The Emancipator's Wife

by Barbara Hambly

  Her eyes closed, Mary didn't even see who Matilda kissed as midnight struck.

  But when Lincoln went back immediately to the men, gathered around the long tables that had been set up to the left of the great common-room fireplace, Mary decided he needed a lesson, and proceeded to flirt, turn and turnabout, with every man of the dozen gallants who preferred dances with the ladies to speculation about who President Harrison would appoint to government jobs. With the Legislature and the courts both in session, even the presence of the Vandalia political matron Mrs. Browning and her daughters didn't lessen the ratio of men to women much. Clerks, delegates, and lawyers jockeyed and nudged for a chance to dance with the flaxen Matilda, black-haired Julia, and plump, lively, fascinating Mary Todd.

  Josh Speed danced with them all, but as she circled the room with him in a gay polka, Mary saw Speed's dark eyes follow Matilda's graceful white form. “Mr. Speed,” said Mary worriedly, her small hand resting on his arm as they lilted through the figures.

  The dark gaze returned to her. She saw the marks of sleeplessness in the lined lids, the crease between nostril and mouth, and remembered Matilda's words in their bedroom after the South Sea Islands lecture, and later gossip of Elizabeth's.

  “Tilda...is very fond of you. I know she wouldn't want to think that you would...would do anything rash or foolish because of her.”

  “You mean, like selling up my half of the store and leaving town?” Speed's smile, usually light as sunshine, seemed tired, with the wryness of a beaten man. “Word gets around fast. No.” He shook his head. “Miss Edwards isn't why I decided to sell up, if I sell up...and I still haven't completely made up my mind to do it. Though since Pa's death they do need me now at home.” He managed a chuckle. “God knows what'll become of Lincoln if I do.”

  It was something that had gone through Mary's mind, too. Not that Lincoln couldn't have found someplace—even in the overcrowded boardinghouses of the new state capital—to live. But she knew he depended on Speed's friendship far more than most people suspected. For a man as gregarious as Lincoln was, very few people pierced the iron wall of isolation he kept around his heart.

  Then Speed sighed, and shook his head. “But it's time for a change, Molly...Miss Todd. Time to...I don't know. Fish or cut line on a lot of things. What better time than the New Year?”

  So when Lincoln knocked at the door of the House on the Hill late on New Year's afternoon, when the curtains of cinder-colored twilight were winding themselves thick beyond the windows, Mary thought only that he brought news concerning Speed's decision—or perhaps sought solace for the separation he knew would come.

  New Year's dinner at the House on the Hill was always a special occasion. They had spent the morning, like everyone else in town, in obligatory calls, leaving their cards at every house. Elizabeth was justly proud of her hospitality, and Eppy had worked like the Israelites in Egypt to prepare cakes, pies, gingerbread, and an enormous savory ham for the Leverings, for Ninian's brother Ben and sister-in-law Helen, for Dr. Wallace and Frances, Uncle John Todd and his daughters, plus the thin, red-haired, and irascible Cousin Stephen Logan. After dinner there had been open house, for all the wealthy and fashionable of Springfield: Senator Herndon and the chinless, slightly inebriated, and now-married Billy; Dr. Merriman and Lincoln's friend Dr. Henry, and their wives; Dr. Jayne and his wife with Julia and her brother William; Stephen Douglas and Jimmy Shields and a whole train of other bachelors come to pay court to Mary and Matilda....

  Elizabeth and Eppy had spent the afternoon and evening darting back and forth to the kitchen for claret cups, platters of gingerbread, and cups of coffee, resolutely refusing all offers of help from the girls.

  The last suitors had been gone for an hour. Matilda—who had been extremely quiet all day—had gone upstairs. When the clock struck six, Mary guessed that there would be no more callers, and with a grateful sigh took off her gloves—which were still too tight for her, much to her annoyance—and stood to see what help she could give in the kitchen.

  Then there was a knock on the door. After a long time—Lina, the housemaid, was back in the kitchen helping Eppy clear up—Mary heard the girl's swift feet running to the hall to answer.

