I dreamed I was researching but also somehow observing the life of Mary Todd. She was a beautiful and intelligent young girl in a wealthy but common family in medieval America. She had smooth golden hair and a placid pale face. Abraham Lincoln was a charismatic and clever but dissipated king in his thirties. Mary was an avid constitutional scholar, but had no desire to be married to a craggy older man who ran with such infamous companions as the irreverent William Shakespeare and the debauched Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
But Lincoln had his heart set on Mary. He pursued her honorably, and her family encouraged her, and boasted about her new constitutional ideas, like Emancipation, which further intrigued Lincoln. He was definitely making headway, especially as he spent less time with Wolf and Will. But in an unwise moment of impatience and frustration, he had a bit of a Thomas Becket moment, and whined to his friends, during one of their now-infrequent carouses, that couldn’t a king just kidnap a wife anymore?
Shakespeare laughed it off, but Mozart had become obsessed with Mary on his own account, and took the question as license to play out his own dark fantasies. He convinced Shakespeare to help him, and they quietly assembled a team of rowdy young nobles to carry out the plot.
But Will got cold feet, after hearing Wolf brag about how he might just act as Abe’s “taster.” So Shakespeare sent a secret message to the Todds, who flew into a frenzy of preparation. They baracaded the house, sent off a young serving girl in a lavish dress on horseback under full escort out the main gates as a decoy, and then Mary, in a plain dress, went with the novice serving the abbess of a nearby convent. They got into the abbess’s pink Cadillac to drive Mary to the safety of the convent.
They were almost to safety, but I was worried they wouldn’t make it, because the nuns would only approach the convent in the car by driving an intricate maze pattern along their rose-lined rosary walk. The pink roses were lovely against the silver gray and pearl pale cobbles of the walk, but the tight turns required low speeds, and it was taking forever.
So I got involved myself, and led a party of village boys down toward the path of the decoy party. As the kidnappers road up, we cheerfully ran out to accost them and impede them, as though we were simply excited to see such a noble hunting party in our village. But Mozart lost patience and turned vicious, whipping the boys out of his way and charging us down.
We scattered, and no one was hurt too badly, and I crept back to the Todds’ house, regretting my actions. I could see through the windows that Lincoln himself had come to sort out the mess. He had himself reached the convent before Mary and the novice, and had brought Mary back home. Because of the notoriety she had gained as knowledge spread of the plot, for some reason this meant she had no choice but to marry Lincoln, and she was becoming reconciled as they grew to know each other better and respect each other’s strengths.
But Mozart was running rampant across the countryside. He caught up with the decoy party and flogged the men nearly to death and raped and beat the poor serving girl who wasn’t Mary. He put out a call for tribute to ostensibly fund a lavish wedding for the king, but was keeping it for himself. Abe and Mary married quietly and began to work together to set things right, but America was tense and on edge with the murmurs of Mozart’s ambitions and plans to steal Mary and the throne. Then I woke up.
