A Friend of Mr. Lincoln (34 page)

“Your Honor,” Jones said while Lincoln opened the book to the marked page, “this case is supposed to be about personal property, not geography.”

“That may be so, Mr. Jones,” Treat said. “But I'm sort of interested in where Mr. Lincoln's wandering mind is going to lead us next.”

“I appreciate your curiosity, Your Honor,” Lincoln said as he walked over to the witness chair with his opened book.

“As you can see from this map, Mr. Tuttle, Madagascar has the honor of sharing the Indian Ocean with the island of Zanzibar. But the hand of the Creator, aided I suspect by certain influences of nature, has given them a different shape. Do you see what I mean? Would you say that one of these islands sort of strays to the left, while the other sort of strays to the right?”

“I will grant you that observation, sir.”

“Thank you. And in your opinion does Madagascar stray to the left or to the right?”

“To the right.”

“And what about Zanzibar?”

“Zanzibar, according to your philosophy, would be a leftward sort of island.”

Lincoln took the atlas from the witness and showed it to Treat and to Jones. He said that he hoped His Honor would demonstrate the same courtesy to him as he had shown to Mr. Jones by allowing his client to once more reveal to the court her birthmark. As soon as Treat had given a weary nod, Cordelia rose and approached the bench and once again slipped down the shoulder of her dress while all three men stared at her distinguishing mark.

“Now if this birthmark island were to be said to lean one way or the other,” Lincoln asked Tuttle, “which would it be?”

“Oh, for God's sake!” Jones said.

Treat had the trace of a smile on his face as he ordered the witness to answer.

“It would lean to the left,” Tuttle said begrudgingly.

“Like Zanzibar?” Lincoln asked.

“They look almost the same. And they're both in the same place. Mr. Etheridge was just—”

“Would you please do me the courtesy of answering my question, Mr. Tuttle? Does this birthmark look more like Madagascar or like Zanzibar?”

“Zanzibar, but if you're going to—”

Lincoln cut off the witness with an expression of sincere thanks for his cooperation and a wish for his safe return home to Crittenden County.

His closing argument to the judge was more passionate than Cage would have predicted after the almost absurd wrangling over the shape of two islands on the other side of the world.

“It's possible, Your Honor,” he said, “that you don't share my fascination with whether a birthmark might be shaped like Madagascar or like Zanzibar. You might think it pedantic of me to quibble over such a thing. But doesn't the potential loss of a fellow human being's freedom demand as close a scrutiny as can be brought to the case?

“As you know
,
Judge, and as some of the people in this courtroom know, I used to be a surveyor. I can assure you that in that profession the very shape of a thing has a critical bearing. Had I ever misjudged the boundaries of a claim or the location of a town site by even the smallest amount, that one mistake could have led to profound consequences, to endless legal battles or perhaps an out-and-out blood feud between warring neighbors.

“And in this case, I know that we can all agree that we're discussing something far greater than a mere property claim. Can the configuration of an island be judged a trivial detail when a woman's life is at stake, any more than when fixing a boundary a few feet one way or the other can be judged trivial? But not all the matters we've been discussing are so small. There is, for example, the looming absence of so essential a document as a bill of sale. Wouldn't a man who had taken on the awesome burden of claiming ownership of another's life at least have a receipt to show for it? Would Illinois, a free state, allow the travesty of a woman being sent into slavery without any papers whatsoever?

“The burden of proof, as you well know, Your Honor, rests squarely with the claimant. A human person in Illinois was presumed to be a free person unless proven otherwise. This was established by Article Six of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, and it was upheld just this past December by the Illinois Supreme Court in
Kinney v. Cook.
Judge, you've seen the marks on this poor woman's back. Could it be on the basis of these scars, these hideous and inhuman scars, and on nothing else, that you are prepared to send her back across the Ohio and into the house of the man who claimed to own her and who meant to prove that he owned her not by offering a document as civilized men do, but by the insult of presenting instead the evidence of his own cruelty and indifference to her well-being?”

There was a passion in Lincoln's tone that seemed to take him by surprise even as he was speaking his summation. He had, Cage thought, meant to make a coolly logical argument, but the image of Cordelia's scarred back was in everyone's mind and it had to be in Lincoln's as well. His voice almost cracked as he concluded, and the courtroom audience was on his side; indeed, half of them were on their feet, calling out for the judge to let the girl go.

