The Emancipator's Wife

by Barbara Hambly

  “Molly . . .”

  She took his hands, and drew him into the empty dining-room. Bessie and Simeon, as always, hung back to give them the time they sought with one another.

  “I had to see you,” she said, and Lincoln bent his tall height down, to kiss her lips.

  “And I was plotting away with Simeon like Brutus and Cassius rolled into one, to come up with some reason Ninian would believe for you to come over here again soon, I...”

  She squeezed his hands hard, shaking him a little; in the dimness of the curtained room, he looked down at her in consternation. “What is it? Did Ninian . . . ?”

  She opened her mouth, and the words that came out were: “Mr. Lincoln, I'm with child.”

  And the next second, she would have given everything she possessed never to have spoken those words; would have traded her life not to have them emerge from her mind into reality, the reality of the rest of her life.

  Lincoln's eyes widened with shock, like a man who has stepped unthinkingly around a corner in a friendly place, and been run through the heart with a spear.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Bellevue 1875

  BEYOND BELLEVUE'S WINDOW BARS, AND THE WHITE CURTAINS THAT let in such maddening quantities of light, the summer day dimmed. Mary's head ached as she remembered the appalled shock in Lincoln's eyes, and anxiety began to overwhelm her, as it so often did at this hour of the day—the medicine she had had immediately after Robert left seemed to have had no effect at all. She understood Mr. Wilamet saying that she mustn't give Robert the advantage by being sleepy or forgetful, but Robert was gone now.

  And she wanted to sleep, and forget the lie she had told, and all that came of it afterwards.

  “Amanda,” she called out, and a moment later the young woman was at the door of her room.

  They both pretended Amanda didn't spend her days on the other side of the barred and curtained interior window, but Mary had only to get to her feet and walk to the door of her room—not locked, these days, for where was there for her to go?—for Amanda to meet her, smiling, in the hall.

  “I'm still feeling quite ill,” she told the younger woman. “Please ask Dr. Patterson to give me another dose of medicine.”

  “Of course, Mrs. Lincoln.”

  But it wasn't Dr. Patterson who came to her room, but John Wilamet.

  “There's no need to go on watering down the medicine now,” she said, at the first sip from the glass he gave her. “Robert is gone, and good riddance to him! How could he—how could any boy—do what he did . . . ?” She stopped herself, shook her head, hearing her own voice beginning to crack with anger and feeling her head throb.

  “Robert is gone,” she repeated. “And what I need now is to go to sleep.” It was still afternoon, but what did that matter? The visit had exhausted her.

  “Mrs. Lincoln,” said John softly. “Do you know what's in the medicine?”

  Mary blinked at him, startled at the question. His tone was the tone of a man who speaks to evade a request, and she'd had enough of that with her husband. She snapped, “What does it matter what's in it? Of course I don't know what's in it, it's a secret of the manufacturer! Manufacturers are entitled to their secret formulae. How else would they make any money? And what that has to do with—”

  “This medicine contains opium,” said John. “They all do.”

  “That's a lie!” Mary gasped the first words that came to her aching, buzzing brain. “I would only take opium under a doctor's advice, and then only a very little for my neuralgia!”

  “You've been taking large quantities of opium for years,” said John. “Your doctors have been giving it to you for years and you've been drinking twice, three times, five times as much on the side. Your whole system is habituated to it.”

  “What a thing to say!” Mary backed from him, her hand clutching the glass. “How dare you call me an opium-eater! Mr. Lincoln was the most strictly temperate man I knew. He would never have permitted my doctors to do anything so wicked!”

  “Mrs. Lincoln.” Patience and care tempered his voice far beyond the youth of his thin face. “May I ask you a favor? For old times' sake?”

  Mary checked the fury rising in her, settled back into her chair. She remembered this young man as a boy in Camp Barker, remembered him driving her through the green trees of that hot foul city by the Potomac. Remembered laughing with him, in better times.

  For old times' sake.

  For the sake of times that had been sweet.

