The Emancipator's Wife (10 page)

Please, God, don't have everybody in town be whispering that. Papa will be disgraced, too. He'll never speak to me again.

And then I really will die.

Somehow she made it to the bed, and lay trembling, listening to the hushed whispers of the girls in Frances's room next door.
Thief, liar.
Mary dragged the pillow over her head, heedless of Mammy Sally's careful hours with the curling-irons. She lay that way for a long time, her mind blank to everything except dread and shame.

Betsey would tell everyone. Betsey had practically announced it to all her friends, right there on the stairway. What would Eliza and Frances say? They'd never be able to hold up their heads at Ward's again, unless they joined in the cry against Mary....Mary knew exactly how those alliances worked. Her heart curled up at the thought, like a giblet in a dry oven.

Daylight was fading from the windows when Mammy Sally knocked on the door. Mary snatched the pillow from her head. “Go away!” And, when Mammy knocked again and opened the door, “Don't you say a word to me! I don't want to talk about it!” She was shaking all over. Somehow that was almost worse than her father being disgraced for having a liar and a thief in his family: that every darky in town was going to be whispering her name in kitchens, tack-rooms, garden sheds.
Did you hear what that Mary Todd did...?

Mammy's eyebrows went up, but she only said, “Turn round, child, let me unlace you. No sense gettin' that pretty dress all creased up layin' on it.”

Mary obeyed in silence, too angry—and too humiliated—to further humble herself by crying. When Eliza came up a few hours later Mary pretended to be asleep. When she did sleep, her dreams were of walking down Broadway hearing everyone she knew whispering behind her:
Liar. Liar and thief.

The next morning Mary stayed in her room. She heard the voices of the family going down to breakfast, but knew better than to even try it herself. All she'd need would be Betsey dragging out the whole story in front of them. She trembled at the thought of the upcoming interview with her father. He would ask her why she'd done it—with the look of hurt in his eyes, as he'd asked her about countless acts of disobedience over the years—and she had nothing, literally nothing, that she could tell him.

She didn't know why she'd done it. Just thinking about saying that made her want to cry.

But she wanted above all things to have it over with, done.
He will never speak to me again,
she thought, and the next moment,
He has to say it's all right. He has to say it or I'll die.

She strained her ears for the sound of his boots on the stairs, and wondered if she should pray. But she could think of nothing God would even consider granting her.

Boots at the bottom of the stairs. Muffled voices, her father's and
Betsey's. She held her breath:
It's going to be now....

I'll cry. He'll forgive me if I cry....

Then, very dimly, the sounds of hooves in the street. A saddle-horse being brought around to the front of the house. The sound of the front door opening...“I'll be back on the first,” said her father's voice.

The door closed. Betsey's light decisive step retreated to the parlor. A moment later, the sound of hooves rattled down Short Street as her father rode away.

Mary sat up, her mouth literally ajar with shock and, a moment later, outrage. There would be no confrontation. No bargaining, no tears, no forgiveness.

He had left without any of them. Without saying good-by.

“She told him you weren't feeling well,” reported Eliza, when she came up an hour later after helping Betsey and Frances wash the good breakfast china—a task never relegated to darkies. “She said you were still asleep.”

And
SHE
called
ME
a liar!
The hairs on her head prickled with wrath.

Her father was going to be gone for almost two weeks, and Betsey had taken it upon herself to step between them, and prevent them from even having the chance to say good-by.

“What did she say to you yesterday, anyway?” asked Eliza, digging through her own little painted tin box for a ribbon to go in her yellow curls. “Is your ear all right?”

Mary barely remembered Betsey hitting her in front of her friends. All she could think was,
She told him in private. Of course—she doesn't want to hear the darkies in every kitchen in town saying, “That Mary Todd's a liar and a thief,” any more than I do. Not because she cares one single thing about me, but because of Papa's reputation at the Legislature and the bank.

But she'd told him. Betsey wouldn't pass up the chance to drive the wedge more firmly between Robert Todd and his “real children.” She had taken him from Mary, and had driven Elizabeth from the house, Elizabeth who had been like a mother to Mary, to make way for her own children. She had struck Mary in front of all her friends, and had lied
—lied
to keep her husband away from his daughter before he rode back to Frankfort.

Mary managed to whisper, “My ear is fine.”

