Courting Mr. Lincoln

by Louis Bayard

Genres: Historical Fiction; Literary Fiction; LGBT & Pride

Synopsis

When Mary Todd meets Abraham Lincoln in Springfield in the winter of 1840, he is on no one’s short list to be president. A country lawyer living above a dry goods shop, he is lacking both money and manners, and his gift for oratory surprises those who meet him. Mary, a quick, self-possessed debutante with an interest in debates and elections, at first finds him an enigma. “I can only hope,” she tells his roommate, the handsome, charming Joshua Speed, “that his waters being so very still, they also run deep.”

It’s not long, though, before she sees the Lincoln that Speed knows: an amiable, profound man who, despite his awkwardness, has a gentle wit to match his genius, and who respects her keen political mind. But as her relationship with Lincoln deepens, she must confront his inseparable friendship with Speed, who has taught his roommate how to dance, dress, and navigate the polite society of Springfield.

Told in the alternating voices of Mary Todd and Joshua Speed, and inspired by historical events, Courting Mr. Lincoln creates a sympathetic and complex portrait of Mary unlike any that has come before; a moving portrayal of the deep and very real connection between the two men; and most of all, an evocation of the unformed man who would grow into one of the nation’s most beloved presidents. Louis Bayard, a master storyteller, delivers here a pause-resisting tale of love, longing, and forbidden possibilities.

Release date: April 23, 2019

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 416

Sample

Her journey from Alton to Springfield should have taken no longer than two days, but as the stage driver himself said, “That’s no more ’n a hope.” At any second of any hour, they might have to pause for a fox or a passel of wild hogs. One morning, it was a pair of rattlesnakes, sporting themselves in the sun. Two hours later, a pile of bleached bones, uncertain in provenance.

Wagon tracks would end without warning, or the old Indian trail they were following would fade back into prairie. More than once, the path would vanish altogether beneath stagnant ponds, obliging the passengers—men and women alike—to walk ahead, with gnats and horseflies for companions.

Farms were few here. Look to every quadrant, there was no signpost, no settlement. Only grass, rolling on like a tide. Higher than any man, pawing at the windows, swallowing whatever it absorbed. Bucks disappeared all the way to their antlers. An entire flock of prairie chickens could feed unseen and then, startled into flight, blacken the sky with their wings.

And as soon as the sun dropped, the prairie wolves began to howl. The sound didn’t bother her so much at first—she made a point of using the word charming—but on the third evening, the calls began to coalesce, as if the wolves were solving a problem amongst themselves, and she began to wonder how many were out there. A hundred? A thousand? Were they even now circling the stage?

She awoke the next morning with a start, convinced that something was grazing on her shoulder, but it was just the slumbering head of a Presbyterian deacon’s sister. This lady until now had kept a cool tone with Mary, but the duress of the journey must have loosened her tongue for, later that day, the woman gave a light rustle to her traveling dress and asked: “Are you coming to Springfield for a visit?”

“Something between a visit and a stay.”

“Depending on how it goes, you mean.”

Mary flushed. “How is it supposed to go, I wonder?” Thinking, as she spoke, that her companion would retreat into convention, but the woman’s dry contralto began to quaver with purpose.

“I’ll tell you how. You’re to find a husband, that’s how. Pretty girl like you, it shouldn’t take you long.”

“You’re very kind,” Mary answered, faintly.

“You have family, then. Waiting for you.”

“A sister, yes. Elizabeth Edwards.” She glanced at the older woman, waiting for a gleam of recognition. “Her husband is Ninian Edwards.” Still waiting. “The son of the late governor.”

“I do apologize,” said her companion. “I can’t be trusted with the names of this world.”

On the fourth day, Mary awoke to find a jaybird perched on the lip of her window. Miles from any tree, what had possessed it to travel so far?

The words came back to her then, unbidden. Tell-tale-tell.

Blame it on Sally, the Todds’ nursemaid. She used to tell the children that jaybirds were Satan’s messengers, flying down to hell every Friday night to recount the sins they’d witnessed. “Down in that bad place,” said Sally, “there’s a little devil setting up on a stool so high that his tail don’t touch the floor. What’s up, Mr. Jay? he says. And Mr. Jay twitters, Well, for beginners, Mary hid Sally’s slippers when Sally was trying to rest her feet in the garden. Old Man Satan bellows, Write that down in your big book, little son. Who else? So, Mr. Jay twitters, Well now, Elizabeth helps Mary in all her mischievous doings. And Satan says, Write that down, too. Careful. Don’t trust nary a thing to your remembrance. So then Mr. Jay says, Miss Ann hollered when Sally curled her hair. . . .”