Probably as a means of putting an end to the outburst, Treat announced he would go into his chambers and mull over the evidence. In the interval, both Jones and Lincoln left the courtroom as well, to consult with other clients about other cases. Cordelia remained seated at the defendant's table, looking straight ahead, staring at the empty judge's bench. Ellie left Cage's side and walked up to sit next to her and whisper a few reassuring words. If it was a violation of court protocol, no one stopped her. In a moment she walked back and took her seat beside Cage again, this time touching and squeezing his arm.

“She's frightened,” Ellie said, glancing over at the self-possessed Mr. Tuttle, who was reading the newspaper in the crowded courtroom as if he had no concern in all the world, and unaware of the hostile stares directed at his back by some of the rustling spectators in the courtroom.

Fifteen minutes later, Lincoln and Jones returned. Lincoln took his seat next to Cordelia, who was still sitting so rigidly and silently it might have appeared to a stranger that she had no real interest in the outcome. Then the judge returned and the murmuring courtroom audience grew quiet.

“I hereby grant the writ of habeas corpus,” Treat said without any dramatic preamble and with a matter-of-fact inflection. He gave an equally undramatic rap of his gavel and turned to Cordelia. “You're free to go.”

The courtroom broke into cheers. Lincoln and Jones stood up, cordially shook hands, and prepared to get on with the next case. Zephaniah Tuttle left the court looking perfectly unruffled but without speaking a word to anyone on his way out. Cordelia stood, wiping tears out of her eyes, quaking a little from relief. Lincoln patted her on the shoulder and the girl, forgetting for a moment all boundaries of race and propriety, leaned forward and flung her arms around his shapeless frame. Ellie, who was wiping a grudging tear or two from her own eyes, rushed forward and gripped one of his great hands in both of hers in gratitude.

“That was well done,” Cage said. “Thank you, Lincoln.”

He discreetly handed him his twenty dollars, and Lincoln was unembarrassed to take it. “Well, it wasn't a sure thing,” he said, as he slipped the money into the pocket of his waistcoat, “but we had some law on our side—not all of it, but enough to make a meal. But listen to me, Cage. That girl is free now, but unless she's got a certificate to show to the next sheriff that takes her in, she might not slide out again.”

A certificate of freedom cost a thousand dollars, not counting the legal fees that would doubtlessly be needed to acquire it. Cage pondered the limits of his magnanimity as he and Ellie and Cordelia rode home that afternoon from Tremont. The Black Laws discouraged Negroes from riding in public conveyances, and so he had already invested in hiring a roomy rockaway coach and driver to take them to Springfield. Ellie somehow managed to sleep as the coach made its lurching way back over the Mackinaw ford and across the infinity of prairie beyond. Cordelia sat upright, staring backwards, measuring off the growing distance between her and the Tazewell County jail. Though it was a warm April day she drew her shawl tighter around her shoulders as if to hold her shaken self together. Her eyes were open, almost unblinking. She looked like someone who had not slept in a long time and still did not dare to surrender consciousness. Cage did his best to reassure her that her ordeal was over, and she nodded in gratitude at his attempt, but both of them knew nothing short of a certificate of freedom could guard against its happening again.

Lincoln and the rest of the court had remained in Tazewell, where they would take care of business for a week or so before packing up and moving on again to all the seven other county seats on the circuit, not returning to Springfield until months later. A part of Cage wished he were still with them, as they rode wantonly across the landscape, singing songs and telling stories and arriving in the next county seat, where they would be welcomed by the souls whose fates they would determine. It struck Cage as a satisfying life, a consequential one, if you could bear the lice and the weary miles and the terrible food. Perhaps it was a life he should have chosen for himself, rich with companionship and authority. It would have felt good to set a slave free, rather than just pay another man to do so. It would have felt good to speak words that mattered unambiguously, rather than sit at a desk chasing down thoughts that had a way of eluding the very words used to describe them.

