Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy

by Karen Abbott

  No, the captain said. It was far safer to remain on board. The shoal water and the Confederate guns would keep the Yankees at bay. If the Condor could withstand the pounding of the waves, she should be freed with the morning tide.

  Rose insisted and the captain refused. She insisted again. Two sailors volunteered to row, and at last he agreed.

  She climbed into a lifeboat on the leeward side, squeezing next to Lieutenant Wilson. Judge Holcombe, the Condor’s pilot, and the pilot’s puppy joined them. She clutched her leather satchel of dispatches and stroked the bag of gold at her neck, making sure the cord was fastened. The boat dropped, inch by inch, the water rising to meet them. As they touched down a great swell gathered and lashed at her. Rose sensed herself tilting, tipping. The boat flipped and let her go. The other passengers swam away from her, struggling back to the capsized boat and clinging to the keel. Even the puppy made it.

  She was sideways, upside down, somersaulting inside the wet darkness. She screamed noiselessly, the water rushing in. She tried to hold her breath—thirty seconds, sixty, ninety—before her mouth gave way and water filled it again. Tiny streams of bubbles escaped from her nostrils. A burning scythed through her chest. That bag of gold yanked like a noose around her neck. Her hair unspooled and leeched to her skin, twining around her neck. She tried to aim her arms up and her legs down, to push and pull, but every direction seemed the same. No moonlight skimmed along the surface, showing her the way; there was no light at all.

  At dawn, a sentry named J. J. Prosper For Me D. Doctor Duval Connor—at three feet eleven inches, said to be the shortest man with the longest name in the Confederate army—was patrolling along the beach at Fort Fisher. Something shiny caught his eye along the water’s edge: the metal buckle of a leather pouch. Opening it, he couldn’t believe his luck—gold coins, fistfuls of them, more money than he had ever seen. He glanced around, made sure he was alone, and buried it in the sand under a piece of burned log, planning to come back for it later.

  As the morning sun slanted across the water, Thomas Taylor, the captain of the grounded blockade runner Night Hawk, found Rose’s body washed up on the beach. She wore heavy black silk, as if in mourning for herself. Dark ribbons of wet hair reached below her knees. “A remarkably handsome woman she was,” Taylor wrote, “with features that showed much character. Although one cannot altogether admire the profession of a spy, still there was no doubt that she imagined herself in following such a profession to be serving her country in the only way open to her. Surely in war the feelings of both men and women become blunted as to the niceties of what is right or wrong.”

  Taylor ordered a group of slaves to carry Rose to Colonel William Lamb, commander of Fort Fisher, who admired her “lovely face, that graceful form in pure development of womanhood.” Lamb’s wife, Daisy, wiped the sand and silt from Rose’s body and detangled her hair, preparing her for one final journey: a ride aboard the steamer Cape Fear, heading upriver to Wilmington. Hundreds of female admirers lined the wharf, awaiting its arrival. One, Eliza Jane De Rosset, president of the Soldier’s Aid Society, had the body brought back to her mansion, where she clipped a lock of Rose’s hair to send to her daughters. “She was an elegant woman,” Eliza wrote, “not at all changed by death.” When Doc Connor discovered that the gold had belonged to a Confederate hero, he turned it in.

  The wake was held in the chapel of Hospital Number 4. Rose’s body lay on a bier, draped with a Confederate flag, surrounded by a phalanx of candles and flowers arranged in crosses. A stream of women, children, and soldiers approached with bent heads and hushed steps. They followed her to the Roman Catholic church of St. Thomas the Apostle, where the presiding priest spoke of “the uncertainty of all human projects and ambition,” and followed her again in a procession to Oakdale Cemetery. It rained all the way, stopping only as the pallbearers lowered her into the ground beneath a wilting canopy of magnolia blossoms. A local reporter noticed a rainbow streaking the horizon and took it as a sign: “Let us accept the omen not only for her, the quiet sleeper, who after many storms and a tumultuous and checkered life came to peace and rest at last, but also for our beloved country, over which we trust the rainbow of hope will ere long shine with the brightest dyes.”

