The Emancipator's Wife (9 page)

The others were all shouting at once to be heard (“Did you bring me something, Papa?” demanded Ann), and Mary saw at once that he was too tired to listen properly to tear-stained cajoleries about jewelry. She ducked into the dining-room while Betsey clapped her hands and ordered the others up to bed, then found her father's slippers and brought them to him in the small parlor where Pendleton had stirred up the fire.

Betsey glanced impatiently up as Mary came in, but said, “Thank you, Mary,” as Mary sat on the footstool to place them on his feet.

As the butler knelt to pull off Robert Todd's boots, Betsey asked, “Are those fools in Washington still talking of letting the National Bank's charter lapse?”

“They're talking of it. Though what they think is going to happen to the country's credit abroad if they do, I can't even begin to guess.”

“Aren't they going to shift the country's specie to state banks, at least?” asked Mary. “That's what it said in the
Kentucky Gazette.
”

“That's my clever girl.” Her father reached out a hand to stroke the bronze-gold curls that fell forward over her shoulder. “State banks and private banks, which means more power for Jackson's friends, when they've got control of the money to do favors.”

“But you run the Bank of Kentucky,” pointed out Mary, her concerns about the pendant currently hidden in her jewelry-box vanishing in the double joy of talking politics and having her father's attention. “Won't that give
you
power?”

“Really, Mary. Your father's just come in from a day in the saddle, and I'm sure he's too tired to explain the National Bank to a schoolgirl. Why don't you just run along to bed? Goodness knows we all have to be up early enough in the morning.” And Betsey put her arm through her husband's, squeezed it possessively. Robert Todd smiled at her, and covered her hand with his.

“Goodnight, Molly.” In his fond eyes she saw herself change from a friend and political partner back into a schoolgirl.

As if the golden joy she'd had in his company had been glass, it shattered in her hands. And left her bleeding.

“Goodnight, Papa,” she said tonelessly. “Goodnight...ma'am.”

She was trembling as she left the parlor, and Betsey closed the door behind her, leaving her in the icy gloom of the candlelit hall. Too hurt, too furious to go up to bed, Mary snatched her shawl from where it hung over the bottom of the bannister and, pulling it tight around her, crossed through the darkened dining-room and out through the butler's tiny pantry, to the blackness of the yard.

It was bitterly cold out there, last week's patches of snow still dotting the ground. Her Granny Parker's tall brick house, catercorner from her father's on the same big lot, was dark already, but rosy light beckoned from the kitchen, and as she crossed the yard Mary heard the slaves' mellow laughter. The door opened as she approached it, Pendleton coming out with a tray of cold supper for his master. Welcoming warmth puffed out around him, the clatter of dishes and the scents of cooking and soap.

“Lord, child, you should be in bed!” Mammy Sally looked up from the hearth, where she was stirring milk-puddings for the little ones
—
Betsey's
little ones—in the nursery.

“You got a long trip tomorrow,” added Nelson, sitting at the battered table in the middle of the crowded little room, drinking the watered-down remains of the coffee from dinner. “As do we all.” He glanced across the table at Saul, Granny Parker's stableman, a good-natured young fellow who'd managed to keep himself out of the subtle power-struggles between the slaves who'd served the first Mrs. Todd and those that
Betsey had, five years ago, brought to the household.

“I think he's talkin' to me,” sighed Saul. He put his arm around Jane, who sat beside him. Jane was Betsey's slave, the housekeeper who acted as her right hand and, Mary knew, was resented by most of the others because her mistress had taken the place of Granny Parker's daughter. The house that Robert Todd lived in had been given to him by Granny Parker—the continued occupation was not the most comfortable of situations.

Jane—whom Mary had expected to look down on a mere stableman because she was a housekeeper, and far lighter of skin—wrapped her fingers around Saul's, and gently kissed his knuckles.

“What's the matter, child?” Mammy Sally beckoned Mary to the hearth, under cover of the murmur and activity as Chaney the cook finished scouring out the pans, and Betsey's maid Judy came in for Betsey's herb tea. “You been quiet all afternoon....Careful—stand back from the smoke. You get one speck of soot on your dress and neither you nor me'll hear the end of it from
someone
in this house.” She glanced across the kitchen at Judy and Jane.

