The Emancipator's Wife (12 page)

That instead of the delight in being the center of attention in a ring of young men held by her saucy wit, she might draw to her a single man, who would love her as Saul loved Jane.

It was a revelation to her, and one that confused her, as she had lately been confused by the stirrings in her body of feelings she didn't understand. She pulled her hands away from Nate and he chased her, laughing, through the sun-dappled woods.

They came out of the undergrowth to see Cash Clay sitting alone in the clearing, his long legs stretched out on the grass, hulling the hickory-nuts the others had gathered, striking them on an outcrop of rock. Nate and Mary stopped, unseen, for at that same moment Mary Jane came into the clearing by herself, her bonnet gone, her fair hair undone and lying over her shoulders. She was looping it up and working a hair-pin into it when she saw Cash; Mary caught Nate by the sleeve and tugged him deeper into the laurel, touching a finger to her lips. Nate nodded, his eyes bright. He knew, as Mary knew, the trouble Cash had in getting a word alone with Mary Jane. Since Cash's return from Yale as a new-fledged abolitionist (“He'll get over it,” Nate had sighed. “With Cash it's always some damn thing”), Dr. Warfield had barely been able to tolerate the young man's presence in his house.

By all rules of propriety, of course, Mary Jane should have gone immediately to seek the others, for even the slaves had left to set up the picnic-baskets by the spring. Betsey—and certainly Mary Jane's mother, the formidable Maria Warfield—were quite clear on what a young lady must and must not do. Watching her, Mary thought,
Go to him!
As if she watched a play—like reading
Twelfth Night
and whispering to Viola,
Tell him who you are!

And slowly, Mary Jane crossed the clearing, her long hair falling unnoticed down over her shoulders again, and stood above Cash, who held out his hand to her, and moved his long legs aside. She hesitated for an endless moment, then settled beside him, her butter-yellow skirts billowing as she sank down, covering his shins in a froth of tucking and lace. Nate's hand closed around Mary's behind the screening laurels, and she was suddenly, profoundly conscious of the warmth of his grip, the soft whisper of his breath on her hair. Like actors in the green-and-golden proscenium of the glade, Cash laid his hands on either side of Mary Jane's face and kissed her; her own hands closed briefly, hungrily, on his arms.

Then quickly she was on her feet, and hurrying away.

C
ASH AND
M
ARY
J
ANE WERE MARRIED IN
F
EBRUARY, AT
D
R.
Warfield's house in Lexington near the University. For two days before, there had been whispers, panic, excitement. Another of Mary Jane's suitors had sent a letter to Mary Jane—which her mother had then passed along to Cash for reasons best known to herself—calling Cash a rake, an abolitionist, and a traitor, and Cash had ridden down to Louisville and publicly caned the man. The result, predictably, was a duel, to be fought on the eve of the wedding.

“Cash is really going to
fight
?” demanded Mary, aghast, when she and Elizabeth went to call on Mary Jane on the afternoon before. Elizabeth would be Mary Jane's matron of honor. They'd found the distraught bride with her sister and four other friends, pacing the parlor and fighting not to weep.

“What else can he do?” demanded Bella Richardson, widening her long-lashed violet eyes. “After the things Dr. Declarey called him in that letter...”

“And getting himself killed is going to help Mary Jane?” retorted Mary. She remembered how her friend had looked up at Cash in the clearing in that hazy autumn light, the way she'd held his arms, wanting and yet afraid. On the back of the parlor sofa, where the light from the bow-window fell, Mary Jane's bridal gown lay in a cascade of ivory-colored silk and point-lace. Mary felt sick at the thought of not knowing whether in the morning she would put on that dress, or black mourning for what was never to be.

“It's a matter of honor,” protested Bella. “I couldn't marry a man who would not fight for his honor.”

“That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard,” snapped Mary, rounding on her fiercely, and Elizabeth said,
“Hush!”

Elizabeth put her arms around Mary Jane, almost forced her to sit in one of the parlor chairs. Mary Jane was visibly trembling, her face waxen, but she held herself calm. In her place Mary knew too well that she herself would be in hysterics. Meg Wickliffe knelt beside the chair, gripping Mary Jane's hands. Not speaking the name of the brother who had been shot.

“The matter is in God's hands,” said Elizabeth quietly. “Very often in such affairs no one is hurt at all.”

Meg turned her face away.

