The Lincoln Conspiracy

by Timothy L. O'Brien

  “She is a friend, Mrs. Lincoln,” Lizzy said.

  “Are you here to participate, Mrs. McFadden?”

  “Well, ma’am, I—”

  “Yes, she will participate, Mrs. Lincoln,” Lizzy said.

  “Lizzy, I must tell Mrs. Lincoln my reason for being here,” Fiona said, cutting her off.

  Mrs. Lincoln gripped her bag again tightly and stepped away from Fiona, closer to Lizzy.

  “I have had more unknown people come into my life this year to tell me things that have been all but devastating,” she said. “I must ask you to bear that in mind, child, whatever you are here to say.”

  “I mean to cause you no fresh burden,” Fiona said.

  “I am my own burden,” Mrs. Lincoln whispered. “I wish I could forget myself.”

  “Ma’am, I have your diary.”

  Mrs. Lincoln’s hands dropped to her side and her bag fell to the pavement. She turned her head to the side, and the gaslight limned the dark pools beneath her eyes. She crept closer to Fiona.

  “My diary went missing after my husband was murdered. It was—it is—a private possession.”

  “I know, Mrs. Lincoln, and that is why I seek to return it to you. I have it. Not here with me now, but I have it. Had I known I was to meet you today, I would have brought it with me. My sincerest apologies.”

  “How did you come upon it?”

  “It came into my husband’s possession, ma’am. I’m not at liberty to explain all of that to you, but I most certainly would like to safeguard its return.”

  “Have you read it?”

  “I have not, ma’am. But I confess that my husband has.”

  “Your husband? What kind of a man is this, so lacking in chivalry?” Mrs. Lincoln asked, her voice regaining the authority and Southern cadences of a Kentucky Todd.

  “My husband is an honorable man. He was uncertain of what he had until he read it. And he listened to me when I told him it was proper and decent to return it to you.”

  “I leave the President’s House and am bound for Chicago on the twenty-second of May, two days hence. Could you be so kind as to return it to me then?”

  “Of course, ma’am.”

  “How do you know my Lizabeth?”

  “We have a common acquaintance,” Fiona said.

  “Who might that be, Lizabeth?”

  “A man who was once a close and trusted friend of my son, George,” Lizzy said.

  “Is this the same man who convinced George to join the Union forces?”

  “He is, ma’am.”

  “Yet you told me that you considered that man a murderer for convincing your boy to go to war.”

  “At one time I believed that for certain, Mrs. Lincoln. I most assuredly did,” Lizzy said. “Augustus convinced my George to march, and now he is dead. But you know what death does to us mothers, Mrs. Lincoln. It turns our hearts and our minds around. I think I have found a different resolution for my grief, and I do believe that Mrs. McFadden comes here, today and to you, with goodwill.”

  “Certainly she comes with goodwill, yes, yes, yes, yes. With malice toward none, with charity for all. Of course she does,” the widow said with a long, forlorn sigh, tipping her head back and closing her eyes to the night sky. “I do know what death does. Death rends one, utterly.”

  Mrs. Lincoln stood still, her face still raised to the moon, her arms at her side, her chest rising and falling slowly. Silent.

  Fiona and Lizzy watched the widow and awaited her next word. When Fiona began to speak, Lizzy held her finger to her lips to warn her off. There was no movement on the street, just the three of them bound in the moment by Mrs. Lincoln’s wanderings.

  She broke from her reverie with a start, addressing Fiona.

  “Have you spent time with spiritualists and mediums, Mrs. McFadden?”

  “No, ma’am, I haven’t.”

  “They are the ones—other than the good Lord—who weaken death’s grip upon us. The Lauries have given me back my Eddie and my Willie, and I intend to see my Abraham again.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Mrs. Lincoln sank into silence once more, shaking her head, and then engaged Fiona again.

