The Emancipator's Wife

by Barbara Hambly

  “Will you dance with me, Mary?” he asked. “For old times' sake?”

  Nellie, in the arms of her bridegroom—a planter from Louisville—was smiling dewily at her, gratified, Mary realized with a flare of alarm, that anyone was dancing with her teacher at all.

  It was then she realized she was becoming someone that other people had to look after socially.

  She danced with Nate, but she talked to him as if she were talking with a stranger, asking after his horses, his plantation, his wife—all the polite small-talk that rose so easily to her lips. He replied in kind, perfectly happily, as if he'd never taken her in his arms in the orchards behind Rose Hill, or chased her through the green-and-golden woods. She wondered if he still had the quadroon girl in his household, or if he'd sold her off.

  It was something a lady wasn't supposed to ask, or even think about.

  In May Elizabeth wrote to her again, announcing Frances's wedding to Dr. Wallace and asking if Mary would like to come back to Springfield when the Legislature finally opened there in the fall.

  Mary wrote back, saying that she would be delighted to come.

  Even then she knew that, books or no books, theater or no theater, thunderstorms or no thunderstorms, she would never live in Lexington again.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Springfield 1839

  SPRINGFIELD HAD GROWN IN TWO YEARS. THE STATE HOUSE WAS nearly finished, though the earth around it was the same hog-wallow of mud, torn-up rubble, and trampled gravel—scummed now with ice—that it had been, and the Legislature would be meeting in shop-fronts all over town because none of the building's rooms were finished inside. The State Supreme Court had been given quarters in a commercial building across the street. But the town swarmed with lawyers, clerks, minor officials eager to get government jobs or government patronage. Ninian's house was always full of men, eager to do favors or to buy small gifts—flowers for his wife and sisters-in-law, a stick-pin or a pair of gloves—to curry his good opinion. Political wives were now bringing their daughters to husband-hunt in the man-heavy town.

  Springfield's atmosphere had changed, from bucolic sleepiness to the aggressive sparkle of power. It went to Mary's head like drink.

  Mr. Douglas called on Mary's first afternoon in Elizabeth's house, to bespeak a waltz at the upcoming cotillion to be held for the legislators at the new American House Hotel. He wore a well-tailored tobacco-colored coat and a yellow silk waistcoat, and looked like a man who was going places in the world.

  “He's still a Democrat,” remarked Ninian, and Mary laughed.

  Elizabeth had spoken of holding a ball to celebrate Mary's return, but since her arrival was so soon before the American House cotillion, they settled on a festive supper for all their friends before going en masse to the more general fête. “Somehow it doesn't surprise me,” remarked Dr. Wallace, helping Frances and Mary into the carriage after supper, “that Mary would manage to get the entire Legislature to welcome her to town.”

  In the long, lamp-lit common room of the American House, Mary, clothed in a ruffled gown of fawn and rose silk—her father's parting gift—was again the center of a court of gentlemen, laughing behind her fan and teasing them as they vied to bring her up-to-date on all that had happened in the town in the two years since her departure. Since she'd had Ninian send her both the Sangamo Journal and the Illinois Republican, there was little she didn't already know about the wild mudslinging that had gone on between the Journal's claque of “Young Whigs” and the Republican's “Young Democrats” over every conceivable subject from the State Bank to the digging of local canals. Legislators and would-be government employees from Chicago to Cairo clustered around her, and nobody even asked what her opinions on slavery were or how old she was.

  She danced two waltzes with Mr. Douglas, who was her height to an inch, so that their steps matched beautifully. He was a wonderful dancer, light on his feet and firm in his lead—“Of course that's how he'd dance,” she giggled to Frances later, over a cup of punch. “That's what his politics are like, too—leading you right along and making you like it.”

  “I don't know, Mary,” teased Frances. “If you really want to marry the President of the United States, maybe you'd better think about changing your politics.” But she laughed when she said it, knowing—as all of them knew—that Mary took her politics far more seriously than she took Mr. Douglas.

