The Emancipator's Wife

by Barbara Hambly

  And as they crossed the threshold into the dim entryway Mary's heart flooded with warmth, that this forbidding woman knew something of her family. That she wasn't just another nameless schoolgirl to be pushed aside, as she was always pushed aside at home unless she raised a fuss or made them laugh. And at the same time it burst upon her like sunlight that French was a language in which one could talk about things that were important and fun, not just about the pen of the gardener's aunt.

  “Grandpa Todd held off the Indians at Blue Licks, Madame.” She had no idea what the French word for a salt-lick was, so simply gave the vowel a Gallic twist. “My Great-Uncle John was killed in that battle.”

  “‘My Great-Uncle John, he was killed in that battle,'” Madame corrected. “This is how it is said in Paris. I too had an uncle killed in battle, fighting for the King of France against the rabble.” She paused in the hallway; through a door on her right Mary glimpsed dark bookshelves and busts of bronze and marble and gilt-trimmed porphyry in niches; through another, wide windows and dappled light. Somewhere in the house a woman sang as she worked, a light air, and in French. There was a smell of wood-smoke, and of pine boughs brought in to freshen the winter stuffiness. The quiet felt like the blessing of God, after the constant turmoil and children crying of her father's house—her stepmother's house.

  “I understand you are something of a scholar yourself.”

  “Yes, ma'am.”

  “And I suppose you've been told all your life not to tax your poor little female brain with such heavy matters as history and mathematics.” Madame led the way down a passageway, and across a narrow court tucked in like an open-air hallway between the main block of the house and its western wing. Plum-colored nubbins of new canes punctuated the thorny stems of roses along the brick of the wall. A green film of moss on the bricks underfoot showed where the shadows lay longest. “At least that's what people were always telling me.”

  “Did they call you a bluestocking, ma'am?” It was the worst thing Betsey and Sophy Breckenridge could say of another woman, and Mary was astonished she remembered the phrase for it in French.

  “Bluestocking? To hear them tell it, I was blue all the way up to my chin.” Madame walked beside her down the court, which had several doors opening onto it and a little iron gate at the end. “And do you know what? It didn't change how I felt. One cannot change what one feels, child. Any more than one can change what one loves.” She paused with her hand on the door-latch. “We're a bit crowded this season. I hope you don't mind a room in the family wing, instead of over on the east side with the other boarders? Dinner is in the main house at five, and perhaps we'll have a little music afterwards—do you play?”

  Before Mary could reply Madame opened the door, to reveal a room every bit as constricted—and as innocent of a fireplace—as her own on Short Street. The two small beds it contained seemed to fill it. Mary's own three trunks were piled at the foot of one, with hatboxes and satchels stacked neatly on top. Beside the other, just removing an armful of folded linen from a stylish portmanteau, was Meg Wickliffe, a smile of welcome and delight on her face.

  “I shall see you girls at dinner,” said Madame. “Don't put spiders in my bed, and I daresay you and I shall get along fine.”

  WITH THE POSSIBLE EXCEPTION OF MAMMY SALLY'S KITCHEN, MARY had never known a place where she felt so profoundly at home as she did at Rose Hill. She missed Frances and Eliza—missed Mammy Sally and even months later missed Elizabeth—but she had never known a sense of peace like the peace she knew at the rambling, tree-shaded house on the Richmond Pike.

  For all Lexington's brick shops and paved streets, for all its University and bustling little downtown, it was still only a few minutes from the hilly bluegrass meadows, from the dark woods and the fields of tobacco and corn. When Nelson came with the carriage on Friday evenings to bring Mary back to Short Street, they drove for the most part through groves and woodland before the houses of the town rose around them, windows glowing amber in the freezing winter dark, or, later, somnolent in the grass-scented twilight of summer. Mary would wave to friends both black and white as they passed them, and then they'd be on the other edge of town, where the hills started up again and the trees clustered thick.

  Mary settled quickly into the sleepy rhythm of those days, the peculiarly Southern blending of countryside and town.