  There were flecks of gray at his temples now and he looked careworn in the last fading daylight from the window. It crossed her mind suddenly to wonder what road had led him here, to this place, and whether his mother and sisters were still alive. His mother had been a strange woman, like a wild black Medea, but his sisters, especially little Lucy, had been dear to her, like so many of the contraband children in the camps.

  The memories stilled her, drew her back to earth out of her rage.

  “Of course,” she agreed. But warily. She wasn't an opium-fiend! And if he thought he could call her one just because she took a little more medicine than pious hypocrites thought proper in a woman . . .

  “Would you listen to me for a few minutes,” said John, “while I talk about medicine? I'd like your thoughts on this, before I decide what to do.”

  He's going to take my medicine away from me! She could hear it in his voice. For my own good, they all say . . . Wicked. Wicked like all the rest . . .

  “Most of the patent medicines you've been taking,” he continued, “the ones they sell in the drugstores already bottled, contain opium. I've worked with medicines, I know what opium smells like and what it tastes like. It's there. Sometimes a lot of it. I don't know how much. Most doctors prescribe small amounts of purer opium for coughs, or headaches, or intestinal flux. It's the only thing that works. Most doctors don't know, or don't want to know, how quickly a patient can become habituated. Many doctors I know are opium-takers themselves, and don't want to admit how harmful it is. Beyond that, nearly all those medicines contain alcohol as well.”

  “Well, a little bit, of course . . .”

  “I don't think it's a little bit. They put in bitter herbs, or sweet syrups, to change the taste. But I think most of these medicines are stronger than saloon rum.”

  “What are you telling me?” Mary set down her glass on the bedside table behind her, her black-mitted hands closed into fists. The headache behind her left eye gave a sudden agonizing throb—old Chief Lightning-Wires getting his tomahawk ready, she thought despairingly. Anger flashed through her on the heels of the pain. I need that medicine. . . . “That you think that as well as being insane, I'm a drunkard? An opium-eater?”

  “Not of your own choosing . . .”

  “Not under any circumstances or conditions! The very idea that because I have occasionally taken laudanum for my truly agonizing neuralgia and headaches, that I would . . . would guzzle such a thing of my own volition is an insult, the rankest implication that no gentleman would even consider in regards to any woman! I'll have you know that my husband was a member of the Washingtonian Society, that he was the most strictly temperate man who ever drew breath! And the kindest, and the best!”

  Tears began to flow from her eyes and John reached out to her, but she whirled from him, strode to the window in the blind fury he recalled from other days. “I shall report you to Dr. Patterson. You will find yourself sweeping out saloons, where I daresay you belong! Now get out of here! Get out of my room or I shall scream!”

  She was screaming already, and John, very quietly, got up and left. Mary rushed to the door as he closed it and pounded on the panels, crying, “And don't you dare lock me in!” She yanked on the knob and the door came open with such violence that she staggered. He was walking away down the corridor, where the lamps had not yet been lit for the night. She screamed after him, “How can I rest here if you keep upsetting me? How can anyone rest in this place?”

  She slammed the
door behind him, opened it and slammed it again.

  Then she went to the table and poured herself another glass of the medicine he had left. The whole bottle had been watered. She could tell how weak was the bitter taste that she was long used to associating with the strength—the warming comfort—of whatever medicine contained it.

  She drank most of the bottle, and fell deeply asleep.

  SHE DREAMED SHE WAS ATTENDING HER OWN WEDDING, IN NINIAN'S house, on that night in early November of 1842.

  She stood in the back of the big double-parlor, nearly out of sight in the shadows in her black widow's dress. She was astonished at how young Ninian looked, the mass of his raven hair unfaded, glowering like a bear staked for baiting as the small group assembled in the lamplight. Elizabeth in her rose-colored dress, her hair still black instead of gray, alternated between seething indignation that her advice had not been taken, and annoyance that the wedding had been arranged with barely four hours' notice, and no time to do proper baking.

  There was a cake, but it was still mildly warm from the oven and the frosting wouldn't set. The smell of ginger filled the room.

  And Mary herself . . .

