The Emancipator's Wife

by Barbara Hambly

  No one was going to say that the President's Lady was some countrified Westerner who didn't know how to dress!

  I had to do it, she thought in despair. I had to, and no one understands!

  She herself didn't understand how she could have spent that much. They must be cheating her, she thought. . . . But she remembered overspending when she'd bought furniture for the remodeled Springfield house, remembered not being quite aware of how that had happened, either.

  Why couldn't money be like it had been for her father? Something you had and something you spent, a comfortable golden vagueness which no gentleman—and certainly no lady—ever discussed in specific terms. As a girl Mary had never had the slightest idea of what her clothes had cost. She'd just gotten what she wanted, and the shopkeepers sent their accounts to her father.

  Why couldn't it still be that way?

  Through the wall of her bedroom she heard Lincoln's footsteps in his own small bare chamber, and the faint creak of the bed as he lay down. Much later, in the dark pre-dawn, she heard him get up again, and go padding down the corridor to the bedroom where his secretaries slept. When the soft tread faded, she slipped on her wrapper and went to the door of her bedroom, and out to the main corridor, dark and terrifying and cold.

  A faint stain of yellow lamplight showed through the secretaries' half-open door, and she could hear Lincoln's voice, reading aloud:

  “What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form, in moving, how express and admirable. . . .”

  And Nicolay's, answering, she couldn't hear what. Relaxed talk, of anything and nothing—of anything except the War that was tearing the country apart. Like the talk around the stove at Dillard's, or among the lawyers in those primitive country inns on the Eighth Judicial Circuit.

  Lincoln's laughter: “That reminds me of a fellow in DeWitt County who married two wives....”

  The gentle talk that he'd come into the parlor that evening seeking, thought Mary, when she'd flown at him with demands about why she wasn't in charge of White House invitations, when she knew perfectly well that it had something to do with her refusal to invite that scheming hussy Kate Chase to dinner when Kate's father was a member of the Cabinet.

  She stole quietly back into her room, her head throbbing, took a spoonful of Indian Bitters, and returned to her cold bed.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  MARY BEGGED LINCOLN'S PARDON, SICK WITH DREAD THAT HE WOULD simply turn cold on her—or worse, bring up the subject of the bills—and was forgiven.

  But the matter of invitations still rankled, and John Nicolay still remained in charge of White House official entertainments.

  There were so many people in Washington to whom one had to be polite, no matter what one knew they were saying behind one's back! “You're the President of the United States,” said Mary, half-playful and half-earnest, over breakfast. “Surely that gives you the right to not have to put up with schemers and liars and hypocrites who would just as soon do you a dirty turn as not!”

  “I surely wish it did,” Lincoln sighed. Even the egg that was usually all he'd have for breakfast curdled untouched on the plate before him in the chilly sunlight. “But in fact it takes that right away.”

  Willie looked up at him, baffled. “Then what do you get, Pa, for being President?”

  “I get to have an eagle embroidered on my napkin,” replied Lincoln promptly. “And I get to have the band play when I come into the room.”

  Mary supposed he was right—that as President, he did not have the right to pick and choose whom he entertained. But the knowledge that Kate Chase's at-homes were better attended than hers—and that the Treasury Secretary's daughter lost no opportunity in advancing her father's chances for the next Presidential nomination by spreading gossip about Lincoln and Mary—made it difficult for Mary to be polite to the younger hostess.

  She began to hold regular unofficial drawing-rooms in the Blue Parlor on her “off” afternoons, and, later, on Saturday nights as well, so that she could invite whom she chose. The company was mostly male, though Ginny Blair Fox was often present, and Sally Orne, when she was in town.

  It was good to talk of literature and art as well as politics, to hear stories of foreign cities and the fashionable world outside the provincial circles of government. It was good to have a few hours in which she didn't have to worry, or watch what she said. It was good to feel that she was important—to push aside the troubling sense that Lincoln was avoiding her, and making plans and decisions in which she had no part.

