The Emancipator's Wife (27 page)

“He is not!” cried Mary, who had the best of reasons to know the volcanic physical desires masked by the lawyer's wary reserve. “Just because he doesn't say a lot of pretty words—”

“And you cannot deny,” cut in Elizabeth inexorably, “that he is a man ten thousand dollars in debt due to poor business practices. You keep saying that wealth doesn't matter, but you have never been poor.”

“And I suppose
you
have?”

Elizabeth's lips tightened. “Your happiness is my duty, Mary. I assure you, you would not be happy with Mr. Lincoln, even if he should ask for your hand....Which I doubt he will do, the way he's been dangling after Tilda.”

“That isn't true!” Mary flashed back. “We have an understanding....”

Elizabeth rolled her eyes.

“Tilda isn't the slightest interested in him....”

“Good God, I should hope not!” cried Elizabeth, clearly startled that Mary would even consider an idea so grotesque. “Her father left her here to make a decent match, not to ally herself with a bankrupt clod-crusher, never mind how clever he is. He has no family, Mary, and no—”

“If you tell me again how he has no money I shall scream!” Mary screamed at her. She pulled free of Elizabeth's grip and slammed through the parlor door and into the hall just as Ninian came in from outside, his sharp nose red with cold. Mary jerked open the front door and stumbled onto the porch.

“Mr. Lincoln!” she called out into the coal-sack blackness of the snowy night. The glow of the parlor lamps touched the drifting flakes, a foot or two beyond the edge of the porch, but there was no sign of any tall figure in the blackness.

Sick dread in her heart and tears flowing from her eyes, Mary thrust past Elizabeth and Ninian, and ran up the stairs to her room.

“Darling...” Matilda turned from the mirror where she was brushing her hair as Mary slammed into the big front bedroom. “I'm worried about Mr. Speed.” Speed was the beau who had escorted Matilda to the lecture. “He's become so serious about me—about himself and me—and this evening he said he couldn't endure to remain in Springfield, if he and I could not be together. I'm afraid that—”

“Oh, leave me alone!” cried Mary, and flung herself down on the bed in a huge storm of crushing petticoats, and buried her face in the pillows. She was crying.

Matilda, being Matilda, took her at her word and left her alone. For nearly forty minutes she brushed and braided her own lovely flaxen hair while Mary sobbed. Only after Mary's grief began to subside did she wrap every shawl in the unheated room around her for warmth, and cross to the bed and silently take Mary in her arms. Mary held on to her and wept afresh. After a long time, her head aching, she finally consented to be helped to undress.

She dreamed she was trying to catch up with Mr. Lincoln on an overgrown woodland path; running and stumbling through the sun-splashed green shadows, calling out to him again and again. But her legs were too short, and she was fat and out of breath, and her head ached too terribly. She saw him ahead of her, the flecks of sunlight mottling his coarse Indian-black hair and the faded blue of the homespun shirt he wore, and his long legs carried him away from her, out of sight.

N
EW
Y
EAR
'
S
E
VE CAME, AND WITH IT A GIANT COTILLION AT THE
American House. Though Lincoln spent most of the evening talking with the men, he was standing beside Mary when midnight tolled, and like every other young couple with an understanding, they kissed. His hands closed tight over hers, though his lips scarcely brushed her cheek. Not much else was possible, with Elizabeth and Ninian only feet away. But as always, Mary felt the hunger in him, the powerful physical desire of an active man coupled with the desperation of an unwanted child. She wanted to drag his mouth down to hers, to let his embrace overwhelm her as it had on her uncle's porch in Columbia, to revel in it as she had then. That physical desire, unspoken of by either, held taut between them, as much a part of their understanding as any amount of
Shakespeare and Whig politics.

Her eyes closed, Mary didn't even see who Matilda kissed as midnight struck.

But when Lincoln went back immediately to the men, gathered around the long tables that had been set up to the left of the great common-room fireplace, Mary decided he needed a lesson, and proceeded to flirt, turn and turnabout, with every man of the dozen gallants who preferred dances with the ladies to speculation about who President Harrison would appoint to government jobs. With the Legislature and the courts both in session, even the presence of the Vandalia political matron Mrs. Browning and her daughters didn't lessen the ratio of men to women much. Clerks, delegates, and lawyers jockeyed and nudged for a chance to dance with the flaxen Matilda, black-haired Julia, and plump, lively, fascinating Mary Todd.

