A Friend of Mr. Lincoln (40 page)

Lincoln, thinking ahead, had brought his portable writing desk along with his broadswords. The three men verbally crafted the document as Cage wrote it out. Then he and Ash presented it to Hardin, who presented it to Whiteside and Rhodes. From the two friends of Shields came grudging assent. Disappointed assent, Cage was sure. Rhodes, in particular, had wanted to witness a fight.

“I suppose you think the business between you and me has come to an end as well,” Rhodes said to Cage, before he could even join Ash in delivering the final news to Lincoln.

“There's no business between you and me, Rhodes. As I recall we had an exchange of insults. Would you like me to apologize for mine? I do so—with whatever degree of abjectitude you think is owed to you. As far as your insults to me, I don't care about them and won't bother myself with ever thinking of them again. Or of you.”

“I'll see to it that you'll have occasion to think of me,” Rhodes sputtered. And then, because he could apparently think of nothing else to do, he poked Cage in the shoulder with his stubby forefinger—hard enough, it was later apparent, to cause a bruise. Then he pivoted on the ball of one of his muddy boots and walked back to his corner.

Hardin had witnessed this, and strode over to Cage to shake his hand. “You handled that well. It's important for at least somebody in a dueling party to keep his temper, otherwise you can end up with all sorts of disorganized mayhem. And I thank you for alerting me in the first place. Sometimes I wonder if Lincoln has any sense at all.”

“You may have saved my life today,” Lincoln said to Cage as he slipped his coat back on and they carried the unbloodied broadswords to the boat. “I don't know what I would have done if I'd stepped into that box with him, or what he would have done to me. I'm spent, Cage. I'm grateful and I'm spent.”

“Well, sit in the boat and ponder how close you came to disaster and Ash and I will row you back across to Illinois.”

Shields and Whiteside and Rhodes had already left the shore, and Lincoln watched them pull away with a drained, disappointed expression. “I was hoping Jim would wait around to shake hands with me.”

Cage and Ash were about to take their seats at the oars when Lincoln abruptly shooed them away. “If I'm not going to slice Jim Shields in two I need to do something with my arms. Let me do the rowing. The least I owe you gentlemen is a little sweat.”

The disappointed spectators on the island had all drifted back to their farms, or embarked in their own boats toward Alton. Cage pushed their vessel off as Lincoln grabbed the oars and stroked forward
,
joining the ragged flotilla headed across the Mississippi. Shields's boat was only a few hundred feet ahead, Whiteside and Rhodes at the oars, Shields hunched gloomily in the stern.

“Watch this,” Lincoln said. “I'm going to pass them.”

He rowed harder, his hands gripping the handles of the oars and his great arms drawing them back in a powerful rhythmic stroke. Cage felt the boat accelerate, saw the sudden wake behind them in the muddy, swirling water. Up ahead, Whiteside and Rhodes saw the boat coming and pulled harder at their own oars, but the two of them combined could not match Lincoln's physical strength nor even comprehend the obsessive determination that was now propelling him. He drove the blades of the oars deep into the water, pulling them through with a force and mechanical will that reminded Cage of the churning paddle wheel of the
Lebanon.
Sweat was pouring down from the brim of his hat and he had to shake his head to fling it out of his eyes, but he did so without missing a stroke.

Up ahead, Shields was watching Lincoln come on, staring at the back of his head with glowering confusion. Lincoln glanced over his shoulder, but only to gauge how much he was gaining, not yet to meet Shields's eyes. He dug deep for four or five strokes and when finally the two vessels were alongside each other he stopped rowing and did his best to regulate his breath and compose his expression. He smiled at Shields and casually said, as if they were passing on the street and there had never been any unpleasantness between them, “Afternoon
,
Jim.”

Shields recognized that he must hold on to his self-possession or he would be humiliated beyond endurance yet again. He had no choice but to return Lincoln's greeting. He responded with a determinedly neutral nod. Lincoln nodded back and plunged the oars again. He kept driving for the Illinois side of the river, where crowds of onlookers were still waiting to find out what the result of the duel had been.

“I
F IT WERE NOT FOR THE
…for the
gift
of marriage,” John Hardin mused as he stood in front of Martinette Hardin's wedding guests, a glass of champagne in his hand, “what would I be? What would any of us be?”

As he spoke, he rested his hand on the shoulder of Alex McKee, the young lawyer who had just married his sister. Bride and groom sat at the head of one of four long tables set up in the yard next to the Hardins' house, tables lit by candelabras and decorated by bouquets of chrysanthemums, set with gleaming china plates and decanters and bottles, presided over by vigilant waiters in livery, some of them free black men hired for the occasion, others the indentured servants of the Hardin household.

