The Emancipator's Wife

by Barbara Hambly

  Mary gave him her sidelong smile, said, “I'm quite capable of fending off my own suitors, thank you, sir,” and flipped open her fan. A drift of breeze came off the river, but the air felt thick and hot, damper than the dry prairie winds of Springfield.

  And Uncle David laughed and shook his head.

  It was curious, after even a few months in Springfield, to be back in a slave state again. And though Mary was as strongly opposed to slavery as ever, she could not deny that she loved the gentler pace of the lands where scrabbling competition was tempered by a more easygoing outlook on life. Uncle David's house in Columbia—most of a day's buggy-ride from Rocheport—though roughly built by even Springfield standards, ran with quiet efficiency. Mary reveled in being brought coffee in bed by the housemaids, and in knowing that if the ribbons on her pink muslin needed pressing before a party, they'd be pressed without arguments from the maids about how much other work they had to do.

  And there were parties. It was twenty miles back down to Rocheport, but when the Whig Convention opened with a grand ball on the night of June 16th, Mary and her cousin Annie were there, strictly chaperoned by Annie's mother, plump Aunt Bet. The town was crammed with delegates and only the fact that cousins on the other side of the family had a house in Rocheport guaranteed the David Todd party anyplace to stay—every boardinghouse and hotel was jammed. Mary was secretly disappointed that Lincoln wasn't among the Illinois delegates—he'd written her he had a court case on the seventeenth—but on Sunday morning, after the closing of the convention, when Mary was just wondering whether Rachel the cook's wonderful pancakes were worth pulling herself out of bed for, she heard the far-off sound of knocking downstairs.

  The creak of footfalls—one of the housemaids running, Abigail or Kessie. Cousin Annie was already awake and brushing her hair—Mary didn't understand how she did it, after both girls had danced until nearly four in the morning at a party given for the delegates who'd come up to Columbia after the convention closed. “Oh, my goodness, if that's that Mr. Teller from Hannibal, who kept asking me to dance last night...,” moaned Annie, with a comical grimace, and listened.

  Mary listened too, and heard, unmistakably, that light, husky voice saying, “I am terribly sorry to disturb you, Miss, but is this where I might leave a note for Miss Mary Todd?”

  She jolted upright in bed, coppery braids tumbling. “Get Abigail and tell her not to let him leave.” It didn't occur to her until later to ask herself why it was his voice that elicited such a reaction. Had it been James Shields, or Lyman Trumbull, or any of her other suitors, she'd simply have rolled over and thanked God for servants to tell them to go away. “Where are my stays?”

  “I do beg your pardon for not sending a note,” apologized Lincoln, when Mary—in an unbelievably brief half-hour—appeared, corseted, dressed, washed, and not a curl out of place, in the parlor. “I didn't know how long it would take to get the judgment, but I figured if I could get to Rocheport in time to have a talk with some of the delegates before they left town, it'd be a good idea to try.”

  “So faithful in love, and so dauntless in war / There never was knight like the young Lochinvar?” And then, a little shyly, she added, “You must have ridden all night.”

  Lincoln scratched his long nose. “Pretty near,” he admitted. “I've got to be in Shelbyville Saturday to speak. If we can't dance but one measure, drink one cup of wine, I thought maybe I might at least walk you to church, Miss Todd? If it's all right with your uncle, that is.”

  They lagged behind the rest of the family party all the way to the Presbyterian church, comparing notes about the delegates and their positions, and lingered under the trees until the lifted notes of the first hymn dragged them unwillingly indoors. Then they had to run the gauntlet of eyes. In Missouri there was no slipping unobtrusively through the door and onto the nearest bench and pretending they'd been there all along. Lincoln started to do this and Mary tugged him sharply by the sleeve; it was only on a second glance that it apparently dawned on him that those rear benches were entirely the province of the slaves.

  The laundresses, gardeners, kitchen girls all grinned good-naturedly and slid over to make room for them, since Miss Molly was already known all over town as the young cousin staying with Judge Todd and they were used to seeing young couples sneak in late, but Mary pulled him down the aisle to the Todd family pew.

