The Emancipator's Wife

by Barbara Hambly

  At Scott's Hotel in St. Louis they were met by Joshua Speed, plumper now with the first flecks of gray in his beard, but with the same cheerful sparkle in his eye. “What's this I hear about you naming my namesake after some pettifogging politico, Lincoln?” The two men embraced, and Mary shook hands with the sweet-faced, dark-haired lady introduced to her as Fanny Speed.

  “Now, I won't have you raking poor Mr. Lincoln down,” said Mrs. Speed. “Your husband is a brave man, Mrs. Lincoln. When Joshua was courting me, Mr. Lincoln pretended to be a Democrat, so that my father could lecture him on the evils of his party while Joshua spoke to me on the gallery. I doubt that even David did that for Jonathan in Bible times.”

  “David would have thought King Saul heaving spears at him was a good trade, after ten minutes with your pa,” grinned Lincoln, and Mrs. Speed tapped him on the elbow with her fan.

  “Oh, the little darling!” Mrs. Speed added, tiptoeing to look at Eddie, whom Lincoln was carrying on one hip. The boy was, at nineteen months, solemn and long-faced and worrisomely thin, and looked for all the world like a miniature version of Granny Parker, except for his gray Lincoln eyes. Bobby, with his round face and watchful blue gaze, cock-eyed as it was, was all Todd. And for that matter, thought Mary suddenly, panic clutching her, where was Bobby . . . ?

  She caught him just before he got out the hotel door and into the street. The traffic and bustle in St. Louis made Springfield look like a country village. The town was a river port, and the jumping-off point for the trading caravans that crossed the prairies and the Great American Desert to the Spanish colonies around Santa Fe.

  Now with the Army to be supplied and militia companies streaming south, St. Louis jostled with merchants, bullwhackers, boatmen, and traders, in spite of the hardship of winter travel. In the crowded hotel dining-room Mary could barely make herself heard above the din as she gossiped with Fanny Speed over mutual acquaintances and kin all over Kentucky and Virginia. As for Lincoln and Joshua, immersed in discussion of the war, it was as if neither of their wives existed.

  For some years, Mary knew, the two men's friendship had cooled—because of Joshua's management of his mother's plantation, she guessed, which put him in the position of owning and working slaves.

  For all that Lincoln upheld the law of the land that permitted slavery to exist, on a personal level he both hated and feared it. She felt a pang of jealousy, watching them together now. Seeing there a past that she could never share.

  From St. Louis all six of them took the steamboat to Louisville, and from there the Lincolns proceeded on to Frankfort. It required the efforts of all four adults to keep Bobby from coming to some kind of grief on the boat. The four-year-old proved just as prone to wandering on a boat of two hundred feet by forty as he had with all of Springfield to choose from, and Mary lived in constant terror of seeing him pitch himself over the rail of the high hurricane deck into the deadly swift currents of the river. Just above Cairo Bobby did disappear, and while Mary and Fanny Speed searched frantically among the boxes, bales, and crates of New Orleans merchandise on the fore-part of the lowest deck, Lincoln walked to the back along the promenades that ran along the sides of the boat, where coffles of slaves were chained, to be sold in Louisville.

  Mary came hurrying aft with the news that she hadn't found a trace of Bobby, she was certain he'd gone overboard, to find her husband sitting on a keg of nails, their errant son at his side, talking to one of the chained blacks: “. . . couldn't take my eyes off the boat engines, even when we was flatboatin' and these things was the enemy an' the invention of the Devil.”

  “They still is, sir,” agreed the slave equably. “We crunched up a flatboat in the fog not ten miles below Vicksburg—why don't they never hang lights on them things? Fog was so thick the pilot couldn't see the river below him....”

  “Ain't that just like a pilot, to keep goin' in a blind fog?”

  “You ever get crunched by a steamboat, Pa? Father,” Bobby corrected himself hastily, seeing Mary approach.

  “Lord, yes! I thought I'd drown, stayin' under till the paddle went by overhead....Mother,” Lincoln added, turning to her with a smile. “I found the rascal just where I thought he'd be.”

  “I just wanted to see the wheel,” explained Bobby.