But in the morning Cash appeared at McChord's Presbyterian Church, muddy from his hard ride back from Louisville but otherwise none the worse for wear. The matter vanished as if it had never been, save for the tears Mary saw in Mary Jane's eyes, and the way she trembled as she stood at the altar with her dark-haired, savage bridegroom. Mary, just turned fourteen and clothed in her own new status as a budding belle, wondered if she were the only person still troubled by the implications of the duel. At the reception in the Warfield parlor afterwards, she watched Mary Jane and her friends laugh and chatter and felt as alien from them as if they were characters in some fantastic book.
Isn't anyone going to ask Mary Jane if she has second thoughts about marrying Cash?
From the group of men around the punch-bowl she heard Cash's booming voice:

“...of course the news had spread of the duel, and the whole state had turned out to watch, it seemed like—Lord, it was like a fair! So I said to Declarey...”

Could you marry a man who would stake his life—and your happiness—on a letter written in anger, that should simply have been put on the fire?

Her eyes traveled the room, picking out the way Elizabeth touched Ninian's sleeve as she murmured something to him; the way Mary Jane's gaze turned, again and again, in mingled love and pain, toward Cash's dark, tousled head among the crowd around the punch-bowl. She saw Nate Bodley in the crowd, and saw how he turned also to scan the big double-parlor...seeking her? She remembered the way he'd taken her own hands in the woods, the whisper of his breath on her hair. She had dreamed last night that she was Mary Jane, sinking down to be kissed in the green and gold of the glade.

Nate had come often to Rose Hill in the evenings, when the older girls would sit in the parlor or, in warm weather, on the pillared porch, exchanging shy commonplaces with the sons of planters, the students at the University. He'd laughed uproariously with the rest at Mary's jokes and witticisms, and had shown a marked disposition to seek the chair
beside hers.

I will marry,
Mary reflected again. The feelings stirred that day in the woods had changed the words' meaning for her. It had always been,
I will marry someday, when I'm grown. . . .

But she was grown, or close to it. She'd coaxed a new dress from her father for today, white tarlatan that rustled and whispered with silvery sweetness, the sleeves so wide they were held out with hoops and everything trimmed with green velvet ribbons. More and more young men were riding out to Rose Hill to see her, and she had become adept at the secret language of sidelong glances and gentle laughter, of kisses promised or withheld.

But it came to her that this was more than a pleasant game, a way to collect beaux as tokens of her beauty and to score off her sisters. It was a hunt, to find a husband. To not be an old maid, scorned and pitied by all.

To hear Meg talk, or Bella or Isabelle, any husband was better than having people whisper about you in that sweetly hateful way, and urge their brothers or cousins to dance with you so you wouldn't be a wall-flower.

Even a husband who would leave you a widow on your wedding-day because some other man called him an abolitionist in a private letter that was intended for no one's eyes but yours.

There was Nate of course, whose quest for her seemed to have been sidetracked by a promising discussion of the proposed railroad between Lexington and Frankfort. A golden Hercules, and well-off—stupid as a brick, Mary thought, and not likely to get anywhere in the world except to be a slaveowner and raise tobacco and horses.

When I marry,
she decided,
it will have to be to a man who's going somewhere. A man like Father, or Mr. Clay.

Her old jest with Mr. Clay, about marrying a man who would be President of the United States, returned to her. Naturally there was no way of guaranteeing that, though it would be intensely gratifying to stand at the center of power, to shine as first among all the women of the land. But it occurred to her that marriage to someone who just stayed at home and minded his slaves and his business would be appallingly dull.

And what if I don't want to get married at all?
She thought of Betsey, always pregnant, more and more frequently ill, confined to the quiet of her room.
What if by the time I'm nineteen—
the last possible outpost of belle-hood before people started calling you an old maid
—I haven't met anyone I love the way Mary Jane loves Cash, the way Elizabeth loves Ninian or Jane loves Saul! What if I don't meet someone like that at all? What then?

As soon as Cash and Mary Jane left in the carriage for Crab Orchard Springs for their wedding-trip, Mary took the opportunity to walk home with Elizabeth, Frances, Eliza, and Ann. There would be dancing that night, and while the men lingered over the punch-bowl and their cigars the girls retreated, to change clothes and have a beauty-nap, for the dancing would last most of the night. The other girls' chatter saved Mary from having to talk. She felt troubled and lonely, doubly so because she had never felt completely at home in the tall-fronted brick house on Main Street.

