The Emancipator's Wife (26 page)

But most of those young gentlemen—clerks and land speculators, young farmers or the sons of the small cotton-planters and dealers who made up the town—who'd come calling as potential beaux hadn't even offered to discuss politics. Not with a lady. It was unheard-of. With them, Mary had been all that a lady should be: flirtatious and clever, laughing at their jokes and twinkling at their wit (such as it was), lively and breathless and filled with energy....

And only half herself.

Impulsively she said now, in the quiet shade of the porch, “How good it is to talk to you, Mr. Lincoln. I've missed you.”

He studied her for a moment, as if weighing up how much to say about himself. Then he said, “And I you, Miss Todd.”

She held out her hand to him, plump white fingers emerging from a mitt of lace. Uncle David's house was of squared logs, added to and clapboarded over, and its wide porch boasted only a bench to sit on, to take the hot feathers of breeze that floated from the hills beyond the town. “You can make that Molly,” she said softly, “if you want.”

He hesitated, then his big hand closed gently around hers. She remembered Speed telling her how Lincoln's father had handed him an ax at the age of eight and put him to work; he had the hands and arms of a laborer. “It's a pretty name,” he said. “Molly.” He smiled uncertainly, like a man stepping over the threshold of an unknown room in the dark, then bent his head suddenly and pressed his lips to her fingers.

At the touch of them, and the sight of the dark rumpled head bending over her hand, Mary felt a kind of a calm shock, as if she understood something she had only known intellectually before, like the first time she'd dreamed in French. And she thought,
I love him.

And it was in her eyes, as he raised his head and met her gaze. Her heart felt clear, and peaceful, and as if all things had suddenly simplified in her life:
I love you.

His big hands caught her arms, crushed her to him, as if she weighed nothing. His mouth was hot on her lips and his breath burned her cheek. Then the next second he thrust her away, or thrust himself away from her. For a moment he sat half turned from her, his breath fast and thick as if he'd been running, then he stood up abruptly and had made one long stride toward the porch steps before Mary sprang up and caught his sleeve.

He turned, and looked down into her face. “Miss Todd,” he whispered, “I am sorry....”

“It's all right.” She could feel the shivering tension in his arm. Could see, for one instant, the naked desire in his gray eyes, before he looked aside. As if he feared, she thought, that if he didn't hold himself in check with a rein of iron he would back her to the wall and devour her.

And it was hard to remember any reason on earth not to let him.

She said again, “It's all right, Mr. Lincoln. And you may still make that Molly, if you'd like.”

He drew a shaky breath, held it for a moment, and let it out; his shoulders relaxed a little as he looked back at her. The expression in his eyes was of a man who expects to have his face slapped hard.

On a similar occasion back in Springfield, Stephen Douglas had made a gallant remark about how a woman ought to forgive a poor man's gesture prompted only by her beauty, and had begged debonair forgiveness on his knees. And James Shields had protested—rather smugly—that he did not know how it had come about that he'd been overwhelmed enough to steal a kiss....

But Mary knew that love was something Lincoln—the perpetual jester—did not joke about. And he wasn't going to say he didn't know how it had come about when he knew very well.

He said again, more collectedly, “I am sorry...Miss Molly.”

“You understand that every girl has to
say
she is sorry, too.” Her twinkling eyes belied her words, and under his deep tan his cheekbones colored. The corner of his big mouth moved in a smile.

“I can step down off the porch if you'd like to slap me,” he offered, in the grave voice he used for jests, and suited the action to the word, bringing his face down almost on level with hers.

Mary reached out with her folded fan and touched him—like the breath of a butterfly—on his cheek. “There,” she said. “Don't let it happen again.”

They both knew it would.

Lincoln was on the road the rest of the summer and fall. His letters came to her from Carlinville, from Belleville, from Shawneetown. He mostly spoke of rallies and speeches, of the discreet horse-trading that went on among the delegates:
I promise to throw contracts your way if your friends vote for me.
Mary had told him that her Aunt Bet read her letters, as Elizabeth read them back in Springfield—he'd been horrified at this and even more shocked when Mary had told him that this was customarily done in all polite households—so he was circumspect in what he wrote, both about his own feelings and about the careful jockeyings among the politicians on the issue of slavery.