  As they walked back to the house afterwards for Sunday dinner—still far in the rear of the rest of the family—Lincoln mused, “I spent most of yesterday evening catching up on the platform for the election, and I never saw so many men dodgin' and skirtin' an issue in my life. It was like watching folks tryin' to dance under a leaky roof in a rainstorm. You'd think to listen to 'em nobody'd ever heard the word slavery in their lives.”

  Mary rolled her eyes in sympathy. “I thought Kentucky was bad,” she sighed. “Nobody here will talk about it, not even if they're not trying to avoid offending delegates. Like at home,” she added. “Betsey—my stepmother—always impressed on us that we call darkies ‘servants,' or ‘our people.' Even her mother did—Granny Humphreys—and she was against slavery like my father. But if you can sell someone, they're not a servant.”

  Lincoln shook his head. He'd sat beside her in her uncle's pew—the first time Mary had ever heard of him entering a church—listening respectfully to the sermon (“Render unto Caesar those things that are Caesar's”) but mostly, she'd thought, he watched the faces of the congregation around them. As he always watched, wherever he was.

  “They can't go on pretendin' forever that slavery doesn't exist,” he replied quietly. “Not with the abolitionists callin' every slaveholder a murderer, an' the slaveholders claiming the abolitionists are incitin' rebellion, and working men in the North gettin' into the act by killin' Negroes in the streets. Here we're choosing a man to run the country for the next four years, we're putting on the line for the world to see what we, the Whigs, believe in an' don't believe in, and all most Whigs want to say about General Harrison is that he's a plain honest man who drinks hard cider an' lives in a log cabin, unlike that frippery fop Van Buren. What kind of election is that? It's like we're in a runaway buggy headin' straight for a brick wall. Sooner or later, we're gonna have to do somethin' about that wall.”

  “I cannot tell you,” said Mary quietly, when they sat alone on the porch again after dinner, “how good it is to talk to someone....” She hesitated. What was it about Lincoln that she found so restful? Why did she feel that, alone among all the people of the world, she could speak her mind to him, be her true self?

  Of course, she never discussed slavery with any of Uncle David's family—it wouldn't have been polite. Nor with any of the young gentlemen of the town who, in the weeks before the Whig Convention, had given such promise of a summer rich with dances, flirtations, compliments, and proposals of marriage. And as she'd found in Lexington, once slavery as a topic became forbidden ground, there was very little of politics that could be discussed. The unspoken darkness permeated every thread and corner of life.

  But most of those young gentlemen—clerks and land speculators, young farmers or the sons of the small cotton-planters and dealers who made up the town—who'd come calling as potential beaux hadn't even offered to discuss politics. Not with a lady. It was unheard-of. With them, Mary had been all that a lady should be: flirtatious and clever, laughing at their jokes and twinkling at their wit (such as it was), lively and breathless and filled with energy....

  And only half herself.

  Impulsively she said now, in the quiet shade of the porch, “How good it is to talk to you, Mr. Lincoln. I've missed you.”

  He studied her for a moment, as if weighing up how much to say about himself. Then he said, “And I you, Miss Todd.”

  She held out her hand to him, plump white fingers emerging from a mitt of lace. Uncle David's house was of squared logs, added to and clapboarded over, and its wide porch boasted only a bench to sit on, to take the hot feathers of breeze that
floated from the hills beyond the town. “You can make that Molly,” she said softly, “if you want.”

  He hesitated, then his big hand closed gently around hers. She remembered Speed telling her how Lincoln's father had handed him an ax at the age of eight and put him to work; he had the hands and arms of a laborer. “It's a pretty name,” he said. “Molly.” He smiled uncertainly, like a man stepping over the threshold of an unknown room in the dark, then bent his head suddenly and pressed his lips to her fingers.

  At the touch of them, and the sight of the dark rumpled head bending over her hand, Mary felt a kind of a calm shock, as if she understood something she had only known intellectually before, like the first time she'd dreamed in French. And she thought, I love him.

  And it was in her eyes, as he raised his head and met her gaze. Her heart felt clear, and peaceful, and as if all things had suddenly simplified in her life: I love you.

