The Emancipator's Wife (55 page)

She laughed shakily. “So it is! Not that half of those wretched cooks we had in Springfield could make a sauce as well as I. I think Mr. Lincoln always ate better in their absence.”

“That's the spirit, Mrs. L.!” Johnny gave her a boisterous thumbs-up. “A few months of old Goodchild's salary, and things will be right as rain.”

But Nicolay regarded her with frosty suspicion when she suggested that she keep the departing steward's salary herself, and the interview ended—as had so many with the secretary—with her temper snapping, and Mary screaming vituperation at him and then fleeing back to her parlor in tears. Nicolay distrusted Watt, and believed every tattled rumor of his raising produce on the White House grounds to sell to the local grocers. He claimed the groundsman was a Southern sympathizer, though Mary guessed he'd have claimed anyone a Southern sympathizer who didn't sympathize with John Nicolay.

When turning off the steward didn't produce enough of a surplus to cover the bills, and Watt offered to order several thousand dollars' worth of trees and roses for the garden and hand over the allotted money to her instead, Nicolay began to make investigations—“Not that it's any of his business, the schemin' German,” muttered Watt. “It's all money for the house, after all.”

At last, when the creditors became insistent, Mary sent a note to Ben French, begging him to come at once. Instead he sent a note saying he was otherwise engaged—it being Sunday afternoon—and that he'd wait on her first thing in the morning. She passed the rest of the day in panic and tears, and retired to bed with Indian Bitters and a headache, to be roused with difficulty by her maid Mrs. Cuthbert the next morning at nine with the news that Mr. French was waiting in the Red Parlor.

It was on the tip of Mary's tongue to demand just who he thought he was, to arrive at this hour of the morning and expect a lady to see him all of a crack....But the memory of the bills drove her out of bed. “Just get me my wrapper,” she instructed, stumbling groggily to the vanity to brush her hair, “and ask him to come up to the parlor.”

“Mrs. Lincoln . . . !” The maid was scandalized.

“Just tell him, and hurry!” Her head still throbbed from last night's headache, and she felt woozy. “I'm sure I'm perfectly decent in my wrapper.” It was new, silk velvet, and of a sumptuous burgundy hue. “Certainly it covers more of me than an evening gown.”

Mr. French half-rose from the parlor sofa as she rushed into the room, the bills in her hands. Merely the sight of that stocky, heavy-shouldered gentleman, and the thought of confessing, released another flood of tears: she could barely get the words out. “Please, please tell the President that it's a common thing, to over-run appropriations. Everyone does it! The money can be taken from some other place, like a man shifting his coins from one pocket to the other, but he must sign to have it done.”

French's eyes bulged slightly when he saw the bills. He shuffled through them, as if hoping that some of them were duplicates, then looked at Mary again with startled awe. She sniffled, and wiped her eyes. “Please,” she whispered. “Please, I shall be ruined if you don't get him to sign—but don't tell him that I spoke to you! Don't tell him that I asked you to help me! Swear it! Promise me!”

When French was gone, she sank down on the sofa, trembling with remorse and humiliation. She heard the Commissioner's footfalls traverse the hall. Heard the glass doors open, and close.

He will hate me,
she thought, her hands tangling in her long hair.
He will hate me forever.
The thought of Lincoln's coldness, his silence, was more than she could bear. How could her life have changed so drastically, when she had achieved her lifelong goal? What had she done wrong?

In time, when French did not return, she summoned Mrs. Cuthbert, dressed, and went down to the conservatory again. As she crossed through the hall she saw Lincoln's thin form silhouetted against the daylight of the open front doors, descending the steps to where his horse waited. Hay and Nicolay stood on either side of the door until he was gone. Then Hay whistled, and rolled his eyes: “What a blow-up! I don't think I've ever seen the Tycoon that mad! What was it about? Did you hear?”

“The Hellcat's spending,” replied Nicolay grimly. “An elegant, grand carpet for $2500....”

“Did anybody tell him what that pink-and-green monstrosity in the East Room cost?”

“He called me in and asked who let that upholsterer Carryl into the house. I said I didn't know at first, then said it has to have been Mrs. Lincoln....”

“Who approved it in the first place?”

“That idiot Wood, who went to New York with her.”

