The Emancipator's Wife

by Barbara Hambly

  “There is a woman named Delia Crane in Jacksonville, of true spiritual power, in whose parlor I was at last able to speak face-to-face with my beloved mother once again. . . .”

  So Mary packed her trunks, put more trunks into storage in the Grand Pacific's basement—after detailed instructions to Mr. Turner about their safety in case of another major fire—and took the train to Florida.

  Robert did not see her off.

  He had intended to, but when he'd come up to her room to help her pack, he'd discovered one of the special petticoats she'd made for herself, with pockets sewn in them so that she could carry money and bonds.

  “Dearest, you know you cannot trust servants in these places these days,” she'd explained, to his expression of horror. “The only safe place is to carry one's money about one's person.”

  “Safe?” Robert was aghast. “You refuse to invest your money—where it would actually be safe—and you carry it around with you, where any scoundrel could take it....”

  “They don't know I have it.” Her anger rose at the disapproval tightening her son's brow. “Honestly, they haven't a pair of magic spectacles to see through a woman's petticoats—I hope! And as for investing it, or putting it in a bank, one has only to read a newspaper to see what comes of that! You only want me to do so because you want to collect the interest . . . and to borrow it to invest in land yourself!”

  He turned bright red. “That's the most absurd thing I've ever heard! I want you to invest it so you won't spend it on idiotic silver-mining stock like you did during the War!”

  “It was not idiotic! Mr. Wikoff's advice was always good—”

  “Mr. Wikoff was a scoundrel and a spy and the stock he got you to buy was trash! You should invest in land because it's safe and profitable—”

  “You want me to invest in land because you want to inherit it when I die!” stormed Mary, and Robert stalked in silence from the room.

  Thus she and her nurse-companion Catherine Foy took a cab for the station and boarded the train alone.

  It was the first time she'd trodden Southern soil since she'd been driven in the carriage through the burned-out streets of Richmond, to sit in Varina Davis's parlor and watch Lizabet Keckley walk about the shambles of the Confederate Senate chamber. From Mrs. Tucker— the owner of the Stephenson House, where she had stayed in St. Catherine—she had heard much of the outrages and injustices of the occupying Union troops after the war (Mrs. Tucker and most of her guests being expatriate Confederates), but she saw little of this in Jacksonville.

  In many ways it was as if the bloodshed which had so nearly torn the country apart had not touched the small town on the St. Johns estuary. The servants at Mrs. Stockton's boardinghouse were colored, well-trained, quiet-footed, and respectful, the kind of domestic help Mary had longed for in vain for years. She and Mrs. Foy took the steamer upriver to Green Cove's sulphur springs, where her arthritis improved with heat and mineral baths. For the first spring in several years she did not suffer from devastating headaches.

  But Jacksonville, though certainly more pleasant in December than Chicago, was just as hollow, like a better-heated room of the same empty, echoing house. She spent a desolate Christmas with Mrs. Stockton's family—three War-widowed daughters and their teenaged children, who treated Mary like a beloved and eccentric aunt—and passed many days thereafter in the dimness of laudanum, chloral hydrate, migraines, and cloudy dreams. Mrs. Stockton seemed to understand.

  “The voices you hear in your spells are the voices of the spirits, speaking beyond the Veil,” she assured Mary, one March afternoon on the gallery when the two ladies took tea together. “I hear them often myself.” She took a bottle of Indian Bitters from her reticule and poured a hefty dollop into her tea, following it up with three spoonfuls of sugar: she had, Mary well knew, female complaints as severe and agonizing as Mary's own.

  Her black-clothed eldest daughter—who actually ran the boardinghouse—paused on the way back to the kitchen to cast a glance of patient exasperation at her mother, then went through the side door. Her husband, like Emilie's Ben, had died at Chickamauga Creek. A balmy breeze drifted in off the estuary, bringing with it the perfumes of salt-water and orange-blossom.

  “Do you hear music also?” Mary remembered the séances at St. Catherine and the Spiritualist camps along the Fox River.

