by John Jakes
Sickened by Stanley’s drunken statements, Brett walked rapidly back to Belvedere. Though she considered Billy’s older brother stupid and venal, she feared that the plan he had described could very well work. The blacks, except for a few of the well-educated ones like Scipio Brown, would logically put their trust in the Republicans. And if they were given the right to vote, they could indeed elect whomever their benefactors chose. Brett had no great liking for the Yankee President, but she couldn’t imagine him being party to such a vile scheme.
Hot and angry, she ate supper alone. Maude, one of the serving girls, worked up nerve to say, “Everyone’s talking of a great battle. Will they come this far to fight?”
“I don’t know,” Brett answered. “No one’s sure of the whereabouts of either army.”
In darkness reddened by the light of Hazard’s, Brett walked into the hills, hoping to find cooler air. Where was Billy? She had had no letters for nearly three weeks. He was fighting for what he believed while Stanley cowered in Lehigh Station, sipping gin and boasting of his political plans.
She wandered higher, through the laurel that lay thick and dim on the heights. There was no wind to stir the deep green leaves, and in the hazy night the stars had a red cast.
By chance, her walk took her past the spot where a meteorite had struck one of the slopes. She and Billy had discovered the smoking crater only hours before his departure for Washington in the spring of ’61. The crater had seemed to be a warning, and what it had warned of had come to pass. By the light of Hazard’s furnaces and chimneys, she saw that the crater was shallower than before. New dirt had washed into its bottom, and the chunk of what Billy called star-iron was no longer visible.
The laurel grew all around the crater, to the very edge. But none grew within the crater itself. Curious, Brett leaned down for a pinch of loose earth from the crater well. It had a gritty, sandy feel. A strange, sour smell.
Was it somehow poisoned, like the nation was poisoned? Poisoned by hatreds, by loss of lives, by the punishment the land deserved because some of its people had chained up so many others for so many years?
Why, they would take a whip to you down on the Ashley if they knew you harbored such thoughts. Yet she wasn’t ashamed of them, only surprised. She had changed. She preferred the friendship and respect of a Scipio Brown over that of a Stanley Hazard.
Absently, she broke off a sprig of laurel. She remembered Billy likening the laurel to their love. He said both would survive these awful times. But would they?
Where was her husband tonight? Where were the armies? Could Harrisburg be burning and they not know it in this peaceful valley? Shivering under the red stars, she gazed away to the darkness in the southwest, imagining the unseen armies sniffing the hot night for scent of each other.
Upset and frightened, she flung the sprig away and hurried down the hill past the poisoned crater. She didn’t fall asleep until the first light of morning.
84
LEE HAD DISAPPEARED INTO enemy country. A city, a government, a land held its breath in hope of good news.
There was none from the West, Orry told Madeline. Rosecrans was astir in Tennessee, and Grant’s hand crushed Vicksburg more tightly by the hour. Orry’s work was a blur of conferences, memorandums, constant arguments with Winder and his wardens over the increasing number of deaths among the war prisoners.
In the evenings, he and Madeline read aloud to each other. Now and then they indulged in sad speculations about their inability to conceive a child. “Perhaps Justin wasn’t wholly wrong to blame me,” she said once.
They studied and responded to occasional letters from Philemon Meek. And they entertained Augusta Barclay one day, enjoying her company while recognizing how anxious she was about Cousin Charles. She said she had traveled all the way to the capital to find some dress muslin, but she really wanted to inquire about him. She had received no letter in two months and feared he’d been wounded or killed in the cavalry clash at Brandy Station.
Orry assured her that he watched the casualty rolls, and so far the name of Major Charles Main had not appeared. Gus knew nothing of the field promotion. She said she was pleased, but she sounded unenthusiastic.
She accepted their invitation to supper. During the meal, they speculated on Charles’s whereabouts. Orry knew that Hampton’s horse had gone into Pennsylvania with Lee, but beyond that, he could provide no information. They said good-bye after ten, Gus intending to travel all night on lonely roads with only young Boz to guard her. Just before she left, she again expressed gratitude to the Mains for sheltering her during the Chancellorsville fighting and said she wanted to repay the kindness if ever she could. Madeline thanked her, and the women embraced; they had formed a liking for each other.
