The Emancipator's Wife

by Barbara Hambly

  Except when she slept.

  She wasn't even sure if her conversation with Mrs. Bennett had been real, or on what day it had taken place.

  Was that madness?

  “Mother?” Robert was still holding her hands.

  “I'm so sorry, dear,” said Mary automatically, and made herself smile. She added, because Robert was looking at her as if she'd begun talking about her tormenting Indian spirit again, “Things go along so quietly here I was just trying to remember what I have done all week.” And she laughed, the light sweet conversational laughter of an accomplished belle.

  But her heart had begun to pound and her thoughts to race, and she thought, I must keep his suspicions at bay.

  And then, I can ask Mr. Wilamet. He will know about such things, and he won't betray me.

  “I'm delighted to hear it, Mother,” Robert was saying, in the pleased tone of one who has put everything into its proper drawer. “That's precisely why I wanted you to come to Bellevue Place—so that you could rest.”

  No, thought Mary, looking into her son's face and seeing only a stranger's. You wanted me to come to Bellevue Place so you wouldn't be worried that I'd embarrass you in public. You wanted me to come here so that I wouldn't have to live with YOU. So that you wouldn't have to think about me again, except maybe to say to yourself, “Poor Mama.”

  And in her secret heart of hearts, a voice whispered: You wanted me to come to Bellevue because of what I did to you, all those years ago.

  Because of the lie I told.

  The lie that had made, and destroyed, his life and hers.

  Lexington 1837

  MARY RETURNED TO LEXINGTON IN THE COLD AUTUMN RAIN OF 1837, jolting up the hill in the stagecoach with Ninian and almost in tears with the pleasure of those craggy familiar hills, the dripping tangled trees. She spent a week at her father's house—which was still hard for her to think of as “home”—sharing the upstairs front bedroom with Ann. Then Nelson loaded her trunks and hatboxes into the carriage and took them over to Ward's school, where she would occupy a room of her own five nights a week for what turned out to be the next twenty-five months.

  Ward's school being ten minutes' brisk walk down Main Street and up Market Street, it was seldom that Nelson would bring the carriage, as he had to Mentelle's. Instead Mary would walk—shaded by a ruffled parasol or muffled in a stylish coat of her favorite hunter green—to the big brick house on Main Street every Friday afternoon, and back after Sunday dinner. Under these circumstances she could be pleasant and friendly with Betsey, and have the patience to teach Margaret and Martha—Mattie, they all called her—their sewing-stitches while her stepmother looked after golden-haired little Emilie.

  It was good to be back in the South, back in the world whose rules she instinctively knew.

  Yet that world had changed, and the subtleness of the changes made the alteration more, not less, disturbing.

  There were still the dances in the long room above Giron's Confectionary, and laughter and French gallantries from the little Frenchman who was so delighted to be able to hold conversation in his native tongue. There were plays at Usher's Theater—heaven after three months in the wilds of Springfield!—and danceables at the Meadows and in the big double-parlor at Ashland. There were picnics at race-meetings in the spring, and young men jostling discreetly to sit beside her while the horses galloped down the long green turf, glistening like polished bronze and copper in the sun. There was the wonderful gossip that only Southerners could understand, of vast tangled family trees and acquaintance that went back generations.

  But many of the shops in Lexington were closed up now, owing to the collapse of the banks in the wake of President Jackson's economic woes. Girls Mary had known no longer came to the dances, or they came in dresses that bore the mark of discreet refurbishment from last season, and people like Bella Richardson were extra-sweet to them and whispered, “Poor things...” when she thought they didn't hear. Many of Mary's former beaux no longer raced their own horses, and wore a look of grimness, as if they'd grown suddenly old.

  Mary Jane Warfield Clay had a son, and was expecting another child soon. Though Mary delighted in little Elisha's soft curls and bright, knowing blue eyes, she found Mary Jane almost wholly preoccupied with servants, high prices, and the household budget. Meg and Mary Wickliffe were likewise both married, and talked exactly like the Yankee women who'd ridden with her on the steamboat down the Ohio, of teething babies and the shocking cost of lamp-oil. When Mary stood at the dances among the single girls, she was disconcerted to realize that some of them were in the upper year or two at Ward's—as she herself had been, when first she'd put up her hair and entered the fascinating world of a belle.