“What's always the matter?” Tears burned Mary's eyes as she drew up one of the kitchen stools. “Mammy, she's poisoning Papa's mind against us! She's keeping him away from us! She told me to run away and not talk to him, because he's too tired, but she doesn't think he's too tired for
her.
She calls me a limb of Satan to my face, or says I'm too fat or will never catch a husband. She's got to be saying that to Papa, too! And he goes along with it!”

She brought up one small white short-fingered hand, dashed the tears away from her eyes.

“I haven't seen him for weeks! He's always gone at the Legislature in Frankfort, and right after the party Sunday he's going back again!” Desolation filled her at the thought of losing him, of always losing him. “She doesn't like to hear me talking politics with him. And I
don't
need it explained to me! I know what we're talking about, I read the newspapers! I'm not stupid, like she thinks I am—like she tells Papa and everyone I am.”

“No, child, I've never heard her say to anyone you're stupid,” corrected Mammy.

“She says to everyone I'm a limb of Satan.”

“That's not the same thing.” An expression of gentle amusement pulled the corner of the old nurse's mouth. “Takes brains, to be a limb of Satan.” With an almost absentminded motion she continued to stir the thickening custard in its pan.

“Lord, Miss Mary,” added Jane, coming to the hearth to tilt steaming water into the tea-pot, “why you take everythin' so hard? Why can't you be sweet, like Miss Frances?”

Mary pulled in her breath in a ragged sob, but if there was one thing her Granny Parker—and her elegant Granny Humphreys, Betsey's mother, in Frankfort—had inculcated into her, it was that you didn't put out your tongue at darkies. So she waited until Jane had gone back to tidying up her account-book at the table before she said, in a low mutinous voice, “If Jane's so smart, let
her
tell
me
why I can't be sweet like Frances. Frances is just a mealy-mouthed wall-flower...and I
am
sweet. Or I want to be.”

“Miss Frances is what she is.” Mammy Sally raised her eyebrows at the scowling girl beside her. “And you are what you are. Wipe your eyes, child.” And she took a clean bandanna from her pocket, lest Mary sully the small square of lace and lawn pinned to her pink silk sash.

Mary obeyed, hands trembling. As always, the sudden swing from the sense of power and gladness that she had in her father's presence, to the rage and tears of having him taken from her yet again, left her exhausted and feeling strange, as if some part of her had separated from herself and couldn't quite fit back together. At such times she had a sensation, almost a fear, of losing herself: an uneasy sense that she was about to start doing or saying things that she didn't want to, couldn't help.

Was that, she wondered, for the flashing split-second before she buried the thought, why she'd lied to Mr. Sotheby?

No. I'll make it all right.

Why
couldn't
she be like Frances? Frances would never have told such a lie. Or like gay Meg Wickliffe, or giggling Mary Jane Warfield, or even Arabella Richardson, who might be a conniving blockhead but never seemed to lose control of either her temper or her tears. Why couldn't she be like any of her other friends and cousins in Lexington, who seemed to get on with their lives with little more than minor heartaches and occasional anxieties over what dress to wear?

She didn't know, and the loneliness of this isolation—worse now that Elizabeth had gone—was like a fish-hook, forever embedded in her heart.

Mammy Sally's heavy-jowled face glistened with sweat as she hooked the pot on its chain down closer to the heat, quickened the gentle rhythm of her stirring. Mary knew she should get to bed—Eliza, who shared her room, would be wondering where she was—but lingered. She felt comforted by the soft clanking of dishes, by the murmur of talk in this familiar room, with its sieve hung on the door to keep the witches away.

She wished she could hang a sieve on the door of the house, to keep Betsey out forever.

“Sometimes when I hears them old stories about wicked stepmothers, I wonder how the poor stepmothers feel,” said Mammy Sally at last, still so low that the others could not hear. “Can't be easy for Miss Betsey, you know, coming down here from Frankfort where she had her own property and her family was just about kings and queens of that town. Coming away from being free, to marry a man with six children already and your grandmother lookin' over her shoulder...” She shook her head. “That'd be enough to give
me
headaches all the time like she gets, and to make me spit poison in all directions.”

“How dare you take her side?” The betrayal cut Mary's heart like a knife.

