The Lincoln Conspiracy

by Timothy L. O'Brien

  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

  The constellations were so rich that Ursa wasn’t alone. Virgo, Leo, Cancer, and Gemini waltzed beneath him. As summer came on, only Virgo would hold her ground, shunted to the side by Libra. Augustus remembered his mother now, telling him in Texas when he was a boy that she couldn’t read books but she could read the stars; Polaris might help get the runaways north, but Libra—“Justice, son, justice!”—would be the only thing that would make the North a home. “That Libra’s important, Augustus, more important than the others. Fix your gaze on it and remember.”

  Texas is far away from here, Momma, for certain, and the whole damn country just waged war for lots of reasons, and maybe justice was one of them; at least the war became about justice and emancipation once President Lincoln framed it that way and gave that fighting and that death and that horror a higher purpose. And certainly we are pushing for justice now in the Shaw and with the Freedmen’s Bureau, pushing for justice ourselves. Yes, ma’am.

  Half of a cigar rested on his windowsill, and Augustus thought about lighting it up and finishing it. His tins were inside a pocket in his coat and he thought about something even stronger, but he restrained himself, reaching for the cigar instead just as another series of sounds distracted him: hooves pounding the ground, dogs yelping in the woods again, more insistent than on other evenings. He went to his door, and by the time he opened it, Fiona was out front in a fine black barouche, looking like a woman who owned the entire District. Before either one of them said a word, they were both laughing.

  “I will not even ask,” Augustus said, chuckling.

  “It’s Mrs. Lincoln’s carriage,” Fiona replied, still grinning. “Your Mrs. Keckly and I are now friends, and we met with Mrs. Lincoln in Georgetown.”

  Augustus whistled, shaking his head. The driver looked down at him suspiciously, refusing to dismount to help Fiona out of the carriage.

  “You’re staying with this one?” the driver asked Fiona.

  Fiona didn’t reply. She held her hand out to Augustus, who helped her step down, then she reached back and pulled her bag from the carriage.

  “I’ll make sure Mrs. Lincoln is aware of your hesitations, sir,” Fiona said to the driver, who, without responding, snapped the reins and led the four black horses into a brisk trot away from Augustus’s house.

  “Are you smoking again, Augustus?” Fiona asked.

  Augustus flicked away the cigar, and he and Fiona walked inside; he poured two glasses of water and they sat down. The same candles from the evening before were glowing around the table.

  “I was growing worried about you and Temple,” he said.

  “He hasn’t been back yet, then,” Fiona replied. “Well, he’ll arrive. He always arrives.”

  “Tell me about Mrs. Lincoln!”

  “I want to talk about Mrs. Keckly first, Augustus. I owe you an apology.”

  Augustus looked away, just as he had the night before when Lizzy first arose as a subject. He hadn’t wanted to talk about her then, and he didn’t want to talk about her now. Fiona placed her hand on his until he looked at her, and then she told him about meeting Lizzy in Lafayette Park, their journey to Georgetown, and Lizzy’s son, George. Just the name George was enough to deflate Augustus, and he sank back in his chair.

  “She thinks his death is my fault,” Augustus said.

  “She used to think that. I don’t know that she does now.”

  “She said that?”

  “She did. She wept, but she did.”

  Augustus pressed his fingers to his eyes and rubbed them.

  “I was consumed with melancholy when George Keckly died,” he said. “I could not sleep deeply; sometimes I could not sleep at all. I had no appetite, no interest in the everyday. It’s a powerful thing for me to hear that his Lizzy is in a forgiving state.”

  “You are not responsible for George Keckly’s death. As Lizzy made clear to me, her grief as a mother confounded her judgment. She lost her child. I do not believe she blames you for that any longer.”

  Augustus patted Fiona’s hand and rose from the table, looking out the window and up at the stars.

  “I thought that you and Lizzy had romantic feelings for each other,” Fiona said, bursting into the same fit of laughter that overtook her when she arrived earlier in the barouche. Augustus turned back to her and began laughing, too. They let their laughter run a good long spell, until their moment was interrupted by the sound, yet again, of trotting horses.

