The Lincoln Conspiracy

by Timothy L. O'Brien

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE ARRANGEMENTS

  Fiona pressed her face against the twin lenses of the stereoscope and focused her eyes on the image propped up several inches away on the other side. In three dimensions she saw a V-shaped trench filled with dead soldiers, their legs, arms, rifles, and bayonets draped willy-nilly over one another.

  “It’s from Gettysburg,” said Gardner. “The stereos are a fine sight better than Mathew Brady’s humdrum daguerreotypes. Timmy O’Sullivan and I got to Gettysburg days before Brady did.”

  Gardner unclasped the Gettysburg card from the clip that held it and swapped another into its place. In three dimensions again, Fiona saw another of Gardner’s images from the war. Abraham Lincoln was sitting inside a tent at a small table, across from General McClellan. Even seated, Lincoln dominated the commander of the Army of the Potomac.

  “That one’s earlier, from Antietam,” Gardner said.

  “Did you ever converse with the president?” Fiona asked, her body still bent at the waist as she looked through the stereoscope.

  “A fair bit,” Gardner said, a note of sadness piercing his brogue. “The president was a gabber. He asked more questions than you could ever answer, and he had good, kind eyes. He was curious about photography. And he and his generals let Brady and me have the run of the battlefields. Here now, I’ll show you something special, Fiona.”

  As Fiona straightened up, Pint hurried into her spot and looked through the lenses of the stereoscope, whistling aloud as he did so.

  “Everyone can live forever in these pictures,” said Pint. “It’s a modern miracle. You can’t be erased or forgotten.”

  “We’ll all be erased and forgotten, just like the rotting soldiers in those trenches,” said Gardner. “Maybe not Lincoln, but the rest of us aren’t going to be saved by glass plates, chemical baths, and some hocus-pocus that stragglers like me perform with light and shade.”

  “There are other ways to be saved,” said Fiona.

  Gardner didn’t respond to her. He reached up to a broad, locked cabinet and opened it with a key he pulled from his trouser pocket. Inside were several shelves, each filled with glass plates that were neatly ordered and alphabetized. The names on the plates offered a catalog of the celebrated and the powerful in Washington who had visited Gardner’s studio to sit for a photograph: Burnside, Morse, Sumner, Hooker, Chase, Farragut, Grant, Seward, Meade, Whitman, Douglas, and, of course, Lincoln.

  They all came to have Brady’s protégé record their images for posterity. The high and mighty, as Gardner called them, paid him $750 for his work. For soldiers, students, and Washington’s working folk he charged $10. He had earned enough to keep his wife and children in a comfortable clapboard house near Georgetown. But he spent little on himself, often slept on the floor of his 7th Street studio, and sent large chunks of money back to Scotland with relatives, earmarking a portion for writers at the Glasgow Sentinel, which, although he owned it, he hadn’t read in years.

  On a shelf of its own inside the cupboard was a mahogany box, which Gardner carefully removed and then opened on a nearby table, placing it next to Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War, an oversized compilation of his work. He had spent the better part of the last eighteen months adding and subtracting photographs from the book, and aimed to spend another year with it before he let his publisher have it. Gardner flipped open the mahogany box and removed a large glass negative draped in a piece of yellow cloth. He slipped off the cloth and then fanned the fingers of his hand toward his chest, gesturing for Fiona to have a look.

  The negative had a long crack in it, which replicated itself as a thick black line across the top of the single silver and albumen print Gardner had made from the splintered plate. He gave the print to Fiona.

  “After the negative broke, I decided to make just one print,” Gardner said. “He sat down for it last February, about two months before he was murdered. I think it’s the last photograph anyone took of him before the killing.”

