes bright. He knew, as Mary knew, the troub
le Cash had in getting a word alone with Mary Jane. Since Cash's return from Yale as a new-fledged abolitionist (“He'll get over it,” Nate had sighed. “With Cash it's always some damn thing”), Dr. Warfield had barely been able to tolerate the young man's presence in his house.

  By all rules of propriety, of course, Mary Jane should have gone immediately to seek the others, for even the slaves had left to set up the picnic-baskets by the spring. Betsey—and certainly Mary Jane's mother, the formidable Maria Warfield—were quite clear on what a young lady must and must not do. Watching her, Mary thought, Go to him! As if she watched a play—like reading Twelfth Night and whispering to Viola, Tell him who you are!

  And slowly, Mary Jane crossed the clearing, her long hair falling unnoticed down over her shoulders again, and stood above Cash, who held out his hand to her, and moved his long legs aside. She hesitated for an endless moment, then settled beside him, her butter-yellow skirts billowing as she sank down, covering his shins in a froth of tucking and lace. Nate's hand closed around Mary's behind the screening laurels, and she was suddenly, profoundly conscious of the warmth of his grip, the soft whisper of his breath on her hair. Like actors in the green-and-golden proscenium of the glade, Cash laid his hands on either side of Mary Jane's face and kissed her; her own hands closed briefly, hungrily, on his arms.

  Then quickly she was on her feet, and hurrying away.

  CASH AND MARY JANE WERE MARRIED IN FEBRUARY, AT DR. Warfield's house in Lexington near the University. For two days before, there had been whispers, panic, excitement. Another of Mary Jane's suitors had sent a letter to Mary Jane—which her mother had then passed along to Cash for reasons best known to herself—calling Cash a rake, an abolitionist, and a traitor, and Cash had ridden down to Louisville and publicly caned the man. The result, predictably, was a duel, to be fought on the eve of the wedding.

  “Cash is really going to fight?” demanded Mary, aghast, when she and Elizabeth went to call on Mary Jane on the afternoon before. Elizabeth would be Mary Jane's matron of honor. They'd found the distraught bride with her sister and four other friends, pacing the parlor and fighting not to weep.

  “What else can he do?” demanded Bella Richardson, widening her long-lashed violet eyes. “After the things Dr. Declarey called him in that letter...”

  “And getting himself killed is going to help Mary Jane?” retorted Mary. She remembered how her friend had looked up at Cash in the clearing in that hazy autumn light, the way she'd held his arms, wanting and yet afraid. On the back of the parlor sofa, where the light from the bow-window fell, Mary Jane's bridal gown lay in a cascade of ivory-colored silk and point-lace. Mary felt sick at the thought of not knowing whether in the morning she would put on that dress, or black mourning for what was never to be.

  “It's a matter of honor,” protested Bella. “I couldn't marry a man who would not fight for his honor.”

  “That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard,” snapped Mary, rounding on her fiercely, and Elizabeth said, “Hush!”

  Elizabeth put her arms around Mary Jane, almost forced her to sit in one of the parlor chairs. Mary Jane was visibly trembling, her face waxen, but she held herself calm. In her place Mary knew too well that she herself would be in hysterics. Meg Wickliffe knelt beside the chair, gripping Mary Jane's hands. Not speaking the name of the brother who had been shot.

  “The matter is in God's hands,” said Elizabeth quietly. “Very often in such affairs no one is hurt at all.”

  Meg turned her face away.

  But in the morning Cash appeared at McChord's Presbyterian Church, muddy from his hard ride back from Louisville but otherwise none the worse for wear. The matter vanished as if it had never been, save for the tears Mary saw in Mary Jane's eyes, and the way she trembled as she stood at the altar with her dark-haired, savage bridegroom. Mary, just turned fourteen and clothed in her own new status as a budding belle, wondered if she were the only person still troubled by the implications of the duel. At the reception in the Warfield parlor afterwards, she watched Mary Jane and her friends laugh and chatter and felt as alien from them as if they were characters in some fantastic book. Isn't anyone going to ask Mary Jane if she has second thoughts about marrying Cash? From the group of men around the punch-bowl she heard Cash's booming voice:

  “...of course the news had spread of the duel, and the whole state had turned out to watch, it seemed like—Lord, it was like a fair! So I said to Declarey...”

  Could you marry a man who would stake his life—and your happiness—on a letter written in anger, that should simply have been put on the fire?

