The Lincoln Conspiracy

by Timothy L. O'Brien

  Temple yanked back on the reins, pressing his feet into the stirrups and arching his back. Several of the gents from the station, mounted, were facing him amid a boodle of people on New Jersey. As Temple’s horse reared up, the group of them looked his way. Nothing ever registered on the gents’ faces, Temple thought. Taut as rails. They recognized his horse, recognized him, and charged dead at him, drawing their guns. There were probably LeMats on the entire lot of them, too, and that’s a tale. Outnumbered here. Time to dash.

  Temple kicked his heels into the sides of his horse and bolted onto E Street, galloping between City Hall and the still burnt-out husk of the Infirmary as a bullet winged past his head. He raced up toward Seventh, plumes of dirty water erupting from the mud and blanketing his boots. Gardner might know what to do with the diaries, and his studio was around the block. But Alexander Gardner toyed with cameras, not guns, and Temple couldn’t arrive there trailing horses and pistolas. Couldn’t do that to Gardner. Scots had their peculiar irritations and angers, and he made it a habit never to provoke Gardner’s.

  The sun bore down, and Temple’s hair, hanging black and damp around his ears, stuck to the sides of his head like slabs of paste.

  He’d need to lose the gents, lose the horse, lose himself, lose the pages, and then get to Fiona. Once the gents from the B&O found out who he was, they might look for Fiona, too. Had to get to her first. Gardner was for later.

  Another bullet whizzed past him, just below his ribs. And his leg burned. Enough, then. Temple pressed the horse onto 7th and sped past the Post Office and turned the corner onto F so that he could ride past the Patent Office, where the government still kept a hospital. Where Fiona worked. Please, Fiona, look away from your soldiers and look out one of those windows. Look away from your soldiers because I’m down here, and I’m in a race and I’m coming back to get you.

  The fractur’d thigh, the knee, the wound in the abdomen

  These and more I dress with impassive hand

  (yet deep in my breast afire, a burning flame).

  Temple glanced up, hoping for a glimmer of her framed in a window above him. A bolt of light bounced off some of the glass and flashed in the corner of his eye, but nothing more. He galloped straight on, bolting down F Street. St. Patrick’s Church sprouted up ahead of him on the right, a handsome little mound of bricks and a steeple, on the same side of the street as the Patent Office. St. Pat’s, feisty and blank, with Irish yearning dripping from every inch of it; Hoban, the Irish architect who’d designed the President’s House, modeling the mansion after a grandee’s pile in Dublin, had also planned St. Patrick’s. They worked in cabals, his old Irish brethren. Father Walter, lord and master of St. Pat’s, standing firm beside his parishioner, the Surratt woman, who’d housed the murderers. Remember that, too. Father Walter will have his thoughts.

  I bind to myself today

  The power of Heaven

  The light of the sun

  The brightness of the moon.…

  I invoke today all these virtues

  Against every hostile merciless power.

  A decision presented itself. The biggest building in Washington, massive in granite, spread like an ancient Greek shrine across 15th Street, directly in front of Temple and corking up the end of F beyond St. Pat’s: the Treasury. Like the Washington Monument—like the District itself, in fact—the Treasury building was incomplete, a notion in search of a home. But at least the Treasury functioned, and it dominated the President’s House, which sat on the ruddy parkland behind it.

  “Money turns the wheel in America, not votes,” Fiona would say whenever they strolled near the Treasury.

  Dozens of thick, thirty-six-foot-high pillars ribboned the building’s exterior. Impregnable. Lincoln had converted the basement into a fortress as a last resort should the Confederates invade the city. His refuge, his last stand. Now Andy Johnson governed from the Treasury, deferring to Mrs. Lincoln until she was ready to leave the President’s House. The Treasury and the streets around it were sure to be crawling with Union boys. Temple liked that fact, liked that the presence of soldiers, stoked with bayonets and rifles, might convince his pursuers to leave off. It gave him options.

  Still, the gents insisted on chasing after him in their bundle, all of them waving guns and screaming. Several pigs roamed 15th Street, and dogs scurried about near puddles. The air smelled. There were dozens of soldiers around here, and confusion was always an ally. As soon as he hit 15th, Temple spun his horse around near a group of six soldiers.

