The Emancipator's Wife

by Barbara Hambly

  He was lying. They both were lying.

  Trembling, she went back to the reception. She wanted to scream at them, to weep, to force them to let her into their secret councils. But she knew that with Lincoln out of the ballroom it was up to her to smile and greet all those Biddles and Mifflins and Rittenhouses. Elizabeth glanced over at her with warning disapproval for even inquiring about masculine business: Mary raised her chin defiantly and stared back. But when she finally returned to their suite and Lizzie unlaced her from the exquisite gown of lilac silk, she had a pounding headache and was so nervous she was ready to scream.

  In Harrisburg the next day Lincoln went to the State House to address the Legislature. Mary was reading to Tad and Willie in the hotel parlor when she heard them return. Outside the door she heard Judd's deep voice, “Do you think it's wise?” and Lincoln's, “She'll wonder where I am, and there'll be no quieting her unless she knows what's going on.”

  The words went through her with a sickening jolt. She felt just as she did when thunder began to growl in the distance. She shut the book and got to her feet as the door opened. They were all around him: Judd and Davis, Browning and Robert and Ward Lamon, looking as grim as Judd had the night before. There was another man with them whom she vaguely recognized as Mr. Pinkerton, a solid little man like a knot of hardwood, with watchful dark eyes that never relaxed. Lincoln said, “It looks like there's definitely a plan to ambush me in Baltimore, Molly, while the railroad car's being hauled from one depot to the other to get on the Washington line. Fred Seward brought word last night that the local Plug-Uglies plan to rush the car, and Mr. Pinkerton here—he's Mr. Judd's railroad detective—says he's got proof.”

  The hate-letters flooded back to her mind: the vile drawing, the writing that had looked so much like blood. She put out her hand to steady herself on the chair and Willie stood up, protectively, at her side.

  “Mr. Pinkerton,” Lincoln went on, “says he's got it worked out for me to go into Washington by another train, alone, without fuss....”

  “Without fuss?” She felt panic rising in her. “What do you mean, without fuss? Alone? Without a guard?”

  “If nobody knows it's me, nobody's going to attack me.”

  “And what if someone guesses?” She looked from one to the other of them—Judd, Pinkerton, Robert, Davis, fools, all of them, who were going to get her husband killed! She began to tremble, thoughts surging into her mind of rushing at them, striking them with her fists, with a broom, with a whip. . . . “It's all very well for you to grow that stupid beard, Mr. Lincoln, but you've been seen with it by thousands and thousands of people in every city along our way. What if someone's overheard your precious plan?”

  “Molly—”

  “Don't you ‘Molly' me!” She jerked her hand from his touch. “What if you're murdered? What will happen to me, to our boys? What if we're murdered? Or doesn't that matter to your precious committee? What if we're caught and held for ransom?”

  “I have to get to Washington,” answered Lincoln quietly, “to be inaugurated as President....”

  “Don't leave me!”

  “Molly . . .”

  “Don't leave me!” She felt as if she would suffocate with terror. “Don't be a fool! You're protected here, with an escort—they're not really going to attack with Mr. Buchanan's soldiers on this train....”

  “Mrs. Lincoln,” intervened Pinkerton, “believe me, they are. There are only twenty soldiers, and our reports indicate that there are hundreds in this plot. And with you and the boys and this whole . . .” He gestured impatiently, as if Elizabeth and Julie, Lizzie and Lockwood and Dr. Wallace, were all present as well. “. . . traveling road-show trailing along after him, those Baltimore secessionists are going to know exactly where to look for him.”

  “So you're going to send him out away from any protection and hope that nobody's going to notice a six-foot-four-inch man pussyfooting his way through Baltimore!”

  “I've got that all arranged, ma'am. He'll be on a sleeper car, in a berth, as my sick relative. Nobody'll see him on his feet—”

  “Well, that's a brave way to commence your administration!” She whirled on Lincoln, hearing her own voice rise to a termagant's shrillness. Any words, anything to make him change his mind . . . “Sneaking into your own capital city in disguise because you're afraid of a rumor—”

  “It's not a rumor,” snapped Judd.