  Senator Sumner was a regular attendee, always ready to top her stories with his own or to give her pointers on the absolute newest styles in hats. Ben French was another, a gray-whiskered, fatherly man whom Mary had originally met back when he was a Democrat in 1848 and he'd come by Mrs. Spriggs's. He was a Republican now, and had replaced William Wood as Commissioner of Public Buildings, though he liked to say that the real Mr. French, dwelling like a little doll inside his skull, was a famous composer, trying to dig his way out. He played the piano beautifully in the Red Room, and wrote poems.

  The Byronic General Dan Sickles came often, though there were some in Washington who frowned on him because of the scandal in his past, when he had shot the man who'd seduced his wife; the brooding darkness of that murder seemed to burn in his eyes, like a character from one of the novels Mary so loved. And for European dash and fashion there were Jacob and Henry Seligman, bankers from Frankfurt-am-Main.

  Most fascinating of all was Chevalier Henry Wikoff. An American, Wikoff had moved like a graceful shadow through European courts for many years. The Chevalier seemed to have met everyone and to know amusing and slightly scandalous stories about them all, and his judgment on matters of etiquette and social usage was as impeccable as the cut of his waistcoats. He had a terrible reputation (Lizabet Keckley said), though to Mary he was never anything but gallant and deferential, and Mary—who'd developed her own hatred of the “vampire press” over those calculated innuendoes of Southern sympathy—was inclined to disbelieve half of what she heard. Even men who disapproved of him, like Charles Sumner, had to laugh at his tales of what the Sultan of Turkey had done with the French Minister to the Sublime Porte, and how the transplanted court of an Indian Royal Prince had comported themselves in a London bathhouse. It was Wikoff who gave her private entertainments and menus the last touch of Parisian elegance, the European flavor that made the diplomats nod approvingly. It was he who told her of what was being read in Paris, and what gossiped about in Madrid.

  It was Wikoff who started calling her the “Republican Queen,” a title swiftly picked up by the press.

  Mary found it soothing beyond words to be treated like a belle again. When she looked in the mirror, although she dressed with great care, she was burningly aware that she was now forty-three, that her figure had thickened and her face had not only aged, but hardened. She looked forward eagerly to her salons in the Blue Parlor, where for a few hours she could forget that her husband spent fourteen hours a day talking to office-seekers and Generals, and preferred the company of his secretaries in the dark watches of the night.

  In October word reached them that Lincoln's old Springfield friend Ed Baker—who had resigned from the Senate to take up command of the volunteer company he had raised in Oregon—had been killed in action at Ball's Bluff, and for a time her nightmares and grief returned. Willie wrote a poem about his father's friend, and it was published in the Washington National Republican.

  No squeamish notions filled his breast,

  The Union was his theme,

  “No surrender and no compromise,”

  His day thought and night's dream.

  Meanwhile cocky General McClellan drilled his troops on the banks of the Potomac, asked for more men, and didn't go out to fight.

  Late in November Lincoln proclaimed a national Day of Thanksgiving, and invited Josh Speed and his wife to the White House for turkey dinner. In the end they had Army beef inste
ad, since Tad and Willie had taken to playing with the enormous turkey that the cook kept penned behind the stable to fatten; two days before Thanksgiving the boys appeared in Lincoln's office with a pardon for Jack the Turkey, asking him to sign, which of course he did. The cook complained to Mary about having to change the menu, Mary complained to Lincoln, and Lincoln—who didn't have much to laugh about those days—only laughed.

  Mary also had very little to laugh about, as the New Year approached and bills poured in like a hemorrhaging wound. Fifteen thousand, one hundred and ninety-eight dollars from Carryl Brothers in Philadelphia. Three thousand dollars from Houghwont and Company in New York. That was the solferino and gold dishes. Thousands more for Brussels velvet for new draperies in the Red Room. “This can't be right!” Mary sat back, aghast, her hand going to her throat; the next second she glanced up at young Mr. Stoddard, the assistant clerk who had been assigned to deal with her correspondence.

