The Emancipator's Wife

by Barbara Hambly

  When, nearly two hours later, the ambulance finally rocked to a stop at the camp, the review was already in progress. She heard the music of the bands while they were still bouncing and hammering through the woods, and screamed at the driver for yet more speed. Julia Grant was sobbing and threatening to be sick, a ploy Mary herself had used far too many times to take seriously. She held out her hand peremptorily to Colonel Porter, and as he helped her down from the wagon, the first thing that met her eyes was Lincoln, mounted on a tall bay horse, leaning over to speak to a very pretty blonde woman riding beside him to review the troops.

  Mary saw red. For a moment it was as if she'd finally surprised Lincoln courting Tilda Edwards, or lingering in the woods with his landlady's young sister, all those years ago. When he turned the horse her way, and started to dismount, she screamed, “How dare you . . . !” and lunged at him, so that he had to catch her wrists to keep her from physically striking him. “How dare you send me by that roundabout way, in that heinous vehicle, with only a few soldiers for guard, so that I could have been captured by the rebels at any moment, while you put up another woman to ride with you before the Army, as if she were your wife instead of me!”

  The blonde woman, still in her sidesaddle, reined away, startled, as from a snarling dog. General Ord rode over quickly and put an arm protectively around her—his wife, thought Mary. Or his doxy—she looked like a designing slut . . . !

  “Molly . . .”

  “Don't you ‘Molly' me! Don't you treat me as if I haven't eyes, as if I count for nothing! Without me you'd still be scratching out a living trying land disputes in the backwoods! The closest you'd have gotten to real politics would be arguing them around the cracker-barrel in Irwin's store!” His face and the faces of those around him appeared and disappeared behind floating slabs of yellow light. She lost track of what she was saying, until she turned away in fury. Someone took her arm—she didn't know who—and led her toward the tents. Looking back, she saw Lincoln still standing, one moment surrounded prosaically by half a dozen blue-clothed and embarrassed officers, and the next, it seemed, alone and wreathed in an aureole of incandescent flame.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  MARY DIDN'T EVEN KNOW HOW SHE GOT BACK TO THE RIVER QUEEN, or for how many days after that, on and off, her migraine lasted. She had dim recollections of Secretary Seward escorting her back to Washington—recollections of chattering to Illinois Congressman Carl Schurz, who accompanied them, about military dispositions and her opinion of Grant's armies. Between burning clouds of migraine agony and the blessed haze of Nervine, excruciating nightmares intruded. She hadn't really shrieked at Lincoln in front of the entire General Staff . . .

  . . . had she?

  Or demanded that he dismiss “that drunken butcher Grant”?

  Or called Julia Grant a cross-eyed whore?

  Dimmer still was the recurring image of her husband riding in review of troops at the side of a beautiful blonde woman, who sometimes had Mrs. Ord's face and sometimes that of Tilda Edwards. All the men saluted, salutes that should have belonged to her, Mary....

  Had he sent her in the ambulance because he hadn't wanted her at his side? Had Colonel Porter had orders to make her late? When she asked Mrs. Cuthbert, timidly, if Mr. Lincoln were back from the headquarters yet, her maid said he wasn't. The President had sent word he would be delayed another two days.

  A lie?

  He doesn't want to come home to me, thought Mary bleakly. He doesn't want to see me. . . . As soon as the maid had left she stumbled to her feet and found her bottle of Nervine. It wasn't a headache remedy—at least, it didn't say so on the label—but she'd found it worked as well as paregoric.

  But the following day the shame and guilt and horror and pain were swept away like yesterday's tracked-in mud by voices in the corridor, by Mrs. Cuthbert bursting into the room: “Ma'am, it's true. The news is confirmed by dispatch, it'll be in the papers tonight. Jefferson Davis and his government have abandoned Richmond.”

  Mary blinked painfully in the curtained twilight. “Abandoned . . .” For a few moments the words had no meaning.

  Then, “Abandoned Richmond? You mean, left it? For our troops?”

  The maid nodded, her face flushed with nearly disbelieving joy. “They're marchin' into Richmond today, ma'am, and your husband with them. He's sent you a telegram....”

