The Emancipator's Wife

by Barbara Hambly

  He'd grown, in his eighteen months in the East. At seventeen and a half he was nearly six feet tall, his thick shoulders rendered less overpowering by the immaculately cut tweed of his suit and the subdued elegance of his collar and cravat. There was no trace of mis-alignment in his eyes, except a slight immobility when he was tired. He looked like he'd lived in Boston the whole of his life. He would be, she thought, an impressive man.

  “Seward's an abolitionist,” complained Clark peevishly, shaking out his napkin. “What are the Legislatures of Georgia and Virginia and Kentucky going to think, except that Old Abe means to abolish slavery after all?”

  “Now, I'm sure if the legislators of those states read Mrs. Lincoln's remarks,” soothed Mr. Drosheimer, “they'll also read the President's statements that he's only against the extension of slavery, that he won't touch it where it already exists. Are you feeling quite well, Mrs. Lincoln? It will be a long journey today.” Throughout the journey—in fact since the day of the election—Mary had felt in jaggedly unequal spirits, torn between elation and anxiety without the steadying balance-wheel of home, neighbors, family.

  The gaiety of travel enraptured her—the reaction, when it came, was crushing. The thought of Lincoln, alone and unprotected in Springfield, had preyed on her mind through a half-sleepless night. The images of those hateful letters and pictures returned to haunt her in terrible nightmares. New York was gorgeous, glittering, sophisticated—her new friends were delightful—but she found that at times the crowds frightened her, and she would return to her hotel room nervous and weepy. Sally Orne, the wife of a wealthy Philadelphia merchant to whom Simon Cameron had introduced her, recommended Uhrquart's Pacifying Indian Bitters for her nerves, and swore by its results. It did seem to help.

  “I'm quite well, thank you for asking,” Mary replied now to Mr. Dorsheimer. “As for the Legislatures of Virginia and Kentucky, you name two of the most loyal states of the Union, sir. I think we need hardly worry about a few radicals there, whatever the people of Georgia may choose to think.”

  “We'll need to worry about a few radicals in Maryland,” said Robert grimly, “if they decide Father's going to interfere with their property. We have to cross through Maryland to get to Washington. There might be trouble with those Plug-Uglies they write about.”

  Mary shivered, and drew her new pink cashmere shawl from Stewart's more closely around her shoulders. Despite the two fireplaces in the Astor House's dining-room, the morning was cold. To no one in particular she murmured, “I shall be glad to get home.”

  At home, when they got there ten days later—three days late due to inclement weather, but free of charge from Buffalo to Springfield, thanks to a very friendly magnate of the State Line Railroad—the confusion was even worse. According to Lincoln, who met them at the railroad station, a tall black shadow in the falling snow, he had played host to delegation after delegation, from Indiana, Illinois, California, Pennsylvania; Cameron's supporters, Cameron's detractors, petitioners that he provide Cabinet posts for everyone from the Governor of Maryland to Cassius Clay. He looked exhausted, when he and Robert and Clark brought Mary's trunks into the house. The lines in his face had deepened, and he didn't look like he'd been sleeping well.

  Or shaving....“Really, Mr. Lincoln, you haven't been meeting all those delegations that way! You look like a savage!”

  His old smile returned and he rubbed his stubbly jaw. “I had a letter from a little girl named Grace Bedell,” he said. “She was of the opinion that I'd make a more impressive President if I had a beard.”

  Mary's mouth dropped open in disbelieving shock.

  “An opinion shared by Davis and Trumbull and the others. Not to mention,” added Lincoln in a lower voice, with a glance through the kitchen door to where Robert was exchanging mock cuffs with his two younger brothers, “it might be that on our way through Maryland to Washington, it would be better if quite so many people there weren't as able to recognize me.”

  “I think it looks swell,” added Willie, coming into the kitchen—which was, she was relieved to note, still warm and orderly, in contrast to the shadowy glimpse of stacked boxes and half-wrapped parcels visible through the doors of dining-room and parlor. Lizzie and young Ellsworth had promised to make sure Tad and Willie stayed fed, warm, and out of trouble, and had, with the help of Lizzie's brother Lockwood, and the free colored valet whom Lincoln had recently hired, been organizing the furniture to be stored or sold. The much grander personal furnishings that she had bought in New York City were going to be shipped straight on to Washington. “He looks like a pirate!”