  During the week, Meg Wickliffe was like a sister to her. They'd braid each other's hair at night, and laugh over the running feud between Madame Mentelle's parrot Xenophon and Dulcie the maid—Xenophon had learned to imitate the sound of the silver bell Madame used to summon Dulcie, and called the exasperated woman into the parlor a dozen times a day. Xenophon also swore in Italian—“I shall never be able to teach Italian so long as that bird is in the house,” remarked Madame.

  At sixteen Meg was very much a belle, and would be sent, she said, to Sigoigne's next year, as soon as her French was up to Philadelphia standards. Her beaux would come to Rose Hill in the evenings and make careful conversation in the drawing-room with Meg and the older girls, under Madame's watchful eye. Meg instructed Mary in the intricacies of curling-irons, chignons, and how to wire one's braids into the latest and most fashionable styles as seen in fashion plates from France; they giggled over the courtships of their friends, designed elegant dresses for one another, and stayed up far too long after bedtime reading The Monk to one another by the light of a single shielded candle.

  Mary would flirt with Meg's beaux in the parlor, when Madame's back was turned.

  When she was home on Saturdays, she would stroll down to Cheapside to shop with Frances and Eliza, with Elizabeth if she was in town, and sometimes with Ann. Mary had learned her lesson and never lied to Mr. Sotheby again, though she found that she didn't feel quite right about the sapphire pendant and seldom wore it. Still, her father bought her other things, earbobs and slippers and gloves, as if deep in his heart he understood that he'd really sent her away to buy peace with his wife. Mary sensed the guilt that lay behind his unwillingness to see her cry, and occasionally used it, if there was something she really, really wanted...though whenever she did this, she always felt ashamed.

  Sometimes after Nelson brought her back to Rose Hill on Sunday evenings, Mary would sit in her room and take her special things out of the little casket where she kept them: brooches, necklaces, handkerchiefs bordered in lace. Proof that her father loved her.

  Hope that he loved her best of all.

  Frances, at fourteen, had finished Ward's school and was already a belle, her fair hair dressed up in elaborate side-curls and serpentine plaits adorned with silk flowers from Sotheby's. As far as Mary could see, she did little but shop, and stroll, and chat with her friends, and sew dresses to wear at the dances held in the long salon above M'sieu Giron's confectionary. On those rare occasions when their father was home from the Legislature, he would shake his head and say, “Now, a girl must be able to amuse her husband, and to raise intelligent sons for the nation,” but Mary observed how Robert Todd would puff with pride when planters' sons like Nate Bodley or Young Duke Wickliffe would come calling.

  And though there was nothing Mary liked better than to shop and stroll and chat with Frances and Elizabeth—nothing that excited and interested her more than the selection of lace for a pelerine, or of silk for a dancing-dress, or being made a fuss over by Mr. Sotheby or Mr. Fowler when she'd come into their stores—she loved, too, the peaceful stillness of the library of Rose Hill, away from the noise and confusion of too many children in too few rooms. There she could savor in peace the way Shakespeare's words sounded in her mind: If I profane with my unworthiest hand / this holy shrine, the gentle fine is this / My lips, two blushing pilgrims ready stand / to smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss....

  She had to be careful, of course, not to speak of it too much—no gentleman liked a bluestocking—but she found great pleasure in being able to talk sensibly about Shakespeare if the subject arose.

  Spring advanced
and the dogwood bloomed. The high tide of summer transformed the hills to lush green, the shade of the thick groves to mysterious blue-black. Like the savor of burgoo against the sweetness of toffee, the social delights of dances and picnics were flavored with politics that were the heartbeat of the South, as men wrangled with the framework of power and law to shape and enable their quest for money and the comforts of life.

  Henry Clay was running for President. An ardent Whig like Robert Todd, Ninian took Mary, Frances, and Elizabeth out to hear the candidates speak at a picnic at Trotter's Grove. Elizabeth joined at once with the other matrons, young and old, of Lexington, in directing their slaves to set out the tables and the food—cornbread, Brunswick stew, imported oysters, homemade jams—and Frances, who cared little who became President, gravitated at once to the young gentlemen who'd come to listen, but Mary found herself a place by the speakers' platform. Cheap draperies of red, white, and blue bunting adorned it; the American flag had had a couple of extra stars scootched into its blue field for Maine and Missouri, and looked a bit ragged and out of balance. Ninian, also maneuvering his way through the crowd to stand close, caught her eye and winked.