  There were far too many horses approaching the house this time for it to be Temple arriving alone. Augustus glanced out the window, and then he and Fiona hurried to the door. A group of ten men were out front, all of them mounted and carrying rifles that rested across their laps. Their horses were unusually steady, the fog wrapping their fetlocks in a fine mist that held its form because none of the mounts was skittish. One of the men spurred his horse and rode forward. He was a big, steely man, his hair and beard jet black, with a bandage spanning the top of his forehead, and he brought his horse close enough to Augustus and Fiona that its shoulder was just a few feet away from them. The rider leaned down from the horse with a flat, forced smile.

  “Your husband recently stole my horse at the B&O, Mrs. McFadden. Would the man of the house be inside?”

  “The man of the house is right here,” Augustus said.

  “She’s not owned by any nigger, boy, so keep your lips from flappin’.”

  A few of the other riders advanced toward the house. There was a gun inside beneath a floorboard, and Augustus began to edge backward toward his door. Two of the riders trotted forward and blocked the path between him and his house.

  “How dare you,” Fiona said. “You have no decency about you.”

  “How dare I? Your husband took a very valuable package that belonged to me, then stole my horse after pummeling me with his damn cane, and then intruded upon my afternoon pleasures to inflict yet another of his beatings. How dare I?”

  “Then you must be Lafayette Baker,” Augustus said.

  “Did I not say I want none of your chatter, boy?” said Baker, glancing at one of his men saddled behind Augustus; on cue, the man reached down from his horse and smacked Augustus across the side of his head.

  “Well, Mrs. McFadden, I am guilty as charged. I am Lafayette Baker of our capital’s National Detective Bureau, and these men are also public servants who work for me. Good men, each and every one of them. I take it that your husband is not here?”

  “He is not,” Fiona said. “And I don’t expect him back this evening, either.”

  “Now, Mrs. McFadden, I’m hardly a fool. Of course he’s on his way back here. Until he arrives, we will have to enjoy the pleasure of one another’s company.”

  “Whenever he arrives, he will not like what he finds here. And he is not a man to be trifled with.”

  “I will give you that. By all standards, your husband is a wonderment. I was tasked earlier in my life to keep order on the streets of San Francisco. Later on, keeping my identity cloaked in the service of the Union, I tried to track Jefferson Davis himself in Richmond. And I spent twelve days chasing an enigma until my men corralled John Wilkes Booth in a burning barn. But goddammit, madam, I find your husband to be a unique and incalculable bother,” said Baker, steady in his saddle. “Still, he is just a man, and I aim to get my package back. And my billfold. The fingerlicker took it off me last time. You married a common thief, Mrs. McFadden.”

  Baker dismounted slowly and then stepped over to Fiona, placing one hand on her throat and using the other to fiddle with the buttons at the top of her blouse. She grabbed at his wrists to pull his hands away from her but couldn’t move his arms. She dug her nails into his arms, but Baker didn’t flinch.

  “Perhaps you and I should go inside while your nigger friend waits out here,” he said
.

  Augustus cocked his arm, ready to strike Baker, but before he took a step, one of the men behind him cracked him in the back of his head with a rifle butt. Augustus dropped to his knees. The other man near the house got off his horse and opened the door, gesturing to Baker to cross the threshold.

  “My men honor me with the spoils of our victory tonight,” Baker said. “Follow me inside, Mrs. McFadden, or I will carry you in on my shoulder and dump you on the floor like a sack of field crops.”

  He grabbed Fiona’s wrist and yanked her arm up, stepping toward the house and getting ready to drag her behind him if she resisted. Fiona pressed her heels into the ground and began to scream, when a loud whistle from near the road caused her and Baker to freeze. Baker turned back, dropping Fiona’s wrist, redirecting his energy and attention to something entirely new, a wrinkle in the steady progression of his plans.