He left his door ajar that night, sensing that Ellie was feeling the same surge of triumphant energy as he was. Just after midnight she slipped into the room and under the covers of his bed and stayed there almost till dawn, neither of them sleeping, making love all night with an urgency born out of shared pride. It was one of those rare moments when she allowed him to glimpse that the careful, enticing distance she kept from him was as much a habit of mind as a defining boundary. But it was a habit of mind she was not likely to give up. She was a woman who couldn't allow herself to love him, or even bear to hear that he might love her. But maybe that was what he wanted too—the same enticing distance, the unclosed gap between the anticipatory present and the secured future. Cage had been observing Lincoln in this regard. Lincoln continually ran the risk of becoming a casualty of others' expectations. Look at the way he thrived on the circuit, hostage to no one's good opinion but his own, responsible to no one but the law and his clients. In Springfield society, though, he often seemed as helpless as a child, awkward and tentative. And in matters of love, or what he thought was supposed to be love, he was even more miserably confused than Cage himself.

“It's no mystery why people think he's so exceptional,” she murmured sleepily in the middle of the night. Her head was buried in his chest and he could feel the breath of her words against his skin. “It's because he
is
exceptional. He wasn't uncertain or confused in that courtroom at all, was he? Not like he sometimes seems. It's fun to see a man do well what he does best.”

The words were so congruent to what his own restless nighttime thoughts had been it was as if they were part of a conversation they had been having. Cage thought Lincoln had done a splendid job—and a splendid thing—in return for the twenty dollars he had been paid. But it was one thing to believe that and another to endure Ellie's uncharacteristically direct praise for a man that he could not stop thinking of as a rival.

“And I have her back,” Ellie said, as she slipped out of bed to stand naked at his washstand. He watched her arrange her hair, pull on her chemise, her stockings, a petticoat and then another. She had not worn a corset but had come into his room otherwise fully dressed and would leave that way. They could hear Mrs. Hopper and Betsy setting out the things for breakfast below, they could smell cornbread baking. Ellie would have to leave right away, with exquisite stealth. Nevertheless, he felt content—what he had with her was enough. There wasn't any more, there was no point in trying to manufacture any more. In his contentment he was about to tell her he would buy Cordelia's certificate of freedom. But before he could do so she turned to him from the mirror, her face composed and business-like.

“We need to see that this doesn't happen again,” she said. “I can't afford to lose that girl.”

“You can afford it. The business will survive. You don't want to lose her because she means something to you.”

“You say that like an accusation.”

“You hear it like one.”

She shrugged as she slipped on her delicate square-toed shoes. “In any case, she needs a certificate of freedom. It seems fair to me that you should pay the larger part of it. Eight hundred dollars. I'll pay the balance of two hundred.”

“I don't see why I should pay more than seven hundred.”

“Seven fifty.”

“All right.”

She frowned, but leaned over the bed to kiss him anyway, the tenderness and triumph of their night together still lingering. “You might have been a little more generous,” she said.

He didn't tell her that before she started to negotiate with him he had been on the verge of announcing he would pay the whole thousand dollars himself. She wanted a deal from him, not a gift. She opened the door slightly so that she could see out into the hall, and when she saw that no one was watching she walked confidently back to her room.

H
E WOKE TO THE MUSIC
of songbirds, to the scent of larkspur and sweet william, to the sound of children playing outside the windows, and—in the distance—the singing of slaves who were already long at work in the fields with their hemp hooks.

“Would you care for breakfast, Mr. Weatherby?” Oz said, magically appearing in the doorway at the very moment, it seemed, that Cage awoke. “It will be served presently.”

“Thank you. Where's Lincoln?”

“Mr. Lincoln went into town early this morning with Rose and Morocco. His toothache was considerably worse through the night and he thought he ought to have the tooth drawn at once.”

Oz was in his fifties, dignified to the point of vanity. His hair was silver and cropped close, his side-whiskers barbered to a pair of sharp darts that almost touched the sides of his mouth. His composure, vocabulary, and courtesy all seemed drawn from a play about bucolic plantation life. Cage and Lincoln were both guests in the Speed home and after two weeks neither had found a satisfactory way of relating to the captive humans who served them with such efficiency and seeming goodwill. There was no way to react to them except to do so as if they were ordinary servants. There was no point in lecturing Speed and his teeming, rambunctious family about slavery, no point in trying to take the slaves themselves aside in an attempt to win their respect by making their own discomfort known. There was nothing Cage could do other than to accept the hospitality that could not be turned away, and to silently allow this pleasant idyll to eat into his soul.

The dining room was crowded as usual when Cage came down to breakfast, almost a dozen Speed relatives gathered around the table as slaves hurried in with hot biscuits they had just taken out of the oven in the summer kitchen. Breakfast was a casual meal, unlike dinner, which was a formidable, choreographed affair at which the Speed men took nightly turns proposing a general theme for discussion—philosophy, politics, the histories of various ancient civilizations. Side conversations were frowned upon, even from the children.

