A Friend of Mr. Lincoln (11 page)

“It's too damned tight,” Ash said, when they had finally finished their imaginary plebiscite. “If you don't find me some more votes I'm going to be wasting my time running against him.”

“Well, there is such a thing as campaigning, Ash,” Lincoln said. “The problem there, though, is your gloomy and combative temperament.”

“He's just not likeable,” Stuart agreed.

“I know it,” Ash said. “I try to be agreeable, but the problem is I value common sense so much I'm offended by anybody who hasn't already made up their mind to vote for me.”

Lincoln nodded appreciatively at Merritt's self-diagnosis and confirmed that it presented a problem. “But we'll triumph over your deficient personality somehow, Ash. Don't forget we have the power of the press at our disposal. A lot of people already agree that Adams is a bloodsucking tick, and we'll make sure that everybody who reads the
Sangamo Journal
has the benefit of that opinion.”

He turned to Cage with a lightning-fast change of topic.

“What did you think of that poem I left off for you? Isn't it the best poem in the world?”

“Did you write it?”

“What!” Lincoln looked around the room in astonishment. He stood up on Speed's bed, his head bent against the ceiling. Then he proceeded to recite the poem from memory.

“ ‘O why should the spirit of mortal be proud!' ” he declaimed. “ ‘Like a fast flitting meteor, a fast flying cloud…' ”

He made his way through the whole thing—kings and herdsmen and saints all alike doomed to the grave, human emotions and thoughts fleeting and meaningless—as he bounced up and down on the mattress, the poem making him exuberant with its solemnity.

“He thinks I
wrote
that!” he said to Speed when he was finally finished. Then he turned to Cage.

“How could somebody as ordinary as me write something as profound as that?”

“Who wrote it, then?”

“I have no idea. I've known the poem for years. It struck me to my heart the first time I read it, but there was no name given in the anthology where I found it. Some anonymous soul—‘hidden and lost in the depths of the grave.' When you think about it, what could be more fitting?”

“We'll all be anonymous souls someday,” Stuart mumbled to himself. “We may think we won't but we will.”

“Stuart has the thing exactly,” Lincoln said. He collapsed back onto the bed with all the finesse of a stork that had been shot out of the sky. “When an elegant summation is wanted, look no further than Stuart.”

Stuart smiled and saluted Lincoln with the smudged glass Speed had given him. He was only a few years older than his new junior law partner but in his bearing and his dress and his overall polish he seemed a decade or more removed. His status was more apparent now than it had been that day at Kellogg's Grove, when they had all been winnowed down and made equal by hardship. He was a cousin of Ninian Edwards's wife, yet another member of the famous Todd family of Kentucky who had been steadily infiltrating Illinois and assuming positions of influence. Yes, he was indeed glaringly handsome, with his serious black eyebrows and thin authoritative mouth. He carried himself with the ease of someone who had known from birth that somewhere in the future a place was being held ready for him. But Cage knew that beneath the surface he was boiling with ambition and frustration like all the rest of them. He had just been beaten in a run for U.S. Congress by Big Red May and was furiously plotting the next chapter in his political career, no doubt planning to load Lincoln up with all the distracting legal work in the meantime.

They talked and connived for another hour, until Speed declared he had to go to bed or he wouldn't be able to get up in time to open his store. Ash Merritt was drunk enough by then to hesitate at the top of the stairway and ponder the steep descent like a boatman trying to chart a course through a treacherous rapids. Stuart grabbed him by the arm before he could take a first fatal step and led him down the stairs, calling good night as he went and warning Lincoln to show up at the office on time for his first day of work.

Cage was about to leave as well, but Lincoln declared that he was too excited by the idea of living in Springfield to ever close his eyes again.

“Let's leave Speed to sleep his storekeeper's sleep while we ramble through the capital city.”

Cage was just agitated enough—from the play he had seen earlier and the course it had set him on, from the excitement of Lincoln's unexpected appearance in Springfield and his contagious enthusiasm—to agree.

They strode forth into a pleasantly chilly April night—the lamps on the streets out, dogs barking after them. They walked around and around the square, then across Town Branch toward Aristocracy Hill, past Ninian Edwards's grand house, out along a vacant road where the starlight shone upon open farm fields.