  They called Rose a heroine and compared her to Joan of Arc, but they were still mostly strangers, mourning a symbol more than a person.

  THE SWEET LITTLE MAN

  LONDON AND THE SHENANDOAH VALLEY

  On the night before Samuel departed for America, Belle took his hand and slid onto one finger a small diamond-cluster ring, telling him it had once been the property of an African princess and that it carried a curious power: if it dropped or was taken off, it meant the wearer was in danger. She tried to focus on writing her memoir but was distracted by reports of Rose’s death—the tragic news reached Europe by the end of October—and by thoughts of her husband visiting her childhood home.

  The entire Shenandoah Valley was now under Union control, and in Martinsburg a tentative serenity had settled over the streets. The provost marshal checked Samuel’s pass and bag before waving him through, and by the time he reached the Boyd home the sky was black and gilded with stars. A servant—it had to be “Mauma Eliza,” whom Belle spoke of often—greeted him with, “You’s Miss Belle’s husband, isn’t you?” Belle’s mother was visiting a friend in Kennysville ten miles away, and so he spent the evening talking with Belle’s grandmother, who wept and welcomed him like a son.

  Another servant, Jim, showed him to Belle’s room. Samuel removed his hat before stepping across the threshold and surveying her things—hair combs and books and a polished palmetto pin—in reverent silence. Sitting before the fire, he opened his journal and composed a passage intended only for Belle’s eyes: “This was your room; here you had been held a prisoner, and had suffered the torture of an agonizing doubt as to your fate. Here lay your books just as you had left them. Writings, quotations, every thing to remind me of you, were here; and I do not know how long a time I should have stood gazing about me in silence. . . . When I retired to bed that night, and Jim had been dismissed from further attendance upon me, I lay for a long time thinking, looking into the fire that glimmered and glared about the room, picturing you here, there, and everywhere about the chamber, and thinking of you sadly, far away from me in England—the exile, lonely and sad.”

  Belle was so charmed by her husband’s writings that she included them in her memoir, calling them an “after-piece” that offered another facet of their unlikely love story—albeit one that Samuel, at least, never intended to convey. “Of the two characters,” mused an early reviewer of Belle Boyd in Camp and Prison, “he is—we say it without meaning disrespect—the truly feminine one.”

  In the morning, after a servant prodded the fire back to life, Samuel sat near its heat and turned Belle’s princess ring on his finger, absentmindedly twisting it off. He recalled her warning and moved through the rest of his day feeling like a “marked man,” a premonition that clung to him as he set off for Baltimore in the afternoon. He got as far as Monocacy Station just outside Frederick, Maryland, where Union detectives approached. It was clear to Samuel that the men recognized him. They asked if his wife, Belle Boyd, was “lurking somewhere in the vicinity” and arrested him for desertion—a pretext to take him into custody, since he had already been dismissed from the Union navy. After transporting him to Harpers Ferry, they brought him before General John Stevenson.

  The general’s face was dominated by a coarse gray mustache, the tips wilting toward his collar like unwatered ferns. He stared at Samuel with a peculiar intensity.

  “Is there anything remarkable about me, or that you admire?” Samuel asked.

  “Yes, sir,” the general replied. “Your duplicity . . . you are a spy. Where are your papers, passes, dispatches?”

  “I have none,” Samuel insisted.

  They were joined by one of the general’s aides. “You’re the husband of Miss Belle Boyd,” he said, deliveri
ng the words as an accusation, “and you ought to be hung.”

  Union officials conveyed him to Washington and conducted another search, confiscating his tall beaver hat and cane and the $14 hidden in his pocket. At Carroll Prison, where Belle had spent four months the previous year, he was tossed into a cell with a blockade runner and a rebel spy. With a crude piece of charred wood he scrawled all three of their names on the wall and sketched a Confederate flag beneath.

  Superintendent Wood stopped by to greet him: “Ho, ho, here we are! So you’re the husband of the famous Belle Boyd, are you? Well, we haven’t got her, but we’ve got her husband.” Samuel received a letter from Belle’s mother, who was refused permission to visit him, and despaired because he was unable to hear news of Belle at all. “I have not smiled today,” he wrote, “but two or three times my eyes have been filled with tears; for I have been thinking of you, Belle, a stranger in a strange land, waiting sad and lonely for my return.”