After Gus was gone, Madeline said, “Something’s wrong between her and Charles, though I’m not sure what it is.”
Orry agreed. Like his wife, he had detected a certain sadness in the visitor’s eyes.
Something was wrong with Cooper, too. Orry saw his brother occasionally around Capitol Square. Cooper was abrupt in conversation and refused further invitations to dinner with a curt “Too busy right now.”
“He’s become a stranger to me,” Orry told Madeline. “And not a very sane-looking one, at that.”
For some months, Orry had known that Beauchamp’s Oyster House on Main Street was a postbox for illegal mail to the North. In late June he wrote a long letter to George, addressing it in care of Hazard’s of Lehigh Station. He asked how Constance was faring, and Billy and Brett, told of his marriage to Madeline, and mentioned Charles’s service with the Iron Scouts. He also described, briefly and somewhat bitterly, his work for Seddon, and his constant conflicts with Winder and the prison wardens. On a sultry evening, wearing the one civilian suit he had brought from Mont Royal, he nervously entered Beauchamp’s and handed the wax-sealed envelope to a barman, together with forty dollars of inflated Confederate money. There was no guarantee the letter would get any farther than some trash bin. Still, Orry missed his old friend, and saying it on paper made him feel better. The June heat continued. And the waiting.
“I’m worried,” Ashton said, the same night Orry mailed his letter.
“About what?” Powell said. Naked except for drawers, he sat examining the deed to a small farm he and his associates had purchased. The place was situated on the bank of the James, below the city near Wilton’s Bluff. Powell hadn’t explained why owning it was advantageous, though Ashton knew it had something to do with the scheme to eliminate Davis.
Powell’s perfunctory question made Ashton snap, “My husband.” He heard the pique in her voice and laid the deed aside. “Every morning he questions me about my plans for the day. When I was shopping downtown yesterday, I had the queerest feeling I was being watched—and then, from the vestibule of Meyers and Janke, I spied James on the other side of the street, lurking behind a water wagon and trying to look inconspicuous.”
A hot breeze blew from the garden, riffling pages of the deed. Far away, heat lightning shimmered. Powell’s four-barrel Sharps lay near the document. He placed the gun on the deed like a paperweight and lightly drummed his fingers on the stock.
“Did he question you this evening?”
She shook her head. “He was still at work when I left.”
“But you think he knows.”
“Suspects. I don’t want to say this, Lamar, but I feel I must. It might be better if we stopped these meetings for a while.”
His eyes grew glacial. “Do I take that to mean I’ve become a bore, my dear?”
She ran to him, reached down from behind his chair and pressed her palms to his hard chest. “Oh, my God, no, sweetheart. No! But things are going badly for James. He’s—disturbed. No matter how careful you are, he might take you by surprise some night. Harm you.” She began to rub slowly, near his waist, her bodice pressing the back of his head as she bent toward the chair. “It would kill me if I were responsible for something like that.”
<
br /> Powell guided her hand lower, murmuring, “Well—perhaps you’re right.”
He allowed her to continue a moment or so, then abruptly took her hand away and nodded at another chair. She sat obediently as he spoke. “My personal safety’s the least of my concerns. Momentous work is under way. I wouldn’t want it interrupted by some witless and preventable act of violence. To tell you the truth, I have been a bit worried about your husband.” He brought his fingertips together and peered over the arch. “Last week I hit on a way to make sure he doesn’t threaten us. I’ve pondered it since then, and I’m convinced it’s sound.”
“What are you going to do, get him dismissed and sent home?”
Powell ignored the sarcasm. “I propose to recruit him for our group.”
“Recruit him?” She jumped up. “That is the most ridiculous, not to say dangerous—”
“Be quiet and let me finish.”
His cold voice stilled her. Cowed, she moved back to the chair as he continued. “Of course that is precisely how it sounds—at first. But think a moment. You can find logical and compelling arguments in favor of it.”
“I’m sorry, I fail to see them,” she countered, though not loudly.
