The Emancipator's Wife

by Barbara Hambly

  Even young Mr. Presby would stop to hear the news and ask what was being said in New York and Philadelphia. The young ladies went in rustling groups with aunts or brothers or fathers to shop for ribbons and silk flowers, but Mary found herself drawn as always to the men who argued about improvements and the National Bank.

  “Good gracious, Mary, you don't want gentlemen to think you're a bluestocking!” exclaimed Frances, and Mary flipped her fan at her and lowered her long eyelashes, and said, “Silly!” Mary was always meticulously careful not to “parade” her learning more than was seemly for a girl, and in any case a girl with as many beaux as she had was in no danger of being considered “blue.”

  But afterwards at the Court Day cotillion, Mary was hard-pressed to keep her mouth shut when Buck Loveridge or Jim Rollins speculated on possibilities of government contracts and the jobs that could be traded for favors, votes, and influence. Her newspaper reading gave meaning to chance fragments of conversation overheard at dances: “What the hell we need some Yankee Congressman takin' money from us, every time we turn around?”

  “Because if Congress didn't build a road down to Louisville with its taxes you'd sit on your tobacco and starve,” Mary retorted. The men all laughed, but later, as she edged her way to the lemonade table through a flowerbed of petticoats and gowns, she heard Arabella Richardson purr to Nate Bodley, “Honestly, Mary's so quick with a comeback, I just don't know how she does it! Myself, I never could tell a demi-crat from a demi-john.” And Bella smiled meltingly up into Nate's bedazzled eyes, like a trusting child.

  A few evenings after this, Mary treated the other boarding-students at Mentelle's to a hilarious imitation of Bella's simpering, during one of those quiet evenings when the handful of boarders gathered after supper in the library to study their lessons. From the secretaire in the corner where she was doing the household books, Madame observed her without comment. But when the other boarders went to bed, she crossed to where Mary sat reading at the marble-topped circular table beneath the chandelier, and said gently, “It hurt, didn't it?”

  “What did?” Mary looked up from Les Trois Mousquetaires. “Little Miss Demi-crat?” And she mimed Arabella's languishing flutter of eyelashes—then had to turn her face aside at the sudden sting of tears.

  Growing from girl to woman hadn't lessened the wild swings of her moods. At balls and cotillions she still burned with the wild glow of exultation, simply at the pleasure of dancing; from this she could pass almost instantly into volcanic anger that left her ill and shaking. She still had those strange periods in which it seemed to her that she was two people, that she stood on the edge of saying and doing some unthinkable word or deed. And try as she would to control her temper, in her anger she would still say cutting things that had to be apologized for later, with agonies of anxiety and tears. She had wept on and off, in secret, for two days, for Quasimodo and Esmeralda when she'd finished Notre Dame de Paris; sometimes it only took a caring look or a gentle query if she felt all right, to bring on tears she could neither explain nor control.

  But she refused to weep for the “slings and arrows,” as she scornfully termed them, aimed at her by the other girls in the town, the ones who said she was a bluestocking, or who raised their eyebrows or rolled their eyes when she'd quote from Shakespeare. She shrugged and replied, “As if I care what that little—” She fished in her French vocabulary for the word for “knothead” “—imbecile thinks.”

  “You are right not to care, child,” said Madame gently. “In five years what will she be? The wife of some planter who fritters his money away on pretty dresses and jeweled earbobs, with nothing to look forward to in this life but the squalling of children and listening to her husband talk of horses and slaves.”

  Mary's mind returned to the cotillion, and Bella in her gown of shell-pink silk, surrounded by young gentlemen. To herself, likewise the center of a group who vied to get their names on her dance-card. To the sheer sensual thrill of the fiddles, the sweet scents of the night outside. To Nate in his ruffled shirt and coat of black superfine, swinging her out onto the dance-floor with such gay strength. To the joy of being held, and the empty ache when she looked through her little chest of her father's gifts.

  “And in five years,” she asked softly, “what will I be, Madame?”

  Madame's hand rested gently on her shoulder. With her angular face and mannishly short-cropped hair, she looked like the embodiment of all those sniggering warnings: virago, harridan, bluestocking.