  The whistle had come through the night and the fog from a man atop a horse, galloping at a full clip up from the road. As the rider got closer to the house, he slowed, easing his horse into a steady trot. Man and animal, both shrouded in the darkness, were indistinguishable from each other, a hard-charging centaur. Fiona and Baker strained to see who it was that approached. As the rider emerged from the gloom and the mist with his cane across his lap, Fiona wrapped her arms around herself, exhaling as her eyes brimmed with tears.

  Temple pulled back on his horse’s reins as he got closer to the crowd arrayed in front of the house, and he found Fiona’s eyes. Then he turned his attention to Baker.

  “You should step away from my wife and my friend.”

  “You don’t even carry a gun, McFadden,” Baker responded, laughing. “I have my men and their rifles. I have my LeMat and my distaste for you. And I have your nigger and I have your bitch.”

  “You have twenty bitches, and my wife is certainly not among them.”

  “How’s that?”

  “I was merely correcting you.”

  Baker looked at his men, confused. Then the entire group began to laugh, a soft gloating that became a wave of loud guffaws; each of Baker’s men remained uncertain about what Temple meant but was sure that he intended a joke of some sort. Temple sat silently atop his horse until the laughter subsided, then raised his cane and loudly whistled again. A torch caught flame in the woods behind Augustus’s house, but no one in Baker’s group noticed the first flash of fire.

  “Look to the timber behind you,” Temple said. “Your bitches are on their way.”

  In short order, twenty torches flashed in the woods, and all of them, like so many oversized candles glimmering in an unsteady, bouncing line in the dark, began moving out from the shelter of the trees and toward Augustus’s house. The trunks of the trees and the undersides of the leaves above them were basked in a honeyed glow when the twenty torchbearers passed by and emerged into the open field. Each of them held a leashed dog in one hand, a torch in the other. And behind each of the torchbearers marched another man carrying a sawed-off shotgun or pistol in one hand and a heavy club in the other—forty men, twenty dogs, and the lot of them seemed readily inclined, even itching, to fight, as they would on almost any day of the week and for almost any reason. To be expected, Temple thought with satisfaction as the torchbearers tightened around Baker’s men: they’re Swampdoodlians.

  “Meet my legions, here to own the night and protect the homestead,” shouted Nail, stepping to the front of the pack and pulling back hard on his wolfhound, which was straining on its leash and up on its hind legs. “We’re also here to offer you some choices, Baker, you scurvy pest.”

  As soon as Baker recognized that it was Nail leading the torchbearers, he turned on him with a snarl.

  “We helped set you up, Flaherty. In all my living days, Wood and I helped set up your shitty little counterfeiting operation, and now you’re here representing and defending this vermin,” he said, gesturing toward Temple, Fiona, and Augustus, who was still on his knees. Temple dismounted and walked toward the group, placing himself between Baker and his wife and Augustus.

  “Me cogniacs is me cogniacs,” said Nail, a long vein beginning to throb on the side of his forehead. “But me friends is me friends. Ya got it?”

  “I got nothing,” Baker screamed, unholstering his LeMat. The gun had nine revolving chambers on top, attached to a long, slender barrel, and a second fatter and shorter smoothbore barrel beneath that could fire a single shotgun round. The upper barrel would have gotten a shot off quickly. But in the dark, with Nail a good thirty feet away, Baker chose to spray his fire; he flicked up a rod on the right side of the LeMat’s hammer, readying the firing pin so he could discharge the 28-gauge shell acked in the lower barrel. Fiddling with the pin took only a moment, but the delay gave Temple as much time as he needed.

  As Baker raised the LeMat, Temple whipped his cane against his wrist, splintering the bone. Wincing and swearing, Baker dropped the LeMat and, with his other hand, drew a Bowie knife from his waistband, raising it above his head and rounding on Temple.

  Temple grabbed Baker’s good wrist, twisting it up and away from his body so forcefully that Baker yelled in pain and dropped the knife. Baker strained, trying to resist, but Temple kept twisting his arm backward until he fell to his knees.

  “You insulted my wife and my friend, Mr. Baker.”

  “Nigger lover.”

