A Friend of Mr. Lincoln (29 page)

He rode a black gelding as handsome as himself. Watching him in the saddle, Cage was aware of his own posture and made adjustments, raising his head, squaring his shoulders, stiffening his back. He knew he could not match John Hardin's bearing and physical confidence, but he could not keep himself from trying. Lincoln of course made no effort in that direction. Even when he was in the best of moods, his own appearance was an afterthought, and he was not in the best of moods today. He rode in a stooped and sloppy manner, his mind removed from his body, which teetered obediently to the rhythms set by his horse.

They were in Hardin's grand house on State Street in Jacksonville by early afternoon, Sarah Hardin greeting them all—even those like Cage whom she had never met—with an overflowing warmth. She was glad enough to see her husband that there were tears in her eyes. She was a match for him physically—slender and dark-haired and arrestingly attractive—and her calm domestic spirit was a perfect fit to his vaulting ambition. She briskly sorted out all her guests into a multitude of comfortable rooms, and even had Christmas stockings for each of them, hung in a long festive row on the mantelpiece.

For several days there was an unending round of parties, during which Mary stuck tight to Lincoln's side. She touched his arm familiarly as she chatted with the Hardins' Jacksonville friends, smiling up at him as if to register their dual appreciation whenever a witticism was uttered or a poignant chord was struck at the pianoforte. If they were not officially engaged, she gave every impression that they soon would be. Lincoln was distracted but compliant. His body was as motionless as a plank for the most part, his arms dangling at his sides, a perfectly pleasant smile on his face. He listened and laughed and told stories, but he was a different Lincoln, a half-Lincoln, his attention divided between the audience in front of him and the swirling confusion in his head.

By Christmas Eve they were all exhausted from the festivities, and there was a quiet night around the fire with just the Hardins and their guests from Springfield. They sprawled comfortably in the parlor, singing Christmas songs in rounds orchestrated by John Hardin's delightfully vibrant sixteen-year-old sister, Martinette. Afterwards they ate three kinds of pie and the political men told stories about the battles of the last session. Matilda Edwards sat half-reclined on a settee, a cup of eggnog balanced in her hand, the lovely bones of her wrist set off against the ruffled cuff of her sleeve. The glow of the firelight revealed the perfect angles of her face to unbearable advantage. Her expression was one of intoxicating contentment, suggesting that she was aware of her outward beauty and that this awareness brought peace to her soul. Her voice when she laughed or when she sang had a raspy, throaty quality that conveyed the possibility of sexual abandon. It was hard for the men not to stare at her, for the women not to notice they were doing so.

Somehow Speed managed to get Matilda off alone, the two of them seated on matching chairs in a far corner of the room, his head bent to hers. They talked for half an hour while Sarah Hardin played the pianoforte and Mary took over from Martinette and organized a new round of carol singing with the energy of a choir director. She kept Lincoln in his place during a rousing “Joy to the World” but his eyes, tormented with jealousy, kept straying over to Speed and Matilda. After a few minutes Speed stood up, helped Matilda pull her lush cashmere mantle over her shoulders, and escorted her out into the night.

“Where are they going?” Lincoln asked Cage in an anguished whisper when Mary had turned away to accept a cup of French coffee from one of the Hardin house servants.

“I don't know,” he answered as gently as he could. “I suppose they're just going outside to talk.”

They were gone for half an hour. When they slipped back into the parlor
,
John Hardin was in the midst of reminiscing out loud about his grandfather, who had been a hero at Saratoga and later burned down an impressive number of Indian villages all over the Ohio Territory.

“I never met the man,” Hardin said. “I would very much have liked to. He died young, murdered by Shawnees. They said he had twelve Indian scalps hanging from his bookcase
,
just like those Christmas stockings hanging tonight from the mantelpiece.”

“John, that's a dreadful story to tell on Christmas Eve,” Sarah said.

“Three states named counties after him. Lincoln here knows that very well, don't you?”

“I do,” Lincoln said, doing his best to stay in the conversation while monitoring the return of Speed and Matilda. Matilda looked as untroubled as ever, but Speed had a cross, confused look on his face. “I had the honor to be born in Hardin County, Kentucky.”