“In any enterprise of this kind, one always needs a certain number of—call them soldiers. Men to carry out the most dangerous phases of the plan. In our case, the men must be more than trustworthy; they must be foursquare against the black vomit of nigger freedom, because only that kind of fervor will beget absolute loyalty. Our soldiers must hate Davis and his coterie of West Point bunglers and Jew bureaucrats, and endorse the formation of our new Confederacy. Except for the last aspect, which he as yet knows nothing about, I submit that your husband meets the specifications in every particular.”
“Well, put that way, perhaps he does.”
Powell’s sly smile broadened. “Finally, would it not be far better to have him close by, where he can be watched, than to have him running about on his own, as he’s doing now?” The low-trimmed gas cast his shadow across her as he padded around the table and fingered a lock of her hair. “With your husband actively involved, it would be far easier for you and me to see each other. I don’t think he’s clever enough to suspect the ruse.”
“I agree about that—especially now that he’s in such a state about the failures of the President.”
“You see? It isn’t such a crazy notion after all.”
He curled the strand of dark hair around his index finger, then moved the finger gently back and forth. “But suppose, despite every precaution against it, he did find us out. Became unbalanced, therefore untrustworthy—” He let the hair fall and laid his hand on the four-barrel Sharps. “That, too, can be dealt with.”
Ashton’s eyes leaped from his face to the shining gun and back again. Frightened, joyous—aroused suddenly—she flung her arms around his neck, kissed it, and whispered, “Oh, my dearest Lamar. How clever you are.”
“Then you don’t object to my plan?”
“No.”
“Not to any part of it?”
Over his shoulder, she saw the Sharps shining on top of the deed. “No—no. Anything you want is fine, as long as I can stay with you always.”
Against her skirt she felt him, large and potent. She felt she was touching more than something physical. She was touching his strength; his ambition; the power they would ultimately share.
“Always,” Powell repeated, picking her up as if she weighed no more than a child. “To ensure it, however, we must agree that James Huntoon, Esquire, is expendable.”
Her open-mouthed kiss gave him the answer.
Late on Wednesday, July 1, Stanley stepped from the first-class car of the train from Baltimore. Even cushioned by swigs from a bourbon bottle, he could hardly accept all that had happened to him in the past twenty-four hours.
Rumors of an impending battle had reached Lehigh Station. He and Isabel had been packing to retreat to the family’s summer home, Fairlawn, in Newport, when Stanton’s angry telegram arrived. Stanley had traveled most of last night and all of today, buffeted by crowds talking of nothing but the battle about to begin, if it hadn’t already, in the vicinity of the market town of Chambersburg. Exhausted and half drunk, Stanley entered the secretary’s sanctum at half past six. He endured ten minutes of Stanton’s wrath, then took a hack to the north side of Capitol Square.
Squalid shops and barracks had grown up around the old brick building at First and A. By turns, the building had been a temporary national capitol after the British burned the official one in August 1814, a rooming house for senators and representatives—Calhoun had died there—and, since ’61, a prison for a wide variety of inmates. These last included female spies working for the Confederacy; sharps and prostitutes; newsmen; fight-prone officers such as Judson Kilpatrick and George Custer.
Stanley had sent messages ahead. Baker’s bay, Slasher, was tethered to the ring post at the First Street entrance. The colonel was waiting outside, truculent but clearly nervous. With him was the prison superintendent, Wood.
“Where is he?” Stanley demanded of Wood.
“Room 16. Same place we put all the editors and reporters.”
“Did you clear out the others in the room? It’s imperative that no one recognize me. Newsmen certainly would.” He was assured it had been done. “You’ve bungled this, Baker—you know that.”
“Not my fault,” Baker complained as Stanley started upstairs through the shadows, the stenches, the flicker and play of gaslights spaced wide apart.
“The secretary thinks otherwise. If we can’t straighten this out, you may lose your precious toy—those four troops of cavalry you persuaded Mr. Lincoln to give you.”