  How pretty I was! She felt a kind of wonder at it, for it was something she had quite forgotten. That plump, bright-faced girl in her best dress of embroidered white muslin, with the collar of Irish lace, dancing with excitement one moment, then turning, suddenly, to look up at her groom with anxiety that amounted almost to fright in her eyes.

  Trying to tell herself that she'd done right.

  Lawful meaning in a lawful act . . .

  Trying to convince herself that love was enough.

  Praying that the words she'd said to him in Bessie Francis's dining-room that morning had not killed once and for all the love he bore her.

  Even in the orange lamplight, and the hot glow of every candle Elizabeth could place in sconces and branches on table and sideboards, Lincoln looked ashen. His dark brows stood out sharply above the adze-blade nose. But it was the only sign he gave of whatever was going on inside. A politician—and a good one—he was never at a loss in company, shaking hands and chatting with the thirty-some friends and family who had been hastily gathered by word of mouth: Old Judge Brown and Lincoln's fellow-lawyer James Matheny, Frances and Dr. Wallace, Lincoln's landlord William Butler and his wife . . . But when the eddies of talk swirled away, and he took the hand of that plump, pretty little partridge in white to lead her to the Presbyterian minister, she could see that his eyes were haunted, as if he were mounting the steps of the scaffold.

  He'd had a gold band inscribed that afternoon: A.L. to M.T. Nov. 4, 1842, Love Is Eternal. He held her hand, and spoke as if he'd memorized the words. “With this ring I thee endow,” said Lincoln, “with all my goods and chattels, lands and tenements....”

  “Lord Jesus Christ God Almighty, Lincoln, the statute fixes that!” boomed Judge Brown from the crowd. “Get on with it!”

  Everyone laughed, including, thank God, the groom himself. With laughter he put the ring on young Mary's finger. With laughter, they kissed.

  Laughing herself in the shadows in her secret corner, Mary saw that young girl—for she was only a young girl, she understood now, no matter what others said or she feared about being an old maid of twenty-four—look up into the face of the man she adored to distraction. And she thought, I'm glad I lied—if it was a lie. I'm glad I brought this about. I'm glad we had the time together that we had.

  All of it, good and bad.

  Because good and bad, all put together, there wasn't so very much.

  And if I had not lied as I did, there would have been less of it, or maybe none at all.

  But she turned her head and glimpsed behind the backs of the crowd a young man in the natty gray suit of a different era, his burly body held stiff, his face with its drooping mustache a cold mask that revealed nothing of his thoughts.

  You lied, Robert Todd Lincoln's eyes said.

  And because of your lie, my father never loved me with the whole of his heart, as the firstborn son has a right to be loved.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Springfield 1843

  THEY LIVED IN A SINGLE RENTED ROOM IN THE GLOBE TAVERN, AT A cost of four dollars a week.

  It took Jerry two trips in the carriage to bring five of Mary's trunks, plus hatboxes, valises, and books, to the plain two-story wooden boardinghouse on Adams Street. She spent the rest of the week going back and forth to Elizabeth's house, packing up what remained. Though Lincoln had left his room at William Butler's on his wedding morning without the slightest idea that he'd be moving in with a bride within twenty-four hours, he was able to walk over from Butler's the following morning with all his possessions crammed into two saddlebags and a cardboard box.

  “Growin' up the way I did, I never did need much,” he said, almost apologetically, as Mary, laughing, looked around the small room for places to put everything. The books—her novels, his law-books, and her volumes of Shakespeare and Burns—they stacked on top of the single bureau. There was no bookcase. “I see those big houses—your brother-in-law's among 'em—and they look so fine, an' I always end up wonderin', what the blazes do them fill 'em up with?”

  “They fill them up,” smiled Mary, turning back to her tall husband, “with the amenities of fine living. With the wherewithal to make music—for one's friends and for one's own peace of mind. With the space to entertain and give parties, for the pleasure of the friends one already has and to meet one's business and political acquaintances. With a healthy and happy environment in which to raise one's children.”