  “Queen Victoria lost her Albert at almost the same time that my Willie passed. There are so many losses. Many, many, many. My sister Emilie knows that Willie’s spirit has visited us in the mansion. On occasion he has come to me at the foot of my bed with the same sweet adorable smile he always had. Sometimes Eddie is with him, and once he came with my late brother Alec. They all love me so.” “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Willie was so small. He didn’t damage me the way Tad did at birth,” Mrs. Lincoln continued. “We did all in our power to save him. We gave him Peruvian bark, Miss Leslie’s puddings, and beef tea, but still he left us. So we laid him out, properly embalmed, in the Green Room of the mansion with a laurel sprig upon his chest. And then we buried him in a little metal casket worked to appear like rosewood. It was gentle in its way. Not like my poor husband, no, no, no. Mrs. McFadden?”

  “Ma’am?”

  “Did you know that the blood that streamed from the bullet hole in my husband’s head stained the cape I wore to Ford’s?”

  “No, Mrs. Lincoln, I did not.”

  “Yes, yes, yes.”

  “I am truly sorry for all of your losses, Mrs. Lincoln.”

  “I still have my Tad. I fear, however, that my Robert is not true. My son Robert covets my money and tells me that my emotions unravel. He says he is frightened to leave me alone, because I am … because he says I am … unwell. Tad doesn’t say these things. But Robert is not truly at odds with me for my mind, Mrs. McFadden. I know his devices. He hires Mr. Pinkerton’s agents to follow me, and he is in league with the railroad men and the New York bankers. His father had lost faith in him before he died. Those men all tortured the president so …,” she said, her voice trailing off.

  Lizzy put her arm around Mrs. Lincoln’s waist and guided her toward the stairs of the Lauries’ house.

  “Mrs. McFadden, will you join our séance this evening?” Mrs. Lincoln asked. “Invisible beings surround us like a great cloud, and the Lauries can summon them from across the river Styx. Séances can be the gayest of pleasure parties, even in a darkened room.”

  “I would be honored to join you, but the hour is late; I want to fetch your diary, and I need to find my husband lest he worry. I would be most grateful if we could converse but one time more. My husband has an unquenchable thirst for information about the president. He admired him so.”

  “Yes, yes, yes. Be on your way, then,” Mrs. Lincoln said. “I will tell Mr. Lincoln this evening that you have recovered my prized journal. The news will comfort him. How will you get my diary to me?”

  “You could join us on the train to Chicago, Fiona,” Lizzy interjected. “If Mrs. Lincoln approves, of course. We could get it from you then, and you could have the longer conversation with Mrs. Lincoln that you have sought.”

  Fiona nodded.

  “Yes, yes, yes, join us for Chicago, Mrs. McFadden. Mr. George Pullman is sending a private rail car for me. I insisted on such, and Mr. Stanton and the others cannot contest and complain about such courtesies now that I am no longer a captive of the President’s House or Washington. I do expect my husband to scold me inside, however. He has always been wary of my extravagances.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Allow me to steer you properly to your home,” Mrs. Lincoln said, as she began laboring to scale the Lauries’ imposing staircase. “My driver will see you to your husband in my barouche, and I will see you on the twenty-second.”

  “I am deeply obliged.”

  “You are without children?”

  “Lizzy inquired of the same earlier, Mrs. Lincoln. Yes, I am, but I am also hopeful for the future.”

  Fiona had to strain now to hear the widow, who, intent upon her ascent, had her back to Fiona and was speaking directly to the Lauries’ townhouse. When Mrs. Lincoln finally reached the
top of the staircase, she was out of breath and pulled a fan from her handbag to cool herself. Her bosom heaving, she looked down at Fiona as the door to the Lauries’ house swung open.

  “Lear had it exactly so, my child. Yes, yes, yes,” Mrs. Lincoln said to Fiona. “Our young ones can unwind us most deeply. My Robert is the serpent’s tooth. I wish you daughters when motherhood arrives for you.”

  Before Fiona took the driver’s hand to climb into the Lincolns’ barouche, she studied Mrs. Lincoln for a moment, taking stock of a woman bereft and shrouded by the fog, floating upon a sea of miseries and losses.

  Fiona nodded to Lizzy and stepped up into the carriage.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  THE MONTAUK

  Temple had lingered in Foggy Bottom long enough to see if he was being followed. Satisfied he wasn’t, he made his way downtown and was standing beneath a lamppost across from Alexander’s studio on 7th Street, taking in the huge lettering the photographer had festooned across the building—lettering large enough to be legible even as the evening grew dark.