“Why do I love that poem so much?” Lincoln asked himself more than he did Cage. “The more melancholy a sentiment is, the more despairing it is, the more beautiful I find it. Is that normal?”

“You have a greater capacity for laughter than any man I know.”

“Yes, but I'm not really a man you know. We've spent one night together and had a few memorable conversations.”

“We've gathered up the dead together.”

“I haven't forgotten. That's a sacred bond, I reckon. You know what we should do? Start a poetry society. You and me and Speed and Ash and of course Ned Baker—you know him?”

“Not well.”

“We'll fix that. He's one of those men it's important to know well. He's a couple years younger than we are—twenty-five, maybe twenty-six. But he's riding a fast horse. If he hadn't had the bad luck to be born in England, I'd predict he'd be president someday. His poetry is excellent, what I've read of it. A little pompous, but so is Ned. Of course when it comes to poetry, it's unfair to place any of us in the same room with you, so if you think it'd be beneath you—”

“No, a poetry society sounds like a fine idea.”

They came to the end of a rail fence; beyond it was a stretch of unbroken ground, and then closed-in forest. The treetops swayed in a soft spring breeze, stirring like some sort of beast of the night that could not be still. Cage remembered the feeling of being watched from the trees by Black Hawk's warriors. Lincoln must have too, because without speaking about it they both turned around and walked back toward town.

Lincoln gripped the back of Cage's neck in his big hand and shook it playfully back and forth. Under the force of his friend's grip, Cage's neck felt pliant as a stalk.

“I've been observing you all night,” Lincoln declared. “Close observation of humankind is the first business of a sharp-witted lawyer like myself. So what's stewing up there inside your head? I sense turmoil of an animalistic nature. Women maybe.”

“I'm thinking of the work I need to do. Hoping it's the work I'm meant to do.”

“I wonder if I'll be any good at the law. I confess my arm trembled a bit when I raised it in front of the supreme court clerk the other day and took the oath.”

Cage started to reassure him but decided not to, didn't think he needed to. So they walked on through the night in silence until Lincoln spoke again.

“Has Speed told you about this girl he's set up?”

“Yes, and it sounds like he's wasted no time in telling you as well.”

“He's proud of her some.”

“Proud of having her is more like it. Did he offer to share her with you?”

“As long as I pay her. I wouldn't mind a turn with her. She's bound to be reasonably good-looking, knowing Speed's taste. But I don't have the money to spend and I'm not as carefree as our friend. Besides, there's that other thing.”

“Other thing?”

“I told you about her, don't you remember? Miss Owens.”

“So you're marrying her?”

“Only if you advise it.”

“How can I possibly give you advice one way or the other? I've never met her.”

“But you will,” Lincoln said. “There's going to be a picnic, to which you are going to be invited for the purpose of laying eyes on her. And your judgment will weigh mightily.”

“S
O YOU'RE MR. SPEED'S FRIEND
who has no room to rent to me?” she said when she opened the door. She swept back in welcome and he walked into the room, eager to be out of sight of passersby, though it was night and the house on Jackson Street where she lived was far away from the center of town. She lived in an upper room with a separate entrance, reached by an outside stairway. From the house below, he could smell greasy meat and onions cooking and hear an old woman complaining about something or other in a spiritless monotone to someone who was not bothering to reply. A dog had joined Cage as he approached the house and had escorted him up the stairs. When she closed the door the dog was sitting on the stoop with a look of satisfaction, as if conscious of having served some important function.

He had been in a state of anxiety in the days and hours leading up to this encounter, but now that the door was closed and he was in the room alone with her he felt unexpectedly comfortable and unhurried. She asked for his hat and set it on the pier table between the windows, whose shutters were discreetly closed. The room was orderly and well-kept, with one corner given over to a great deal of sewing and pattern work. Elsewhere there were pictures on the wall, a writing desk, several cane-backed chairs, and a bed with a better bedstead than his own. No doubt Speed had seen to it that she had these things—probably supplied them from his own store—but Cage had the sense that the quiet presiding taste was her own.

“I could call you Mr. Weatherby,” she said, “or I could call you—it's Cage, I believe, isn't it?”

“Yes, Cage—for Micajah.”