  “Oh, thank you,” sighed Lincoln. “Just the thing to give confidence to the South.” But his eyes twinkled. “Looks like we're going to Washington the long way,” he went on, pulling off his gloves and moving the gently steaming kettle to the front of the stove, to heat up for tea. “People need to be reassured, Mother. They want to see me and they want to hear everything's going to be all right—and God knows I need to see them. When a man asks help of someone,” he added, “it comes better face-to-face.”

  He ran a hand over his jaws and through his hair, and she wondered despairingly how she was going to get him through four—or with luck, eight—years of the Presidency without letting him appear before the Prince of Wales or the Czar of Russia with his hair like a canebrake. “I've got invitations to stop and speak in half a dozen cities already—Cleveland and Cincinnati and Harrisburg and Honolulu for all I know—and more coming in all the time. It means leaving early, the eleventh....”

  “Of February? But I'll be in St. Louis! I've made an appointment for fittings for my dresses! That's two weeks from now! Madame Blois will never be able to have them ready....”

  “You and the boys can meet me in Indianapolis. The sale of the furniture's on the ninth—I think Mel Smith's buying most of it. Then we'll be staying at the Cheney House till we go.”

  “Good.” Mary liked the Springfield druggist and his wife. “That gives us time for one last reception here, before we leave.” She looked through the dining-room door and into the parlor again, seeing how dark the house was, and how cold and musty it already felt. Fido, curled up by the kitchen stove, raised his head worriedly, sensing that the world as he knew it was coming apart. Henry Rolls, whose yard backed the Lincolns', had already agreed to take the little yellow dog for the four years the Lincolns would be gone; she wondered if the boys would miss him.

  If they would miss this house, as she would.

  The reception was a splendid one, and lasted far into the night. Lizzie, Mary, and her two older sisters all turned the house upside-down, cleaning and sweeping and scrubbing. Elizabeth lent her Eppy and Lina, and came over to take charge of the baking herself. Then all the Todd girls turned out in their finest, to bid an official good-by.

  Everyone in town put in an appearance—Merce and Jamie, the Reverend Smith, who'd spoken so kindly at Eddie's funeral; the ladies of the Episcopal Sewing Guild; Cousin John Stuart and Cousin Stephen Logan; the Gurleys and the Wheelocks and Mrs. Dall, whose infant Mary had nursed right after Tad's birth. . . . The house was crammed from parlors to attics and there was barely room for Eppy, William the new valet, and Maria Francesca to move about the kitchen. Robert, stiff and shy in his natty Eastern tailoring, stood with his parents, shaking hands and making sure to speak to everyone who filed in. Lizzie as usual tried to keep track of Tad and Willie and as usual succeeded only about two-thirds of the time.

  To Mary's intense relief, Lizzie—who was accompanying her brother Lockwood, Elizabeth, the young Julie (now Baker), and Young Bess (as everyone called Julie's sister) to Washington City for the Inauguration—had promised to remain for a time as a guest in the White House and keep an eye on the boys until Mary found her feet. Harrison Grimsley shook his head over the plan and warned Lincoln, “I promise you, if my wife stays on with yours, you're going to have your hands full with the pair of them.”

  Lincoln grinned and ducked his head. “The boys'll keep
'em busy.” He'd just returned from three days in Coles County. In all the time she'd known him—even when his Cousin Hetty was living in her sewing-room—she had seldom heard Lincoln speak of his family, though she was aware of the steady stream of ill-spelled and whining letters he'd received over the years, mostly asking for money. She remembered how he'd rushed down to Coles County when his stepbrother had written him that his father was dying: which had turned out to be a false alarm, but while he was there, could he loan them twenty dollars?

  He had declined to rush down, the next time his stepbrother wrote. His father had died.

  He had come back from this most recent visit to his stepmother sad and thoughtful: “They don't treat her well,” he'd told Mary. “Like she was nothing, because she's of no use to them anymore.”

