“Why on earth not?” Mary shot up to her full five foot two. “Has Mr. Edwards forbid it? The nerve! I am of age, and I will marry whom I please. Why, we’ll elope!”
“No, Mary. It’s not him. It’s me. I can’t marry you.”
Mary sat back down. “You’re in love with Matilda Edwards,” she said flatly.
“No. I’ve hardly spoken a word to her.”
“When did that stop anyone?”
“Be that as it may, I’m not in love with her. I’m not in love with anyone else.”
“You are angry that I paid so much attention to Mr. Webb the other night. Maybe I was flirting a wee bit. The deceiver deceived! I meant no harm, truly. He was the only person not acting ridiculous about Matilda, and he is a perfectly agreeable man, and—”
“It’s not Webb. I like Webb. Why would you being friendly to him distress me? Mary, it’s me. I can’t marry you. I can’t marry anyone.”
Mary reviewed all the reasons a man might not marry—a loathsome disease, unnatural behavior, financial distress—and decided to focus on the least frightening one. “Mr. Lincoln, I told you again and again that I don’t expect to live in high style.”
“I can keep a wife. It’s me. Mary, will you listen to me? Every time I think of marriage, my blood runs cold. I’m not ready. I don’t know if I ever will be, but I do know that I’m not ready now.”
“Do you love me?”
Mr. Lincoln gazed at her for a long time. “I don’t know,” he said. “You’re pretty, and you’re smart and lively, but—”
“Then end it.”
He began pacing around the room. “But we were engaged. I made a promise. Perhaps—”
Lawyer that he was, no doubt he was worried that she might sue him for breach of promise to marry—not that she would humiliate herself by taking the witness stand as a spurned bride. “End it,” she repeated. “I will not hold you to a promise that you do not wish to keep. I will release you from our engagement. I will even put it in writing.”
She went to the desk, supplied with ink and paper as if awaiting such an occasion, and scrawled something—anything—to the effect of what she had told Mr. Lincoln, then held out the finished product to him. Evidently, it satisfied his lawyer’s mind, for he took it and stuffed it into his coat pocket.
“I didn’t want to hurt you, Miss Todd.”
“Yet you managed that quite competently.” She turned away, conscious of the tears beginning to run down her face. “I did not write this in the letter, but know this: my feelings for you have not changed. Should you come to your senses and recognize how good we would be for each other, I will be here.”
“Oh, Mary!”
He pulled her on his knee and kissed her as passionately as he had kissed her when he had proposed marriage. It was she who disengaged herself, marched to the parlor door, and flung it wide open.
“You have this all backward, Mr. Lincoln. Goodbye.”
* * *
Of course, she cried all night. Who wouldn’t? She refused dinner, claiming indisposition, and when poor Matilda came bearing a plate of food, she threw it across the room. Though she did wait until Matilda had left, at least.
What could she do? Springfield, and especially her own little circle, was too small for her and Mr. Lincoln’s estrangement to go unnoticed, and while few if any might have suspected their engagement, Mary had no doubt that word would go out soon over it being broken. But she would have to brave it out, because going back to Lexington was unthinkable. Her sister Ann would take her place in Springfield—something she had been hinting at in her letters already—and Mary would return to her maiden’s bedroom a confirmed spinster, growing peculiar and set in her ways as her younger half sisters sprouted up and began attracting suitors. She might as well start teaching school, acquire a multitude of cats, and be done with it.
In Springfield, at least she had some possibilities. Not that any of them meant anything to her.
Of course, after bathing her eyes the next morning and picking up the broken crockery, she had to tell Elizabeth. “You know, I really don’t think the two of you would have been happy together,” Elizabeth said. Was she fighting back a smile? “Mr. Lincoln is certainly a talented lawyer, and it’s admirable how far he’s come in life, but he’s just not your sort, Mary, and will never be. That would have become all too apparent when you began entertaining—if he could even give you a suitable home in which to entertain. He’s…well, he’s a plebian, my dear. And, Mary, there’s something else that’s always made me wary. Have you ever seen him go to church? Certainly he goes to none that any of our circle attends. I have given him the benefit of the doubt, thinking he might be a member of some primitive sect, but he never speaks of going anywhere. I fear he is a nonbeliever.”
“Oh, pshaw! He is a spiritual man, and that is what counts. And as for his origins, they are the only thing common about him. I can see great things in him.”
“You certainly are eager to defend a man who treated you so shabbily.”
“I won’t have anyone speaking ill of my future husband. For he will be, when he comes to his senses.”
She had spoken reflexively, but really, what other explanation could there be other than some peculiarity in Mr. Lincoln’s character? It was another reason—indeed, the best reason—to remain in Springfield. When he returned to normal, she would have to be on the spot.
* * *
As January wore on, it became apparent that Mr. Lincoln was suffering dreadfully. The day after he ended (or, as Mary liked to think of it, suspended) their engagement, he failed to turn up for a vote at the legislature, and by mid-January, he had collapsed entirely, taking to his bed as if he, not Mary, had been the spurned one. Elizabeth, who made it her business to keep current with the gossip about Mr. Lincoln, informed Mary that he was all but a lunatic and that only Joshua Speed and Dr. Anson Henry, who was both Mr. Lincoln’s friend and a physician, were allowed to tend to him. They would not even trust him around his dinner knife, for fear that he might end it all then and there.
While Mr. Lincoln lay confined in his bladeless room, visitors trooped to the Edwards house, eager to see the two young ladies who had brought him to his ruin. In one version of events, poor Matilda’s stony heart had laid Mr. Lincoln low; in another version, Mary’s coquettishness had made him, literally, insanely jealous. For either lady to leave town or even to refuse company would have driven the gossips into a frenzy, so they sat side by side in the drawing room smiling grimly, chattering inanely about any subject they could find that was as far from Mr. Lincoln as possible.
After about a week or so of this, Mr. Lincoln was seen once again in the streets of Springfield, looking pale and thin and gloomy but acting, everyone agreed, perfectly sane. The gossip receded, and life went back to normal—except that Mr. Lincoln no longer appeared at the Edwardses’, or scarcely anyplace else that he was likely to meet Mary, which meant in essence that he avoided any social gathering where ladies might be present. In turn, Mary avoided the places where she might run into him, such as the homes of his married friends. Yet she made it her business to keep informed of his doings. She felt his sorrow from afar when President Harrison, whom he had worked so hard to elect, fell sick on the day of his inauguration in March and died just a month later. All for naught!