“Ellie for Ellen.”

She smiled, and her warmth and ease startled him a little. She was four or five years younger than he was. She wore a blue muslin dress, tight at the waist and at her slender throat. He was not sure at the start of that first meeting that he cared so much for her face—it was rather blunt and broad, he thought—but very quickly its plainness began to represent for him a confounding new benchmark of beauty. She wore her hair in the style of the times, parted in the center so that it framed her face, the tip of her left ear showing through the loose plaits like the tender shoot of a plant.

“I know all about you from Joshua,” she said as she settled into a chair and gestured for him to do the same. “He said he was surprised when you told him you wanted to see me.”

“He doesn't really know me.”

Her eyes brightened a little. They were brown.

“He doesn't really know me either. But I pretend that he does. There's no harm in that. What should you and I pretend about?”

He searched for a witty answer but he was too flummoxed by her teasing wit and by her bold availability. He was ashamed to be so bashful. There was no need to impress her, but he wanted to. She was nothing like the whores in that Beardstown brothel, nothing like the respectable ladies of Springfield, though in her simultaneous sexual frankness and social acuity there was the embodiment—perhaps the mimicry—of both.

When she realized he was not going to be able to find anything to say, she unclasped the bracelet at her wrist and leaned forward to set it on the writing desk next to his chair. It was a gesture both casual and electrifying, a silent overture to the drama of her undressing. Her outstretched arm was only inches from his head. He smelled the perfume on her wrists, and then felt her fingertips idly grazing across his side-whiskers, and then her hand on his cheek. She was looking at him with what he knew was only mild interest, though he felt caught in a gaze of such intensity that he looked away, at the bracelet she had set down on the writing desk. Two strands of gold links, with a bezel depicting a Roman temple in tiny mosaic tile.

“Do you like it? Joshua said it was the Temple of Minerva.”

“He's wrong. It's the Temple of Hercules.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because I've seen it. I've sketched it.”

She sat back, lifting her leg so that the toe of her boot just barely touched his knee. “In Rome?”

He nodded. Perhaps it was just his wishful thinking, but he thought there was more curiosity in her eyes than before.

“What would a man who's been to Rome like to see me remove next?”

He nodded toward her earrings. She took them off with a slight tilt of her head to either side, tightening the muscles in her neck, and once again reached out to lay them down next to the bracelet, this time not returning to her chair but sliding onto his lap. She seemed to weigh almost nothing as he stood with her in his arms and carried her over to the bed.

He had been stirred up ever since witnessing that beautiful teapot actress in
Fazio,
and had needed some way to resolve his bewildered longing. Ellie supplied the physical resolution in short order—she was clearly accomplished at that, unembarrassed by it—but as he lay with her in her bed afterwards the longing remained. She was now the source of it. Her candid sexual nature, her air of contentment and independence, was unexpectedly wounding. The ease with which she bestowed herself ran counter to his own nature. It undercut the sense of romantic destiny that he was disposed to feel. But the obvious fact that they did not belong together, did not fit together, felt irrelevant. Something about her confused him, excited him, threatened the settled rhythms of his life.

She was from Maryland, she said. Her father was a millworker who had been robbed and murdered at night on the National Road. Her mother married a widower who already had eight children of his own, and she was infatuated enough with her new husband to agree to his suggestion to send Ellie and two of her sisters off to Louisville, where they could board with distant relatives and be out of the way. She found employment in a millinery workroom and at sixteen married her foreman, a dreamer and tinkering-minded man who staked everything on moving himself and Ellie to Illinois, where he believed he could find investors for an invention he called the prairie car, a great Noah's Ark–like conveyance that would roll over the landscape powered by steam, assisted when the winds were favorable by a towering mast and a great canvas sail. He had solicited interest in Springfield, where she had met Joshua Speed at a gathering of potential investors. But whatever enthusiasm her husband had been able to generate evaporated when it became clear he had never taken the trouble to secure a patent.

As some men do when they are unhappy and disappointed he began to beat his wife, and she was obliged to burn him with a hot iron, and afterwards to hold a knife under his throat and order him out of the state. The ensuing arrangement with Speed did not trouble her. She liked him, understood that young men needed sporting relationships until they found someone of their station to marry (and often needed them afterwards). When it came to religion she was an infidel, a deist at best, and saw nothing at all unnatural in a frank exchange of sexual favors for material support.