“Child, I'm not taking her side.” Mammy Sally turned from her stirring to give Mary a hug, her uncorseted flesh yielding as a feather mattress under the faded calico of her dress. “I'm just sayin' she
has
a side.”

“Well, I have a side, too. Why couldn't she stay in Frankfort, and be free and queen of everybody there like you say? Why did she have to come here?”

Mammy Sally smiled, and poured out the cooling milk into the shallow ramekins for Patty the nurse-girl to take up to little Margaret and baby Sam. “Maybe she wonders that now, too. But she got to make the best of things as they are, the way we all do.”

The door opened into the frosty night and Saul came back in, breath blowing steam. “Everythin' loaded up ready to leave in the mornin',” he reported, and went to put his arms around Jane's waist. The housekeeper turned, startled, then closed her eyes and with a motion that went straight to Mary's heart leaned her head back against the man's heavy shoulder, as if relaxing into the pillow of a bed.

“Because you know she can't go back,” Mammy Sally's quiet voice went on. “Can't none of us ever go back.”

C
HAPTER
S
IX

M
ARY LEFT THE PENDANT HIDDEN IN HER JEWEL-BOX AT HOME
THE
following morning, when the family set out on the daylong drive to Aunt Liza Carr's. She knew she'd be sharing a room that night not only with Eliza, but with Ann, who kept a ruthless eye on Mary's trinkets to make sure their father never gave Mary more than she herself got. Mary had meant to take her pony and ride beside her father's tall horse—a ploy she used whenever she could, to get time alone with him—but Betsey ruled that ladies didn't spend all day in the saddle the way men did. A few hours was all that was proper for a girl.

So Mary and Eliza were drafted into the chore of looking after little Georgie, who chose that morning to act up, racing wildly around the house, refusing to dress, and shrieking at the top of his lungs.

Betsey's babies, mercifully, were left back at home with Mammy Sally. Only those whom Mary thought of as Robert Todd's “real children”—Frances, herself, Levi, Ann, and George—plus Cousin Eliza, of course—would be with their father to witness the wedding of Elizabeth, who had stood in as a mother to them all.

Even in wintertime, Mary loved the hilly bluegrass country, with its sharp outcrops of granite, its shadowy thickets and dense woods. The dangers from Indians, from cougar and bears, that had given this land the name “The Dark and Bloody Ground” fifty years ago, had given place to plantations of tobacco and hemp, where blood-horses looked mildly over pasture fences, but the shape of the land remained, dramatic and untamed. Though pale sunlight filtered through the leafless boughs of tulip and paw-paw trees, the silence of the woods seemed to hold secrets that tugged at Mary's heart.

The ceremony at Walnut Hill was quiet, and small by Southern standards, meaning fewer than a hundred people: Todds and Parkers and
Logans and Russells and all the other connections that made such unbreakable chains all across the South. In addition to Mary and her brothers and sisters, several of her father's brothers and their wives were present, and her exceedingly handsome cousin John Stuart, who had recently gone to practice law in the recently-admitted state of Illinois. The bridegroom himself had come from Illinois to study law at Transylvania University in town, and it was understood that though he would take up residence with Elizabeth at Walnut Hill until he finished his studies, he would (
what else?
thought Mary) be welcome in Robert Todd's house as an overnight guest several times a week.

Her throat ached with renewed desolation as she watched Elizabeth speak her vows in Aunt Liza's parlor. All those years of going to Elizabeth for comfort against Betsey's sharp tongue, all those years of knowing her oldest sister was her refuge, and now Elizabeth was leaving her for good. Even the fantasy that somehow, some way, Betsey would disappear and Elizabeth would come back from Walnut Hill dissolved in the glowing happiness of Elizabeth's words, “I do.” Elizabeth would go with Ninian, wherever Ninian decided to go.

No quantity of sapphire pendants would ever assuage that hurt.

The second-day party held at Robert Todd's house in Lexington on the following Sunday was four times as big as the wedding, and wildly more gay. The house, which wasn't even large enough for the family (not to mention the cousins, brothers, and family connections Betsey unhesitatingly invited to take up residence from time to time), was jammed to the doors with well-wishers and friends. Arabella Richardson showed up in the promised new dress of blue silk so elaborate, and so much more beautiful than Mary's new white frock, that Mary darted back upstairs and put on the sapphire pendant, on a blue velvet ribbon around her neck.