  Mary sat up with a jolt that made her head feel like it was coming off her shoulders, almost grabbed the yellow envelope from the maid's hand. “I should be there,” she said. “I should be beside him, when he rides in!”

  Was Mrs. Ord at his side?

  ENTERING RICHMOND TODAY. MILITARY ESCORT WAITING TO BRING YOU IF YOU ARE FEELING WELL ENOUGH.

  “What time is it? Draw me a bath, and have Peter get out my trunks....Tell Mr. Hay I'll be going to Richmond tomorrow.” She fumbled herself into the wrapper Mrs. Cuthbert held for her. “He should have waited for me!”

  “I don't expect General Grant would have let him bring you when they all first went in,” said the maid tactfully. “Not till they'd made sure all the rebel troops were really gone.”

  “I'll believe that when I hear Grant didn't have that cross-eyed cow of a wife with him.” She shook back her hair and settled it into place with a pair of jeweled combs that had been a gift from the Seligman bankers. “Not that he'd care. He looks like the kind of man who takes more thought for his horses than he does for a mere wife. Especially that one. Put in the dark-green velvet, I'll need to look like the President's wife when I ride in. I should ask dear Senator Sumner to accompany me, and Secretary Harlan's sweet daughter. Robert is so fond of her....”

  She paused, as it crossed her mind who would most rejoice in the news. Who would most long to enter the ruined capital of the Confederacy, to see the chief city of the slaveholding states crushed in final defeat? “And bring me my lap-desk, please,” she added. “And tell Mr. Hay that I'm going to ask Mrs. Keckley to accompany me.”

  “IT WAS ONE OF THE KINDEST—AND ONE OF THE GREATEST—THINGS anyone ever did for me,” said Lizabet Keckley softly, gazing out the window into the laundry-hung yard of the Lewis boardinghouse, as if she could see back across the ten years that separated that hot April from this sweltering July of 1875.

  Ten years, thought John.

  It was not so very long a time.

  “I'd heard the day before, that Richmond had fallen. I gave all my girls all the day off.” She laughed a little, at the memory of the time when her business had been large enough to support a little workshop of “girls.”

  “We took the River Queen down to City Point the next morning, and the military train on into Richmond. Mr. Lincoln met us there.”

  She shook her head wonderingly, and John knew exactly what she was recalling, for he had been there too. The burned buildings, the charred bricks of chimneys like the pillars of ancient Roman ruins—the fires lit by the rebel forces to destroy the bridges, the tobacco works, and the military warehouses had run wild, destroying nearly a third of the city. Some women watched them, silent and gaunt in home-dyed mourning. The slaves—ex-slaves—crowded the streets to watch the soldiers march in....

  “She was like a little girl,” said Lizabet. “She was wild. She glowed. It was his triumph, his vindication. But I think it was more for her than that. She'd spoken to me many times about her father's slaves, people she grew up with, parts of her family. I know slavery in Kentucky—at least for the house-servants—wasn't what it was farther south, but she hated it. Hated that people she cared for could be taken away like that. I don't think she ever got over that.”

  “I know I never did,” remarked John drily, and Lizabet glanced over at him, and laughed.

  “Under it all she has a good heart, you know. She was so much a lady of the South, but she saw what slavery was, and what it did to us. One of the first things she did was take us into the Legislature, where all the desks and chairs were tumbled around from the Confederate Congress leaving so fast, and papers
still scattered on the floor. She brought me up to the front of the room and had me sit in Mr. Davis's chair. I picked up some of the papers lying on the floor—one of them was the bill saying free people of color would not be permitted to enter Richmond. I still have it.”

  Her smile turned reminiscent and a little weary. As if she looked further back still from that high seat in the Confederate Legislature, backward down the long road she'd trodden, the road they'd all trodden. As if she saw straight back to her days in the unceiled cabin in Virginia, to the first time she was whipped at the age of four, and to her parents, weeping over the news that her father's master was moving West, and taking his human chattels with him. To the beatings of a mistress determined to “break her insolence” and the rape that had given her her only child.

