The Emancipator's Wife

by Barbara Hambly

  “When those medical lackeys my husband hired came with their statements about conversing with the dead being proof of madness, I told them, if belief in the survival of the soul in Heaven is madness, then I claim the sisterhood of madness with Christ and all his saints.” Scorn flicked in Mrs. Hill's voice and she squared her slim shoulders. “If it is madness to believe that love survives death, and that my precious boys in Heaven still love and comfort the mother they loved on earth, then how I pity your bleak and loveless sanity!”

  Mary assumed there was some kind of grapevine telegraph in operation, as soldiers exchanged from rebel prison camps during the War had assured her existed in Andersonville and Libby Prison under the very noses of the guards. She was certainly aware that every darky in Lexington had known news and information long before a single white was aware of it, apparently by telepathy. In any case, the following morning directly after breakfast, she and Olivia Hill made their way to the densest copse of elm-trees, that stood farthest from the house at a corner of the grounds, and found Minnie Judd and the white-haired Mrs. Bennett waiting for them there.

  “It's good of you to come with us here,” said Lucretia Bennett in her oddly-inflected voice. “Good of you to help us in trying to reach out to our loved ones on the Other Side.”

  “I don't hold much hope.” Olivia took Mary's other hand and drew her down onto the bench in the secluded shade. “We have twice attempted to hold gatherings here—mostly at this early hour, when the sunlight is not so harsh. Perhaps there were not enough of us to invoke the energies needed to build a bridge of thoughts for the souls to pass from the Summer Land to this world. We can only trust, and pray.”

  In the dense shade the four women recited, very softly, the Lord's Prayer, and just as softly, sweet voices harmonizing, sang “Shall We Gather at the River.” Despite her misgivings about the daylight, Mary felt herself relaxing with the familiar words, the peaceful sense that these circles always brought her. Others over the years had included more prayers, and many had incorporated more music, drawing the Seekers together into calm and ready thought.

  But always was that awareness that they understood her loss. Who young Minnie might have lost, Mary did not know—a friend, perhaps? She was too young to have given a sweetheart to the War. But Mrs. Bennett's black dress told her at least that this woman, like Olivia Hill, had walked the road she had walked. And all of them, she knew, had this in common: that they had found life without their loved ones literally beyond bearing.

  In her mind Mary painted the darkness of those shuttered, curtained parlors, the enclosed sense of comfort and safety. The flicker of candles that always recalled the dim parlors of her girlhood, before the pallid glare of gaslight chased shadows away.

  Please come, beloved, she whispered in her heart. Please speak to me through these kindly women. Rest your hands on my shoulders, let me know that even here you're with me. That you've forgiven me . . . The dreams of the night before last, and of last Wednesday night—was it only a week ago?—were the clearest she had seen him in many months. Even the knowledge that they would end with his head slumping down to her shoulder, blood gleaming blackly in his hair, wasn't enough to make her thrust them aside, even if she could have. They were all she had.

  Give me something to live on, something to hold! I miss you so.

  “Now, ladies.” Dr. Patterson's deep voice broke the sweet silence that succeeded the song. Mary's eyes snapped open and Olivia and Mrs. Bennett dropped her hands at once, like guilty schoolgirls. The superintendent strode across the grass toward them, with his wife and Amanda striding purposefully behind. “You know this kind of excitement isn't at all good for you. Mrs. Hill, I'm surprised at you.”

  Mary replied, since Olivia seemed unable to answer. “Are we not then even permitted to pray? I should think you, of all people, would approve.”

  The doctor smiled, that impenetrable and eternal smile that she was coming to hate. “Of course you may pray, my dear Mrs. Lincoln. But prayer is for Sunday in chapel, or quietly and privately in your room, as St. Paul recommends, and in a spirit of Christian resignation. Mrs. Bennett, Mrs. Hill, I have a little treatment I'd like to try on you now before lunch, to see if we can make you feel better....”

  “He always does that,” whispered Minnie Judd, in her soft thread of a voice as the doctor and his wife led the two other women away. “He doesn't like to see us gathered together. Not even in daytime.”