  Senator Herndon's chinless cousin Billy—who after a number of opening shots at various careers was currently a clerk at Speed and Bell's Dry Goods—asked her to dance too, declaring that she moved as gracefully as a serpent; Mary rolled her eyes, and replied, “That's rather severe irony, sir, especially to a newcomer. Now I think I've torn a flounce, and need to go repair it.” As she retreated upstairs with Merce and Julia she added, “Remind me to wear a torn flounce next time, in case he ever asks me again.” All three of them were still laughing over this—and over Billy's newly-grown whiskers, which resembled nothing so much, in their patchy fairness, as socks hanging on a clothesline—when they returned to the dancing a few minutes later.

  Merce's new sweetheart, a patrician New Yorker named Jamie Conkling, came up and claimed Merce with a bow—“If you'll excuse me, Miss Todd, I think I need Miss Levering to keep me from dying of loneliness out on the floor....” Across the room, Dr. Wallace caught Mary's eye and started to approach, but beside her a quiet, very light voice asked, “Miss Todd?”

  She turned, looked up—and up and up—and saw to her enormous surprise the tall stringy storyteller who'd rescued her from Professor Kittridge in the Globe Tavern yard over two years before.

  He wore a suit now of very ill-fitting dark wool, and a black string tie, and his black hair was firmly pomaded to his narrow, rather bird-like head. In his eyes was the look of an unarmed man about to go into single combat with a Gorgon.

  “If you please...Miss Todd...That is, if you don't mind...”

  Beside him Josh Speed gave him a nudge closer to her, and whispered, “Just ask her, Lincoln.”

  Lincoln swallowed hard. He had an Adam's apple like a lime on a string. Mary realized this had to be Cousin John Stuart's partner. Frances certainly hadn't lied about his looks.

  He blurted out, “Miss Todd, I'd sure like to dance with you in the worst way.”

  Speed shook his head and groaned.

  Fighting to keep from laughing, Mary held out her hand and answered, “I'd be delighted, Mr. Lincoln.”

  He did, in fact, dance with her in the worst possible way. But while Mary would have been merciless about someone like Billy Herndon—who had done himself no good with his “serpent” remark—she felt oddly protective of this gangly backwoodsman, and did her best to keep her new slippers out from under the Conestoga boots that she guessed were Lincoln's only footwear.

  The fact that the dance was a schottische didn't help the situation any. Halfway through Lincoln stopped abruptly, abashed, with all the other couples swirling around them. “I guess I better let you go 'fore I kill you, Miss Todd. I thank you....”

  “Mr. Lincoln.” She looked up into his eyes, clear gray under the overhang of his brow, and smiled. “How dare you slight a lady's courage, sir? I'm made of hardier stuff than that. Lay on, Macduff. . . .”

  His whole gargoyle face transformed with delight at the quote. “And curs't be he that first cries ‘Hold, enough.' But let's sort of get ourselves out of the main channel here, and practice a little in the shallows.”

  In a corner of the common room away from the main ring of dancers Mary took him carefully through the steps: hop-hop, slide-slide, hop-skip-slide....

  “Like tryin' to learn to march in the Army,” Lincoln said, gravely studying the toes of Mary's pink Morocco-leather slippers, which she made just visible with the tiniest lifting of the hem of her skirt. “Only then it was just right and left, and once I'd tied a string around my right wrist I could remember it most of the time. I guess folks would just laugh at us if I was to ask you to lead.”


  “You did all right leading old Professor Kittridge across the yard the way you did. What did he call you? For two years now I've been dying to ask....”

  Lincoln laughed, and scratched the back of his head, a habitual gesture that made rapid inroads on the pomaded neatness of his hair. His smile transformed his face, dissolving its gravity into comic mobility, and lightening it like sunlight on stones. “The servant of the servants of Mammon. Bad enough, he says, that humanity has enslaved itself to the Devil of Property. But lawyers who haggle over other men's property for pay are the lowest of the low. Lookin' at it that way, I reckon he's got a point.” He gingerly held out his hands to her. “Can we slow down to half-speed, till I get the blame thing figured out?”

  “Of course.” Mary took his hands—the biggest hands she'd ever seen, straining at the seams of his much-mended kid gloves. “Everyone else in the room is so busy minding their own feet, they'll never notice.”

  It robbed the dance utterly of the reason that one did a schottische—the exhilaration of its flying speed—but it did give Mary enough time to get her toes clear of his boots. Now and then, when she glanced up, she could see his lips move as he counted the steps.