  “You just wanted to get yourself killed leanin' over that rail, li'l Marse,” corrected the slave. “And give your poor Ma a conniption-fit. He's fine, ma'am,” he added. Bobby was covered head to foot with splashed-up river-water and the soot of engine-smuts. “We kept him back off the rail.”

  Mary gave each member of the coffle a quarter, for whatever small luxuries might be bought in Louisville, and hauled the protesting Bobby back to the higher decks of the boat. But that night when she waked in their little stateroom in the rear of the boiler-deck to hear the muffled singing of the men chained below, she saw the moonlight shining in her husband's open, listening eyes.

  THEY WERE FIVE DAYS TRAVELING UP THE OHIO RIVER TO CARROLLTON, where the Kentucky River flowed down from the dense green forest, and another day and a half going up the Kentucky to Frankfort. From the upper deck of the smaller stern-wheeler on that leg of the journey Mary watched the scenery transform itself into home: the gray rock of the banks becoming more jagged and fantastic, the trees darker and thicker than any Illinois woodland. This was The Dark and Bloody Ground, the violent land that the Todds had settled in the wake of the Revolution in the East, worlds distant from the clean-smelling grassy spaces of Illinois.

  The land where she had flirted, and danced, and been hailed as the belle of Lexington.

  The land she had fled eight years ago.

  The land in which she still walked, most nights when she dreamed.

  When Pendleton opened the door to the front hall of the big house on Main Street, Mary cried, “Pendleton!” and clasped the servant's hands, almost before she saw the rest of the family. She led Lincoln in, keeping a firm grip on Bobby's hand while Lincoln carried Eddie: The boys had nearly exhausted themselves running up and down the corridor of the train from Frankfort, and Mary, her head aching from the jolting and the noise of the train, was a little surprised that several of the passengers hadn't hurled the two obstreperous children out the windows.

  And there they all were on the stairs, looking so changed. Her father coming down toward her, grayer even than he'd been four years ago. “Molly,” he smiled, and bent gravely to take Bobby's hand. Mary braced herself, cringing, lest her father or Betsey draw back from Bobby's defective eye, but Robert Todd said only, “Well, now, sir, you've grown some since last I saw you. And got yourself a brother now, too, I see.”

  The others on the stair pushed forward. Betsey, so thin she looked like she'd break if she tripped, but still with that chill precise air: “What filthy things trains are, to be sure.” She scrubbed at a smut of soot on Eddie's cheek, as if Mary should have been able to keep the boys clean on a conveyance that belched coal-smoke and churned dust with every yard it traveled.

  Granny Parker, blue eyes still sharp though her hair was snow-white now: “Let the girl be, Betsey! You should have seen yourself last month when you came home on that thing from Frankfort!” Good heavens, was that stocky man with the receding hairline and red-veined nose Levi? And the shifty-eyed sallow malcontent beside him—smelling faintly of corn liquor—that couldn't be George?

  They had to be, because the two young gentlemen of the ages Levi and George ought to have been—were still, in Mary's recollections—must be Sam and David, David, whose crying had nearly driven Mary crazy that horrible cholera summer of 1833. And the others were children she felt she'd never seen before: a coolly self-possessed girl of fifteen (not Margaret, surely!), a plump, vivacious girl a few years younger (Mattie?!?), a beautiful blond boy of nine who couldn't be anyone but Alec, Alec who'd been born while Mary was teaching at Ward's. . . .

  “So you're my little sister?” asked Lincoln, looking down at the pretty golden-haired eleven-year-old who was the only one of the
m to come to him instead of hanging back.

  Mary cried in delight, “Emilie!” and seized the little girl's hand as Lincoln picked Emilie up as easily as he'd have picked up a kitten, and gave her a kiss on the cheek. For years now Emilie had written to Mary—not often, but frequently and candidly enough to let Mary know that the child she'd taught her first samplers still remembered her with love.

  The littler ones—Alec, Elodie, and Katherine—crowded around their tall new relative, clamoring to be picked up also and making the acquaintance of their rather overwhelmed small cousins, both of whom clung to their father's legs.

  “That's going to be your President of the United States, is it?” Granny Parker folded her skinny arms beneath her shawl and stood beside Mary.

  “He is,” agreed Mary, a little defensively: Granny Parker had always been unpredictable.

  “Not much to look at.”

