The Emancipator's Wife

by Barbara Hambly

  “Molly!”

  “—and have whistled Ninian down the wind if it weren't that he was the son of the governor!” All Mary's pent-up resentments about having her letters read, about being called fat, about her father's long absences, frothed to the surface. “You have no more notion of love than does that snippy old harpy our father married! Only love of money...”

  Elizabeth—who had never had any trouble holding her own in the noisy Todd household—reddened with anger, but as usual her voice remained cuttingly level. “If you marry that backwoods pumpkin-roller with his load of debts you'll find out soon enough what money means!”

  “Money means nothing beside love!” Mary screamed at her. She felt as if she were burning up inside. “I'd rather by far marry a poor man who's going somewhere than a rich incompetent who couldn't even get on the electoral ballot of his own party in his own state!” (Ninian hadn't.)

  “Honestly!” Elizabeth threw up her hands. “There's no talking to you when you get like this! I'd hoped that a little time away would cure your temper....”

  “There is nothing wrong with my temper!!!” Mary shrieked. “It's you who don't want to admit that you're—”

  Movement caught Mary's eye and she turned—they both turned—to see Eppy frozen in the parlor doorway.

  And behind her, his eyes bulging out of his head with horror, was Mr. Lincoln.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  LINCOLN AND MARY WENT TO THE CIRCUS TOGETHER A FEW DAYS later, and tried to pretend everything was still all right. Mary tried hard—and succeeded well—in being her usual bright, flirtatious self, but the excursion was not a success.

  Lincoln marveled over the elephant—Sultan, his name was—and asked the dour Scotsman in charge of him all kinds of questions about what elephants ate and how they worked. “I never did see anything like it,” he remarked, in one of his rare relaxed moments that day. “Though my ma told me of them—my stepmother,” he corrected. “I'll have to write her of this. She'd tell me tales of wonderful things, things I'd never seen, growin' up in the woods; the only person back then who treated me like a human being.”

  But for the most part Mary felt, all that day, that Lincoln was studying her uneasily. He had little to say to either Elizabeth or Ninian and she wondered exactly how much Lincoln had heard of what she and Elizabeth had said to one another, and how much of a shock it was to him, to see how her bust and waist and hips had expanded since their last meeting in June. Wondered if he were re-thinking, in that new light, all the local gossip that Mary Todd “had a temper.” Certainly Elizabeth never went beyond glacially exquisite politeness to him, and when they returned to the house that evening, he was not asked to stay to dinner.

  Mary had another screaming-match with Elizabeth and cried herself to sleep.

  Lincoln left town soon after that, and was gone almost a month.

  His journeys up and down the state all summer in the cause of the Whig Party and William Henry Harrison showed on his face and his form, during the few October days before his latest departure. While Mary had grown plumper from the thrill and jollity of campaigning, Lincoln had grown more lean. Even in repose, he looked tired. The skin over his high cheekbones was tanned dark from riding long distances between the prairie towns, and lines were settled around his eyes. His notes to her were short, and when he did see her, he was very quiet. Mary tried to convince herself that this was only the result of days and weeks spent exerting himself to charm and convince voters.

  She failed. And as usual when she felt fear, it transformed itself to anger. When Lincoln left for Pontiac to take cases at the DeWitt County Circuit Court—because of his campaign journeys he hadn't worked all summer—Mary returned, almost defiantly, to the round of rallies and speeches, balls and barbeques, attendant on the final throes of the election, culminating in a glorious, dazzling, torchlit procession on Election Night.

  Tippecanoe and Tyler, too!

  But she wished Lincoln were in town at her side.

  After making speeches, trading favors, promising votes, talking to delegates, crisscrossing the state on horseback for six solid, weary months—to the total neglect of the work that might buy him new clothes or would pay his board bill at Butler's, where he and Speed both ate—Mary wasn't even sure whether Lincoln himself cast a vote.