The other girls went rustling up the stairs, but Mary passed through the dining-room and pantry to the big kitchen in the back of the house, where she knew the servants would be gathered, taking advantage of the warmth there on this icy day and also of the fact that the family was out.

But coming into the pantry she saw Nelson and Pendleton standing in the kitchen door, and beyond them, heard the sound of a woman weeping.

“What is it?” Mary slipped between the two men and into the brick-floored room. “What's wrong?”

Nelson turned, and Mary saw that his eyes burned with impotent rage. Past him in the kitchen Jane sat huddled on a stool beside the big brick hearth, her face buried in her hands. Mammy Sally held her, rocked her gently, tears running down her face.

Softly, Nelson said, “Your Granny Parker took Saul to Mr. Pullum, to help your Uncle David out for having backed a bill for one of his friends. Saul's gone. Taken away with a coffle for Louisville this morning.”

“Saul...” Mary fell back a step. After the biting air of the street the kitchen was warm, the smell of vanilla and steaming cider incongruously sweet. Jane leaned her head back against Mammy Sally's shoulder, still hugging herself, as if without the binding strength of the older woman's arms her heart would tear itself out of her ribcage and flee to some land where things like this didn't happen. Where a man couldn't be taken away and sold just to raise a little extra cash, without anyone once asking if he had family or loved ones.

Saul was gone, just like that. Without warning, without good-by.

Not because of some stupid dispute about honor, thought Mary, that he would have had the choice to take up or leave alone. But because it suited her grandmother to help out Uncle David, and this was the quickest and easiest way.

Marriage, and honor, and sapphire pendants, and not being an old maid—even having a stepmother who sent one away from home for putting spiders in her bed—suddenly seemed insults to the silent agony on Jane's face. The petty luxuries of the free.

Mary gathered up her skirts and went quietly back through the pantry, and up the stairs.

C
HAPTER
E
IGHT

A
FTER
C
ASH
'
S WEDDING,
M
ARY UNDERSTOOD THERE WERE TWO WORLDS
in Lexington. She had always been aware of the division between them, but had slipped back and forth across it with the blithe malleability of a child, to whom the fairies in the garden are as real as the horses in the stable. Besides the storybook tales of King Arthur and his knights, and the heroes of Troy, Mary had grown up on Nelson's narrations of talking foxes and clever rabbits and of little boys and their conjure-wise grannies; of the Platt-Eye Devil who waited for bad children in the dark and of the jay-bird who'd fly to Hell every Friday night to tell Satan of little girls' iniquities.

Everyone always said that slavery in Kentucky “wasn't like it was deeper south,” and that, to Mary's mind, had made it all right.

When Granny Parker sold Saul, the division between the worlds sharpened into focus for her: how narrow the gap was, and how abysmally
deep.

The world of the whites was itself divided into two: the world of men, of politics, of speculation for new lands opening in the West, of horse-racing and money-making and the casual, noisy, whiskey-smelling friendships of men; and the world of women. Mary wasn't sure which she liked best. She reveled in gossip, in shopping, in flirtations on the porch of Rose Hill and beautiful new dresses—she'd grown adept at coaxing promises from her father, and at holding him to them, if necessary, with tears. She loved afternoon-calls and the intricate ritual of who was at home to whom and who left cards on whom. But she understood that the ultimate power lay with the men.

And the men, who would gallantly offer their arms to help women cross puddles that they assumed the women didn't have the brains to walk around, guarded their power jealously. To get drunk, to shoot or thrash one another, to whip any darky who needed it or gamble the fortunes on which their families depended, were prerogatives not to be shared with addlepated females or Northerners like Mr. Presby who couldn't comprehend what things were like in the South.

Yet it was also a world of enchantment, of sultry evenings on the porch listening to the cry of the crickets, a world of taffy-pulls and dances in the big ballroom above Giron's Confectionary. A world of writing letters to friends and brushing Meg's hair and frantically trying to sneak time to get back to the literary adventures of the blameless Isabelle and her flight from the loathsome and doomed Duke Manfred...

A world of sweet peacefulness where day succeeded quiet day, and season gentle season, in a land where the rules were always clear—if sometimes byzantine and never spoken—and people could be counted on.