  “On the contrary,” replied Mary, “I think he's grand.”

  A door opened behind her. Warmth and familiar scents from the big kitchen enveloped Mary in a tide of the past so powerful that it brought tears. Even before she turned she knew who stood there, her smiling face more wrinkled than ever but her eyes as wise. “Mammy Sally!” Mary cried, and flung herself into the old woman's arms. “Oh, Mammy, I missed you! I missed you all!”

  “Well, don't weep about it, child,” said Granny Parker, both amusement and impatience in her voice.

  “No need to weep, child,” added Mammy Sally kindly. “You're home now.”

  YEARS BEFORE, WHEN LINCOLN HAD RETREATED IN EXHAUSTION TO Speed's plantation, Mary had pictured him in her home state, seeing close up for himself the conditions that so many Yankees fulminated against in self-righteous ignorance. In the three weeks they spent in the big front bedroom of her father's house that November, she had a chance at last to act as her husband's guide as he further explored the world of the South, this ambiguous double world of white and black.

  Being Lincoln, of course, he would talk to anyone and listen to anyone, without the slightest sign that he even noticed whether they were white or black, male or female—he and Cash Clay were the only men she'd met in her life who had ever suggested that women as well as men ought to have the vote. She noticed that the house servants, who could be the sternest critics of “white trash” manners and pretensions, accepted him immediately—and not, she was sure, because he was a Congressman. They'd seen Congressmen before, and thought fairly poorly of some. One morning, waking early, Mary came downstairs and found Lincoln having breakfast in the kitchen, talking to Mammy Sally and Nelson. “You watch out for that one, sir,” she heard Nelson's voice as she crossed the shadowy dining-room. “She get mad at Mammy Sally once, she put salt in her coffee—”

  “Now, I can't believe my Molly would do a terrible thing like that!” gasped Lincoln, in such exaggerated shock that both servants burst into the good-humored laughter of those—Mary reflected with wry affection—who knew her all too well.

  Then she heard Mammy Sally say, more quietly, “She look happy, Mr. Lincoln. I always knew she'd need a strong man to take care of her; you're good for her.”

  Elizabeth might have her doubts about what was due a Todd of Lexington, Mary reflected, her heart warmed by joy. But it was wise Mammy Sally who saw more clearly what Mary needed.

  It was good to know.

  On the second night of their stay, Robert Todd held a party in their honor, and in the midst of flirting with old beaux (Nate Bodley had grown sadly stout and reeked of liquor) and catching up news from girlfriends (Mary Wickliffe had married the brother of Meg's husband, of all things), Mary glanced across the crowded room and saw Lincoln as usual in a knot of men, local politicians—listening with the air of a man who seeks to comprehend the place in which he finds himself.

  He always listened more than he talked. She had heard him described as a jokester and a talker, but in fact he was more an observer. It was only that, when he talked, people remembered the tales and jests he told. She was intensely sorry Cash Clay was away—Cash had been among the first to volunteer, Meg Wickliffe (now Preston) had written her, and had gone with General Zachary Taylor to invade Mexico. He had been captured in January; “We just heard he's been freed,” Meg now informed her breathlessly. Even without Cash's assistance, Lincoln and Robert Todd were engrossed in conversation hours after Betsey had gone yawning up to bed and the servants had cleaned up after the rest of the long-departed guests.

  “I don't think you'll find a man in this country who'd argue that with Oregon settling up, we shouldn't have the rest of New Mexico as well,” her father said. “Mexico can't hold the harbors of the California coast, for instance, and if we don't take them you know it's only a matter of time before Russia does.”

  After making sure Bobby and Eddie were tucked up in the trundle-bed in the corner of the guest-room, Mary crept silently back downstairs. The rear parlor was dim but for a single lamp, its amber light outlining her father's blunt features, Lincoln's long nose and jaw.

  “I s'pose the average highway robber would make the same point about the contents of your pockets—that he's got a better use for 'em, an' if he don't take 'em the feller down the road will.” Movement in the darker shadows of the front parlor, where Pendleton was loading the last of the abandoned punch-cups onto a tray. “But that aside, my question is: will the slaveholders in Congress try to make New Mexico into slave territories? An' then admit 'em as slave states?”

