The Lincoln Conspiracy

by Timothy L. O'Brien

  Toward the end of his bender, after a night of faro on Bond Street, he stopped by his father’s one morning for breakfast. When his father didn’t answer, Temple let himself in and made his way to the small room his father had converted into a study and where he read the newspaper each day. He found his father slumped in a chair, with a bullet hole in his head and the gun he had used to kill himself on the floor by his foot. The muzzle was still warm and Temple could smell gunpowder. There wasn’t a note or any other explanation for his father’s suicide, and Temple collapsed on the floor, burying his face in his hands.

  About a week later, when word arrived that President Lincoln needed New York detectives to populate his newly formed police department in the District, Temple contemplated his current disgust for Manhattan and pursued the request. His handlers at the police department all approved the move, and in short order he was off to Washington.

  His dreams never journeyed closer to the present than after the moment when he separated from New York and the riots and Cassius and found his way to Washington and Fiona.

  And his dreams of New York, lately, were always dreams of his father.

  Step back and dodge the fist, Temple. Dodge it.

  Slap.

  He couldn’t dodge it.

  Slap. Slap.

  Temple awoke in a cell, his arms bound behind him to the chair he sat upon, facing a small man covered in clouds of white whiskers and white hair who was slapping him to get him to stir. Slapping him hard.

  “Stop!” Temple shouted.

  The man grinned from within his whiskers, his teeth tangled and yellow.

  “We have the mick’s attention,” the man said, nodding to a Union soldier who stood behind him in the cell. “You are in my prison at the wishes of the war secretary and we mean to have chats with you, sir. I would have you understand that we take these matters seriously and that our time is limited.”

  Temple pressed his wrists outward, testing his coils and the strength of the chair. There was little give in the rope and the chair was thick and sturdy; breaking it was going to require acrobatics and would be noisy, so that wasn’t for now. He was, for the time being, a prisoner.

  “I have met too many a new person in these recent days and weeks and I am dizzied with names. What might yours be and where am I?”

  “William Wood. Old Capitol Prison.”

  Temple knew the name, if not the man. Nail had occasionally mentioned Wood as one of his handlers during the war, when Nail was drafting cogniacs of Secesh currency. Temple also knew now that his cell was inside the District’s most infamous prison.

  Several stories of brick and bars, its bottom third painted with a heavy white band, the Old Capitol was a former boardinghouse now serving as a lockup for Confederate officers and other high-value prisoners. Two of those accused of conspiring to assassinate President Lincoln were being held there: the widow and boardinghouse owner Mary Surratt and Samuel Mudd, a doctor said to have attended to John Wilkes Booth’s broken leg and given him shelter at his Maryland home after the assassination.

  The Old Capitol had also been a stronghold for the Union’s spy services during the war, and the men who worked in the building carried out Edwin Stanton’s directives against enemies in the South and those closer to home, in the streets and salons of Washington. Nail and Alexander had both told Temple that William Wood was an intimate of the war secretary’s and the steward of the Old Capitol—and therefore one of Lafayette Baker’s overseers.

  Temple looked about his cell, which was cramped and furnished only with his chair and a simple plank bed. The ceiling was high in the middle and sloped at a sharp angle where it joined a short, three-foot wall on the other side of the floor; they had him on the highest floor of the prison right beneath the roof. There was a single window in the room, more than halfway up the cell’s largest wall, and it was fitted with four thick iron bars. His boots and cane were in a corner.

  “Yes, we had the courtesy to remember your cane,” said Wood, following Temple’s gaze around the room. “We are benevolent men who do not want to overlook your severe handicaps, Mr. McFadden.”

  Temple didn’t respond.

  Wood sat in silence, too, staring at him. He raised his right hand and snapped his fingers, prompting the soldier in the room to leave. The metal door clanged shut behind him.

  “We are alone now and we can speak with each other directly, as men. I would loosen your bonds, but I am told that despite your limp and your distaste for guns, you are a singularly dangerous man. That you have even kept Lafayette Baker at bay, and he is an individual not to be trifled with.”

  Temple remained as he was, staring down at the floor.