  Mary had followed the campaign closely in the several journals available in Lexington, both Democrat and Whig, and wanted to hear what men from elsewhere in the state were saying about Clay's American System of public works and strong currency. But when she tried to edge closer, Elizabeth gestured to her to come to the food-tables.

  “Really, Mary,” she whispered, as soon as Mary came close. “You mustn't push yourself in among the men that way.”

  “I was close to Ninian,” protested Mary. And then, when Elizabeth simply pursed her lips and handed her a dish of beans to set out, she added in annoyance, “I'm not going to flirt with him, if that's what's worrying you.”

  “The things you do say.” Elizabeth's expression was that of a woman requesting a servant to remove a dead mouse from the soup tureen. “A gentleman never seems to mind anything a lady does, but what he thinks of a young lady who has so few qualms about unsexing herself is another matter. In any case,” she added, “gentlemen are more comfortable talking politics without ladies present...if you know what I mean.”

  Mary scowled rebelliously, but when she looked back in the direction of the platform, it was pretty clear to her what Elizabeth meant. She could hear Old Duke Wickliffe's voice rising in anger about the God-damned bill to forbid the importation of slaves to the state, see his son Young Duke lashing the air with his riding-whip. Cash Clay was squaring off with the bull-like young Nate Bodley, gesticulating furiously. By the sound of it, Nate—whose father owned Indian Branch, one of the wealthiest plantations in Fayette County—was already half drunk.

  Before nightfall, thought Mary uneasily, somebody would call somebody out, or someone would end up thrashed with a cane behind the line of carriages where black grooms walked the blood-horses to be raced later in the afternoon. And the young ladies of her acquaintance, Frances and Meg, Eliza and Mary Jane and Isabelle, all clustered together, giggling at Arabella Richardson's jokes or crying out admiringly at Meg's new walking-dress of pleated jaconet, as if nothing more serious existed in all the world.

  Don't they remember that Isabelle's brother KILLED Meg's brother three years ago, over a letter written to a newspaper? Mary wondered, puzzled and angry. Don't they care who gets elected, who runs the nation?

  Of course, it didn't do for a girl to thrust herself in among the gentlemen once the talk got heated, for fear of hearing words no young lady should hear. But that didn't mean girls had to act like imbeciles, just to get young men to like them.

  She realized that the sun-dazzle in her eyes was growing brighter, that sections of leaves were disappearing from the chestnut trees, appearing and disappearing, as things do in dreams. Her stomach curled with dread. In a small voice she said, “I think I'm getting a headache,” and Elizabeth's annoyance changed swiftly to her old protective sympathy.

  “Maybe if you sit down in the carriage where it's shady it'll go off.” She put her arm comfortingly around Mary's shoulders, though Mary knew perfectly well that her headaches never “went off.”

  She had had them, on and off, for a year or more; it seemed to her that since she'd begun having her monthlies they'd become more frequent, and worse. Sometimes Mammy Sally's remedies of bitter herbs would stave them off. More frequently nothing helped.

  “Well, I'm not going back home,” Frances hastened to put in. “You just sit still and be quiet, Mary.” And as if to emphasize her words she fluttered off in the direction of Arabella and her cronies. Even in her agony, Mary felt a stab of furious resentment, that she could not be joining her as the center of the boys' attention. Wittier and quicker-tongued than the fairy-like Frances, she surreptitiously enjoyed the game of drawing beaux away from her sister.

  It was like the knowledge that her father sent her more presents than he sent Frances or Ann.

  “I'll get you a wet napkin to put on your eyes.” Elizabeth guided Mary gently to the carriage, with clearly no intention of leaving the speaking either. “Ninian, I think I saw Dr. Warfield over near the tables. Do you think he might come and see Mary?”

  By the time Ninian came to the carriage, with the gray-haired professor of obstetrics and surgery from the University in tow, old Nelson had fetched a glass of ginger-beer and had put up the hood of the barouche in a vain effort to approximate by shade the darkness that Mary's throbbing head craved. As Mary heard the voices approach, she heard Nelson offer, “I can take Miss Mary on home and be back in an hour, Miss Elizabeth.”

