The Emancipator's Wife (4 page)

But in Swett's pale eyes she saw that expression with which she was so familiar from a lifetime around lawyers and politicians. That gauging look, waiting for a reaction as a hunter waits for a turkey to step out from behind a bush.

“Lunacy?” Mary thrust her hands behind her. Time and time again she'd heard Mr. Lincoln say to clients,
Whatever you do, don't take any paper they try to hand you.

Swett was still talking.

“...courtroom today—this afternoon, in fact—” He took out his watch, as if to emphasize to her how valuable everybody's time was. “—to defend yourself at a hearing...”

“What hearing?” She blinked at him, feeling nonplussed in the most literal sense of the word: at a point from which one cannot go on. He couldn't really be charging her with lunacy. She had to be mistaken about that. She was Abraham Lincoln's wife! “How can it be this afternoon? I need a lawyer....”

“A lawyer has already been arranged for you, Mrs. Lincoln.”

“By whom?” Her voice sounded astoundingly calm in her own ears. She remembered all those times back in Springfield, when people would come to Lincoln's office asking for help. You could get a lawyer in a day, but seldom in an hour.

Robert,
she thought.
Robert will know how to get me a lawyer. He's a lawyer himself. He'll probably defend me; that way I won't have to spend any money.
Her mind was working slowly, clogged with a dreamlike confusion. It was hard not to simply stare at the pattern of Mr. Swett's silver silk waistcoat. She must keep her mind focused.

Then Swett's next words hit her like a spear in the chest. “By your son Robert, Mrs. Lincoln. Now please.” He held out the writ to her and she fell back another step, still refusing to touch it. Refusing to believe.

“Robert knows?” Her mouth felt like someone else's mouth as she said the words.
Robert knows,
her mind repeated, like a litany that was crucially important for reasons she couldn't recall.
Robert knows. How could Robert know, unless
...
?

A portion of Swett's vulpine face disappeared behind a fragment of migraine fire. His beard waggled, temporarily with nothing above it. “Now, Mrs. Lincoln, please. Surely you yourself must admit that much of your behavior is not that of a sane woman.”

“I ‘must admit' nothing of the kind!” Her mind snapped clear and fury bloomed in her, the blind rage that had all her life lain just beneath the surface, taking her breath away. In a staggering vision of lucid clarity she saw that all her fears had always been true, all her suspicions, all her wariness of betrayal....She heard her own voice rise to a scream of hatred for them all. “How
dare
you speak to me this way? It's Robert who put you up to this, isn't it? It's Robert who thinks I'm insane, isn't it? He always has! Because I won't put up with that cold little sourpuss he married! Because I want to travel and see the world! Because he wants my money—”

“Mrs. Lincoln, please!”

“Because I see more of the world of the spirits than he does, and he believes that only
his
view of our world can be right!”

“Mrs. Lincoln,” said Swett patiently, “all of this can be discussed at the courthouse. That's what a hearing is for. Your son has consulted doctors, and the doctors believe you to be insane.”

“What
doctors
?” Her voice twisted at the word. “They don't know me, they haven't even spoken to me!”

“Mrs. Lincoln, look at this room—” He gestured around at the tight-drawn curtains, the trunks piled high against the walls, the packages stacked on the floor, on the table, on the bed all around the small area where she slept, when she slept.

“You come into a lady's room unannounced and pronounce upon her sanity because you did not give her the opportunity to make it presentable for callers? Because you did not give her the option of replying that she was not at home? For shame, sir! Did no one ever teach you that a
gentleman
sends up his card to ask if his arrival is entirely convenient?”

“None of this is to the point.” Swett's voice had hardened. Mary, backing from him like a mouse from a cat, saw him suddenly as an alien creature, alien to her as Lincoln had sometimes appeared alien on those few occasions when she'd seen him with other lawyers, wearing his calculating lawyer-face. Hastily she pushed that memory of his cold craftiness from her. Of course he hadn't been like them ever in any way! He'd been a saint....

“The judge and the jury are waiting for us at the courthouse. Your lawyer, too, and the doctors who have heard an account of your case.” He took out his watch again, and glanced at it significantly, as if, thought Mary, there weren't four other clocks in the room, one of them purchased only last week....

“An account that
you
saw fit to give!” She hurled the words at him like knives. “God knows what lies you've told them! Or did you even have to tell them lies? Just bribe them, the way you have all your life bribed juries to rob the poor!”

He didn't so much as flicker an eyelid at the barb. “You can come with me, or these officers”—he gestured to the stone-faced men in the hall behind him—“will bring you, whether you will or no. There are two carriages downstairs. Unless you yield to me I will either have to seize you forcibly myself, or these men will have to take you and bring you in handcuffs. Now please, Mrs. Lincoln, put on your bonnet and come with me, as you usually would. I'm sure you don't want there to be a scene in the lobby—”

“You are a scoundrel and a coward, and if my husband were alive he would deal with you! Go home and take care of your own wife—about whom God knows I've heard enough tales!—and leave
me
alone!”