  “Oh, dear, yes. The Colonel—my husband—used to play the fiddle, and often I'll hear it, coming from the bedroom door as I go up the stairs.”

  She spoke cheerfully, but Mary shivered. The voices that seemed to exude from the walls or the floor when she was having one of her spells had been angry voices, voices of malice, whispering of evil and death.

  Spy, they said. Hellcat. Limb of Satan. Liar.

  Perhaps it was the little bit of extra Cordial she drank at tea with Mrs. Stockton that brought them back that night, because as she lay awake in her room, staring at the amber pool of the night-light's tiny gleam, she heard them again.

  Sometimes it was a hissing whisper. Sometimes merely a low mutter that she could almost make out—this she feared with all her heart, for it sounded like the muttering of the men in the hallway of that awful little house across from Ford's Theater on that terrible spring night. Get that woman out of here. Who gets to tell her he's dead? Can we find some woman to take her back to the White House without a scene?

  Ten years ago. In two weeks it would be ten years exactly.

  Desperately she sat up in bed and cried, “Tad! Taddie, darling, where are you?” And then, hopefully, praying the next moment that she'd see her middle son, her sweet-faced boy, her little champion, with his hands full of flowers from the White House conservatory, she called: “Willie?”

  Were those two glowing shapes taking form there by the wall her cherished boys?

  She saw their faces, their eyes and their hands, appearing and disappearing in a shining cloud. Saw their mouths forming words, their hands reaching out of the light toward her . . .

  “Bobby,” Willie said, his voice echoing Mary's own. “Bobby is lost. Bobby is lost. Bobby will die....”

  And she saw, as if through a window, Robert crossing his own tidy parlor back in Chicago. Saw him stop, cough, soundless as a dumb show, clutch at his chest, knees slowly buckling as he collapsed to the floor. Saw Mamie run in, shaking her father frantically by the shoulder, sobbing in wild terror, her mouth moving mutely, Papa! Papa!

  Where Young Mary was—where the servants were (if there were any that week)—Mary didn't know. But she heard Tad saying, “Bobby will die. Bobby will die.”

  Bobby will die.

  She screamed, “No!” and the dream exploded like shattering glass.

  Mary wired frantic messages from the telegraph office in Jacksonville the following afternoon: My belief is my son is ill telegraph me at once without a moments delay, she scrawled, addressing her wire to Robert's new partner, Edward Isham. On receipt of this I start for Chicago once your message is received.

  And also to Isham, with instructions to deliver it to Robert on his sickbed: My dearly beloved son Robert T. Lincoln rouse yourself and live for my sake All I have is yours from this hour. I am praying every moment for your life to be spared to your mother.

  She spent the night feverishly packing. Mrs. Foy tried to talk her out of returning—“Sure, you'll get to the station to find word that Mr. Robert is flourishing”—but Mary shook her head.

  “He will lie to me,” she snapped. Her hands trembled with agitation and she fumbled the cap from a bottle—she didn't care which bottle. They were all the same. “And that scoundrel Isham will lie. They don't want me near my son. Isham is thick as thieves with that mealy-mouthed hussy. She wants to keep me away from my son, away from my granddaughter....”

  Upon reaching the train station she tore up unread the telegram that was waiting for her. It would only be Isham's lies.

  Start for Chicago this evening hope you are better today you will have money on my arrival.

 
; Anything, anything to get him to live. To keep him at her side.

  All the way to Chicago, three endless, nerve-shattering days on the train, she thought, If he leaves me, too, I shall die.

  Three days in a bone-shaking train car, her arthritis and neuralgia racking her like the Inquisition's den of torments. Three days of tension and terror feverishly reading newspapers and magazines without the slightest awareness of the words. Three nights of lying on her narrow bunk, waiting for Catherine's breathing to deepen so that she could slip one of her bottles of Godfrey's Cordial or chloral hydrate out of her bag or her petticoat pockets, to take the few extra mouthfuls that would give her blessed sleep.

