The Emancipator's Wife

by Barbara Hambly

  And both Elizabeth and Matilda—who appeared to be able to consume tarts and gingerbread all day without gaining an ounce—went into peals of laughter.

  Lina appeared in the door. “Miss Molly? Dr. Henry's here to speak to you.”

  Shabby-looking as always, the angular physician bowed as he came into the room. Elizabeth rose graciously and said, “You must be frozen, Dr. Henry,” in a voice that Mary had heard her use on other occasions when she was being gracious to people she considered beneath the notice of Todds. “Lina, please fetch another cup for Dr. Henry.”

  “Please don't trouble....”

  “It's not a bit of trouble....”

  He's here from Mr. Lincoln. Mary knew it, for Dr. Henry was, like Simeon, one of the closest friends Lincoln had in Springfield. Her heart seemed to shrink in her breast to the size of an apple-seed.

  She wondered whether Speed would have come, if he hadn't feared meeting Matilda.

  She set aside the yards of soft snuff-colored fabric and sat with folded hands, saying all the proper things in the long rigamarole ritual of tea and welcome and “Oh, Matilda and I can go sit in the front parlor...” which was freezing cold, no fire being kindled there on days when Elizabeth was not receiving company....

  And wanting to scream.

  After byzantine maneuverings, Elizabeth and Matilda left the parlor for the kitchen. Dr. Henry sat quiet for a time in the upholstered velvet chair Elizabeth had vacated, and Mary, hands still folded, waited, feeling as if the room echoed with the hammering of her heart.

  She knew she should make some further inane inquiry about Dr. Henry's health, or how was dear Mrs. Henry...? Or offer him sugar or a slice of gingerbread. No young lady—as Betsey, and Elizabeth, and Mammy Sally had always impressed upon her—ever came at things brashly with a man, letting him know what you thought or wanted.

  But she felt too lost to go on.

  “How is Mr. Lincoln?”

  “Not well,” said Dr. Henry.

  I will not cry.

  “He is...in terrible torment of mind. And the body can endure only so much, when the mind is torn, as his is, between scruples, and honor, and desire.”

  What a tidy formula, thought Mary bitterly. She shut her lips on the question, What is his desire, and exactly where does he think his honor lies?

  “You should remember, too,” Henry went on, turning Elizabeth's silver sugar-tongs over and over in his thin fingers, “that for nine months now he has worn himself out physically, campaigning. And the Legislature rescinding all those motions and plans he fought so hard for, I think only added to this crisis in him. You know how deep his passions are, behind that bumpkin façade.”

  Mary nodded silently, remembering the power of his arms around her, the naked hunger of his kiss.

  “He is a man whose heart is stronger than his body.” Dr. Henry set the tongs down, finally met her eyes. “And it is wearing him away. Speed looks after him as well as he can, and his new landlady Mrs. Butler, but we are all concerned.”

  Mary drew a deep breath. “Does he want me to release him from our engagement?” She wondered whose voice it was that she heard saying those words. It sounded astonishingly calm.

  Henry leaned forward, and took her hands.

  That means yes, thought Mary, despairing, even before he replied.

  “Miss Todd, Mr. Lincoln holds you in highest esteem. Too high to put you in the position you would be in, he says, were you to go through with this match. His debts weigh heavily on his mind, and the...the disapproval of your family....”

  “He says,” repeated Mary, and looked helplessly into those kind and worried blue eyes. “What do you say, Dr. Henry?”

  Did he tell you about Matilda Edwards?

  Would you say so, if he had?

  She remembered Lincoln telling her he'd written a letter, which someone—probably Speed—had put on the fire. Had he written because he knew that he couldn't face a woman's tears? Because he knew he was no good speaking without notes, and would end up giving in if she cried?

  Or because, as she'd learned in their correspondence over the summer, he could write what was truly in his heart?

  She remembered Speed telling her that Lincoln had broken up with his last fiancée—the portly Miss Owens over in New Salem—by letter. Had he seen her face-to-face—had she wept as Mary had wept on New Year's Day—would he be married now?

  I'm twenty-two! she wanted to scream. How much longer can I go on waiting?