On the other side of that narrow abyss lay the world of kitchens, backyards, and dusty alleys in the deep shade of elm-trees, refuges for whoever could get away from their unceasing work for a quick chat with friends who might disappear tomorrow. It was a world of back-fences and the tiny economies of vegetable-plots, fish-hooks, second-run coffee-grounds, and dresses too worn for “the missus” to want anymore.

A world where there was no power, and no redress. Ever.

For weeks after Saul's departure Mary thought of him. She would see him in her mind, chained to the deck of the steamboat going down the Ohio to the Mississippi, and down the Mississippi to New Orleans, and thence to harsh labor and early death in the sugar and cotton lands of the deeper South. In her dreams he would gaze silently at the dark walls of trees gliding past, and Mary would sometimes hear the wailing slave-songs that would drift from behind the brick walls of Pullum's slave-yard.

“I'm goin' away to New Orleans,

Good-by, my love, good-by,

I'm goin' away to New Orleans,

Good-by, my love, good-by,

Oh, let her go by.”

Papa would never sell any of our people,
she thought, and most of the time truly believed it. But in fact, Mammy Sally and Nelson and Chaney and Pendleton belonged, not to her father, but to Granny Parker. As Saul had done. When that thought came to her, Mary would close her eyes in panic, her heart hammering at the fear of losing her friends.

At the idea of her friends losing their homes and each other, weeping as Jane had wept.

And there was nothing she could do about it, as there had been nothing she could ever do about her mother's death.

When Cash came back from Crab Orchard Springs with Mary Jane, Robert Todd gave a reception for the newlyweds at the new Main Street house. At this party Mary took Cash aside and asked, “
Are
you an abolitionist, Cash?” She'd heard the word bandied about a great deal, usually as a deadly insult. Even her father would argue that, though opposed to slavery in principle as Mr. Clay was, he was not an abolitionist. Cash looked down at her with his arms folded, his piercing eyes grave.

He said, “Yes, I am.”

“But you own slaves.” He had been left fatherless young, at sixteen inheriting the plantation of White Hall, where they grew tobacco and hemp.

“That will only be until I can establish my brothers in some profession where they can make their own way, and until I can establish myself in a way that will not do injustice to Mary Jane.” He glanced across the spacious double-parlor that had once been the common-room of Palmentier's Tavern. Mary Jane, clothed in the brighter colors and more modish styles of a young wife, laughed with her friends as if she had never felt fear in her life. The company overflowed the double-parlor and filled the family parlor across the hall, and the dining-room beyond that. “Then I will free the people whom my father left to me—and in freeing them, will free myself.”

Mary was quiet. She had heard this before, from Elliot Presby—and had gotten into screaming arguments with the tutor on the strength of it. But from Cash it was different. Cash
did
understand the South, as the sanctimonious young New Englander never could.

“People in this country talk about slavery as if it were a matter of choice,” Cash went on. “Like the decision whether or not to keep a carriage, or whether to become a Methodist or a Baptist. We have lived with it so long that it seems like that to us, and not what it really is. Not what Mr. Lloyd Garrison has shown us—showed
me,
when I went to hear him speak at Yale—that it is.”

Cash's voice had grown grave, without his usual edge of theatrical anger. “And it is a sin, Mary. It is an evil, the most wicked of injustices, perpetrated and carried on simply because it is profitable to
us
to buy and sell black men and make them do work for us. Garrison describes it for what it is, and describes slaveholders—myself still numbered among them—for what they
—we—
really are: oppressors beside whom Herod and the Pharaoh of Egypt were fiddling amateurs. It cannot be allowed to continue.”

A few days later Cash rode out to Rose Hill in the evening, at the time when young gentlemen customarily called on the girls. In warm weather, chairs would be brought out onto the lawn beneath the chestnut-trees, for Madame frowned on such visits, but in the bitter cold of early spring she relented, and admitted them to the fire-warmed parlor. There she would take out her violin and play, to the accompaniment of her daughter Marie on the piano. Most of the young gentlemen were terrified of her.

Madame had long ago ceased to frighten Mary. When the school-day was done and the day-students went home, Madame and her husband seemed more human, like parents to the handful of boarding-students. Evenings in the big parlor were like the family that Mary had always wished she had; they made up, in part, for the desolation she still felt each time she left her father's house.

That evening Cash brought her a note from Mary Jane, a commonplace invitation to tea the following week. When Mary walked him out to the porch, he slipped her a closely folded packet of papers: “Mr. Garrison's newspaper,
The Liberator,
” he whispered. “Read it yourself, Mary, and see if you do not agree with us, that slavery is a moral issue, and not merely a question of white man's property and white man's law.”