  “And you put up with it?” Mary's voice snapped with scorn for this thin girl in the dazzlingly fashionable dove-gray gown, scorn that reflected the surge of rage burning through her. Minnie regarded her with surprise in her cornflower-blue eyes.

  “We must put up with it, ma'am. What choice do we have?”

  What choice indeed? thought Mary, shaking with anger as Minnie, too, walked away under the trees toward the big stone house, her demi-train rustling on the grass. When you have been judged a madwoman, you have no choice. You must take what they give you, and rejoice that it is no worse.

  And all the peace beneath those lush trees, all the pleasant treatment and hollow professions of understanding, could never make up for that indignity.

  THAT NIGHT MARY TOOK SUPPER WITH THE PATTERSON FAMILY. MRS. Patterson smiled her wooden smile and tried to make gracious small-talk, but the fourth time she broke off to berate her daughter for not “behaving like a lady” when the poor young woman was clearly doing her best not to upset her food in company, Mary was hard put not to slap the doctor's wife.

  Dr. Patterson had just returned from his bi-weekly visit to Chicago, and though he spoke kindly to his daughter he said nothing in her defense. Mostly, he chatted with his son about the affairs of his practice in Chicago. All her girlhood Mary had been ingrained with the idea that Yankees had no manners, and though she'd found that in many cases this was an exaggeration, she'd never been able to get used to this particularly Yankee combination of sanctimoniousness and preoccupation with work to the exclusion of one's company. Even after all these years, even in this situation, it annoyed her.

  After supper Dr. Patterson mixed Mary a glass of medicine to take before she went to bed, for her back had begun to ache again, and her head, and she found herself both depressed and unable to rest. But when Amanda had helped her change into her nightgown and wrapper, and had locked the door for the night, Mary sat up for a time in the chair beside her bed, her eyes closed in the silence.

  She whispered the Lord's Prayer, as the women had done that morning in the shade, and sang softly under her breath, “Shall we gather at the river/ the beautiful, the beautiful river. . . .”

  Prayer and song were an incantation, like Mammy Sally's hoodoo rhymes. Hoping against hope that even without the circle of loving hands and hearts, the spirits would come. The gas hissed softly, its flame turned down low behind a painted globe of glass—never since childhood had Mary been able to sleep in a completely dark room. Through the pink mosquito-bar tacked over the window a whisper of breeze stirred the dense, hot air. The big house was silent around her. Even the woman who had screamed last night—screamed so loudly that she could be heard here on the family side of the house—made no sound.

  How many nights she had sat thus in her great bedroom in that cold dreadful mansion on Pennsylvania Avenue, that fraudulent white-painted sepulchre of her dreams....Had sat late, so late that even the incessant noise of soldiers marching in the street, of bugle calls from the camps on the near-by Mall, had ceased. Her husband was absent, as he was so often absent, having slipped down the service stairs and out of the house through the basement, to walk alone through the chilly fog to the War Department to wait for dispatches. Sometimes he'd even sleep there on the sofa in the telegraphers' room. Or coming back, he would go to his office, his stockinged footfalls passing her door, to read petitions or pleas or the papers related to a thousand and one details of the War that only he could decide upon, until he fell, exhausted, asleep at his desk.

  In that silence—Mary rem
embered it so clearly now, called it back to her, willed it back—it had seemed to her that the gaslight had burned blue, just as candles did in the romances she read, and she had seen those beautiful, glowing forms pass through the closed door of her bedroom and come to her, holding out their hands.

  Willie. . . ! She had seen him so clearly. His face—a round Todd face, just beginning to lengthen as he passed his eleventh birthday—wore that expression of thoughtful calm that had nothing in it of solemnity. A Todd face and his father's gray eyes. Sometimes he wore the gaudy little uniform the militia Zouaves had given him, along with an honorary commission of Colonel; sometimes the dark wool suit in which he'd been buried. He did not seem ghostly at all, only wrought of a pale light, and he led a smaller child by the hand, little Eddie in the long toddler's dress of tucked linen that Mary had sewed for him.

  Her dearest boys! She had clasped them to her heart, though now she could not remember whether their flesh had felt solid in her arms. Yet it wasn't a dream! she told herself. It happened, just as Nettie Colburn, and Lord Colchester, and the other mediums of the spirits had assured her it would!