She was trembling, and clutched at the corner of the cluttered dresser for support.
This has to be a dream,
she thought,
a nightmare.
And,
Robert knows. Robert is having them do this thing.
She felt the same nauseating fury that she had when the stylish Washington hostesses would whisper behind her back—or Washington newspapers would print, for all the world to read—that she was a Confederate spy. That she slipped into Lincoln's office late at night to steal Army plans to send to her brothers in Lee's forces across the river. That she should be locked up.

She was surrounded by her enemies, as she had been all her life.

Through blinding tears she screamed, “Let me at least change my dress!” for she was revoltingly conscious of the muck splattered on the hem of her skirt and the stale smell of sweat in her bodice and chemise.

But Swett's hand was on her elbow, and Swett—glancing pointedly at his watch again—was escorting her out the door. She yanked free of him, barely able to see, her hands fumbling with the veils on her bonnet. Mr. Lincoln, she wondered in rising panic, where was Mr. Lincoln? When the big prairie lightning-storms frightened her, in that little cottage in Springfield, he'd come striding home from his office through the pounding summer rain to be with her....

He's dead,
she remembered, the memory like yesterday, like a dagger in her guts.

He's dead.

For a minute she smelled his blood on the shoulder of her dress.

The iron elevator doors clattered open. She wanted to explain to Swett how dangerous elevators were, but caught herself:
They'll use that to call me insane.
She held her breath in terror as the car rattled down.

Every word, every action, every glance will give them ammunition, as it did in Washington when they all said I was a spy.

They passed through the lobby, Mary holding herself bolt upright, though her head felt ready to explode. She pulled away, walked ahead of Swett as though he were a servant, hiding her terror under scorn. It was early afternoon: ladies in walking-dresses of summer silk clustered like flowers around the doorway to the conservatory. She felt their glances like knives in her back.

Enemies.

As Swett had promised, there were two carriages at the curb, though it wasn't more than a street or two to the Cook County Courthouse. Single-horse broughams, such as doctors drove—she could guess which was Swett's by the spanking-new paint, the glossy youth of the well-mannered horse. What did the novels all say?
The poor thing was taken away in a closed carriage....

This can't be happening to me....

She was a Todd of Lexington, whose grandfathers had fought and defeated British and Indians.

This can't be happening to me....

The terrible, agonizing realization of how alone she was.

Swett held out a gloved hand to help her in, for the step was high. It was as if even the inanimate wood and steel mocked the shortness of stature that had all her life been a bitter unchangeable fact.

Mary pulled her hand away. “I ride with you from compulsion,” she said coldly, keeping her voice steady with an effort, “but I beg you not to touch me.”

Swett climbed in. The carriage moved off with a jolt.

C
HAPTER
T
WO

Lexington, Kentucky July 1825

A
CHILD CRIED IN THE DARK OF A SILENT HOUSE.

The breathing of the four other children in the bed was a presence more felt than heard, but Mary knew they were asleep. Twelve-year-old Elizabeth, dark and slim and efficient, had whispered reassuringly to the others as Mammy Sally put them to bed, “Now the doctors are here Ma will be all right.” Six-year-old Mary wasn't so sure of it.

On other nights in summer the house smelled of lamp-oil and the straw matting on the floors, of the wet scent of the chestnut-trees behind it and now and then smoke from the kitchen. Now the sticky darkness stank of medicines and blood.

Just before Mammy Sally put the children to bed—Elizabeth, fragile eight-year-old Frances, Mary, and tiny, fretful Ann, with little Levi in the trundle-bed—their Granny Parker had come to the house, something she rarely did after the sun had set. Their father had come down out of their mother's bedroom with a branch of candles in hand, and had embraced his mother-in-law with desperate intensity.

Dr. Warfield had arrived shortly after that, and Dr. Dudley; Mary had heard their voices downstairs as Mammy was tucking the children in. As soon as the old black nurse's candle disappeared down the stairs, Levi had crept up into the bed with the girls, like a frightened puppy seeking the comfort of its litter-mates. When the footsteps of the men vibrated on the stairs, and the door of their mother's room opened and shut,
Elizabeth had done her whispered best to comfort them all.

Now Mary stared at where she knew the open door had to be in the darkness, gaping into the still-deeper dark of the hall. Their new brother—George, Elizabeth said his name was—still wailed untended, which meant that Mammy had to be in the sickroom, too.