Later that day she made it her business to linger in the kitchen, and when Betsey's back was turned abstracted a handful of coffee-beans from the tin caddy that was usually kept locked. These she used to bribe Saul to procure for her a dozen live spiders, an astonishing number considering it was the middle of winter. The result was everything Mary had hoped it would be, Betsey's voice screaming wildly in the darkness a few minutes after bedtime—she was always too stingy to carry a bedroom candle—and Patty, who had her own reasons for disliking her mistress, reporting the next day in the kitchen that she'd found Miss Betsey standing on a chair naked as a jaybird, shrieking and trying to claw the confused arachnids out of her long unbraided hair.

She can't prove I did it,
thought Mary, with a kind of burning complacency as she lay listening to the cries and thumps.
She can't prove a thing.

But Betsey didn't need or want proof. Despite the fact that Mary had sworn Saul to secrecy and dropped down the outhouse the candy-tin in which the spiders had been delivered, Betsey confined Mary to her room for the ten days intervening before her father's return from Frankfort—days of anxiety, loneliness, and alternating waves of defiance and agonizing shame.

Worse still, she refused to let her have any books, not even the Bible. Only sheets to hem.

So there was nothing to do but wait for her father's return.

She wished there were something she could do to punish herself, so that he would forgive her. Wished there was some way she could go back in time and rub out everything that had happened since that Wednesday afternoon in Mr. Sotheby's store. Make it all not have happened, make everything go back to what it had been before.

She knew she mustn't wish for Betsey to die before her father got home—she could just imagine what God would have to say if she prayed for it—but the thought was frequently in her mind.

Sometimes, when she thought of what her father would say to her, she wished she could simply die herself.

Her father came home just before suppertime on the first of March. Mary was so exhausted with shame, with remorse, with anger at herself and Betsey and all the world, that she started sobbing the moment she heard the hooves of his horse in Short Street, and was still weeping after supper, when Betsey came into her room—wordlessly and without knocking—and escorted her down to his study.

“Your mother and I have been talking,” said Robert Todd, when
Betsey had closed the door and went to stand beside him at his desk.

Mary protested, “She's not my mother!” Then she clapped her hands over her mouth and stood, tears streaming down her face, looking from Betsey's stony countenance to her father's weary one. She saw in his eyes only a kind of tired peevishness. There wasn't even anger, she realized, with a sick shock of disappointment. Only that he didn't want to be troubled with the conflict between his first wife's children and their stepmother.

He just wants everything to be all right, so he can be like his friends and not worry about it.

The knowledge was like opening a beautifully-wrapped present and finding it empty. Like biting into a delicious-looking piece of cake that had been made without sugar or salt.

And I'm the one who's hurting him.

It seemed that there was nothing that she could do or feel that was not wrong.

“Your mother and I have been talking,” he said again, and Mary flinched, waiting for the words of anger, of disappointment, of rejection.
Liar. Thief.
She wished she could shrink in on herself and disappear. Then he said, “And we've agreed that you're old enough now to go away to school.”

Mary looked up. This was so unexpected that she was caught breathless, as if she'd stepped through her familiar bedroom door and found herself falling down the backyard well. Then the meaning of his words sank in, and her disappointment evaporated, her volatile spirits leaped.

School...

Mary had listened in hungry envy when the Reverend John Ward had spoken to his classes about the seminaries for higher education that girls could go to, in Philadelphia and New York. Meg Wickliffe—who at sixteen was almost finished at Ward's—said she might go to Sigoigne's very prestigious Female Academy in Philadelphia, next year or the year following, and Mary's soul had ached with the desire to go, too. To learn more of history than the Reverend and Mrs. Ward could teach. To have access to all the literature of England and France that she'd only just heard about...to learn to speak French properly, and maybe Italian, maybe even Latin like the boys.

The sudden shift from shame and dread to the great longing of her heart was so unexpected that for the first few moments while her father was speaking, Mary only felt confused, as if she were dreaming.
Betsey didn't tell him. She can't have told him....

“...know that we don't have the money to send you to Philadelphia or New York. But Madame Mentelle at Rose Hill teaches a very fine course of studies....”

Madame Mentelle!
Mary's thoughts came crashing back to earth. She'd seen the tall, rangy Frenchwoman striding about Lexington's muddy streets in her hopelessly old-fashioned, high-waisted dresses. In the frame of her short-cropped hair her angular face and pale eyes had a decisive expression even more witchlike than Betsey's.

