A Friend of Mr. Lincoln (18 page)

He set down his glass and lit a cigar and released a cloud of smoke, adding to the deadly brew of smells already circulating in the room.

“Well, Truett's dead, too, for that matter,” Reed continued. “As soon as they find him. That was as clear a case of outright murder as I've ever seen.”

Cage wasn't feeling well. He was light-headed and his hands were shaking and he had to master the need to vomit. Witnessing a man being shot did not have the same steadying effect on him as it had on Reed. It made him revisit the horrors of the Black Hawk War—the face of that Indian who had tried to kill him on their retreat from the prairie, Bob Zanger's butchered body, the emaciated warrior he had shot out of a tree at Bad Axe. These memories resided in his mind like a sepsis. Most of the time the infection was barely detectable, but now it swelled malignantly, the sense that human life was without value or purpose, that it was lived in tedium and ended in pain and stink.

Reed wanted to resume the conversation they had been having when Truett walked into the room. If they didn't open a tallow and soap business in Springfield someone else would. If Cage would be his partner, provide some working capital, Reed would—

Cage stood up and excused himself. He said they would talk later when they were not so distracted by the evening's excitement. On the way out of the hotel he encountered Lincoln hurrying along the street.

“Is it true? Henry Truett shot Early?”

“It's true.”

“Just shot him? In cold blood?”

“Just walked right in and shot him.”

“How bad off is he?”

“Pretty bad, I think. We carried him over to Ash's.”

“Well, I'd hate to see it end like that for Jacob. He was a fine captain in the war. And Truett is a worthless little shit. Stuart and I had to collect a debt from him for one of our clients. He's got a big money pile from being land register but the son of a bitch won't pay his bills. Are you all right, Cage? You don't look well.”

“I just watched a man be shot, and that's not a thing I like to see. I'm going home.”

He took a step and his feet skidded out from under him on the icy street. He was not hurt but he sat there for a moment, haunted by the memory of the appalling swiftness with which Early had fallen to the hotel floor after being shot. It could all be over that fast. He had seen it too many times now not to believe it.

“Well, Cage,” Lincoln said, “do you want to sit in the street all night or do you want to go home?”

J
ACOB EARLY'S FUNERAL
was an angry, austere affair, presided over by a Methodist minister who begged the Creator to bring down his terrible justice upon the cold-blooded murderer who had robbed Springfield of a war hero and leading citizen—a man who, as a minister himself, had brought many souls to God.

Cage sat in the back next to Lincoln and John Stuart and Jim Reed, Early's former comrades-in-arms. Cage had barely known Early, but he felt like a comrade-in-arms himself, since he had seen the man shot and helped pick him up off the floor, and then shaken his hand before Ash Merritt had done his futile best to save his life.

It was the second funeral he had been to that week. Roger Victor, one of his annoying parlor sitters at the Palatine, had been buried two days before. He had been sitting at the communal table, speaking in French to Theophilous Emry, when an alarmed look appeared on his face and his head dropped onto the table with the force of a dead weight. In one thrombotic moment he was gone. Or at least that was how Mrs. Hopper described it. Cage had not been there when it happened. He had been lying in Ellie's bed, going over her figures for the rent and overhead costs of her dressmaking business while the old woman and her son who lived below continued their never-ending argument. He came back to the Palatine to find Victor's body lying on the floor of the parlor where Mrs. Hopper and the other residents of the house had moved it from the less seemly locale of the crumb-strewn dining room. They had covered Victor's contorted face with a silk pillowcase, and were doing their best to comfort one another as they waited for the undertaker. They had the same numb look as Cage himself must have had after witnessing Jacob Early's murder.

“A silly political dispute,” Speed said to Cage as they walked away together from the town cemetery where Early had just been laid to rest. “And a man lies dead. It could happen to Lincoln, you know. He's always writing the same sort of anonymous letters and resolutions that got Early killed.”

Lincoln wasn't there to heed the warning, not that he would have heeded it in the first place. He and Stuart had left the cemetery as soon as the last prayers were said, racing back to their office to catch up on their legal work and to plot out the final months of the 1838 campaign.

“A young enough man, too,” Speed went on. “How old was Early? Thirty-one? Thirty-two? Life can be so goddam short, so goddam pointless.”

Cage shrugged in acknowledgment of his friend's cynical wisdom. Stephen Douglas rode past them in one of the carriages that were leaving the cemetery. He touched the brim of his hat when he saw them and shook his head mournfully as if to declare what a dreadful business it had all been, then settled back in his seat as the coach bore him away to plot his own strategy.