“You think there was ever anything really between them?”

Standing behind the doors of the Blue Parlor, Mary clenched her hands in fury. How
dare
that puppy insinuate that there had been anything in Mr. Wood's escorting her to New York? Was that what the newspapers were saying, too? What Kate Chase was whispering in her so-fashionable parlor? The man was gallant, that was all. God knew Mr. Lincoln was gallant enough to the ladies to make Mary want to tear his hair out.

“The man's an imbecile, but he's not crazy.” Nicolay shrugged impatiently. “And of course Frenchie would swear he'd never seen a requisition for so much as a teaspoon. ‘It will never have my approval,' Father Abraham said. ‘I'll pay out of my own pockets first—it would stink in the nostrils of the American people to have it said that the President had approved a bill over-running an appropriation of $20,000 for flub-dubs for this damned old house, when the soldiers cannot have blankets....'”

Their voices faded, up the office stairs.

C
HAPTER
F
ORTY-SIX

W
ORSE WAS TO COME.
C
HEVALIER
W
IKOFF TOOK HER ASIDE
DURING
the next Saturday evening soiree and murmured, “Please forgive my mentioning this, Mrs. Lincoln—only the wish to be of assistance to a lady in distress would prompt me to so much as mention a matter which must be extremely painful to you. But it happens that I might be in a position to help you. I have friends....”

His voice dipped discreetly—he'd already mentioned and hinted at his connections with the French embassy, and his work for the English government in India and Turkey. “Friends who would pay a good deal for advance notification as to what your husband intends to say in his message to Congress next week. Nothing to do with our friends south of the river,” he added hastily, as Mary opened her mouth to protest. “And nothing to do with anything that would come out in this country. Purely for internal consumption only. By the time it reaches Eng—the home country,” he corrected himself modestly, “the address would have been given here already.”

He glanced around him, though the groups in the oval salon were all engaged in animated talk: General Sickles bowing over the hand of Ginny Fox. Sumner and the Seligman brothers laughing over one of Sumner's stories.

“They offered me eight hundred dollars,” Wikoff murmured. “I told them I no longer played that little game. But when a mutual friend spoke of your need, I realized at once it may be a way out of your difficulty. And it's surely no crime to ‘spoil the Egyptians,' as Moses says, and carry away money from a rival government who wants to hear things the day before they come out in the newspapers anyway. I only offer it for your consideration.”

And Mary thought,
Eight hundred dollars!
As if she'd been tossed a rope in a stormy sea. There was the traditional New Year's reception to be thought of—which had to impress diplomats and Senators alike—and her cherished hope of holding a grand private ball in the White House—perhaps for Lincoln's birthday?—one to which she would have to invite no one but those who supported and honored her husband.

And it wasn't as if his Congressional message contained military plans, or anything that would aid the Secessionist rebels if it leaked out. Surely there was no harm in showing the text, “for internal consumption only,” to some domestic department in England? In the back of her mind, all the way over to the government printing office on an invented errand a few days later, some small voice kept screaming,
You know he would be furious—he would hate you for this. . . .

But Lincoln's scrupulous honesty, particularly where money was concerned, was one of the things that had always annoyed her about him, especially when they needed the money so badly. Wikoff had recently sold her a quantity of stock in the Nevada silver-mines, and had proven himself honorable in that transaction. He could be trusted.

And it was Lincoln's fault, really, for refusing to consent to sign an appropriations bill....

How often, in their Springfield days, had he neglected his practice for politics, but objected when Mary prevaricated with storekeepers over credit unredeemed? He simply didn't understand.

When the text of the Congressional message appeared in the
New York Herald
two days before Lincoln delivered it to Congress, it was as if someone had set off a bomb in the White House. Wikoff—probably because of his former reputation, thought Mary indignantly—was
immediately suspected and called before a Congressional Judiciary Committee; she was sick with dread until word came back to her that Wikoff claimed that Johnny Watt had stolen the address. Watt, to Mary's astonishment and relief, assented to the lie, and in heartfelt gratitude she wrote a letter furiously denouncing those who claimed the gardener was a Confederate sympathizer.

Something must have gone wrong,
she thought,
with Wikoff's transfer of the information to his contacts in the British Ministry. He must be trying to protect his sources. Or perhaps he, too, is afraid of retaliation . . . ?