Two-year-old Eliza, the daughter of Joshua's sister Susan, reached out for Cage from her mother's lap as he approached the table. “Where Giant?” she plaintively asked.

“The Giant is getting his tooth out,” Cage explained to the child. Eliza nodded her head gravely, as if she understood, but looked around for Lincoln anyway. Between the two exciting houseguests, she much preferred the Giant, who, until his painful molar had finally sent him off to his bed, had spent a good part of yesterday afternoon crouched on his back with his knees in the air balancing a squealing Eliza on the soles of his feet.

“Did the poor man sleep at all?” Susan asked Cage.

“I'd be surprised if he did. I could almost hear his tooth throbbing in the next bed.”

“Well, the doctor will draw the tooth,” Mrs. Speed said as she waved away an elderly house slave named Nanny who was offering her a platter of ham, “and I'm sure Mr. Lincoln will be returned to us in excellent condition.” Lucy Speed was Joshua's mother. She was in her fifties and had borne many children, most of whom had gravitated as adults back to the Speed plantation, where they hovered around their widowed mother with a solicitude she had no patience for. Despite all its childbearing, her body was trim and upright, and she must have had a similar resiliency of spirit, since she spoke fondly of her late husband but showed no particular interest in mourning him. She was from aristocratic Virginia stock, her family connected somehow with Thomas Jefferson.

The other Mrs. Speed in the room, Lucy Speed's daughter-in-law Emma, took her niece from Cage's lap in time for Julia Ann, the younger house slave, to fill his coffee cup. He muttered “Thank you” reflexively, but had noticed that no one else in the household was in the habit of thanking the slaves for anything. They were well-trained, well-treated, and as placidly regarded as drifting clouds.

Cage and Lincoln had been here in the bear grass land of Kentucky, at the Speed family plantation of Farmington, for two weeks. In another week they would board a steamboat for home, but already the business and politics and feuding of Springfield felt like something that was taking place not just across the Ohio but in some frenetic kingdom far across the wide Pacific. Until his toothache, Lincoln had been as content and as calm as Cage had ever seen him. The Speeds were aswim in wealth and learning and family connections. Not only had Lucy Speed known Jefferson, but Emma Speed had astonished Cage and Lincoln the night they arrived by casually mentioning that she was the niece of John Keats! But whatever pretensions they had as a family were mostly hidden, emerging only during the high-minded conversation of the dinner hour, when lines from
The Iliad
or from the letters of Cicero might sally back and forth across the stewed mutton. Cage and Lincoln had been intimidated their first night with the Speeds, seated at the long table in formal dress in front of delicate china, their hosts' faces rosy with candlelight reflected off the faceted surfaces of crystal dinnerware. And then there had been the unsettling expertise of the slaves, as they moved silently from one diner to the next, filling wineglasses, ladling out gumbo or pudding sauce. But the intimidation quickly wore off, due to the warmth of the Speed family, the various ways in which Joshua Speed's brothers and sisters and half-siblings and in-laws made them feel welcome and enlisted them in games of whist and charades and riding expeditions and shopping trips to Louisville and tickling contests with the children.

The main house was a tasteful brick mansion with two great octagonal rooms that caused the house to flare out symmetrically on either side. From its front a broad avenue ran over a picturesque limestone bridge and out past the hemp fields to the Bardstown turnpike. There were gardens behind the house and a commodious carriage house and too many scattered outbuildings to count—any one of which, Lincoln had told Cage, was bigger than the log houses he had lived in when he was a boy in Kentucky and Indiana. An old stable had been converted into a kind of summer house, and that was where Cage had spent a good deal of his time in the last two weeks, working on his manuscript with all thoughts of business shut out of his head. Speed had in fact cleaned the place out for him for just this purpose, assuring him that his family would not think him unsocial for wanting to spend time alone with his work. The rule for guests at Farmington was that they be happy and productive, or happy and indolent if that was their preference.

