A Friend of Mr. Lincoln (38 page)

Whiteside had no option but to retreat. As soon as he was gone, Cage was sure Lincoln was going to take the letter out of his pocket again, but he did not.

“No,” Lincoln said. “I've got people waiting on me in court and more pleas to write. I'll read Shields's letter when I've done my duty by my clients and not before.”

That evening, in their room at the Franklin House, he finally pulled the letter out of his pocket and read it aloud. It referred to “articles of the most personal nature.” It was almost dark outside, but the insufferably humid heat was unabating. It seemed to feed off the waning sunlight like a night-blooming plant. Cage had thrown the window open but the air was too weighty and sodden to stir from one place to another. Lincoln lay on his back on the bed, his feet planted on the wall a few inches from its end. His coat was off and a thin ring of grimy sweat was visible around his neck.

“Shields says my articles were ‘calculated to degrade me,' ” Lincoln said, looking up from the letter. “That couldn't be farther from the truth. I have no interest in degrading anybody.”

“Read the rest of it,” Ash said.

“ ‘I will take the liberty of requiring a full, positive and absolute retraction of all offensive allusions used by you in these communications, in relation to my private character'…and cetera and cetera…‘This may prevent consequences which no one will regret more than myself. Your obedient servant
,
James Shields.' ”

He handed the letter to Cage, who went over it in silence with Ash as Lincoln continued to talk.

“He starts with a false inference. He says that I wrote ‘articles of the most personal nature.' Well, I didn't write that first letter, I only wrote the second letter, so ‘articles' plural doesn't apply.”

“That's a way out,” Cage said. “Though an extremely legalistic one.”

“I'm an extremely legalistic critter, especially when my hide is at stake. And also shouldn't I be offended that this man jumped to the assumption that I'm the author of such a scurrilous assault on his character?”

“You
are
the author.”

“Only of
one
scurrilous assault. It deeply offends me—it wounds
my
character and damages
my
reputation—to have Shields accuse me of doing it more than once.”

“This is serious,” Ash said. “It may feel like a comical situation, but it's not. Think carefully how you respond.”

“I'm thinking very carefully, Ash. You can be sure I don't care to be shot. It would do my political career real harm to be killed by such an ass as James Shields. I think the thing to do is write an answer that will puzzle his mind a little. The more time he has to spend thinking, the better the chance he'll cool off.”

He opened his portable desk, took out pen and paper, and scribbled hastily as the light disappeared. When he was finished he read his letter aloud to his friends with the same exaggerated precision Cage had seen him use in the courtroom.

“ ‘Your note of today was handed me by General Whiteside. In that note you say you have been informed that I am the author of certain articles which you deem personally abusive of you; and without stopping to inquire whether I really am the author, or to point out what is offensive in them, you demand an unqualified retraction of all that is offensive; and then proceed to hint at consequences. Now, sir, there is in this so much of assumption of facts, and so much of menace as to consequences, that I cannot submit to answer that note any further than I have, and to add, that the consequences to which I suppose you allude, would be a matter of as great regret to me as it possibly could be to you.' ”

He stared placidly at his two friends for a reaction.

“I have no idea what you're saying,” Cage told him.

“I'm saying there cannot be any talk of me retracting what I said about him until he retracts his note accusing me of doing so.”

“You've caused my brain to seize up,” Ash said.

“Good,” Lincoln said, folding the letter. “That's the intended effect.”

Whiteside and Shields were eating whortleberry pudding in the dining room of their hotel when Cage and Merritt entered the establishment with Lincoln's note. At the sight of them, Shields abruptly stood, wiped his chin with his napkin, gave his visitors a curt nod, and disappeared upstairs. The elaborate protocols of the code duello forbade him from speaking directly to the representatives of the party to whom he was intending to issue a challenge.

Whiteside made a show of scraping up the last of his pudding before reading the note. He frowned and read it again.

“What kind of reply is this?” he said.

“It's the only possible reply to such an offensive insinuation,” Ash said.

“This is the worst sort of humbug! All we're doing here is going around in circles!”

“Keep your voice down,” Cage said, noticing that the other diners in the room had shifted their attention to Whiteside's table.

“What, sir?”

“I said please keep your voice down, General. We don't want this to be a public discussion.”

“Who is this man?” Whiteside said to Ash. “Is he Lincoln's second, or are you?” He was no longer bothering with a civil, agreeable facade. His pale face had turned red with the lightning rapidity of a chameleon.

“There are no seconds,” Ash said. “As yet, no challenge has been made.”

“Well, that's because of the obfuscatory tactics of your—”

Cage interrupted him before his choleric voice could rise again. “Look,” he said, “this is very simple. The three of us can solve this without a fight. Have Mr. Shields write to Lincoln, saying he withdraws his former note. Then all he has to do is inquire in a more civil tone if Lincoln was the author of the offensive article.”

“What happens then?”

“Tempers cool.”

“Shields doesn't want his temper cooled. He wants satisfaction from a man who has grievously offended him and is offending him further with his ridiculous theatricality. Tell your man to speak plain, and decide whether he is a gentleman or not!”

