The Emancipator's Wife

by Barbara Hambly

  Mary was usually accompanied by Frances, and by Mercy Levering, with whom she quickly became fast friends. Lively, dark-haired Julia Jayne often joined them, the daughter of yet another town doctor: The four of them went together to the orgy of militia reviews and barbecues that surrounded the great Daniel Webster's visit to Springfield, and the ceremonies and speeches that accompanied the laying of the State House cornerstone on the Fourth of July.

  Mr. Douglas was a dandified little dynamo, barely an inch taller and only a few years older than Mary and already registrar of the land-office of Springfield, a position of considerable power. Of all the men in Springfield, Mary felt that he was the only one who had potential to go beyond the small politics of state and county. When he would take her to picnics and cotillions, his talk was of the close maneuverings of money and land, and the promise of new inventions that would open the frontier country to men of enterprise and resource.

  “Douglas is a Democrat,” said Ninian, over supper one night. “And a demagogue, with his eye always on the main chance. I don't trust him.”

  “Just because he votes for Van Buren doesn't mean he's going to break my heart.” Mary smiled a little as she said it, because charming as he was, she found something about Douglas's Yankee single-mindedness slightly repellant.

  “Doesn't it?” Ninian glanced sharply at her from beneath those level black brows. “Could you really love a man whose politics were that different from yours, Molly? You take politics seriously, as all intelligent people should. Could you really live with a man for whose intellectual mainspring you had contempt?”

  Mary delicately buttered one of the beaten biscuits that were Eppy's pride before replying. At home she would have dodged the question, since most of Betsey's questions had some ulterior motive, but in Ninian's eyes—and Elizabeth's peaceful silence—she read only interest in what she actually thought. At length she said, “I hope I'll never be put to the test of falling in love with a man whose ideas differ radically from mine.”

  “That would hardly be possible, would it?” asked Frances. Mary and Frances had spent the day—a Saturday, hot with the breathless humidity of high summer—picnicking with Dr. Wallace, Mr. Douglas, and Mercy Levering, in the woods that fringed Sutton's Prairie to the east of town. That huge expanse of empty grassland, rising imperceptibly to a too-close horizon, filled Mary with a kind of panic, and she had been glad for the company of her sister and her friends.

  Having watched the matter-of-fact understanding, the peaceful teamwork, of Frances and William Wallace—having seen her sister's obvious happiness with the soft-voiced young doctor—Mary wasn't sure what to answer. Could she wholeheartedly love someone whose mind was alien to hers? She had certainly not loved Nate Bodley.

  She felt a lump of envy in her chest, and the lump of loneliness that never quite ever went away. She said, “Would you love Dr. Wallace, if his ideas differed from what you believed was right?”

  “Of course.” The prompt self-evidentness in her sister's voice told Mary that Frances had never given the matter a thought and hadn't the slightest idea of why Mary hesitated.

  “Which I suppose is why,” smiled Elizabeth, “everyone says that women should stay out of politics. In how many households do you think there's really room for two politicians?”

  By her tone of voice that ended the matter, but Mary persisted. “Next you'll be saying that women shouldn't have an education.”

  “Of course not, dear,” said Elizabeth. “I know how you love your books. Just don't let your education interfere with your happiness.”

  Mary opened her mouth, and shut it again, overwhelmed with the familiar sense of speaking to people from some unknown land.

  In any case the point was a moot one, because much as Mary enjoyed flirting with Stephen Douglas—and he, clearly, with her—she felt in his presence no such stirring of the senses as she'd experienced with Nate Bodley, let alone the delicious and instantaneous raptures occasioned by the heroes of Belinda and Glenarvon. What she did experience—with more and more frequency as the summer drew on—was an odd sense of desperation.

  “Elizabeth is less insistent about it than Betsey,” sighed Mary a few nights after that conversation, as she and Mercy sat on the porch of Ninian's house watching their escorts for the evening drive off in a rented buggy. Merce had been asked to a lecture on Phrenology at the Mechanics' Institute hall by Josh Speed, a partner in Speed and Bell's Dry Goods—a twinkly-eyed Kentuckian who had the gift of getting along with nearly everyone in town—and Mary had been escorted along by Mr. Shields, a bantam Irish lawyer who quite plainly considered himself God's gift to the female sex. “But she wants to marry me off, too.”