  “Did he ever marry his lady from New Salem?” asked Mary, after Lincoln had bowed awkward thanks, fetched her a cup of punch (at Speed's whispered reminder), and beaten a hasty retreat to join the men in the hall. The musicians—a German, a free black farmer, and Ninian's quadroon coachman Jerry—were likewise refreshing themselves before the next dance: Mary, her sisters, Merce and Julia clustered at the rear of the room, all except Elizabeth flushed and rumpled.

  Elizabeth heaved a long-suffering sigh. “No. After all our urging...”

  “Well, you could hardly blame him,” retorted Frances. “Apparently Miss Owens didn't trouble to watch her figure and got enormously fat.”

  “I heard she was the one who called it off,” put in Julia Jayne, tossing her dark curls. “One can have enough of a man who falls into brown studies and can't be troubled to converse with a woman for hours on end. Not to mention leaving the poor thing to fend for herself when a group of their friends went riding and had to cross a stream on horseback....”

  “Lincoln's trouble,” observed Josh Speed, who had joined them, “—other than not having a lick of sense about women—is that he's risen out of the world he was born into, and so cannot marry the kind of woman he grew up with. Yet he's still enough of a backwoodsman that he's never learned how to talk to ladies of this new world that he hopes to make his.”

  “I'd say,” remarked Frances, looking over at the unruly black head rising above the jostling group in the hall, “that he's never going to learn to talk to ladies at the rate he's going. He must be thirty if he's a day.”

  There were shouts of laughter from among the men: “. . . so about the third time the top of the hogshead fell down inside the barrel, the cooper figured he'd put his son inside the barrel, to hold the top up while he fixed on the hoops. . . .”

  Mary remembered Court Days at Lexington, and the backwoodsmen who'd come in from their rough cabins in the canebrakes. Most held a few acres of corn which they chiefly made into whiskey, their herds of cattle and pigs which they let rove wild in the woods. Illiterate, coarse, woodcrafty as the Indians they had supplanted, they lived from hand to mouth and from day to day, their women barefoot in faded calico with trains of tow-headed silent children.

  What became of those children? Mary wondered, comparing them with her well-mannered little pupils at Ward's, with Betsey's little ones at home. What became of the ones who yearned for something beyond the woods, who looked about them at men dying of pneumonia or accidents or sheer hardship at thirty-five or forty, when their strength gave out? The ones who thought—as she had thought—There must be something else?

  She glanced across at Speed, and she saw the deep, amused affection in the young storekeeper's eyes as he watched his lanky friend: a servant of the servants of Mammon, in his shabby suit and rough boots and mended gloves, an ungainly interloper in the world of gentility and power. “Mr. Lincoln's come a long way,” she said softly, and Speed's gaze shifted to her.

  “That he has.”

  “And he'll have to go a long piece farther,” sniffed Frances, “before he's likely to come across a woman willing to put up with him.”

  ABRAHAM LINCOLN WAS LIKE NO MAN MARY HAD EVER MET. FRANCES still made fun of him, but when they encountered one another at dances that winter, he would awkwardly maneuver to speak to Mary, to dance with her if he could. She was used to having beaux jockeying for her attention and trying to cut one another out for dances, but Stephen Douglas, and the elderly widower Edwin Webb, Josh Speed, cocky little Jimmy Shields, handsome Lyman Trumbull—for whom Mary had a passing tendre—and the suave John Gillespie were men who knew how to play the game, with women and with one another.

  Lincoln was different. He was agonizingly shy, laboring under the double burden of his very odd looks and his excruciating awareness of social backwardness. Mary guessed, from the hesitant way he spoke to her, the way he would hang back when Douglas or Shields deftly claimed her attention from under his nose, that he'd had harsh rebuffs from women before, and had no idea how to make a neat riposte. Mostly he just retreated to the world of men, a world in which he was a quite different man.

  Across the room at Ninian's or the Leverings' she would watch him with Ninian, with Jamie Conkling or Ed Baker—a brisk little cock-sparrow Englishman and another of her Coterie, as their circle of friends came to be called—or others who knew him through Legislature and the courts. The shyness fell off him there like an ill-made coat, and he'd joke, and listen to other men's stories, and speak with a sharp and quiet acuteness that vanished utterly the moment one of the Springfield belles addressed him.