Up they went, past rooms holding inmates, and others where interrogations were conducted, sometimes lasting hours. Room 16 was a long, desolate chamber with a single gas fixture and one filthy window at the end. Spider webs festooned the ceiling corners. Strange stains discolored those portions of the wall that could be seen; bunks piled with dirty blankets and luggage hid the rest.
Packing boxes, empty bottles, items of men’s clothing littered the floor. The furniture consisted of two dirty pine tables with benches. The quality of the prison’s food could be judged from what was scrawled on the wall in charcoal:
MULE SERVED HERE
“Lower bunk, on the left,” Wood whispered.
The floor creaked as they tiptoed toward the small, almost dwarf-like man snoring with his back to the room. The visible side of his face was heavily bruised, his eye a puffy slit yellow with matter. “Good Christ,” Stanley said.
Randolph stirred but didn’t waken. Stanley shoved Baker aside and walked out. Downstairs, in Wood’s office, he slammed the door and said, “Here’s the long and short of it. A black whore escaped when Randolph was taken at Mrs. Devore’s. The whore telegraphed Cincinnati. The owners of Randolph’s paper are Democrats, but they have sufficient influence in Ohio to elicit a response from a Republican administration—I speak particularly of Mr. Stanton. Habeas corpus or no habeas corpus, Randolph goes free first thing in the morning.”
Baker sighed. “That clears it up, then.”
“The devil it does. Who beat him so badly?”
“That man you sent me. Dayton.”
“Get rid of him.”
Baker stroked his beard, shrugged. “Easy enough.”
“And the witnesses.”
“Not so easy.”
“Why not? One’s in custody—”
“The white prostitute,” Wood said. “She’s with the other women.”
“Get the nigger’s name from Mrs. Devore,” Stanley ordered Baker. “Find her and get both women out of Washington. Threaten them, bribe them, but I want them five hundred or a thousand miles from here. Tell them to use assumed names if they value their skins.” Baker started to raise some objection, but Stanley blustered, “Do it, Colonel, or you’ll no longer command the First District of Columbia Cavalry, or any other organization.
”
With an unintelligible mutter, Baker turned away. Wood scratched his chin. “There’s still Randolph to be reckoned with. Nobody cut his tongue out, y’know.”
Stanley’s glance lashed the warden for joking at such a time. “Randolph is Mr. Stanton’s responsibility. The secretary is calling on Senator Wade right now, and it’s expected that some well-respected congressmen will soon counsel with Randolph’s publishers. The message will be quite simple. It will be to their advantage to keep quiet but infinitely troublesome for them if they don’t. I suspect they’ll choose the former. Then, if Randolph talks, who’ll corroborate his wild statements? Not his paper. Certainly no one here—” Baleful, he eyed the warden and the chief of the Detective Bureau.
“The women won’t,” he continued. “They’ll be gone. Dayton, too. Many unsubstantiated tales of government excess are circulating these days. One more will hardly cause a ripple.”
“I’ll speak to Dayton tomorrow,” Baker promised.
“Tonight,” Stanley said and went down and out to the square, where Union officers, evidently rounded up for disciplinary reasons, stumbled from a newly arrived van while raffish men and women leaned from the prison windows, crying, “Fresh fish! Fresh fish!”
“I regret this,” Lafayette Baker said to a still-sleepy Elkanah Bent. It was half past eleven. Bent had been wakened and dragged to the office by Detective O’Dell, who professed to know nothing about the reason for the urgent summons.
Baker cleared his throat. “But facts are facts, Dayton. You injured Randolph by repeatedly hitting him.”
Bent clutched the arms of his chair, straining forward. “He resisted arrest!”
“Even so, it’s evident that you employed more force than was necessary.”
Bent struck the desk. “And what do you and Wood employ when you question someone? I’ve been at the prison. I’ve heard the screams—”
“That’s enough,” Baker said, his tone ominous.
“You want a scapegoat—”
“I don’t want a thing, Dayton. You’re an able agent, and if I could keep you, I would, believe me.” Bent spat an oath. Baker colored but kept his voice level. “I am under orders from the War Department. The secretary himself. Some satisfaction must be offered for what happened to Randolph, and I regret—”