“I want to live a meaningful life,” Speed blurted out. “I want to depart the earth surrounded by a loving wife and grieving children. Not shot dead on a saloon floor.”

“Stay out of politics.”

“I'm serious. I'm going to put my mind to business, drink only modestly, look for a proper wife. I haven't been living deliberately enough. Carefully enough.”

“I want to talk to you about Ellie,” Cage said.

“She told me. You want to set her up in business. It's a fine idea. She has talent and energy and will no doubt succeed.”

“Her living situation can be improved. There's a room available now at the Palatine.”

“I thought you said your manager wouldn't approve of her visitors.”

“She won't need those visitors anymore. She'll be in a different line of work.”

“Is that so? Do you intend to live with her?”

“I intend for her to have a place in my lodging house, that's all. She'll be charged for room and board like everybody else and can come and go as she pleases. If that means that every now and then she finds herself in my rooms that's her affair.”

“This coming and going into rooms—how would it apply to the man who introduced you to her in the first place?”

“You just said you were looking for a proper wife.”

“That doesn't mean I plan to suspend my existence until I find her. Cage, do you imagine that you're in love with her? You have to know that she has too much of an investment in herself to love anyone else. She has an indifferent heart.”

“I don't care.”

“Well, then you are in love, or in something dangerously like it.”

A week later a widow from Jacksonville named Mrs. Bicknell arrived at the Palatine. While the draymen carried her furniture and possessions into Roger Victor's now-vacant room, Cage introduced her to Mrs. Hopper not only as a new resident but as the proprietress of a soon-to-be-opened dressmaking and millinery shop in which he had retained an interest. Mrs. Hopper surely had suspicions, but Ellie had too much invested in her new circumstances to give the game away. And for that matter it wasn't a game. She wasn't acting. She was exactly the firm-minded businesswoman she wanted the world to perceive her as being. Her married name was indeed Mrs. Bicknell, and though she was not officially a widow her husband was gone from her life and there was a reasonable chance, given his drinking and helplessness and violent manner, that he had died or would soon die from one unheralded cause or another.

A month or so after she moved into the Palatine, Ellie met Cage at the property they had rented for her store; it was east of the square, the site of a small watchmaker's shop that had gone out of business a year earlier. Carpenters were already at work, putting in shelves to hold fabric and building cabinets for pins and hair combs and jewelry that would be offered for sale at Bicknell & Co., Women's Fashions and Accessories.

“You are the ‘Co.,' ” she told Cage. “Unless you would like your name spelled out on the sign.”

“No, I'm content to be a silent partner.”

Cordelia, the Negro woman that Benbrook and Westridge had urged him to employ, was already at work, seated on a stool in the back of the store, sewing amid the chaos of construction. When she saw Cage she stood and greeted him by lowering her eyes, waiting to be spoken to.

“It's all right, Cordelia,” he said. “Please don't interrupt your work on my account.”

She sat down again quickly, as if his casual request had been a command. She had a concentrated servility of manner, but her wide-set eyes were ferociously alert. Cage guessed she was twenty-three or twenty-four. She was slightly built, her skin a deep brown, a raised scar on one cheek. On the advice of her sponsors, he and Ellie had been careful not to ask her too many questions about her background, though she had arrived ready with a fabricated story that she had been a housekeeper for a family in the free state of Indiana. The family was in the yarn business, but it had foundered with the economy, and she had come west because she heard there might be work in Springfield. At first she told the story like someone under interrogation. In the following weeks she had grown more relaxed, but still attacked her work with the intensity and vigilance of someone determined to be invisible.

“So she's suitable?” Cage asked Ellie after they had finished inspecting the shop-to-be and were standing in front of it, on a street a few blocks removed from the main shopping district. But there were new signs of industry here as well. Ellie's shop wasn't the only business being built or revivified.

“She can sew, she knows clothes. She obviously knows how to stay in the background and not cause any trouble to anybody. Good needlewomen with good eyesight and good sense are rare anywhere. So yes, fortunately for you, she's suitable. If she wasn't, you would have heard from me about it.”

“I have no doubt.”

“I'll need a sign, by the way. Do you know a good sign painter?”

“I'll ask around. How are you settling in at the Palatine?”

“Very comfortably.”

“I'm alone in my rooms at night. My hinges are well oiled and the carpet in the hallway is thick.”

She smiled up at him, having read his thoughts long before he spoke them.

“We could still be discovered by Mrs. Hopper.”

“I don't mind.”