  “Is Miss Todd here?” asked the familiar voice.

  And Mary thought, Thank God, Elizabeth's in the kitchen. . . .

  And there he stood, the top tousle of his unruly hair seeming to reach for the wooden archway that separated front parlor from rear.

  She melted into a smile. “Mr. Lincoln! Do sit....”

  He held up his hand to silence her. In the firelight—only a single lamp had been lit in the other parlor—she saw his face was haggard, his eyes filled with the last extremities of wretchedness.

  “Miss Todd,” he said.

  And Mary felt the tears rush to her eyes at the formality of his address. Had it been another man who had gone back to calling her by her surname after the more intimate “Miss Molly,” she would have twitted archly on the defection, fluttered her eyelids, and made her dimples peep....

  Her heart was sick within her. She could say nothing.

  Lincoln took a deep breath and went on, as if he were speaking from memorized notes, as he did in court and on the political platform.

  “Miss Todd, I had meant to communicate with you by letter, setting forth all the reasons why our understanding—if understanding it is—cannot any longer endure. But a better man than I am put that letter on the fire, and convinced me that I was honor-bound to speak to you in person....”

  Mary began to tremble uncontrollably. Her vision of him blurred with tears but she heard the miserable desperation in his voice as he said, “Molly...”

  “I didn't mean to flirt!” she sobbed frantically. “Oh, the deceiver is deceived! I never meant...”

  “Molly, it hasn't got anything to do with you flirting!” The formal tone broke from his voice as he abandoned his rehearsed lines. “Good Lord, I know you flirt with everything in britches! That's just how you are!”

  “I've played fast and loose with you, and now you turn from me....” Shudders wracked her whole body. She collapsed back on the sofa, hands pressing to her face, praying, desperate her tears would change his mind, as they so often changed her father's. “I never, never meant to—”

  “No!” She heard him cross the room to her, felt his arms, so astonishingly strong, gather her to him. Felt the warmth of his body through the wet cold of the coat he still wore. “Molly, it's just it would never work out between us! I'm...I'm saddled with debts....” He stumbled, groping for words. “Poverty is the only thing I'd have to offer any woman....”

  And I can't keep my temper, thought Mary, pressing against him, her hands locked around his lapels, and I let myself get fat....No wonder he wants to run away! Terror of losing him—of losing the one man she could talk to easily, the one man who understood her—ripped at her like the shock of a wound, and she sobbed, “I love you! And you said that you loved me, too!” Don't leave me....

  “Molly...!”

  He lifted her onto his lap, cradled her to him like a child. The physical power that had shocked her, drawn her on the porch in Columbia, now comforted her and she clung to him, her face against his chest, sobbing that it was all her fault and wanting to hold him and never let him go. There has to be something I can say, some way I can undo the damage. . . . “You promised me,” she sobbed again and again, as she had sobbed to her father, to coax dresses out of him. “You said you loved me! I trusted you, I believed you—was your love a lie, then?”

  “No!” He wiped her eyelids, and kissed her cheek, and turning in his arms she pulled his mouth to hers, frantic for reassurance of love. He tried to pull away and she wept harder, refusing to let him go. The next moment he was holding her close, kissing her, not with the passionate hunger of before, but with great gentleness, as if he understood how deep ran her need to be loved.

  Footsteps in the hall.

  Mary stumbled to her feet, Lincoln risin
g above her. “I must go,” he said tonelessly, and Mary nodded, clutching one final time at his hand. He strode from the house just as Elizabeth came into the front hall. Mary fled past her, up the darkness of the stairs. Let her make of that what she pleases. If she thinks I'm weeping because he said good-by, so much the better.

  She knew that above all else, she didn't want to see Elizabeth's satisfied face.

  Matilda was sitting in bed, reading by the light of a branch of candles, her fair hair shining in the amber light. She looked up and saw Mary's face. “Dearest...”

  Mary shook her head violently, and went to stand by the window, though the cold seeped through the panes and made that whole side of the room as icy as outdoors. She pressed her forehead to the glass, hoping that the pounding pain starting behind her eyes would subside. Hoping that she'd catch a glimpse of that tall form striding away into the night. But there was only darkness outside.