  If you're not careful you'll end up like that. . . .

  Mary didn't even know whose voice it was, speaking that warning in her mind. Because in a way she envied Madame. Madame was happy, with her husband and her daughter and her books and her fiddle, doing exactly what she pleased and not caring what others said.

  Mary wondered what it would be like, not to be always looking over her shoulder, wondering if Betsey or Elizabeth or Granny Parker were approving of what she did.

  “The world is an enormous place, Mary, and there is a great deal in it. Good plays by actors a notch above the strolling players who come to Mr. Usher's theater. Opera, sung by men and women of talent and long training. Buildings that are older than your grandmother and that speak of the ages they have seen.”

  For a moment the schoolmistress's pale eyes softened, remembering perhaps those gray streets of Paris in the days of the kings, where lush moss grew on stones that had been set into place before the first Pilgrims boarded the Mayflower. Then she smiled, and shook her head: “Somehow, child, I cannot see a girl of your intelligence spending the whole of her life within a dozen miles of the Kentucky River.”

  No, thought Mary. And yet sometimes as Nelson would drive her to her father's house on Main Street on Friday evenings, and back to Rose Hill on Monday mornings, and she'd watch the slaves sweeping down the board sidewalks in front of McCalla's Pharmacy, or old Mrs. Richardson gossiping with Mr. Ritter—M'sieu Giron's cook—in front of the confectionary, she'd wonder how she was ever going to leave this place.

  Meg was gone, at Sigoigne's Select Female Academy in Philadelphia. Her letters were full of playhouses and opera and dazzling dresses. Frances and Eliza were fully occupied with the leisurely lives of helping Betsey run the household, making dresses, riding out with their friends to pay “morning-calls.” Though Mary loved her studies at Rose Hill, loved the exhilaration of taking first in recitations and of knowing more about history than any other girl, she sometimes wondered what Betsey's reaction would be if she said some Sunday evening, “I don't want to go back.”

  Would she reply, “You must”?

  Rose Hill was her home, and Madame Mentelle like a mother to her, giving her what no one ever had. But as the years flowed stealthily by, and her father and Mr. Clay started talking of who would run for President again—as Mary realized that from being among the younger girls at the school she was now eighteen and the oldest—she began to feel a kind of desperation.

  It wasn't that there had been any falling-off of her suitors. A belle to her lace-gloved fingertips, she knew how to make the most of her rosy prettiness, and had the advantage of being sharply intelligent, well-read, and with a name for witty repartee. She was skilled enough on the dance-floor to follow even the most awkward gentleman and make him feel he was actually dancing rather well; she used a variation of the same technique in conversation.

  Nate Bodley continued to seek her out at subscription dances and cotillions and balls, and there had been a number of kisses stolen in quiet parlors and secluded woods.

  If she had loved any of the regiment of town boys and sons of planters whose names filled her dance-cards, she knew it wouldn't be difficult to find a husband.

  But she didn't. And a husband wasn't what she wanted to find.

  She didn't know the name for what she wanted to find.

  Increasingly, it was dawning upon her that many of the Lexington boys frightened her. It wasn't that she disliked them, although she considered a number of them
complete idiots on the subject of paper currency. Some, like Cash and Nate, she was deeply fond of.

  But the first time Cash got into a duel after his wedding—with Mary Jane expecting their first child—Mary was shocked, and furiously angry. The whole scene in the parlor, this time of White Hall, was repeated, except without the wedding-dress lying like a mute and gorgeous intimation of tragedy over the back of the sofa. Mary Jane weeping, Frances and Mary and Mary Jane's sisters all gathered around to comfort her—old Mrs. Warfield, too, muttering, “I told you how it would be....” in the background, and Cash, of course, nowhere to be found.

  And just as well, thought Mary, stroking her friend's icy hand. She didn't think she could have seen Cash without screaming at him, “How can you do this to Mary Jane?”

  Four years had changed her view of what it was for a man to defend his honor. It was no longer a case of the romantic agony of a bride widowed upon her wedding-night, trading bridal white for somber veils of woe. Cash's death would leave Mary Jane a widow and his unborn child an orphan, to be raised by the gloomily triumphant Mrs. Warfield and whatever new husband Mary Jane might eventually find. Their suffering was the price Cash would cheerfully pay, thought Mary, for his precious honor.