It was dazzling to think how many sins could be committed by a brood of six children—and how stingily Satan’s messenger could hoard them in his brain. One summer morning, Mary found a jaybird sitting in a tulip tree and began calling up to him. “Howdy, Mr. Jay, you are a tell-tale-tell. You play the spy each day, then carry tales to hell.”

Just then, the bird flashed its wings in a crack of air. The upper beak parted from the lower, and a thick suety maw opened before Mary’s eyes. At the sound of her scream, Sally came limping over. “Child,” she said, gathering her up, “that bird can’t do a thing to you ’less you let him.”

Gazing now at the jaybird on the other side of her window, Mary could afford to smile at the memory. Only the smile soon faded, and with a vigor that startled her fellow passengers, she began pounding on the window until the bird flew away.

For the rest of the journey, her mood was black. She spoke to no one and grimaced at every shudder of the coach’s frame as it toiled over the swells. When at last they crested the final hill and began the slow descent into Springfield, the view that rose up before her was a match for her mood. Streets treacled with mud and horse dung. Unpainted mud-daubed cabins. Steers and hogs and the noisiest wagons in creation, piled high with corn and turnips. Shoeless farmers and their shoeless wives and children. Not a sidewalk, not a streetlight. The mud so thick the stage could barely pull through. An ugly, raw, primordial town.

What had she done? Why had she left behind the four walls she knew? The people who loved her? Father and Sally and Nelson and Madame Mentelle and Mrs. Ward. She had thrown them all away on a bet.

“Now now,” said the deacon’s sister, resting her hand on Mary’s. “Why should you be crying, dear one? You’re going to your future.”



Living in a frontier town, Ninian Edwards liked to say, was no different from living anywhere else. You just had to find a way to rise above.

In a town like Springfield, you might start by shaking off your fifteen-by-eighteen cabin for a two-story frame house with wooden paling. From there, if you were feeling bullish about your prospects, you might graduate to something in the Greek Revival style, with as many as four rooms upstairs and another room in the attic and a back stairway. This stairway would necessarily consume part of your kitchen, which would then require you to eat all your meals in the dining room. From there it was a short step to the cherry dining table with the turned legs and thence to the French bedsteads that sold for ten dollars. Why stop there? Why not build a wide hall with parlors on both sides? From there, you would necessarily have to hire servants to clean all the rooms and to spare your wife, in her newly minted role as hostess, the labor of cooking and laundering and child rearing.

But finally, the best way to stand out among your fellows was to move skyward. It was, thus, the impulse of Ninian Edwards—an impulse very much encouraged and, one might even say, fomented by his distinguished wife—to buy the first plot and to build the first house on the elevation known (with some bitterness and only by those who did not live there) as Quality Hill.

This being Illinois, it could scarcely be called a hill, but the house was pitched at least thirteen feet above its nearest competitors and boasted two floors and five servants and a dizzying fifteen rooms, including bedrooms for the master and mistress. But where the house particularly excelled in the eyes of the Springfield gentry was in its front parlor, which ran for an unprecedented forty feet, making it longer than most flatboats and giving it the capacity to hold as many notables as Ninian Edwards, in his position as lawyer and state representative, could cram inside.

For his wife, Elizabeth, however, the room that bore the most strategic value was the spare bedroom. Here she had resolved to install each of her younger sisters until such time as they were carried off by husbands. Frances Todd was the first beneficiary of that campaign and was claimed—within a year and to a mostly lukewarm response—by William Wallace, a genial, impoverished doctor and drugstore proprietor who harbored dreams of land speculation.

Now it was Mary’s turn, and her pride bridled not just at being second but also at being so scarcely concealed a burden. Ninian, for all his upward aspirations, had weathered setbacks in the panic of thirty-seven, and with his liquidity strained by the cost of entertaining, he was not eager to add more debits in the form of Todds. But he himself had a young cousin he was preparing to bring into the world, and after weeks of remorseless negotiations with his wife—waged in each of their fifteen rooms—Ninian agreed that Mary could be sent for.

Never was there a question of whether she would come.