  “It has been a day, hasn't it?” came Matilda's voice softly behind her. “I'm so sorry, dearest. And I'm afraid I hurt Mr. Speed terribly this morning....”

  “Mr. Speed?” Mary turned back from the window, remembering how Speed had seemed to see no one but Matilda, all through the ball last night.

  Speed, she recalled then, had been one of the few members of the Coterie who had not passed through the parlor that day.

  “He came by just after breakfast, while you were still upstairs,” said Matilda softly, shutting her book. “He asked me to marry him, so tenderly—it quite broke my heart to tell him that I could not.”

  Mary whispered, “Poor Speed.” And turned to look out once more into the darkness.

  So Lincoln had heard that Matilda had turned down Speed—and that he was now free to court her without fear of hurting his friend.

  And had rushed immediately to end whatever existed between Mary and himself.

  Mary closed her eyes and knew she hated all men.

  “Not a very good start for the year 1841, is it?” Matilda's voice was sad.

  “No,” said Mary, softly. “Not a very good start.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  WITHIN A WEEK, JOSHUA SPEED SOLD OUT HIS SHARE IN BELL'S drygoods store and made arrangements to return to his family in Kentucky. If Tilda shed any tears at the prospect of his departure, she didn't do so in Mary's presence.

  When Lincoln neither called on Mary nor sent her a note by the second week of January, she made an excuse and had Jerry drive her down to the offices of the Sangamo Journal.

  Any lady who was a proper lady would, of course, have sent in her card to Simeon Francis and waited in the carriage. But by the standards of Lexington society, no true lady would have gone seeking word of Lincoln in the first place—certainly no self-respecting belle would have dreamed of letting herself be seen wearing the willow for any man—and Mary had always been a believer in the sheep-and-lamb principle.

  She could just imagine what Betsey, or Betsey's redoubtable mother, would have to say about the single big room of the print-shop, with its bare wooden floor reeking of ink and spit tobacco. Though the Sangamo Journal was the leading Whig newspaper of the state, Simeon Francis still couldn't afford to hire a clerk or turn down job-printing work to make ends meet. When Mary entered, the stocky editor was setting type for calling cards for the wealthy Mrs. Iles, working as close to the iron heating-stove as he could in the bitter cold.

  “Miss Todd!”

  “I realize it's not terribly ladylike of me to come here, sir,” said Mary, with a wan twinkle. “But it wouldn't have been ladylike of me to make you come out to the street and freeze to death, and...” She hesitated, holding out her hands to the stove, wondering what Springfield gossip had spread so far about herself and Lincoln.

  She finished, “...and there were reasons that I couldn't write you, to come to the house.”

  “I take it—” Simeon wrapped an inky rag around his fist to pick up the tin coffee-pot and pour her a cup “—this concerns Lincoln?” Mary flushed, and looked down into the black depths of the liquid he handed her, unable for a moment to reply. “Since I understand your sister and Ninian aren't exactly in favor of your engagement?”

  “Did Mr. Lincoln tell you this?”

  She glanced up as she spoke, saw the compassion in his blue eyes, and wondered what Lincoln had told him. Wondered for the thousandth time what Ninian had said to Lincoln, back on that snowy night in November.

  She sipped the coffee. It was utterly poisonous.

  “I've heard nothing from him, sir,” she said, in what she hoped was a matter-of-fact voice. “I was concerned he'd been taken sick. I haven't wanted to...to ask Ninian.”

  “No.” Simeon sighed and propped his small square spectacles up onto the bridge of his nose. “No, I understand.”

  “Is he ill?”

  Dear God, she thought, suddenly aghast, don't let Mr. Francis say he's been fancy-free and happy as a lark and going about his business. . . .