  “I'm a doctor of people's bodies, Miss Todd,” said Henry gently. “Not their minds, and not their hearts.”

  “His heart?” she asked, trying to keep the anger out of her voice. “Or mine?”

  She wrote the letter sitting in the parlor before the fire, while Dr. Henry sipped his tea and Elizabeth and Matilda undoubtedly dissected Lincoln's character and prospects in the kitchen and prayed that Mary would come to her senses. Mary forced herself to pretend she was writing a practice composition at Madame Mentelle's: My dear Mr. Lincoln, it is with deep sorrow (deepest sorrow?) that I take pen in hand. . . .

  Her usual method of writing was to write as she spoke, tumbling, hurried, thoughts sparking other thoughts in a welter of ellipses, parentheses, and underlines. Now she forced herself to consider every word, to remain formal and contained. I release you, I wish you well, but remember that my feelings toward you have in no way changed. I will always be . . . Your Mary.

  Her hands shook as she put down the pen and, contrary to Elizabeth's repeated admonitions of thrift, she thrust the three botched attempts into the fire. Let Elizabeth guess what she might have said rather than find it on the back of a sheet on which she wrote her grocery-lists.

  She was still staring into the fire as Dr. Henry took his departure. “Is everything all right?” she heard Elizabeth inquire in the hall, and despair flared in her at the note of smug satisfaction she detected in her sister's voice.

  Cold flowed through the room with the opening and closing of the outer door.

  SPEED LEFT SPRINGFIELD QUIETLY BEFORE THE END OF JANUARY. Dances were held in the big common-room of the American House in honor of St. Valentine's Day and Washington's Birthday: Lincoln attended neither. There was a rumor—which Mary heard through Jamie Conkling, Mercy's fiancé—that the new President, Mr. Harrison, was considering Lincoln for chargé d'affaires of Bogotá, in return for the prodigious efforts Lincoln had put forth during the campaign. Mary's heart was sick at the thought of Lincoln leaving Springfield—leaving the country!—but it came to nothing. President Harrison died in April, and his Vice-President, former Virginia governor John Tyler, was a compromise nomination whom no one had taken seriously. Tyler took over as President, owing no favors to anyone.

  Ninian and others, who had expected great rewards from a successful Whig candidate, were considerably miffed.

  A more serious rumor—and one that Mary tried to push from her mind—was that Lincoln, in addition to wearing the willow for Matilda Edwards, was shyly courting his landlady's young sister: “A much better match, if you ask me,” sniffed Elizabeth. “Though what a child of sixteen would want with marrying a man of thirty-two, I'll never know. Not that there's anything wrong with a young girl marrying a man of maturer years,” she added hastily—she and Mary were in the ladies' cloakroom at the American House, Mary having been press-ganged into pinning up a torn petticoat-flounce at the Washington's birthday dance. “Was that Mr. Webb I saw you dancing with earlier, dear?”

  “It was.” Mary concentrated on pinning the stiff taffeta—not easy, between the uncertain dimness of the single oil-lamp, the arctic temperature of the cloakroom, and the shrieks of laughter from Mrs. Browning's daughters nearby as they compared notes about a friend's engagement. Her breath was a cloudy puff of gold. “Trying to be gallant and to pretend that he hasn't two darling little objections to any sane woman taking her place as the second Mrs. Webb.”

  “Now, dearest,” coaxed her sister, “you know how you like children. You alwa
ys said how you loved your little pupils at Ward's. And you're just a marvel, Betsey writes me, with the little ones at home. As for Mr. Lincoln, marrying the Rickard girl will do him no good politically. She's quite common, I understand, as one could expect. But then, for all Mr. Lincoln's undoubted virtues, his background and manner are such that no one can or would take him seriously for any post higher than the State Legislature.” Disinterested as she was in politics, Elizabeth was still Ninian's wife.

  Mary bent her face down over her sister's petticoat-frill, unable to trust herself to meet Elizabeth's eyes.

  “Don't tell me he fell for that?” gasped one of the Browning girls, and the other said, “Darling, men have no idea how long it takes for a woman to know she's with child! They don't know what's happening when we get our monthlies, or anything about women, really. You can tell them almost any tale and they'll believe it.”

