The Emancipator's Wife (25 page)

“And Mr. Gillespie's coming to our house,” said Mary consideringly. “And goodness knows if Elizabeth's back yet with the carriage...Oh!” she called out, hurrying back to the edge of the sidewalk and waving her handkerchief at the driver of a passing dray. “Oh, Mr. Hart!” For she recognized the man as a laborer whom Ninian had hired on several occasions to fix fences and mend the stable.

“Mary!” cried Merce, shocked. “What are you...?”

The little Irishman drew rein and touched his soaked hat-brim, and Mary gave him her most flirtatious smile. “Mr. Hart, could I possibly,
possibly
trouble you to drive past my brother-in-law's house on your way back to the freight depot? It isn't so very much out of your way....”

“Miss Todd...!” said Speed, half-shocked and half-laughing, and Merce gasped, “Mary, don't you
dare
! Everyone will talk!”

“Oh, pooh. We need to get home.”

“
We
nothing! That dray is...” She visibly bit back the word
filthy,
out of consideration for Mr. Hart, and finished with, “My sister-in-law will
kill
me!”

“Well,” laughed Mary, “I think I'm a match for my sister. I can't make poor Mr. Speed go hunting someone to take a message for me, Mr. Speed, I really couldn't....And I think we can trust Mr. Hart, can't we, Mr. Hart?” She turned to the carter appealingly, with a helpless flutter of her lashes, and the unshaven, stocky little man laughed good-naturedly and held out a dirty-gloved hand.

“I'm not too proud if you're not, Miss Todd.”

Speed rolled his eyes. “Your sister will skin me for letting you do this. Here,” he added, pulling off his apron, “you'd better put this over the seat....”

“Are you sayin' the seats of me vehicle aren't all they should be?” Hart bristled with mock indignation, as if the plank on which he sat wasn't wet with rain and slick with spattered mud, and all four burst into laughter. As they jolted through the streets—Merce having remained, like a stranded mariner, on the boardwalk outside Speed's store—Mary saw Douglas and Lincoln emerging from Birchall's store, Douglas natty in a new broadcloth coat and Lincoln looking like he'd dressed in a high wind in some scarecrow's hand-me-downs. Mary lifted her hand like a queen and waved as Betsey had admonished her for years: move the wrist, never the elbow.

Douglas looked shocked, and as if he asked himself if he really wanted as a Senatorial—or Presidential—wife a woman who'd ride unchaperoned on a construction dray through the middle of town.

Lincoln removed his dilapidated hat and executed a profound bow.

C
HAPTER
E
IGHTEEN

I
T WAS THROUGH LETTERS THAT THEIR LOVE FIRST GREW.

Even with Mary—who had reason to believe that she was the woman he talked to most easily—Lincoln was often silent as a clam, as if at some time in the past he'd been told that he mustn't speak to women as he spoke to men and had no idea how one
did
speak to women. He was not, Mary noticed, a good speaker extempore, even on politics, and needed to prepare his notes carefully. Had they not shared an interest in both politics and poetry, she thought he'd never have been able to put two words together with her at all.

Writing freed his thoughts.

In his letters she had the feeling of seeing the man, and not what his awkward body or his barren upbringing had made of him.

And Mary, as quick with witty repartee as she could be with defensive sarcasm, found that she, too, could write of deeper thoughts than she could express aloud...certainly than she could express to Elizabeth and Ninian. Not only was Lincoln different from any man she had ever met
—she
was different, with him.

Through the winter of 1839 they met each other socially, at the House on the Hill or the homes of friends: the Leverings, or the Englishman Edward Baker, the acerbic Dr. Anson Henry or Simeon Francis, who published the
Sangamo Journal.
The
Journal
's little one-room board building, or Simeon's big house on Sixth Street near-by, were de facto club-houses for the Young Whigs of the capital, of whom Lincoln was acknowledged chief. Mary became very fond of the sturdy editor and his forthright wife, Bessie, and read the
Journal
regularly. Any trace of romantic possibility between herself and Stephen Douglas was swept away when in the wake of a particularly nasty round of political mudslinging Douglas lost his temper and tried to cane Simeon in the street.