  They seemed so young. Mary laughed about it with Isabelle Trotter and Julia Warfield, before one of Mr. Clay's sons came over and swept her into a cotillion on his arm. Then for a time she could dimple and laugh and be once again the belle of the ball. But that night, listening to Ann's soft breathing beside her in the dark of the upstairs front bedroom, Mary stared at the ceiling with panic racing in her heart.

  Nate Bodley came to call on her, the second or third afternoon after her return from Springfield. “What is it?” he asked, when she stood up and stepped away from his attempt to clasp both her hands, and they both glanced at Betsey, who smiled pointedly and said,

  “Well, I'll leave you two young people to get re-acquainted.” She rustled out into the hall, leaving them alone together in the double-parlor. Mary heard her sharp voice call out to Chaney about laying another plate for dinner.

  “I've missed you, Mary.” Nate stepped closer, smiling his old devilish smile, and still Mary didn't answer. In her mind she saw the brass head of his cane flying up and down, smelled the mud of the gutter, and the bitter tang of Mr. Presby's blood. “What is it, sweetheart? Now, don't you freeze up on me....”

  At that she glanced up at him, her eyes bright with anger. “Do you honestly need to ask that, sir, since Mr. Presby lived here under our roof?” The young tutor had returned to his family's New England home at the same time Mary had gone to Springfield. He had not returned.

  Nate's face flushed. Mary wondered whether it was because of guilt over the caning, or because the caning involved the pretty quadroon slave girl he had bought. She wondered too whether that girl was still in Nate's father's household. “That was politics,” he protested. “You gotta understand, Mary, there's things a man can't put up with another man layin' on him.”

  A well-bred young lady would have simply said, Then we can only agree to differ, Mr. Bodley—with or without shyly downcast eyes—and left it at that. If she really wanted to sever the connection, there were a thousand social ways to avoid Nate without fuss. Mary felt her own cheeks flame.

  “It was not politics, sir,” she replied in a steady voice. “A righteous man accused you of evil and you had no argument in your favor but violence. That doesn't sound like politics to me.”

  “What it doesn't sound like to me is any of your business, begging your pardon, Miss Todd, or any woman's business....”

  “It is every right-thinking person's business—”

  “It is not!” Nate cut her off, jabbing his finger at her, his eyes blazing with the gunpowder violence that had so frightened her that spring day half a year ago. “I see you've become an abolitionist in the North, talking to people who haven't got the slightest idea what it's like here—”

  “I didn't need to travel to the North to see what's right under my eyes here, Mr. Bodley!”

  “But it's no man's right to tell me what I can and can't do with my own property in my own house!”

  “And not the right of the woman you'd make your wife, either, whether or not you have a concubine under your roof?” Mary lashed back.

  Nate's mouth flew open with shock at hearing her say the word; for an instant he was silenced. Then he laughed harshly. “God help the man that makes you his wife, Mary Todd!” Turning on his heel, he strode from the room. Ma
ry heard Betsey call out, “Mr. Bodley...” as the front door slammed.

  Mary stood by the hearth, trembling, tears of anger blurring her vision and her head starting to pound as her stepmother came into the parlor. “Mary, honestly, how can you quarrel with Mr. Bodley so soon after your return? You really must strive to get the better of your temper, my dear, or you stand in grave danger of ending an old maid.”

  “Oh, leave me alone!” Mary turned in a whirl of turkey-red skirts. “What woman wouldn't be better off an old maid, than living with a yellow rival beneath her husband's roof?”

  “Mary!” gasped Betsey. “You didn't say such a thing to Mr. Bodley?”

  “It's true!”