  She breathed deep, the swoony warmth from Dr. Patterson's medicine enfolding her. If Dr. Patterson had not interrupted them, would not a few more minutes have sufficed for the Circle they'd formed? Even in daylight, even in the midst of this terrible place? Would not the spirits have found some way of communicating with those they loved? In her mind she formed the scene, Mr. Lincoln shyly smiling as he walked toward her through the deep shadows of the elms, with Eddie on one hip and Willie clinging to his hand, and Tad—young thin tall Tad like a half-grown Thoroughbred colt—striding alongside.

  Could she not at least have felt on her shoulders the pressure of strong hands, as occasionally happened in the darkness of those séance rooms, when the medium would tell her that he sensed the presence of a tall and bearded man?

  She sat awake—or mostly awake—in the gloom for what felt like hours, before lying down on top of the covers, and crying herself to sleep.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Springfield 1837

  IN JUNE OF 1837 MARY PACKED HER MANY TRUNKS AND HATBOXES, and in company with her father and Judy, made the jolting coach journey down to Louisville, to take one of the Ohio River steamers to Cairo.

  Her father hired a stateroom for her, barely big enough to swing a mouse in, let alone a cat. He himself took a curtained bunk in the men's cabin, and spent a good portion of each day in the gentlemen's parlor, smoking long nine cigars, playing vingt-et-un and talking politics with the highly assorted crowd of slave-traders, land-speculators, cotton- and sugar-brokers, merchants, and lawyers who journeyed up and down the Ohio from Cairo all the way up to Pittsburgh. “I don't believe you talk politics with them at all,” teased Mary, when her father took her for a walk around the upper deck in the evening cool after supper. “I believe you just use that as an excuse to gossip, the way you always accuse us poor women of doing.” And she twinkled a smile at him from beneath her bonnet-brim.

  “And isn't that just what you do?” he countered with a grin.

  And Mary laughed, for she didn't want to complain of the company in the ladies' parlor. But in fact she found it excruciatingly dull, consisting as it did of a New England woman whose husband was engaged in “something to do with land” in Mississippi, a merchant's wife whose whole soul was occupied in the cost and difficulties of running her husband's business (and his life as well, in Mary's opinion), and the wife and daughter of an Ohio state Assemblyman who weren't entirely clear whether the husband/father of the family was a Democrat or a Whig.

  The talk was all of servants, and of the expense of running a household, and the best way to get wine-stains out of damask. Why was it, Mary wondered, that married people became so dull? When Mary said she was from Kentucky the Yankee woman had asked disapprovingly if her father owned slaves, and had proceeded to lecture her—in Mr. Presby's best style—on the evils of slavery without bothering to ask first what her own views on the subject were.

  “You'll like Springfield,” prophesied her father, leaning his elbows on the upper-deck rail. “With your taste for politics you'll feel right at home there.” On the stern-deck below them hogs squealed in their pens among high-piled sacks of corn, bushels of oats, barrels of whiskey and apples. Now and then above the incessant pound and splash of the two great paddles, Mary could hear the voices of the slaves who'd come onboard at Louisville, chained to the walls along the narrow walkways on either side of the engine-room. Sometimes singing, sometimes calling out in whatever gambling-games it was they played to pass the time and take their minds off where they were going. Sometimes, from the starboard where the women were chained, she would hear a child cry.

  “It's going to be the state capital now, isn't it?” Elizabeth had mentioned that in her latest letter, in the midst of a host of Ninian's concerns, as if it were important only because it raised the value of Ninian's town lots.

  “If Ninian and the Long Nine have anything to say about it, it will.”

  “The Long Nine?” Mary raised her brows. “So my brother-in-law has become a cigar? It's a guarantee of popularity, I suppose....”

  Her father laughed. “That's the name someone gave the representatives of the Sangamon County delegation at the Legislature. There are nine of them—the biggest county delegation in the state—and every man of 'em's over six feet tall, the tallest six feet four. Springfield's already the center of trade and farming in the state, and the biggest town. Vandalia's a mere village by comparison.”

