Henry and Clara Read Online Free

Friday evening of October 1851, the city house was empty. Pauline had taken Amanda Harris and Lina, the baby girl she and the judge had unexpectedly produced together, down to Kenwood, Joel Rathbone’s great estate south of the city. They would spend the weekend there, while out in Loudonville Judge Harris presided over his other daughters, his son Will, and the Rathbone boys. At twilight he and Will made the short journey over the plank road out of Albany, and upon arriving, Will ran into the house full of excitement. “Father has a letter from Mr. Fillmore,” he said to Clara, pompously setting the White House stationery on a table near Pauline’s sewing basket, which Clara and Louise had been organizing. Louise seemed uncertain who Millard Fillmore actually was and what he had to do with Papa. Clara, now seventeen, knew exactly how he’d become President when General Taylor died two summers ago, and she reminded her younger sister that they’d met the handsome, white-haired President at Papa’s wedding.
    But Papa himself was all that mattered to Clara right now, and she rushed out to his carriage to greet him. “My darling,” he said, dropping a satchel of legal papers to embrace his favorite daughter. They walked back to the house and into the parlor,where Will was again poring over Mr. Fillmore’s letter. Clara hoped it contained good news, since lately she had noticed that whenever talk in the house turned to politics or Mr. Weed or the state of the country, her papa seemed troubled and her stepmother impatient.
    In truth, Mr. Fillmore’s letter contained little more than the courteous greetings of a genial man, one who remained friendly toward his old friend Ira Harris despite all provocations from “the Dictator” — Fillmore’s former patron and Harris’s present one, Thurlow Weed. The falling-out of Weed and Fillmore had begun as soon as the latter became Vice President — a position he owed, everyone felt, to Mr. Weed, who soon took offense at Fillmore’s assertiveness over the spoils of office. When President Taylor died — after drinking too much iced milk on a hot Fourth of July — the quarrel over patronage evolved into a war of principle. Thurlow Weed adopted the antislavery views of his most promising protégé, Senator Seward, the man he now hoped to make President, causing a rift with those Whigs who backed Fillmore’s efforts to enforce last year’s great Compromise, which might ensure the survival of slavery but would at least preserve the Union.
    Judge Harris had been triply distressed by these developments. Temperamentally, he was with Mr. Fillmore, a man more interested in respect than power; morally, he was with Mr. Seward, whose boldness in citing God’s “higher law” against slavery was something Harris himself could never have managed; and politically, he seemed to be nowhere at all. Mr. Weed, who had been so attracted by the abilities he displayed in the legislature, had cooled toward him: the more brilliant Seward now claimed the Dictator’s attentions, while Harris, taken care of with a seat on the court, was more or less forgotten, except on those occasions when the editor of the
Evening Journal
needed a special favor, and Harris, rather to his shame, was willing to provide it.
    Clara could sense that Pauline Harris’s frustrations were even greater than her husband’s. Not long ago she had heard her stepmother remark to one of her Rathbone in-laws, who was standing right beside Ira Harris, “Alas, there isn’t much supremacy to the supreme court.”
    Now Ira Harris asked Clara, “Have you and Louise had your supper?”
    “Yes, Papa. We ate with the boys.”
    “Where are they now?” asked the judge.
    “Out near the orchard, playing ball.”
    “Well, my lady,” said Ira Harris, relaxing a bit now that everyone was accounted for, “as soon as I get cook to feed me and Will, perhaps you and I can read a little of Mr. Irving together. Would that suit