  She flirted with Douglas, danced with Gillespie and Trumbull, walked out with Jimmy Shields and sweetly tried to discourage—but not discourage too much—the attentions of the avid and elderly Mr. Webb, all the while trying to eat as little as possible. But she found her temper was shorter on short rations and her headaches, which had plagued her on and off through the summer, grew worse. She longed for Mammy Sally's mouth-wringing tisanes, for the gentle care of Uncle David's old cook Rachel...for something other than Elizabeth's tart remarks about “overcoming her tendency” to headaches, as she admonished her to “overcome” her temper.

  On the ninth of November, the Sangamon County Circuit Court would begin its session. On the twenty-third, the Legislature would begin meeting, in the Springfield Methodist Church, since the State House was still not done. Mary was determined that when Lincoln returned to town, she'd demonstrate to him that she wasn't a girl to wait sighingly for a man's attention. He'd see how popular she was—plump or not, spirited or not, twenty-one or not—with every other bachelor in that man-filled town, and she wrote to her father in Lexington for the money for three new dresses to make sure the point was carried across.

  And on the seventh of November, Ninian's Uncle Cyrus arrived in town, with his daughter Matilda.

  Mary liked Matilda Edwards immediately. She and Elizabeth waited impatiently in the parlor, on the evening that Ninian had Jerry harness up the carriage and rode to meet the stage at the American House Hotel—a total of three blocks, but there would be luggage and the streets were unpaved and soupy after the first of the autumn rains. Cyrus came in with Ninian, big-shouldered and tall like all the Edwards men, elegantly dressed, even for travel. He was a prominent politician and man of business, and one of the wealthiest citizens of Alton, which lay just upriver from St. Louis. He bowed over Elizabeth's hand, smiled at Mary: “Here's my girl Tilda,” he told her. “I know you'll be great friends.”

  Matilda Edwards was sixteen years old, tall for her age and blonde and ethereally slender. She was exquisitely dressed in dark-blue delaine and what appeared to be at least ten petticoats beneath her rustling skirts, and had the gentlest, most natural smile Mary had ever seen. “Oh, dear, I hope you'll be able to put up with me,” she murmured guiltily to Mary, as Mary led her up to show her the bedroom they would share. “I sleep like a cat—up and down and moving all around....”

  “It's all right, I get up about a dozen times a night....”

  “Oh, dear, neither of us will get any sleep....”

  “Do you read in bed?”

  “Shhh! Papa would slay me if he knew....Oh, you have a copy of Belinda . . . !”

  The two girls stayed awake, whispering and giggling, until nearly dawn.

  Every man in Springfield fell instantly and violently in love with Matilda Edwards on sight.

  Including Abraham Lincoln.

  And no girl could be really angry with her because she was so sweet.

  “Oh, Papa will be so pleased,” Tilda sighed, after the first small party at the House on the Hill—to which Mr. Lincoln was not invited—at which Cyrus renewed his political connections with the wealthier inhabitants of Springfield and his daughter was introduced to the Coterie. It was nearly two in the morning; she and Mary were brushing out each other's hair and getting into their nightgowns, while the rain pattered gently on the leaves outside. “He wants me to meet other gentlemen. That's why he brought me here.”

  “Other gentlemen?” Mary cocked her head at the significance of the modifier. Any other girl would have driven her wildly jealous, the way the young men had clustered around her—including several of Mary's own beaux.

  Tilda turned her enormous blue eyes
upon Mary. “You won't tell?”

  Mary shook her head.

  “There's a...a gentleman.” Self-possessed and matter-of-fact as she had been all evening, the girl blushed. “Back home. Mr. Strong.” She could barely bring out his name above a whisper, as if the syllable was a precious thing. “Papa thinks I must look about me a little—he says I am too young. A girl must have beaux, you know,” she assured Mary anxiously, as if she thought that after flirting with a dozen men herself Mary would somehow object. “But... I could never truly look at another man, you know.”

  Mary gave her a smile that beamed with understanding. “I know.” And made a resolve to encourage her young cousin in exactly that course of action, no matter how long she should stay beneath Ninian's roof.

  The fact that at no time did she worry about losing Lincoln to Tilda did not, however, make it any easier to watch him follow the girl with his eyes, and stand talking with her for fifteen minutes at a time at the American House ball that marked the opening of the Legislative session. In response, Mary flirted and danced with every other suitor she could attract. Back in Lexington, she had learned that if a girl wanted to gain and hold a man's attention, all she had to do was lavish her smiles upon another man. Stephen Douglas danced as divinely as ever; Jimmy Shields was most assiduous in bringing her cups of punch (with superhuman resolve, she eschewed the cake).