  He shifted his broad-brimmed straw hat on his head, and looked out, as if he could see, beyond the wall of forest along the riverbank, the small settlements marked by pluming smoke, the tiny farms. “Illinois is one of the fastest-growing states of the Union, daughter. The key to our nation's future lies in the West. You'll meet the best of the coming men there.”

  “Are you trying to marry me off, Pa?” Mary regarded him coquettishly.

  He pinched her chin. “I just want my girl to be happy.”

  She turned her eyes away to the green monotony on either side of the river, the forest that seemed to stretch on forever, trying to unthink the thought that had sliced across her mind: You want to be happy knowing you've done your duty by “your girl.”

  Happy with Betsey. And Betsey's children.

  With the problem of those she supplanted all happily gone away at last, and no man to say you didn't do your duty.

  She had so looked forward to this journey—to seeing Elizabeth and Frances again, and Elizabeth's new baby—Julia, named for the first tiny daughter, who had died. She still felt wild, dancing excitement at the sound of the churning paddlewheels, a bursting exhilaration at these new lands, this new world. But the suspicion that this was only a farther-away version of Mentelle's snagged in her mind. It caught on her thoughts like a burr in a petticoat, filling her with unthinkable shame.

  At Cairo they transferred to another steamboat, this one going upriver on the Mississippi, which even in those high reaches was a broad yellow-brown stream whose banks were a tangle of snags and bars that the pilot had to negotiate with care. Sometimes they'd pass a flatboat, wide rafts a hundred feet long and laden with pumpkins and corn and hogs, riding the current all the way down to New Orleans. The paddles would churn the water and the men working the sweeps would shake their fists, sun-browned men who looked like they'd been braided out of strips of rawhide, with their faded hair and faded shirts and heavy Conestoga boots. Mary made the acquaintance of a French lady from New Orleans and her even-more-French aunt from Paris, and had a good time speaking to them in their native language of the cities she longed more than anything to see. She had a sense, riding the river, of profound delight, of moving out of the lush hollows of Kentucky and into a wider world.

  They debarked at St. Louis, and then truly the world did change.

  All of her life Mary had lived in Lexington, traveling no farther than Frankfort to visit Betsey's ha
ughty, thin-nosed old mother. Her world had been a rolling verdant world of dense forests and granite outcrops, of patches of laurel, paw-paw, tulip trees. When the stagecoach climbed from the river-valley where St. Louis lay, the full harsh sweep of the prairie wind struck them, and she saw for the first time the prairie emptiness: green, flat, endless, unbroken to the horizon, baking with that indescribable scent of curing grasses under the morning sun.

  Clinging to the strap in the swaying coach, Mary gazed at the stage-ruts sweeping away into the unimaginable distance and thought, I'm going in the wrong direction! I should be going south, to New Orleans, or east to New York and Europe. Where am I going, and why?

  AT LEAST THERE WERE TREES IN SPRINGFIELD. FOR TWO DAYS ON THE stage, jolting through that vast untenanted world of tall grass and meadowlarks, Mary had had terrible visions—her sister's letters to the contrary—of yet another desolate constellation of board shacks, weathering slowly to grayness in the hot wind and unending glare of the sun.

  But Springfield stood on the bluffs above the Sangamon River, and the fertile country along the bottomlands and around Lake Springfield was settled up with scattered farms and cattle grazing contentedly in the waist-deep prairie grass. It was late in the day when the stage pulled into the yard of the Globe Tavern, an unpromising quadrangle of whitewashed buildings whose long porch sheltered an assortment of the local bumpkins and a pair of sleepy dogs. A bell clanged from the cupola on the roof, to announce the arrival. Dust and smoke hung in the air, as did the smell of livestock.

  “What do you want to bet that's Ninian's carriage?” Robert Todd helped his daughter from the big high-wheeled coach and nodded toward the lower-slung and more elegant vehicle that stood waiting. “I wrote him the night we arrived in St. Louis, that we'd be on the next stage. The team certainly looks like Ninian's taste in horseflesh,” he added, with an admiring glance at the glossily-groomed bays. “Have a seat and I'll go find him. He'll be inside.”