  Elizabeth referred to him as a “cracker from the canebrakes”' but he had, despite deficiencies in table manners, an inherent dignity that went far beyond which fork to use, and a genuine kindly consideration for others. Moreover, Mary knew perfectly well that a man couldn't become a lawyer, much less a member of the State Legislature, without being able to read and write. “No, it's perfectly true,” Josh Speed told her, one freezing January afternoon when Mary came into Speed and Bell's to buy ribbons. “Most of what Lincoln knows he taught himself. I don't think he's had more than a year of schooling in his life. He really did grow up in a log cabin, in the Indiana woods. His father used to hire him out to the neighbors to cut wood and husk corn, and keep the money he made—which is legal,” he added, as Mary opened her mouth in indignant protest. “Up until a boy's twenty-one. It's just most fathers don't do that kind of thing anymore.”

  “So that's what they mean when they speak of a ‘gentleman of the old school,'” sniffed Mary, and Speed laughed, and came around the end of the counter to hold out his hands to the iron heating-stove.

  “Well, Lincoln left Indiana the minute he could, and I haven't seen him in any tearing hurry to get back. He told me once his pa used to thrash him for reading. When he was living in New Salem, about a day's ride from here up the Sangamon River, he used to walk ten or twelve miles to borrow books, if he heard of people who had them.”

  Speed and Bell, Mary knew, generally had a small stock of books, whatever could be brought in from the East. These were mostly almanacs and volumes of sermons, though once they did get in a volume of Shakespeare's sonnets, which Mary bought. The store was built of sawn lumber and whitewashed inside and out. It smelled of wood and soap, and now the heavy scent of smoke and burnt coffee. Barrels and bins ranged the center of the room near the stove, where men would sit through the winter evenings talking politics and spitting tobacco. Shelves occupied every foot of wall with bright bolts of calico and sheeting, pots of white-and-blue enamel, caddies of tea and coffee and dishes to whose edges packing-straw still clung. They didn't stock the variety of fancy goods and ribbons that Birchell and Irwin did, but Mary liked Josh Speed.

  “Is he in?” she asked impulsive
ly, because she knew Lincoln lived upstairs with Speed, in the big loft. Speed shook his head.

  “He'll be at your cousin's law offices if he isn't in the Legislature— Stuart left him in charge of the whole practice when he went to take his seat in Congress. Lincoln's a devil for work: between riding the circuit courts all summer, and now working to organize the Whig Party the way the Democrats are organized, my guess is once the snow melts I won't see much of him.”

  “That must be what happens,” remarked Mary lightly, “when you're allowed to keep some of the money you make.”

  Speed laughed, then glanced at the empty wooden chairs around the stove with a reminiscent grin. “He'll be here tonight—the whole bunch of them, Baker and Conkling and Douglas...” He shook his head, with a kind of wonder and delight in his eyes. “I've never heard arguing the way it is when Lincoln and Douglas get after each other over the State Bank or divorce or Indian lands or anything that's on their minds. It's amazing, like watching two gods throwing lightning-bolts at each other. One night Douglas wasn't here and Lincoln did an imitation of him, and argued with himself. That's the closest I've come in my life to dying laughing.”

  Mary chuckled at just the thought of it—by this time she'd seen Lincoln do imitations of people. But as Joshua escorted her across the muddy plank sidewalk to Ninian's carriage she felt a pang of bitterest jealousy, that this world of politics and power and informal alliances around the stove was something she would never be permitted to join. For a moment she was a child again, seeing the shoulders of her father's guests close in a rank against her.

  Hearing Betsey say, Really, Mary. . . .

  And being relegated to conversation about earbobs and beaux.

  The next time she saw Lincoln, at a Washington's Birthday ball given by the Leverings, Mary caught his eye and edged from the group of her admirers to stand with him in the corner by the stairway. “Mr. Speed tells me you're an admirer of Robert Burns, sir,” she said, glancing up at the tall man who towered over her. “I have a book of his poems, if you'd ever care to borrow it. Mr. Speed says come spring you'll be riding all over the state to the circuit courts—that has to be unbelievably dreary.”