She revealed everything about herself. She lay beside him, unhurried, indifferent to her own nakedness. There seemed to be nothing closed off about her, nothing he couldn't touch or reach, and yet there remained an intoxicating boundary. Her very openness to him felt like a kind of rejection.

“Why does Speed share you?” Cage asked, when he had sensed that their time was over and had begun to put on his clothes.

“Why shouldn't he? He's a generous man. He likes his friends and wants them to share in his pleasures.”

“Has he sent a lot of his friends around?”

“Very few. Only people he trusts and thinks I might like. I like you well enough. I hope you'll come back, but of course you know you must pay me.”

“I know that,” he said. Awkwardly, he emptied coins out of his purse onto his palm as she watched.

“You may pay me in guineas if you like. I'd rather have real English money than a paper shinplaster from some bank that may already have gone out of business.”

He counted out what Speed had told him to pay, and then, flustered, added half again as much to it. He stood there holding the money in his hand, not quite sure what to do with it.

“Don't be embarrassed,” she said. She got off the bed and onto her feet, still blazingly naked, and he set the money into her open palm. Cage was aware again of the cooking smells from the rooms below, and the man who had been silent before as the old woman lectured him was now venomously defending himself, yelling at the top of his lungs that she should go straight to hell and see if she liked the men there any better.

“You can see why Joshua wanted a better situation for me,” she said as she pulled on her robe. “He doesn't like coming here. But there are so many people flooding into Springfield right now there's hardly anyplace else to live. And I suppose that even if you did have a room that my character wouldn't be the sort that would—”

“Your character is not at issue,” he blurted out gallantly.

“Oh, of course it is. But I have plans to improve it.”

She kissed him, an unrequired gesture of genial affection that he had to remind himself had nothing to do with love. She opened the door. The dog that had walked up the stairs with him was still sitting there, wagging his tail in excitement.

“The dog will see you out,” she said.

“You have a particular air of satisfaction,” Joshua Speed told Cage a few days later, “that can only be supposed to be the result of a particularly satisfying experience.”

It was midmorning on a hot June Sunday. Cage and Speed were members of an expedition of a dozen people that had set out from Springfield on horseback, leaving the roads behind to ride across country to a picnicking spot ten miles away on a shady bluff above the Sangamon. They had fallen back to retrieve Speed's hat, which had blown off in a gust of wind. Though they had not quite caught up to the main party, Cage was worried that their voices would carry, and he gave Speed a cautioning look to that effect.

“If you're referring to your friend—”

“Yes, for God's sake I'm referring to my friend. You don't have to whisper. They can't hear you, you know. They're all upwind from us. Did you like her?”

“Of course I liked her.”

“You can see why I wanted to get her into a decent house somewhere. I don't like the people she's boarding with—a lazy, worthless clerk of some sort and his horrid old mother. They're nosy, too. Her only friend there is that dog, and nobody even knows who he belongs to.”

Speed was riding a very fine gray stallion that was impatient at trailing so far behind from the main party. The stallion pranced about and shook his head as Cage plodded along on Mrs. P, who was older and more patient and had no nervous energy to discharge. Speed was an elegant rider—he kept his mount in check with almost invisible adjustments of the reins, and his posture in the saddle and his overall conformance seemed to mirror the high physical standards of his horse.

“You should get her to mend your clothes,” he said. “On top of everything else, the woman can sew.”

“What exactly are your plans for her?”

“Why should I have plans? I enjoy her company, I enjoy knowing my friends enjoy her company. I'm a happy man. Besides, Ellie's not the kind of woman who's going to let somebody else plot out her life. As soon as I tried, our delightful little arrangement would be over.”

Cage was well aware that he had no right to be irritated by Speed's breezy contentment. If anything, he should credit him for generosity. But the idea that Ellie could be so indifferently shared cut across his sense of what was right, or at least what ought to be right. Perhaps there was no great offense in keeping a woman if the terms offered an advantage to both parties, but this business of sharing gave the whole thing the taint of indenture. Cage didn't want to be a part of it, though he wanted very much to share in it and see her again.