“How's that for symmetry?” Hardin asked the group. “And not only that—you lost your grandfather to Indian perfidy just like I did.”

“That's true,” Lincoln said. “He was out in the fields with my father, then only a boy. An Indian sharpshooter fired at him from concealment and caught him in the heart and he went right down into the pumpkin patch. The Indian then ran out and grabbed my father and would have run off with him if my uncle Mordecai hadn't seen him from the house and took down his rifle. It was a terrible sort of shot to have to try, with that Indian hugging the boy like that, and Mordecai was still something of a boy himself. But he had to do something, and he aimed at a little shiny moon trinket on the Indian's chest, and by jings if he didn't send the ball punching right through it. That Indian fell down dead, my pa ran home to grow up and marry my mother, and here I am today telling you all about it.”

Cage had heard Lincoln tell the story several times before. It was not meant to be a funny story, of course, but he had worked it over with the same consideration he brought to his extended jokes, raising the pitch of his voice in some places, pausing for dramatic effect in others, carefully gauging his audience to make sure he was following the right narrative rhythm. But tonight he told it flatly, almost disinterestedly, with a kind of rote craftsmanship that allowed his mind to be elsewhere, on what exactly was going on with Matilda Edwards and Joshua Speed. As a result the guests in the Hardin parlor did not quite know how to react, whether to be horrified by the account of the attack or amused by the droll way Lincoln credited it for his own existence. So there was not much reaction at all
,
just a gradual change of subject until, around midnight, the party broke up and the guests drifted upstairs to their beds.

Cage and Lincoln and Speed were all sharing an attic room with a slanted ceiling. Lincoln wasted no time in anxiously quizzing Speed as he tried to clean his teeth at the washbowl.

“What were you talking to Matilda about?”

“Nothing. It doesn't matter.”

“Were you making love to her?”

“I was trying.”

“What did she say?”

“Good Christ, Lincoln, let me alone. She doesn't want me. She doesn't want anybody. She's in love with Newton Strong.”

“She told you that?”

“No, but she kept bringing him up. ‘My good friend, Mr. Strong.' ‘Mr. Strong is as good as his name.' ‘Oh, you're so funny, Mr. Speed. I think you and Mr. Strong must be the funniest people in Illinois.' She knows exactly what she's doing, I'll give her credit for that. She draws you in, and draws you in, and then when you're finally close enough she looks at you as if it was the strangest idea in the world that there could possibly be anything between you. I think she's one of those women who gets satisfaction out of watching a man lay himself bare in front of her. She's got a watchmaker's curiosity about what's going on inside us.”

“She's not as cold as that,” Lincoln declared. “She can't be. You can see it in her eyes.”

Poor naive Lincoln, Speed's look said. He'd just had his heart broken, so it was natural he would be cynical, but he'd had far more experience with women than Lincoln and was able to understand that great beauty was not necessarily the outward manifestation of a pure soul.

“Why don't you have a try at her, then?” Speed said. “Throw Mary over and go after Matilda. You won't be in my way.”

“I can't throw Mary over. I tried that once. I won't do that to her again.”

“Well, then, what's the point of worrying about it? You're stuck fast. Let's all get Matilda Edwards out of our minds and go to sleep.”

The Christmas sky the next morning was clear. The mercury sat at just over twenty degrees, but there was no wind to draw it down farther. The stable cold did little to discourage the citizens of Jacksonville from rushing outside to celebrate Christmas. The shops were all open and the streets were crowded with rowdy wassailers and revelers. Crackers were firing everywhere and callithumpian bands assaulted the air with raucous music.

Cage had had his own bed in the Hardins' comfortable attic room but he had slept fitfully, aware of Lincoln lying awake all night in the double bed he was sharing with Speed on the other side of the room. And Lincoln's ragged mood was still glaringly obvious this morning, as the members of the Springfield contingent wove in and out of the shops, gossiping and laughing and buying trinkets for one another. Walking beside Mary, Lincoln craned his neck to keep sight of Matilda, who seemed to be everywhere at once, running from one shop window to the next and joining in the singing of the high-spirited wassailers she met along the way.