  “Gentlemen, that group just held up the B&O,” Temple yelled. “I’m a Metropolitan Police detective, and I think they’re Secesh.”

  “And what the hell is a Metropolitan Police detective?” one of the soldiers shouted back, looking up at Temple and squinting.

  A bullet tore into the breast of Temple’s horse, and the animal’s forelegs buckled. Temple rolled off and away from the horse as it crumpled, staking the ground with his cane and dragging his bad leg along behind him as mud caked his side. The soldier who had just been yelling back at Temple looked down at him before he fell to the ground, too, a bullet splitting open his head. White puffs of dust burst in the air behind Temple’s head and just below his feet; eruptions from rifle shots sinking into the flour sacks that the army had piled along the Treasury’s foundations as added fortification against a Confederate invasion that never came.

  A gray, rolling ball of smoke—a small storm cloud of it—had also formed in front of the gents and their horses as they neared 15th off F Street. All slow motion again, like the train station. The gents were simply shooting at the soldiers to clear their way, shooting so much so quickly that their posse was shrouded and smoldering, and they didn’t care. They were shooting up Union boys in the middle of Washington, the sun bearing down to expose them, and they didn’t care. They knew no one would take them in. Another pair of soldiers appeared to drop, but Temple couldn’t be sure because a slight panic began to envelop him. One of the men was shouting, his voice ricocheting amid the shots and rising above the rest of the frenzy inside the gunpowder cloud.

  “We work for Mr. Baker,” the gent screamed, “and that man’s a spy.”

  Temple absorbed the thought as he stood up, slightly dizzy.

  “Lads, if I’m the spy, why are they killing you, then?” Temple shouted back.

  Another bullet zipped past Temple, thigh high, before burrowing into the mud.

  He wondered why they hadn’t killed him yet and in the same moment knew it was because he still had the pages. They would want to know that before they killed him. They would want to find the pages—or learn if they had gone missing—before they killed him.

  More than a dozen soldiers formed ranks and raised their rifles, beginning a slow trot as they moved toward the group of gents. This will slow them down, Temple thought. Slow them down, and then I’ll find my trace away from here.

  Temple, sweating, his chest heaving, spotted a thin, wiry gent break from the pack and swing his horse toward him. No gun out on this one. Just the crescent of a long, thin cavalry sword. He slipped to the left side of his saddle and charged toward Temple, intending to pin him with the blade. The gent was handy, comfortable on the horse and confident with his sword. As the gent bore down, Temple spun on his good leg, tendrils of mud dripping off his jacket and pants. No target left for the sword, but the gent’s arm was stretched firm and rigid as the horse galloped past. Temple whipped his cane upward into the gent’s wrist, breaking the bone. The gent screamed and dropped his sword and the reins as he grabbed his wrist; the horse, eyes bulging in fear, turned and then came to an abrupt stop, pitching the gent off the saddle and over its shoulder into the mud.

  A leather satchel lay on the ground next to the unconscious swordsman, and Temple plucked it up and spilled out its contents: a small pistola, ammunition, glasses, leather gloves, a penknife with an image of a locomotive etched into the blade. Temple slung the empty satchel over his shoulder and dragged himself t
o the horse—yet another large, meaty one—and mounted it. Second stolen horse of the day. Temple was worn and sore. His muscles ached and his leg throbbed. He braced his cane next to the pommel and then patted his boots. High and sturdy, Fiona’s boots had protected the pages from the mud and the rain and the puddles. He grabbed the diaries from inside his boots and stuffed them into the satchel, then looked back from atop the horse at the swarm of soldiers and gents behind him. Another one of the gents was dead on the ground and still more soldiers were down. Two of the gents were watching Temple from inside the melee, struggling to push through the pack of soldiers so that they could finish their work, finish Temple. They would start to regroup shortly, but now Temple knew where he was taking them. Piggies go to market.

