The Emancipator's Wife

by Barbara Hambly

  He handed Mary into the carriage and signed to the stagecoach guard to pile their luggage beside it, then crossed the yard and climbed the plank steps to vanish into the inner darkness of the porch. The slave girl Judy, exhausted and intimidated by the journey, retreated to a bench near the woodpile. Mary put up her parasol against the slanting light of the afternoon sun and looked eagerly around her, taking in what she could see of the town that Elizabeth—and now, apparently, Frances—had chosen for their home.

  The tavern yard certainly didn't look promising, and the street visible beyond—rutted and unpaved under a miasma of yellow dust—even less so. In addition to the carriage in which Mary sat, the yard contained half a dozen infinitely more plebeian vehicles, mostly farm-wagons, and a decrepit buggy, as well as a number of saddle horses hitched to the porch railing. Dogs snored in the shade. Chickens scratched. An occasional hog wandered in from the so-called street.

  Whereas in Lexington there would have been a variety of people in evidence—wealthy planters, students of law and medicine from the University, slaves on errands for their masters, and young ladies in silks and fine muslins shopping in the Cheapside stores—here there seemed to be nothing but farmers and teamsters. In the shadows of the tavern porch a gang of rough-looking idlers drank, spit tobacco, and laughed uproariously over some tale being spun for them by a tall skinny idler sitting on a barrel with his long legs sprawled out before him. Presumably, reflected Mary, sitting up quite straight in her new pink ruffled dress, there was a better class of citizen farther into town.

  Movement in the tavern doorway. Mary turned, hoping it was her father and Ninian. But instead a blocky, broad-shouldered man in the tattered remains of a black long-tailed coat, bewhiskered and filthy, staggered across to the carriage, jabbed a grimy finger up at her, and declared, “And another thing, Missy: if slavery was to be expanded into the Western territories, how long would it be before the white slave-lords of the South would demand white slaves as well as black? How long before the wealthy factory-lords would take the indifference of the government for license to enserf the luckless laborers who are already de facto slaves, by further robbing them of what little liberty they still enjoy? Eh?” He glared up at Mary, red-faced with anger. “You answer me that, Miss!”

  Mary looked away, cheeks burning. The man reeked of cheap liquor and clearly was incapable of taking—or even recognizing—a hint that his conversation was not wanted. Judy, who'd gotten to her feet, was looking around in an agony of uncertainty, not about to go up and tell a white man to go away. In Lexington, of course, it simply wouldn't have happened. Too many people knew Mary—any shopkeeper or clerk in town would have headed off the drunkard from a girl they'd waited on since her earliest childhood.

  But since the alternative was to take refuge in a public tavern—presumably among this man's equally inebriated comrades—and since Mary wasn't sure she could make a dismount from the rather high carriage without providing every idler on the porch with a glimpse of petticoats, pantalettes, and ankles—she remained where she was. Her frozen silence seemed to enrage her interrogator still further.

  “A government system which condones the domination of any man by any other man has automatically doomed to destruction all those it pretends to protect!” bellowed the whiskered man. “Of course the government will permit the extension of slavery into the newly formed territories and of course the result will be—”

  “Professor Kittridge, come on up here on the porch and let me buy you a beer.” The storyteller unfolded himself from off his barrel and ambled over to the carriage. Mary had an impression of enormous stringy height, of coarse black hair sticking out in all directions and high, sharp cheekbones. The stranger's features all seemed too big for his face—nose, brow, mouth—and his eyes were deep-set and gray as winter rain. He was dressed like the men on the flatboats in what seemed to be the uniform of the country, a faded calico shirt and linsey-woolsey trousers tucked into Conestoga boots, and there was a small straight knife-scar on his right temple. His voice was a husky tenor, high without being reedy, and underlaid, Mary thought, by a soft Kentucky flatness about the vowels.

  “Lay not your hand upon me, servant of the servants of Mammon!” Professor Kittridge swung around and lashed at the storyteller with a punch that would have stopped an ox in its tracks. “Pettifogger! Serpent! Diabolos!”