At the time of her summons, she was working as an apprentice teacher at her old school. She had taken the job on the premise that teaching was a perfectly honorable profession for an unmarried gentlewoman and that there might be worse ways to fill one’s days than helping Mrs. Ward herd a pack of Lexington girls from grammar to arithmetic to history to plain sewing. Yet she couldn’t escape the feeling that every time she read aloud from Miss Swift’s Natural Philosophy, every time she encouraged some tin-eared ten-year-old to plump up her French vowels, she was being measured for a coffin. Her father was more than usually absent from home—the state senate, the branch bank, and the family manufactory all claimed their pieces of him—and Mary had little to do with her spare time but quarrel with her stepmother and pick her way through the thickening ranks of Todd brats. Springfield, Illinois, may have been on the edge of civilization, but it had the advantage of being there and not here.

So, in the fall of 1839, she came.

Her new bedroom was small but well proportioned, with all the accouterments of an indefinitely temporary guest: a canopy bed, a carpet from Lauderman’s in St. Louis (Elizabeth said Springfield carpets were too drab), a bureau, a wash-hand basin, a looking glass. When she retired, a freshly tended fire was waiting for her; when she awoke, she found a pitcher of fresh water. The only thing she could think to complain of was the jarring sound of carts carrying stone to the new capitol . . . but she commanded herself to think of it as the price of progress.

And was she not progressing, too? Going to her future. Until, without warning, the future came rushing at her.

It happened on her twenty-first birthday, a few days shy of Christmas. Elizabeth had commemorated the occasion by giving her sister a dry embrace, a new pair of shoes, and a cake. It was only when Mary was reaching for a second piece that Elizabeth leaned in and whispered: “You mustn’t panic.”

Which, up to that moment, she had felt no inclination to do. It was true that Kentucky girls married young and Todd girls younger—Elizabeth herself was barely nineteen when she snagged Ninian. There was at least a perverse comfort in the counterexample of Mary’s stepmother, who had been written off as a lost cause until the newly widowed Robert Todd came a-calling. To hear people talk, Betsey had been anywhere from twenty-five to twenty-eight, though it was impossible to know because she had destroyed all the records. “Birthdates,” she used to say, “are never etched in stone. Not even tombstone.”

At face level, such vanity was ridiculous. With her marriage, Betsey had inherited half a dozen children from a dead woman and had then popped out another nine of her own in nearly as many years. She was constantly ill, eternally vexed. Any accents of spring had long since vanished from her face and figure—and still she carried on as if she were a woodland nymph. Only now could Mary see the advantages. Imagine being whatever age you chose! Suppose, she thought, she were to declare herself four. Mama would be alive, and so would Baby Bobby. Grandmother Parker would still live just up the hill. She would still be Mary Ann, infinitely better than Mary.

Suppose now she were twelve. Running so quickly the three blocks uphill to school that a Lexington watchman once reported her for eloping. Reciting from The Ladies Geography and wearing a chaplet of flowers to the May Day parade.

Suppose now she were seventeen. Fresh out of finishing school, a prized dance partner, fluent in flirtation, gazing down the rest of her life as if it were a flowering prairie, extending in every direction.

How had it become so quickly a peninsula? Today, if she were to call the roll of her old classmates at Madame Mentelle’s, she would have to add to every girl’s name, except hers, a man’s surname. Even the least likely of prospects had gone at matrimony with a grim and single-minded resolve, and they now had the carriages and summer cottages to show for it.

And what had she to show after four years of tea parties and late-night suppers? Four years of flirting with the same Lexington boys with whom she’d once picked blackberries along Upper Broadway. Four years of French swiss and pianofortes and blushing for the homesick students of Transylvania University.

After all this time, she had begun to wonder if, unbeknownst to her, she harbored some constitutional flaw. An innate faltering, perhaps, that manifested itself at le moment critique. Looking back at the swains who used to crowd around her on the herringbone floors, she could see how easily she had wielded her power over them, had guided them to the brink of infatuation. Yet each time it had come to naught. And each time—here was the insight that had until now eluded her—she had been the one to take the step back.

Often without intending to. All it needed, in the end, was a passing gibe, a bit of playful sparring that devolved into quarrel.

Take that sweet young Mr. Broadhead, the Massachusetts theology student whom Father had engaged to tutor the younger Todds. Anyone could see he was besotted with her. Always clearing his throat when she passed. Engaging her in the fine points of Episcopalian liturgy. She had given him just enough encouragement to awaken hope. Then, over breakfast one morning, for reasons she still couldn’t understand, she had called him the one word she knew he couldn’t abide. “Do Yankees know how to dance, Mr. Broadhead?”