Hardin reminisced about his first term in the assembly, back when the legislature was still meeting in Vandalia. The road from his home here in Jacksonville to the capital was little more than a buffalo track, the lodging in Vandalia was miserable, the food inedible, the winter storms so wild and biting that he could not even get to the post office to receive a desperately anticipated letter from his wife.

“Party spirit ran high in Vandalia, as Mr. Lincoln and some of the rest of you can attest.” He tilted his glass in the direction of Lincoln, seated at the next table over. Lincoln nodded in nostalgic confirmation. He looked almost serene, almost handsome, in the candlelight of a still September night, only five days removed from his near duel with James Shields. “We were not wanting in passion, in the fervent belief that we could make our beloved state of Illinois a paradise on earth for its citizens. But, for me, beneath the passion and the excitement there was a deep dark pit. It was the pit of loneliness. I had the hypo, ladies and gentlemen. I had the blues. I missed my wife. I had the crushing sense that to be separated from her was not just an inconvenience, but a betrayal of all that was natural and all that was ordained by God. I realized during that season in Vandalia that a day spent apart from my Sarah was a day subtracted from life itself.”

He went on, eloquently, a little tiresomely, praising the institution of marriage, its essential role in taming the wild individual beasts that we all are in danger of reverting to. Without marriage the world would still be populated, but only by the careless, loveless, undisciplined offspring of isolated men and women. It would be a wilderness, every man at his own fire, fearing the dark, shivering from the cold.

“So let us drink in thanksgiving,” he said, finally holding up his glass, “that Martinette and Alex have found, in each other, a warm hearth to sit beside, a new life to share. May their love light the way as they walk hand in hand into the future they have begun to make.”

The guests drank to the bride and groom. The women were in tears from Hardin's speech, some of the men too. Mary Todd was there, warm tears running unabashedly down her cheeks as she applauded Hardin's sentiments. The Hardins had been careful not to seat her at the same table as Lincoln, whom she had not seen in over a year. However, Cage had found his own place card next to hers. As moving as Hardin's toast had been, she was desperate for the testimonials to be over so that she could find out about the duel firsthand from Cage.

After Hardin's toast, soup bowls were set before them in a fluid, coordinated rush by the servants. Mary absentmindedly stirred the clear broth with her spoon and ignored the people around her as she bore in on Cage with her questions. Had it been for real or was Lincoln merely toying with Shields's pomposity? Had he really chosen swords? How close a thing had it been?

“Closer than I would have liked,” Cage said. “And I hope closer than you would have liked as well.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you were provoking Shields too, weren't you? With that poem in the paper?”

“Julia and I were just having fun!”

“That may be, but the result was to send Shields further over the edge. You almost got Lincoln killed.”

Now her eyes were welling again. She dabbed at them with her dinner napkin and looked around at her neighbors, smiling at them in a way to leave the impression she was still emotionally affected by John Hardin's charming remarks on marriage. But Cage knew that they were tears of remorse and confusion.

“Am I really such a horrid person?” she whispered when she turned to face him again. She was a woman of appealing appearance who on this night looked stunning, her skin as luminous as marble in the candlelight, a silver necklace fastened at her throat in a way whose suggestiveness he could not logically interpret. It was as if she had put it there only to signal that it should be removed, that everything she wore was only for the purpose of making you understand that there was bare skin beneath it. Though she carried extra weight throughout the area of her bodice and her shoulders, it only added to the overall impression of lightness conveyed by her correct posture. Her neck was slender, her face full, with as yet only the teasing suggestion of a double chin.

“You're not horrid,” Cage of course had to say. “But what you did was serious business, even if it seemed like fun at the time.”

She nodded as she looked down at her soup, admitting he was right, willing to be chastened. She looked again in Lincoln's direction. Someone on her opposite side opened his mouth to talk to her but she pretended she didn't notice and turned back to Cage.

“He looks different. Not as sad and spindly as the last time I saw him. Having me out of his life must agree with him.”

“It agrees with you too. You look splendid.”

“Thank you, but I'm miserable.”

“Why?”

She shrugged as if it were a matter of no importance. “What do you think he'll do next? Run for Stuart's seat in Congress? Run for governor? People are talking about that.”

“Maybe he'll just content himself with practicing law with Logan.”

“You don't believe that. Lincoln's not the sort to ‘content himself' with anything. Neither are you. Neither am I.”

The servants swept in once more to remove their soup bowls. The groom was standing now at the head of the main table, offering his own toast in the pause before the delivery of the main course. He was thanking the Hardins for their generosity, thanking the guests for their friendship, thanking God for creating the woman who was now—unbelievable as it seemed to him, undeserving as he was of such good fortune—his bride forevermore.

