The Emancipator's Wife (28 page)

Mary closed her eyes and knew she hated all men.

“Not a very good start for the year 1841, is it?” Matilda's voice was sad.

“No,” said Mary, softly. “Not a very good start.”

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY

W
ITHIN A WEEK,
J
OSHUA
S
PEED SOLD OUT HIS SHARE IN
B
ELL
'
S
drygoods store and made arrangements to return to his family in Kentucky. If Tilda shed any tears at the prospect of his departure, she didn't do so in Mary's presence.

When Lincoln neither called on Mary nor sent her a note by the second week of January, she made an excuse and had Jerry drive her down to the offices of the
Sangamo Journal.

Any lady who was a proper lady would, of course, have sent in her card to Simeon Francis and waited in the carriage. But by the standards of Lexington society, no true lady would have gone seeking word of
Lincoln in the first place—certainly no self-respecting belle would have
dreamed
of letting herself be seen wearing the willow for any man—and Mary had always been a believer in the sheep-and-lamb principle.

She could just imagine what Betsey, or Betsey's redoubtable mother, would have to say about the single big room of the print-shop, with its bare wooden floor reeking of ink and spit tobacco. Though the
Sangamo Journal
was the leading Whig newspaper of the state, Simeon Francis still couldn't afford to hire a clerk or turn down job-printing work to make ends meet. When Mary entered, the stocky editor was setting type for calling cards for the wealthy Mrs. Iles, working as close to the iron heating-stove as he could in the bitter cold.

“Miss Todd!”

“I realize it's not terribly ladylike of me to come here, sir,” said Mary, with a wan twinkle. “But it wouldn't have been ladylike of me to make you come out to the street and freeze to death, and...” She hesitated, holding out her hands to the stove, wondering what Springfield gossip had spread so far about herself and Lincoln.

She finished, “...and there were reasons that I couldn't write you, to come to the house.”

“I take it—” Simeon wrapped an inky rag around his fist to pick up the tin coffee-pot and pour her a cup “—this concerns Lincoln?” Mary flushed, and looked down into the black depths of the liquid he handed her, unable for a moment to reply. “Since I understand your sister and Ninian aren't exactly in favor of your engagement?”

“Did Mr. Lincoln tell you this?”

She glanced up as she spoke, saw the compassion in his blue eyes, and wondered what Lincoln had told him. Wondered for the thousandth time what Ninian had said to Lincoln, back on that snowy night in November.

She sipped the coffee. It was utterly poisonous.

“I've heard nothing from him, sir,” she said, in what she hoped was a matter-of-fact voice. “I was concerned he'd been taken sick. I haven't wanted to...to ask Ninian.”

“No.” Simeon sighed and propped his small square spectacles up onto the bridge of his nose. “No, I understand.”

“
Is
he ill?”

Dear God,
she thought, suddenly aghast,
don't let Mr. Francis say he's been fancy-free and happy as a lark and going about his business. . . .

“Not in body, no, I don't think so,” replied the editor slowly. He drew up a wooden chair for her, of the several that stood around the stove, silent reminders of the male political camaraderie from which Mary was forever excluded. “As far as I know he's been hauling himself down to the Methodist Church to vote in the Assembly most days. I'm glad he has, to tell you the truth, for it gets him out of his room. He and Speed are both rooming at Bill Butler's these days, while Speed gets his affairs together. When Lincoln's not actually in the Assembly he's up there alone. Pacing, sometimes, Speed tells me. Sometimes just sitting staring out at the sleet.”

Mary was silent, shocked. Lincoln had told her he was subject to fits of sadness—hypochondria, he called them deprecatingly. But he had jested about them, as a man might jest about breaking out in a rash when he ate strawberries.

To her mind, unbidden, rose the desperation in his voice as he'd cried, “Molly...” The passion of his kisses and the shocked horror in his eyes as he'd seen her for the first time in the full spate of her fury against
Elizabeth.
I've driven him away,
she thought, and tried to push the thought from her mind.
He loves me, but . . .