  “Not in body, no, I don't think so,” replied the editor slowly. He drew up a wooden chair for her, of the several that stood around the stove, silent reminders of the male political camaraderie from which Mary was forever excluded. “As far as I know he's been hauling himself down to the Methodist Church to vote in the Assembly most days. I'm glad he has, to tell you the truth, for it gets him out of his room. He and Speed are both rooming at Bill Butler's these days, while Speed gets his affairs together. When Lincoln's not actually in the Assembly he's up there alone. Pacing, sometimes, Speed tells me. Sometimes just sitting staring out at the sleet.”

  Mary was silent, shocked. Lincoln had told her he was subject to fits of sadness—hypochondria, he called them deprecatingly. But he had jested about them, as a man might jest about breaking out in a rash when he ate strawberries.

  To her mind, unbidden, rose the desperation in his voice as he'd cried, “Molly...” The passion of his kisses and the shocked horror in his eyes as he'd seen her for the first time in the full spate of her fury against Elizabeth. I've driven him away, she thought, and tried to push the thought from her mind. He loves me, but . . .

  Or have I killed his love for me?

  Yet how could he have kissed me with such frenzy, if he didn't love me?

  Had he kissed Matilda that way? Had he dreamed of doing so? Was he only waiting for his best friend to leave town so he could have his chance to try?

  She felt her eyes fill with tears, not knowing whether they were of sorrow or blind, screaming rage at the man she loved. She fought them back: I must not, must not, have a tantrum, or a fit of crying, for Mr. Francis to tell him about. . . .

  Are they all talking about me like that?

  The recollection of every spurt of rage, every sharp-tongued retort, speared through her mind like a rainstorm of daggers: remorse, panic, shame. Then murderous anger at everyone for talking of her when it wasn't their business, for laughing at her behind her back.

  Very carefully, she said, “May I...would you take him a note, sir?” She fought the impulse to run out to the carriage, to tell Jerry to take her to Butler's boardinghouse. To rush into that dark and lonely—and probably icily cold—room and tell the tall, silent man there how much she loved him, how much she needed him....

  To beg his forgiveness, to make him say that he loved her, too.

  To hear him say that he wasn't really in love with Matilda, that he wasn't really in torment of mind because Matilda was really the one he wanted to wed.

  But of course it was ridiculous. No young woman ever called on a bachelor in his room.

  Ever.

  No matter how much she needed to hear his voice.

  Tears began to flow down her cheeks, hot against her chilled skin. If she'd ever doubted she loved him, she knew now that she did.

  Simeon said gently, “Of course, Miss Todd.” He moved toward the end of the table closest to the stove. Mary guessed that the ink at the far end would be frozen.

  She brought her hand from her muff, held it up to stay him: “
Thank you, Mr. Francis. I'll...I'll send one over later, if you'd be so kind.”

  Back in her room Mary prayed, Dear God, don't let him be really in love with Matilda. But she felt as always that she was speaking the words into an empty room. She had always been able to move her father by her desperate tears of contrition, and to move Lincoln.

  She'd never managed to move God.

  Sitting at the little vanity—profoundly thankful, cold as it was, Matilda was out paying calls with Elizabeth—Mary tried to compose a note to Lincoln. But again and again her mind turned to the thought of that tall skinny storyteller sitting alone in his room—the new room that he now occupied alone—with a blanket around his shoulders, staring out at the driving sleet.

  An exile from the world he sought to leave behind, and an unaccepted sojourner in the world of ideas, power, and the responsibility for not only his own actions but the well-being of others.

  And she could find nothing to say to him except, I love you. Don't leave me.

  The following day she still hadn't found the words to write. The weather was foul, snowing and sleeting, and she sat in the parlor with Elizabeth and Matilda, drinking tea and making a brown challis dress for the St. Valentine's Day ball that would be held at the American House...annoyed because she still couldn't fit into last winter's ball-dresses even though the seams had been let out as far as they'd go. “It absolutely isn't fair,” she declared archly, stitching lace to the low swoop of the corsage. “You eat one piece of cake and you get enormously fat, and then it takes years of nibbling on bread and water before all is well again...that can't be right, can it? Why don't we ever have a lecturer at the Mechanics Institute on why that happens?”