  “Mr. McFadden, you must have respect for our needs and priorities. We have successfully prosecuted a war. The country will be remade and the South will be absorbed into the national plan. President Lincoln has been cruelly and unjustly murdered and we have his assassins incarcerated. We want completion. We want to move forward. Why do you insist on standing in the way?”

  Temple didn’t look up.

  “I once worked with your friend Jack Flaherty. Then he changed. He stood in the way. He was killed yesterday, while you were harassing Mr. Stanton at the parade.”

  Temple’s head snapped up and he strained against the ropes.

  “Ah, some emotion from you at last. Yes, Mr. Baker saw to it that your friend Nail was gunned down. He did so most efficiently, with our new Gatlings. In a way, you’re responsible for Flaherty’s death. He would still be counterfeiting greenbacks among that motley tribe in the swamps had you not swept him up into this folly. Really, consider yourself and consider your circumstances. What are you trying to accomplish? Do you want to see your wife dead, too?”

  Temple roared, stooping forward and raising the chair off the ground behind him as the ropes around him dug into his arms, chest, and wrists. He swore aimlessly, spittle flying from his mouth, but without his cane he couldn’t take the weight of his body or the chair, and he spun in a half circle before tumbling backward onto the floor. The ropes hadn’t loosened, the chair hadn’t cracked, and Wood stepped into the space above him, his head framed by the beams on the ceiling.

  “Lafayette Baker searched Swampdoodle for the Booth diary, upending floorboards and beating several residents for information. But he couldn’t find it. I want that diary,” Wood said, looking down at him. “I understand you have Mrs. Lincoln’s diary as well, but the widow is of no threat to us. Her son Robert has already promised us that he will see his mother committed to an asylum in Illinois. She is quite mad, and no one takes her claims and howlings seriously anymore. Whatever case you fancy yourself building regarding the president’s assassination will not rest upon his widow’s proclamations.”

  Wood lifted his right hand again and snapped his fingers. The metal door swung open and the soldier stepped back in.

  “Sit him upright,” Wood said. “And get him some water.”

  After the soldier hoisted him back up, Temple returned to form, staring silently at the floor.

  “I want to know where the Booth diary is, and you won’t be leaving here until I have it,” said Wood. “I know much about you, Mr. McFadden. Your father, for example, the immigrant doctor. He put a bullet in his head two years ago, shortly after the draft riots in New York, did he not? I assume you’re wrestling with similar demons, which makes you a threat to society.”

  Wood turned away and walked to the door. As he yanked it open, Temple cleared his throat, and Wood froze in the doorway. Then Temple spoke for the first time.

  “Who is Maestro?”

  Wood bowed his head for a moment, then stepped out, slamming the door behind him.

  THE GUARDS LEFT Temple tied to his chair for the night, and that was the condition in which Edwin Stanton found him when he arrived at the cell the next morning. Stanton turned on his heel in a fury and called in the guards to unbind Temple. They protested, pointing out that they were merely carrying out William
Wood’s orders and that Mr. Wood urged caution given the prisoner’s strength and cunning. Stanton exploded again, telling the men that they could stand guard in the cell, weapons at the ready, and were free to fire should the prisoner attempt an attack or an escape.

  “I’m sorry to find you like this, Mr. McFadden. It is not my preference that you be treated so.”

  Temple said nothing. After his ropes were loosened, he brought his arms in front of his body, slowly and painfully, for the first time in more than a dozen hours. He stretched his legs toward the wall, but didn’t look up.

  “You are inserting yourself into issues and among men that will only pollute you,” Stanton said. “There were mighty forces circling around President Lincoln, and I regret that I did not see them sooner, but I know them now. I beg of you, do not pollute yourself further in this entanglement.”

  “The sun, too, shines into cesspools and is not polluted,” Temple said.

  “All you need to do is tell me where the Booth diary is. Speak up and I will get you out of here.”

  “We have two ears and one tongue so that we would listen more and talk less,” Temple replied.

  “You are going to stay in this cell barking platitudes at me—platitudes from a failed and homeless philosopher—while your wife and friends remain at risk?”

