Mrs. Lincoln's Rival (32 page)

“As it happens, I took up the instrument only this morning.”

“So recently! You’re quite the virtuoso.”

“Thank you.”

“And to answer your question, yes, the
gentlemen
”—she gave him a look of teasing rebuke as she corrected his pejorative—“seem to be having a wonderful time.”

“They seem to feel . . . a sort of new and exhilarated life,” he said thoughtfully, with no trace of his usual sardonic wit. “They breathe more freely, as if the proclamation had freed them as well as the slaves.”

“Indeed they do,” said Kate. “It’s true that an enormous burden has been lifted from their shoulders. Many of them, especially my father, having been working for this day, or a day like it, for decades.”

John studied her. “You seem somehow freer too.”

“And why not? Am I not an abolitionist myself?”

“I’m sure that’s part of it, but you seem—” He paused, regarding her fondly but speculatively, his brow slightly furrowed. “You seem happier than when I last saw you. Unburdened somehow.”

Kate spread her hands and shrugged helplessly, although she knew very well what burden she had discarded during her time away. “Perhaps my travels reminded me of all I had waiting for me here at home, and not to take it for granted.”

He smiled, a little curious, a little skeptical. “You mean, of course, your family and your comfortable home.”

“Not at all. I was referring to a lovely bit of embroidery I had left behind in my sewing basket. I’m thrilled beyond measure to take it up again.”

John had chosen that moment to take a drink of his cider, and he nearly choked on it. “That was ill timed, Miss Chase,” he scolded, laughing and spluttering as he groped in his pocket for his handkerchief.

“On the contrary,” she said as she smiled, lifted her chin, and took his arm. “I would say it was perfectly timed.”

• • •

John came to supper the following evening, and the day after that, he and Kate went riding together. The late-September air had turned pleasantly temperate, and John’s company was even more amusing than she remembered. There was a new easiness between them, a comfortable friendship and mutual admiration that made it possible for them to tease each other about their differences, subjects they once had been obliged to avoid.

Kate had returned to a city transformed by the ongoing war. When she left Washington, it had resembled a vast army camp, but over the summer it had become one boundless, sprawling military hospital. Every morning since Antietam, steamships had brought hundreds of wounded soldiers to the Sixth Street Wharf, some disembarking on foot with bandages wrapped around their torsos or arms, others carried on stretchers, still more stumbling awkwardly on makeshift crutches. Ambulances distributed the sick and injured among the dozens of hastily organized hospitals established in converted schools, hotels, churches, clubs, and private residences. The wife of secretary of the interior, Elizabeth Smith, had transformed the second floor of the Patent Office into a hospital ward for hundreds of soldiers, and Father had told Kate that Mrs. Douglas had established a hospital in her own mansion. She was an “angel of mercy,” he had rhapsodized, so fondly that Kate had looked askance at him. He had not called on the lovely widow since Kate’s return, as far as she knew, and to her secret relief. Although Kate loved them both dearly, she did not want them to become too fond of each other.

Kate was astonished when John mentioned that Mrs. Lincoln visited the wounded soldiers almost every day. “That cannot be,” exclaimed Kate. “Does she not remain in mourning?”

“She does,” John said, “but nevertheless, shrouded in so much black crepe that you can scarcely tell there is a lady swathed within the vast acres of fabric, she fills her carriage with baskets of food, fresh fruit, and flowers, buying whatever the White House gardens cannot grow. She spends hours distributing her bounty to the wounded men.”

Kate shook her head. “This contradicts everything I’ve read in the papers.”

“Whom are you going to trust, me or some newspaperman?” he protested with a grin, and then, reconsidering, he added, “Unless you’re referring to the accounts of a certain well-known lady reporter?”

Kate nodded, for she remembered Mary Clemmer Ames’s scathing rebuke quite well, as it had provoked her righteous indignation. “While her sister-women scraped lint, sewed bandages, put on nurses’ caps and gave their all to country and death,” Mrs. Ames had written recently in the
New York Independent
, “the wife of the president spent her time in rolling to and fro between Washington and New York, intent on extravagant purchases for herself and the White House.”