The blazing chagrin on Bella's face was everything Mary had hoped it would be.

Robert Smith Todd was a popular man in Lexington, and his friends crowded the parlor. From the chattering circle of her school-friends, their voices drew her like the Pied Piper's magic music toward them around the refreshment table. Fond as she was of Meg Wickliffe and Mary Jane and the others, their conversation was centered wholly around beaux and earbobs...subjects all very fine in their place, but nothing to the headier mental delights of politics. Her father was saying, “...just because Jackson fought the British and can hold his liquor doesn't mean he has honest friends.”

“The voters will find their mistake if Jackson does do away with the bank.” Mr. Henry Clay took a julep from the tray Pendleton offered, a tall man, thin and hawk-faced and leonine, and also the handsomest man in Kentucky, Mary thought, right after her father. “Think about some of the bankers you know, gentlemen...present company excepted.” Clay's warm gray eyes twinkled as he raised his glass toward Robert Todd. “Can you imagine putting the finances of the
country
into their hands?”

Mary edged closer, and the man beside her glanced down at her with an understanding flash of a grin: Mr. Clay's cousin Cash, who'd stayed at the Todds'—naturally, at Betsey's invitation—when he and his body-servant had managed to inadvertently burn down the dormitory of Transylvania University a few years before. Though everyone was crowding close to hear Henry Clay speak, Cash squeezed aside to make room for Mary. He was a big handsome young man with black hair and a devil in his green-eyed smile.

Mary's new brother-in-law Ninian Edwards said, “And every one of them can make as many friends as he needs for votes, just by extending credit....”

“Hell,” snorted Cash, “Old Hickory's idea of raising money is betting everything he owns on a horse-race and hoping for the best—not that I mean to disparage a single one of his horses.”

“I daresay some of them have more sense than some of the men Mr. Jackson's been putting into office,” remarked Mary impulsively, and that got an even bigger laugh.

“You have a smart little girl there, Todd,” approved Old Duke Wickliffe, Meg's father and the wealthiest of the planters near-by Lexington. He spit—with perfect politeness and excellent aim—into the cuspidor half-concealed among the ferns at the end of the refreshment table.

Mary looked up at Mr. Clay, who had served in the government under every President from George Washington on, who had been one of the last to flee the capital in the face of the invading British, who was as close to a fighting hero as Kentucky had. “You
will
run for President against Mr. Jackson again, won't you, sir?” And, with her dimpled, one-sided smile, she added archly, “I still hold you to your promise of an invitation to your inaugural ball.”

Henry Clay laughed at the reminder of the old jest between them. Mary had known Mr. Clay for most of her life, admiring him with her father's admiration, and later loving him as a friend when she'd go riding out to the gates of his plantation, Ashland, along the Richmond road outside of town. Only gradually had she understood that he was something more than a kingly, lion-haired family friend with a voice like an avenging god's. She'd heard her father talk of Mr. Clay being elected President of the United States long before she had any clear idea that President of the United States was very different from state Assemblyman or state Senator, both offices her father had held.

“My dear.” Clay bowed over her hand. “Since you remind me of my promise, you give me no choice but to run.”

The men applauded, and Cash likewise bowed to Mary and said, “Then you have my personal thanks, Miss Mary, for spurring my cousin on to his duty again....”

“Like he needed it,” commented Meg's brother Young Duke Wickliffe with a cheeky grin at the tall statesman.

“And I, in turn,” said Clay, with becoming gravity, “claim
your
invitation, Miss Mary, to your husband's inaugural ball...whoever the lucky gentleman may be.”

Cash and the other men laughed again, and Mary fluttered her fan and glanced up at Mr. Clay sidelong, as she'd seen Elizabeth and Meg Wickliffe glance at their beaux. It was another old joke between her and Mr. Clay that if she couldn't grow up and marry him, whoever she
did
marry would have to become President to even things out. Even at thirteen Mary understood how to flirt as well as talk politics, how to look shyly under her lashes, and which angles of her head best became her. This knowledge was almost second nature among the well-born belles of the South. In fact, for a woman to talk politics, she was almost obliged to flirt, to take the edge off what she said so that men wouldn't think her mannish.