  Her eyes traveled the room, picking out the way Elizabeth touched Ninian's sleeve as she murmured something to him; the way Mary Jane's gaze turned, again and again, in mingled love and pain, toward Cash's dark, tousled head among the crowd around the punch-bowl. She saw Nate Bodley in the crowd, and saw how he turned also to scan the big double-parlor...seeking her? She remembered the way he'd taken her own hands in the woods, the whisper of his breath on her hair. She had dreamed last night that she was Mary Jane, sinking down to be kissed in the green and gold of the glade.

  Nate had come often to Rose Hill in the evenings, when the older girls would sit in the parlor or, in warm weather, on the pillared porch, exchanging shy commonplaces with the sons of planters, the students at the University. He'd laughed uproariously with the rest at Mary's jokes and witticisms, and had shown a marked disposition to seek the chair beside hers.

  I will marry, Mary reflected again. The feelings stirred that day in the woods had changed the words' meaning for her. It had always been, I will marry someday, when I'm grown. . . .

  But she was grown, or close to it. She'd coaxed a new dress from her father for today, white tarlatan that rustled and whispered with silvery sweetness, the sleeves so wide they were held out with hoops and everything trimmed with green velvet ribbons. More and more young men were riding out to Rose Hill to see her, and she had become adept at the secret language of sidelong glances and gentle laughter, of kisses promised or withheld.

  But it came to her that this was more than a pleasant game, a way to collect beaux as tokens of her beauty and to score off her sisters. It was a hunt, to find a husband. To not be an old maid, scorned and pitied by all.

  To hear Meg talk, or Bella or Isabelle, any husband was better than having people whisper about you in that sweetly hateful way, and urge their brothers or cousins to dance with you so you wouldn't be a wall-flower.

  Even a husband who would leave you a widow on your wedding-day because some other man called him an abolitionist in a private letter that was intended for no one's eyes but yours.

  There was Nate of course, whose quest for her seemed to have been sidetracked by a promising discussion of the proposed railroad between Lexington and Frankfort. A golden Hercules, and well-off—stupid as a brick, Mary thought, and not likely to get anywhere in the world except to be a slaveowner and raise tobacco and horses.

  When I marry, she decided, it will have to be to a man who's going somewhere. A man like Father, or Mr. Clay.

  Her old jest with Mr. Clay, about marrying a man who would be President of the United States, returned to her. Naturally there was no way of guaranteeing that, though it would be intensely gratifying to stand at the center of power, to shine as first among all the women of the land. But it occurred to her that marriage to someone who just stayed at home and minded his slaves and his business would be appallingly dull.

  And what if I don't want to get married at all? She thought of Betsey, always pregnant, more and more frequently ill, confined to the quiet of her room. What if by the time I'm nineteen—the last possible outpost of belle-hood before people started calling you an old maid—I haven't met anyone I love the way Mary Jane loves Cash, the way Elizabeth loves Ninian or Jane loves Saul! What if I don't meet someone like that at all? What then?

  As soon as Cash and Mary Jane left in the carriage for Crab Orchard Springs for their wedding-trip, Mary
took the opportunity to walk home with Elizabeth, Frances, Eliza, and Ann. There would be dancing that night, and while the men lingered over the punch-bowl and their cigars the girls retreated, to change clothes and have a beauty-nap, for the dancing would last most of the night. The other girls' chatter saved Mary from having to talk. She felt troubled and lonely, doubly so because she had never felt completely at home in the tall-fronted brick house on Main Street.

  The other girls went rustling up the stairs, but Mary passed through the dining-room and pantry to the big kitchen in the back of the house, where she knew the servants would be gathered, taking advantage of the warmth there on this icy day and also of the fact that the family was out.

  But coming into the pantry she saw Nelson and Pendleton standing in the kitchen door, and beyond them, heard the sound of a woman weeping.

  “What is it?” Mary slipped between the two men and into the brick-floored room. “What's wrong?”

  Nelson turned, and Mary saw that his eyes burned with impotent rage. Past him in the kitchen Jane sat huddled on a stool beside the big brick hearth, her face buried in her hands. Mammy Sally held her, rocked her gently, tears running down her face.

  Softly, Nelson said, “Your Granny Parker took Saul to Mr. Pullum, to help your Uncle David out for having backed a bill for one of his friends. Saul's gone. Taken away with a coffle for Louisville this morning.”

  “Saul...” Mary fell back a step. After the biting air of the street the kitchen was warm, the smell of vanilla and steaming cider incongruously sweet. Jane leaned her head back against Mammy Sally's shoulder, still hugging herself, as if without the binding strength of the older woman's arms her heart would tear itself out of her ribcage and flee to some land where things like this didn't happen. Where a man couldn't be taken away and sold just to raise a little extra cash, without anyone once asking if he had family or loved ones.