Lincoln was one of those who pulled the two men apart. Mary, who had just stepped from Diller's drugstore when it happened, flattened back against the wall, her gloved hand pressed to her mouth, almost in tears with the wave of unreasoning terror that washed over her at the sight.

“What is it?” asked Lincoln, crossing the street to her when Douglas had jerked himself free of other men's restraining hands, and stormed on his way. “Are you all right, Miss Todd?”

“Yes.” Mary's voice was a toneless whisper, but she was shaking as if she, not Simeon—not Elliot Presby—had been attacked. Lincoln just stood there, looking down at her as if he hadn't the slightest idea of what to do in the face of feminine emotion. Mary fumbled in her reticule for a handkerchief and guessed, wryly, that if Lincoln had a bandanna in his pocket it probably wasn't clean. “No. It's just...a friend of mine was caned in the street, back home, and...and hurt very badly. And one of my cousins...shot his best friend, over an article printed in the newspaper....” She fought to keep her face from crumpling into weeping again.

Nothing really happened!
she reminded herself desperately.

Why did she feel the panic terror, smell again the mingling of gutter-mud and blood?

She tried to draw a deep breath.

Douglas of course would have had a clean handkerchief and dabbed away her tears with it.

Douglas with his cane flashing through the air...

But it was Lincoln who'd seen her pressed against the wall, her face white with shock, while everyone else went about their business.

“Would you like me to take you home, Miss Todd?” he asked gently, and she nodded, and laid her hand on his offered arm.

T
HE MUDSLINGING, OF COURSE, HAD BEEN PART AND PARCEL OF THE CAMPAIGN
to elect General William Henry Harrison President come Novemeber.

As soon as the roads were clear in spring, Lincoln was on them, making speeches in support of General Harrison and debating political issues with every Democrat in every corner of the state. He wrote to Mary from Jacksonville, from Alton and Belleville: brief notes, mostly concerning the political debates, in which he knew she was interested.
(Catch Stephen Douglas telling me what
his
rivals said about
him, she thought.) Though the tall, gawky man was almost as reticent about stating his thoughts on paper as he was on Ninian's porch, his feelings came through in those simple, lucid paragraphs, his deep sense of politics as service, as the duty that must be taken up as the price of power. Mary, who like her father and Ninian and nearly everyone she knew, had only thought of government in terms of privileges, perquisites, favors, and contracts, felt surprised and a little ashamed: it was as if she had mistaken a woodland pond for the Atlantic Ocean.

She had, she realized, operated under the assumption that men who'd lived most of their lives in the backwoods, if not invariably stupid, were certainly simple.

There was nothing simple at all about Abraham Lincoln.

When the Legislative session closed for the summer, Mary accepted the invitation of her two uncles—the Honorable North Todd and Judge David Todd—to spend the summer in Columbia, Missouri. She packed her trunk and Ninian escorted her on the two-day stage-ride to St. Louis, then by steamboat up the Missouri to Rocheport. Ninian had his own reasons for going to Rocheport, for there was going to be a gathering of Missouri Whigs there in a few weeks.

Mary had always held a little grudge in her heart against her uncle David, because it was to pay his debts that, long ago, Granny Parker had sold poor Saul. But the feeling dissolved when the big, jovial man sprang down from the buggy where he'd been waiting for her at the landing, and gathered her into his arms. “What, you haven't got our girl married off yet?” demanded Uncle David of Ninian, and pinched Mary's cheek. “What's that wife of yours been doing?”

“Fending off suitors with a broadsword and shield,” returned Ninian with a grin, and shook Uncle David's hand. “And she needs to, sir, with the way this girl draws 'em.”

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.