  “Gardner’s Gallery” was spelled out in foot-high letters across the top of the building, with three columns of advertisements bordering the windows right below: “Cartes de Visite, Stenographs, Album Cards; Imperial Photographs—Plain, Colored, Retouched; Ambrotypes, Hallotypes, Ivory Types.” Alexander was not shy in his promotions. On the D Street side of the studio, he had attached a large billboard to the edge of the roof: “Photographs.” Below that sign, another advertisement was painted on the wall: “Views of the War.”

  Yellow light was spilling out from the middle window of the studio’s second floor. Gardner had returned.

  Temple knocked on the door, but there was no answer. He pounded on it again, as loud as he could, and then backed into the street and stared up. Moments later, Gardner poked his head out the window, about to burst into a rage until he saw Temple below him, grinning.

  “Why so damn noisy?” Gardner yelled.

  “Why so damn hard to find?”

  “Lang may yer lum reek!” Gardner shouted back in Scottish slang, as he did on the infrequent occasions when he was relaxed enough to be a wit.

  Gardner had spread several lanterns around the room, but he was anxious about them. There were enough chemicals in his studio to ignite the building should any one of the lanterns tip over. For that reason, he rarely worked at night.

  “Stop eyeing the lanterns and talk with me,” Temple said.

  Temple was sitting with his bad leg propped up on a small table. He had spent most of the day on his feet and his leg was throbbing. Before arriving at Gardner’s he had contemplated going to his boardinghouse to gather fresh clothes for Fiona and himself—it was only several blocks away, at 15th and F—but he assumed that Pinkerton would be watching his home. Perhaps Baker, too, if he had already discovered Temple’s identity. Maybe they were watching Gardner’s studio. But he had circled the area twice before hovering across the street and observing the neighborhood and its inhabitants for several minutes. Anyhow, he needed to have this conversation.

  Gardner pulled a cheroot out of a bag and lifted one of the lanterns to his face so that he could light it. His beard pressed against the lantern as the end of the cheroot glowed red, and Gardner drew deeply on it.

  “You’re afeared of fire and now you have one progressing in your very own mouth,” Temple said. “Sitting here, in your own studio, you’re surrounded by flames.”

  “The cheroots relax me. General Sickles gave me a dozen last week because he is still pleased with photographs I took of him.”

  “Everyone is usually pleased with your photographs.”

  “Sickles was especially pleased. I made his in New York shortly after his trial for killing Francis Scott Key’s son here in Lafayette Park. He claimed that he was temporarily insane, and he had a strong, crafty lawyer who turned the judge in his favor.”

  “The lawyer was who?”

  “Edwin Stanton. It was just a few years before he became war secretary.”

  “I am finding Mr. Stanton to be rather ubiquitous,” Temple said. “People say Danny Sickles was a dirty sort.”

  “Indeed, even if he did lose half a leg at Gettysburg. When he was with Tammany Hall—workin’ and givin’ it laldy among the corrupts haunting your New York—he represented the city’s delegation to London. In the name of the wee man! He brought an adventuress as his guest to Buckingham Palace and formally introduced her to Queen Victoria!”

  Both men laughed hard enough that they rocked back in their seats. When Gardner finally settled down, he drew on the cheroot again and exhaled a thick cloud of gray smoke.

  “A fine smoke is a fine smoke, no matter who gives them to you,” Gardner said. “Fiona told you about my words with Pint, I take it?”

  “She did.”

  “After Fiona left the studio, Pint just sat here ruminating, not sayin’ a word. So I told him to skedaddle. Too much anger inside him, and he drinks too much.”

  “He’s been our friend, and we all have a dose of anger inside us.”

  “Well, people evolve.”

  Temple pulled his leg down from the table and sat upright, leaning toward Gardner.

  “Was everything you did in the war for Pinkerton? Every photograph?”

