The Emancipator's Wife

by Barbara Hambly

  Betsey clicked her tongue. “Nonsense. They can't tell so quickly.”

  But Mary glanced over at Eliza, cold terror gripping her. Last summer's newspapers had been filled with reports of the cholera that had killed thousands in New York and New Orleans, like the ravenous plagues of medieval Europe. Frances set down her spoon rather quickly, and said, “I know Mary has a few weeks of school yet, but if some of us could go down to Crab Orchard Springs early this year she could join us as soon as she's done.”

  And little Margaret, glancing from face to face of her shaken seniors, asked, “What's cholera?”

  “It's a sickness, sweetheart.” Betsey stroked her eldest daughter's blond curls. “A sickness that only bad people and poor people get.”

  “Aunt Hannah wasn't bad, or poor,” pointed out Mary, “and she died of it last year.” Betsey looked daggers at her, but Mary turned to her father, whose sister Aunt Hannah had been. He didn't admonish her for contradicting her stepmother.

  Instead he said, “I think I'll just ride over to the University, and see what they're saying at the Medical College. I won't be long—and I think it's probably best if no one goes outside for now.”

  Just before dinner he was back, with the news that ten other cases of cholera had been reported in the town. Nelson was sent to the market to buy tar and lime: “The disease seems to spread through the night air, according to Dr. Warfield,” said Robert Todd, to his wife and children assembled in the family parlor. “Until we can get packed, and get out of town, I think the safest thing we can do is stay indoors, keep the windows shut, spread lime on all the windowsills and thresholds and burn tar to cleanse the air. I think the Mentelles will understand if you leave school a few weeks early this term, Molly,” he added, glancing over at Mary. “I understand the air is better in Crab Orchard Springs. If we leave now, we can probably get a cabin there, until the epidemic is over.”

  But the next morning Mary came down to breakfast to hushed whispers and bad-news voices. “Pendleton is sick,” her father told her. “We've got him isolated and I've called Grant Shelby to take a look at him”—Grant Shelby was the local veterinarian, who also handled slaves—“but Mammy Sally says it looks like the cholera, and from what I've seen I agree with her. I'm afraid there's no question of leaving town now—or of leaving this house.”

  There followed three of the most nightmarish weeks Mary had spent in her life. The summer's heat lay on the city like a soaked blanket. The air was unbreathable from the white streaks of lime on every window- and doorsill, and from the flambeaux of tar that Nelson made up and burned all around the house. In the dark of the shuttered house the smells thickened daily, hourly, in every stuffy, shadowy room. Mary felt the stink of it would never leave her throat. Yet she was forbidden to so much as venture out into the yard, though Betsey crossed back and forth to the coach house a dozen times a day, to help with Pendleton's nursing.

  Mary herself felt very little fear that she would catch the disease. She feared it far less than she feared lightning-storms, or the silence that lay over the stricken town. Generally the creak of wagons and carriages, the clop of hooves and clamor of voices from Main Street, reached to every corner of the big house, shutters or no shutters. Now Lexington was silent, and under the summer's heat the only sounds that could be heard through the shutters were the occasional creak of a single wagon passing, or the tolling of a funeral bell. If she had no fear for herself, she was frantic with fear that Frances, or Ann, or Eliza would come down sick, or that, when the quarantine was over, she would hear the news that Mary Jane or Meg or Nate Bodley was dead. Every night when she prayed—as Granny Parker had instructed her from earliest childhood—she added to the rote litany of OurFatherWhoArtinHeaven...the fervent request that her friends be spared.

  But she had no sense that God heard her. The last time that she had truly petitioned God was when she was six, that her mother return to comfort her, for she needed her so.

  God apparently had not heard.

  Nearly as bad as the smells was David's crying, which went on and on, sawing at the terrible silence. That, and the fact that as fruits and vegetables were thought by some to cause the disease, in the height of the season of peaches and mulberries the family lived on beaten biscuits and beef tea. After the first week there was no more newspaper, for so many of the men who printed it were either sick or tending the sick in makeshift hospitals. Betsey, wraith-thin, took to her own bed with exhaustion, and was snappish and impatient, and Robert Todd spent most of his days at her side. Mary kept to the semi-dark of her shuttered bedroom, reading books from her father's library to shut out her fears, or peering through the chinks in the shutters to watch the dead-carts rumble by below. One afternoon the noise of clumping and thumping in the hall brought her to the door, and she saw her father and Nelson bringing trunks down the attic stairs.