Josh Speed danced with them all, but as she circled the room with him in a gay polka, Mary saw Speed's dark eyes follow Matilda's graceful white form. “Mr. Speed,” said Mary worriedly, her small hand resting on his arm as they lilted through the figures.

The dark gaze returned to her. She saw the marks of sleeplessness in the lined lids, the crease between nostril and mouth, and remembered Matilda's words in their bedroom after the South Sea Islands lecture, and later gossip of Elizabeth's.

“Tilda...is very fond of you. I know she wouldn't want to think that you would...would do anything rash or foolish because of her.”

“You mean, like selling up my half of the store and leaving town?” Speed's smile, usually light as sunshine, seemed tired, with the wryness of a beaten man. “Word gets around fast. No.” He shook his head. “Miss Edwards isn't why I decided to sell up,
if
I sell up...and I still haven't completely made up my mind to do it. Though since Pa's death they do need me now at home.” He managed a chuckle. “God knows what'll become of Lincoln if I do.”

It was something that had gone through Mary's mind, too. Not that Lincoln couldn't have found someplace—even in the overcrowded boardinghouses of the new state capital—to live. But she knew he depended on Speed's friendship far more than most people suspected. For a man as gregarious as Lincoln was, very few people pierced the iron wall of isolation he kept around his heart.

Then Speed sighed, and shook his head. “But it's time for a change, Molly...Miss Todd. Time to...I don't know. Fish or cut line on a lot of things. What better time than the New Year?”

So when Lincoln knocked at the door of the House on the Hill late on New Year's afternoon, when the curtains of cinder-colored twilight were winding themselves thick beyond the windows, Mary thought only that he brought news concerning Speed's decision—or perhaps sought solace for the separation he knew would come.

New Year's dinner at the House on the Hill was always a special occasion. They had spent the morning, like everyone else in town, in obligatory calls, leaving their cards at every house. Elizabeth was justly proud of her hospitality, and Eppy had worked like the Israelites in Egypt to prepare cakes, pies, gingerbread, and an enormous savory ham for the
Leverings, for Ninian's brother Ben and sister-in-law Helen, for Dr. Wallace and Frances, Uncle John Todd and his daughters, plus the thin, red-haired, and irascible Cousin Stephen Logan. After dinner there had been open house, for all the wealthy and fashionable of Springfield: Senator Herndon and the chinless, slightly inebriated, and now-married Billy; Dr. Merriman and Lincoln's friend Dr. Henry, and their wives; Dr. Jayne and his wife with Julia and her brother William; Stephen Douglas and Jimmy Shields and a whole train of other bachelors come to pay court to Mary and Matilda....

Elizabeth and Eppy had spent the afternoon and evening darting back and forth to the kitchen for claret cups, platters of gingerbread, and cups of coffee, resolutely refusing all offers of help from the girls.

The last suitors had been gone for an hour. Matilda—who had been extremely quiet all day—had gone upstairs. When the clock struck six, Mary guessed that there would be no more callers, and with a grateful sigh took off her gloves—which were still too tight for her, much to her annoyance—and stood to see what help she could give in the kitchen.

Then there was a knock on the door. After a long time—Lina, the housemaid, was back in the kitchen helping Eppy clear up—Mary heard the girl's swift feet running to the hall to answer.

“Is Miss Todd here?” asked the familiar voice.

And Mary thought,
Thank God, Elizabeth's in the kitchen. . . .

And there he stood, the top tousle of his unruly hair seeming to reach for the wooden archway that separated front parlor from rear.

She melted into a smile. “Mr. Lincoln! Do sit....”

He held up his hand to silence her. In the firelight—only a single lamp had been lit in the other parlor—she saw his face was haggard, his eyes filled with the last extremities of wretchedness.

“Miss Todd,” he said.

And Mary felt the tears rush to her eyes at the formality of his address. Had it been another man who had gone back to calling her by her surname after the more intimate “Miss Molly,” she would have
twitted archly on the defection, fluttered her eyelids, and made her
dimples peep....