He was almost sobbing with happiness when he finished. As Cage applauded along with the other guests, his eyes were on the bride and groom but he could feel, at his side, the directed intensity of Mary Todd's emotions. At twenty-three, she was half a dozen years older than Martinette, half a dozen years overdue in discovering her own happiness, her own destiny. There had been other suitors besides Lincoln but no one else, apparently, who had captured her imagination with comparable strength. The fact that he was awkward, that he was uncultured and half-educated, unstoppable and ungovernable, bursting like a spring out of the rocky ground of his beginnings—all this had spoken to a young woman who had been reared among, and bored by, young men of unsurprising polish and promise. It made sense that she would have heedlessly joined in the attacks on James Shields by writing her own satiric verse. Like Abraham Lincoln, she had a nervous need to be at the center of whatever was happening.

After dinner the reception drifted back into the Hardins' main parlor, where the ceremony had taken place and where all the chairs that had been set down were now taken up for dancing. There were new window drapes of sea-foam green, the same shade as the bride's wedding dress, and the color scheme was repeated—subtly but detectably—in the bouquets of artificial flowers and in the pastoral painting on the fireboard.

“Well, you last saw the house in utter disarray,” Sarah Hardin told Cage as they stood in front of the mantel. “I hope you weren't horrified. But as you see, we did manage to put it back together somewhat.”

“It's a beautiful house, and a magnificent setting for this occasion,” Cage told her. “It's a perfect wedding.”

“It wouldn't have been, if you hadn't come here to warn John. We would either have been mourning Mr. Lincoln or pretending to mourn Mr. Shields.”

As he talked to Mrs. Hardin, Cage faced the reflection in the pier glass behind her. Across the room he saw Mary Todd glide up to Lincoln and smile hello, the first communication that had passed between them since he had read her note releasing him from the obligation to love her. His face was frozen for a moment in uncertainty, and then at something she said he relaxed. Another moment and they were laughing—no doubt at James Shields and his inflated self-regard. When Mrs. Hardin was called away to deal with some emergency involving the wedding cake, Cage turned away from the pier glass and started to walk across the room to where Lincoln and Mary were standing. He felt a pressing sense of urgency that was not so different from the need to intercede in the duel with Shields. If they got back together, if Lincoln fell into the same black sea of despair as he had before, he might well end up just as dead as if his neck had been sliced through with a broadsword.

But he stopped before he reached them. What was he planning to do, separate them with his own hands? He would offer Abraham Lincoln his advice if he asked for it but by God he would not be his guardian. He watched Lincoln staring down at Mary with the same look on his face that had been there before. Cage thought his friend was partly afraid of Mary but hopelessly intrigued by her—drawn to her greater knowledge and guile, to the radiant beauty that she seemed capable of turning on and off like the pulsing bioluminescence of a sea creature. Cage watched them with all the clinical distance he could muster, then turned away, and saw their reflection again as they left the party behind and walked together out the front door of the Hardin mansion.

“You might have told me you were part of this dueling nonsense,” Ellie said to Cage when he came back to Springfield. They were once again in his rooms, but she was fully and prohibitively dressed, armored in her whalebone corset and tightly coiffed hair. She had come not for lovemaking but to deliver a grievance. “It might have occurred to you to consider my situation.”

“I don't know what situation you're talking about.”

“I'm your business partner! If you'd been killed, there might have been probate, there might have been all sorts of complications that would have been very bad for my livelihood.”

“I was never going to be killed, Ellie. I was only his second—his third, really.”

“Well, don't seconds and thirds shoot each other in duels all the time? It's no more unthinkable than the principals killing each other over some stupid point of honor that nobody even cares about.”

“Things were moving in a hurry. There wasn't time to tell you.”

“There was time. You didn't want to tell me. You didn't care to hear my opinion.”

“You're right. I didn't care to and I wasn't obliged to. After all, you aren't my wife. We have our own spheres and we do as we like—isn't that what we've been so careful to arrange?”

He stared at her from his chair, confident that he had made a point, feeling satisfaction in his momentary dominance of the argument, though still wishing an argument had not taken place. After his absence of more than a week, his lodgings appeared subtly unfamiliar to him: the bed and bookcases and pictures all in the same place, but changed in size or alignment or something by perhaps one degree, the way his house had looked to him as a child once when he had returned after a summer's absence and had grown perhaps an inch—everything the same but his perspective unsettlingly altered. Now he realized that that crucial one degree of difference applied as well to the woman standing before him in her salmon-colored dress, a striped ribbon at her neckline, a cameo bracelet on her wrist. Who was she? Even at moments like this, when they were at a defiant impasse over an imagined breach of their loveless contract, he was still faint with desire for her. But he was still picturing Martinette Hardin's wedding, the tears of joy on the faces of the bride and groom and guests. A contract was not the same as a union, the hunger he felt for Ellie was a different thing than love.