  “I couldn't say, ma'am,” replied the young man. “I can get Mr. Nicolay to double-check the bill with Alexander's—”

  “No!” She reached as if to physically catch him, keep him in the parlor, then drew back her hand, ashamed. She made her voice light, the coquettish tone of a belle, denying something was important even as it burned a hole in her heart. “No, don't trouble Mr. Nicolay with it . . . or my husband. I . . . I will write to Mr. Alexander....”

  It couldn't possibly have cost $1700 to have new wallpapers in the East Room and the big State Dining Room downstairs! Why didn't she remember it costing that much?

  Her hand began to shake as she looked through the other bills Stoddard had given her. Her mind simply blanked out the sums, dissolving them into a buzzing vagueness. There had been enough trouble over the $900 the dinner for Prince Napoleon had cost—the thought of going to John Nicolay for money to cover the overrun turned her sick to her stomach with dread.

  The thought of what Lincoln would say was unthinkable.

  “You can go, Mr. Stoddard. I will deal with these. I . . . I'm relying on your discretion. You know how the newspapers get hold of things.”

  “Of course.”

  I can't deal with this now, she thought, as the clerk's footsteps retreated down the cavern of the upstairs hall. Tears flooded her eyes.

  Lincoln, she knew, would be beyond furious. Manlike, he had no idea how much redecoration cost, and no notion of the difference in appearance between the best materials and inferior goods. It was the Springfield house all over again. Few men she knew understood that one never knew how much work would cost until it was actually done. Nor should he have to worry about this, she thought wretchedly. He was already obliged to entertain hundreds of people several times a week out of his own salary.

  She couldn't let anyone know.

  Even as she couldn't let anyone know of her grief and fears for Ben Helm and her brothers.

  Alone in the curtained dimness of the parlor, she could hear the voices of the men beyond the glass doors. Careless voices, loud and coarse. Cursing sometimes, as if they didn't even realize that the President's wife and children might be within earshot; or talking about the women who had swarmed to the city in such numbers, following the Army, women with names like Short Annie and Lucy Twenty-Three.

  He didn't need this evidence of Mary's fecklessness, on top of everything else.

  She thrust the bills into her secretaire and locked it. Her head ached and she fled the dark room, seeking someplace where there wasn't a chance that Nicolay or Hay would walk in on her as she wept.

  Like a fugitive shadow, her silk taffeta skirts rustling, she descended the wide stair, slipped through the dining-room where servants were already laying the table for dinner, and down the short corridor of glass that led to the conservatory. Even in the corridor, the humid warmth of the greenhouse enfolded her in its comforting embrace. Southward through the wavy panes of the corridor's glass Tad and Willie were visible on their ponies, galloping back and forth across the cropped grass of the paddock. Their tutor, Mr. Williamson, sat on the fence and watched them good-naturedly. It was he who'd named the ponies Caesar and Napoleon (though Tad pronounced his mount's name “Teeda”—and Williamson still hadn't had the slightest success in teaching the boy to read).

  Silence and sweetness, and the thick scents of greenery and earth. She sank down onto one of the heavy green benches, pressed her hands to her face. Five thousand dollars! And another $3000 . . . plus that bill for the rose-colored silk for the new gown for next week's reception . . . but she could just imagine what the newspapers would say if she made an appearance in the same gown she'd worn to entertain Prince Napoleon!

  But this was all her fault, nevertheless. She always swore not to spend any more money and this always happened. She didn't quite know how or why. She lowered her head to her hands, and began to cry.

  “Now, then, Mrs. L.,” said a gentle Irish voice, “we can't have you makin' those lovely blue eyes red.”

  She raised her head. Johnny Watt stood before her, in his rough boots and mud-stained shirtsleeves, his honest countenance grave with shared sorrow. The groundsman had a trowel in one hand and hanks of string dangling from his pocket, for tying up vines. Gossip attributed him with years of corrupt bookkeeping and chicanery, but Mary couldn't believe that was true any more than some of the vile rumors being circulated about the elegant Chevalier Wikoff. Certainly no more true than the abominable absurdities ascribed to her. A quiet and unalarming presence, Watt was always willing to take time from his work to show her the new blooms.