“You cannot believe everything Mrs. Ames writes,” John said. “You know I would be the last person to heap praise upon the Hellcat if I was not certain she had earned it.”

“Perhaps not the
last
person,” said Kate, thinking somewhat abashedly that she might deserve that title.

“The penultimate, then. It is the absolute truth, Kate. Nearly every day Mrs. Lincoln can be found walking along the rows of bloodied, ailing men, offering them delicacies from the White House garden and kitchen with her own soft, plump hands. She sits at the bedsides of the lonely soldiers, talking with them, reading to them, helping them write letters home.”

“I had no idea.”

“I say she ought to make her rounds with a few newspaper correspondents in tow,” John remarked, bringing his horse to a halt in the spreading shade of a chestnut tree on the bank of a particularly scenic bend in the river. “She should have them take shorthand notes of all her sweet, comforting remarks to the suffering men, and their grateful replies. Nothing would raise her in the esteem of a critical public faster than that.”

“And yet she does not.” Kate pondered the enigma. “Perhaps she doesn’t want to draw attention to her visits out of concern that the curious public would flock to see her and would get in the physicians’ way. Perhaps she’s one of those who thinks it’s improper for ladies to visit the hospitals because—” She felt a faint blush rise to her cheeks. “Because the patients are so often in a state of, that is to say, in order to facilitate the tending of their injuries—”

“The patients are not appropriately attired for company?” John offered helpfully.

“Yes, thank you, that’s it.”

“I don’t think that’s the reason,” said John. “I believe she finds solace for her own grief in caring for the suffering men.”

Kate gave him an appraising look from the corner of her eye. “Careful,” she warned, nudging her mare with her heels to set her into a walk. “That sounded dangerously approving, perhaps even sympathetic.”

“Then I have expressed myself very badly indeed,” said John, feigning alarm as he urged his horse forward to catch up with her.

Kate smiled at him over her shoulder, but as she turned back around, her mirth quickly faded into puzzlement. Why would Mrs. Lincoln squander a perfect opportunity to do some politicking for her husband and polish her own oft-tarnished public image at the same time? Whenever Kate visited the hospitals—which was apparently far less often than the First Lady did, she thought with a twinge of guilt—she carefully ensured that at least one member of the press happened to hear of it before she carried her basket across the threshold.

Perhaps, she mused, Mrs. Lincoln received as her reward something more profound, more deeply fulfilling than the noisy praise of the irredeemably fickle public.

• • •

With the return of autumn, Nettie’s summer holiday came to an end. Instead of sending her back to Brook Hall, Father enrolled her in boarding school in Manhattan, where he hoped she would receive a more rigorous program of study, especially in foreign languages, and develop a better regulation of her habits. Mrs. Eastman, her previous headmistress, had said that Nettie possessed a quick and comprehensive intellect, but she was woefully lacking in self-discipline. When Father determined that a girls’ school in Manhattan would correct her of that fault, he asked Kate her opinion regarding schools. He was very much surprised when Kate recommended not her own alma mater, Miss Haines’s School, but the French and English boarding and day school of her strongest competitor, Mrs. Mary Macaulay, at Madison Avenue and Fortieth Street. If he had been able to read between the lines of her censored letters so many years ago, he would have understood why.

Kate missed her dear little sister, who at fifteen was blossoming into quite a pretty young lady, sweet and endearing, beloved by everyone. Kate wrote to her often and promised to visit her at school when she could, but the change of seasons had also ushered in the Washington social season, and so she was soon caught up in the familiar, exciting whirlwind of balls, receptions, breakfasts, trips to the Senate gallery to observe important debates, and excursions into the nearby countryside to visit the troops. The most contentious talk in the drawing rooms and parlors centered around General McClellan’s ongoing ineffectiveness in Virginia, terrible clashes between opposing armies, and the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which had stirred up resentment, in the border states especially but elsewhere in the Union too.