“You're getting too careless. We have a business to build.” She tilted her head to the shop behind her. “We can meet here instead. One or two nights a week.”

“Three or four.”

She laughed—affectionate, grateful, happy. All the things he wanted her to be.

E
IGHT O'CLOCK ON AN AUGUST EVENING,
the astral lamps just now lighted, a mighty bowl of Mrs. Edwards's famous chicken salad weighing down the mahogany sideboard next to pyramids of beaten biscuits and airy macaroons. Young women with bare arms and bare shoulders, holding glasses of champagne, smiling up at men basking in the power conferred on them by the Whig victories in the election two weeks before.

Newly elected United States congressman John T. Stuart stood in front of a massive bureau in Ninian Edwards's parlor. The bureau was crowned with a mirror that gave the people in line waiting to congratulate him a view of the back of his sculpted head. Since meeting Ellie, since setting her up in her shop, Cage had begun to notice what people were wearing, what fit and what didn't, what was produced by a talented tailor or dressmaker and what was thoughtlessly bought ready-made. Stuart's frock coat, he recognized, was expertly cut, with no outdated padding in the shoulders. His dark checkered waistcoat was tight against his trim torso, the ends of his wool trousers hovered at some precise perfect point above the top of his booted feet.

Lincoln, holding forth on the other side of the room, was as negligently dressed as ever. There was no way, apparently, to make his sleeves come out right. His funereal-looking coat gaped at the shoulders and the big soft knot of his cravat swallowed up his skinny throat. None of it mattered. He was as much a man of the hour as Stuart was, reelected to the state legislature for a third term, winning more votes than anyone else from Sangamon County. The Whigs had done all right generally, though Ninian Edwards's uncle Cyrus had lost the governor's race and Stuart himself had had to ride out a confusing and contested election, finally being declared the winner over Douglas by only three dozen votes.

But it was a full-throated Whig victory celebration that Ninian Edwards was throwing nonetheless. John Stuart had no qualms about treating his treacherously thin victory as a shattering mandate, and he was proudly showing his purple swollen thumb to everyone who came up to shake his hand. The injured thumb was even sweeter to him than his election. It still had Stephen Douglas's tooth marks in it. The two candidates had been debating in the market house a few days before the vote when the Little Giant's haughty, wheedling invective had succeeded too well, and Stuart had suddenly lost his lawyerly composure, launched himself at his diminutive opponent and wrestled with him all through the building and out onto the lawn, Douglas hitting and gouging at Stuart like a hysterical monkey in the claws of a leopard. He had finally escaped by the expedient of biting down hard on Stuart's thumb.

“I know all about you.” Elizabeth Edwards had suddenly appeared at Cage's side. Ninian Edwards's wife was not nearly as starchy as her husband, but Cage could see at once she was formidable in her own way, her smile as assessing as it was welcoming. “I've read your marvelous book. Lincoln told me he was bringing you, and I was glad to hear it—but he's left you becalmed in the middle of the room. I don't think he has any manners, do you?”

“Lincoln's thoughtful enough, Mrs. Edwards, he just—”

“Oh, it's not his fault. He's risen from nothing at all, all by himself, and there are naturally things he still doesn't know the first thing about. We have to be patient and teach him how to behave.”

She put her arm through his and guided him to the sideboard and ordered him to fill a plate and eat. The chicken salad, she said, was an old Todd family recipe, made with butter instead of oil. Everybody knew that Mrs. Edwards was a Todd, one of the members of the famous Lexington family who kept emigrating in stages from Kentucky to Illinois, seeding the whole state with influential characters. Stuart himself was a Todd cousin, so was John Hardin, the Whig leader from Morgan County, and so was—distantly—Stephen Logan, a prominent Springfield attorney and political operative. Mrs. Edwards introduced Cage to her married younger sister, Frances, and informed him that still more Todd sisters were on the way.

“There are dozens and dozens and dozens of us,” Mrs. Edwards said. “But it's Mary's turn to come out here next. Do you think she can find a respectable husband in Springfield, Mr. Weatherby? She has very strong opinions, and she's a perfect take when it comes to political matters. So he'd have to be someone who could stand up for himself.”

That was the first time Cage heard the name Mary Todd, and he would remember later that as she talked about finding her sister a husband Mrs. Edwards's eyes were roving around the room, settling for a moment perhaps to consider Joshua Speed
,
just then in earnest conversation with Ned Baker, who could possibly be another candidate. He would not remember her gauging Lincoln for the assignment. The Todds were as notoriously refined as Lincoln was rustic, and everybody knew he had already failed to make a match with another well-bred Kentucky lady who had also been named Mary. The union of Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd was as unlikely in theory that night as it would later prove to be in reality.