  “What is it?” she asked. “What's happening?”

  “Old Solly the gravedigger's outside,” said Nelson. “He's asking for whatever trunks and boxes folks have, since the coffin makers can't make enough coffins for those that're dead.”

  Shoulder to shoulder in the lamplight, both men were dirty and dusty, shirtsleeved and daubed with the smuts of burned tar: black man and white man, of the same age, in the same household, feeling the same fear—helping others as well as they could. Mary opened doors for them and helped them maneuver the heavy trunks down the stairs, with a sense of seeing the front-parlor world of the whites, the shadow-world of the back alleys and kitchen-yards, merge....

  Do men like Papa and Dr. Warfield think they're going somewhere different than Pendleton and Nelson when they die?

  Pendleton recovered, though he was weeks in bed and lost a good thirty pounds. By July the funeral-bells had quit tolling, and Robert Todd packed up his family and took them, belatedly, to Crab Orchard Springs. Later Mary heard that five hundred people had died in Lexington, including half the patients at the lunatic asylum that stood beside the University.

  COMING BACK THAT FALL TO LEXINGTON, MARY HAD THE SAME unsettled feeling that she had had at Mary Jane's wedding: a sense that fear and upheaval were all being swept tidily away out of sight. Fate had asked questions about the two dusty men bringing trunks down from the attic, and those questions were put aside unanswered. White men and black men had died, but when the shadow of death withdrew, business at Pullum's Exchange revived more quickly than at any other establishment in town. When Mary would go down to the perfumers and milliners on Cheapside with Frances or Mary Jane, she would see the hickory whipping-post beside the Courthouse, the place where disobedient slaves were chained and flogged, and she would sometimes look at her companions and think, Don't you see? Don't you understand?

  But how could they, when she didn't really understand herself? All the argument that year was about the National Bank, and Andrew Jackson's iniquities, and the takeover of Indian lands in the West. Perhaps her father and Mr. Clay were right, she thought, and freedom was something to be given to the darkies only with due care, and not handed out rashly....

  But the sight of slavery still sickened her.

  One night shortly after the family's return, just before Mary was to go back to Mentelle's, she was waked again by the distant rumble of thunder. Her sleep was never sound, and some nights she would lie awake until nearly dawn, listening to the soft breathing of Eliza and Ann, whose room she shared in summer so that the guest room could be kept ready for visitors. Neither of the other girls stirred. For a time Mary lay silent, listening to the slow ticking of the clock in the hall and wondering what time it was and what had wakened her....

  Voices, she thought. Voices, and the sound of a door opening in the yard.

  Silently, she slipped out of her low trundle-bed. The night was hot, the smooth old wood of the floor cool under her feet as she stole to the bedroom door and out into the hall. The door was a bone of contention between herself and the other two girls, for since childhood Mary had been unable to endure an open door—
even of a closet or armoire—in a room where she slept. She opened it now, and slipped into the upstairs hall, knowing that if she opened the bedroom shutters they would awaken, too.

  Moving by touch in the dark she unlatched the shutters of the window in the hall. There was no light in the yard below, but by the moon's gleam she could see figures moving at the bottom of the high kitchen stairs. Mammy Sally, Mary thought, identifying the woman's figure though she wasn't wearing the headrag that kept kitchen soot and grease out of the hair of the women servants. And the tall man with short-cropped silver hair could be no one other than Nelson. They faded back into the shadows of the wall, but having seen them, Mary could see them still.

  Waiting.

  Curious, and wide-awake, Mary eased the shutter back into its place. She knew she ought to go back into the bedroom for a wrapper or a shawl—Betsey had repeated over and over that for a lady to move about in her nightgown was only a half-step above walking about naked—but to do so would risk waking Eliza and Ann. Besides, Mary frequently made surreptitious nocturnal expeditions to the outhouse clothed only in her nightgown—when she'd already used the chamber pot two or three times in the night and didn't want to risk Ann or Eliza deriding her—and didn't think it so horrible. She was covered, after all.