  Temple, as he had at Mary Ann Hall’s, slammed his cane into Baker’s head, leaving him unconscious on the ground. As soon as Baker dropped, one of his men wheeled on his horse, working the lever on his Spencer, cocking its hammer, and aiming the rifle at Temple. Nail set his wolfhound loose, and the dog bolted at the shooter, leaping and sinking its teeth into his leg. A cloud of gunsmoke erupted from the barrel of the Spencer as the rider screamed in pain. The .56–56 missed Temple, blowing instead through one of the windows of the house.

  All of the dogs were barking now, and Nail’s men spread out, steadily encircling the smaller loop of Baker’s men.

  “Listen here, boys,” Nail shouted, raising his torch. “We can each go to it and make this bloody, mix it up, trade what we got. Or we can lodge sensicles, marvelations, and wisdoshiness into our heads and part for the night.”

  The shooter with the Spencer was swearing at Nail’s wolfhound still hanging off his thigh. Nail snapped his fingers and the dog dropped off, blood dripping from its mouth, and trotted back to its master.

  “What say you, boys?” Nail repeated. “There are forty of us and just a handful of you turnips. I’ll give you about ten seconds to decide before we tear you up.”

  “We don’t leave without Mr. Baker,” one of the men said.

  “Temple?” Nail asked.

  “I want to keep Mr. Baker here for the night,” Temple said. “We have matters to consider.”

  “Won’t work,” shouted one of Baker’s men. “He’s with us. And when Mr. Stanton hears of this, you’ll have hell to pay.”

  Temple weighed it all—Augustus and Fiona, the men on both sides who’d get killed or hurt, the smell of the Spencer’s powder still drifting in the air, the weight of the night—and nodded at Nail.

  “Get your man, boys,” Nail shouted to the group. “Horse him up and get him out of here. If any of you return tomorrow, the next day, the next month, whenever, we won’t give you the consideration.”

  Two of Baker’s men dismounted and lifted his body, carrying it over to his horse and getting ready to hoist him across the saddle.

  “Leave Mr. Baker’s horse here,” Temple said. “I liked his last horse before it was shot out from beneath me, and I’m sure I’ll like this one. I’m keeping his gun, too.”

  “You can’t take a man’s horse and his gun,” said one of Baker’s men.

  “Get your arse moving,” Nail yelled. “All of you should feel sainted that you’re even making it back home tonight. Stop the palaver and move.”

  Baker’s men loaded him across a horse and lined up on their own mounts, trotting down to the road and into the
dark. Temple swept Fiona into his arms and then put an arm around Augustus’s shoulders. Fiona slipped her arm around Temple’s waist.

  “You arranged for Nail to oversee Augustus’s house?” she asked him. He nodded, and she pulled him down to her and kissed him.

  “Now I know why I kept hearing dogs in the woods for the last week,” said Augustus. “The guardian angels of Swampdoodle. I’m grateful, Mr. Flaherty.”

  “Nail’s enough. We’re familiars now.”

  Augustus nodded.

  “Anyway, ’tain’t nothin’,” Nail said. “I’m going to send my boys back to the woods and then confer with Temple privately, if you and Mrs. McFadden don’t take insult at that.”

  Augustus was bleeding from the back of his head where the rifle butt had hit him, and Fiona took him inside to dress his wound. Nail scooped the LeMat off the ground and examined it.

  “I haven’t seen one of these before, Temple. What is it?”

  “It’s a LeMat, a Secesh gun. Baker drew it on me at the B&O that first morning when I found the diaries, and I knew right then that he had to be tied into the army in some way. Confederate officers carried LeMats and other arms made by the Frenchies because they were cut off from our guns up here. But the LeMat was unusual, and I reckon that Baker got it when he was spying in the South.”

  Temple took the gun from Nail, holding the walnut grips closer to the torch so that he could look at them more closely. Etched along the bottom of one of the grips was the original owner’s name: “Col. George S. Patton—Richmond.”

  “There you go—Baker either stole it or beat it out of this Patton fellow,” Temple said. “Alexander Gardner told me he trained Baker as a photographer so that he could spy in Richmond. He obviously collected mementos there as well.”

  “Arsehole!” Nail crowed. “Toting a Secesh gun.”