  Mary felt a twinge of anger as she said the words—at Elizabeth, at Betsey, at her father. At the world that was so constituted that an unmarried girl would, when she died, spend Eternity leading apes around Hell.

  “They just want you to be happy,” pointed out Mercy, breaking off a spray of the sweet-smelling honeysuckle to twine around her fingers. She spoke a bit diffidently, for in spite of their friendship Mary had lost her temper at her once or twice over trifles, and though they'd made up with tears and apologies, Mercy now tended to pick her words carefully.

  “Can't they see I'm happy as I am? Why does a woman need to marry some man to be happy?”

  Mercy replied, her voice peaceful in the thickening twilight, “I suppose because we can't stay forever in our fathers' houses.” Sitting straight-backed on the rush-bottomed porch chair, she seemed to give off an aura of quiet from her rustling lavender muslin skirts, her smooth fair hair. “Because if we're not part of some household—father's, brother's, brother-in-law's, husband's—we won't be comfortable, and will have to make our livings at some horrid task like sewing or ironing or teaching school. And because without a husband or children of her own, I don't think any woman can truly be happy.”

  Mary was silent, thinking of her mother, thin and worn with childbearing. Of Betsey, always pregnant, always angry, more and more often ill and confined to her room...With a flash of insight Mary realized her stepmother felt the same anger she did, at the husband and father who found it so easy to be away for weeks at a time with the Legislature.

  “Elizabeth sees Mr. Speed, or Mr. Shields, and sees they'll be rich, and have nice homes, and that as Mrs. Shields you'll never want for nice dresses or a carriage.”

  “As if that mattered!” retorted Mary. “I should rather marry a poor man whom I loved, a man who is going someplace—even a Yankee—than an old rich one with all his fortune secure. I've told Elizabeth that.”

  “And I think Elizabeth doesn't see why you can't love a wealthy man as easily as a poor one,” responded Mercy. “Or why you can't love Mr. Douglas, who is certainly going someplace. He's used his position as registrar to buy up some of the choicest property in the state, Mr. Speed tells me, up near Chicago....”

  “Chicago?” exclaimed Mary, startled. “You mean that village where the lumber boats come in?”

  “Mr. Speed said Chicago will be a major city one day, and that Mr. Douglas will end as a very rich man.”

  Mary sniffed, amused. “If I paid ten cents for one town lot in every village someone told me was going to be a major city one day, I'd be bankrupt tomorrow. And Ninian doesn't trust Mr. Douglas.” She hesitated, turning her fan over in her hands. “To tell you the truth I don't either, after the way he went on about Mr. Sampson's Ghost.”

  Sampson's Ghost was the pseudonym used by a writer of letters to the Sangamo Journal during a local campaign for probate justice that had been closely followed by every inhabitant of the House on the Hill. The Democratic candidate, a General Adams, lived on land deeded to him by the deceased Mr. Sampson; the letter-writing Ghost offered proof that not only had Adams forged the deed to Mr. Sampson's land, he had earlier forged a judgment to gain title to the land of a man named Anderson, robbing Anderson's widow and son. The letters were entertaining, written with a wry satiric humor that had m
ost of the town laughing. Stephen Douglas had bristled when Mary had laughed at them, however, and had defended Adams hotly.

  “A fool can write whatever he likes to the papers, and get another fool to print it.” Douglas, Mary had learned already, had little use for the editor of the Journal, the bespectacled and cheerful Simeon Francis. Then he had added—fatally, if he'd ever had any intention of winning Mary's hand—“What does a pretty girl like you need to go reading that farrago for, anyway?”

  “I think,” said Mary slowly now, looking back from her vantage-point on the porch with Mercy in the scented dusk, “that Ninian is right about Mr. Douglas. He probably wouldn't appreciate two politicians in one household. Certainly not if the other one wasn't a Democrat.”

