The Emancipator's Wife

by Barbara Hambly

  “Well, a girl must have beaux.” Mary plucked a sprig of the honeysuckle, turned it in her fingers, as Mercy had done that evening, five years ago. Then she asked, “I heard . . . that is, someone mentioned to me . . . that Mr. Lincoln was courting Sarah Rickard.” She glanced quickly at her guest, then turned her eyes out to the shadows of the lawn again, to the sporadic passersby on Second Street. “Is that true?”

  Bessie sighed. “That was over months ago.” She looked as if she might have said something else, then held her peace, and said instead, “And since that time he's been on the road almost constantly, traveling between the courts.”

  Mary stroked the polished leaf in her hand, and said, “Indeed.” Silence lay between them for a time, broken by the metallic throb of the cicadas in the trees.

  “Well.” The older woman rose to go. “Simeon tells me you speak and read French like a native—is that true? For he's gotten a box of the oddest old French books, and hasn't the faintest idea of what they are or what to do with them. Would you care to come over to dinner Saturday and help us look through them?”

  “I'd love it!” Mary stood too, and walked her the few feet to the steps. “The one thing about Springfield that's the hardest to bear, is that I can never find a novel I haven't read before! It makes me glad I read French because that gives me that much more chance of finding something!”

  “Well,” smiled Bessie, “I hope we'll have something Saturday that will cheer you.”

  Accordingly, on Saturday evening Jerry harnessed the carriage and drove Mary the few streets to the Francis house. Though Springfield was still very much a frontier town, with woods and prairies only a few blocks from the new (and in places still unfinished) State House, Simeon Francis had a large and pleasant house, built of whitewashed lumber and surrounded by wide gardens of vegetables and flowers. Bessie was renowned as a cook, though like most of the housewives in Springfield she was in a constant quest to find and keep a servant girl from among the daughters of the itinerant population of Irish and Portuguese laborers. Guests of the Francises were just as likely to be pressed into service making gravy as entertained in the parlor.

  Though it was nearly eight by the Courthouse clock, the sun had not yet set. The house was filled with the scent of boiled vinegar—Bessie had obviously been doing her pickling that day, even as Mary had spent most of the afternoon in the sweltering kitchen helping Eppy and Elizabeth put up preserves. Simeon greeted Mary on the porch and led her through to the parlor, where Bessie, red-faced and a little rumpled-looking, sat on a low pouf with a small box of books before her.

  “Mr. Speed used to stock books at Bell's,” the older woman said. “But that imbecile Irwin doesn't see the use in anything that isn't an almanac or a book on how to physic horses.... This looks like a novel.”

  “It's Notre Dame de Paris!” exclaimed Mary in delight. “Victor Hugo—the story of the hunchback and the gypsy-girl! Oh, put it aside for me . . . whatever it costs, I'll pay you . . . or I'll write Papa to pay you,” she added with a laugh. “This one isn't French but Spanish: Lope de Vega. And Manon Lescaut . . . Oh, put this aside for me but don't dare tell Elizabeth.... Oh, and Les Liaisons Dangereuses!”

  So absorbed was she in looking through the volumes—and trying to think of a way of getting Les Liaisons back to the house with her that evening without incurring Elizabeth's censure—that she didn't even hear Simeon leave the room until he returned. Then she only saw Bessie look up and smile, and turning her head to see who had entered, Mary—with her hair tumbled forward from its ribbons in her enthusiasm and book-dust all over her hands—found herself face-to-face with Lincoln.

  “Simeon,” commanded Bessie briskly, “I need help with the corn pudding.” And she caught her husband's sleeve and dragged him bodily from the room.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  “I'VE MISSED YOU,” SAID LINCOLN BLUNTLY, INTO THE PROFOUND silence that followed.

  You knew exactly where a letter would reach me, surged to Mary's lips—anger, pique, love, humiliation . . . the scared pain of eighteen months.

  She took a deep breath and said, “I've missed you, too.”

  She started to rise from the hassock where she sat and Lincoln said, “No, don't get up, I'll come on down there. What have you got?” He folded his long legs, to sit on the floor beside her hassock.