  Fiona was holding a photograph of Lincoln. The president had a long, skinny neck, and his left ear, slightly blurred, hung like a small saucer from an oversized head. His hair was mussed; his black bow tie was askew, wandering beneath the collar; his brow was deeply furrowed; and his beard was peppered with strands of gray. His cheeks formed two tired pouches on either side of a prominent, broad nose. He was a man who looked, and had every right to be, unwound by war, death, and the weight of the world. But there was a faint, amused smile tracing his lips, and his eyes were deep, dark, resolute, and knowing. He was his own person, a man at peace with himself. And Alexander was correct: the president had good, kind eyes.

  The president’s eyes would have been the most memorable feature of the photograph if it had been a clean print. But it wasn’t a clean print—the crack in the glass negative scarred the photo, leaving an L-shaped fissure that plunged downward from the uppermost left corner of the photo before it sliced to the right, across the top of Lincoln’s head. It could have been the shadow of a lightning bolt, Fiona thought. Or the finely grooved, gunpowder-black crease of a bullet that pierced time and justice, all of a moment in a theater balcony.

  “It’s like Death laid his finger across this picture,” Fiona said softly.

  “It was an omen, and I’m fixed to destroy this goddamn negative because of it,” Gardner replied. “But I just can’t rid myself of it. I put it back in the box every time.”

  Fiona put down the print and studied the negative on the table in front of her. She lifted Gardner’s photo manuscript to eye level, then dropped the Sketch Book with a muffled crunch on top of the negative. When she removed the manuscript, the glass plate was webbed with cracks.

  “There,” she said to Gardner. “You’re rid of it.”

  Gardner brought a small bin to the edge of the table and swept the fragments into it with the yellow cloth. He put the print back into the mahogany box and closed it, letting his hands rest a moment on the lid.

  “Thank you, Fiona,” he said. “I’m weary of being connected to this war.”

  “We’re all connected, Alexander, and none of us will escape it,” she replied.

  Pint walked over and stared into the bin at the glass shards, tilting his head slightly as he pondered the shattered negative.

  “Alexander was more connected than most, though,” Pint said. “Weren’t you, Alexander? The arrangements of bodies, the plums from McClellan. Those weren’t accidents.”

  “And?” Gardner replied.

  “And that’s how you know Pinkerton, ain’t it?”

  Gardner glanced at Fiona. She knew most of this, and so did Temple, but they didn’t know about Pinkerton—and with Pinkerton in all of their lives now, it amounted to more than it had in the past.

  Fiona didn’t say anything, waiting for Gardner to respond to Pint. Gardner brought a handkerchief to his forehead and mopped beads of sweat from his brow.

  “I met Pinkerton through Mat Brady. Brady began stealing my work, putting it out under his own name, and I wanted to leave; Pinkerton introduced me to McClellan. The general had needs for his war and I met them. Once Lincoln took a shine to the photography, especially my stereos, I was granted passage with the troops.”

  “Why did you never tell us of Pinkerton, Alexander?” Fiona asked.

  “Because they paid me well not to say a word about him. And once I got in deeper they said they’d send me to the Old Capitol for lockup if I disclosed anything,” Gardner replied. “I was doing more than making images. At Pinkerton’s direction, I took photographs of the terrain where battles were going to take place, or where McClellan thought they might take place. The general made military maps from them. And I took pictures of entire army units, which Pinkerton and his boys scanned with Union officers to spot Confederate infiltrators.”

  “You also did one other thing,” Pint said. “Your arrangements.”

  Gardner stared coolly at Pint, as if seeing him for the first time.
<
br />   “I sometimes arranged dead soldiers in more … more … dramatic positions for my photographs. It gave them dignity.”

  “No, it gave Lincoln’s government powerful pictures it could plant in newspapers to curry favor for the war—and it gave you pictures that you could sell everywhere else to fatten your purse,” Pint said.

  “That too,” said Gardner. “Yes, that too. Only the embalmers on Pennsylvania Avenue saw their businesses grow faster than mine or Brady’s. But it wasn’t just money. There was responsibility. Memories matter.”

  “None of it was real.”

  “It was all reality. It was a higher reality. It captured what was and what had passed. It made people care.”

  “You staged them,” Pint shot back. “You used death as a prop.”