In time she could stand the uncertainty no longer. She feared the dark—Mammy was full of tales about African demons and the Platt-Eye Devil that lurked under beds—but she feared even more this state of not knowing. Carefully, Mary slipped from Elizabeth's comforting arm and slithered to the floor, a little white ghost in her nightdress, her auburn-bronze braids hanging down her back. Silently she tiptoed to the door, and sat beside it in the pitch-dark hall, listening to her infant brother cry, to the occasional half-heard mumblings behind the closed sickroom door.

Once she heard her mother groan, and smelled fresh blood above the stale odors of sickness. Elizabeth had told her that bleeding would bleed out the sickness, but the smell made Mary's heart quake. Then after a long time the scrape of a chair on the floor, and her father's voice, saying her mother's name
...

A thump, indistinct and dreadful, like something unknown and unspeakable groping its way toward her in the dark. Mary pressed her hands to her mouth and in her heart whispered the litany with which she'd tried on other nights to keep the Platt-Eye Devil at bay:
Hide me, oh my Savior, hide...

But whatever it was that the future held, it was rushing toward her and there was no way she could hide.

The door down the hallway opened. Candlelight, and the redoubled smells of sickness and blood. One of the doctors emerged with the candlestick in his hand, and Granny Parker, bony and upright in her black dress. Then Mary's father and another doctor, carrying between them a woman's body in a white shift, her long dark braids trailing down to the floor. The shift was spattered with blood and there were bandages on both arms. When Mary's father stumbled a little, the woman's head lolled and Mary saw for the last time her mother's face, pale with the ravages of sickness and death.

M
ARY
'
S EYES SNAPPED OPEN, THE TERROR OF THAT HOT DARK HALL
jolting back hard into the sticky-hot terror of the carriage as it stopped.

Leonard Swett said, “Here we are, Mrs. Lincoln.”

Mary had passed the massive gray stone walls of the Cook County Courthouse almost daily since coming back to Chicago in March, and still felt disoriented at the sight. Like everything on the street—in the whole of downtown—it was unfamiliar to her, and the shock of seeing it made her clench her small hands tight until her nails pinched the palms through the silk-fine black kid of her gloves.
I mustn't let them see. I mustn't let anyone see me break down.

She was a Todd of Lexington, whose grandfathers had fought and defeated British and Indians.

I won't give them that satisfaction.

The tension of her clenched jaw-muscles fired blinding snakes of light through her vision. Her head swam—in addition to the migraine, she was definitely having one of her “spells”
—Why does it have to be now? I must focus my mind, do something....They said I have a lawyer....

But terror of the blaze that had destroyed the city seemed to be branded into her brain, tangling thoughts of the present with images of the past. Her mother...the Fire...and Tad had died only weeks before the Fire. Choking out his life, imploring her with sunken eyes, so like her husband's.

He'd left her to face the Fire alone. As they all had left her.

She pulled her hand away again from Mr. Swett's proffered help, hoping she wouldn't stagger on her swollen feet as she stepped down that too-long drop to the curb.

Preceded him in silence from the blinding heat of the sidewalk into the dense gloom of the Courthouse's side door. She had to use the toilet again and didn't dare ask for it, couldn't endure reducing herself before these haughty, scornful men.

The courtroom was full of people.

She heard their voices as Mr. Swett and his guards led her along the corridor, and her heart sank.

She should have realized there'd be an audience to her shame. Of course word would get to the papers. It always did. And of course people would show up, to gape, to listen, to have all the gossip to carry home to their families or their cronies at the saloon. Gossip about the Confederate spy. About Mr. Lincoln's crazy widow who never could keep her temper.
Vampires, ghouls, all of them...

Every chair in the room was full. An usher was already bringing in more from other courtrooms, for those who waited, standing, around the doors.

Mary's whole body turned hot, then icily cold. She wanted to scream at them, to curse them. How dared they treat her this way? She was Abraham Lincoln's wife....

“Mrs. Lincoln...” Mr. Isaac Arnold came down the aisle between the wooden chairs, a stringy grim-faced man with an untidy gray goatee. Her heart leaped at the sight of him. He was her friend, Mr. Lincoln's old legal colleague from his circuit-riding days.

“Mr. Arnold, what is the meaning of—?”

And she broke off as she saw the man behind him. A neat-featured man, young and tall and becoming burly, his pouting rosebud mouth nearly hidden under an immense light-brown mustache and his eyes, blue-green like hers—like so many of the Todds'—filled with a calm neutrality in which wariness flickered ever so slightly, his own version of the hated lawyer-face.

Of course it had to be,
she thought with despair that held no surprise.
Of course he would be the one to betray me, to drive the knife into my heart.

A square, firm hand immaculately gloved in gray kid took hers, propelled her toward the front of the room while Mr. Arnold hastened to join Swett by the doors. Robert Todd Lincoln said nothing to her, and she was not going to give the entire population of Chicago the satisfaction of screaming at her son in front of them.

How dare you?

How could you?

Robert would have an explanation. He always did.