Cage broke away from the main group to slip into a bookshop, and when he came out ten minutes later he caught sight of Lincoln and Mary standing alone at the end of the street, so wrapped up in an argument that they seemed unaware of the Jacksonville Christmas crowd streaming past. Cage could not make out much of what they were saying—or, rather, what Mary was saying, because Lincoln just stood there not meeting her eyes, nodding his head in guilt-stricken agreement: “So obvious”…“no idea of the humiliation it causes me”…“well then what did you suppose you were saying?”

Mary's face was red under her bonnet and she appeared to be on the verge of lashing out with her gloved hand to strike Lincoln across the face. Afraid that one of them might look his way and draw him into an argument that ought to be private, Cage retreated back into the shop and occupied himself by browsing through a new book about Hungary.

When he went outside again they were no longer there, but they rejoined the coterie later at the Hardins' house. Judging by the stiffness they kept between themselves, they had not reconciled, but had resigned themselves to another few days of carefully orchestrated civility. By the end of the week, when the weather was beginning to set in, Cage and Speed and Lincoln saddled their horses and said goodbye to their hosts. They were anxious to get back to work before the arctic force of an Illinois winter trapped them in Jacksonville. Mary and Matilda and the others would stay with the Hardins until after the new year.

The three friends rode in silence for much of the way, a silence imposed by Lincoln's incessant brooding.

“Goddammit!” Speed blurted out at last. “You have to get yourself away from that woman somehow. Look how miserable she's making you.”

“She's not the one making me miserable. It's me that's doing so, my own inconstant nature. I'm unworthy of Molly, that's the truth of the matter. Her powers of observation are very great and she sees me pining after Matilda.”

“That doesn't require great powers of observation,” Cage said.

“Nevertheless, it hurts her to see it. I've wronged her. I have to put thoughts of Matilda and every other woman aside and do my best not to wound Molly anymore.”

Having been spurned by Matilda, Speed was not in the most resilient of moods himself, but he joined Cage in trying to convince Lincoln that he had a very confused attitude toward Mary Todd. The expectation of happiness, they argued, instead of merely the desire not to wound, should be the true foundation of a marriage.

“No,” Lincoln said, “honor is the foundation of marriage, as it is the foundation of every other good thing. I've pledged myself to Molly, and the side of my character that's trying to withdraw from that pledge is a very poor fellow and I won't have him around.”

Lincoln declared that he felt better now that the matter was settled for all time. He would abide by the demands of his conscience, which were completely congruent with the desires of the woman who loved him, and whom he must love in return without distraction or regret. It was a punishing sort of resolution to make, but it buoyed him nevertheless to make it, and his attitude in the saddle gradually changed from a forlorn slump to a more or less upright posture. There was some liveliness in his voice again, a fatalistic cheerfulness. He even erupted into a humorous story that neither Cage nor Speed had heard before, about a heartless lawyer who, in payment for defending a farmer in a murder charge, had demanded every piece of his client's property, from his cabin to his very chickens.

“It might have been worth it to the farmer if the lawyer had saved his life, but he was as incompetent as he was greedy, and the jury sent his man to hang. Well, that wasn't even the end of it, because the lawyer's fee included the dead man's body, which he promptly sold to a team of unscrupulous physicians. The lawyer's only request was that he be allowed to watch while they cut him up. While they were stripping the skin off the poor dead man, one of the physicians asked the lawyer why in the world he would want to witness the procedure. ‘Well,' said the lawyer, ‘because it's a rare thing in my profession to have the pleasure of seeing my client skinned twice.' ”

Lincoln laughed as heartily as he ever had, great gusts of condensation erupting from his mouth into the cold air. Speed, thinking Lincoln was revived enough to bear the news, took the occasion to mention that he was moving to Kentucky. In an instant all of the joviality that Lincoln had been fighting to recover was gone. Under the brim of his hat his eyes went black with despair. His expression was as blank as a post.