Her heart was sick within her. She could say nothing.

Lincoln took a deep breath and went on, as if he were speaking from memorized notes, as he did in court and on the political platform.

“Miss Todd, I had meant to communicate with you by letter, setting forth all the reasons why our understanding—if understanding it is—cannot any longer endure. But a better man than I am put that letter on the fire, and convinced me that I was honor-bound to speak to you in person....”

Mary began to tremble uncontrollably. Her vision of him blurred with tears but she heard the miserable desperation in his voice as he said, “Molly...”

“I didn't mean to flirt!” she sobbed frantically. “Oh, the deceiver is deceived! I never meant...”

“Molly, it hasn't got anything to do with you flirting!” The formal tone broke from his voice as he abandoned his rehearsed lines. “Good Lord, I know you flirt with everything in britches! That's just how you are!”

“I've played fast and loose with you, and now you turn from me....” Shudders wracked her whole body. She collapsed back on the sofa, hands pressing to her face, praying, desperate her tears would change his mind, as they so often changed her father's. “I never, never meant to—”

“No!” She heard him cross the room to her, felt his arms, so astonishingly strong, gather her to him. Felt the warmth of his body through the wet cold of the coat he still wore. “Molly, it's just it would never work out between us! I'm...I'm saddled with debts....” He stumbled, groping for words. “Poverty is the only thing I'd have to offer any woman....”

And I can't keep my temper,
thought Mary, pressing against him, her hands locked around his lapels,
and I let myself get fat....No wonder he wants to run away!
Terror of losing him—of losing the one man she could talk to easily, the one man who understood her—ripped at her like the shock of a wound, and she sobbed, “I love you! And you said that you loved me, too!”
Don't leave me....

“Molly...!”

He lifted her onto his lap, cradled her to him like a child. The physical power that had shocked her, drawn her on the porch in Columbia, now comforted her and she clung to him, her face against his chest, sobbing that it was all her fault and wanting to hold him and never let him go.
There has to be something I can say, some way I can undo the damage. . . .
“You promised me,” she sobbed again and again, as she had sobbed to her father, to coax dresses out of him. “You said you loved me! I trusted you, I believed you—was your love a lie, then?”

“No!” He wiped her eyelids, and kissed her cheek, and turning in his arms she pulled his mouth to hers, frantic for reassurance of love. He tried to pull away and she wept harder, refusing to let him go. The next moment he was holding her close, kissing her, not with the passionate hunger of before, but with great gentleness, as if he understood how deep ran her need to be loved.

Footsteps in the hall.

Mary stumbled to her feet, Lincoln rising above her. “I must go,” he said tonelessly, and Mary nodded, clutching one final time at his hand. He strode from the house just as Elizabeth came into the front hall. Mary fled past her, up the darkness of the stairs.
Let her make of that what she pleases. If she thinks I'm weeping because he said good-by, so much the better.

She knew that above all else, she didn't want to see Elizabeth's satisfied face.

Matilda was sitting in bed, reading by the light of a branch of candles, her fair hair shining in the amber light. She looked up and saw Mary's face. “Dearest...”

Mary shook her head violently, and went to stand by the window, though the cold seeped through the panes and made that whole side of the room as icy as outdoors. She pressed her forehead to the glass, hoping that the pounding pain starting behind her eyes would subside. Hoping that she'd catch a glimpse of that tall form striding away into the night. But there was only darkness outside.

“It has been a day, hasn't it?” came Matilda's voice softly behind her. “I'm so sorry, dearest. And I'm afraid I hurt Mr. Speed terribly this morning....”

“Mr. Speed?” Mary turned back from the window, remembering how Speed had seemed to see no one but Matilda, all through the ball last night.

Speed, she recalled then, had been one of the few members of the
Coterie who had not passed through the parlor that day.

“He came by just after breakfast, while you were still upstairs,” said Matilda softly, shutting her book. “He asked me to marry him, so tenderly—it quite broke my heart to tell him that I could not.”

Mary whispered, “Poor Speed.” And turned to look out once more into the darkness.

So Lincoln had heard that Matilda had turned down Speed—and that he was now free to court her without fear of hurting his friend.

And had rushed immediately to end whatever existed between Mary and himself.