  Three nights of sitting beside Tad's chair in the Clifton House, listening to the agonized gasping of his breath.

  Of sitting beside that immense rosewood bed in the White House, with its ostentatious hangings of purple and gold, looking down at Willie's still face.

  Of lying on that stiff horsehair sofa in Petersen's parlor, hearing men's voices muttering in the hall . . .

  Dear God, let him live! she prayed as the train jolted and shook her aching bones. Dear God, let him live until I get there! Preserve his life. . . .

  But she knew too well that God never answered such prayers.

  The train reached Chicago on a leaden evening. After Jacksonville's balmy warmth, the chill of the half-constructed train-station cut her flesh like a knife. She stumbled from the train car, catching Catherine's arm, shaky as a drunken woman.

  After the peace of Jacksonville, the noise of Chicago was like being beaten with a thousand iron hammers, the stench—of smoke, of soot, of packing-yards, of horse-dung, of unwashed humanity streaming along the platform all around her—was like one of the lower circles of Hell.

  “You have to fetch a cab,” she gasped to the nurse. “Put the luggage into storage here. I must get to Robert's immediately. I'll worry about a hotel later—after we get to Robert's, I'll send you to the Grand Pacific to make arrangements. I pray I'm not too late....”

  Catherine turned her head in the direction of the waiting-rooms, at the end of the long gloomy platform. The gas-lamps made splodges of yellow in the thickening twilight; the figures crowding and pushing toward the train cars and away from them were also hellish, a confusion of smelly tweeds and crowding shoulders, demon-faces leering from shadow.

  The sturdy Irishwoman said, “I don't think you need worry about being too late, Mrs. Lincoln.”

  Jostling his way through the crowds on the platform, in obviously flourishing good health, his face flushed with annoyance, was Robert.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE

  Bellevue Place August 1875

  “I THINK FROM THE MOMENT I RETURNED TO CHICAGO IN MARCH,” said Mary softly, “Robert intended to have me incarcerated as insane.”

  She reached across the short distance that separated her chair from the one John had filched from the hallway for Myra, and clasped Myra's gloved hands. Even through the shut curtains of her room, the sunlight leaked in brilliant bars. The house was hushed, for dinner was served in the afternoon on Fridays, with only a small cold supper at night, so that Dr. Patterson could have a good meal before getting on the Chicago train at four. Myra had come walking up the drive at just after four, only a few minutes after Mary had taken her post at the window to watch for her: Mary's heart had pounded so hard with relief, with joy, with apprehension that even now her friend would be turned away, that she'd had to sit down to still her trembling.

  She was still trying to get her breath when John had knocked on the door, and shown Myra in.

  She hadn't heard what he'd said to Amanda, in the next room with the communicating barred window, but before she had even dried the tears of relief that streamed from her eyes at the sight of Myra she had heard the attendant's footfalls whisper away down the corridor carpet.

  John brought in the chair from Amanda's room, and sat quietly in a corner while Myra and Mary talked.

  “John has told you, about . . . about how I slid into . . . misuse . . . of my medicines.” She could scarcely get the words out. She couldn't think of a soul besides Myra to whom she would even mention the possibility of such behavior, much less confess to what it had caused her to do. “I didn't think he could possibly be right, but since I have followed the regimen that he outlined for me, I have not had a ‘spell,' nor any of the . . . the delusions that plagued me so.”

  She broke off, biting her lips and feeling tears sting, and Myra squeezed her hands encouragingly.

  “Nevertheless, I did sometimes have dreams—long before I began taking medicine—that foretold disaster. Mr. Lincoln had them, too. So when I dreamed that Robert was dying, it seemed to me . . .”

  She shook her head. It was impossible to rid her mind of the stony-eyed fury and suspicion in her son's face under the harsh gloom of the station gaslight.

  “Well,” she said, “he wasn't dying. Then I believed for a time that the dream had presaged some terrible accident, and of course he would not listen to me. And I admit that I acted like a crazy woman. Much of it I don't even remember, so I must have been taking . . . well, a great deal more Cordial than was good for me.