As for Cage himself, he was under no scrutiny as a marital partner either. He was in Ninian Edwards's home not as a member of the triumphant Springfield junto but as a civilian observer, and in this crowd men without political aspirations were something to be puzzled over. In any case, though he recognized that any man his age ought to be actively looking for a wife, he was preoccupied with his privately scandalous and exquisitely unfathomable arrangement with Ellie. They met as she proposed at her shop, the number of times per week depending on her volume of work and level of exhaustion. At the Palatine they kept up a charade of neighborly friendliness when they dined together or sat with others in the parlor. At night, he struggled to fall asleep without torturing himself by listening for footsteps on the stairs or the almost inaudible whisper of her door opening to receive a visitor. He didn't think it would happen now that she had an enterprise and an income of her own—or at least happen often. She was no longer in the keeping of Joshua Speed but if she chose to see him or anyone else she would certainly do so. There had, he thought, been only that one time with Lincoln. But Lincoln was a man people tended to develop a deepening fascination with, struck by his powerful alternating moods of animation and melancholy.

He was supremely animated tonight. There he was, with his hand on John Hardin's shoulder, looking down on him, pausing before he delivered the sidesplitting conclusion of some story that Cage and Mrs. Edwards, across the noisy parlor, couldn't hear.

John Hardin: distractingly handsome and commanding, dark-eyed, dark-haired, intimidated by no one. He was the Whig representative from Morgan County and lived in Jacksonville, not Springfield, so when he walked into a room there was a “Hardin's-in-town” ripple among the guests, heads turning, hands offered in greeting. He stood with Ned Baker, listening to Lincoln's story. Ned was equally imposing but not quite as splendid-looking. Hardin had precise features and immaculate grooming. Ned's face was large and florid, and he was balding in a spectacularly inelegant way, with wayward strands of hair flopping this way and that. It was odd that neither of these two remarkable-looking individuals drew the eye as compellingly as the man they were listening to, the awkward and arguably homely Abraham Lincoln.

“Do you think he would really want to kill himself?” Elizabeth Edwards asked Cage. She had apparently been studying Lincoln as intently as he had. There was no need to ask why this thought had come into her head. Sim Francis had recently published “The Suicide's Soliloquy” in the
Journal.
It was the same curious reverie Lincoln had read aloud to the poetry group that night last March when Jacob Early was shot. The poem was published anonymously but everyone knew Lincoln was the author
,
just as everyone had known he was the author of the Sampson's Ghost letters that had derailed Ash Merritt's campaign.

“I think it was just a literary exercise,” Cage told Mrs. Edwards.

“Well, you're a literary man, so I suppose you would know. But to write well, don't you have to write with conviction? Don't you have to mean what you say? I think you and the rest of his friends should keep a close eye on him.”

She excused herself to go off and lecture one of the liveried servants who was standing over a half-empty punch bowl. He was a young black man—a free man in a free state, in theory—but her sharp tone as she instructed him to for heaven's sake fill the punch bowl indicated that Mrs. Edwards had no interest in such distinctions.

Cage drifted over toward Lincoln, who was standing now in a group with Ash Merritt at its center. Ash was holding forth about Jacob Early's fatal gunshot wound, looking up periodically to make sure no ladies were in earshot. He and another doctor standing next to him had performed the autopsy, which they said revealed that the ball had nipped the ureter at its upper part.

“I suspected as much while I was treating him,” Ash told the group. “The flow of matter was very great, and it had a urinous smell.”

“A hard way to go,” the second doctor said.

“Yes, to die in great pain is one thing, but to die needing to piss will test your faith in a just God.”

They talked in great detail about the angle of the bullet that had entered Early's body, how it had passed through the upper part of the sigmoid flexure of the colon, narrowly missed the spine as it exited just to the left of the fourth lumbar vertebra, and had caused—so often the case with injuries of the kidney, Ash observed—a retraction of the testes.

Lincoln was silent, listening to this grisly postmortem discussion with determined concentration. Cage remembered him saying in the Carmans' house that he had to work hard to learn something but once it was learned it was etched into his mind as if into a piece of steel. Cage could almost hear the sound of engraving as the doctors' words entered Lincoln's mind. He thought it curious at the time. But at that moment he didn't yet know that Lincoln had been hired to represent Henry Truett for the murder of Jacob Early.