  A mosquito whined in her ear, and she swept at it with her fan. It was time to go inside. She gave Mercy a hug and a kiss, and the girls exchanged promises to meet the next day to go downtown to look at ribbons at Birchall's Store. Within the house the hall was dark, though lamps burned in the dining-room where Frances helped Eppy to set the table. Mary ascended the dark stair to her room, Mercy's placid words lingering uncomfortably in her heart.

  We can't stay forever in our fathers' houses. . . .

  What if Father dies? She hastily pushed the thought from her mind, turning from it as she'd physically have averted her face.

  But the image of him standing in the upstairs hall with Nelson rose out of the shadow, both men covered with dust, the stink of lime and gunpowder hanging heavy in the stuffy heat of the enclosed house and the glowing green ghost of cholera flitting from window to window, just waiting to slip inside.

  One day he will die. What then?

  Live with Betsey? Mary shuddered.

  With Levi? Or George?

  Father will be fine!

  But panic whispered to her, nevertheless. What then? What then? What then?

  A letter lay on her dressing-table, its green sealing-wafers cracked across. Of course it was Ninian's right—and Elizabeth's, as her guardians this summer—to read letters that came to her under their roof. But the sight of the opened correspondence filled Mary with the sudden desire to go storming downstairs and inform her sister that she would not stand to be treated like a child.

  But until I marry, she thought furiously, I am only a child in her household. . . . Elizabeth certainly read Frances's letters. As Merce's sister-in-law read Merce's.

  And there was nowhere but Betsey's house to go back to.

  Her hands trembled as she carried the letter to the window, where the last twilight gave enough of a faint blue flush for her to read.

  It was from the Reverend John Ward, her old Lexington schoolmaster.

  My dear Miss Todd,

  I hope this letter finds you in full health and happiness. Often in the years since you left my tutelage I have spoken of you as the best and most promising pupil I have ever had the pleasure and privilege to educate; and frequently my good wife and I have wondered whether, in fact, you might find your calling in the education of the young.

  Owing to my wife's illness this summer, she has been unable to assist me as she formerly did, making it necessary for us to seek help in the education of the younger students here at Ward's. Yours was the first name that rose to both of our minds. Your deep love of learning, combined with your affection for small children, impressed us both deeply. I have already spoken to your father and your stepmother concerning the propriety of your returning here to board and to teach. . . .

  Mary's hand tightened hard on the paper and she thought, Oh, I'll just bet Betsey leaped to tell Papa how proper it is, as long as it keeps me out of the house. . . .

  But as she sat in the window, looking out into the last of the twilight, she thought again, We can't stay forever in our fathers' houses.

  A schoolmistress.

  The thought made her smile. She remembered Madame Mentelle. Maybe an eccentric and happy schoolmistress, who did as she pleased and could stay up all night reading if she wished, and whose letters no one would read without her permission.

  One who did not have to live in this desolate and book-less hog-wallow in the midst of the empty prairies, waiting in terror for the next storm.

  Still she leaned in the window, her forehead against the glass that was no cooler than the stifling air. A man walked by in the street, a tall skinny silhouette, whistling an old backwoods tune. Darkness settled thick.

  After a long time Mary got up, shook her petticoats straight, and went downstairs, to ask Ninian if, when he journeyed to Lexington next month to investigate railroad stocks, she could return with him.

  It was time to go home.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Bellevue Place May 1875

  “MRS. LINCOLN.”

  A soft tap at the door of her room. John's voice—it was hard for her to think of him as Mr. Wilamet, though he was so grown-up now, with his thin, serious face and his spectacles. They changed so, boys....

  Mary pressed her hands to her face, unwilling to think about the boys who would change no more.

  “Mrs. Lincoln?”

  She didn't even look at the curtained judas on the door, the curtain that could be nudged aside by anyone in the corridor.

  “What is it?”

  “Your son is here to see you.”

  Mary's voice rang hard as flint in her own ears. “I have no son.”