  Crickets and cicadas made a strident chorus outside as she crept down the wide staircase, her long braids lying thick down her back. Somewhere a dog barked.

  Hoodoo? she wondered. Though Mammy Sally would deny it to every white member of the household, the old slave knew more about nursing than the herbs and willow-bark she'd employed to get Pendleton through the cholera. More than once, on her stealthy trips to the outhouse, Mary had seen the old nurse out at midnight, drilling a hole in the south side of one of the chestnut-trees at the bottom of the yard, to “blow the chills” out of her own body and into the tree. Mary knew, too, that servants from other households would sometimes come to their kitchen, asking for a conjure of peace-plant and honey to sweeten up a harsh mistress, or balls of black wax and pins to send an importunate master away. These they'd deny wanting, if they saw Mary watching.

  The dining-room with its graceful table and glass-fronted cabinet of silver service was a cavern of nameless shadow. Mary kept to the wall, feeling her way along, till she reached the pantry door, and slipped through into the kitchen, smelling of grease and ashes, warm as a bake-oven even hours after the big hearth-fire had been banked.

  From there she stepped out at last into the blackness of the porch. Shadows stirred in the dark beneath the house's tall brick walls, and Mary saw the harlequin squares of a man's gingham shirt, the brief flash of eyes.

  “Lou?” came Mammy's voice, and a whisper replied, “'S'me.” A moment later Lou stepped across to the bottom of the kitchen steps. In the moonlight Mary identified him; one of Mrs. Turner's slaves, whom she rented out as a day laborer to the hemp and bagging factory in which Robert Todd was a partner.

  Mammy stepped out of the shadows, handed Lou a bundle. Not bulky enough for blankets, Mary guessed; it had to be food or clothes. “There's a hay-barn five miles down the Louisville road,” Mammy whispered. “Don't sleep there, they always look there, but there's a cave in the creek-bank just behind it.”

  “Patrols ride that road mostly early in the night,” added Nelson. “Whatever you do, you keep away from them.”

  “With Mrs. Turner behind me,” said Lou, “you got no worry there.” In the kitchen Mary had heard talk of Mrs. Turner, things the white folks of Lexington never knew. The chill-eyed Boston woman was hated and feared throughout the slave community. If even half of what Mammy and Nelson and Jane had whispered was true, Mary wasn't surprised Lou would run away.

  “When you get to Louisville keep to the edge of town. There's a tavern on the south side called Bridges, the owner don't care who sleeps in his sheds. Look for Mrs. Chough that lives behind the Quaker meetinghouse there, she'll get you across the river. You see this sign on a fence, it means they'll take you in.” Kneeling, Mammy sketched something in the dust of the yard, smoothed it over at once. “You see that sign, it means they'll give you food at least. When you been gone three days, I'll let Tina know you got away.”

  Lou bent quickly to kiss Mammy's sunken cheek. “Tell Tina I'll send for her, I swear it....” Tina must be the woman he loved, thought Mary, in some other household, some other kitchen in the town. “Tell her I'll find a way somehow.”

  Nelson said, “She knows you will.”

  “God bless you.” The runaway clasped Nelson's hand, kissed Mammy again. “God bless you both.”

  The two Todd slaves waited until Lou had disappeared into the dark of the trees. Like a ghost Mary fleeted away before Mammy could reach the top of the steps from the yard. In the dark of the downstairs hall she paused for a moment, overwhelmed with a wild urge to laugh, to cheer, to dance.

  She felt she had learned a secret, and the secret was this:

  That the people most concerned in the subject of freedom weren't sitting around tamely waiting for the abolitionists and the colonizers to quibble the matter out between them. The people most concerned didn't really care whether Mr. Clay and his friends were thinking “what was best for the darkies,” or whether the issue was moral or political, or whether, as Nate Bodley's father claimed, abolitionist pamphlets stirred up slave revolts.

  They were doing whatever they had to, to be free.