  The storyteller met this barrage of invective by putting his hand on his attacker's forehead and holding him off at the length of his gorilla-like arm, Kittridge's frenzied punches slashing inches short of his ribs. At the same time he backed off, so that Kittridge's own momentum propelled him by degrees to the porch. As he did so, the storyteller glanced up over Kittridge's head to Mary, checking to make sure she wasn't harmed or alarmed. His gray eyes met hers, and when he saw that far from fainting with affront she was struggling not to laugh aloud, they sparkled with a deep answering delight.

  Barely had the Professor and the servant of the servants of Mammon vanished into the darkness of the porch when Robert Todd, Ninian Edwards, and a skinny little man carrying a coachman's whip appeared from around the corner, quickening their pace as they crossed the yard. “Miss Mary, I beg your pardon,” called out Ninian. “I thought I'd have time to pick up sugar and coffee from Irwin's. Can you ever forgive me?” His eyes twinkled as he, the coachman, and his father-in-law loaded the trunks onto the back of the carriage and strapped them into place. Judy, looking infinitely relieved to have the world return to situations with which she was familiar, hurriedly crossed to join them.

  “Shall I horsewhip Jerry here for leaving the carriage?” Ninian indicated the coachman with a grin, and the black man grinned back.

  “I should think it massively unjust to punish the servant for a sin he shares with the master.” Mary put on her most pious expression, and all three men laughed. “Just don't you dare let it happen again.”

  Ninian and her father sprang into the carriage, Judy climbing up to the coachman's box. Jerry unhitched the team and swung himself up beside her. “You are just, as well as beautiful, Miss Mary,” said the coachman gravely, and clicked to the horses. Ninian leaned forward to point something out to her father about his team. As the carriage turned, Mary saw the tall storyteller emerge from the porch again, a couple of saddlebags over one bony shoulder, making for the saddle-horses tethered on the other side of the yard. He stopped a stride beyond the porch steps, seeing her with the men of her family.

  Mary met his eyes, raised her hand in a little gesture: I'm well. Thank you. And he lifted his enormous hand to her in return.

  The wheels of the carriage threw dust on him as it pulled out of the yard.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  MARY WAS THREE MONTHS IN SPRINGFIELD. IT WAS HEAVEN, TO BE with Elizabeth again, mothered and fussed over as she had been when she was a child. Heaven to share the second-floor front room of Ninian's handsome brick house with Frances, instead of with the whining tattletale Ann. Frances slept promptly and soundly, and didn't make a fuss when Mary sat up reading: didn't moan and mumble, “What, again?” on those nights when Mary had to use the chamber pot half a dozen times. It was heaven not to spend all day, every day in a battle of wills with Betsey; heaven not to have a gaggle of little half-brothers and -sisters playing in the library when she wanted to read.

  That made up for a lot.

  And Springfield was lively. Ninian's house—the “House on the Hill,” though personally Mary wouldn't have called that hill more than a bump—was the center of all the best society there, the young lawyers and politicians who were starting to flood into town, now that it would be state capital. As a member of the influential Long Nine, and the son of the former governor, Ninian had connections with all the spider-threads of influence and favors and promises of government jobs in the county.

  For the first time in her life she could discuss politics freely, without Betsey throwing up her hands and making remarks about schoolgirls and bluestockings, and Mary reveled in this
like a cat in catnip.

  She had plenty of chances to talk politics. With the State Legislature coming to Springfield, single gentlemen were ten to a lady, and a girl had to be really trying, not to have her dance-card filled days before a ball.

  That, too, made up for a lot.

  But it didn't make up for the prairie thunderstorms, whose violence Frances hadn't lied about. When the forks and sheets of lightning drove down out of the blackness, when thunder ripped the sky as if the whole of the universe were tearing to pieces, Mary could do nothing but hide herself in bed, weeping with a fear she didn't understand and sometimes screaming inconsolably as if Death itself stood just outside the bedroom door.

  And it didn't make up for the fact that Ninian's modest collection of books was one of the finest libraries in Sangamon County: Its few volumes of edifying fiction Mary either had already read or made short work of in the first week. The only bookstore in town, C. Birchall and Company, refused to stock novels on the grounds that they were immoral, and thus she spent her three months in Springfield engaged in a constant quest for something—anything—to read.