  She guessed, since they would be in Washington four years—if not, as she already hoped, eight—that Lincoln and old Mother Sarah would not meet again.

  The reception was scheduled to last until midnight, but it was closer to two in the morning before the last guests finally left. Many of them were office-seekers, who had wangled their way into the party to speak to Lincoln. Towards the end of the evening, Robert, Ellsworth, and John Hay—like boisterous young Musketeers—were acting as discreet chuckers-out. Lincoln spent the next morning at the State House, but returned, exhausted, in the afternoon; she heard him lie down as she moved quietly about her own room, packing up the last of her things. In addition to Elizabeth, her daughters, and Lizzie, Dr. Wallace was going to be part of the Lincoln party—Frances was no longer healthy enough to undertake so long a journey—and her half-sisters Margaret and Mattie would be meeting them in Washington, to see her triumph (and request government jobs for their husbands, she reflected) as well.

  Downstairs she could hear the boys—too loud, she thought, they'll wake their father—and Ellsworth's light, free laugh. But the house seemed strange, half-empty in the gray winter light.

  From the next room she heard Lincoln call out, “Molly?” and there was fear in his voice.

  She thought, Nightmare, and hurried to open the connecting door. And no wonder . . .

  He was sitting up on the edge of his bed in his shirtsleeves, hair all tousled on his head, staring across the room at his shaving-mirror on the wall. “Look in that mirror,” he said. “Do you see one reflection in it, or two?”

  She angled her head, for the mirror was set high. “One.” It looked, in fact, pretty much as it always had. “Are you all right?” His unshaven face looked waxen with shock.

  “Yes. I guess.” He shook his head, ran a hand through his hair. “It must have been a dream—one of those dreams when you dream you wake up.”

  “And you saw two reflections?” Her voice wavered a little—she knew from Mammy Sally the evil of seeing one's own face in a mirror in a dream.

  Lincoln nodded. “One looked pretty normal—'cept for the beard, that is. But the other, the one behind it, was white, like a ghost's face. Like a dead man's. And it come to me—almost like hearin' someone say it—that was because I'd be elected twice.”

  She whispered, her heart like ice in her breast, “Elected twice—but you won't live through your second term.”

  He stood, and took her hands in one of his. “We don't know that.” And his grip tightened a little when she tried to pull away. “It's only a dream, when all's said.”

  But he didn't believe it. She could hear that in his voice. And neither did she.

  SHE DREAMED OF HIM HERSELF, A FEW NIGHTS LATER, WHEN SHE LAY asleep in the Wide Missouri Hotel in St. Louis after a day of fittings and shopping and chatter with Lizzie and with Madame Blois. Dreamed first of herself, burning her old papers the day before yesterday, her last day in Springfield. All those old letters, those quick-scribbled notes he'd sent her while on the circuit or in Washington. Just cleaning house, part of her said casually, and part of her admitted her fear that some journalist would get hold of them, and use them for God knew what. His views had changed over the years—in his letters he had not always been discreet.

  In her dream she turned her head, to see Lincoln standing in the back door of the house, watching her as Mr. Smith the druggist and his men moved the last of their furniture away. Fido sat next to his boots, raised a worried paw to scratch his knee—Will everything be all right?

  Then she dreamed of the bedroom at the Cheney House—the elegant bridal suite, the best in the hotel, where Tad and Willie had shared the trundle-bed and Robert had slept on the couch. Saw in her dream Lincoln there alone, roping up his single small trunk by himself: books, papers, a few shirts, and his new suit. Robert was already gone—down to the station? Robert was fanatically punctual and lived in terror of missing a train.

  Outside the windows, the sky was bleakly dark, just staining with morning gray. Lincoln took one of the hotel's cards to the little marble-topped desk, wrote on the back, A. LINCOLN—WHITE HOUSE— WASHINGTON, and stuck it in the leather label-holder on the trunk. He carried the trunk downstairs himself, a tall man alone in the cold stillness of the morning, to join Robert and Ellsworth, Nicolay and Hay and the others waiting in the lobby. To go to the train station and start for Washington, not knowing when, or whether, he would return.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Philadelphia February 1861

  “MR. LINCOLN?” ABOVE THE HUBBUB IN THE BALLROOM OF THE Continental Hotel in Philadelphia, Mary wasn't sure how she heard Norman Judd's murmur, but she did. She turned her head to see the railroad magnate touch Lincoln's sleeve, and the look on Judd's face was the iron look of a man who has received the worst kind of news.