Rather than simply have her joke and fall back into silence, she had pressed on. “Is it true Yankees bathe in molasses?” “I’ve read that Yankee drawing rooms are fairly bathed in spittle.” Every word wreathed in laughter and striking so deeply that, by the end of breakfast, he had quite gone off her, never to be coaxed back.

Why had she done that to Mr. Broadhead? Why had she teased Jedediah Fowler about President Jackson? Why had she chided Alexander Chaney for chewing too loudly and laughed when John Wilkes got a kernel of corn stuck between his teeth? She had meant no harm—no conscious harm—and still she had managed, in the space of a few seconds, to deaden every last ember that stirred in their hearts.

It had to be that, in her soul, there lay some rebel contingent. Lying in ambush the whole while and rising up at the first suggestion of romance. But if so, what was it rebelling against? Or holding out for? Something better, was that it?

“There is nothing better,” said Elizabeth. “And many things worse.” She gave Mary the lightest of boxes on the ear. “It’s only a matter of time, puss. At least you still have your bloom.”

The very thing you told a woman on the verge of losing it.

Every morning now, she stood before her looking glass, canvassing her assets as pitilessly as a butcher. Arms: shapely. Shoulders: smooth. Complexion: good. Forehead: too broad. Cheeks: too ruddy. Face: a touch too round. Hair: chestnut with a hint of bronze. Eyes: blue, shading toward violet. Eyelashes: silky. Nose: straight. Lips: curled. Teeth: small. Figure: full, with the tiniest suggestion of stoutness.

She could not reckon herself a beauty, but she felt entitled to the claim of prettiness, and from experience, she had learned it shone brightest in social settings. Under Madame Mentelle’s tutelage, she had mastered the waltz at fifteen, and men who might never have given her another glance changed their minds after watching her on the dance floor. The sway of hoop under lace, teasing glimpses of silk-sheathed ankles . . . here and here alone she was confident in her own spectacle.

“And don’t forget,” said Elizabeth. “You’re a woman.”

Mary had considered this self-evident until the night of her first Springfield cotillion. Coming down the stairs half an hour into the proceedings, she heard fiddles striking up a three-quarter tune. She saw the long wavering lines cast by the candles across the marble floor. For a few moments, she paused on the next-to-last step to better savor the spectacle—only to realize that a dozen men in black wool were converging on her. The suaver ones asked if she had a place on her dance program; the others simply stared. In every eye growled the same hunger. How could she not think of prairie wolves?

“Gentlemen,” crooned Elizabeth, “please don’t crowd Miss Todd. We have all night to grow acquainted.”

Back in Lexington, eligible men were so thin on the ground that it was not uncommon to see girls finishing out balls in each other’s arms. There was no such danger in Springfield, where males outnumbered females two to one. To be a young woman in the young capital of a young state was to enjoy an immediate fame.

“It’s like this,” her new friend Mercy told her. “When menfolk start in to settling a place—clearing their trees, I mean, and fighting their Indians—they’re perfectly happy with whores. It’s all they’re fit for. But once a town gets up on its feet, as Springfield has, well, then they start aspiring to something more. The kind of girl you can take out on your arm.”

Or, as the minister at First Presbyterian liked to put it: “It’s never too late to help some poor fellow fight the battle of life.”

Mercy had already found hers. A lawyer: amiable, devoted, attractively sardonic, but ever on the circuits, chasing judges from county to county. A “Gone-Case,” Mercy called him, but she treated his absences as an excuse to be the unattached girl the world assumed her to be, and she and Mary spent many an idle hour that fall, keeping a running tally of Springfield bachelors.

“Mr. Billings?”

“Gracious, no. That ghoulish smile.”

“Mr. Edmund?”

“Too fond of his own jaw.”

“Mr. Douglas, then.”

“One’s husband should never be shorter than oneself.”

At some point, the discussion always broke down in laughter, but even at her giddiest, Mary was alive to her injustice. Was she not small ? To be dismissing, in a few hard words, men who had done nothing more than show an interest? Did they not deserve better?

And at the back of those scruples lay another question, posed by that rebel contingent of her soul. Did she not deserve better?

In January, Elizabeth, sounding moderately impatient, said: “You need a fallback.”

There was no point protesting for Elizabeth had already found a candidate: Edwin Webb.

A Whig lawyer and state representative. (“I know how soft you are for politicians.”) A trusted ally of Elizabeth’s husband. (“Ninian says he could be governor one day.”) And crucially: in a lonely cast of mind, having just lost a wife.

“Of course, he has charming manners,” said Elizabeth.

“I have seen his manners.”