  For years, John knew, Lizabet had “worked out” so that her wages might support master, mistress, their family, and others. She had humiliated herself, begged, and negotiated with her circle of white customers in St. Louis to help her buy her freedom. When she'd begun working in Washington, she had paid them back every penny of what her freedom had cost.

  “She gave a dinner that night in Mr. Davis's mansion,” Lizabet said after a time. “And she had a lot to say about Varina Davis's taste in wallpapers and clothing, I remember, and none of it good, though it was so close to her own that you could barely have told them apart. I remember her friend Senator Sumner at that dinner, in his fancy vest, and Robert so handsome in his uniform, with Mary Harlan, whose father was a Congressman and in Mr. Lincoln's Cabinet—and both the young people more caught up with holding hands under the table than with the fact that the Union had broken the back, not only of the rebellion, but of slavery for all time. Which was as it should be.” She smiled again, at that long-ago sight, of new love like the first blossoms on the black ruin of war.

  “She must have apologized to Mr. Lincoln, and begged his pardon, as she always did. When she and I went out to Richmond in the train she was shivering and wound up like a clockspring, but at the dinner they were friends again.

  “They were sweet together, you know?” Her eyes softened, rueful and kind. “Him so tall and grave, and all in black, for he never really came out of mourning for Willie. And her fussing around him in a circle with all her ribbons fluttering, making him bend down so she could slick his hair for him, and always watching him out of the corners of her eyes, worried whether he was all right. Which he wasn't,” she added. “He was sick by then, and always tired. His hands and feet were always cold, he said, and his color was bad. But he'd go to the hospitals with her, and shake hands with thousands of men.”

  John nodded, remembering those two figures in the moonlight on the deck of the River Queen. Remembered how Mary had reached out her hand for her husband's; remembered Lincoln taking off his tall hat, and bending down to kiss the small, plump woman in her costly black silks.

  Remembered the love and partnership in that kiss, and the unspoken knowledge that the other would always be there.

  EIGHT DAYS AFTER THE FALL OF RICHMOND, ROBERT E. LEE, WEARING his last good uniform—probably the one Mattie had smuggled him from Washington—rode up to Appomattox Courthouse and handed his sword to Ulysses Grant.

  And it was over.

  Lincoln read a speech, to the thousands who assembled by night on the White House lawn. It became one of Mary's clearest memories of him, standing in the window, with Tad beside him holding a lamp. Lincoln's face was cruelly gouged with weariness but very calm, as he spoke of his plans for rehabilitating the secessionist states back into the Union. His strong tenor voice carried out into the sticky darkness against the roar of the cicadas in the trees.

  She had a headache that day. Even Robert's return the following day—Thursday—to the White House from Appomattox, or the prospect of seeing Our American Cousin on Friday night, didn't cheer her. Only when she went on her carriage-ride Friday afternoon with Lincoln did her spirits lift, with the fresh air and sunlight, and the chance to be with her husband alone, if one discounted the presence of fourteen cavalrymen clattering their sabers all around.

  It was the first time they'd been alone together since the disastrous review at Malvern Hill, which he did not mention at all. When he referred to the trip, he spoke of the tortoise he and Tad had found beside the railroad track, and she of Varina Davis's gowns which had still been in the house at Richmond—“Most of them could have stood a stitch or two,” she sniffed, which made him laugh, as she hadn't heard him laugh since Springfield.

  “The War is over,” he said, leaning back on the carriage-seats in the dogwood dapple of slanted evening sunshine. “All but the shouting—of which there'll be plenty, when the Legislature hears that I don't plan to hang every Democrat politician in sight. But it's over, Mother. And you and I are free.”

  The carriage turned up the last stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue, still damp enough from winter and spring so as not to be dusty. The White House seemed to shine ahead of them through its sheltering trees. She closed her eyes briefly and took Lincoln's hand, then smiled up into his face as his immense grip returned her squeeze.

  The last sunlight warmed her face, and made her feel alive again, after all those years of darkness and terror and unsurvivable grief.

  Willie was gone. All her brothers—except the obnoxious George—were dead.