  CHAPTER NINE

  FOR THE MOST PART, HOWEVER, MARY'S AWARENESS OF THE SHADOW-WORLD that underlay the gracious brick houses of Lexington, the horse-races and picnics and the ubiquitous network of kinship ties that spread from Kentucky to the Virginia tidewater, was simply that: an awareness, like her awareness of the earth underfoot. Cash, and Mr. Clay, and increasing numbers of men in the town might be preoccupied with the subject of that earth—might see everything in terms of mud and worms and stones—but except on those occasions when the veil between the worlds of black and white lifted, Mary's days were shaped and colored by other things.

  She turned sixteen. Nate Bodley kissed her in the shadows of the cherry orchard behind Rose Hill; she slapped him, and burst into tears, as a young lady must (Betsey said), but the sensation of being held, of being touched, of being wanted stirred her deeply. She found herself watching for opportunities to engineer such a scene again.

  Along with the girls she'd gone to Ward's Academy with—some of whom were now day-students at Rose Hill as well—she and her sisters were part of the vast web of Todd cousinry that stretched back into Virginia and extended its tentacles across the river into Illinois: Porters and Parkers and Stuarts, Logans and Russells and Richardsons and ramifications still more distant. Girls and young men, they had known each other from childhood parties, from picnics in the woods and on the banks of the Town Branch and the Kentucky River, chasing each other through the trees as Nate Bodley had chased her. And as she now looked at Nate, they all looked at one another with changed eyes.

  It was a happy time. In addition to Nate—and half a dozen other beaux—Mary had her studies and her beloved books at Rose Hill. She had Frances and Eliza and her friends, friends she'd known all her life. No longer forced to live under Betsey's roof, she came to dearly love the small half-brothers and half-sisters whom she had formerly so resented. Secure in the knowledge that she would be returning to her own pleasant room at Rose Hill on Sunday afternoon, she could hold little David on her lap, play with small Margaret and small Sam, and bask in their uncomplicated love.

  There were balls and cotillion parties almost every week, either in the long room above Giron's Confectionary or in the private houses of friends. Summer lemonade or Christmas eggnog, crickets calling in the warm nights or the diamond glow of silent winter stars. Her father and the other men arguing cotton and politics. There were lectures at the Lyceum about nitrous oxide, galvanic batteries, cold-water cures for fever, and the Reverend Zaccheus Waverly's talks on travel in the Holy Land, from which Nate or one of the young law students at Transyl
vania would beg for the privilege of walking her home.

  There were exhibitions of waxworks, and rides under the lilac trees of Ashland, Mary straight and graceful in a rifleman-green riding habit that flowed down over the left side of the neat-stepping little hackney her father had bought for her. There were student plays at Rose Hill, not amateur fit-ups but careful productions with elaborate props and scenery: Pizarro, Hernani, Macbeth in which everyone exclaimed over the passion with which Mary played the mad scene to a couple of tall, thin senior students grimly bedight in false beards. There was the true theater too, with troupes visiting from New York or Philadelphia. There were bonnets and coiffures, and the always-delightful challenge of extracting promises for new frocks from her father, and holding him to them with tears; there was La Belle Assemblée and the Royal Ladies Magazine.

  The second Monday of every month was Court Day, when the justices of the peace would assemble in the County Courthouse. But most of the people who crowded the square before the Courthouse had little interest in what went on inside. Peddlers, horse-traders, trappers from the hills would set up their pitches, shouting the virtues of bloodstock or coonskins, milk-cows or Old Sachem Medicinal Bitters. Slave-dealers would be there, too, to buy up debtors' Negroes at the Courthouse door: stony-faced black men tricked out in blue coats and plug hats and women in neat-pressed calico (“Strip off, gal, let the gennleman have a look at yuh....” “See his back? Not hardly a stripe on 'im; he don't need much whippin'....”).

  On the benches along the iron fence, idlers spit and whittled, smoked and swapped tales: Nate Bodley in his ruffled shirt bought a peg of hard cider for ragged old Solly the gravedigger, who had once been so drunk and disorderly that in desperation the town council had sold the old white man to a free Negro woman for thirty cents so he'd have someone to look after him.