  “Sure, Mrs. L., it's no great thing to run over the amount you was given,” he said, when Mary had sobbed out her trouble to him. “Why, Congress does it all the time, and you don't see them fine gentlemen in tears over it, not that nine-tenths of 'em would know what a tear was if they was to drown in an ocean of 'em....All they do is shift over money from some other fund.”

  Mary blew her nose, folded her handkerchief, and looked across into those bright, understanding eyes.

  “It's like a man shiftin' change from one pocket to the other, that's all,” Johnny went on encouragingly. “Nothing to grieve yourself over, or to go showin' a long face to poor Mr. Lincoln, and him with so much else to worry him nowadays. Why, it's what Congress does payin' that stuck-up laddybuck Hay to be the secretary of your husband's secretary, when he's on the books as a clerk in the Department of the Interior.”

  He snipped a pink rose from the bush nearby, neatly trimmed off the points of the thorns with his shears and wrapped the stem in a square of tissue from the box on the bench.

  “Now, what's to keep you from turnin' that smooth English scoundrel Goodchild out, that was Mr. Buchanan's steward, who's been sellin' the food you pay for out the back door? You could do his books yourself, and have Mr. Nicolay pay over his salary to you. I'm sure you'd run the place better than Goodchild ever did.” He grinned his leprechaun grin. “It's what you do, after all, when you've overspent your dress allowance back home. You turn off the cook and do your cookin' yourself for a month or so, till the dibs get back in tune.”

  She laughed shakily. “So it is! Not that half of those wretched cooks we had in Springfield could make a sauce as well as I. I think Mr. Lincoln always ate better in their absence.”

  “That's the spirit, Mrs. L.!” Johnny gave her a boisterous thumbs-up. “A few months of old Goodchild's salary, and things will be right as rain.”

  But Nicolay regarded her with frosty suspicion when she suggested that she keep the departing steward's salary herself, and the interview ended—as had so many with the secretary—with her temper snapping, and Mary screaming vituperation at him and then fleeing back to her parlor in tears. Nicolay distrusted Watt, and believed every tattled rumor of his raising produce on the White House grounds to sell to the local grocers. He claimed the groundsman was a Southern sympathizer, though Mary guessed he'd have claimed anyone a Southern sympathizer who didn't sympathize with John Nicolay.

  When turning off the steward didn't
produce enough of a surplus to cover the bills, and Watt offered to order several thousand dollars' worth of trees and roses for the garden and hand over the allotted money to her instead, Nicolay began to make investigations—“Not that it's any of his business, the schemin' German,” muttered Watt. “It's all money for the house, after all.”

  At last, when the creditors became insistent, Mary sent a note to Ben French, begging him to come at once. Instead he sent a note saying he was otherwise engaged—it being Sunday afternoon—and that he'd wait on her first thing in the morning. She passed the rest of the day in panic and tears, and retired to bed with Indian Bitters and a headache, to be roused with difficulty by her maid Mrs. Cuthbert the next morning at nine with the news that Mr. French was waiting in the Red Parlor.

  It was on the tip of Mary's tongue to demand just who he thought he was, to arrive at this hour of the morning and expect a lady to see him all of a crack....But the memory of the bills drove her out of bed. “Just get me my wrapper,” she instructed, stumbling groggily to the vanity to brush her hair, “and ask him to come up to the parlor.”

  “Mrs. Lincoln . . . !” The maid was scandalized.

  “Just tell him, and hurry!” Her head still throbbed from last night's headache, and she felt woozy. “I'm sure I'm perfectly decent in my wrapper.” It was new, silk velvet, and of a sumptuous burgundy hue. “Certainly it covers more of me than an evening gown.”

  Mr. French half-rose from the parlor sofa as she rushed into the room, the bills in her hands. Merely the sight of that stocky, heavy-shouldered gentleman, and the thought of confessing, released another flood of tears: she could barely get the words out. “Please, please tell the President that it's a common thing, to over-run appropriations. Everyone does it! The money can be taken from some other place, like a man shifting his coins from one pocket to the other, but he must sign to have it done.”