  His big hands caught her arms, crushed her to him, as if she weighed nothing. His mouth was hot on her lips and his breath burned her cheek. Then the next second he thrust her away, or thrust himself away from her. For a moment he sat half turned from her, his breath fast and thick as if he'd been running, then he stood up abruptly and had made one long stride toward the porch steps before Mary sprang up and caught his sleeve.

  He turned, and looked down into her face. “Miss Todd,” he whispered, “I am sorry....”

  “It's all right.” She could feel the shivering tension in his arm. Could see, for one instant, the naked desire in his gray eyes, before he looked aside. As if he feared, she thought, that if he didn't hold himself in check with a rein of iron he would back her to the wall and devour her.

  And it was hard to remember any reason on earth not to let him.

  She said again, “It's all right, Mr. Lincoln. And you may still make that Molly, if you'd like.”

  He drew a shaky breath, held it for a moment, and let it out; his shoulders relaxed a little as he looked back at her. The expression in his eyes was of a man who expects to have his face slapped hard.

  On a similar occasion back in Springfield, Stephen Douglas had made a gallant remark about how a woman ought to forgive a poor man's gesture prompted only by her beauty, and had begged debonair forgiveness on his knees. And James Shields had protested—rather smugly—that he did not know how it had come about that he'd been overwhelmed enough to steal a kiss....

  But Mary knew that love was something Lincoln—the perpetual jester—did not joke about. And he wasn't going to say he didn't know how it had come about when he knew very well.

  He said again, more collectedly, “I am sorry...Miss Molly.”

  “You understand that every girl has to say she is sorry, too.” Her twinkling eyes belied her words, and under his deep tan his cheekbones colored. The corner of his big mouth moved in a smile.

  “I can step down off the porch if you'd like to slap me,” he offered, in the grave voice he used for jests, and suited the action to the word, bringing his face down almost on level with hers.

  Mary reached out with her folded fan and touched him—like the breath of a butterfly—on his cheek. “There,” she said. “Don't let it happen again.”

  They both knew it would.

  Lincoln was on the road the rest of the summer and fall. His letters came to her from Carlinville, from Belleville, from Shawneetown. He mostly spoke of rallies and speeches, of the discreet horse-trading that went on among the delegates: I promise to throw contracts your way if your friends vote for me. Mary had told him that her Aunt Bet read her letters, as Elizabeth read them back in Springfield—he'd been horrified at this and even more shocked when Mary had told him that this was customarily done in all polite households—so he was circumspect in what he wrote, both about his own feelings and about the careful jockeyings among the politicians on the issue of slavery.

  But under his wry observations and astute commentary, she sensed his pleasure in having someone with whom he could share his thoughts. “Man does not live by politics alone,” he wrote her from Waterloo, after ten days of travel and political meetings in southern Illinois, “and sometimes I wish I could only sit beside a stream in the woods as I used to, watching to see what leaves would float past.” The decision on the part of the Whig leaders to evade the issue of slavery completely, for fear of offending Southern, slave-owning Whigs like the Todds, annoyed him: “The sole argument of this election seems to be that General Harrison doesn't use gold dessert-spoons like President Van Buren does. By this argument I too would be qualified for the Presidency, and I don't see anyone rushing out to vote for me.”

  Because even sleepy little Columbia—which made Springfield look like New Orleans in comparison—was galvanized by the election, there was plenty for Mary to write to him about, and between her accounts of rallies and excursions and parades, she wrote of her affection for him, and her hopes to see him in Springfield in the fall. “Julia writes me that in October there will be a grand circus and menagerie coming to Springfield, which will display a gigantic elephant, the first ever seen in the State, as well as a giraffe and exhibitions of horsemanship and trapeze artistry,” she wrote. “I do hope that, even amid the final stages of General Harrison's campaign, we can take the time to behold such a spectacle.”

  Of course, knowing that she loved Lincoln did not keep her from flirting with half a dozen of the Columbia beaux. She made herself the life and soul of the entertainments surrounding the Presidential campaign, kept her mouth properly shut about both Shakespeare and politics, and in the three months she was in Missouri received two proposals of marriage, one from a young cotton-planter and another from a delegate from one of the southern counties. She walked out with a number of gentlemen and received posies and danced whenever she could, and this almost—but not quite—made up for the fact that there wasn't a book in the town besides a couple of Bibles and what she'd brought in her own trunks, and there was nothing resembling a theater closer than St. Louis, a hundred miles away.