  Yet no one—not even Mary Jane—seemed to share Mary's awareness. When she spoke her thought to Frances in the carriage on the way out to White Hall, Frances stared at her and said, “For God's sake, Mary, keep your mouth shut! Don't you think Mary Jane is suffering enough?” As if Cash had come down with cholera, and had not chosen to make his wife suffer rather than let some other man call him “nigger-lover” unpunished.

  And Mary, sitting mute beside Frances as the team pulled the vehicle up one of the long steep hills by the river, had the queer, sudden sensation of kinship with Mr. Presby. She felt a stranger in an alien land, wanting to shout things in a language that nobody there understood.

  That night, at her father's house, after the exhausting afternoon comforting Mary Jane, Mary had dreamed of Cash and the other man both firing into the dirt at their feet. In the dream it was the earth that bled, as if in justification of the Indian name of Kentucky, “The Dark and Bloody Ground.” On her way down to breakfast a few hours later Nelson caught her with the news that both Cash and his opponent had shot deliberately wide, and Mr. Presby subjected everyone at the breakfast-table to a scathing sermon on the evils of dueling, a practice never engaged in in the North. (“Except by Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr,” remarked Mary, shaking out her napkin, which earned her a bespectacled glare from the tutor.)

  But every man Mary knew—including her father and both her uncles—carried weapons when he left his front door. In the glass showcases of half the shops, braces of pistols were displayed along with silk scarves and necklets of pearls. Men showed off their knives to one another, which they carried sheathed beneath their superfine swallow-tailed coats, and spoke with pride of the swords concealed within the hollow shafts of their canes. During the election of 1836 feelings ran high, and there were shouting-matches at political-speakings, the hot tempers fueled by Kentucky bourbon. The ladies mostly kept clear of these—as ladies must—but unlike most ladies of her acquaintance, Mary could not pretend she didn't see what she saw: red faces, mouths stretched by shouted oaths, the vicious blaze of violence in men's eyes.

  Men spoke admiringly of the “code duello” of the South, but there was little of that punctilious tradition in the brawling that broke out at Court Days. On one occasion Mary saw Cash holding back the crowd while his friend Jim Rollins kicked and lashed a Louisville Democrat who'd sung a song insulting Henry Clay: “In spite of his running he never arrived. . . .”

  Dust stinging her eyes and the smell of blood in her nostrils, Mary thought, I can't live like this. I can't.

  She turned her face aside and found herself looking down a quiet street near the Courthouse, in time to see her neighbor Mrs. Turner being helped by her coachman into a carriage. There was a slave boy with them, carrying two small parcels his mistress had bought from the peddlers in front of the Courthouse. At the sound of the ruckus around the fight the boy checked his steps and craned his neck, and without word or admonition Mrs. Turner took the coachman's light whip from beside the dashboard and caught the youth a savage lick across the backs of his legs that dropped him to his knees. The parcels went tumbling into the dust. Mrs. Turner lashed the boy a second time, this time across the face, and stood quiet as a schoolmistress in her walking-dress of lavender-gray while the boy picked up the parcels and staggered to his feet, blood running down his face.

  Then she handed the whip back to her coachman, and got into her carriage, the boy handing in her packages and scrambling up behind.

  Where will I be in five years?

  That year, Frances went to Springfield, Illinois, to visit Elizabeth and Ninian.

  “I daresay it won't be long till Elizabeth finds a husband for her,” remarked Betsey in a tone of deep satisfaction, when Frances's first letter reached them in Lexington, speaking of her warm welcome to Ninian's big house on the hill, and the cheerful entertainments planned by the best of Springfield society. Like Lexington, Springfield was a new town, rough and raw on the bluffs above the Sangamon River, but growing fast. Like Lexington, it was a hotbed of state and local politics, with money to be earned and money to be grabbed in land-dealing and political patronage.