  Belle, meanwhile, had read all about her husband’s predicament: he was in “daily danger,” one London paper reported, “of meeting with the greatest outrages” at the Yankees’ hands. She knew it would be up to her to save him.

  In Harpers Ferry, not far from where Samuel Hardinge had been held for questioning, another former Union soldier was reclaiming a piece of her old life. Emma never became a missionary, as she once told Jerome Robbins she might, and instead returned to nursing, working at a hospital run by the US Sanitary Commission, a relief agency that supported sick and wounded soldiers. Not one of her female colleagues knew of Frank Thompson—she would keep that secret for a while longer—and it had taken time to relearn how to move and speak like them, to see herself as they did. Her own eye cataloged curious distinctions: the most highly cultivated and refined women were the least bothered by the hardships of the job, and invariably made better nurses than those from the lower classes. She had no time for the foolish, sentimental girls who expected the hospital to look like a drawing room where, Emma wrote, they might “sit and fan handsome young mustached heroes in shoulder straps and read poetry” instead of combing matted hair and washing dirty skin. Even the hardiest of this sort lasted only days.

  She thought often of her own war heroes, General Poe (currently assisting with Sherman’s devastating March to the Sea), General McClellan (who just lost the presidential election to Lincoln), and all the men of the 2nd Michigan. She never saw Jerome again, but he wrote and described the siege of Vicksburg with such brutal specificity that she felt as if she’d been there. James Reid disappeared for good, most likely back to Scotland with his family. Now there was someone new, but from an old part of her life: Linus Seelye, also a native of New Brunswick, who had come to Harpers Ferry seeking work as a carpenter and randomly made her acquaintance. “Her whole life was an interesting conundrum,” Linus said of her, “for every week something would come up—something she could accomplish, overcome, move or manage, that would eclipse the last.” Like Jerome, he was smart and soft-spoken; like James, he was tall and blond and married; his wife remained back home in Canada. He was thirty-two, nine years older than Emma, and listened to all of her stories, even the ones she only pretended were true.

  She began writing those stories, beginning with her divinely inspired decision to join the army and including everything she wished to be remembered for: her valor during some of the war’s deadliest battles, her inventive disguises and risks behind enemy lines, her care for the wounded and the dead. She titled the book Unsexed; or, The Female Soldier—a risqué choice, she knew—and would later rename it Memoirs of a Soldier, Nurse and Spy: A Woman’s Adventures in the Union Army. Lest she appear too feminine, she chastised all the able-bodied men of the North who failed to enlist, even quoting a famous poem written by Oliver Wendell Holmes, then a young soldier, called “The Sweet Little Man”:

  We send you the buttonless garments of woman!

  Cover your face lest it freckle or tan;

  Muster the apron-string guards on the common,

  That is the corps for the sweet little man.

  At the same time she emphasized that her every violent and “masculine” act—shooting a female rebel through the hand, unloading her pistol in a rebel soldier’s face—stemmed from self-sacrifice, that most feminine of qualities; she saw now that her two selves had worked in perfect concert. She mentioned Jerome Robbins only in passing, offering no hint that he knew her secret, and never mentioned Frank Thompson at all, remaining deliberately vague about her name, her background, and exactly what her comrades saw when they looked at her. It was a meticulous balancing act, one that Emma masterfully transferred from her life to the page, leaving the story open to interpretation while its hero kept parts of herself hidden.

  LIKE MOST OF HER SEX

  RICHMOND

  Detectives found Elizabeth’s sister-in-law living in a boardinghouse on Canal Street, told her they were conducting an investigation, and asked if she would testify against the Van Lews. Mary was happy to oblige, telling them that she had lived with the family for several years, that she’d heard them express hope that the Confederacy would fail, that they were strong abolitionists and sent a Negro woman north to be educated, that her estranged husband had deserted and fled to Union lines, and, most important, that she didn’t want her children growing up in their home.