“He owns a two-story brick house, and Ninian tells me he is unimpeachably solvent.”

“Solvent? Is that now enough to recommend a man? Why not declare him bipedal? Air-breathing?”

“You’re missing my point. He is intended as an insurance policy.”

“In the event nobody else comes along. Thank you very much.”

They were silent for a time.

“Perhaps,” said Mary, “you might tell me where Mr. Webb resides. When he’s not legislating.”

“In Carmi.”

“Where on earth is that?”

“South,” said Elizabeth, waving her hand vaguely at the parlor window.

“How far?”

“A few days by stage. You’d be much closer to Father.”

Mary cast her eyes down at the mess of blue yarn in her lap. It had started out as a mitten but seemed to be venturing toward mantua.

“Carmi,” she muttered.

“They say it’s famous for its hospitality.”

“If by hospitality you mean whiskey, I’ve no doubt. A girl need never fear coming down with the ague in Carmi.”

They were silent again.

“I don’t suppose it matters,” said Mary, “that Mr. Webb is twenty years my senior.”

“Fifteen,” said Elizabeth softly.

“And has two children.”

“I am told they have a sweet character.”

“Yes. The sweetest little objections you’d ever hope to find.”

The subject remained closed for the rest of the night. Which meant only that Elizabeth had been driven underground. The very next evening, Mary was invited to dinner at the Jayneses and was unsurprised to find Mr. Webb, in a rather dandyish striped waistcoat, waiting in the drawing room. At the sight of her, he leaped to his feet and began scratching his scalp.

“Miss Todd! Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes?”

“You are quite a sight yourself.”

From across the room, Elizabeth stared daggers.

“Please,” said Mr. Webb, drawing out an armchair. “Won’t you sit down?”

At dinner, they were seated next to each other, but as luck would have it, the conversation was animated and general enough to deter side conferences. Railroads and tunnels. General Adams and Dr. Henry. The minutes fairly winged past, and all she had to do, really, was fix her gaze on whoever was speaking at any given moment to forget the entire reason she was there. It wasn’t until dessert arrived that Mr. Webb leaned into her and murmured: “I see you follow the political circus.”

“A family obsession.”

“But how rare to see such a discriminating intelligence wrapped in a—a package so . . .” He faltered. “Such lovely hands you have.”

“Thank you.”

“Lucky the gentleman who gets to hold them.”

“Well,” she said, “perhaps, upon my death, I shall have them severed and bequeathed to you.”

It was out of her mouth before she could call it back. His response was a laugh so piercing that every head swung around.

“Pardon me,” he said. “Miss Todd has struck straight to the funny bone.”

Then he laughed again, his jaws flapping open to reveal a great expanse of gray tooth and pink uvula and, beyond it, only blackness. And from the blackness, the sound of flapping. A bearing down of wings.

“Did you hear that?” she cried.

“Hear what, Miss Todd? Are you quite well?”



No quantity of merino could have prepared her for a Springfield winter.

She’d wake up of a morning, thinking she was in the heart of May: the sky clear, the streets dry and hard trodden, sunlight pouring through every door and window. Then, a few minutes before eleven, the mercury would dive for the cellar, and an armada of frost would come sailing in from the south, and merino was nothing.

In late January, there came a long stretch of mild weather, beguiling enough to make her think spring had muscled its way to the fore. Following hard on, a perfect torrent of snow. Between supper and dinner, a good foot and a half of it, piling along the streets in thick dull ramparts. Elizabeth dragged all the quilts from her trousseau, the servants kept the fires blazing in every room, and still the windows sheathed over with ice, and still the cups froze to the saucers. A roast chicken sprouted a layer of frost as it sat at the breakfast table.

The horses stayed in their stables, wreathed in blankets. Steamships ceased to travel on the upper Mississippi and—an occasion of equal significance—Ninian and Elizabeth ceased to entertain. What was the point when no one would venture abroad? Mary did as much needlepoint as she could, perused the local papers, read great quantities of nonsense verse to her niece and nephew (when she could keep them still), and when all that began to pall, she set herself the project of translating the latest Balzac. Line by line, she plied herself, imagining the day when she would fling the completed pages at the author and cry: “Voyez! J’étais fidèle!”

But no matter how many projects she took up, the gloom crowded round. Night flowed indistinguishably into day, sounds echoed queerly down every hallway. Even the tolling of the clocks took on a strange asymmetry. De-don. De-don. She was saved from madness by her uncle, who drove up the hill one afternoon in a horse-drawn sleigh. “Who’s for an adventure?” he called.

