The house of lincoln, p.1
The House of Lincoln, page 1
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Books. Change. Lives.
Copyright © 2023 by Nancy Horan
Cover and internal design © 2023 by Sourcebooks
Cover design by Heather VenHuizen/Sourcebooks
Cover images © Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images, Gustavo Ramirez/Getty Images
Internal design by Tara Jaggers/Sourcebooks
Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Apart from known historical figures, any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
Published by Sourcebooks Landmark, an imprint of Sourcebooks
P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410
(630) 961-3900
sourcebooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Horan, Nancy, author.
Title: The house of Lincoln : a novel / Nancy Horan.
Description: Naperville, Illinois : Sourcebooks Landmark, 2023.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022050991 (print) | LCCN 2022050992 (ebook) | (hardcover) | (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Lincoln, Abraham, 1809-1865--Fiction. | Springfield (Ill.)--History--19th century--Fiction. | LCGFT: Historical fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3608.O725 H68 2023 (print) | LCC PS3608.O725 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6--dc23/eng/20221031
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022050991
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022050992
CONTENTS
Front Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Part Two
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
Chapter Fifty-Five
Chapter Fifty-Six
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Chapter Sixty
Chapter Sixty-One
Chapter Sixty-Two
Chapter Sixty-Three
Chapter Sixty-Four
Chapter Sixty-Five
Chapter Sixty-Six
Chapter Sixty-Seven
Chapter Sixty-Eight
Chapter Sixty-Nine
Chapter Seventy
Chapter Seventy-One
Chapter Seventy-Two
Chapter Seventy-Three
Chapter Seventy-Four
Chapter Seventy-Five
Chapter Seventy-Six
Author's Note
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Back Cover
For Kevin
“To this place, and the kindness of these people, I owe everything.”
—Abraham Lincoln
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
FEBRUARY 1909
Below, the men are eating turtle soup.
Seated in the gallery above, Ana follows the courses outlined on a menu tucked into the souvenir program. Happily, she thought to bring her opera glasses. Never has the Arsenal looked so festive, with swooping buntings and American flags suspended in pairs like giant butterflies over the long banquet tables. She recognizes many faces above the boiled shirts: judges, bankers, lawyers, doctors, land developers, politicians—more than seven hundred of Springfield’s “quality.” On the main dais, two foreign ambassadors sit admiring the immense French and English flags floating for their benefit among the Stars and Stripes. How festive, she thinks. And how utterly different from the way the building looked six months ago.
From the gallery she can see tension melt into camaraderie among the men as the waiters circulate, bottles in hand. Amusing that only the priest and one other fellow have turned their glasses over. The others drink champagne as they study the menus, remarking on the crabs, the guinea squabs, the tenderloins yet to come. A tittering glee sweeps through the auditorium as oysters arrive.
“Five barrels of them,” comments a young woman seated to her right. “And more than a ton of ice cream for dessert. My husband helped haul it in.”
Unlike the other women in the balcony, Ana does not have a husband or brother who is a member, nor has she paid the twenty-five-dollar ticket fare to be here. She knows why she has been invited to the birthday bash: she’s meant to be a decorative relic from times past, and that is all right. She has dressed the part by wrapping her throat in a piece of her mother’s lace, stuck through by an ancient brooch.
At the podium, the first speaker is throwing his voice. “Picture for a moment Lincoln’s arrival in Springfield, a poorly dressed young man riding into town alone, bent on making a name for himself…”
Her stomach lets out a gastric rumble and she thinks of the uneaten lamb stew in her icebox. It will be a long evening. If Robert Lincoln shows up, though, it will be worth near starvation. She shifts in her seat, closes her eyes, and prepares to endure the affair to its end.
“Arrival,” she hears the speaker say again. And as if she’s sipped the Log Cabin punch the men are now enjoying, she feels light-headed and almost swoons from the sudden, vivid memory of her own arrival in Springfield in 1849, some sixty years ago.
* * *
“The exiles are here!” someone had shouted that day as she tumbled off the train into the chilling November morning. Clusters of men and women stood waiting for them. A man wearing a minister’s collar shouted out names—Vasconcelles, Ferreira, DeFrates—while a big blond woman in a fur hat sorted Ana’s family and the others into shivering groups. Ana hunched beneath a thin wool cape the Presbyterian ladies in New York had given her.