Lincoln for his part was often out with Speed, watching the slaves harvest the hemp or flail the stalks for their seeds. He had a fascination with machinery and took joy in watching the fibers as they were run through hackles and ropewalks and jack screws to turn them into cordage and bagging. To Cage's mind, Lincoln had a way of ignoring the slaves as they bent over with their hemp hooks to cut down the stalks in a choking cloud of dust and pollen. Perhaps to him such backbreaking labor in the full force of the late-summer sun was nothing to be remarked upon. It was the sort of work he had grown up doing, the crushing physical and spiritual burden that had caused him to leave his luckless father's homestead and try to make his living any other way. But for Cage the problem of how much active slavery he could observe at close range without somehow speaking up about it was growing acute. He saw no good that could come out of raising the issue with his hosts. Like Joshua Speed, they had all been born into this arrangement and seemed to believe that their benign stewardship over their own slaves excused them from any moral worry about the institution itself. Once or twice he tried to share his discomfort with Lincoln, but Lincoln only said he was uncomfortable too and shrugged his narrow shoulders and went back into the house to wrestle with the children and quiz Mrs. Speed about Jefferson.

The truth was that neither Cage nor Lincoln had the will to resist the seductive force of this loving, vibrant family. The Speeds had reached out and drawn them into their circle with an openheartedness that was disorienting. It was hard for either of them to summon up a raging conscience when they had been made to feel so deeply and completely at home. Cage observed the Speed women—Mrs. Speed herself, or Emma, or Susan, or Joshua's half sister Mary—as they bustled through the house, laughing with each other, trading recipes, arranging flowers, setting aside their needlework to speak tenderly to their children. He remembered some of that feminine brightness from his own childhood, but it had been extinguished so early by the death of his mother that it felt less like an actual memory than some hazy notion of happiness he had received from a book. His father had been a warmhearted man and had done the best he could, but a widowed father and a motherless son necessarily made up a stark household. By now he could call to mind only a dream-like approximation of his mother's face. He could recall the universal maternal timbre of her voice but not its specific sound. Being in the Speed home for two weeks had plunged him for the first time into a real awareness of what he had once had, might still have had if fortune had followed a different course.

The same hunger for what might have been was visible on Lincoln's face as he played with the children or followed the women bashfully around the house. His case was worse. He had been an even lonelier boy than Cage, more brokenhearted, more betrayed by circumstance, more confused. In most respects he was an uncommonly successful man, but his success was driven less by self-confidence than by its opposite, by a howling emotional need. Here in Kentucky, amid this throng of doting women and roughhousing children, he had seized upon the normal human joys of life as if they were something he had never known existed.

Lincoln wasn't the only one absent from the breakfast table. Speed himself had failed to appear.

“He left very early this morning on horseback,” his mother said. “Even before Mr. Lincoln set out with Rose and Morocco.”

“Where did he go?”

“Oh, on a very mysterious errand,” Susan said. “We couldn't possibly tell you.” The women smiled conspiratorially at each other. Cage could have begged them for an answer but he decided to safeguard his self-respect by finishing his breakfast and then retiring once more to his makeshift office in the summer house, where he was far too aware of writing and reading in comfort while the slaves continued their labor in the hemp fields. At four o'clock in the afternoon he looked out the window and saw a wagon slowly cresting the little stone bridge on its way to the main house. Morocco was driving. He was in his mid-forties and had the most independent portfolio of any of Farmington's slaves, entrusted with crucial postal errands and occasional matters of business. He and Rose, who was twenty years younger but similarly astute, had taken Lincoln with them that morning when they drove into town to sell peaches and cider from the property's orchards.

Rose rode in the back of the wagon with the leftover produce and Lincoln swayed miserably on the seat next to Morocco. Cage walked out of the summer house to meet them. He could see from fifty yards away that Lincoln's jaw was swollen and packed with bloody wadding.

“I believe Mr. Lincoln here could do with a bit of a rest,” Morocco said to Cage.

“Your supposition is correct,” Lincoln mumbled. “The doctor and I had quite a wrestle over that tooth.”

He nodded his thanks to Morocco and Rose and walked with Cage toward the house. “I read somewhere,” he said, “that if you breathe exhilarating gas during the process you can have your tooth out with no pain at all. I sure would have welcomed a taste of that gas today, Cage.”

“Well, at least it's behind you.”

“Not so sure. There's a piece still down in there somewhere he couldn't get to, and if it starts hollering again I'll have to—”

He broke off when the front door opened and a group of solicitous women came fluttering toward him in their summer dresses. He opened his mouth in a bloody and lopsided smile and allowed them to take his arms and lead him into the house.