  “Then never have your photograph taken,” Gardner responded. “You’ll do just fine. You can be forgotten.”

  Gardner put his handkerchief back in his pocket. He unbundled his shoulders and sat back against a table. He pulled his hand through his black beard and exhaled.

  “Pint knows Pinkerton, too, Fiona,” he said.

  “They know I spied,” Pint said. “Temple’s known that and he knows that’s where I learned the codes. No mysteries about me.”

  “They know that Pinkerton paid you?”

  Pint took his turn at gauging Fiona’s reaction. Again she said nothing, waiting for Pint to respond.

  “Once. Just once. I got an assignment to watch the dormitories at Georgetown College. The Secesh schoolboys there raised and lowered the shades in their bedroom windows to signal Confederate lookouts across the Potomac about Union troop movements. It was like watching signal flags on ships at sea. I figured out what the shades meant and I gave it to Pinkerton.”

  “The army used the information to arrest students,” Gardner noted. “They went after students.”

  “Spies,” Pint said. “They were spies. Damn them for it. I didn’t care if they got rounded up.”

  “You see, we are all connected to the war,” Fiona said. “No one in the District escapes it. Not you, Alexander. Not you, Pint. Not me.”

  Fiona placed her hand on Gardner’s cheek, held it there briefly, and then did the same for Pint, considering his eyes before she moved toward the door.

  “Time for me to walk about unescorted again, gentlemen,” Fiona said. “If you’ll excuse me, I need to find my husband.”

  As she pulled open the door she turned back to Gardner, who was slumped in a chair and staring out a window.

  “Alexander.”

  The sound of her voice made him stir. He sat up straight and swiveled toward her.

  “Fiona?”

  “I take powerful delight in your stereoscopes. And thank you for showing me the photograph of the president.”

  “Thank you, Fiona.”

  “You ought not go out there all by your lonesome,” Pint said to Fiona.

  She raised her fingers to her lips, shushing him, then picked up her bag, still stuffed with the supplies from Dr. Springer’s office, and left.

  Fiona closed the door behind her and exited Gardner’s studio onto 7th Street. When she reached Pennsylvania it was already heavy with midday commerce and traffic. On the avenue, just off 7th, Fiona lingered at an enormous plate glass window that featured arched bronze lettering proclaiming to visitors that they had arrived at Mathew Brady’s world-famous studio of photographic portraiture (rates negotiable). The glass’s expanse offered a view inside, despite the glare of the sun on the pane, where an elegant waiting room furnished with plush chairs and polished wooden tables had been arranged for visitors seeking Brady’s services. A small daguerreotype of Ulysses Grant sat on a ledge inside the window, next to a larger image of Andrew Johnson. An even more sizeable daguerreotype of Lincoln, with black bunting draping its frame, rested on the opposite side of the ledge.

  Brady’s studio, once magical to Fiona, now felt different, blunted and farcical. As she peered inside, her reflection presented itself within the arc of the lettering on the glass, the outline of her body drawn in slightly undulating lines and shadows that were nearly overpowered by the sunlight behind her. She studied her form for a moment, wondering about the havoc the night trek to Oak Hill had visited upon her eyes, her hair, her mood. She had her overstuffed bag at her side and the midday heat on her shoulder; a poor sight, she feared, and time to come before she could address the matter.

  Hers wasn’t the only reflection captured by the glass. Over her shoulder, the dim reflection of a bulky man hovered behind her. Though his silhouette was largely shapeless and defined only by broad shoulders and lupine arms hanging down at his sides, the sun glazed off the white straw hat atop his head like a beacon. He appeared to be several feet away, and as Fiona began to turn, he rotated away from her. When she repositioned herself back in front of the glass, he swung toward her again.

  “Quietly, quietly,” she could hear Temple telling her, “that’s how these things come upon you.” Remember who you are, he’d advised, and respond by trying to control the pace of it all.