  “Books,” said Mary, blessing Bessie—the scheming matchmaker!—from the bottom of her heart. And, when Lincoln picked up Les Liaisons, she added with a quick grin, “I'll have to smuggle that one into the house. It's supposed to be most improper for girls to read.”

  Lincoln grinned back. It was almost as if all the past year and a half had never been. “Well, there's chapters of the Book of Genesis—and Judges, too!—that wouldn't pass muster by half the ministers in this town.”

  “Oh, tell me which!” Mary bounced on the hassock and clapped her hands like a child.

  “Now, I had enough hard names called me campaigning for Harrison, I'm not going to have ‘corrupter of young maidens' added to the list.” A door closed somewhere in the house; Simeon's voice called back to the kitchen.

  “. . . for goodness' sake, Bessie, there's only the four of us, unless you've got the Russian Army in the basement and didn't tell me about it....”

  Bessie was famous for the quantity, as well as the quality, of the food she served.

  Lincoln's eyes warmed with affection at the overheard words. Then he looked back at Mary, and the amusement died away. Gently, he said, “Miss Todd . . .”

  “You may make that Molly,” said Mary softly. “If you like.”

  Lincoln was silent, no doubt turning over in his mind what it meant to call her by her nickname again. Then, very quietly, he said, “Molly. All these months I've owed you an apology that I wasn't man enough to make. I know I hurt you. I am sorrier for that than I have ever been for anything in my life.”

  Mary said, “It's all right.”

  “And I made a fool of myself.”

  You certainly did! In front of all Springfield, too. And of me . . . What are you saying, Mary Todd???

  She took a breath again, thanking God that for once in her life she hadn't blurted her first, fatal, unconsidered thought.

  Why was it that in novels, girls who loved and who passed through pain were always afterwards in perfect control of their hearts and thoughts and their nasty, flaying, ungovernable tongues?

  “People do.” She looked into his face, so close, for once, by her own. “Goodness knows I've gone through most of my life making a fool of myself. Saying things that I later wish I'd cut out my tongue before I said. Because I do wish that, I can't tell you how often.”

  Simeon came in then, with the announcement that dinner was on the table. If Mary had had a gun then, she would have shot him. Over dinner she asked Lincoln about Kentucky, and they were able to compare their thoughts concerning the divided world of the South. “I'd seen slaves being sold on the block in New Orleans,” Lincoln told her. “Right out on the sidewalks of Baronne Street, like so many cattle. And comin' down the river on the flatboat, we'd see 'em in the sugar-fields, an' hear 'em sing, strange songs, African they must've been, like nuthin' human. But this was the first time I've lived with house-slaves fetchin' whatever I needed, an' cleanin' an' cookin'; first chance I'd had to actually talk to Mrs. Speed's servants. A couple evenin's I walked out to the quarters. Though I don't imagine they'd tell a white man the truth about what they really felt, I did hear some remarkable storytellin'.”

  “Did they tell you about the Evil Mr. Jaybird, who takes tales of bad children to whisper into Satan's ear in Hell?” asked Mary with a twinkle. “My Mammy used to scare me to death with that one.”

  His eyes widened in alarm. “Lord, I guess it would! No, I didn't hear that one . . . though I did get to pretend I was a Democrat for an hour and a half, so Speed could have the time alone with the young lady he was courtin', while I kept her pa busy rakin' me over about politics.”

  �
��That,” laughed Simeon, “is nobility beyond the common run, Lincoln.”

  And Mary said, as lightly as she could, “It's good to know other people besides myself have families like dragons, that have to be fought.”

  At the end of the evening Lincoln helped Mary on with her light lace shawl, when the jingle of harness announced the arrival of the Edwards carriage. Mary cast a quick glance through the front window, praying that neither Ninian nor Elizabeth had decided to go for a little ride in the cool night air. But as far as she could see—the quarter-moon had risen late and it was very dark beyond the tiny yellow spots of the carriage lamps—only Jerry was on the box, so there would be no need to fear that that unmistakable tall silhouette would be seen in the lamplight of the door.

  “Is there . . .” Lincoln hesitated, his big hands ever so slightly brushing her arms as he settled the lace wrap in place. “Is there any chance that we might meet again?”