  The detectives pushed for more, asking Mary if she knew or had seen or heard anything else, any evidence that the Van Lews were involved with the spy network that was undermining the Confederacy. She didn’t, and their official report concluded with, “And further this deponent saith not.”

  After examining all of the testimony against Elizabeth, and taking into account her family’s “wealth and position,” Confederate officials reached a split decision. While they believed that she was “very unfriendly in her sentiments” toward the Confederacy, and that, “like most of her sex, she seems to have talked freely,” they didn’t believe she had committed any significant acts of disloyalty. None of their searches of her home yielded any incriminating papers or escaped Union soldiers. None of their officers had been able to entrap her by offering to smuggle information through the lines. No one could prove she had anything to do with the spy ring assisting the enemy. For now, the adjutant general’s office concluded, there was “no action to be taken.”

  Elizabeth knew how quickly that could change if, at any time, she stopped overestimating them and they stopped underestimating her. She dared not alter her routine. The wheels of the Underground spun on schedule, sending one dispatch after another to Grant’s headquarters at City Point. Every evening, from seven to midnight, the general, his officers, and two dozen soldiers gathered around the campfire, smoking cigars and discussing the latest information from their spies in Richmond.

  They learned that everyone was preoccupied with Sherman’s ruthless march and that Jefferson Davis—publicly, at least—had struck a pose of confidence and optimism. “The Government, from time to time,” read one report, “claims to have dispatches of a favorable kind, but this is not believed by the community.” They even received updates about North Carolina, learning the exact number of troops General Lee sent to Wilmington to reinforce the forts below the town. They discovered that the weakest point of the enemy’s line was between the Nine Mile Road and the Mechanicsville Pike, and debated how to exploit it. On December 21, after Sherman had captured Savannah and presented it as a “Christmas gift” to Lincoln, they heard that the city’s “plain classes” were anticipating the evacuation of Richmond. They learned, from information Elizabeth gleaned through a Confederate deserter, that “the enemy are planting torpedoes on all roads leading to the city.”

  As smoothly as her enterprise ran, Elizabeth still lived in a quiet and pervasive state of terror. She hadn’t forgotten that note from the “White Caps,” threatening to burn down her house and write with her blood. She knew strange men still spied through her windows, followed her on the street, took careful measure of her words.
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br />   Late one night she was awakened by a scratching at the garden entry door. A cold fear sank into her chest. She closed her robe around her and lit a candle with shaking fingers. A shadow at the door came to shape in the light, the features sharpening one by one: Mary Jane Bowser, looking as if she had just run for her life.

  [ PART FIVE ]

  1865

  THE WAY A CHILD LOVES ITS MOTHER

  LONDON

  On the twenty-fourth of January, Belle sat at her desk in the Brunswick Hotel and considered what she wanted to say to the president of the United States. She would approach Lincoln as if she expected him to do her bidding, as she would any man, but she knew better than to cajole or flirt or pretend she was a defenseless woman; his appetites seemed confined to the political, and she would address him in his language, and as his equal. She did not like Lincoln personally, believing him to be a hypocrite and “destroyer,” but she appreciated his wit and dry humor, and admired all those, men or women, who were able to create themselves from nothing.

  She felt it then: a short, shallow hiccup in her belly, reminding her that she would never again act solely on her own behalf—or at least that she shouldn’t. Before the end of the year, if not the end of the war, she would be a mother.

  She dipped her nib in the ink and began to write:

  Honble Abraham Lincoln

  President of the U.S. America

  I have heard from good authority that if I suppress the Book I have now ready for publication, you may be induced to consider leniently the case of my husband, S. Wylde Hardinge, now a prisoner in Fort Delaware, I think it would be well for you & me to come to some definite understanding. My Book was originally not intended to be more than a personal narrative, but since my husband’s unjust arrest I had intended making it political, & had introduced many atrocious circumstances respecting your government with which I am so well acquainted & which would open the eyes of Europe to many things of which the world on this side of the water little dreams. If you will release my husband & set him free, so that he may join me here in England by the beginning of March—I pledge you my word that my Book shall be suppressed. Should my husband not be with me by the 25 of March I shall at once place my Book in the hands of a publisher.