But under his wry observations and astute commentary, she sensed his pleasure in having someone with whom he could share his thoughts. “Man does not live by politics alone,” he wrote her from Waterloo, after ten days of travel and political meetings in southern Illinois, “and sometimes I wish I could only sit beside a stream in the woods as I used to, watching to see what leaves would float past.” The decision on the part of the Whig leaders to evade the issue of slavery completely, for fear of offending Southern, slave-owning Whigs like the Todds, annoyed him: “The sole argument of this election seems to be that General Harrison doesn't use gold dessert-spoons like President Van Buren does. By this argument I too would be qualified for the Presidency, and I don't see anyone rushing out to vote for me.”

Because even sleepy little Columbia—which made Springfield look like New Orleans in comparison—was galvanized by the election, there was plenty for Mary to write to him about, and between her accounts of rallies and excursions and parades, she wrote of her affection for him, and her hopes to see him in Springfield in the fall. “Julia writes me that in October there will be a grand circus and menagerie coming to
Springfield, which will display a gigantic elephant, the
first ever
seen in the State, as well as a giraffe and exhibitions of horsemanship and trapeze artistry,” she wrote. “I do hope that, even amid the final stages of General Harrison's campaign, we can take the time to behold such a
spectacle
.”

Of course, knowing that she loved Lincoln did not keep her from flirting with half a dozen of the Columbia beaux. She made herself the life and soul of the entertainments surrounding the Presidential campaign, kept her mouth properly shut about both Shakespeare and politics, and in the three months she was in Missouri received two proposals of marriage, one from a young cotton-planter and another from a delegate from one of the southern counties. She walked out with a number of gentlemen and received posies and danced whenever she could, and this almost—but not quite—made up for the fact that there wasn't a book in the town besides a couple of Bibles and what she'd brought in her own trunks, and there was nothing resembling a theater closer than St. Louis, a hundred miles away.

During a political campaign, one didn't really need plays.

With the dances and parties attendant on the campaign there were always refreshments—pies and taffy, picnics of burgoo and barbeque—and, a little to Mary's alarm, she found her sleeves getting tight and her corset-laces harder to pull close. “Oh, it's nothing, everyone gets a little plump in the summer,” consoled Annie—no sylph herself—and the two girls talked Uncle David into an expedition down to St. Louis on the steamboat for new dress-goods. Mary laughed about this, and made jokes with Annie and her other girl-friends in the town as they cut and fitted lettuce-green sprig muslin and pink dimity, but her recollection of Betsey's remarks about fat girls never finding husbands gnawed at her mind.

Yet the food was so good! Sweet and comforting, and doubly so because Elizabeth wasn't always looking over her shoulder, making remarks about the need to catch a beau.

Nevertheless, when Mary was packing her trunk to return to Springfield, it was with a pang of horrified shock that she realized how many of the dresses she'd brought with her at the beginning of summer she hadn't worn in some weeks—and how many of her favorites had had the seams let out two, or in one case three, times. Even as she ate a last breakfast of Aunt Bet's justifiably famous blueberry-maple pancakes before Quincy the coachman brought the buggy up to drive her and Uncle David to Rocheport, she quailed at the thought of facing Elizabeth. Quailed, too, at the recollection of Josh Speed's humorous account of Lincoln's reaction when he discovered that the Miss Owens he'd been tepidly engaged to a couple of years ago had grown enormously stout in his six-month absence.

I'm not
enormously
stout,
Mary told herself, as she got into the buggy. Her heart began to pound with guilty apprehension, though it would be a good four days' travel before she'd have to face her family and friends.
And that'll soon disappear, once I get back to Springfield. If I just don't eat much on the steamboat. . . .

But almost the first thing Elizabeth said to her, when Mary came downstairs the morning after her arrival in Springfield four days later, was, “Good God, Molly, you've put on flesh! I would scarcely have recognized you, now that I see you in the light.” The stage had been late coming into town, and Mary, her head aching from its swaying, had been glad only to come home and go upstairs after a swift embrace to Ninian, Elizabeth, little Julie, and Eppy in the kitchen.

She flushed now to the roots of her hair. “Well, and I'm
delighted
to see you too, Elizabeth! Thank you for making me feel
so much
at home already.”

It was Elizabeth's turn to color up. She said, “I'm sorry. You're right, it wasn't my place to say anything....”

“I should say not!”

“But if your own sister can't give you a hint, who can? I can see we're going to have some work cut out for us, letting out your winter dresses.” She spoke in a mollifying tone, but Mary, stung to tears, was in no mood to forgive and forget.

“Well, thank you
very much,
” she retorted. “Please don't hesitate to use the tape-measure so you can have the most
accurate
information when you tell your friends about it.”

“I'm sure no one in town,” replied Elizabeth icily, “is going to need
my
word that you've gotten stout, once they see you. I only say this for your own good, dear, for you are twenty-one now and as you know, gentlemen as a rule don't ask fat girls to marry them.”