  During a political campaign, one didn't really need plays.

  With the dances and parties attendant on the campaign there were always refreshments—pies and taffy, picnics of burgoo and barbeque—and, a little to Mary's alarm, she found her sleeves getting tight and her corset-laces harder to pull close. “Oh, it's nothing, everyone gets a little plump in the summer,” consoled Annie—no sylph herself—and the two girls talked Uncle David into an expedition down to St. Louis on the steamboat for new dress-goods. Mary laughed about this, and made jokes with Annie and her other girl-friends in the town as they cut and fitted lettuce-green sprig muslin and pink dimity, but her recollection of Betsey's remarks about fat girls never finding husbands gnawed at her mind.

  Yet the food was so good! Sweet and comforting, and doubly so because Elizabeth wasn't always looking over her shoulder, making remarks about the need to catch a beau.

  Nevertheless, when Mary was packing her trunk to return to Springfield, it was with a pang of horrified shock that she realized how many of the dresses she'd brought with her at the beginning of summer she hadn't worn in some weeks—and how many of her favorites had had the seams let out two, or in one case three, times. Even as she ate a last breakfast of Aunt Bet's justifiably famous blueberry-maple pancakes before Quincy the coachman brought the buggy up to drive her and Uncle David to Rocheport, she quailed at the thought of facing Elizabeth. Quailed, too, at the recollection of Josh Speed's humorous account of Lincoln's reaction when he discovered that the Miss Owens he'd been tepidly engaged to a couple of years ago had grown enormously stout in his six-month absence.

  I'm not enormously stout, Mary told herself, as she got into the buggy. Her heart began to pound with guilty apprehension, though it would be a good four days' travel before she'd have to face her family and friends. And that'll soon disappear, once I get back to Springfield. If I just don't eat much on the steamboat. . . .

  But almost the first thing Elizabeth said to her, when Mary came downstairs the
morning after her arrival in Springfield four days later, was, “Good God, Molly, you've put on flesh! I would scarcely have recognized you, now that I see you in the light.” The stage had been late coming into town, and Mary, her head aching from its swaying, had been glad only to come home and go upstairs after a swift embrace to Ninian, Elizabeth, little Julie, and Eppy in the kitchen.

  She flushed now to the roots of her hair. “Well, and I'm delighted to see you too, Elizabeth! Thank you for making me feel so much at home already.”

  It was Elizabeth's turn to color up. She said, “I'm sorry. You're right, it wasn't my place to say anything....”

  “I should say not!”

  “But if your own sister can't give you a hint, who can? I can see we're going to have some work cut out for us, letting out your winter dresses.” She spoke in a mollifying tone, but Mary, stung to tears, was in no mood to forgive and forget.

  “Well, thank you very much,” she retorted. “Please don't hesitate to use the tape-measure so you can have the most accurate information when you tell your friends about it.”

  “I'm sure no one in town,” replied Elizabeth icily, “is going to need my word that you've gotten stout, once they see you. I only say this for your own good, dear, for you are twenty-one now and as you know, gentlemen as a rule don't ask fat girls to marry them.”

  “Well, I wouldn't know about that! As it happens, I got four perfectly decent proposals of marriage in Columbia—not that I had the slightest interest in any of them! And Mr. Lincoln finds me attractive enough to come to an understanding with me.”

  “Mr. Lincoln?” Elizabeth stared at her, appalled. “Molly...”

  “What's wrong with Mr. Lincoln?”

  “He is a bumpkin,” stated Elizabeth, with cold finality. “A backwoodsman, and a penniless bankrupt to boot. Why don't you accept a proposal of marriage from Mr. Hart the carter while you're at it?”

  “And why don't you admit—while you're at it—that you have no use for a man unless he's wealthy and high-born! That you'd as soon have married some crippled old dotard, if he'd had a big house and land and wealth—”