She struck at me, and in doing so knocked the knife from my hand—my strength diminished by fever. Her fists flew about my face and belly faster than I could perceive them, and I tasted the salt of fresh blood in my mouth. She drove me back with each blow, until I could no longer keep my feet steady beneath me. For the first time since the night Henry had saved my life, I felt death looking over my shoulder.
Henry was wrong….
I collapsed, and she was on me at once—my arm shaking as I again held her by the hair. And then her fangs were in my shoulder. The pain of punctured flesh and muscle. The heat of blood rushing to the wound. The pressure in my veins. I stopped pulling at her hair and laid my hand flat upon her head, as if comforting a friend in a time of grief. All apprehension left me now. All pain. The warmth of whiskey. An unknown joy.
These are the last moments of my life.
I struck the martyr against the ivory comb in her hair. It lit—brighter than the sun, a halo behind her head. Her red hair burst into flame and I felt her fangs leave me; heard her screams as she rolled on the ground—the fire spreading to her clothes, refusing to let her go. With the last of my strength, I got to my knees, retrieved my ax, and buried it in her brain. She was no more, but I had not the strength to bury her, or walk the mile to my boardinghouse. I dragged her body inside, closed the door, and—after helping myself to a torn strip of her bedsheets to dress my wounds—helped myself to her bed.
I do not expect I shall ever again have the opportunity of defending and murdering a client in the same day.
When Abe rode circuit, his hunts were confined to darkness. But when he worked out of Springfield, he grew increasingly fond of hunting during the day.
One of my favorite tricks was setting a sleeping vampire’s house alight when the sun was highest in the sky. This left the devil with two unsavory options: meet me in the daylight, where he would be weak and half blind, or remain inside and burn. I cared not which he chose.
By the time Abe won reelection to the State Legislature in 1838, he was becoming known around Springfield as an eloquent speaker and capable lawyer. A man with ability and ambition to match. A man worthy of esteem. He was twenty-nine years old, and in just over a year’s time, he’d gone from a penniless newcomer on a borrowed horse to a man who moved with the capital’s elite (though thanks to his debts, he remained penniless). He charmed dinner party guests with his backwoods folksiness and impressed fellow legislators with his easy grasp of the issues. “His table manners are a bit rough,” wrote fellow Whig Ebenezer Ryan to a friend, “and his suits in need of mending. But he is possessed of the finest mind I have ever known, and has a gift for forming his thoughts into eloquent turns of phrase. I expect he could be governor someday.”
Abe also thought less often of Ann Rutledge.
It is true what they say of time. I find my melancholy much improved of late, and take to my errands with renewed zeal. Mother sends news that she and my half-siblings are in good health. * I have a fine partner in Stuart, a pestilent but well-meaning friend in Speed, and the respect of the finest men in Springfield. Were it not for my debts, I should be the happiest of men. And yet I cannot escape the feeling that there is something missing.
John T. Stuart had a plan.
It had taken some convincing, but he’d finally managed to drag his junior partner to the cotillion at his cousin Elizabeth’s.
Having much business to attend to, I did not think it a good use of my time. Yet Stuart kept at me—pestering me as [his stepbrother] John had years before. “Life is more than papers, Lincoln! Come now! It shall do our health wonders to be out among people.” This continued for the better part of an hour, until I had no choice but relent. On reaching the Edwardses’ house (before I’d so much as shaken the snow from my soles), Stuart whisked me through the house and introduced me to a young lady seated in the parlor. It was then that his scheme became clear.
Her name was Mary Todd—Stuart’s cousin, and a new arrival to Springfield. Abe recorded his first impressions of her that very night, December 16th, 1839.
She is a fascinating creature, just this week turned one-and-twenty, but so gifted in conversation—and not in the stilted, learned manner of excessive breeding, but rather in a natural, God-given way. A tiny, witty thing with a pleasing round face and dark hair. Fluent in French; trained in dance and music. My eye could not help but return to her, time and time again. More than once I caught her staring back, her hand cupped to the ear of a friend—both laughing at my expense. Oh, I am keen to know her more! When the evening was all but concluded and I could bear it no longer, I greeted her with a low bow, saying “Miss Todd, I want to dance with you in the worst way.”
Legend has it that Mary later told friends: “And he certainly did.”
She was strangely drawn to the tall, unrefined lawyer. Despite the gulf of wealth and breeding that divided them, there were a few crucial similarities that would form the basis of their relationship: Both lost their mothers at a young age, and continued to be defined by that loss. Both were decisive, emotional creatures—prone to soaring highs and abyssal lows. And both enjoyed nothing more than a good joke (especially when it came at the expense of “some deserving charlatan”). As Mary would write in her diary that winter, “He is not the handsomest suitor I have ever known, nor the most refined—but he is without question the cleverest. Yet there is a sadness that accompanies his wit. I find him quite strange… strange yet intriguing.”
But as much as she was intrigued by Abe, Mary was torn, for she was already being courted by a short, stocky Democrat named Stephen A. Douglas. Douglas was a rising star in his party, and a man of considerable means, especially when compared to Lincoln. He could provide Mary with the lifestyle she’d grown accustomed to. But while he was undeniably brilliant and undeniably rich, he was also (in Mary’s words) “undeniably dull.”
“In the end,” she recalled in a letter written years later, “I decided that it was more important to laugh than eat.”
She and Abe became engaged in late 1840. But while the two were “in hearty love and a hurry to get hitched,” there was still the small matter of getting permission from Mary’s father. The young couple wouldn’t have to wait long for his answer. Mary’s parents were due in Springfield for Christmas. It was to be Abe’s first encounter with his future in-laws.
Robert Smith Todd was a wealthy businessman and a fixture in Lexington, Kentucky, society. Like Abe, he was both lawyer and lawmaker. Unlike Abe, he’d amassed a great deal of wealth, some of which he’d used to purchase slaves for the mansion that he shared with his second wife and some of their fifteen children.
I am unnerved at the prospect of being judged by a man of such influence and accomplishments. What if he should think me a fool or a peasant? What then of our love? I can think of nothing else. It has given me no shortage of worry these two weeks.
Abe needn’t have worried. The meeting went better than he could have hoped—at least according to the poem Mary dashed off to Lexington the next day, December 31st:
My darling Abe was at his best,
our darling father, most impressed.
The happy news (you might have guessed),
is that our union has been blessed!
As one post rider carried her poem to Lexington, another delivered a letter to her newly blessed fiancé. It was addressed “urgent” in Henry’s unmistakable scrawl—and carefully worded (as all the letters that passed between him and Abe were) to avoid any direct mention of vampires lest it be delivered to the wrong hands.