“Well, I wouldn't know about
that
! As it happens, I got
four
perfectly decent proposals of marriage in Columbia—not that I had the
slightest
interest in any of them! And Mr. Lincoln finds me attractive enough to come to an understanding with me.”

“Mr. Lincoln?”
Elizabeth stared at her, appalled. “Molly...”

“What's wrong with Mr. Lincoln?”

“He is a bumpkin,” stated Elizabeth, with cold finality. “A backwoodsman, and a penniless bankrupt to boot. Why don't you accept a proposal of marriage from Mr. Hart the carter while you're at it?”

“And why don't
you
admit—while you're at it—that you have no use for a man unless he's wealthy and high-born! That you'd as soon have married some crippled old dotard, if he'd had a big house and land and wealth—”

“Molly!”

“—and have whistled Ninian down the wind if it weren't that he was the son of the governor!” All Mary's pent-up resentments about having her letters read, about being called fat, about her father's long absences, frothed to the surface. “
You
have no more notion of love than does that snippy old harpy our father married! Only love of money...”

Elizabeth—who had never had any trouble holding her own in the noisy Todd household—reddened with anger, but as usual her voice
remained cuttingly level. “If you marry that backwoods pumpkin-roller with his load of debts you'll find out soon enough what money means!”

“Money means nothing beside love!” Mary screamed at her. She felt as if she were burning up inside. “I'd rather by far marry a poor man who's going somewhere than a rich incompetent who couldn't even get on the electoral ballot of his own party in his own state!” (Ninian hadn't.)

“Honestly!” Elizabeth threw up her hands. “There's no talking to you when you get like this! I'd hoped that a little time away would cure your temper....”

“There is nothing wrong with my temper!!!”
Mary shrieked. “It's you who don't want to admit that you're—”

Movement caught Mary's eye and she turned—they both turned—to see Eppy frozen in the parlor doorway.

And behind her, his eyes bulging out of his head with horror, was Mr. Lincoln.

C
HAPTER
N
INETEEN

L
INCOLN AND
M
ARY WENT TO THE CIRCUS TOGETHER A FEW
DAYS
later, and tried to pretend everything was still all right. Mary tried hard—and succeeded well—in being her usual bright, flirtatious self, but the excursion was not a success.

Lincoln marveled over the elephant—Sultan, his name was—and asked the dour Scotsman in charge of him all kinds of questions about what elephants ate and how they worked. “I never did see anything like it,” he remarked, in one of his rare relaxed moments that day. “Though my ma told me of them—my stepmother,” he corrected. “I'll have to write her of this. She'd tell me tales of wonderful things, things I'd never seen, growin' up in the woods; the only person back then who treated me like a human being.”

But for the most part Mary felt, all that day, that Lincoln was studying her uneasily. He had little to say to either Elizabeth or Ninian and she wondered exactly how much Lincoln had heard of what she and
Elizabeth had said to one another, and how much of a shock it was to him, to see how her bust and waist and hips had expanded since their last meeting in June. Wondered if he were re-thinking, in that new light, all the local gossip that Mary Todd “had a temper.” Certainly Elizabeth never went beyond glacially exquisite politeness to him, and when they returned to the house that evening, he was not asked to stay to dinner.

Mary had another screaming-match with Elizabeth and cried herself to sleep.

Lincoln left town soon after that, and was gone almost a month.

His journeys up and down the state all summer in the cause of the Whig Party and William Henry Harrison showed on his face and his form, during the few October days before his latest departure. While Mary had grown plumper from the thrill and jollity of campaigning,
Lincoln had grown more lean. Even in repose, he looked tired. The skin over his high cheekbones was tanned dark from riding long distances between the prairie towns, and lines were settled around his eyes. His notes to her were short, and when he did see her, he was very quiet. Mary tried to convince herself that this was only the result of days and weeks spent exerting himself to charm and convince voters.

She failed. And as usual when she felt fear, it transformed itself to anger. When Lincoln left for Pontiac to take cases at the DeWitt County Circuit Court—because of his campaign journeys he hadn't worked all summer—Mary returned, almost defiantly, to the round of rallies and speeches, balls and barbeques, attendant on the final throes of the election, culminating in a glorious, dazzling, torchlit procession on Election Night.

Tippecanoe and Tyler, too!

But she wished Lincoln were in town at her side.

After making speeches, trading favors, promising votes, talking to delegates, crisscrossing the state on horseback for six solid, weary months—to the total neglect of the work that might buy him new clothes or would pay his board bill at Butler's, where he and Speed both ate—Mary wasn't even sure whether Lincoln himself cast a vote.