  Lincoln hesitated fractionally before putting his big hands on her shoulders. His grin was rueful. “And dear knows what our poor little codger's gettin' himself into, arrivin' early this way,” he said, and bent to kiss her. His black hair hung down in his eyes—never, to the end of their days together, did Mary see it brushed back for more than five minutes at a time. If he's to go anywhere in politics, she thought, we're going to have to invest in a little pomade. “But we'll deal with that as best we can, Molly, and I reckon we'll brush by somehow.”

  He kissed her again, and then—Jerry having departed—folded her in his arms and carried her to the bed.

  He left the next day for Taylorville, for a one-day session of Christian County Court. Mrs. Beck, who owned the Globe, found planks that could be put together to form a rough bookcase: Mary and Lincoln had already formed the habit of reading to one another in the evenings, Mary in this case reading Les Liaisons Dangereuses and translating as she went. (“Lord, that Valmont's a scoundrel!” exclaimed Lincoln, as if the whole thing were happening in Springfield instead of the Paris of the ancien régime.) Mrs. Beck was less than pleased when Mary complained about the curtains—which were faded and limp—and responded to Mary's suggestion that they be at least starched and ironed with a tart, “Well, my lady, I'll certainly send one of the slaves to take care of it right away!”

  Mary flushed bright red, but Mrs. Beck had already turned on her heel and strode off down the stairs; Mary spent the rest of the rainy day with the six additional trunks of dresses, shoes, underwear, and books that Elizabeth had sent over, trying to arrange them in such a fashion that two people could at least get from the door to the bed without turning sideways. Julia arrived with Mary's cousins Lizzie and Francy, to sweep her off for tea at Uncle John Todd's, but that first night alone Mary lay for a long time awake, listening to the clamor of men's voices in the common-room downstairs, to the clang of the bell that announced the arrival of the stages, to old Professor Kittridge's drunken harangues in the yard, and to the Bledsoe family arguing over money in the room next door.

  Wondering how she, Mary Todd of Lexington, who could have been the wife of any planter in Kentucky and several states around, had come to be alone in this dreary place.

  And trying to push from her mind the shame at her lie and the dread of what Lincoln would say if he ever found out.

  He won't, she told herself
frantically. I can tell him I miscarried. . . . She'd heard Mammy Sally speak of slave women who'd done so. Or is it different for darkies than for whites? Who could she ask?

  The thought of him finding out—of standing revealed in his eyes as a liar and a cheat—was more than she could bear.

  “You really must talk to that woman,” said Mary, when Lincoln returned late Wednesday afternoon. “She's insufferable, and a slovenly housekeeper. I had to starch and iron the curtains myself, and I had a headache all the rest of the day. And her cooking leaves much to be desired as well. If we were to move to the American House . . .”

  “It would cost us half again as much,” said Lincoln gently, drawing Mary to his side where he sat on the bed. “And that we cannot afford.”

  “Oh.” Mary looked down at her hands, filled with shame that she hadn't thought of that before getting into a quarrel with their landlady.

  “I told you, didn't I, that you'd be marrying a poor man—”

  “As if that mattered a whit to me!”

  “Well, if it's true I'm grateful for it. And if it's not quite as true on closer examination as you thought it was when you said it, I'm glad you're still willin' to stand by it.”

  Mary opened her mouth to protest, then saw the twinkle in his eye and retorted, in mock primness, “You're not the only person in this household who stands by his word, Mr. Lincoln. I can be patient in a good cause.”

  “That's my Molly.” He tightened his big hand on her shoulder, and bent to kiss the top of her head. “As for Mrs. Beck, I heard all about your hoo-rah from her on my way across the yard, an' I smoothed her feathers a trifle. You got to remember, she runs this place with just the two servant girls, when she can get a servant girl, and most of the work she does herself. Of course she'll get cross, when somebody tells her to do more. One day I'll be clear of the National Debt that landed on me when I took over my partner's half of that wretched grocery in New Salem, and then we'll be able to live . . . well, if not like Brother Ninian and Sister Elizabeth, at least as well as common folks. You think you got enough flub-dubs in them trunks to last you till then?”