Mary's glance shot to Betsey's face, and she understood. This was
Betsey's way of getting her out of the house. Of having Robert Todd that much more to herself.

She, Mary, had handed her the wherewithal to convince him to do it....

And because of the pendant—because of the falsehood she had told—she couldn't even protest.

“You'll like it there,” said her father, with encouraging cheer.

How do you know?

She managed to say, “Yes, Papa. Thank you, Papa.”

He held out his arms to her, and Betsey moved aside a half step, as if giving permission for Mary to sit on her father's knee. “That's my little girl,” he said, rocking her, holding her—taking comfort, she felt, though it was something never said between them, in her nearness and her unquestioning love.

Betsey didn't tell him,
Mary thought again, disbelieving. Her heart ached with gratitude—not to Betsey, but to God.

Betsey was getting exactly what she wanted, spiders notwithstanding.

Mary was still her father's little girl, his child for whom he could make everything all right without effort when she wept, and not a liar and a thief.

But the price of that miraculous salvation was exile.

“Mary,” said her father's deep voice in her ear, “I want you to apologize to your mother for what you did.”

Mary nodded, and at his urging slipped down off his knee. She curtsied to Betsey, whispered, “Ma, I'm so sorry.”

Betsey's face was enigmatic. “I accept your apology, Mary. We will say no more of it.” A formula? A promise? A simple acknowledgment that certain things were best kept quiet for the good of the family's reputation? Mary's eyes searched her stepmother's face briefly, then fell before the cold gaze. Betsey had kept her secret, and Mary, now, was obliged to keep it, too. The shame of being caught in a lie—of being trapped by her lie—burned in her like the scar of a red-hot knife, sealed in her secret heart. She knew she would never, ever speak of what she had done.

Not even to obtain forgiveness.

“Run along now,” said Betsey, “and tell Chaney to give you some supper.”

As Mary backed from the little book-crammed study she saw her
stepmother take the place she had had moments ago on Robert Todd's knee. “Well,” said Betsey, as Mary shut the door, “now maybe we'll have some peace.”

C
HAPTER
S
EVEN

R
OSE
H
ILL WAS A LOW, RAMBLING HOUSE BUILT IN A GROVE OF
locust trees, out on the Richmond Pike. From earliest childhood Mary would pass the place when she'd ride her pony to Mr. Clay's graceful stucco house at Ashland, which stood nearby. She'd seen Madame Mentelle in town, too, and had overheard Betsey and her bosom-bow Sophonisba Breckenridge talking about her—“virago” and “bluestocking,” and “very well educated I
suppose,
but those
dresses
she wears...” The roll of Sophy's eyes had been worth a thousand words. “I'll bet that poor husband of hers lives under the cat's foot.” And the two women had giggled like malicious girls.

Now the tall Frenchwoman stood at the top of the front door's three brick steps: “Dulcie will show you where to put Miss Mary's things,” she told Nelson, as the old coachman unstrapped the trunk from the back of the carriage. The slave woman of whom she spoke stepped down to help Nelson carry in Mary's many boxes, and Madame herself glanced sidelong at Mary, her pale eyes unreadable. “Take the books into the library.
La bibliothèque de votre père, c'est renommé ici à la ville.”
Her French was so fast, and so slurred, that Mary had to grope for the words addressed to her, picking the sentence apart.

La bibliothèque...
the library
...de vot' père
...your father's library...

“Merci, Madame,”
she replied carefully, meeting that disconcerting gaze unflinchingly. Understanding that this woman was testing her—probing to see how much work her French would need to achieve the proficiency of a truly accomplished young lady, she went on in that language. “Papa says you are a scholar.”

Madame winced, as at the scraping of a nail on tin. “
Une scholaira?
This isn't Latin! I was afraid all you'd learned here was American French. Good God, the Chickasaws speak it better than those imbeciles at Ward's.”

Mary's spine stiffened, for she liked the Reverend Ward and his wife. “Maybe the Chickasaws learned it while selling American scalps to the French before the Revolution,” she retorted.

Madame's eyebrows shot up at this impertinence. Then, slowly, she smiled, revealing long yellow teeth like a horse's. “From what I hear, your grandfather kept the local market in such commodities fairly scanty.”

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.”

W
ITH THE POSSIBLE EXCEPTION OF
M
AMMY
S
ALLY
'
S KITCHEN,
M
ARY
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.