  The older woman's lips pursed impatiently. “A good many things are true in this world, Miss, but that doesn't mean that a lady ever speaks of them. If you don't curb your temper, men will say—”

  Mary screamed, “Leave me alone! I don't care what men say!” And pushing past her, she blundered into the wide hall and up the stairs. Her vision was beginning to dissolve into jagged lines of flaming wire. She wanted to curse, to beat on the walls, to shriek at them for a parcel of fools. Later, lying in her room on the big four-poster bed, she felt sick and depleted. Frightened, too, and half-nauseated with guilt. Nate would tell everyone he knew—all the young men in Lexington—that Mary had become a termagant and an abolitionist since she'd been in the North.

  And Betsey...!

  She remembered screaming at Betsey—who would be certain to tell her father when he came home, not to mention all her gossipy friends....

  The floorboards outside the bedroom door creaked. There was a gentle knock, familiar from a lifetime of tantrums and headaches and darkened rooms, and Mary whispered, “Come in. Please come in,” without turning her face from her pillow.

  She heard Mammy Sally enter, and cross at once to the windows, pulling the curtains against the light that Mary had been too angry and too sick to block out. The day was hot for September, and Mary heard the dim voices of children in the street—Sam and David and Margaret and Mattie and little Emilie all shrieking at one another like baby birds. She peered dolefully up from beneath the tangle of her disordered hair as the elderly nurse looked down at her for a moment, then sighed and shook her head, and sat on the bed at her side.

  “Your head ache, child?”

  Mary nodded. Even with the curtains shut the light in the room seemed blinding.

  The strong hand stroked back the tumbled chestnut curls. “Nelson told me you took up for that poor yeller gal Serena, that Mr. Bodley bought last spring, and thrashed Mr. Presby over. That was good of you, child, but it wasn't any business of yours. Not to lose a beau over. And not to get yourself into trouble with Miss Betsey, so soon after you come home.”

  “He wasn't my beau,” said Mary softly. “Not from the minute I saw it happen.” She sighed, and dropped her head back down to her arm, wondering that her skull didn't split. Mammy Sally reached to the bedside table, where she'd set a cup of her herbal tea. Mary managed to sit up, took it with trembling hands and sipped the sharp-tasting, nasty brew. In the day's heat the steam only made her head feel worse. “And Betsey would marry me off to the Sultan of Turkey, if she thought it would get me out of the house.”

  She turned over, tangled in her petticoats and stiff with corset-bones, and Mammy Sally, instead of saying—as Betsey certainly would—that she would crumple her dress and rip a sleeve-seam by lying on the bed fully clothed, merely helped straighten the heavy volutes of fabric around her, and brought up the other pillow for her head.

  “Why can't I keep my temper, Mammy?” Mary whispered. “Betsey talks like she thinks I like to shout and scream and feel sick the way I do. I can't help it—I don't mean to get angry like this. I know what I'm supposed to do and say, and I just...I just can't.”

  “I know you can't, child,” the older woman said softly, reaching out a gentle, work-roughened hand to wipe the tears away. “All you can do is watch yourself, and do what you can so you'll have less to fix later. And maybe the Sultan of Turkey likes a wife with a little temper to her, to keep him from getting bored.”

  And in spite of her pain, and the sickness rising in her stomach, Mary laughed, and hugged the old woman.

  It was truly good to be home.

  NATE BODLEY BECAME ENGAGED TO ARABELLA RICHARDSON THE following week. For the next year, in between teaching French and listening to the smaller girls at Ward's read their lessons in the chill of early dawn, Mary periodically suffered the spectacle of the radiant Bella shopping for her trousseau, or comparing notes about it with the other unmarried girls of the town.

  Mary had not been the only girl whom Nate had squired to picnics, Court Days, and danceables, and Nate had been far from Mary's only beau. Still, when young gentlemen who were slaveholders or the sons of planters asked Mary to dance, or came to sit beside her beneath the trees of Trotter's Grove, there was a note in their voices, a difference in the way they disposed their legs and arms and bodies, that told her—and every other girl in town as clearly as an announcement taken out in the newspaper—that they no longer considered her marriage material.