Mary ran next door to summon Mercy. The two women climbed into the sleigh, wrapped themselves in buffalo robes, and they were off.

The way was hard through the city, but once they had climbed out of the valley, the horse took new heart, and the grass that would have slowed their passage in warmer times lay hard packed now under a bed of snow, which eased the runners over every slough. Everywhere she looked, Mary saw boundlessness.

“Lovely,” she murmured.

Half a league outside Springfield, Uncle John drew the sleigh to a halt and pointed toward a nearby walnut tree, where a strange, gray figure stood shimmering in the dusk. Like a charcoal drawing, she thought, bleeding off the page. In fact, it was a doe, trapped in the snow and ice. Straining every limb to be free and only imprisoning itself more thoroughly. It was so mesmeric a spectacle that Mary never saw her uncle reach for his rifle. Not until the stock was pressed to his cheek and his finger poised on the trigger did her hand, without any command from her, grab for the gun. The barrel jerked straight toward the sky, and the ball went roaring into the snowy wastes.

“Have you taken leave of your senses?” Her uncle turned on her. “Do you want to get yourself killed?”

“But you can’t,” she whispered.

“And if I don’t, she’ll starve to death! Is that what you want?”

Mary’s face must have composed some reply, for with a clench of fury, he flung down his rifle.

“That’s what I get. Bringing along a pair of girls.”

They were quiet, the three of them, all the way back to town, although it seemed to Mary that, even from a great remove, she could still hear the thrashes of that trapped animal. Dying, in increments of terror. She pressed her gloved hands to her face as the cold began to coil round her. She should never have come to Springfield.

Fifty yards shy of Quality Hill, the sleigh caught in a culvert and took a sudden lurch to the right. The horse staggered, briefly lost its footing, and for a second, the conveyance threatened to tip over altogether. Mary’s hands groped for Mercy’s, and together, they sat teetering on some unseen fulcrum.

At last the carriage resolved into stillness. For some seconds the three of them sat there, collecting their wits. Everything around them was the soul of silence—until, from behind, came the sound of feet crunching in the snow, gradually accelerating in the manner of a predator converging on prey.

“May I be of help?”

A gentleman’s voice, robed in Kentucky vowels. Uncle John whipped his head round and squinted into the dusk.

“Why,” he declared, “it’s Mr. Speed! Aren’t you an angel of mercy?”

“No such thing,” answered the stranger, drawing up alongside them. “Just a pair of hands, ready to work.”

From her tottering vantage, Mary could see no hands, only a bundle of scarves and a top hat. Whatever face was concealed therein was already inclining toward her uncle.

“This is a bit of a pickle,” said the stranger. “We must get the ladies out, but we mustn’t risk tipping the sleigh over.”

After some consultation, it was decided that Mr. Speed would attempt to hold the sleigh in place while Dr. Todd, with great care, extricated himself. The resulting shift in weight sent a rather terrifying tremor through the springs, but the runners held firm, and the two men, digging in their heels as best they could, contrived to drag the sleigh, inch by inch, to level ground. From there it was short work to extricate the women. Mercy, being nearest to the street, was the first to come out. It was Mary who, being second, hesitated.

“Up we go,” said Mr. Speed, extending his arms toward her.

Down he meant, surely. But, in that first instant she did rise—in an utterly pure way, the weight of her own body left far behind and the stars rushing toward her. A second later, she was back on Earth, and Mr. Speed was saying what a near thing it was. Later, much later, she would be able to break down his face to its component parts. The chin, etched to a taper. The nose, sensitive and rather agreeably long. The mouth, generous. Eyes of the most candid and guileless blue. But in that first encounter, she could reliably speak only to the corporate effect. It was simply the most pleasant face she had ever seen.

Even as her mind voiced the word, she winced at its mildness. How could pleasant begin to describe a face of such patent and palpable affability? A face that bent its every last ray on you. Shone on you, yes. With a start, she realized that she had been gazing at him rather longer than was strictly necessary. “I do thank you, sir,” she murmured. “We were most fortunate to—although I don’t suppose we were in any great—”

But he was already looking past her. “Here now, Dr. Todd! Your sleigh is in a bad way, and these womenfolk look chilled to the bone. Mightn’t we convey them home?”

“By great and good fortune, they live just up the hill.”

Mr. Speed followed the trajectory of Uncle John’s figure to the Edwards manse, then turned his head slowly back round.

“Why, you’re Miss Todd.”

In that moment, it was