  “That's probably best,” agreed Elizabeth.

  And Dr. Warfield—whose daughter Mary Jane had been shyly slipping away all afternoon to speak to Cash Clay among the trees of the groves—asked, “How often does your sister have these nervous headaches, Mrs. Edwards?”

  “Sometimes two or three a week. Sometimes she'll go a few weeks without one.”

  Old Dr. Warfield climbed into the carriage, making it rock like a ship in the storm and bringing Mary's lunch heaving back into her throat. She wanted to scream at him to go away, to leave her alone....Elizabeth and Ninian climbed in also (rock, sway, lurch!), Elizabeth taking her seat beside Mary and the two men opposite. It would have been, of course, completely improper for any man to have been in the carriage alone with her. “May I take your pulse, Miss Mary?”

  Elizabeth turned down the cuff of Mary's glove; the medical man's gloved fingers felt warm on her icy wrist.

  “Your sister is of a nervous disposition, is she not, Mrs. Edwards?” There wasn't a soul in town who hadn't heard of Mary's alternating charm and tantrums.

  “Yes,” replied Elizabeth, “very much so.”

  “And I believe Mr. Edwards told me that this is your little family politician?”

  “She has a very lively mind.” Much as Elizabeth might disapprove of Mary's unladylike zest for politics and study, she would never admit this to even so prominent an acquaintance as the professor.

  Just let me alone! Mary wanted to scream at them, and began to weep as the hammering in her head increased. She opened her eyes a slit: Dr. Warfield looked like a buzzard, with unhealthy skin and a straggling beard. As she watched, half his head and a portion of his right shoulder disappeared into a fiery cloud of migraine light.

  “That explains it,” said the doctor wisely. “A female's constitution is far more nervous than a boy's would be. The entire system of the female is rooted in the nerves and the generative functions rather than in the higher organs of thought and reason. For this reason mental activity tends to overload and debilitate her, resulting in these headaches, which are much more characteristic of the female system than the male.”

  “But what can we do about them?” asked Ninian.

  Her brother-in-law might be a blockhead about tariffs, thought Mary, but that was the first practical remark she'd heard concerning her headache from any white person that afternoon.

  “Personal
ly, I would recommend that she be bled, to lower her constitution. If bleeding does not relieve the pressure on the overactive nervous system we shall try a blister, to draw the heat away from her brain.”

  There's nothing wrong with my brain! Just take me home and leave me alone in the dark! Get Mammy Sally to make me some of her herbs. . . .

  But of course nothing would do for it but that Dr. Warfield and Ninian accompanied Mary and Elizabeth back to the house—and to Betsey, who was sent for and who was less than pleased about being obliged to leave the picnic and her friends to tend to a stepdaughter whom she half-suspected was putting on this show of pain simply to gain attention.

  Mary was put to bed, swathed in her green-and-gold-flowered wrapper. Dr. Warfield came in with a china bleeding-bowl and a sharp little knife. He was brusque and rough-handed, his breath smelling of bourbon, and the blade gouged deep. In the stuffy, curtained bedroom the blood stank. Mary wept, wondering if she were going to die as her mother had died, but her headache didn't go away.

  “Do you feel better, darling?” asked Elizabeth, and Mary had the good sense to nod. The last thing she wanted was a blister to draw the heat away from her brain.

  “I'm afraid that as long as she is kept in school, she will run the risk of continuing to suffer in this fashion,” she overheard Dr. Warfield say, outside the bedroom door, as Elizabeth made sure no chink of light came through the curtains and Ninian tucked her in with brotherly affection. “Education, and the mental overstimulation of attending a political speaking, invariably react thus on the female organism.”

  “Well, I know how much Mary loves school....” Her father's voice. He must have ridden back from the political speaking too. He sounded doubtful, because it was true that the headaches had become much worse in the three months Mary had been at Mentelle's. But before Mary could do much more than think in panic, Don't take me out of the school . . . ! Betsey's crisp voice cut in.