Family groups were directed to spare bedrooms or a few empty houses the church people had found for the ragged band of religious exiles. One hundred thirty Portuguese immigrants were in their group, and not one of them fully understood the words puffing like clouds from the mouths of the welcomers.
Ana was nine years old at the time, but the image in her mind of that day was precise as an engraving. She’d stood with her hand in her father’s grip and stared out at a river of mud that was said to be the main street. Pigs with feet sunk in the oozing mess nosed around the half-buried wheels of a driverless carriage. Just beyond it, a spread of abandoned boots—perhaps twenty-five or thirty of them in all sizes—poked up from the porridge-thick earth. This was the first of many mysteries she encountered in her first months in Springfield. It was likely the children had been lifted out of their little boots by their parents—she could imagine that—but what about the grown-ups who left behind their large leather footwear? Who lifted them out of the muck? Her mother would say such a feat was the work of God, as she often said about odd things difficult to explain. Ana had pictured a whole collection of shoeless citizens being sucked up into heaven in one grand resurrection.
She’d not bothered her mother with any questions that day, for Genoveva Ferreira had nearly collapsed in a fit of weeping. Ana understood now that she was heartsick with longing, standing there remembering the lovely cobblestone streets of her hometown in Madeira. But Ana’s father was beaming. He had looke
* * *
“The Great Emancipator,” comes a voice from the podium. Ana shakes off the gauzy reverie and scans the crowd on the main level.
“You knew the Lincoln family,” says the young woman next to her.
“Long ago.” Ana now regrets mentioning it earlier.
“He would have been pleased by such an event in his honor,” the woman adds in a hushed voice.
“Mr. Lincoln?” Ana presses a finger to her lips but the words come out anyway. “Oh, my dear, he would have leaped out the nearest window.”
CHAPTER TWO
JULY 1851
The limestone paving heated her thighs through her dress as she watched the shoppers across the street on Chicken Row. From her perch on the top step of the huge stone Capitol, she could see men hauling gunnysacks of flour and tubs of grease to canvas-hooded wagons with chairs lashed to their sides. Yoked oxen were bellowing in the street. Beside one wagon, a woman with a bolt of cloth in her arms argued with her husband. It was 9:00 a.m. and every pole around the square had a horse tied to it. Weaving through the human and animal legs in the street, a black-and-white hog went about his business.
“Pocilga,” her mother said of Springfield. A pigsty. The remark pained Ana. She loved this town. When they came at dawn to set up their stand, she liked nothing better than to feel the morning unfold around the square as awnings lowered, newspapers opened on benches, wooden sandwich boards took their places in front of stores. Today, yes, she could see garbage all over the place. Food scraps, chunks of broken bricks and wood, rags, and fat piles of horse droppings that made women lift their skirts. Filth like this, her mother was quick to point out, would never be permitted in Funchal, her hometown in Madeira. A merchant would be fined if he failed to sweep the section of road in front of his shop.
Ana glanced from time to time toward the spot where her mother had positioned her stand, right at the corner where Chicken Row met the street market around the corner on Sixth. From the Capitol’s steps, she could see Genoveva Ferreira hold up a plucked bird for a shopper’s look. Ana watched to see if her free hand would beckon her to come translate. Her feet itched to run on the grass. She was thin and long-legged and could outrun her brother, but she stayed still on the step. Of the five of them in the family, Ana was the one who spoke English best. It was a mark of pride, but it kept her tethered to her mother, who spoke only Portuguese.
Sitting nearby, her friend Cal traced with a finger the small shell shapes in the steps. She turned to Ana, lifting her face, freckled as the chicken eggs her own mother was selling at the street market. “You hungry yet?”
Ana nodded.
“What you got?”
Ana sighed and laid out what was in her sack. An apple and a hard chunk of sausage. The stray dog called Jasper who ate rocks all day came over to have a look and turned tail.
“Even he don’t want my lunch.”
Cal waited until Jasper had scampered a distance off, then produced a surprise out of a square of newspaper—a thick biscuit slathered with applesauce. She pulled it apart and gave Ana half. In the sunlight, Cal’s hair was an explosion of curly red tendrils jittering around her head.
