She should have been furious at Judge Brown’s outburst. She should have been distressed at the rain that began to beat against the windows as if the Lord had been waiting for a cue. But what did they matter? Nothing, just as the coffee she spilled on her dress at Elizabeth’s reception mattered nothing, just as the ruination of her slippers when she stepped out of the carriage in front of the Globe Tavern and into a mud puddle mattered nothing. All that mattered were the last words they exchanged as they lay entwined together later that night. “Good night, Husband.”
“Good night, Wife.”
2
Emily
December 1854 to March 26, 1856
Years before, eleven-year-old Emily Todd had watched, her lip wobbling, as her older half sister, Mary, and her husband and sons prepared to get into the carriage that would take them to the railroad station, their visit to Lexington at an end. Mary had hugged Mr. and Mrs. Todd goodbye, and then had turned with a special farewell to Emily. “Now, my dear, don’t look so sad! When you are grown up, you shall visit us in our house as our special guest and stay as long as you like. Won’t she, Mr. Lincoln?”
“Indeed she shall,” Mr. Lincoln had said. He smiled at Emily. “We’ll always have room in our house for Little Sister.”
Seven years had passed, and the promise was about to be fulfilled.
* * *
“Emily! How lovely you look!” Mary embraced her sister as she stepped off the train onto the platform of Springfield’s depot, stalling the passengers behind her.
Abraham Lincoln gently tugged the sisters aside, then pecked Emily on the cheek. “Little Sister, it’s been too long since we’ve seen you.”
“Was the journey troublesome? How are they in Kentucky? Have you a beau yet?”
Emily laughed. “No, they are well, and no.”
“I cannot wait to show you our fine carriage,” Mary said as Mr. Lincoln saw to her trunk. “Not new to us—we bought it last year—but new to you. Mr. Lincoln agreed to buy one of the nicest ones Mr. Lewis had, within reason, of course. Tell me, dear, have you been to the old house lately?”
While dying of cholera a few years before, Mary and Emily’s father, Robert Todd, had managed to make his will, but in his feeble state had had it witnessed by only one person instead of the requisite two. Their brother George, who got on poorly with nearly everyone in the family, had successfully challenged the will, and the gracious house in which Emily had been born had been sold instead of going to her mother. Mrs. Todd and her children had had to move to her considerably more modest family house at Buena Vista, not far from Frankfort. How Emily had cried in those first few weeks after the move, thinking of her old room in Lexington! “I don’t have the heart to see someone else living there,” Emily said.
Mary grimaced. “Indeed, it still makes me angry to think of it. That creature George. To think that there was a time I treated him like my own little pet. My dear, I think we must get you a new bonnet. That one does not show off your eyes as it should.”
Mr. Lincoln approached with her trunk, and Emily smiled up at him. She still remembered her first meeting with her brother-in-law in 1847, five years after the Lincolns’ marriage. He and Mary had visited Lexington on their way to Washington, where Mr. Lincoln was to serve in Congress. Emily had been so intimidated by his height and his craggy face that she had stepped behind her mother like a little girl. Mr. Lincoln had not laughed at her foolishness, but had shaken her hand and said, “So this is Little Sister.”
As if aware of her thoughts, Mary said, “When you first met Mr. Lincoln, he was a brand-new congressman. And now, I hope he shall be a senator.”
“Now, Mother,” Mr. Lincoln said, using one of his favorite forms of address for his wife, “don’t count your chickens.”
“I did say hope, Mr. Lincoln. And speaking of chickens, I have an excellent meal planned for tonight, Emily. I have come quite far in cookery since Mr. Lincoln and I were first married a dozen years ago. Why, when I read Mr. Dickens’s account of poor Dora Copperfield’s housekeeping, I thought he must have been peering through my kitchen window!”
Mr. Lincoln handed Emily into the carriage. It was what she had expected him to own—comfortable and well made but unpretentious. As Mary settled beside her, she said, “Now, you must not expect Springfield to be as handsome as Lexington, my dear, especially this time of year, but it has improved with time, I must say. Why, it is the same time of year I first arrived! That is propitious, I hope.”
Evidently Mary assumed that Emily would find a husband in Springfield, as had all four of Emily’s half sisters. But at eighteen, Emily was in no particular hurry.
Springfield was not a gracious-looking town, but it had an undeniable bustle to it. As the Lincolns’ carriage passed through its streets, people waved to Mr. Lincoln, whose tall figure was unmistakable even inside the carriage, and peered at the unfamiliar lady next to his wife. “Oh, you will make quite the splash here, Emily! I count on you being the belle of the season.”
Their carriage pulled onto a block lined with modest, well-kept houses and stopped in front of a one-and-a-half-story yellow cottage, tricked out handsomely with green shutters. A boy of ten sprang out—Emily’s nephew Robert, known as Bob, who walked to the carriage and handed out first his mother, and then Emily, in a manner born of long practice. Knowing that he was of an age to stand on his dignity, she thanked him, careful to avoid effusiveness, and was rewarded with a smile. “How you’ve grown, Bob!”
“Well, I won’t match Father,” Bob said good-naturedly.
The door opened and out stepped a small boy, followed by a colored servant leading an even smaller boy. Those two children, Willie and Tad, were strangers to Emily, having been born after the Lincolns had last visited the Todds in Kentucky. As she admired and greeted them, she thought sadly that there should have been a fourth boy standing there: the Lincolns’ second son, Eddie, who had died of consumption just months after Mary and Emily’s father. Mary, who had taken to writing to Emily not long afterward, had confessed that she had nearly starved herself to death in the weeks afterward, so terrible had been her grief.
But she looked happy now, as did all the Lincolns. As they sat in the parlor and caught up on the past several years, the younger boys ran in and out, completely uncowed by their father, who beamed at them. Emily smiled to herself, remembering that back in Lexington in 1847, as the Todd family waited for the Lincolns to arrive from the depot, a young cousin of theirs had hurried into the house, fresh from the train himself. “Aunt Betsy,” he had announced, “I was never so grateful to escape a train in my life. I was stuck with a couple and their brats who kept the entire train in an uproar while their father just grinned and aided and abetted their antics. I thought—” Their cousin had turned white. “Good Lord, here they are out front!”