These Honored Dead (A Lincoln and Speed Mystery #1) - Jonathan F. Putnam Page 0,2

I have a lot of friends in New Salem.” The modesty of his smile seemed genuine. “But a man can hardly live on the legislative salary warrant alone. Besides, we’re in session only a couple of months of each two-year term.”

“So now you’ve hit upon the law,” I said. It had once been my chosen profession too.

“So now I’ve read law,” he said, nodding. “Blackstone’s Commentaries, front to back. Twice. I studied with no one but the mosquitoes.”

“There’s no prospect of a Mrs. Lincoln as of yet?” I asked. I myself was merely twenty-two years of age, but I guessed Lincoln to be five or six years my senior, getting on in life to remain a bachelor, moving to a new town, and seeking a single accommodation.

Lincoln laughed so hard he was sent into a coughing fit. “Don’t beat around the bush, Speed,” he shouted when he regained his breath. “Please, do tell me what’s truly on your mind.”

“My experience in sharing a bed, and a narrow one at that, every night with another man is that it’s impossible not to learn of his affairs,” I replied seriously. “So you can either pretend and ignore the obvious or acknowledge it straight away.”

“I suppose you’re right,” Lincoln returned, turning serious himself. “I remain unmarried. To my profound sorrow.”

His voice trailed off, but I sensed he was gathering his words and so I kept my tongue silent. At length he continued, “I’d formed an understanding with a young woman in New Salem. Two years ago. She was a handsome girl. But . . . we had to delay matters while she waited to inform a former beau of hers who’d gone missing. And then, just when it seemed we would move forward to a promised land of contentment . . .” He went mute, and this time he did not continue.

“I’m sorry,” I said quietly.

“Brain fever,” he murmured.

We sat in silence and watched the crackling hearth. The yellow-orange light of the fire cast Lincoln’s tensed face in sharp relief. I regretted having touched so raw a nerve when I was just getting to know the man.

“I’m afraid we somehow detoured down a maudlin road,” said Lincoln after a minute, shaking his head back and forth to rouse himself. “Let’s turn back. Have you heard the one about the Baptist preacher from Indiana?”

I hadn’t, I said, gesturing for him to relate it and glad for the change of subject.

Lincoln clambered to his feet and began pacing about the room, as if addressing some unseen jury. His posture was a little stooped in the shoulders. “So this preacher, he begins his sermon by telling his parishioners”—here Lincoln adopted a voice of self-important pomposity—“‘I am the Christ, whom I shall represent today.’ Well, he launches into his sermon, and it’s a barn-burner. All fire and brimstone.

“Now at one point, a lizard darts out from the shadows and runs right up the preacher’s leg. He doesn’t stop the sermon—he merely loosens his pantaloons and kicks them off. But by then the lizard is up on his chest, into the pocket of his shirt, and so the preacher, still midsermon, unfastens his shirt collar and pulls his shirt away too. This rids him of the lizard finally, but the preacher is too consumed by his vigorous speechmaking to notice his state of undress. So he’s standing in front of his congregation, his naked, hairy stomach extending over his undershorts, as he comes to his thundering conclusion—‘and that is the will of the Lord.’”

Mirth now played at the corners of Lincoln’s mouth and around his eyes. He went on: “The congregation is stunned, speechless. Finally, one old lady in the front row rises up and shouts”—Lincoln took on her squeaking, scolding tone—“‘If you represent Christ, then I’m done with the Bible.’”

Lincoln slapped his own thigh and I roared with laughter. He threw himself down again on the plank floor in front of the glowing embers, his long legs splayed outward and a wide grin spread across his face.

“I’ve done nearly all the talking,” he said as our merriment died away. “How about you? How did a gentleman like Joshua Speed, with all his illustrious forebears, end up out here on the frontier?”

***

To my everlasting good fortune, a few days before my seventeenth birthday my lungs were afflicted by terrible disease. I was taken by our private carriage to Farmington, my family’s estate, where Dr. Mathews bled me for several days running. But when the disease did not relent,