  Professional theatricals were immoral, too. No amount of picnics and buggy-rides in company with admiring young gentlemen could make up for that.

  If Lexington was provincial, Springfield was rustic.

  Much as she enjoyed that summer, she could not rid herself of the feeling that she should have gone in the other direction when she got on the steamboat at Cairo.

  Though Springfield was officially now the state capital of Illinois—with a cleared field for the new State House and ox-teams hauling stones through the unpaved streets to prove it—the Legislature still met in Vandalia, a sleepy village sixty miles to the south. Teamsters, laborers, and ruffians associated with the building jostled along the few board sidewalks that dignified the downtown, and clogged the barrooms of the shabby and unprepossessing taverns that dotted the outskirts of town.

  On Mary's second evening in Springfield, when Ninian gave a party for the regiment of Todd and Stuart cousins—and their most privileged friends—Mary couldn't help missing the students and professors who had added a note of sophistication and learning to Lexington parties. The talk was either gossip concerning all the Todd, Logan, and Stuart cousins, or of state politics, of government contracts, and of who had influence with the state's Congressmen and Senators in Washington—fascinating topics enough, but not to the exclusion of everything else.

  “Of course it's not much,” grinned her cousin John Stuart, as they stood together on the porch in the semi-darkness, with the dim glow of the oil-lamps within shining on the bower of polished honeysuckle leaves. “It's rough and raw compared to Kentucky—and I'll say it myself, though I love this place. But that's why we're all here. To be in on a good thing from the beginning.”

  From within, Elizabeth's voice lifted, calling for a game of Speculation. There was warm laughter, and the scraping of chairs. “Can I help you, Eppy?” asked Frances's voice—Eppy had been introduced to Mary as “our cook,” and though legally Illinois was free soil, it was quite clear to Mary that Elizabeth regarded the handsome young black woman in the same light that she'd regarded Mammy Sally, as a well-loved slave.

  Springfield was, Mary reflected, in some ways very like home.

  “Sure, you can walk three blocks and be out on the prairie...now.” Cousin John tucked a thumb into his waistcoat pocket, and turned his head, a strong, blunt profile against the dark masses of the trees. The air felt dense, and even this far from the river the occasional mosquito whined. Mary felt the preliminary ache behind her eyes that whispered of a thunderstorm somewhere, over those endless grasslands.

  “But you mark my words, Mary, in five years, Springfield is where everything will be happening in this section—maybe in this country. The prairies are the best farmland there is. Land that people are trading around now as if it were shoelaces is going to settle up. Town lots that people give me to pay bills with will be worth what they are in Boston or Philadelphia. The State of Illinois will swing a lot of power in the country. You could do worse than to settle here and make it your home.”

  “Are you trying to hitch me up with someone already, Cousin John?” Mary forced aside fears of the coming storm and gave him a sidelong look.

  John Stuart merely laughed. “I don't think you'll need any help from me, Cousin Molly.”

  He might even be right, thought Mary, as she let the big man take her arm and lead her back into the parlor, though she'd heard far too many land-speculators and schemers in her father's parlor in Lexington to be dazzled by encomiums about “this section's going to go far....” She'd heard much the same about the proposal to run a railway line from Frankfort to Lexington, which had ended up in disastrous failure when it was discovered that the grade was too steep and that the weight of the trains very quickly destroyed the granite ties between the tracks.

  The section may indeed have been destined for greatness, but the thought of living in a town with no bookstores and no circulating library filled her with dismay.

  And if her destiny in life was to marry the President of the United States, Mary reflected, with a wry nod to her early passion for Mr. Clay, it was pretty clear she wasn't going to meet him here.

  It was enough, on the occasion of that first party, to sort out relatives she'd only met upon occasion years ago, if at all: the courtly cousin John Stuart and his wife; Uncle John Todd—a doctor—and his schoolgirl daughters, tall Lizzie and chubby Francy; Ninian's brother Benjamin and his wife Helen; the Leverings, who lived nearby on the Hill; quiet, saturnine Dr. Wallace, who was Frances's leading beau. Then there was Senator Herndon—another of Ninian's Long Nine—and his chinless and pompous cousin Billy, and a short, dandified little lawyer with the manners of a dancing-master and the voice of Jove speaking from Olympus, Mr. Stephen Douglas.