  Temple rode the horse full chisel down 15th, past a line of new three-story row houses, and he weighed veering off onto Pennsylvania Avenue. But he stayed on 15th, gathering more speed and distance from the men chasing him. He dashed down to B where it met the Tiber Creek, a finger of water that was an open sewer, just like the Potomac. The Potomac, a long, brown snake that people dumped their piss and garbage into—and then they drank from it. Even the new pipes in the President’s House had Potomac water in them. Fiona thought water from the Potomac had killed the Lincolns’ little boy and everyone else in Washington who got the fever; she was happy to have found a boardinghouse with its own well water. The Potomac stank when summer arrived, and it got up into your head like the humidity. Things were right in Washington only in the spring and fall. Summers were the inferno and winter never got proper. Half snows, white dustings, always the promise of blizzards but nothing more.

  Galloping east on B, he was close to completing the circle that had begun that morning at the B&O: the Smithsonian was out to his right, surrounded by parkland across the Tiber, and the Capitol had come into view again, straight in front of him. But he didn’t plan on going that far. The Center Market would be busy today.

  As he passed 9th Street on B, Temple looked back over his shoulder. The gents, three of them, were a couple of blocks behind him. Glassworks, butchers, embalmers, tanners, and dry grocers sold their wares nearby along Pennsylvania, but the stalls surrounding the market were given over to food—heaps of food that farmers and others carted into Washington to feed the troops and the locals. Wagons were piled high with the stuff, and the Tiber stench that wafted over the market didn’t stop vendors, cooks, grocers, boardinghouse owners, soldiers, and everyone else who lived in the District from crowding the weathered wooden stalls to buy yams, milk, apples, chickens, lettuce, bread, corn, pigs, and beer. The market, a yawning, single-story timber horseshoe, had its back to Pennsylvania and gaped open toward the Tiber, embracing the haze and the odors and the chaos. Temple swung his horse hard into the market’s main square and jumped a pair of heavy wagons that had closed in front of him. As he and the horse landed, he spotted David Dillon next to his vegetable stall, sorting heads of browning, wilting lettuce.

  “Dilly, this is for you,” Temple shouted, sliding the leather satchel from his shoulder.

  “What’s it?” Dillon queried, his voice laced with an Irish brogue Temple had lost years ago.

  “It’s important. I need a favor. Bring this to Nail in Swampdoodle. I don’t have any time.”

  “What’s it?”

  “Please. I’m being chased, and I have no time. Don’t look inside.”

  “You’re bloody and dirty.”

  “We’ve both seen worse.”

  “Well, indeed we have, Temple, indeed we have,” Dillon said as he wrapped his hands around the satchel and stuffed it down into his cart, between heads of lettuce and bunches of carrots.

  “Get them to Nail in Swampdoodle,” Temple said. “I’ll be in your debt.”

  Temple spun his horse around as three black stallions leapt the wagons and charged into the square, carrying the gents. His right leg was numbing, but he managed to kick his left heel into his horse’s side hard enough to send both of them streaking toward the back of the square, well away from Dillon. Temple was weary now, and the reins grew heavy in his hands. A bullet grazed his left shoulder almost as soon as he heard the shot from the gun that delivered it; a rivulet of blood ran down his arm toward his wrist, dripping from his cuff like thick, warm cider. And he was quite trapped. The wooden flanks of the market surrounded him, and the gents were blocking the only way he could escape on horseback. He slipped down from the saddle as he reached one of the market’s back corners and began looking for an exit beyond one of the food stalls, an exit that might take him onto Pennsylvania.

  The gents, still on their horses, trotted up to him slowly. They had no need to rush now.

  “Gentlemen,” Temple said, leaning on his cane, his back bowed.

  “The papers,” one of the gents responded as the other two dismounted.

  “Papers?”

  Temple was too weak to get his cane off the ground. One of the gents pulled his gun from his belt and held it by the barrel—like a hammer, Temple thought. This is how death arrives. This is how death moves. The gent rushed toward Temple. A rifle shot snapped through the air, and the top of the gent’s head fragmented, blood and small pieces of bone erupting in a crimson halo around his skull.

  Five men—some of the same ones who had been in the scuffle back at the B&O—were striding in a phalanx across the square, all of them armed with rifles. They fired rounds jointly this time, and the two gents still astride their horses dropped from their saddles before they could turn their mounts around.