  “Don't you talk to me!” Mary screamed at him. “Don't you say a word to me!” Whipsawed by eleven days of travel, exhaustion, and uncertainty, she burst into frenzied tears. She struck at Lincoln's hands as he led her to the back of the parlor, tried to fight free of him, to flee. . . . Only there was nowhere to flee to. She was dimly aware of the men glancing at one another, of Robert's face wooden with embarrassment, of Willie coming up on her other side:

  “It's all right, Ma. Things will be all right.”

  Of Lizzie's arms around her, gently easing her away from Lincoln, to whom she perversely clung the moment he tried to draw away and go back to his precious advisors—may they all burn in Hell for eternity. . . .

  “Go back to them!” she screamed at him, shoving him suddenly away. “Go back to them and leave me! You don't care a thing about me and you never did! You'd sooner be inaugurated President than keep us safe, me and your sons!” And she flung herself, weeping, into Lizzie's arms.

  Their suite at the Jones House Hotel included several bedrooms, though Governor Curtin had asked Lincoln and herself to spend the night at his house. Lizzie led her into the nearest one—assigned to Robert, Hay, and Nicolay, to judge by the leather gripsacks dumped on the beds and the scent of bay rum—and eased her into a chair. “So I won't disturb his precious advisors?” cried Mary resentfully. But it was good to be away from the men to weep, with Lizzie patting her hands and Elizabeth and the two girls hurrying back and forth with cold compresses and hartshorn. At least, she thought, someone cared....

  But the childishness of that thought tore her, as her paroxysms of tears subsided. I've made a fool of myself, she thought, bitterly, and in front of them. . . . Trembling, she blew her nose, and got to her feet.

  “No,” she said, when Lizzie tried to stop her. “I'm fine now. Let me go.”

  She could hear the voices of the men still in the parlor. Talking about her, she knew. About the scene she'd just made. About how right they were to keep her out of things. Her face grew hot with shame as she stepped past Lizzie and opened the door.

  They all turned, faces wary—manlike, dreading another scene. Lincoln started toward her immediately but she said in her steadiest voice, “Mr. Lamon?”

  The bearlike lawyer stood at once. Like Lincoln he was a frontiersman turned lawyer; in the plush comfort of the Presidential railroad car, he'd whiled away hours of travel playing the banjo and singing for Tad and Willie's delight.

  “Please go with him, Mr. Lamon.” She turned to Mr. Pinkerton, regarding her with suspicion in his reptilian eyes. “I understand your point, sir, about not drawing attention to my husband by a large entourage, and I apologize if I . . . if I let my feelings overcome me. But I beg you will allow at least one bodyguard, in the event of . . . of the unexpected.”

  Lincoln looked down at Pinkerton, then over at Lamon. “That's not a bad idea. I allow I'd feel a little better about it myself, knowing there's two of you.”

  “That's a good point, Mrs. Lincoln, and well taken.” Pinkerton sounded like the admission cost him an effort to make. “Thank you.”

  “I won't leave his side, ma'am.” Lamon opened his coat, to show her the two bowie knives he habitually wore at his belt. “You can count on me, Mrs. Lincoln.”

  SHE SLEPT LITTLE THAT NIGHT. AFTER SUPPER WITH THE GOVERNOR, Lincoln, Lamon, and Pinkerton took their departure. She lay awake most of the night fighting visions of the anonymous sleeping-car being stopped en route, being overswarmed by shouting men with clubs, ropes, tar and feathers; men who all had Nate Bodley's face. Then she would wake to h
ear the soft voices of Robert, Hay, Ellsworth, and Nicolay, continuing their endless card-game in the parlor.

  Coming out to the parlor to breakfast the next morning she found Ellsworth beaming over the coffee-cups: “This came in around six, Mrs. Lincoln.” He held out a telegram, unopened—an open one lay beside Nicolay's plate.

  REACHED WASHINGTON SAFELY—WILLARD'S HOTEL

  But it was a bad start, she thought, dropping sugar into her coffee, when a President could not enter his own capital city in triumph, for fear of being murdered by the very people he was taking an oath to protect.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  THE WHITE HOUSE HAD CHANGED GREATLY SINCE MARY LAST HAD entered it for James K. Polk's receptions. Five days after her arrival in Washington—five days in which she barely saw her husband for more than a few minutes while he distractedly gulped down an egg and a cup of coffee for breakfast in their parlor at Willard's Hotel—she was received in the Blue Parlor by Harriet Lane, President Buchanan's niece.