  John Wilamet said nothing in reply to that. But he didn't go away. Mary had learned the distinctive creak of the floorboards in the quiet downstairs hall of the family wing, even through the muffling of the Turkey carpets. When she couldn't sleep—as often she couldn't, this past week that she'd been here—it seemed to her sometimes that the comings and goings of Mrs. Patterson and Young Doc shook the house, forcing her to demand paregoric or chloral hydrate to help her drift off. How anyone could be so inconsiderate...

  She repeated, raising her voice, “I have no son!”

  Still Mr. Wilamet remained. Mary watched the curtain on the door, waiting for it to move, as it did when Gretchen or Mrs. Patterson would peep in on her—believing they were so clever and subtle! But it didn't stir.

  She got impatiently to her feet and went to the door, yanked the curtain aside to face the young man through the wooden bars. “Didn't you hear me?”

  “I heard you, ma'am.” John still retained the gentle burr of the South that Mary had not heard about her in years. “But the man who's here seems to think he has a mother.”

  Mary put a hand to her head; a tear leaked from her eye. She wasn't even sure why she wept—Robert never had any patience with tears. But it had become such a habit with her to weep that she did it almost without thinking. “Get me some paregoric, then, if you will,” she said fretfully. “I have such a headache. If I'm to see him I must be at my best.”

  “Of course,” agreed John. “But if I may say so, ma'am—he'll be watching for that.”

  “Watching for what?”

  “Watching for you to be a little sleepy, the way paregoric makes you. Maybe a little less sharp. More forgetful.”

  Mary opened her mouth to snap that paregoric never had that effect on her, but closed it. It did make her a little drowsy and more than a little forgetful—so much so that she'd sometimes sit for many hours gazing into the dimness of her hotel-room, and come out of a dream to discover she'd drunk half the bottle without being aware of it. But she'd hoped that no one had noticed.

  The thought that Robert would be watching for weakness had never occurred to her. But of course he was a lawyer. He'd watch, as lawyers all watched. And use everything she did and said.

  “Just a little, then—water it down. I won't give him that satisfaction. And send Amanda in here to me, so I can change my dress.”

  “Good for you, ma'am,” grinned John. “Don't give him a thing.”

  As she dressed, Mary's anger rose, sharpened by the sense of restless unhappiness that had so frequently attacked her over the years. In her mind she saw Robert in the courtro
om again, tears in his eyes as he announced to the entire world that his own mother was a lunatic.

  But when, at last, she entered the parlor and saw him sitting there, physically so like her father, tall and barrel-chested, with wariness in his Todd-blue eyes, her rage overflowed into tears again and she could only sob, “How could you?”

  He was on his feet at once, to conduct her to a chair. She jerked her arm away. “Mother, you know you are not well,” he said, in his even, rather light-toned voice. “You know you haven't been well—”

  “I haven't been well for twenty-three years!” Mary lashed at him. “You try living with headaches, neuralgia, back pains, and internal complaints for that long and see what it does to you! But I am not insane!”

  “No one is saying you are completely insane, Mother....”

  “You are. A week ago, in a public courtroom, you said exactly that!”

  “I didn't come here to argue with you.” Robert took her hands, his tone indicated that he didn't want to discuss the matter further—Mary was familiar with that from a lifetime of dealing with her own father. “I came to see how you are feeling. You look more rested than you did, more at peace. How has your week been passed here?”

  Mary started to snap back at him that it had been passed in much the fashion anyone would expect, for a woman locked up unjustly by her own family, but she hesitated, his words penetrating past her fury.

  How had she passed the week here?

  And she realized, with a sense of panicked shock that shook her to her core, that she did not exactly know.

  It was a realization that took her breath away. It was not that she had been unconscious: she remembered small incidents quite clearly, like the attempt at a séance in the garden with Mrs. Hill, and the carriage-rides—twice? three times?—with Mrs. Patterson and Blanche. But they all came back to her as if part of a cloudy and pleasant dream, without anxiety or pain. She recalled telling Mrs. Bennett—that haunted-eyed old woman with the extraordinary delusion that parts of her body had been taken away and replaced by parts of someone else's—that she had not been so happy or comfortable in her life.