L
INCOLN'S DEMAND THAT SHIELDS WITHDRAW
his original accusatory note was a rhetorical trap, and Shields knew it. He had understood that to take part in Lincoln's dance about who had insulted whom first would lead to an ever more finely calibrated correspondence that would, in the end, make his quest for justice nothing more than an eccentric and even laughable demand. The prickly state auditor had had enough. The next time Whiteside appeared at the Franklin House it was with a formal challenge in hand.

“Well, shit,” Lincoln said when Whiteside left.

“Don't accept the challenge,” Cage told him.

“He can't do that,” Ash said.

“Of course he can. Just walk away, and—”

“No, I can't walk away,” Lincoln said. “I don't live in a world where I can get away with doing that, as much as I'd like to.”

“You've got the choice of weapons,” Ash said.

“I know I do. And I need something that'll give me a chance with that little piece of shit. Broadswords.”

“Broadswords?” Ash said. “You mean to fight this duel like a medieval knight?”

“I mean to fight this duel with a weapon I can kill Jim Shields with if I need to. I've got a friend from the war days at the armory over in Jacksonville. I reckon he can spare a few broadswords.”

He went to his writing desk again and made a quick sketch: two rectangles facing each other.

“We'll have it so the two of us both have to stay in our own little boxes—say, ten feet across. I've got the longer arms by a considerable margin, and I've got a lot of practice swinging an axe.”

“Shields will see that as an unfair advantage,” Ash said.

“Well, fine, if he doesn't like it, he doesn't have to fight me.”

But Shields wasn't going to back out, and they all knew it. Lincoln wrote another letter, specifying the weapons and the fighting boxes, offering Shields one more chance to withdraw his offensive note so that a civil reconciliation could be undertaken between the parties. When Ash set off to deliver the note to Whiteside, Cage remained with Lincoln at the hotel.

“I've gotten you mixed up in something all over again,” Lincoln said.

“You certainly have.”

“Go home to Springfield. You don't have to be one of my seconds. I can find somebody else here in Tremont.”

“You won't find somebody else who wants to put a stop to this as much as I do.”

“That's true. Ash has a fighting streak in him. I don't know what it is about doctors but as a species they don't seem as peaceable as you might think. I could use a calm-natured friend on my side, but it's a lot to ask, particularly of a calm-natured friend. You sure about this?”

“I'm sure that fighting a duel with Shields is dangerous and ridiculous. But if you insist it has to happen, I'll stand by you.”

Shields made no protest to Lincoln's terms. Whiteside told Merritt that Shields was determined to fight and would arrive at the dueling ground across the Mississippi from Alton on Thursday at eleven a.m. with broadsword in hand.

The next day Lincoln and his seconds traveled to Jacksonville. They arrived at night and took a room at the Lafayette, where just before midnight a man appeared at their door carrying a blanket-wrapped bundle. Lincoln introduced him as Colonel Nail. He was the commandant of the armory, though he was dressed as a civilian and spoke in a soft voice like someone on a secret errand. He unrolled the blanket onto the bed to reveal two long, heavy, broad-bladed swords. They were well cared for, no rust, no pitting on their lethal blades.

“I had them sharpened for you,” Colonel Nail said, as Lincoln wrapped his fingers around the grip of one of the swords and lifted the weapon up in the lamplight. “Both of them the same. You could knock off a pig's head with either.”

“It's a weighty weapon, Charley,” Lincoln said to the colonel. “I got my hands on one of these a time or two during the war, but we drilled mostly with wooden swords.”

“Well, you're welcome to borrow them,” Nail said, “but I want them back. And I don't want to interfere in your business, but if somebody gets killed with one of these I don't want it known they came from the armory. I have troubles enough as it is. I won't go into them but they involve my poor wife, who is now paying the price for her habit of using scotch snuff as tooth powder.”

“A puzzling addiction,” Ash told him. “I treated a young woman just last month who was sick from eating snuff. I gave her a puke and up from her stomach came almost a full pint of it.”

Ash and Colonel Nail discussed his wife's symptoms while Lincoln continued to inspect the swords, picking up one and then the other, gauging their weight as he seemed to ponder the gravity of their use.

In the morning, Cage woke to the sound of Lincoln and Merritt sparring with the swords outside the window while the hotel's kitchen staff watched. He got up and dressed hurriedly, left the Lafayette and walked to John Hardin's house on State Street, which almost two years ago had been the site of the fateful Christmas excursion that had led to the unraveling of Lincoln's engagement to Mary. Once John Hardin heard about the duel, Cage was sure, he would find a way to use his influence to stop it. The servant who opened the door recognized him and showed him to the parlor. The last time Cage had seen this room, it had been extravagantly decorated for Christmas, with stockings hanging from the mantel and wreaths on the windows. Now it was almost bare, the carpet taken up, the curtains down, scaffolding on the walls where paint was being stripped and reapplied.

Sarah Hardin greeted him with the same warmth he remembered from that Christmas visit and apologized for the destruction. Everything was chaos, she said. Martinette's wedding was to take place here in less than a week. But of course Cage knew that, because he had written that he was coming.

