Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

both sought from time to time. Graham remembered her as a twenty-something with “large, expressive blue eyes,” a “fair complexion,” and auburn hair—“not flaxen as some have said.” She had “a good mouth and good teeth in it. Sweet as honey and nervous as a butterfly.” He also remembered the moment when Abe first made her acquaintance. “I have never seen a man’s jaw hang quite so low before or since. He looked up from his book and was hit square in the heart by that ancient arrow. The two exchanged pleasantries, but I recall the conversation being one-sided, for Lincoln could hardly keep his wits about him—so struck was he by this lovely vision. So amazed was he by her love and knowledge of books.”
Abe wrote about Ann that very day.
Never has there been such a girl! Never has a creature so beautiful and so bright existed in one body! She is a good foot shorter than I, with blue eyes and auburn hair and a shining, perfect smile. She is a bit slender, though it cannot be held against her, for it suits her kind, delicate nature. How shall I ever sleep again knowing she is out there in the night? How shall I ever keep another thought in my head when she is all I care to think about?
Abe and Ann saw more of each other, first at Mentor Graham’s, where they carried on lively discussions of Shakespeare and Byron; then on long, late summer walks, where they carried on lively discussions of life and love; then on Ann’s favorite hilltop overlooking the Sangamon, where they hardly talked at all.
I am almost ashamed to record it here, for I fear it may somehow cheapen the thing itself, but I cannot resist. Our lips met this afternoon. It happened as we sat upon a blanket, watching the occasional flatboat drift silently by below. “Abraham,” said she. I turned, and was surprised to find her face so close to my own. “Abraham… do you believe what Byron says? That ‘love will find a way through paths where wolves fear to prey’?” I told her that I believed it with all my heart, and she pressed her mouth to mine without another word.
It is the moment that I wish to remember with my dying breath.
Three months remain before I am required in Vandalia, and I plan to fill every moment of them with Ann’s company. She is the most fetching… most tender… most brilliant star in the heavens! Her only fault is that she lacks sense enough to avoid falling in love with such a fool as I!
Abe would never write with such flowery flourish again. Not of his wife; not even of his children. It was the stomach-turning, obsessive, euphoric love of youth. A first love.
December came “too quickly.” He bade Ann a tearful farewell and rode to Vandalia to take his oath as a member of the legislature. The prospect of being a “rail-splitter seated beside men of letters” (which had previously given him fits of excitement) now hardly mattered at all. For two agonizing months, he sat in the Capitol thinking of Ann Rutledge and little else. When the session closed at the end of January, he was “out the door before the sound of the gavel ceased to echo,” and sped home for what would be the best spring of his life.
There is no music sweeter than the sound of her voice. No painting more beautiful than her smiling face. We sat in the shade of a tree this afternoon, Ann reading Macbeth as I lay my head across her lap. She held the book in one hand, and played with my hair with the fingers of the other—gently kissing my forehead with each turn of the page. Here, at last, is all that is right with the world. Here is life. She is the antidote to all the darkness that poisons this world. When she is near I care nothing of debts or vampires. There is only her.
I have resolved to ask her father’s permission to marry. There is but one insignificant obstacle in the way of my doing so, and I shall see to its removal at once.
That “insignificant obstacle” was named John MacNamar—and contrary to Abe’s flippant reference, he posed a serious threat to their happiness.
That’s because he and Ann were engaged to be married.
[MacNamar] is by all accounts a man of questionable character, who pledged his love to Ann when she was but eighteen, only to depart for New York before such time as they could marry. The few letters she received from him in Decatur were hardly those of a man in love, and it has been ages since she has received any word from him at all. Until he releases her, however, I shall not be satisfied. But I