Mrs. Lincoln's Rival Read Online Free PDF Page A

said nor done anything that would reflect badly upon herself or her father.
    That had not always been so.
    Two years before, newly liberated from Miss Haines’s School in Manhattan, she had come to Columbus, exultant with freedom—from the headmistress’s demands, from loneliness, from the strictures of childhood. She had craved attention, admiration, love—things her pious and preoccupied father offered in frustratingly minute quantities. He relentlessly admonished her for her faults, reminded her that her days on earth were limited, and urged her to pursue perfection—ceaselessly demanding, forever unsatisfied. Was it any wonder that her heart and imagination were captivated by a man who admired her exactly as she was, who thought her perfect already?
    He was a young man, though nearly ten years older than she, wealthy, handsome, and recently wed to a lovely woman from a prominent Columbus family. Of course Kate was flattered when he paid attention to her whenever they met in society. Conversations in the midst of a watchful crowd led to earnest confidences shared in secluded nooks. He began calling on her at home while her father was away, and then, more boldly, taking her on drives throughout the city, heedless and unmistakable in an open chaise. Their illicit meetings went on so long and so publicly his wife inevitably learned of them. Whether she confronted her husband Kate did not know, but rumors whispered that the heartbroken wife would visit friends who lived across the street from the Chases and watch through the window day after day, tears streaming down her cheeks, as her husband helped the glowing young girl into his carriage and drove off with her alone.
    When Aunt Alice told Kate’s father, he scolded her so terribly that she wept, but she could not give up her admirer. Once she had experienced the heady rush of his limitless praise and adoration, the dizzying excitement of his presence, the terrifying allure of the forbidden, she could not go back to the dull, colorless, ordinary days she had known all her life before him.
    She let him kiss her once, no more, but it was enough. He boasted to his friends of his familiarity with her, and unkind but not unprovoked gossip swirled about her. Furious, her father forbade her to see him again, shouted down her tearful pleas, and threatened to send her away to live with relatives until the scandal could be forgotten. Heartbroken, without a single sympathetic friend, she yearned for her admirer and lived for the days her father traveled away from the city and she could do as she pleased, free from his condemning scrutiny.
    One day it was announced in the papers that her father intended to travel to Washington City, but on the appointed day he did not go, and so he was in his study reading when the man arrived to take Kate riding. Alarmed by the sound of the governor’s footfalls in the hall, he scrambled beneath a sofa, where Father quickly found him, hauled him to his feet, and beat him soundly with the whip from his own buggy, rendering him so bruised and bloodied that he could not go out in public for several days. He never again appeared on the Chases’ doorstep, and when Kate plummeted into a dark pit of melancholy, forlorn and abandoned, her father sent her east to stay with family until she came to her senses.
    After many long weeks, separation and silence from her would-be lover accomplished what all her father’s warnings and punishments had not. Remorse overcame her, and shame, and regret, and when she thought of the anguish she had put his poor wife through she could hardly bear it. Time passed, and whenever Kate thought back on those strange, intoxicating times, she remembered feeling passion and desire and love, but she could not summon up those feelings anew. She did not know what had come over her, why she had risked her reputation, her father’s respect, and all her future happiness upon someone who, it must be said, was no more than an