They had been friends since the first day Ana’s mother joined the other vendors at the market. Cal was the same age, eleven, and had the same job, watching over her younger brother, Paul, while her mother worked.
Ana had a second job, running errands for people in her neighborhood. Cal often went with her through the downtown area, delivering notes to the druggist or buying some item at the general store for an elderly senhora. It was a new privilege and a streak of freedom for both girls to go out together into the busy streets on their own. Ana had been lonely and awkward two years ago when they first arrived. She thought only in Portuguese. Every sentence she ventured back then felt like a wobble across a rope bridge. Not anymore. She had ripped a blank page out of the back of her father’s Bible and made a small map of the businesses surrounding the square, labeling each store with the names of the merchants in tiny print. Now she thought in English part of the time. She knew more people in the shops, knew more about the merchandise and shopkeepers than most people in her neighborhood.
She and Cal took little notice of the men in tailed coats who moved in and out of the Capitol carrying carpetbags bulging with papers. Other people interested them more: the butcher, his belly wrapped in a clean white apron every morning, whistling different bird sounds as he swept his section of the walk. The afflicted young man who sat on his haunches on an old church pew outside the saddle store, spewing ugly words. And there were always people passing through, heading to California or Oregon. Across the street was one of them, that woman holding a roll of fabric who looked just now as if she might cry.
“What does she say to him, you think?” Ana said. It was a watching game they had.
“Who? That lady over there? I know what he’s saying. ‘You’re gonna wish you had food instead of cloth if we get stuck in snow. It tastes better.’”
“Ugh.” Ana put down her biscuit. “Why you bring that up?”
Everybody in town, even Ana, knew the tale of the families who had set out from Springfield with a wagon train for California seven years ago. Trapped in the mountains by blizzards, they ended up eating the bodies of the dead to survive.
From the corner of her eye, Ana spotted her mother’s hand go up. She jumped to her feet and raced over to the stand, where a short, dark-haired woman was examining the chicken pies spread out on her mother’s crate. She had a boy with her who looked to be about eight, her brother Joao’s age.
“Ma’am?”
“How much for three?”
“Quanto custa para três?” Ana asked her mother.
“Vinte centavos cada.”
Twenty cents each did not please the woman, whose mouth puckered like a coin purse. “It should be less if I buy all of them.” Her son turned away, embarrassed.
“E possível pagar cinquenta centavos para os três?” Ana asked.
Her mother’s face spoke her dismay. She smoothed her apron, looked down. Ana knew she was weighing whether to hold out for full price. She nodded finally.
“Maybe fifty cents,” Ana said.
The woman savored her triumph with a grin as she filled a sack with the pies and walked away with her boy.
“Raios te partam,” her mother sniped as the woman departed. May thunderbolts cleave you.
* * *
“Joao! Food!” Ana spotted him chasing a ball and waved the apple in the air. Her brother ignored her. “Joao!” she hollered again, just to irk him. He wanted to be called Joe, but their mother wouldn’t hear of it.
“He wants an American name,” her father had argued in Joao’s defense.
“Joao is a strong name,” her mother argued back.
Emmanuel Ferreira dismissed the remark with a philosophical shrug. “It doesn’t matter.”
“It does.”
“You are too proud,” their father always said.
Ana knew what he really meant. Genoveva Ferreira still clung to the high position her family held in the old country. Emmanuel, who came from humbler people, was more practical. Adaptar, he told her. You will feel better.
* * *
Ana went back over to the market where her mother stood a stone’s throw from some Irish vendors who called out to people in an accent the girl found musical. Her mother was wary of these people. “Catholics,” she had warned her children. It was the Catholics in Madeira, after all, who had terrorized the Presbyterian converts and chased them out of the island. But their father had already become an American. “Here, they are the despised ones,” he would say. “Don’t be afraid of them. They are running from their own troubles.”
Ana could see with her own eyes that some of them were as tattered as her family had been when they came to this town. The vendors were a jumble of immigrants, mainly Irish and German. Some were longtime Americans but new arrivals in town—from Missouri and Kentucky mostly. Friction snapped among them, but they kept their tempers in check, lest the market master throw them out.