  Robert Todd laughed. “We haven't even taken those places yet, Lincoln, and here you're worrying about what their status as states will be?”

  “I am, yes. That's a flaw of my character. Because as long as slavery has a legal foothold in this country, it's gonna be like an alligator in your bathtub: every time you turn around, there the blame thing is. And the more I look at the problem, the more it seems to me that it's beyond my ability to come up with any solution that won't cause more damage than it remedies.”

  Mary slipped through the door, and settled on the black horsehair sofa, content to simply listen to the talk of these men that she loved. Lincoln was smiling, cracking his knuckles, his eyes very bright. In the forgiving warmth of the lamplight, her father's face shed years; it was as she remembered it from her childhood.

  She was, again, her father's favored child, listening to the talk as she'd always listened, included in that circle of friendship and power.

  If there was greater contentment in life, she couldn't imagine what it might be.

  THREE WEEKS OF PEACE. THREE WEEKS OF BEING ABLE TO LIE ABED with her husband in the mornings, secure in the knowledge that Mammy Sally was looking after Eddie and that Bobby had been absorbed into the flock of younger Todds, playing noisily in the wide garden with Alec and Elodie, Mattie and Kitty. On the first day of their stay, she and Betsey had taken the children aside and ordered them on pain of death not to tease Bobby about his eye, and so far the threat seemed to be working. And even if Bobby ran away, Jane or Judy would find him, not she.

  Three weeks of Chaney's marvelous cooking, of rides in the countryside with her father and her husband. Of watching Lincoln's utter bliss in browsing through her father's library and reading everything he could lay hands on, far into the night. Three weeks of listening avidly to talk of the war and the upcoming session of Congress. Of seeing the men of the district encounter Lincoln without the memory of the uncertain hick who had first come to Springfield in buckskin britches shrunken halfway up his shins. Here, he was, instead, a man who had been elected by the voters of his state.

  A man who would one day have power.

  And their approval shone back onto her, who had seen this man's promise and married him, when nearly everyone else had turned away.

  They went to hear Henry Clay speak, first in the courtroom, then in the town's brick market-house while the rain pounded down outside. Thin and brittle-looking now, his hands stiff with arthritis, Clay blazed with his old intelligent fire as he denounced the war with Mexico, which had al
ready claimed the life of his oldest son. Afterwards Mary fulfilled one of her deepest dreams by introducing Lincoln to Clay, beside the rough temporary stage that had been erected at one end of the hall. She flashed her old flirtatious smile at the statesman who had been like a second father to her: “And I promise you, Mr. Clay, he will be President one day. Though I'm still waiting for that invitation to your inaugural ball.”

  Clay laughed, “It may happen yet, Miss,” and shook one long finger at her. His ginger hair was snowy now and this made his eyes seem pale as the wintry sky. He glanced across at Lincoln—there was not much difference in their heights. “I'm running for the Senate again this year—drives me crazy to see others making a mess of things up there.”

  “I'll try to keep things from going all to hell, sir,” promised Lincoln, a little shyly, “till you arrive.”

  They took the stage to Winchester, Virginia, and from there the railroad to Washington City. They arrived late—the December night was bitterly cold and drizzly, the streets outside the depot swamps that rivaled the worst of Springfield's hog-wallows. Lincoln found porters for their four trunks, free blacks or, Mary guessed, slaves “working out” and bringing their owner part of whatever they earned for the day. As they walked down the dark street toward Brown's Hotel—recommended by Lincoln's legal colleague Judge David Davis—Lincoln gazed around him, as if sniffing the air in this, the largest city he'd seen in his life.

  Far down one street the dark bulk of the Capitol loomed, lost in a maze of scaffolding. Brick houses stood among trees, some of them mellowed and elegant with years. Here and there newer buildings, taller and bulkier, shouldered each other in modern blocks. The streets were extravagantly wide, and gold lights shone in a few windows, blurred with mist.

  “So this is Washington,” said Lincoln softly. He carried both his sons, Eddie on his arm as easily as if the boy had been a parcel and Bobby on his shoulders, looking out wearily over his tall black hat. Both boys, after darting crazily up and down the aisle of the train car all day as was their wont, had suddenly crumpled with exhaustion, and Eddie was snoring softly in the circle of his father's arm.