  Buchanan was a lifelong bachelor; Miss Lane, violet-eyed and beautiful and just edging past the final frontiers of even the most diplomatic definitions of “youth,” had acted as hostess in his household since the death of her parents when she was a child. She had a slight British inflection to her voice and the well-schooled perpetual smile of a longtime member of the diplomatic corps, but behind it she watched Mary warily from the moment the gangly Irish doorman showed her into the Blue Parlor.

  The newspapers—particularly the Democratic ones like James Bennett's New York Herald—had been merciless about the “Illinois gorilla” who was about to take over the Presidency, and his fat loud-mouthed vulgar wife. Mary had closely quizzed her escort that day—the white-haired Mrs. McLean, whose husband was an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court and had been one of the contenders for the Republican nomination—to make sure that her gown of magenta taffeta, with its flowing Isabeau sleeves, was, as Madame Blois had assured her, of absolutely the most fashionable style.

  It apparently was, to judge by the infinitesimal relaxation in Miss Lane's cool greeting. The President's niece unbent a bit more at Mary's firm, polite handshake and quiet voice, and Mary silently blessed Madame Mentelle for schooling her, all those years ago, out of all but the slightest Bluegrass inflection in her speech. The Blue Parlor had at some time in the recent past been completely refurnished—she also noticed that the old glass-and-wood screen in the front hall that she remembered had been replaced by a new one of glass and iron—but the furnishings had a shabby look to them already; the brocatelle upholstery was worn and the brightly figured rugs threadbare.

  “Housekeeping here is the most appalling challenge,” drawled Miss Lane, with a gesture at the gaily painted blue ceiling, which was already peeling slightly over the fireplace and around the medallion of the Roman-style gasolier. “Rather like a cross between a palace and a hotel, with a subscription ballroom thrown in. Nothing really prepares one for it.”

  “I'm sure I'll manage,” said Mary, detecting the patronage in the younger woman's light voice.

  “Well, of course with so many of the town's hostesses leaving now over this horrible secession, goodness knows what your entertaining will be like. I understand the Corcorans left last week for Paris—that's their house across Lafayette Square, they gave the most astonishing parties—and the Taylors will be gone as well. And of course the Davises.”

  “I am sure,” said Mary thinly, “that Washington will not suffer for lack of entertainments.”

  “Of course not,” agreed Miss Lane, with the words But who in their right senses would want to associate with the Republican riffraff coming in to take their places? unfurling like an invisible banner in her restrained little smile.

  Mary itched to slap her.

  After tea Miss Lane showed her over the house and introduced her to the servants—“The doormen and the gardeners are the only ones employed by the government itself, you know. Will you be keeping on the rest of the staff? Mr. Vermereu, the butler, is a Belgian, but the rest are British. Uncle is a great believer in the British system of training servants, and I've found them quite reliable.”

  “Certainly I'll keep them on for the time being,” replied Mary, determined to yield nothing to this flawless haughty woman, with her air of speaking to a country cousin.

  If the downstairs of the house was shabby, with its tobacco-stained rugs, torn upholstery, and window-drapes that bore the scissor-marks of souvenir-hunters, the upstairs resembled a down-at-the-heels boardinghouse. Her heart sank. The long central corridor was bare and gloomy, with gray filtered light leaking into it from the open doors of the bedrooms on either side. At the east end, through ground-glass doors, the shadows of men were visible in the vestibule of the President's office; the murmur of their voices and the vibration of their feet served as an uneasy reminder of those delegations that arrived, one after the other, at Willard's Hotel, demanding of Lincoln what he was going to do about the new Confederate States. Trunks were open in several of the bedrooms. A valet was packing one of them, a maid another.

  In three days, this will be mine.

  The wife of the President.

  The First Lady of the land.

  “Thank goodness, Mr. Pierce had all the plumbing modernized.” Miss Lane's plummy voice broke into her private ecstasy. “Not that it works, half the time. But at least you have it. America does have some advantages over Britain—Uncle's house in St. James had only the most primitive bathing facilities and was absolutely glacial in the winters. The bathroom here has allegedly hot water piped in....” She opened a door off the small private corridor in the southwest corner, to reveal a handsome dressing-room papered in imitation oak-graining, and floored with oilcloth printed to look like tile. “And there's another water-closet off the secretary's office, at the other end of the house. Ghastly number of bedrooms here to heat, but then you have quite a large family, haven't you?”