  She stepped away from the studio and walked along more briskly than before, passing a series of dry goods dealers, tanneries, clothing stores, butchers, and all of the embalmers that Alexander had cataloged as just another perversity of the war. Bringing the little boys’ corpses home to stuff them and preserve them and plant them in the ground. She stole glances into the angled windows of a barber shop (luxury shave, five cents; gentleman’s haircut, ten cents), and eyed the same stocky figure trailing along behind her, floating beneath a hat that appeared as hard and white as bone.

  Quietly, quietly.

  Whatever doubts Fiona now had about Brady’s bona fides, and about the stagings and gossamer domains of photographs, she was quite certain about something else: she was being followed.

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE TELEGRAMS

  A scattering of Negro children played jacks and marbles; a separate pair had rolled and knotted a rag into a makeshift ball and were tossing it to each other. A brown mutt, its fur knotted and its haunches buzzing with flies, slept curled next to a puddle that was slowly evaporating against the base of a shade tree. One little girl sat alone, talking to a corn husk doll. A tall boy bobbled a baseball up and down off the tip of a crudely whittled bat and stared at the two men approaching from down the block; he didn’t let the ball escape him and drop to the ground, yet he never bothered focusing on it, either.

  As the men drew closer, each of the children, one by one, stopped what they were doing and also focused on the pair. One of the men was a Negro, dressed for town; the other was white and limped along, bearing his weight on a cane. Dandy Negroes rarely came to Tiber Island. White folk never came at all, except to collect rent.

  Wary and bunching together shoulder to shoulder, with the dog barking at their side, the children began singing:

  The riverbed makes a mighty fine road

  Dead trees to show you the way

  And it’s left foot, peg foot, traveling on

  Follow the drinking gourd

  The river ends between two hills

  Follow the drinking gourd

  There’s another river on the other side

  Follow the drinking gourd

  The air around Tiber Island was rank, with the taint of offal crawling in on the breeze off the Potomac, and as Temple and Augustus neared the children they were enveloped by it. Temple was accustomed to the odor in other parts of the District, but here, where the river melted and broke muddily into the Washington Channel, forming a bent waterfront southwest of the Capitol, the odor was so overpowering that he thought to pull a kerchief to his face. Off in the distance, the Washington Monument was all foundation, a tapering, quarter-built slab that looked as though it would never be completed. Here there were stone warehouses along the water bisected by alleys dotted and stuffed with tiny two-room huts and cabins—“alley-houses,” where free Negroes lived.

  Temple had been to alley-houses
elsewhere in the District, each time with Augustus, but he had never been to Tiber Island before. Nor had a chorus of children greeted him.

  “Do you know the song?” Temple asked.

  “It’s an Underground Railroad song about the Little Dipper,” Augustus said. “About using the North Star on the Dipper as a guiding light, so slaves could find their way when they escaped from the South.”

  “And they’re singing it to greet us?”

  “They’re singing it to warn everyone else that strangers are here. Every Negro in the alleys knows we’re here now; the dice and cards are coming up, most of the doors are closing, and it will all be about watching now. Whites in Tiber Island, if they aren’t unloading goods from boats into the warehouses, just mean trouble to these folks.”

  I thought I heard the angels say

  Follow the drinking gourd

  The stars in the heavens gonna show you the way

  Follow the drinking gourd

  Temple and Augustus walked around the children and headed into an alley directly in front of them. When they reached the back of one of the warehouses, Augustus tugged Temple’s sleeve, directing him to the right. Three Negroes were sitting on stools. One of them was old, with a shock of white hair and a beard; the other two were young, broad, and muscular. They stared at the ground, their elbows propped on their knees, but they were clearly guarding the old man.

  Augustus, smiling broadly, bent forward at the waist.

  “I stand in humility before the right honorable former slave and wise man for the ages, Master Lexington Sparks.”

  “Oh, there ya go, Augustus, goddamn! Ya win me ever’ time with that honeysuckle,” the old man said, standing up and embracing Augustus. “I don’t need the sweets from ya, son.”