She flirted with Douglas, danced with Gillespie and Trumbull, walked out with Jimmy Shields and sweetly tried to discourage—but not discourage too much—the attentions of the avid and elderly Mr. Webb, all the while trying to eat as little as possible. But she found her temper was shorter on short rations and her headaches, which had plagued her on and off through the summer, grew worse. She longed for Mammy Sally's mouth-wringing tisanes, for the gentle care of Uncle David's old cook Rachel...for something other than Elizabeth's tart remarks about “overcoming her tendency” to headaches, as she admonished her to “overcome” her temper.

On the ninth of November, the Sangamon County Circuit Court would begin its session. On the twenty-third, the Legislature would begin meeting, in the Springfield Methodist Church, since the State House was still not done. Mary was determined that when Lincoln returned to town, she'd demonstrate to him that she wasn't a girl to wait sighingly for a man's attention. He'd see how popular she was—plump or not, spirited or not, twenty-one or not—with every other bachelor in that man-filled town, and she wrote to her father in Lexington for the money for three new dresses to make sure the point was carried across.

And on the seventh of November, Ninian's Uncle Cyrus arrived in town, with his daughter Matilda.

Mary liked Matilda Edwards immediately. She and Elizabeth waited impatiently in the parlor, on the evening that Ninian had Jerry harness up the carriage and rode to meet the stage at the American House
Hotel—a total of three blocks, but there would be luggage and the streets were unpaved and soupy after the first of the autumn rains. Cyrus came in with Ninian, big-shouldered and tall like all the Edwards men, elegantly dressed, even for travel. He was a prominent politician and man of business, and one of the wealthiest citizens of Alton, which lay just upriver from St. Louis. He bowed over Elizabeth's hand, smiled at Mary: “Here's my girl Tilda,” he told her. “I know you'll be great friends.”

Matilda Edwards was sixteen years old, tall for her age and blonde and ethereally slender. She was exquisitely dressed in dark-blue delaine and what appeared to be at least ten petticoats beneath her rustling skirts, and had the gentlest, most natural smile Mary had ever seen. “Oh, dear, I hope you'll be able to put up with me,” she murmured guiltily to Mary, as Mary led her up to show her the bedroom they would share. “I sleep like a cat—up and down and moving all around....”

“It's all right, I get up about a dozen times a night....”

“Oh, dear, neither of us will get any sleep....”

“Do you read in bed?”

“Shhh! Papa would
slay
me if he knew....Oh, you have a copy
of
Belinda . . .
!”

The two girls stayed awake, whispering and giggling, until nearly dawn.

Every man in Springfield fell instantly and violently in love with Matilda Edwards on sight.

Including Abraham Lincoln.

And no girl could be really angry with her because she was so sweet.

“Oh, Papa will be
so
pleased,” Tilda sighed, after the first small party at the House on the Hill—to which Mr. Lincoln was not invited—at which Cyrus renewed his political connections with the wealthier inhabitants of Springfield and his daughter was introduced to the Coterie. It was nearly two in the morning; she and Mary were brushing out each other's hair and getting into their nightgowns, while the rain pattered gently on the leaves outside. “He wants me to meet other gentlemen. That's why he brought me here.”

“
Other
gentlemen?” Mary cocked her head at the significance of the modifier. Any other girl would have driven her wildly jealous, the way the young men had clustered around her—including several of Mary's own beaux.

Tilda turned her enormous blue eyes upon Mary. “You won't tell?”

Mary shook her head.

“There's a...a gentleman.” Self-possessed and matter-of-fact as she had been all evening, the girl blushed. “Back home. Mr. Strong.” She could barely bring out his name above a whisper, as if the syllable was a precious thing. “Papa thinks I must look about me a little—he says I am too young. A girl must have beaux, you know,” she assured Mary anxiously, as if she thought that after flirting with a dozen men herself Mary would somehow object. “But... I could
never
truly look at another man, you know.”

Mary gave her a smile that beamed with understanding. “I know.” And made a resolve to encourage her young cousin in exactly that course of action, no matter how long she should stay beneath Ninian's roof.

The fact that at no time did she worry about losing Lincoln to Tilda did not, however, make it any easier to watch him follow the girl with his eyes, and stand talking with her for fifteen minutes at a time at the
American House ball that marked the opening of the Legislative session. In response, Mary flirted and danced with every other suitor she could attract. Back in Lexington, she had learned that if a girl wanted to gain and hold a man's attention, all she had to do was lavish her smiles upon another man. Stephen Douglas danced as divinely as ever; Jimmy Shields was most assiduous in bringing her cups of punch (with superhuman resolve, she eschewed the cake).