  And Lincoln, hovering at the edge of the cluster of young clerks and delegates around that slim, blonde vision in pink silk, barely seemed to notice Mary was in the room.

  As far as Mary could see—and she kept as much of an eye on the group around Matilda as she could while engaged in holding as many other men as possible on her own string—Lincoln never worked up the courage to so much as approach the girl as a suitor. That could have had something to do with whatever he might have overheard Elizabeth snap at Mary about him during their quarrel.

  And it could have been because Josh Speed had also fallen—apparently quite seriously—in love with Matilda, too.

  Mary's temper shortened as the evening progressed, until she finally lashed out at Julia Jayne over some casual jest about Mary's new dress. She left the assembly-room in tears. Jamie Conkling—who had become great friends with her, since their mutually beloved Mercy had returned to her parents in Baltimore—escorted her home.

  After that Mary saw little of Lincoln. As a practicing attorney and a member of the State House of Representatives he was, she knew, frenziedly busy. With his party in the minority in both Houses and the whole state's finances in disarray he was fighting an uphill battle to salvage the internal improvement measures that the Whigs had put through. With banks and businesses closing right and left, nobody was about to release funds to build roads, no matter how badly they were needed.

  Sometimes he would call after supper in the evenings, or walk with her on those few Sundays before rain—and then snow—closed in on the prairies. Once, he took her sledding.

  But he was always withdrawn, as if struggling with his own thoughts. On the sledding excursion he spent a good deal of the time talking with Matilda, who had accompanied them in company with Josh Speed.

  Even before Tilda had appeared on the scene—even before Lincoln had walked into Elizabeth's parlor to discover that the prettily plump, high-spirited girl he'd danced with and written to was now a fat, shrieking termagant—there had been times when Mary had wanted to hit him over the head with a book. He was abstracted, absentminded, and perpetually late through becoming absorbed in whatever case he was working on or story he was telling to the loafers who hung around Diller's drugstore. He would drift away into thought and pay no attention to what Mary or anyone else was saying to him. On some occasions, when she was late coming down to the parlor, she'd find him so engrossed in one of Ninian's books that he'd been unaware of her entering the room.

  And if there was something on his mind—and she would take oath, as the winter days advanced toward Christmas, that there was—he was as tight as an oyster about saying what it was.

  Raised in a vociferous family where everyone spoke their mind and if you didn't ask for what you wanted you certainly wouldn't get it, Mary found this silence maddening.

  Yet when, after Lincoln had walked her home one snowy night from a Missionary Society lecture on the South Sea Islands, she asked him what the matter was, he turned the question aside with a story he'd heard about what the native ladies of those islands actually did with the dresses the missionaries sent them: “And I don't know whether the moral of that story has to do with innocence, modesty, or only just the weather there.” Mary had to laugh, in spite of her annoyance, and stepped up on the porch, two steps up so that their faces would be on level when he kissed her, gently, on the cheek. Her hands tightened over his, big and awkward in his mended gloves, and his fingers returned the pressure.

  But he turned away hastily as Ninian came out onto the porch, and as she rustled into the hall to shed her jacket and muff, she heard her brother-in-law say, “A word with you, if I may, Lincoln.”

  Mary froze. She was starting to turn back toward the door when Elizabeth appeared from the parlor: “How was the lecture, dear?” And, when Mary took an impulsive step toward the door, Elizabeth purposefully crossed the room to head her off. “Come into the parlor, dear, and get warm. You must be frozen.”

  “What's Ninian talking to Mr. Lincoln about?” She could hear Ninian's voice on the porch, but he'd closed the door. An understandable thing to do—the night was freezing—but anger and panic stirred in her heart at this exclusion.

  “Good heavens, dear, I don't know.” Elizabeth's usually soft laugh was tinny. “Politics, I suppose....”

  “Ninian sees Mr. Lincoln every day at the State House.”

  Elizabeth put a hand on Mary's elbow to guide her into the parlor, and when Mary balked, her hand tightened. “Darling...”