Wikoff was put in the Old Capitol Prison for a month, with the notorious Mrs. Greenhow and the other rebel sympathizers. He sent Mary a thoroughly amusing note apologizing for his inattendance at the New Year's reception. The
Evening Star,
the
National Intelligencer,
the
Boston Advertiser,
the
Telegraph,
all had a field day, trumpeting corruption and inefficiency, and segueing into speculation about Mrs. Lincoln's extravagance and parsimony, including a ridiculous tale that she was cutting up the outworn White House sheets to make drawers for “Old Abe” and her family.

Further and far juicier rumors circulated by mouth, spread, Mary was certain, by the servants she'd discharged and fanned by Kate Chase's malicious gossip.

Lincoln accepted the story of Watt's responsibility, and asked Mary nothing of the matter. But his chilly silence terrified her more than shouting ever could. The rainy nights passed sleepless, or clouded with dreams of trying to explain to him that she'd needed the $800 to pay Carryl of Philadelphia for a sapphire pendant.

“My dearest, dearest Mrs. Lincoln, can you ever forgive me?” whispered Wikoff, when, on the first of February, he appeared again in her Blue Room salon. He looked not a hair the worse for his month of incarceration, immaculately turned out as usual and resplendent in a new waistcoat of yellow silk. He fell to one knee in front of the chair where she sat, and kissed her hands. From the other side of the room General Sickles and
Senator Sumner looked shocked. “I was aghast, horrified.... I'd warned the Minister over and over about a certain one of his clerks....”

“It wasn't you who sent the address to the paper?”

“Good God, no!” Wikoff gazed up at her with dark, ardent eyes. “How could you suspect . . . ? Except of course that it is what everyone
did
suspect....”

“I
knew
there had to be some mistake!”

Wikoff shook his head solemnly. “Never make a social misstep, Mrs. Lincoln. Even those mistakes one makes in the passion of one's youth, the world never forgives, nor ever again regards your actions with anything but suspicion! All I could do was keep quiet—and trust to Watt's good nature. What,” he asked suddenly, peering into her face. “Not crying?”

Mary dabbed quickly at her eyes.

“My dearest Mrs. Lincoln, staying in the Old Capitol Prison wasn't pleasant, but I'd go back there for another month rather than cause you pain....”

She half-laughed, turned her face aside. “No, it's just that my son has come down sick—Willie—and I'm worried about him, a little....”

And my husband barely speaks to me, much less reads me his speeches anymore. And the young men he spends his days with—and his nights—call me “Hellcat” behind
my back. . . .

And I'm so alone.

She drew a deep breath, and called on all those years of hiding her heartaches from her old Lexington nemesis Arabella Richardson. “I'm quite all right. I'm doing what I can for Mr. Watt, for of course he cannot be simply turned out of his job here. I've written to—”

The door of the Blue Room opened. Lincoln stood framed in it, wearing his coat but no tie, the way he often worked in the evening. His face was grave, but she instantly saw the anger burning deep in his gray eyes.

“Mr. Lincoln,” she said, rising, a welcoming lilt in her voice. “To what do
we owe . . . ?”

Lincoln quietly crossed the room, nodding to Sumner and Sickles, and bowing deeply to Ginny Fox. He got close enough to Wikoff so that no one else could hear except Mary, and said softly, “Please come with me, Chevalier.” In the doorway she glimpsed Nicolay watching, and
beside him another one of the reporters who were around so often—Smith or Jones, she didn't remember the name, only that he wrote for a Boston paper....

Lincoln took Wikoff by the elbow and walked him out of the room. The whole of the salon flooded after them at a discreet distance into the vestibule, hanging back behind the glass windscreen that shielded the doors, to see and not be seen. Mary heard Nicolay's voice behind her: “. . . of course he's a spy! Smith showed the President the
evidence—Wikoff's been in the pay of the
Herald
all along....”

At the outside doors, Mary heard Lincoln say quietly, “Chevalier, I don't want ever to hear of your coming into this house again.”

Wikoff started to say, “You wrong me, sir....” But Lincoln had already turned away. McManus, the Scots gnome who kept the doors, closed them in the Chevalier's face.