Father always found a receptive audience in Kate when he returned home from the Treasury Department at the end of a difficult day, and the days were all difficult. Father doggedly pursued General McClellan’s removal from the head of the Army of the Potomac, and he even had a replacement in mind: General Joseph Hooker. On the day after the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation had been published, Father and Kate had visited General Hooker in the asylum where he was recovering from an injury to the foot he had suffered at Antietam, to wish him good health, to deliver a basket of fresh fruits and flowers, and to take his measure. The general had been unable to rise from his bed to welcome them, but even reclining with his leg propped up he had made an impressive figure, tall, with wavy blond hair, blue eyes, and a high complexion. His manner was gallant with a bit of braggadocio, and he had readily criticized General McClellan when Father had asked his opinion of what had gone wrong with the Seven Days Battles.

“General,” Father had told him soberly, “if my advice had been followed, you would have commanded after the retreat to the James River, if not before.”

“If I had commanded,” General Hooker had replied stoutly, “Richmond would have been ours.”

Afterward, Father and Kate had conferred over a game of chess, and by the time Father had placed her in checkmate, they had agreed that General Hooker would make a fine replacement for General McClellan. They had both liked that he spoke as a soldier rather than an aspiring politician, and although he had struck them as less intellectually gifted than they had expected, he had seemed quick, clear, and active. “All that remains,” Father had said as they arranged the pieces on the chessboard for another game, “is to convince the president that replacing McClellan is necessary.”

Father confided in Kate so freely and enlisted her aid so often that she was caught by surprise when he did not. One afternoon he met her at the door after she returned from a ride with John Hay in the brilliant, clear autumn sunshine. “Katie, dear,” he said as she untied her bonnet, his expression pensive, “would you take a turn with me in the garden?”

Though cheerful from her pleasant outing, she was rather tired and badly in need of refreshment, but something in her father’s manner told her the conversation could not wait. So she smiled, put her bonnet back on, and took his arm.

They had not wandered far from the house when Father asked if she had heard from Governor Sprague recently. “No,” she replied, her heart leaping curiously at the sound of the name she had tried to forget, and deliberately ignored whenever it appeared in the papers. “His last letter to me came in the spring.”

“I see.” Father looked somewhat relieved, but then he halted abruptly. “Did you quarrel?”

“Not exactly.” Kate fervently hoped that her father would not connect the timing of William’s last letter to the advent of her inexplicable unhappiness. “Let’s just say that there are other gentlemen I prefer at the moment.”

Father nodded in a distracted, puzzled sort of way and resumed their stroll. “I thought perhaps he had called on you, since he has occasionally called on me, and I wondered why you had not mentioned it.”

“There was nothing to mention,” Kate replied, her curiosity rising. “I was not aware Governor Sprague came so frequently to the capital. Why has he called on you? Is he seeking your expert advice on how to run his state?”

Father allowed a small smile and patted her hand where it rested on his arm. “A bit of that, but mostly to discuss military matters, and politics in Washington.” He hesitated. “He called on me this afternoon, and he talked so incessantly that I fear the only way I could see to get rid of him was to invite him to supper.”

Kate fought back the urge to sigh. “When?”

“Tonight.”

It was just as she had suspected. “Very well. I’ll go now to speak to Addie and Mrs. Vaudry, if you haven’t already.”

“I have.” Father looked pained. “I hope I haven’t incurred their wrath, or yours.”

“Nonsense! It’s just as easy to prepare supper for three as for two. As long as he isn’t bringing along the entire First Rhode Island Regiment, the servants should not be put to any extra trouble.” A sinking feeling compelled Kate to ask, “He isn’t bringing along the entire regiment, is he?”

“He didn’t mention them.” Father halted again and turned to face her. “Katie, dear, it isn’t only because of the inconvenience that I thought this news might upset you. If there is some reason you don’t wish to see the governor, you don’t have to attend. I could tell him you are indisposed.”

“And leave you without a hostess?” Amused, she shook her head. “I’m always happy to help you entertain your friends, Father. You know that.”

“If the governor has offended you, I cannot call him my friend.”

Kate felt a flutter of worry in her chest, but she concealed it with a loving smile. “I’m happy to entertain your enemies too. In fact, I daresay that is a skill worth mastering. It is surely at least as important to be able to entertain one’s enemies well, as it is to entertain one’s friends.”