At the back of the courtroom Mr. Arnold was in conference with Swett, and with a man whom Mary had recognized vaguely as Mr. Ayer, Swett's partner.
So he's on their side,
she thought bitterly,
and not my lawyer at all. Who have they got for me, then?

For a ludicrous moment she wondered if Robert would be defending her after all.

To save money, naturally.
Her
money, of which he was sole heir.

Robert,
she thought,
I am sorry....

Robert sat down next to her, at the small table that, in the United States, constituted the “dock.” Though she would not look at him, Mary could smell the pomade with which he combed his hair. She looked around the courtroom, narrowing her eyes a little, trying desperately to discern faces through the flashing scrim of migraine.

There were faces she knew—faces and forms, for as age blurred her sight she had relied more and more on shape, color, and movement as much as on features. Surely that was Mr. Turner of the Grand Pacific! He couldn't possibly think she was insane! He'd said himself, those nights she'd gone to him after nightmares, that several women of his acquaintance needed a hotel maid to stay in their room through the dark hours....When things she heard or saw in her strange spells of confusion frightened her, he'd said he understood, had agreed that it was all perfectly normal....

And that was Mary Gavin, the stout maid who'd usually stay with her on those terrifying nights when, all too often, she'd hear voices speaking out of the walls and the floor. When dreams of fire would be so real to her that she had to fight not to run out into the streets again, panting with terror. And Mrs. Harrington, the housekeeper of the Grand Pacific, with her gray hair piled in a pompadour eked out as usual with false switches....

The shock of seeing them turned Mary cold. Her fury snatched at all her trusty weapons of sarcasm and mockery, all the secrets about them that she had gleaned:
For a girl whose brother is a simpleton you have little room to talk....Why should the jury believe Irish trash? I never met an Irish servant who didn't lie like Satan....Why don't you tell them about your father's bankruptcy instead of about me?

But then they will say I'm crazy,
she thought, forcing her rage back.
If I stand up and say Mrs. Harrington skims money to invest in railroad schemes, I've seen Mr. Turner corner the housemaids in the linen-room, it won't help me. It will just give Robert a chance to twist my words, to point out to them how little self-control I have. I have to think....

There was one of those moments of quiet that sometimes fall on buzzing rooms, and she heard Mr. Arnold say quite clearly, “...doubt the propriety of my being on this case at all.”

“May I remind you,” said Swett icily, “of the necessity to have this case over with swiftly? Before there is further embarrassment for all? Back out, and you will put into her head that she can get some mischievous lawyer to make us trouble and defend her. Do your duty.”

But it was only when she saw Mr. Arnold coming back down the aisle toward the dock that Mary understood that this friend of her husband—this man to whom she had recently given a complete set of Shakespeare, in gratitude for his support of her during her grief—was in fact going to be her defender.

Do your duty,
Swett had ordered him....

Arnold sat on the other side of Robert, so that to speak to him, Mary would have to speak across her son.

The bailiff was saying, “All rise for Judge Wallace...the Court of Cook County is now in session....”

Some of the pounding in Mary's head had now diminished, buried under the warm featherbedding of medicine. Even the itching, the burning pain in her privates didn't seem so bad. But it was hard to concentrate; her mind kept slipping to other thoughts, old memories and dreams, then pulling back in shock so intense that it was easy to slide away again.

I am not insane!

She felt as if, for some inexplicable reason, everyone had started saying she was a black woman, when she could look at her hands, look at her face in the mirror, and see herself as white as she had been yesterday, as white as they....

“I was first called to attend to Mrs. Lincoln in November of 1873 at the home of her son, Mr. Robert Todd Lincoln,” declared Dr. Willis Danforth, a stubby and businesslike little man whom Mary chiefly remembered for nodding offhandedly throughout her account of her physical symptoms (“Nervousness is only to be expected of the female system,” he'd said, and hadn't taken a single note), and the unquestionable garishness of his watch-fobs.

“She was at the time suffering from a derangement of the nervous system, and a fever in her head.”

I was suffering every day from blinding headaches, you self-important dolt, as I've suffered all my life!

“She said that the spirit of a dead Indian was at work inside her head, drawing wires from her eyes—especially the left one—and from the bones of her cheeks. She said that she saw him quite clearly....”

I did! He was there! He's there now, waiting for me with his pincers....

Of course the spirits of the dead are present, are all around us. If the benevolent ones help us and aid us, is it not just as reasonable to suppose that there are spirits of malice who torment us?

“These symptoms were undoubtedly rooted in a physical cause, and under my care they decreased gradually and I ceased to see her. In March of last year, however, I was called back to attend upon Mrs. Lincoln, who was again suffering from a debility of the nervous system, with hallucinations. She claimed that her deceased husband had told her that she would die on the sixth of September, and this time I could discern no physical cause for her symptoms beyond an abnormal nervous state.”