  Lincoln saw it, too, and knew it for what it was. He'd been shaking hands since eight-thirty with the cream of Philadelphia society, telling funny stories, remembering the names of everyone who was introduced to him and remembering too whatever contributions they'd made to Whig politics back twenty years. He bowed a little to a banker and his wife, with whom he'd been chatting under the chilly white glimmer of the gasoliers, and said, “If you good folks will excuse me, I think there's another crisis brewing.” He kept his voice droll, so that the stout banker and his stouter wife both laughed. Mary, delightedly renewing her acquaintance with the vivacious Sally Orne, saw his tall black form edge away through the crowd toward the gilt-trimmed ballroom doors.

  “Excuse me,” she said, and began to thrust her way through the crowd after him.

  There were times, during the ten days since they'd begun their journey to Washington, that she wondered if they were ever going to reach the capital at all. Every city they passed through, it seemed, had invited Lincoln to stop, to speak, to receive the local dignitaries—dignitaries whose support would be desperately needed, if the seceded Southern states should refuse to compromise or to return to the Union. Needed still more, if loyal and powerful Virginia, or worse yet, Maryland, should decide to join them.

  Since meeting the Springfield party in Indianapolis, there had been days when she had barely spoken to her husband at all. Certainly she had not spoken to him alone. As if to remind the new Chief Executive of his obligations to Illinois Central, Norman Judd had provided them with a special Presidential car, decorated like a plush hotel suite with crimson curtains and gold tassels. Even in its privacy Lincoln was always surrounded by his supporters and advisors, that group of handlers she was coming to hate. It was as if the group around the stove at Speed's had taken over his life, leaving only crumbs of him for her. When he talked politics, he talked now with them. Judd was always there, and fat David Davis, the gigantic Ward Lamon, and crafty Orville Browning. Hay, Nicolay, and young Ellsworth added some lightness to the party, rushing about like squires to the political champions.

  More than ever she was grateful for the company of Elizabeth and her daughters, and of Lizzie, and Lizzie's brother Lockwood. The atmosphere of alternating tension and elation, wearing enough on her, had turned her younger sons—never the quietest of souls to begin with—into frantic little dynamos. Frustrated at be
ing shut out of the men's councils, Mary would slap the boys or shriek at them, something she knew did not help the situation but which she could not seem to keep herself from doing. What a blessing to have Elizabeth or Julie Baker, or Lizzie, scoop Tad up and say, “Your Mama's tired now, Taddie . . . ,” and bear him screaming into another part of the car.

  Moreover, she knew there were things she wasn't being told. Telegrams reached them at all stations, and Lincoln would go into conference with the men again, leaving her like a child shut out of her father's study.

  She had heard of it, however, when Lamon came in from the train platform in Westfield, New York, with the news that Senator Jefferson Davis—hero of the Mexican War and fixture of Washington society and politics—had been sworn into office as President of the Confederate States of America. “Looks like they mean business,” Browning had said, and Lincoln had only looked grim and sad.

  Mary reached the door Lincoln had just passed through, to one of the smaller anterooms of the Continental's ballroom. John Hay stood beside it, smart-looking in new evening-clothes. The New York newspapers had had such a field day describing Lincoln as a hick, a bumpkin, an uneducated baboon who would make the United States ludicrous in the eyes of the world, that everyone, Lincoln included, was being very careful to be absolutely correct in all things.

  “I'm sorry, Mrs. Lincoln,” Hay said. Though he'd read law in Lincoln's office for over a year, he'd been officially taken on only days ago as John Nicolay's assistant. “Mr. Lincoln asked that he not be disturbed by anyone.”

  “What is it?” she demanded. “What's happened?”

  Hay's dark eyes shifted. “It's nothing serious.”

  “Tell me!”

  “Mother . . .” Robert appeared at her side, gently took her arm. “It's nothing serious. Everything's fine.”