  “I obtained rooms again at the Grand Pacific, and Robert took one next to mine. But as usual, we quarreled—over my money, which he wanted to borrow to invest, and over my going about the city by myself, and over my shopping. Yes, I know I spend too much money, but I never pay full price for things anymore. . . . I will only buy after I have argued the shopkeepers down. And what harm does it do, to me or to anyone? Except of course to Robert, who views every trinket I buy as that much less he will inherit.”

  She heard the anger in her voice, felt the familiar deadly heat of it flush her face, and bit back the several other animadversions that rose to her lips about her only living son's determination to control her and her money.

  Far easier to berate Robert, she thought, than to talk about the weeks she had spent, living in Chicago alone.

  “I had . . . such terrible dreams. Dreams that the city was burning again. Dreams that Robert was planning to kill me for my money. I remember dreaming that he'd cut a door between his room and mine, and was going to creep in at midnight and smother me with pillows—I ran from the room into the hall, where he seized me....I must have been sleepwalking, or still dazed from the dream, for I did scream that he was going to kill me, or at least he claims that I did. I—I may have. I honestly don't remember.

  “He sent Dr. Danforth to visit me, and I remember almost nothing of the visit. He said—Dr. Danforth said—that I claimed that someone had tried to poison me at a train-station in Georgia on my way up from Florida. Again, I have no recollection of saying anything of the kind, but I do remember reading a story in a magazine—the Saturday Evening Gazette, I think it was—that involved the heroine being given poisoned coffee, and drinking a second cup in order to make herself sick enough to purge her system.”

  Her fingers tightened around Myra's, as if the sensibly gloved hands were a lifeline that would draw her from this deceptively sunny, quiet maelstrom of helplessness.

  “Then Robert had me followed. He claimed it was because of the money I carried around with me in my petticoats, which he said would make me a target for robbers. But he gave the men instructions to make note of who I talked to, and who came to see me at my hotel. That tells me that his intention was not entirely disinterested, and that he was planning this for some time.”

  “They certainly must have told him what time you could generally be found in your room,” commented Myra thoughtfully. “They were right on the spot when you returned from your shopping that morning, you know. And the judge—a busy man with schedules to keep—and jury were waiting, already empanelled, in a courtroom that was held ready. The witnesses all have to have been contacted at least a day in advance. It was nicely planned.”

  “I suspect that was Mr. Swett.” Mary almost spit the name. “He never approved of me, not even when my dearest husband a
nd protector was alive! I told Robert that I was planning to leave Chicago again, to go to California. He was horrified, of course, and forbade me to go, as if I was his child rather than a grown woman! But after he left the Grand Pacific and went back to live in his home again—we quarreled over my poor little Mamie, too, and how that dreadful mother of hers treats her!—I saw no reason to go on staying in that horrid room, with nothing to do day after day but visit the shops. Mr. Lincoln had spoken of going to California, and Mrs. Stockton in Jacksonville set me thinking of it again, telling me that it is a marvelously healthful climate, and now that the railroad runs there even a poor widow like myself can travel and live there safely.”

  “When was this?” asked Myra, and Mary shook her head.

  “I don't remember. It was sometime after the first of May, because I know I wrote to Ella Slapater's cousin in San Francisco on the first. Robert urged me to go back to Springfield and live with Elizabeth—where he could keep an eye on me, I daresay.”

  She closed her eyes. All those quarrels—in the Grand Pacific's red plush lobby, in Robert's painfully neat parlor, in the kitchen of the house on Eighth and Jackson Streets back in Springfield—blurred into a single nightmare, of Robert's voice growing colder and colder....

  Only it wasn't Robert's voice. And it wasn't Robert, who drew away from her, who walked out of the room.

  “And within ten days,” said Myra thoughtfully, “you were locked up.”

  WHEN JOHN ESCORTED MYRA DOWNSTAIRS AN HOUR LATER, TO confer with Young Doc, Mary sat for a long time in the dimming twilight of her room.