Besides, Mary had always enjoyed flirting.

“Elizabeth, you'd best go fetch that good-looking husband of yours away if you're ever to get started on your wedding journey,” said Granny Parker, leading Elizabeth into the parlor and fixing Ninian with a beady dark eye. Old Elizabeth Parker had come over the Cumberland Gap in a wagon and had lived in a blockhouse among the canebrakes before Lexington was founded. She had scant regard for husbands, having buried her own decades ago. “I take it you'll still be with Liza when you get back from White Sulphur Springs?”

“Until Ninian's done at the University, yes.” Elizabeth's gaze followed her grandmother's, to where Ninian's dramatic raven curls could be seen over the crowd around Mr. Clay and her father. Something in her face, in the way her expression softened, brought back to Mary the way Jane had settled into Saul's shoulder in the kitchen, like the same passage of music, played in a different key.

“Where's she put you these days, Frances?” inquired Granny Parker of the second sister, who trailed along behind Elizabeth, holding her hand. “In the attic?”

“I think I heard her tell Nelson to move a blanket out to one of the sheds,” provided Mary archly, which got another laugh. “That way she can rent out the room.”

Frances, who had no sense of the ridiculous, only said, “Oh, no, ma'am, I share the small room at the top of the stairs with Ann.” But
Betsey, making her way to her husband's side, stopped and stiffened with anger, and her narrowed gaze focused on Mary as if seeing her clearly for the first time in that very crowded day.

Mary turned quickly, and looked around for her father. She had to catch him now, had to make it all right....
I'll tell him I don't know what came over me—
that was true enough....
I'll tell him Bella Richardson said she deserved to have the pendant because her father is richer than Papa....And I...and I got so angry that I couldn't let that pass....

She began to tremble as she nerved herself up for the interview.

But the group of men had shifted, Ninian and Cash coming over to the knot of girls around Granny Parker, Ninian to put an arm around Elizabeth and Cash to sidle as close to Mary Jane Warfield as he could without her father seeing them. Mary slipped away as soon as she could, joining the group of girls who accompanied Elizabeth up to Frances's room, to collect the last of Elizabeth's things as the carriage that would take her and Ninian to White Sulphur Springs was brought to the door. The girls hugged Elizabeth as they mounted the rather narrow stairway, blocking the way completely with their wide mountains of petticoats: Frances and Meg were already in tears and Arabella Richardson was pretending to be.

Mary saw Betsey emerge from the parlor and come toward them, and tried to get up the stairs before her, but there were simply too many girls in the way. Her stepmother reached out and caught the sapphire pendant in her hand, jerking so hard Mary thought either the ribbon or her neck would snap.

“Why don't you tell me which is worse, Miss: to hold household in the face of needless expenditure, or to lie to tradesmen in order to get something you want?”

She spoke in a level tone, but quietly, so quietly Mary wasn't sure, afterwards, how many of her friends heard. Mary's stomach gave one sickening heave under her tight-laced corsets and she felt her face grow cold. Then blood flamed to her cheeks and her throat and her chest, and she retorted, “At least I don't spy on people behind their backs!”

With a gesture as smooth and swift as swatting a fly, Betsey dealt her a stinging box on the ear, and every girl on the stairway stopped dumb, staring down at the two of them at its foot. “You can go to your room, Miss,” said Betsey, “and stay there. I think I've seen enough of you for the day.”

As Mary thrust her way blindly up through what felt like a patchouli-scented forest of petticoats, she heard the voices behind her,
whispering questions....

Whispering answers.

She slammed the door of her room like a wordless curse flung at her stepmother, then stood hanging on to the handle, her knees trembling so hard she didn't think she could make it to the bed. Shame washed over her like the waves of a bottomless ocean.

Shame and terror.
She'll tell Papa.
The words hammered the inside of her ribcage until she felt she would die if she did not scream.

Liar. Liar. Mary Todd is a liar.

The whole town would know about it and nobody would ever speak to her again.

Her father...

She felt sick, as if she were going to throw up.
I didn't mean it. I only wanted something pretty!

Thief. Liar and thief.