  The world of peace and beauty that had been the South—the world of black and white in which she'd grown up—had vanished, its passage marked by blackened walls and the black clothes of widowed belles who, like her, would never forget what they had lost.

  But she was here, and the spring evening was sweet. She and Lincoln had survived the War together. She felt as if they'd spent a long hideous night both clinging to opposite ends of a shipwreck spar adrift in a stormy ocean. Unable to speak to one another, unable to do anything but hang on and pray their strength would last till daylight.

  Now they'd been cast up together on an unknown beach. What would lie in the land beyond she didn't know. But somehow, after four years of grief and confusion and separation, she had her husband back.

  SLEEPING IN THE AFTERNOON, IN HER ROOM AT BELLEVUE PLACE, Mary dreamed that she was in the dream that Lincoln had had, a day or two after his return from Richmond.

  She dreamed of the White House, its long upstairs hall utterly dark. The air felt stuffy and silent, as of a house long deserted. She saw Lincoln, asleep with the sleep of exhaustion in that small spartan bedroom. Saw his eyes snap open, saw him look around. It was dark in the room and cold, but she heard now—as he heard—the sound of someone weeping, somewhere in the house, weeping jaggedly . . . as if he or she had been crying for hours but could not stop.

  He sat up, and ran his hand through his hair. He was dressed in shirtsleeves and trousers, barefoot as if he'd lain down too tired to even completely undress. For a time he listened, then got to his feet and went to the door, listening in the darkness. Mary watched him pad soundlessly through the empty halls, looking into the rooms, first upstairs and then down. Beds empty and stripped of their sheets, his office bare in the ghostly moonlight, no papers. No charts on the long battered pine tables, only a tattered map of the Union and Confederacy still pinned to the smoke-defaced paper of the walls and that stained old picture of Jackson above the fireplace. He looked into her room, and Tad's. Both were empty and cleared out. Even the cats had gone, and little curly-haired Jip.

  Downstairs the East Room was a cavern of darkness, in which candles burned like constellations of fevered stars. A huge dim shape reared in its center, a black canopy shrouded with black curtains; every window was hung with black. Here alone were people—men, soldiers, standing around a black-draped coffin. Now and then one would shift his feet and the creak of boot-leather and the clink of a buckle were loud as cymbals in the deathly silence of the house.

  Lincoln crossed the thick green carpet with its pink roses, from Carryl's of Philadelphia. Stood for a moment looking up at the sable canopy, the coffin that it sheltered.
Distantly the sound of weeping began afresh. He stepped forward to one of the guards, the soldier tired, like a picket after a long night's watching.

  “What is it?” asked Lincoln softly, and looked at the coffin in the shadows. “Who is dead in the White House?”

  The guard answered, “The President. He was shot by an assassin. He's dead.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  Washington July 1875

  “SHE GAVE AWAY EVERYTHING HE OWNED,” LIZABET KECKLEY SAID. “She told me she could not bear the memories they held.”

  Late-afternoon sunlight glared on the waters of the Potomac, glimpsed through the ragged screen of trees. Closer, pools and puddles that studded the Mall's unkempt grasses flashed like silver. At the far end of the long park, closer to the Capitol, some effort was being made to transform the open land into the sort of tapis vert that its designers had originally envisioned, but at the moment it was pretty much as John remembered it from a decade ago: a swampy strip of ground where people grazed their cows. The granite monument to George Washington didn't look any further along than it had been when the money to build it ran out in the late 1850s.

  Beside him, Frederick Douglass nodded. Though his hair was whitening he still stood tall and regal, his hard, almost frightening features relaxing into a rare expression of personal grief. “She gave me a pair of his spectacles,” he said, in his deep, beautiful voice. “And one of his canes—one that I think he actually used once or twice. People were forever presenting him with canes, and of course he had about as much use for a cane as I have for a pink silk petticoat. At fifty-five he had the body of a twenty-year-old. You have his coat, don't you, Lizabet?”

  The seamstress shook her head. “I forget who she gave his coat to. She gave me his brush and his comb, because I'd often comb his hair, the last thing before they went down to a reception. I cut it, once or twice—he was always letting it get too long. I wish I had kept the cuttings.”