  I drove him away, thought Mary dully. Not just to Matilda, who of course isn't interested in him, but to this . . . this sly little chit of a girl. It was all she could do not scream, to leave the American House that night and go at once to the Butler house, where Lincoln was boarding.

  To throw herself, sobbing, into his arms again? To promise as she promised Elizabeth and Mercy and Julia and everyone else who knew her, at one time or another, that she didn't mean the things she said when she was in a temper? I don't want to be this way . . .!

  Or to pull Sarah Rickard's hair out in black handfuls and fling it into Lincoln's face?

  For an interminable year, she waited for the news that Lincoln was going to marry Sarah Rickard.

  And wondered what on earth she was going to do if he did.

  Through the bitter days of winter she did daily battle with her pride not to write to him, to engineer a meeting. Instead she systematically kept every other beau in Springfield on her string and tried not to remember that she was now twenty-two. Only in Springfield was it possible for her to remain a courted belle—in Lexington she'd have been on the sidelines years ago, hearing the Arabella Richardson Bodleys of the world say “Poor dear,” in hatefully sweet sympathy.

  There was Mr. Webb, of course, faithful and paternal as ever.

  And for a time she toyed with the idea of detaching the handsome Lyman Trumbull from his growing affection for Julia Jayne. Two years ago, in Lexington, she wouldn't have hesitated about it for an instant.

  But the grip of Lincoln's hands on her shoulders—the slow deep twinkle in those gray eyes when she picked a hole in Douglas's tirade on states' rights, or made some sharp observation on a third party that amused him...How could she forget those and make herself settle for someone else?

  When spring came and people started getting about the streets a little more, Mary would see Sarah Rickard coming and going from the Butler boarding establishment, a slender small girl with black hair and tilting dark eyes. It had hurt her, that Lincoln had asked for release from her the moment he knew that his best friend no longer had any claim on Matilda Edwards, but in her heart she'd known that Matilda was no threat. If Ninian frowned on Lincoln courting a mere Edwards sister-in-law like Mary, even had Matilda been willing, he would never have permitted a match between Lincoln and a full-blood Edwards.

  But this black-haired sprite in flowered green calico was a girl of the world Lincoln had left, a girl of the farms and the backwoods, who sang the old ballads he loved as she went about her work.

  So Mary waited. She never saw them in company, and listen as she would, there seemed to be no other gossip about them, one way or the other—where Elizabeth had picked up her information Mary didn't know. Lincoln dissolved his partnership with Cousin John Stuart, who since his election to Congress had been drifting further and further from him politically. Instead Lincoln went into partnership with Mary's elderly and irascible cousin Stephen Logan. When April opened the roads, Lincoln began riding the circuit again: Tazewell County, McLean County, Livingston County, DeWitt County, Champaign County, Logan County, Menard County. She saw him little in company, and wondered if, having been told that he was no fit mate for a Todd of Lexington and unwelcome in the Edwards family circle, he had withdrawn completely from the gay social circles of the town.

  But ladies did not ask such things of their brothers-in-law.

  In June, Springfield was shaken by the murder trial of the Trailor brothers, William, Henry, and Archibald. The three men had been seen entering town with the amiable and simpleminded Archibald Fisher, who had then vanished. The town hummed with anger and suspicion, posses going out to spend most of a week searching the brush along Spring Creek and tearing down Hickox's milldam so the stream could be dragged. Returning to town, Lincoln patiently asked questions of everyone in sight, combed the countryside, and eventually located Archibald Fisher in the care of a doctor who had found him wandering about the countryside after a mild head injury, much to the secret annoyance of everyone who'd come to the trial expecting it to end in a spectacular triple hanging.

  Mary, personally, had to clap her hands over her mouth to keep from laughing when Lincoln rose to his full gangly height in the courtroom and said, in that high, rather hesitant voice, “Your Honor, I would like to call to the stand Mr. Archibald Fisher....”

  On the way out a spectator muttered, “It was too damned bad, to have so much trouble, and no hanging after all.”

  Ninian's only comment was “Jackanapes.”