  Mary turned, her heart pounding suddenly, and looked up into his face. “I'm sure Bessie and Simeon could arrange it. Couldn't you?” Her glance went past him to their hosts. Bessie was smiling. Lincoln looked grave, and a little unhappy—Ninian had been a friend too long for him to feel comfortable about carrying on clandestine meetings with a member of his household. Mary wondered again what her brother-in-law had said to Lincoln, that night the winter before last, and told herself firmly that she'd only be arrested if she went straight home and brained him with the fire-shovel.

  Not for separating them, she realized. But for hurting a sensitive man already so cruelly uncertain of himself.

  A week later, Bessie Francis sent a note to Mary asking for her help in making over a dress—a task both of them knew Elizabeth loathed—on a night when they knew Elizabeth would be out with the ladies of the Episcopal Church sewing circle. Again Bessie dragged Simeon away to “help with supper” for nearly an hour and a half, and Mary and Lincoln sat in the parlor, talking and more at their ease than Mary could remember at any time in their earlier courtship. Had his sojourn in the world from which she'd come, she wondered, changed his perspective on her? She recalled his diffidence in company—and their earlier meetings had nearly always been in company. Recalled, too, how she had flirted with other men.

  “It's just what one does, Mr. Lincoln,” she explained earnestly, when the subject came up, and to her relief he laughed, as if she were some titled French lady explaining royal court procedure to an American. “One must have beaux.”

  “So I hear tell,” he replied, scratching his deplorable hair. “And I've always thought the ladies should have just as much right to wag their tails as us men.”

  They helped clear up after supper, and sat in the warm darkness of the porch watching the fireflies. When Simeon and Bessie went inside Lincoln kissed her, gently at first and then with hungry urgency. Mary returned home that night shaken to her bones and profoundly glad that the single lamp in Ninian's front hall was too dim to give Elizabeth much of a look at her face.

  Love grew in her like weeds in a wet, hot June. Love, and passion, for his roving touch waked in her a reciprocal sensuousness. She no longer wondered how the blameless heroines of so many novels “fell.” Had not Lincoln been scrupulous of her honor, even in the midst of their most fevered embraces, Mary guessed how easy it would have been for them to slip from caresses that teetered on the edge of danger into coupling like animals in the hot darkness of the parlor.

  She found herself thinking, for days on end, of the strength of his arms and the smell of his flesh, with an intensity that made her blush. She was aware, as the first sharp frost of September silvered the grass, that Elizabeth was watching her more closely. But it was hard now to hide her thoughts. Did Lincoln think of her, too? Daydream about her? When he was in the State House, or the brick building where the courts met, did he count the hours and the days until Bessie thought up some other excuse to invite them both to dinner?

  Even when they were alone together, he was deeply self-contained. When he spoke with passion, that passion was often directed toward politics, toward justice and the purposes for which men united to govern themselves or toward the law.

  His own passions he seemed to fear, thrusting her away from him sometimes with trembling abruptness, as he had the first time he'd kissed her. It was as if, for him, any middle ground between the clearheaded comradeship of two Whig politicians—one of whom happened to be a woman—and the brute lust that she tasted in his kisses was unexplored territory, in which he did not know his way. When he held her in his arms he whispered, “My God, Molly, I love you,” but at other times he held himself back. Not aloof, but simply deflecting the issue, as he'd deftly dodge answers about road-tax legislation by coming up with some absurd story or jest that would have everyone laughing so hard they'd forget that he hadn't made a direct reply.

  Was that because he was a lawyer? she wondered. Or because somewhere, sometime, someone had taught him to keep every feeling to himself?

  It was at Simeon's that he read out loud to her the second of the “Rebecca” letters, describing, in an aside about Jimmy Shields's honesty in office, “I seed him . . . floating from one lady to another and on his very features could be read his thoughts: ‘Dear girls, it is distressing, but I cannot marry you all. Too well I know how much you suffer; but do, do remember, it is not my fault that I am so handsome and so interesting.'” Mary, who had had enough of Shields's self-satisfied courtship, nearly choked with laughter, and the following week, when Lincoln disappeared into the case he was working on—something he was maddeningly wont to do—she and Julia spent an idle afternoon in Mary's room, gigglingly composing another letter from “Rebecca,” enlarging upon Shields's supposed courtship of the author of the letters.