  The men in the phalanx continued Temple’s way, never breaking their line. His cuff hung from his wrist like a wet rag, and he wiped it against the top of his pants. A fresh stream of blood reddened his fingers again. His head drooping, his breath short, Temple watched a few tufts of green grass rise toward him from a swirl of dirt, dust, and food scraps as he collapsed.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE CURES

  “Most of them died from flux and diarrhea,” said Springer. “They ate poorly. And the water killed many of them. On both sides. It wasn’t bullets. Bullets did their work, mind you. But don’t you think it shocked some of them to discover that their insides were rotting slowly, or a leg was putrid and the rot was crawling to other parts of their bodies, and that none of that seemed similar in the least to the glory they envisioned of dying in battle?”

  “Don’t you think it shocked them?” Springer asked again. “Mrs. McFadden?”

  Fiona laid the lancet and small saw in a shallow porcelain tub of water on the stand by the table where the officer’s corpse lay. A wide shaft of light slanted in through a window above her, bathing the tub in a frost that turned the rubied water a cloudy pink.

  “Did we have to cut out that much of his leg this morning, Dr. Springer?”

  “Mrs. McFadden?”

  “Did we have to cut out that much of his leg? What were we trying to accomplish?”

  “We tried to stop the rot. We always have to cut to stop the rot.”

  “Yes, everyone cuts.”

  Fiona gazed past Springer, into the airy galleries beyond him on the Patent Office’s second floor. Samurai armor and swords, one of Ben Franklin’s printing presses, presidential gifts from foreign dignitaries, and neatly tied rolls of state documents filled glass cases lining the museum’s walls. Most of the space in the cases was given over to row upon row of unusual and largely stillborn mechanical contraptions that had won federal patents, including a model of a riverboat with inflatable devices on its hull so that it could better navigate the Mississippi’s shallows. Lincoln had designed and patented the contraption when he was still a congressman. Only several months before, cots and other makeshift hospital beds had crowded the gallery’s central space. Even then, many of the cots sat white and empty, floating parallel to the marble floor like a field of tumbled gravestones. Fiona, along with Springer and the other surgeons, had moved to smaller side rooms when the government renovated the gallery for Lincoln’s second
inaugural ball, a month before he was shot.

  Though death had clung to its walls, Fiona knew that Springer felt the Patent Office to be the grandest of spaces, and in moments when they had little to say to each other, he took pleasure in reminding her of his affection for the building. She turned to find him pleased that she was contemplating the office’s collections.

  “President Lincoln thought our patent system a singular achievement, Mrs. McFadden, and—”

  “I wish I could say the same of our medical system,” Fiona said, cutting him off.

  “As I was saying, we are in a building that celebrates invention. And you have an inventive, independent mind. I commend you.”

  “We are in a building that has been a hospital for the past four years. Very little of what we have done here has been inventive.”

  “May I remind you that I am a doctor and that you are here to assist me?”

  “Of course you may, Dr. Springer, though, as I’m sure you know, I am a graduate of Syracuse Medical College.”

  “You are not a doctor.”

  “I have studied medicine,” Fiona replied, her cheeks flushing. “I have studied medicine with men who claim to be doctors. And I have studied with a woman who actually is a very fine doctor.”

  “Ah, Mrs. Walker.”

  “Yes.”

  “She wears trousers.”

  “Mary Edwards Walker is a dedicated doctor.”

  “Mrs. Barton and Mrs. Dix would agree with you,” said Springer, the corners of his mouth turning up into a broad grin. “But the thing remains: Mrs. Walker wears trousers!”

  “As I do at times, Doctor. A dress and a corset make it impossible to work.”

  “I’ve offended you,” Springer said, his eyes still twinkling.

  “Please, sir, make your rounds in a corset for a day. You’ll understand.”

  “What I don’t understand is your aversion to amputation.”

  “I fail to see what it accomplishes. We probe the wounds with dirty fingers, and we operate with pus and blood on our gowns. We scrape the bone and tissue away and pack the abscess with soiled cotton. It’s all so … septic.”