  She was a good friend from childhood, and would of course go on being a good friend. She was Robert Todd's daughter, cousin or second cousin or kin to most of them, and there was no question of cutting her: people were entitled to be abolitionists if they wanted to, they supposed. It was a free country, wasn't it?

  But none of them danced more than one dance with her, and only after the younger girls' dance-cards were full.

  And because—of course—nobody would speak of the scene between her and Nate, she never had the opportunity to explain to anyone whether she was actually an abolitionist or not.

  Gentlemen who believed, with her father, that the slaves should be one day freed—when they'd been sufficiently educated and prepared for freedom, or when they could be relocated to some other country suitable for them—continued to court her. The older students at Transylvania University were joined by some of the younger professors. If Mary had to suffer the spectacle of Bella Richardson hanging possessively on Nate Bodley's arm, at least—for a time—she could contemplate it from within a circle of her own admirers.

  For two years she was happy at Ward's, happier than she had been at any time since she'd left Madame Mentelle's in 1837. She loved her pupils, who ranged in ages from seven to eleven—girls and boys both, for the Reverend believed that if the two sexes mingled in the backyards, nursery wings, and parties of the town, there was no reason they shouldn't do so in the classroom. She loved, too, having her own room, having access to all the books she wanted—being able to travel, in thought at least, to those places where she longed to visit: Venice, Constantinople, Paris, Scotland. When Elizabeth wrote the following summer inviting her back to Springfield, Mary passed it by in favor of a visit with the family to Crab Orchard Springs, as they had done in her girlhood.

  There were good times even with her family, helping to look after the littler children when baby Alex was born, in '39, almost two years after her return. She would sit in the kitchen as she used to, watching the stir and bustle of the big house. Elizabeth's Eppy had taught her some cookery in Springfield—Chaney began to instruct her in more.

  Yet during those two years Mary found herself lying awake more and more, either in her small pretty room in Mr. Ward's house or at her father's house—with her father gone to the Legislature in Frankfort yet again—wondering if this was what she wanted. If this was all there was. All there was going to be. Sometimes she'd take out her casket of jewels, as she'd done at Mentelle's, and turn over the earbobs, the gold chains, the sapphire pendant in her fingers, as if the sight of them were reassurance that though she didn't live in her family's house, still she was loved.

  Sometimes this worked.

  Sometimes it didn't.

  She was perfectly aware of it, when people first started treating her as a spinster.

  That was at Christmas
of 1838, shortly after she turned twenty-one. Nellie Clay—who had been one of her senior pupils at Ward's when first Mary returned from Springfield—got married then, in a huge party held at Ashland, Nellie being a twice-removed cousin of Mr. Henry Clay's. Mary had coaxed a new dress of pink and green silk from her father for the occasion, and her curls, threaded with dark-green velvet ribbon, shone like copper in the light of the candles in the octagonal central hall as the bride descended the stair. And it gave her a sense of pride, almost as if Nellie were a daughter she had raised, when Nellie ran to hug her after the ceremony—girls wed young in Kentucky, and Nellie was seventeen.

  Yet at the reception afterwards, hearing the babble of voices and seeing so many familiar faces—Mr. Clay a bit grayer than he'd been at Elizabeth and Ninian's second-day party, Nate already getting thick under the chin—Mary felt a sudden stricken, shaken fear, as if the ground beneath her feet had been rocked by an earthquake.

  All the belles, in their rustling skirts of ivory or rose or pale-blue silk, were now decidedly younger than she, some by nearly five years. The young men crowded around them, offering cups of punch and slices of cake; eyelids were fluttered, blushes half-concealed behind blond lace fans. The young matrons—Mary Jane Clay, and Margaret Preston, who had been Meg Wickliffe when she'd shared a room with Mary at Rose Hill—were gathered in the rear parlor, watching with the satisfied air of soldiers whose battle has already been won as the fiddles struck up a dance-tune. Madame Mentelle glanced around from conversation with Mr. Clay and M'sieu Giron, and beckoned Mary to join them, but halfway there Mary was intercepted by Nate Bodley.