  “I don't think, upon the whole, I'd be sich a bad match neither—I'm not over sixty, and am just four feet three inches in my bare feet, and not much more around the girth. . . .”

  “Mary, you are bad!” Julia rapped her with the feather end of her quill, and Mary said, “Oh, wait, wait, I've got an idea, let's write a poem about their marriage!”

  More suffocated laughter—goodness knew what Elizabeth thought the two young women were up to behind the closed bedroom door. But, Mary reflected, Elizabeth was used to Julia coming up to visit, and they did giggle like schoolgirls....

  Pardonably proud of their masterpiece, Mary presented the completed composition to Simeon, and it duly and anonymously appeared in the Sangamo Journal on Friday.

  Reading it in Simeon's parlor at their next meeting, just before his departure for the Tazewell County Circuit Court, Lincoln only rolled his eyes and grinned. “You girls'll get me in trouble yet.”

  “I always said Lincoln's a fool and a jackanapes,” snorted Ninian, over supper a week later. “It's one thing to call a man a liar and a thief in print—you saw what Lincoln and Douglas called each other during the election!—but it's another to make him a laughingstock, and he should know it. Well, he went too far with that poem. Jimmy Shields has called him out.”

  “Called him out?” Mary set down her fork, aghast. Even Eppy, carrying the platter of corn pudding in from the kitchen, paused in startled alarm.

  Elizabeth said, “Good heavens,” and Mary knew that her sister saw what she herself saw in her mind: Mary Jane Warfield crumpled weeping on the sofa of her father's parlor, with the sunlight falling through the bow window onto her unworn wedding-gown and veil. Panic seized her, and with it terrible dread. . . . “Does Mr. Lincoln even know how to use a dueling pistol?”

  “More like squirrel-guns at twenty paces, I'd say. Or bowie knives.”

  “This is no joke,” reproved Elizabeth, with a glance at Mary's ashen face. Ninian sighed.

  “This is just what we don't need, with the Whigs in the minority all over the country and elections coming up,” he said sourly. “They'll be lucky if they aren't jailed, the both of them. This isn't Kentucky or Louisiana! I understand Shields and General Whiteside went down to Tremont where Lincoln's tryi
ng a case and issued a challenge.”

  “They aren't really going to fight?” Mary felt tears burn her eyes. In her mind she saw from a great distance the dream she'd had the night before Cash's duel, of the two men firing into the earth, and the earth bubbling forth blood.

  “Lincoln's named a second,” said Ninian. “I hope and pray they'll have the sense to go kill each other across the river in Missouri, but even so . . .”

  Mary got up and ran from the table, shaking with terror. Later in the afternoon, in spite of the towering storm clouds gathering, she had Jerry drive her to Bessie's. “I'm afraid it's true,” said Bessie. “You were a little rough on Mr. Shields, Molly—but he was already hopping mad over Lincoln's earlier letter. Don't take it to yourself.”

  “What happened?”

  The older woman shook her head, unwilling to speak. She'd taken off her apron and the day-cap that kept kitchen-soot and grease out of her hair, but the heavy folds of her skirt still bore the stains of boiled huckleberries. Looking through the open back door into the kitchen, Mary could see that she still hadn't found a girl to hire.

  Then Bessie sighed. “Jimmy came flouncing over to the office last week, demanding to know who'd written the Rebecca letters. Simeon asked for twenty-four hours and went to Lincoln, and told him that Shields was ready to have blood for them. Lincoln said he'd written the four of them. I gather Jimmy went away and thought about it for a few days. Then he followed Lincoln down to Tremont with a second and demanded satisfaction.”

  “Dear God.” Mary pressed her gloved hands to her face. For an instant she was thirteen again, standing at the foot of the stairway at Elizabeth's second-day party, caught in wrongdoing and aghast at what she had done. “Dear God, he will never speak to me again!”

  I've lost him, she thought. After we had just found one another. How could I have been so stupid. . . ?

  And then, Dear God, what if he's killed? Shields, for all his vanity, was an accomplished shot. Lincoln had told Mary of a youth spent in country wrestling-matches, but the only time he'd fought another man with weapons in his hands had been when his flatboat had been attacked by river-pirates on the way to New Orleans. He'd been twenty-two, and still carried the scar of that skirmish on his forehead.