  Like Lexington, too, Springfield seethed with Todd cousins and Todd connections. Half of southern Illinois was populated by Kentuckians who had crossed the river rather than compete, in industry or agriculture, with the slaves the Virginians brought in. Mary's uncle John Todd was a physician in town; another uncle there was a judge. Her handsome cousin John Stuart was a lawyer there, as was her cousin Stephen Logan from the other side of the Parker family: both were active in the Legislature in Vandalia, and there were female cousins as well, Lizzie and Francy and Annie. In her letters Frances sounded very much at home.

  “And high time,” Betsey added, folding up the letter and glancing along the table at Mary. Margaret, Sammy, David, and Martha had been joined in Mammy Sally's care by beautifully dimpled little Emilie, and Mary suspected her stepmother was increasing yet again. Robert Todd was as usual in Frankfort at the Legislature. “A girl who isn't married by the time she's nineteen just isn't trying.” Mary would be nineteen in December. “I don't know what she's waiting for.”

  “Maybe to fall in love?” Mary dusted sugar over the dish of mulberries and cream that Pendleton had handed her. She didn't look up, but felt her stepmother's glare.

  “Girls fall in love every other week—most girls do, that is. I hope your sister isn't too high in the instep for the Springfield boys.”

  “And in any case,” added Mr. Presby disapprovingly, “the whole idea of young females ‘falling in love' and marrying willfully whoever takes their fancy is, I believe, responsible for a great deal of heartache and unhappy matches.” He spooned a frugal pinch of salt onto the oatmeal he'd requested Betsey have Chaney make for him—everyone else in the household ate cornbread or grits. “The writers of romantic novels have a great deal to answer for.”

  “Surely you aren't advocating the selection of husbands by professional matchmakers, as they do in China, Mr. Presby?” Mary fluttered her eyelashes. “Or perhaps by the lawyers of the young ladies' families?”

  Mr. Presby's upper lip seemed to lengthen with disapproval. Over the years their relations had not improved—once they had nearly come to a screaming-match over molasses. “It is to be hoped that Mrs. Edwards, with a certain amount of experience in the world, will be able to guide Miss Frances's choices and make sure that she marries a gentleman, and a man of means sufficient to support her in the comfort to which she is accustomed. I am sure that otherwise there is no happiness to be expected.”

  She would miss him, Mary thought, when he returned to New England to take up a parsonage in one of those gray little towns where no one seemed to have any fun.

  Already she mis
sed Frances. Ann—now fifteen and finished with whatever the Reverend Ward could teach her—she had never liked, bearing her an obscure grudge from the days when she'd learned that her own name would be shortened from Mary Ann to simply Mary...as if Ann had willfully stolen half her name. Ann was a tale-bearer, a crybaby, and had a temper almost as bad as Mary's—without Eliza to keep the peace between them, they had come to hair-pulling more than once.

  Eliza finished her schooling and had returned to Frankfort. Mary wrote to her weekly, as she wrote to Frances and Elizabeth and Meg in Philadelphia, but it wasn't the same. One by one the friends Mary had made at Ward's school had married, or were engaged. When she went to the dances at Giron's, the talk among them was all of servants and babies, or the latest of them to be engaged. There were new young belles “coming out”—including Ann—girls four and five years younger than Mary. Though Mary laughed and flirted, she felt increasingly alone.

  It was her last year at Rose Hill. She was the oldest girl in all the classes, and helped Madame Mentelle with the younger ones. She still had the room she'd shared with Meg, at the end of the narrow courtyard on the family side of the house, but she now occupied it alone. More than once Madame had said to her, “You are like a daughter to me.” Her own daughters were married, Marie to the son of Henry Clay (“A drunkard who'll break his father's heart,” predicted Betsey, with gloomy satisfaction).

  “It is a shame and a disgrace that there is no possibility for a young woman to attend college the way a young man does,” declared Cash, when he encountered Mary at a Court Day in the spring of 1837. “You're a perfectly intelligent person—God knows more intelligent than half the men of my acquaintance. You're well read, well informed, politically astute.” He frowned, his black brows plunging down over the slight hook of his nose. “Yet this country can find no better use for you than to marry you off to a bucolic ignoramus like Nate Bodley.”