She stowed the papers under her mattress, where she was fairly certain no one would find them. The girls made up their own beds each morning, and changed their own sheets on Tuesday nights, the linen fresh-washed and fresh-pressed by Dulcie and Caro. It did not seem, thought Mary, that you could get away from slaves. Once she'd read
The
Liberator,
tucked between the pages of
A Young Lady's History of the United States,
it seemed to her that slaves were everywhere, in every corner of Lexington.

They did all the laundry. They cut all the wood, for kitchen fires, bedroom fires, heating water to wash clothing and dishes. They ironed sheets and napkins in every house she knew of, from the wealthy plantations like the Wickliffes' Glendower and Dr. Warfield's The Meadows to houses like her father's and Granny Parker's. They worked on road-gangs, cutting trees and leveling grades so that wagons could come and go from Louisville on the river, taking hemp and tobacco down to market or hauling up the
batiste de soie
and
gros de Naples,
the feathers and ribbons and buttons of mother-of-pearl that made shopping-expeditions in Cheapside so entrancing. They milked everyone's cows and shoveled out everyone's stables; they spread the manure on everyone's gardens so that roses and carrots and potatoes would grow.

She realized she didn't know anyone—except old Solly, the town drunk and gravedigger—who didn't own a slave.

Yet it was clear to her, reading Mr. Garrison's impassioned writings, that the owning of slaves, the selling of slaves, did more than just make a mockery of the liberty that the United States had claimed as a birthright in separating from England. It was evil in and of itself, in the eternal eyes of God. The men who owned other men were tyrants, the men who sold other men were kidnappers, the men who punished other men for not accepting bondage as their lot were no better than robbers who beat their victims. Garrison's words burned her, left her breathless and deeply troubled.

Because she knew in her heart that they were true. But if she accepted them, she understood that she would have to accept that her father was a tyrant and kidnapper. That Mr. Clay, whom she both admired and loved, was, in Garrison's words, “a patriotic hypocrite, a fustian declaimer of liberty, a highway robber and a murderer.”

Then she would look around her at the friends chatting of beaux and dresses—good people, dear and sweet (except maybe Arabella Richardson)—and she wouldn't know what to feel or think.

She would have liked to talk to her father about this, but on those Saturdays and Sundays when she returned to the Main Street house, her father, if he was home at all, was always surrounded by family: always talking to Ninian—who frequently came up with Elizabeth from Walnut Hill if the couple weren't staying outright at the Main Street house for a few weeks—or admonishing Levi and George, or playing with little Margaret, little Sam, or baby David....Or if he were doing none of those things,
Betsey was there, and Mary felt robbed and abandoned all over again.

Even a new pair of slippers or the promise of a new dress did not entirely make up for the ache—and confusion—in her heart.

Nor could she bring the matter up to M'sieu Mentelle without opening the subject of where she'd gotten hold of copies of
The Liberator.
No young lady at Rose Hill was permitted to receive correspondence that had not been scrutinized by Madame. The parents of her boarders expected her to be aware of such things. And in any case the rule about speaking only French within the house was strict, and Mary did not feel up to discussing “the popular fury against the advocates of bleeding humanity” in French.

One Saturday evening in the summer of her second year at Mentelle's—1833—Mary found her chance. Supper at the Main Street house was done—a reduced group around her father's table, for Ninian had received his law degree not long ago, and had taken Elizabeth north to his family home in Springfield, Illinois, leaving Mary bereft. Mr. Presby had returned to Boston to visit his family, and the Todds had begun to make plans to retreat to Crab Orchard Springs—or perhaps to Betsey's small country house, Buena Vista, five miles outside town, as soon as Mary was out of school for the summer.

Mary herself felt depressed and strange, as if she were going to have a headache later. She had had a nightmare the night before, about the town being flooded with water that shone ghastly green with poison, and the thunderclouds building over the mountains filled her with uneasy dread.

After supper she'd followed her father out onto the rear porch that overlooked the small formal garden that was Betsey's pride, and beyond it the woodland that bordered the stream at the rear of the property. In buying Palmentier's, Robert Todd had also purchased the three town lots surrounding it—practically the only vacant lots remaining near the center of Lexington—so that this green and pleasant prospect would remain his.