And Lincoln, hovering at the edge of the cluster of young clerks and delegates around that slim, blonde vision in pink silk, barely seemed to notice Mary was in the room.

As far as Mary could see—and she kept as much of an eye on the group around Matilda as she could while engaged in holding as many other men as possible on her own string—Lincoln never worked up the courage to so much as approach the girl as a suitor. That could have had something to do with whatever he might have overheard Elizabeth snap at Mary about him during their quarrel.

And it could have been because Josh Speed had also fallen—apparently quite seriously—in love with Matilda, too.

Mary's temper shortened as the evening progressed, until she finally lashed out at Julia Jayne over some casual jest about Mary's new dress. She left the assembly-room in tears. Jamie Conkling—who had become great friends with her, since their mutually beloved Mercy had returned to her parents in Baltimore—escorted her home.

After that Mary saw little of Lincoln. As a practicing attorney and a member of the State House of Representatives he was, she knew, frenziedly busy. With his party in the minority in both Houses and the whole state's finances in disarray he was fighting an uphill battle to salvage the internal improvement measures that the Whigs had put through. With banks and businesses closing right and left, nobody was about to release funds to build roads, no matter how badly they were needed.

Sometimes he would call after supper in the evenings, or walk with her on those few Sundays before rain—and then snow—closed in on the prairies. Once, he took her sledding.

But he was always withdrawn, as if struggling with his own thoughts. On the sledding excursion he spent a good deal of the time talking with Matilda, who had accompanied them in company with Josh Speed.

Even before Tilda had appeared on the scene—even before Lincoln had walked into Elizabeth's parlor to discover that the prettily plump, high-spirited girl he'd danced with and written to was now a fat, shrieking termagant—there had been times when Mary had wanted to hit him over the head with a book. He was abstracted, absentminded, and perpetually late through becoming absorbed in whatever case he was working on or story he was telling to the loafers who hung around Diller's drugstore. He would drift away into thought and pay no attention to what Mary or anyone else was saying to him. On some occasions, when she was late coming down to the parlor, she'd find him so engrossed in one of Ninian's books that he'd been unaware of her entering the room.

And if there was something on his mind—and she would take oath, as the winter days advanced toward Christmas, that there was—he was as tight as an oyster about saying what it was.

Raised in a vociferous family where everyone spoke their mind and if you didn't ask for what you wanted you certainly wouldn't get it, Mary found this silence maddening.

Yet when, after Lincoln had walked her home one snowy night from a Missionary Society lecture on the South Sea Islands, she asked him what the matter was, he turned the question aside with a story he'd heard about what the native ladies of those islands actually did with the dresses the missionaries sent them: “And I don't know whether the moral of that story has to do with innocence, modesty, or only just the weather there.” Mary had to laugh, in spite of her annoyance, and stepped up on the porch, two steps up so that their faces would be on level when he kissed her, gently, on the cheek. Her hands tightened over his, big and awkward in his mended gloves, and his fingers returned the pressure.

But he turned away hastily as Ninian came out onto the porch, and as she rustled into the hall to shed her jacket and muff, she heard her brother-in-law say, “A word with you, if I may, Lincoln.”

Mary froze. She was starting to turn back toward the door when
Elizabeth appeared from the parlor: “How was the lecture, dear?” And, when Mary took an impulsive step toward the door, Elizabeth purposefully crossed the room to head her off. “Come into the parlor, dear, and get warm. You must be frozen.”

“What's Ninian talking to Mr. Lincoln about?” She could hear
Ninian's voice on the porch, but he'd closed the door. An understandable thing to do—the night was freezing—but anger and panic stirred in her heart at this exclusion.

“Good heavens, dear, I don't know.” Elizabeth's usually soft laugh was tinny. “Politics, I suppose....”

“Ninian sees Mr. Lincoln every day at the State House.”

Elizabeth put a hand on Mary's elbow to guide her into the parlor, and when Mary balked, her hand tightened. “Darling...”

Mary tried to yank her elbow away and Elizabeth's grip closed like a claw.

“Darling,”
she repeated, and closed the door of the parlor behind them. There was an edge to her voice, and a wariness in her eyes, bracing for another storm. “Ninian and I have your best interests at heart, you know that. Mr. Lincoln is a very fine man, a very honorable man. But you cannot deny that he is a very cold man, a man who has no particular liking for women....”