  “Hell no!” Gardner shot back, bolting up from his chair. He sucked on the cheroot again and began walking in circles around the studio, pounding his fist against the wall—but coming to a full stop, and being careful not to do any damage, when he got near one of the cameras he had scattered about the room. Stop, start, stop, start, stop, start, until his anger slowly unwound.

  Gardner sat down again, dropping the cheroot into a stone bowl to burn out. Temple waited for him to calm because, invariably, he would reveal a bit of himself after a rage, perhaps as a penance of sorts.

  In addition to his equipment and his shelves and his cabinets, Gardner kept several oversized albums of his own work in the studio and the book Fiona had so enthusiastically mentioned, his Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War. He walked to a table and grabbed a large, leather-bound scrapbook and brought it back to his chair, flipping through its pages until he found an article he had cut from The New York Times about a display of his Antietam photographs at Mathew Brady’s studio. He read the clip aloud.

  “ ‘October twentieth, 1862: These pictures have a terrible distinctness. By the aid of a magnifying glass, the very features of the slain may be distinguished.’ ”

  Gardner looked up from the book.

  “I think I prize that phrase, ‘a terrible distinctness.’ I chronicled something horrible during the war and I recorded it with clarity, Temple.”

  Gardner flipped more pages in the scrapbook, closely examining a few, until he found another clip he was looking for, from Harper’s New Monthly.

  “This next one isn’t about me. It’s about a photograph that Jim Gibson took during the war at Savage’s Station, of a field hospital scattered with the wounded and the dying. ‘This scene brings the war to those who have not been to it. How patiently and still they lie; these brave men who bleed and are maimed for us. It is a picture that is more eloquent than the sternest speech.’ ”

  Gardner looked up again at Temple.

  “All of us on the battlefield were witnesses, Temple.”

  Gardner laid out the challenges of taking pictures in the field. He needed another photographer or an assistant with him at the same location: one to set the camera up, the other to arrange the glass plates and mix chemicals. Once the chemicals were ready, they were poured onto the plate and allowed to evaporate, and then the plate had to be dunked in a solution, in complete darkness, inside a wagon—“On a battlefield, mind you!”

  When the plate was ready, it was fitted in a holder and slotted inside the camera, which had to be moved into the right position and brought into focus. After the plate was exposed, photographers had only minutes to get it back to the wagon to develop it. The plates were fragile and brok
e easily, so photographers had to do as much as they could to cushion them during transport—“On a battlefield!” Alexander thundered again.

  Gardner told Temple that when Gibson took aerial photographs of the battlefields, he occasionally went up in one of the army’s hot-air balloons. Gibson came back from his first balloon rides aglow, brimming with excitement about what he’d seen and photographed from the sky. But the army only let him up because it wanted surveillance photos that could be used to plan attacks, and when Gibson returned, the military confiscated his plates.

  “By the time Jim got around to his third or fourth ride, he knew he wasn’t going to keep a single thing he brought back. But I tell ya—he kept going up.”

  “Because that was the trade,” Temple said. “They gave him access to other parts of the war in exchange for occasional reconnaissance.”

  “That was the trade.”

  “You too?”

  “Yes, absolutely. And I’d do it again. I could never have gotten near the real force and terror of it without the army’s help. And the army wasn’t going to let me in without giving it something in exchange. So we swapped, and I gave people pictures that weren’t pageantry—gave them pictures of dead Rebel and Union boys without shoes. And if that forces people to confront calamity, then I’ve served a purpose, and not a devilish one.”

  “I can’t argue with that.”

  Gardner sat up, shaking his head, and leaned in toward Temple.

  “But I also arranged bodies and rifles and swords sometimes to make the settings more appealing, so the photographs would sell. Pint rode me hard on that when he and Fiona were here, and we got to screamin’.”

  “We all have our unsavories.”

  “You’ve got your cards,” Gardner said.

  “I do.”

  Gardner slumped back in his chair, burying his chin in his chest and running his fingers through his beard. Temple lit up a cheroot, letting the sweet edge of it rest against his tongue while he waited again for Gardner to resurface.

  “All of it makes me feel like it’s time to start fresh, maybe venture to the Great Plains and acquaint myself with Indian country,” Gardner said.