  “I have nothing to ask of you, Mr. Stanton, but that you would remove to the other side, that you may not, by intercepting the sunshine, take from me what you cannot give.”

  Stanton shook his head and removed his spectacles. Temple thought it again: this was a weary man, bent by the weight of having prosecuted a bloody and uprooting war.

  “You must understand that I thought President Lincoln to be a miraculous and extraordinary man,” Stanton said. “I did not hold him in high regard when I first encountered him as a lawyer in Ohio, and I certainly did not hold him in high regard even when he invited me into his administration. Perhaps none of us did. But I came to love, admire, and respect him as the greatest man I have ever met. I would have made any sacrifice to protect him.”

  Temple stared at the floor.

  “I will give you until tomorrow evening to make up your mind. Mr. McFadden, we will kill all of you if we have to, but we will have that diary.”

  As he departed, Stanton ordered the guards to leave Temple unbound, find two extra men to escort him to and from the latrine in the prison yard, and then bring him food, water, and a pitcher and towel to clean himself.

  Temple interrupted Stanton’s departure with the same question he had asked of Wood.

  “Who is Maestro?”

  Stanton looked at Temple and shook his head, sighing as he left the cell.

  THAT EVENING, WOOD ordered his prison guards to move Temple, as well as Mrs. Surratt and Dr. Mudd, from the Old Capitol Prison to the Old Arsenal Penitentiary.

  The Old Arsenal was a massive brick fortress several times larger than the Old Capitol and was home to none of the spycraft and intelligence gathering that had made its sister institution so noteworthy. Instead, the Old Arsenal, closed for years and reopened only recently at the war secretary’s command, was dedicated solely and enthusiastically to a single mission: incarcerating the assassination conspirators and diminishing them as they awaited trial.

  Dominating the tip of Greenleaf Point, where the Potomac and Anacostia rivers flowed together, the Old Arsenal featured heavily guarded, twenty-foot rampart walls that enclosed a sprawling, open yard baked by the sun. Inside the courtyard, a large brick building housed workrooms and dining rooms. The entire northern side of the penitentiary was a three-story brick slab lined with cells for prisoners, flanked on one end by the warden’s residence and a chapel and at the other end by the deputy warden’s quarters. Two squat, white wooden guard towers, topped by domed roofs and rounded like gazebos, loomed over the southeastern and southwestern corners of the entire structure and were manned by two lookouts and two marksmen from the military’s rifle corps. The military was ordered to run the Old Arsenal with an eye toward Secesh sympathizers attempting to free the conspirators. Stanton mandated that Jack Hartranft, a Union general whom President Johnson had appointed to run the penitentiary, should keep the Old Arsenal in a state of lockdown—no one in, no one out, unless they had written orders from the war secretary or William Wood.

  The Old Capitol guards herded Temple, Mrs. Surratt, and Dr. Mudd into the back of an enclosed wagon around midnight. It was the first time Temple had seen either of them. Two guards hoisted Mrs. Surratt into the wagon, and she sat down on a narrow bench lining one of its walls. Her dark hair was parted in the middle and swept into a tight bun, and her wrists, like Temple’s, were bound by a pair of handcuffs fitted with six inches of chain. A rosary dangled from her hands and she kneaded its beads between her thumbs and fingers, her lips moving in silent prayer from the time she was stuffed inside the back of the wagon until they reached the Old Arsenal.

  Guards placed Temple aboard next, and then they lifted Dr. Mudd into the back of the wagon. Almost bald and with a heavy moustache and goatee, Dr. Mudd looked just as listless and tired as Mrs. Surratt. His handcuffs, however, were unusual—a pair of Lilly irons that were several inches thicker around the wrists than the pairs binding Mrs. Surratt and Temple. Rather than being connected by a chain, Dr. Mudd’s handcuffs were linked by a pair of flat, almost planar, iron slats that fitted over each other and then were locked together with a custom deadbolt. Temple had seen Dr. Mudd’s handcuffs only in photographs that Alexander Gardner had taken of the prisoner camps; Union soldiers used them to hold Secesh and other prisoners of war. It was impossible for the doctor to move his hands, and he rested them in his lap.