  “I thought your partner was going to make one of us this evening, Stuart,” remarked Dr. Wallace, when the rather extended family party settled down in the parlor for a game of Speculation.

  John Stuart shook his head and grinned again. “He's ridden over to New Salem, courting.”

  “What, still?” laughed Ninian. “Is he never going to bring himself to the scratch?” And Elizabeth rapped his elbow with her fan and scolded, “Shame!”

  “Your sister's been trying for months to get Mr. Lincoln married off,” said Mercy Levering, a fair and rather reserved girl of Mary's age to whom Mary had taken on sight. “Mr. Lincoln is Mr. Stuart's law partner....”

  “It would challenge any matchmaker in the world,” teased Frances. “Which is why Elizabeth is so keen on it....”

  “I am not,” replied Elizabeth, with the matronly dignity she'd already begun to assume back in Lexington, and went on handing out the little mother-of-pearl fish tokens for the game.

  “Is he that ugly?” asked Mary, and Mercy put her hand over her mouth so as not to be seen giggling.

  “He is ugly as Original Sin,” replied Frances grandly. “And he eats with his knife.”

  “Frances...,” reproved Elizabeth, who would have taken the lead in the gossip if she didn't have her position to uphold.

  “Well then, dearest,” said Mary judiciously, “I can only say that your encouragement of the match is terribly irresponsible, both for the sake of the poor woman and whatever children they'll bear....”

  “That is unjust.” Elizabeth was struggling not to burst out laughing. “He isn't that ugly.”

  “But you must admit he does eat with his knife,” pointed out Frances, amid gales of chuckles around the table.

  “He's a backwoodsman,” protested Ninian. “It's taken Cousin John a year to teach him not to sit on the floor.”

  “Stuart met him in the militia during the Black Hawk War,” provided Uncle Dr. John, “and taught him to read....”

  “I didn't teach him,” laughed Cousin John, turning to Mary as Elizabeth went back primly to handing out counters. “I just encouraged him to read law. H
e was a captain under me, elected by his men, a gang of toughs from the rough side of New Salem....”

  “As if New Salem had a polite side,” added Frances, rolling her eyes.

  “I remember one day Lincoln was marching them across a field someplace in the north of the state, beating the bushes for Black Hawk and his braves, and they come up on a fence. It's clear across their line of march and there's a gap of about three feet in the fence; I could see the look on Lincoln's face when he realized he didn't remember the command to form a column—to get in a single line to pass through the gap. He looked aghast for about half a minute as the fence gets closer and closer, then he yells out: ‘Company to fall out for two minutes and reassemble on the other side of that fence!' I almost fell off my horse laughing.”

  “Mr. Lincoln is engaged to a Miss Owens from Kentucky,” supplied Elizabeth, seating herself at the head of the parlor table in a demure rustle of taffeta petticoats. “I'm hoping—we're all hoping, for he is really the best-natured soul on the planet—that she'll succeed in teaching him a few social niceties.”

  Frances shuffled the cards. “He'll always be ugly.”

  “Well, there is that.”

  Mary's father returned to Kentucky the following day—or more probably, she reflected wryly, he returned to Frankfort, or Louisville, or some other town where there was business that would keep him from the too-crowded house in Lexington, and the sharp-voiced demands of his wife. The bitterness that flavored her old grief at being left behind Mary hid, as she tried always to hide it, beneath flirtation and jests and fun.

  And it was fun. Frances had already formed around herself and Elizabeth a coterie of the young men and girls of Springfield—with more young men coming in all the time—and there was no more talk of being an old maid at nineteen. On the afternoon of Robert Todd's departure, Mr. Douglas appeared in a buggy to take Mary riding out on the prairies, and as if Elizabeth had hoisted a flag from the topmost gable of the House on the Hill, every eligible bachelor in Springfield put in an appearance that first week.