  Mary tried to yank her elbow away and Elizabeth's grip closed like a claw.

  “Darling,” she repeated, and closed the door of the parlor behind them. There was an edge to her voice, and a wariness in her eyes, bracing for another storm. “Ninian and I have your best interests at heart, you know that. Mr. Lincoln is a very fine man, a very honorable man. But you cannot deny that he is a very cold man, a man who has no particular liking for women....”

  “He is not!” cried Mary, who had the best of reasons to know the volcanic physical desires masked by the lawyer's wary reserve. “Just because he doesn't say a lot of pretty words—”

  “And you cannot deny,” cut in Elizabeth inexorably, “that he is a man ten thousand dollars in debt due to poor business practices. You keep saying that wealth doesn't matter, but you have never been poor.”

  “And I suppose you have?”

  Elizabeth's lips tightened. “Your happiness is my duty, Mary. I assure you, you would not be happy with Mr. Lincoln, even if he should ask for your hand....Which I doubt he will do, the way he's been dangling after Tilda.”

  “That isn't true!” Mary flashed back. “We have an understanding....”

  Elizabeth rolled her eyes.

  “Tilda isn't the slightest interested in him....”

  “Good God, I should hope not!” cried Elizabeth, clearly startled that Mary would even consider an idea so grotesque. “Her father left her here to make a decent match, not to ally herself with a bankrupt clod-crusher, never mind how clever he is. He has no family, Mary, and no—”

  “If you tell me again how he has no money I shall scream!” Mary screamed at her. She pulled free of Elizabeth's grip and slammed through the parlor door and into the hall just as Ninian came in from outside, his sharp nose red with cold. Mary jerked open the front door and stumbled onto the porch.

  “Mr. Lincoln!” she called out into the coal-sack blackness of the snowy night. The glow of the parlor lamps touched the drifting flakes, a foot or two beyond the edge of the porch, but there was no sign of any tall figure in the blackness.

  Sick dread in her heart and tears f
lowing from her eyes, Mary thrust past Elizabeth and Ninian, and ran up the stairs to her room.

  “Darling...” Matilda turned from the mirror where she was brushing her hair as Mary slammed into the big front bedroom. “I'm worried about Mr. Speed.” Speed was the beau who had escorted Matilda to the lecture. “He's become so serious about me—about himself and me—and this evening he said he couldn't endure to remain in Springfield, if he and I could not be together. I'm afraid that—”

  “Oh, leave me alone!” cried Mary, and flung herself down on the bed in a huge storm of crushing petticoats, and buried her face in the pillows. She was crying.

  Matilda, being Matilda, took her at her word and left her alone. For nearly forty minutes she brushed and braided her own lovely flaxen hair while Mary sobbed. Only after Mary's grief began to subside did she wrap every shawl in the unheated room around her for warmth, and cross to the bed and silently take Mary in her arms. Mary held on to her and wept afresh. After a long time, her head aching, she finally consented to be helped to undress.

  She dreamed she was trying to catch up with Mr. Lincoln on an overgrown woodland path; running and stumbling through the sun-splashed green shadows, calling out to him again and again. But her legs were too short, and she was fat and out of breath, and her head ached too terribly. She saw him ahead of her, the flecks of sunlight mottling his coarse Indian-black hair and the faded blue of the homespun shirt he wore, and his long legs carried him away from her, out of sight.

  NEW YEAR'S EVE CAME, AND WITH IT A GIANT COTILLION AT THE American House. Though Lincoln spent most of the evening talking with the men, he was standing beside Mary when midnight tolled, and like every other young couple with an understanding, they kissed. His hands closed tight over hers, though his lips scarcely brushed her cheek. Not much else was possible, with Elizabeth and Ninian only feet away. But as always, Mary felt the hunger in him, the powerful physical desire of an active man coupled with the desperation of an unwanted child. She wanted to drag his mouth down to hers, to let his embrace overwhelm her as it had on her uncle's porch in Columbia, to revel in it as she had then. That physical desire, unspoken of by either, held taut between them, as much a part of their understanding as any amount of Shakespeare and Whig politics.