“But you're here today,” she said. “I hope you didn't mistake the date. If you did, we insist that you be our guest until the wedding.”

“Thank you, but I'm only here because of some urgent business I need to discuss with your husband.”

“But John's not here. He's out of town on court business.”

Cage trusted Sarah Hardin enough to tell her what was going on. She gasped in horror and told him she would get word to her husband at once. He would certainly want to intervene in any way he could. Why, the very idea of Mr. Lincoln taking part in such a barbaric custom as a duel! And with swords!

When he got back to the hotel, Cage didn't tell Lincoln of his talk with Sarah Hardin, or of the fact that he had spent an hour in her husband's study writing letters to Baker and other friends of Lincoln who might possibly be able to intervene in time. If only Speed were not in Kentucky. He was sure that between the two of them they could talk Lincoln into making a simple apology to Shields for his incendiary parody and doing so in a way that would not compromise his standing.

But Speed was not here and the duel that had once seemed hypothetical was taking on the force of inexorability. They started out for Alton that afternoon and put up for the night in a third-rate hotel in Carrolton. They would rise early in the morning in order to reach Alton and cross the Mississippi to the dueling ground on the Missouri side by midmorning.

It would have been difficult for Cage to sleep in any case, but the night was miserably hot and still, the atmosphere weighing so heavily upon the earth that it was an exertion just to draw breath. He lay on the sweat-soaked mattress next to Lincoln staring at the two broadswords lying on the table, their blades like the sheen of a lake upon which the moonlight shone and shifted.

Ash Merritt was asleep on the room's other bed, a narrow mattress resting on a frame built into the wall. Above it hung a faded portrait of George Washington. Ash was deep into an apparently untroubled sleep, snoring in a progressive sequence that made Cage think of a man climbing an endless stairway. It seemed impossible that there could actually be a duel tomorrow, impossible and insane.

In the middle of this endless, oppressive night, Cage wrestled with his own complicity. There was the paralyzing dread of what was to come tomorrow, but there were also bright unbidden flashes of expectation. It was a feeling he remembered from the Black Hawk War, from the day he had ridden out on that scouting mission from Kellogg's Grove—a watery knowledge that something horrible was likely to happen, but that to survive would mean a life transformed. His logical mind had convinced him that there was little likelihood of anything good resulting from tomorrow's event. But if Lincoln escaped getting killed, and escaped killing Shields in the process, there might be scraps of political advantage. Dueling was a gentlemen's ritual. Defending an obscure point of honor at peril of his life might reinforce the point that Abraham Lincoln was not satisfied with his origins, that he meant to keep rising. If Cage managed to avoid arrest, if he was spared the sight of his friend being cleaved in two by a broadsword, he might come out of the affair with a sense of public honor that would help mask the private shame he felt at having agreed to be part of a humiliating and lethal charade.

Merritt's snoring kept growing in volume, searching for a crescendo. There was a clock in the hall ticking away, but Cage didn't know what time it was. Three in the morning, maybe.

“Are you awake?” Lincoln whispered next to him. “Have you been awake all this time?”

“Yes.”

“Well, why didn't you say anything? I've only been lying here pretending to sleep because I didn't want to wake you.”

They got out of bed and dressed and crept out of the room, closing the door carefully behind them and then leaving the hotel. They walked without speaking until they came to a rotting pier at the edge of a creek. They sat down and stared at the unmoving surface of the water.

“I believe there's a piece of cornbread in my pocket,” Lincoln said. “Want some?”

Cage shook his head. He knew Lincoln had barely eaten all day and maybe if he could get something down now it might clear his head enough to call off the fight.

“I miss my flatboat days a little,” Lincoln said, chewing and looking out at the river. “Not enough to go back to them. A river looks pretty at night but the snags and perils are legion.”

He threw some crumbs out onto the surface of the water but no fish rose to claim them.

“The thing that plagues my mind the most,” he said, “is that I might accidentally split Shields's head in two. I wish I had never written that damned letter in the paper. He had every right to be agitated about it.”

“Why can't you just tell him that?”

“Because the machine I've caught myself up in doesn't seem to go in reverse.”

Lincoln decided to take off his boots and his socks and lower his great pale feet into the water. He stared at them in fascination, as though he had never noticed them before and now realized he might see them no longer. “It's funny that Molly got herself mixed up in all this. I wonder why.”

“I don't know, but her poem made the situation much worse. The last thing Shields needed was a fresh humiliation.”

“Well, she's got high spirits and she likes to be in the middle of things. I suppose she'd fight a duel with Shields if she could. She'd be formidable with a broadsword in her hand.”

“An artfully worded apology,” Cage said, not wanting to think about Mary Todd just now. “A simple retraction—I still don't see what in God's name is wrong with that. Let me write a letter and you can—”

“No, it's gone too far. There's too fine a line between apologizing and backing down. It won't matter who I'm asking to vote for me next, some ruffle-shirted grandee or a poor sucker slopping hogs all day, once they know I walked away from a fight they won't need to ask any more questions. The thing to do is for me to go through with it and do my best to disarm him somehow.”