Or have I killed his love for me?

Yet how could he have kissed me with such frenzy, if he didn't love me?

Had he kissed Matilda that way? Had he dreamed of doing so? Was he only waiting for his best friend to leave town so he could have his chance to try?

She felt her eyes fill with tears, not knowing whether they were of sorrow or blind, screaming rage at the man she loved. She fought them back:
I must not, must not, have a tantrum, or a fit of crying, for Mr. Francis to tell him about. . . .

Are they all talking about me like that?

The recollection of every spurt of rage, every sharp-tongued retort, speared through her mind like a rainstorm of daggers: remorse, panic, shame. Then murderous anger at everyone for talking of her when it wasn't their business, for laughing at her behind her back.

Very carefully, she said, “May I...would you take him a note, sir?” She fought the impulse to run out to the carriage, to tell Jerry to take her to Butler's boardinghouse. To rush into that dark and lonely—and probably icily cold—room and tell the tall, silent man there how much she loved him, how much she needed him....

To beg his forgiveness, to make him say that he loved her, too.

To hear him say that he wasn't really in love with Matilda, that he wasn't really in torment of mind because Matilda was really the one he wanted to wed.

But of course it was ridiculous. No young woman
ever
called on a bachelor in his room.

Ever.

No matter how much she needed to hear his voice.

Tears began to flow down her cheeks, hot against her chilled skin. If she'd ever doubted she loved him, she knew now that she did.

Simeon said gently, “Of course, Miss Todd.” He moved toward the end of the table closest to the stove. Mary guessed that the ink at the far end would be frozen.

She brought her hand from her muff, held it up to stay him: “Thank you, Mr. Francis. I'll...I'll send one over later, if you'd be so kind.”

Back in her room Mary prayed,
Dear God, don't let him be really in love with Matilda.
But she felt as always that she was speaking the words into an empty room. She had always been able to move her father by her desperate tears of contrition, and to move Lincoln.

She'd never managed to move God.

Sitting at the little vanity—profoundly thankful, cold as it was, Matilda was out paying calls with Elizabeth—Mary tried to compose a note to Lincoln. But again and again her mind turned to the thought of that tall skinny storyteller sitting alone in his room—the new room that he now occupied alone—with a blanket around his shoulders, staring out at the driving sleet.

An exile from the world he sought to leave behind, and an unaccepted sojourner in the world of ideas, power, and the responsibility for not only his own actions but the well-being of others.

And she could find nothing to say to him except,
I love you. Don't leave me.

The following day she still hadn't found the words to write. The weather was foul, snowing and sleeting, and she sat in the parlor with Elizabeth and Matilda, drinking tea and making a brown challis dress for the St. Valentine's Day ball that would be held at the American House...annoyed because she still couldn't fit into last winter's ball-dresses even though the seams had been let out as far as they'd go. “It absolutely isn't fair,” she declared archly, stitching lace to the low swoop of the corsage. “You eat
one
piece of cake and you get
enormously
fat, and then it takes
years
of nibbling on bread and water before all is well again...that can't be right, can it? Why don't we ever have a lecturer at the Mechanics Institute on why
that
happens?”

And both Elizabeth and Matilda—who appeared to be able to consume tarts and gingerbread all day without gaining an ounce—went into peals of laughter.

Lina appeared in the door. “Miss Molly? Dr. Henry's here to speak to you.”

Shabby-looking as always, the angular physician bowed as he came into the room. Elizabeth rose graciously and said, “You must be frozen, Dr. Henry,” in a voice that Mary had heard her use on other occasions when she was being gracious to people she considered beneath the notice of Todds. “Lina, please fetch another cup for Dr. Henry.”

“Please don't trouble....”

“It's not a bit of trouble....”

He's here from Mr. Lincoln.
Mary knew it, for Dr. Henry was, like Simeon, one of the closest friends Lincoln had in Springfield. Her heart seemed to shrink in her breast to the size of an apple-seed.