Lincoln paused beside Mary in the gaslit front hall, the other members of her salon crowded around and staring, aghast. With great gentleness—considering how furious she could see he was—he bent down from his height and kissed her cheek, then walked across the hall, and disappeared through the doorway of the servants' stair.

T
HE GRAND PRIVATE BALL THAT SHE HAD COAXED AND SCRIMPED
AND
maneuvered for—and, some said, committed minor treason for—took place four nights later, and was one of the most splendid in the history of Washington. Since it was private, and not official, the invitations were out of Nicolay's control for once. She had given a great deal of thought to the guest-list. The Marine Band played, and Washington's finest restauranteur, M'sieu Gautier, outdid himself on the provision of refreshments at the midnight supper: sweetened replicas of Chinese pagodas and the Goddess of Liberty; a sugar Fort Pickens and an edible frigate
Union,
guns, smokestacks and all; pâté de foie gras and beehives full of charlotte russe.

But for Mary the night had a hollow, unreal quality, like attending a party in a dream. Even Lincoln's gentle teasing, as Lizabet Keckley put the finishing touches on Mary's scarf, gown, and hair, had a subdued note, as if he were trying to resume the old lightness of their conversations, before he'd thrown the Chevalier out of the house. “My cat's got a long tail tonight,” he said, smiling at the length of her white satin train, and Mary tapped at his elbow with her fan. “Maybe if some of that tail were up around the head it would have a better appearance,” he added—he always professed to be shocked at the low cut of her ballgowns, though they were certainly no lower than, for instance, those of Harriet Lane or Kate Chase.

She had also noticed he didn't animadvert on the propriety of other women's dresses.

Mostly, as they descended the stairs and crossed through the wide State Floor corridor to the East Room, her thoughts were with Willie, lying sick upstairs. He'd seemed to feel a little better that day, when Lincoln came into the guest bedroom to tell him about the offer he'd had from the King of Siam of a corps of elephants for his army. (“C'n 'ee hab un?” demanded Tad at once. “'Fraid not, Tadpole,” said Lincoln gravely. “It'd scare your ponies if we kept it in the stables, and we need the East Room for your mother's fandango.”) But the pale skin of the boy's forehead had still felt feverishly hot to Mary's lips, and today he'd seemed worse, tossing restlessly between sleep and waking.

Between Lizabet Keckley's ministrations, Mary had gone back to the guest-room a dozen times to see him, and had always found Lincoln there. He'd reached out to her and taken her hand, and the shadow of the
Chevalier—and of the eighty couples who had returned their invitations as inappropriate in days of war—retreated before the shadow of still greater fear.

That shadow followed them down to the East Room, like an uninvited guest. The great reception hall glittered with gaslight, the air redolent with the masses of hothouse flowers with which it was decked. Through the evening Mary was torn between concern for Willie and bursting pride in the beauty of the place. She and Lincoln made the promenade of the room, shaking hands with officers, diplomats, Senators. The midnight supper in the State Dining-Room was admitted to be superb, even by the fussy old Lord Lyons, the British Minister. But Mary excused herself two or three times, and, gathering her vast skirts in hand, hurried up the stairs, to where Lizabet Keckley sat by Willie's bed.

The next day Willie was worse, and by Saturday the doctors were saying that it was typhoid fever, the same disease that had some ten days ago killed Queen Victoria of England's Prince Consort Albert. The usual Saturday reception at the White House was canceled, and Mary spent all the day sitting beside the bed, changing the cold compresses on Willie's head, and reading to him when he woke. Lincoln hired an Army nurse—a Quaker lady named Mrs. Pomeroy—to look after Willie and take some of the burden from Mary's shoulders. He himself came in as often as he could, and Lizabet was there every night. Bud and Holly Taft also spent much time in the sickroom, and young Julia brought flowers—Holly went to play with Tad, but Bud remained beside Willie's bed. Lincoln had a cot moved into the guest-room, so that he could be with his son at night.

On Monday Tad came down sick. Lincoln spent most of the day sitting beside one or the other of the boys, though Hay and Nicolay brought telegrams from the War Department about the fighting now raging in Tennessee. Willie's throat was so swollen that he could eat little, and it seemed to Mary, when she came into the room over the course of the next week, that her son was wasting away before her.