  “Mrs. Surratt, I would like to introduce myself,” Temple said. “I am a detective with the Metropolitan Police Department and I would like to help you.”

  She kept on praying, her lips expanding into occasional O’s and then flattening into efficient, thin lines as she continued murmuring into the night. Temple introduced himself again, but she ignored him.

  He also tried to start a conversation with Dr. Mudd, whose eyebrows were arching and curling in a fashion so rapid and odd that Temple could only conclude that the doctor was panic-stricken.

  “Doctor, might we have a word, I—”

  “Why are we here?” he snapped back.

  “Well, that’s exactly one of the things I would like to know, Dr. Mudd. Why are we in this prison?”

  “Why are we here?” the doctor said again, not heeding him.

  “I believe we are because we stand accused.”

  “I know we are accused, you fool. I want to know why we’re here, in this wagon at this hour. If you can’t tell me, then please do not accost me any further.”

  The rest of the ride from the Old Capitol to the Old Arsenal was made in silence. But when they reached the Old Arsenal and were pulled down off the back of the wagon, Mrs. Surratt burst into a long, low cry, one that stretched into the night like a mother mourning for a child. Stumbling away from the wagon, she pointed at six men lined up near the prison’s gates, and she began shrieking and sobbing even louder.

  Each of the men, all of whom were also alleged to be involved in the conspiracy to assassinate the president, wore white canvas hoods that gathered tightly around their necks with small, laced gaps for their mouths and no other openings, even for their eyes. Each wore a pair of Lilly irons on his wrists and across his ankles; the devices securing the men’s legs were also chained to seventy-five-pound iron balls.

  Mrs. Surratt collapsed to the ground, still pointing at the men while she rolled the beads of her rosary in her left hand, her screams tracing the Old Arsenal’s walls and echoing in the courtyard beyond the gates.

  “You better shut it now, you dirty bitch, or we’ll shut it for you,” one of the guards shouted.

  The guard lifted the butt of his rifle to strike her down, but Temple stepped in between her and the soldier, wrapping up the rifle’s stock in the chains of his handcuffs an
d then spinning the entire weapon up and out of the guard’s hands.

  As the rifle clattered to the ground, it discharged with a burst of fire and a clap, sending a bullet whizzing into a wall thirty yards away. The shot silenced Mrs. Surratt, who kept pointing at the hooded conspirators until she fainted a moment later. Another guard stepped over and slammed his gun into the back of Temple’s head, knocking him out.

  WHEN TEMPLE AWOKE the next morning, he was lying on a lumpy shuck mattress on the floor of a cell. His cane was propped in the corner, but other than that there were no other objects in the room.

  A faded sheet of paper hung inside a frame on the wall of his cell. It was inscribed with a list of rules that had been prepared many years before, when the Old Arsenal was a fortress still devoted to reform and when the prisoners were meant to cultivate a set of civic principles that they could take with them into proper society when they were freed:

  1. You shall be industrious and labor diligently in silence.

  2. You shall not attempt to escape.

  3. You shall not quarrel, converse, laugh, dance, whistle, sing, jump, nor look at nor speak to visitors.

  4. You shall not use tobacco.

  5. You shall not write or receive letters.

  6. You shall respect officers and be clean in person and dress.

  7. You shall not destroy or impair property.

  The list reminded Temple of similar rules at his orphanage in Dublin. All that distinguished this place from the prison of his childhood were bars.

  THE SAME DAY, Stanton visited Wood in his office at the Old Capitol to ask why Temple had been transferred to the Old Arsenal along with the conspirators.

  Wood rocked back on his chair, considering the question. Together he and Mr. Stanton had navigated all of the difficulties of waging a vast and complex war, as well as the messy, untoward business of supervising the District and rooting out spies and other miscreants. Mars, as Mr. Lincoln had so fondly nicknamed him, had never found need to question Wood’s judgment in such matters before. Even so, the war secretary wanted an explanation of McFadden’s relocation, and Wood was pleased to oblige.