She wondered whether Speed would have come, if he hadn't feared meeting Matilda.

She set aside the yards of soft snuff-colored fabric and sat with folded hands, saying all the proper things in the long rigamarole ritual of tea and welcome and “Oh, Matilda and I can go sit in the front parlor...” which was freezing cold, no fire being kindled there on days when Elizabeth was not receiving company....

And wanting to scream.

After byzantine maneuverings, Elizabeth and Matilda left the parlor for the kitchen. Dr. Henry sat quiet for a time in the upholstered velvet chair Elizabeth had vacated, and Mary, hands still folded, waited, feeling as if the room echoed with the hammering of her heart.

She knew she should make some further inane inquiry about Dr. Henry's health, or how was dear Mrs. Henry...? Or offer him sugar or a slice of gingerbread. No young lady—as Betsey, and Elizabeth, and Mammy Sally had always impressed upon her—ever came at things brashly with a man, letting him know what you thought or wanted.

But she felt too lost to go on.

“How is Mr. Lincoln?”

“Not well,” said Dr. Henry.

I will not cry.

“He is...in terrible torment of mind. And the body can endure only so much, when the mind is torn, as his is, between scruples, and honor, and desire.”

What a tidy formula,
thought Mary bitterly. She shut her lips on the question,
What is his desire, and exactly where does he think his honor lies?

“You should remember, too,” Henry went on, turning Elizabeth's silver sugar-tongs over and over in his thin fingers, “that for nine months now he has worn himself out physically, campaigning. And the Legislature rescinding all those motions and plans he fought so hard for, I think only added to this crisis in him. You know how deep his passions are, behind that bumpkin façade.”

Mary nodded silently, remembering the power of his arms around her, the naked hunger of his kiss.

“He is a man whose heart is stronger than his body.” Dr. Henry set the tongs down, finally met her eyes. “And it is wearing him away. Speed looks after him as well as he can, and his new landlady Mrs. Butler, but we are all concerned.”

Mary drew a deep breath. “Does he want me to release him from our engagement?” She wondered whose voice it was that she heard saying those words. It sounded astonishingly calm.

Henry leaned forward, and took her hands.

That means yes,
thought Mary, despairing, even before he replied.

“Miss Todd, Mr. Lincoln holds you in highest esteem. Too high to put you in the position you would be in, he says, were you to go through with this match. His debts weigh heavily on his mind, and the...the disapproval of your family....”

“He says,”
repeated Mary, and looked helplessly into those kind and worried blue eyes. “What do you say, Dr. Henry?”

Did he tell you about Matilda Edwards?

Would you say so, if he had?

She remembered Lincoln telling her he'd written a letter, which someone—probably Speed—had put on the fire. Had he written because he knew that he couldn't face a woman's tears? Because he knew he was no good speaking without notes, and would end up giving in if she cried?

Or because, as she'd learned in their correspondence over the summer, he could write what was truly in his heart?

She remembered Speed telling her that Lincoln had broken up with his last fiancée—the portly Miss Owens over in New Salem—by letter. Had he seen her face-to-face—had she wept as Mary had wept on New Year's Day—would he be married now?

I'm twenty-two!
she wanted to scream.
How much longer can I go on waiting?

“I'm a doctor of people's bodies, Miss Todd,” said Henry gently. “Not their minds, and not their hearts.”

“His heart?” she asked, trying to keep the anger out of her voice. “Or mine?”

She wrote the letter sitting in the parlor before the fire, while Dr. Henry sipped his tea and Elizabeth and Matilda undoubtedly dissected Lincoln's character and prospects in the kitchen and prayed that Mary would come to her senses. Mary forced herself to pretend she was writing a practice composition at Madame Mentelle's:
My dear Mr. Lincoln, it is with deep sorrow (deepest sorrow?) that I take pen in
hand. . . .