  But she could see how the production of the supposed victim, alive and smiling mildly, in open court before a townful of would-be spectators to a hanging, would have been more than Lincoln could resist. Seeing him from the back row of the crowded courtroom, she thought he looked exhausted, like a man burning up inside with slow fever. If he saw her, he gave no sign of it.

  The courts adjourned for the summer. Lincoln left for Kentucky, to spend some weeks with Speed at Speed's family plantation near Louisville. Thus he missed Mercy Levering's marriage to James Conkling, and the sight of a somewhat thinner Mary bedecked in a new frock of pink and copper sprig-muslin—her father had come through with a special gift yet again. She wondered if Lincoln would have stood up with Jamie, had Mary herself not been present.

  Were people saying, behind her back, “Thrice a bridesmaid, never a bride”?

  During that long summer, she thought often of that tall shy backwoodsman, encountering for the first time the slow-paced luxury of a Kentucky plantation. Wished she could be there, or at least read a letter of his impressions of the world she knew so well. She pictured him, sitting on the porch of the Big House with Joshua—though most of those “Big Houses” were not actually so big—listening to the singing of the field hands as they came home in the twilight. How would it look to him, that strange double world of white and black?

  Christmas came, and spring again, and summer's heat and storms. Matilda Edwards departed gracefully for Alton, having broken every heart, male and female, in Sangamon County.

  Mary was twenty-three.

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

  She turned down another offer from Mr. Webb, put Mr. Gillespie off with smiles and dimples and eyelids fluttered behind her fan.

  Elizabeth started to look at her with sharp sidelong glances, which did nothing for Mary's temper.

  She was waiting. She did not know what she was waiting for.

  “I would like to see him happy,” she said, one afternoon in late August, when Bessie Francis, Simeon's stout motherly wife, came calling and found Elizabeth out. It wasn't often that Mary saw Bessie alone, but she liked the big woman, who shared her love of politics and, being Simeon Francis's wife, knew everything about everyone in Sangamon County. She asked Bessie to stay, and Eppy brought lemonade from the kitchen to the sweet-scented shade of the porch, for the day was grillingly hot. Among the things the two women laughed about was the anonymous letter Lincoln had written to the Journal, hilariously funny as all Lincoln's political satires were and signed “Rebecca of the Lost Townships,” poking fun at the politic
al policies of the dapper Jimmy Shields.

  “He writes these pieces that leave everyone laughing.... He was the one who wrote the Sampson's Ghost letters, wasn't he?”

  “Couldn't you tell?”

  “Once I got to know him, yes. And all those other silly aliases he uses, like John Blubberhead. And yet with that, and with all his jokes and jests, every time I look at him I see this...this terrible sadness. A darkness . . . It goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me but a sterile promontory. Is he . . .” Mary hesitated. “Is he happier now?”

  Bessie didn't answer for a time, but in her eyes Mary saw an understanding, and another question entirely. Before her younger friends, Mary was careful to chatter of beaux and frolics, for there was nothing so dreadful as to be seen wearing the willow for a man who'd made a spectacle of himself following Matilda Edwards all around town . . .

  But Bessie, in her forties, wasn't a frolic or a gossip.

  After a little silence the older woman sighed. “No,” she answered, “I don't think he's happier. I don't think Abraham has had much experience with happiness in his life. I suspect he's always been too intelligent not to see farther than is comfortable for a man.” Bessie—and Mrs. Butler, Lincoln's landlady—were the only people in town who called Lincoln Abraham. “Are you happier now, Molly?”

  Mary mutely shook her head.

  Bessie said nothing, only plied her fan of stiffened newspaper. Around them, bees hummed in the honeysuckle.

  “I know I should get over him and move on.” Mary tried to force her voice not to tremble. “I know it's absurd to . . . to turn down what Elizabeth calls ‘good offers,' as if they were pieces of land come up for sale. She asked me last night what my plans were, and I don't know! But the thought of marrying anyone else is . . . is simply impossible.”

  Bessie smiled, with gentle teasing, “That's not what Mr. Gillespie seems to think. Or Mr. Webb. Or Mr. Trumbull . . .”