  “I married young,” lied Mary sweetly, with a glance at Miss Lane's ringless finger. You old maid.

  “That's usual out West, isn't it?” Where they haven't anything better to do with their lives, do they? Miss Lane gathered her rustling skirts, and preceded her down the wide stairs.

  Three days of delegations, of debates, of sitting beside Lincoln at dinners during which he was preoccupied in talk with political hosts. Suite Six at Willard's Hotel was besieged by office-seekers, whose determination and persistence made the jostling madness that had plagued him at Springfield look like a Presbyterian Church tea. Lincoln took to waking early and going for long walks before sunrise with Robert or Nicolay. Often he'd breakfasted before she woke, and was closeted all day with Congressmen trying frantically to reach a compromise to conciliate the Confederacy. “I will not extend slavery into the territories,” he said, over and over, and the delegates went away.

  In those days she received few calls from Washington hostesses, at least partly because the parlor of Suite Six was constantly in use by her husband. “The President's wife is never obliged to make calls,” Adele Douglas informed her, when she invited Mary and her sisters and nieces for tea to the beautiful house she and Mary's old suitor owned on Lafayette Square. “It's a pity that all the really powerful hostesses were Southerners and slaveholders—which stands to reason, Washington being situated where it is. And of course nearly everyone else in Washington is here only temporarily.”

  Everyone but the Cuttses, who were related to the late and much-mourned Dolley Madison. Mary wondered, wryly, if one reason Douglas had fought so hard for re-election was because his wife didn't want to surrender her position as one of Washington's social leaders. “For the past seven years now everyone has agonized over their guest-lists, so as not to have fights breaking out over every dinner. Even before the election Mrs. Clay of Alabama would refuse to go in to dinner with anyone who'd been elected on an anti-slavery ticket, and she knew who they all were. Goodness knows what this season will bring.”

  “I daresay if Maryland sec
edes,” replied Mary, “we'll all have other things to think of besides our guest-lists.”

  In fact she was far more interested in the horrors of the crisis that loomed over Washington—the desperate attempts to find some grounds of compromise between the Union and the secessionist states—than she was over the niceties of Washington's social scene. But as ever, she was excluded from the men's councils, and relegated to the task of forming the necessary social network with the wives of Cabinet members and influential Senators.

  William Seward, whom she had distrusted from the days of the Chicago convention when the hawk-nosed little New Yorker had tried to take the nomination from Lincoln, had left his ailing wife in Albany. But Salmon Chase's daughter Kate—the ranking Cabinet hostess in town—made clear from her first visit that she intended to establish herself as the center of Washington society in her father's rented house, as she had been center of society in Columbus during her father's gubernatorial days.

  Kate Chase was young, red-haired, breathtakingly pretty, highly educated, and keenly intelligent, and Mary loathed her at sight. To Mary's gracious invitation to call at the White House, Kate had replied, with an air of great innocence, “And I hope that you will call on me,” a slap in the face given the Washington custom that the President's wife did not make calls. Mary could not believe it wasn't calculated.

  It did not help that it was obvious to Mary that both Seward and Chase regarded Lincoln as an uncouth barbarian who had to be “handled” as a pawn for their greater wisdom—though how much wisdom there was in Seward's plan to start a war with both Britain and France so that the Confederacy would leap back into the Union again, she was at a loss to determine.

  The morning of the fourth of March dawned cloudy and raw. Rumor had flown around the previous afternoon that there would be an attempt to assassinate Lincoln during the inaugural parade, inflaming all Mary's fears anew. It had taken Willie and Lizzie hours to quiet her before the dinner that Lincoln was giving for the men he'd selected for his Cabinet. In addition to the hated Seward and the oleaginous Cameron, there was the sanctimonious Mr. Chase of Ohio; Mr. Welles, Secretary of the Navy, a newspaperman who sported a bad wig and had a beard like a holly-bush; Mr. Blair, whose extensive family had been virtual royalty in Maryland for generations; Mr. Caleb Smith, yet another of David Davis's political debtors; and Mr. Edward Bates, who had been appointed mainly because he came from Missouri and had political connections to every Democrat in that barely loyal tinderbox state.