The Lincoln Conspiracy

by Timothy L. O'Brien

  Fiona turned the discussion back to the Old Capitol Prison.

  “Temple is not the only person they have there, Augustus.”

  “Of course he’s not.”

  “Two of the conspirators are there, those accused of plotting the president’s assassination.”

  “Mary Surratt and Samuel Mudd.”

  “Yes, and Mrs. Surratt’s priest visits her there regularly, according to the papers.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The priest, Jacob Walter, has a Catholic church here in the District on F Street—St. Patrick’s. He also runs an orphanage there,” Fiona said, smiling faintly at the memory of how that particular geography discomfited her husband. “Temple hates orphanages and would have avoided F Street for that very reason—except that the Patent Office is on the same block.”

  “Where you work.”

  “Where I work!” she said. “My poor, brave husband was reduced to a sack of nervous bones whenever he came to fetch me at the Patent Office’s makeshift hospital, because there was an orphanage nearby.”

  “Fiona, I’m lost in this, I’m afraid.”

  “Temple was trapped in an orphanage in Dublin as a child and was bullied there. He fell from a window, and the fall split his leg.”

  “He never shared that with me. Hence his trepidation concerning F Street.”

  “Yes, he has been uncomfortable on F Street. And on the day that all of this began, when he was being chased from the B&O with the diaries, he was forced to ride down F Street. Temple told me later that he nearly tossed away the diaries and let his pursuers have them because he found himself riding right past that frightening orphanage!”

  They both began laughing at this in a full, rounded way, like neither of them had laughed in days.

  “I still don’t understand what use we can make of this now, Fiona,” Augustus said.

  “Temple said he remembered as he passed the orphanage during the chase that Father Walter was Mrs. Surratt’s priest. Temple knows Father Walter. When Temple first came here from New York, Archbishop Hughes gave him a letter of introduction to the priest.”

  “And?”

  “And as I said, the newspapers report that Father Walter is allowed to visit Mrs. Surratt at the Old Capitol Prison.”

  “It is still a formidable pile, that prison,” Augustus said, nodding.

  “It is,” Fiona acknowledged. “But as you said, the McFaddens are resourceful.”

  She rose from the table and then cupped her elbow in her palm, bringing her hand up to her face and hunching over. In a moment she was standing upright again, her composure intact.

  “I miss him in a way that consumes me, Augustus.”

  Augustus stood up to comfort her, but she waved him away, saying good night instead and finding her way to one of the bedrooms.

  “I’ll sleep on the sofa in the sitting room, and I’ll have the Colt on the floor beneath me,” Augustus said to her as she walked down the hallway.

  “Thank you, Augustus,” she replied, stopping and turning back to him. “You are our dear, dear friend.”

  Later, lying on her side in bed and running her fingers across her face to measure the swell of her welts, she longed for Temple even more than she had earlier while imagining him in a cell at the Old Capitol; she longed for him so intensely that the tug in her bosom drew deep, like something overflowing on the end of a rope at the bottom of a well. She began crying as she pulled the sheet up to her chin, and eventually she fell asleep.

  “WE’VE BEEN HERE a very long time, seventy years, founded to look after the spiritual needs of the lads building the Capitol and the President’s House, yet you and your husband have never once visited us nor joined us to celebrate a mass.”

  Father Walter, sitting on the edge of an old oak desk in an office wedged between the vestry and a storage room behind St. Patrick’s sacristy, gazed at Fiona from beneath a pair of bushy gray eyebrows. His black cassock draped in folds to the top of his feet and a heavy silver crucifix hung from his neck and spread across his chest, as much a part of the priest’s own architecture, Fiona thought, as it was a symbol of his devotion.

  That morning she had washed her hair for the first time in more than a week and changed into fresh clothes Sojourner had retrieved for her from a trunk that Lafayette Baker’s men had torn through but not soiled near Nail’s shattered, smoldering warehouse in Swampdoodle. Then she made her way from H Street and down 10th to St. Patrick’s, pausing briefly to look down the block to Ford’s Theatre before she entered the empty church.

  Father Walter had large, ruddy hands, and he clasped hers between them in a gesture she would have found overly familiar from anyone other than him. A Bible he had been reading when she knocked on his door was spread facedown on the desk, its brown leather binding worn and cracked. He followed her eyes to the Good Book.

  “Colossians, chapter three, verse thirteen,” Father Walter said. “I was reacquainting myself with it before you arrived.” He pulled the Bible across the desk and into his lap, turned it over, and began reading the passage to Fiona. “ ‘Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another—’ ”

  Fiona interrupted him and completed the rest of the passage: “ ‘Forgive as the Lord forgave you.’ ”

  “You have read your Scriptures,” Father Walter said, putting the Bible back down on the desk.

  “Matthew, chapter eighteen, verses twenty-one and twenty-two,” she replied. “ ‘Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, “Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother when he sins against me? Up to seven times?” ’ ”

  “ ‘Jesus answered, “I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times,” ’ ” Father Walter responded, completing the passage. “Tell me, Mrs. McFadden, your husband came to the District well recommended by Archbishop Hughes, and yet he is a stranger to our parish. Is he as conversant in Scripture as you?”

  “My husband fills his head with poems, I’m afraid. He admires poets and has an affinity for Walt Whitman’s verse.”

  “Walt Whitman is a heathen.”

  “Father, I have seen Mr. Whitman at work in the hospitals ministering to the wounded, sick, and dying. Whatever his beliefs may be, I think he does the Lord’s work.”

  “I understand he is an atheist.”

  “The war that all of us just endured made many men and women question their faith, Father.”

  “And yet you do not.”

  “I question the injustices that surround us, but I am a woman of faith.”

  “So we all must be in times like this,” Father Walter said. “Forgive my bluster over Mr. Whitman.”

  “You are much concerned, it would appear, with forgiveness, Father.”

  The priest looked down at his Bible again and rested his hand atop it.

  “I think that the true Christian is a forgiving Christian,” he said, pulling the Bible back into his lap. “This has been a time of turmoil and blood and cruelty. Forgiveness is not the first path some of our brothers and sisters will choose to follow. I fear mightily for the well-being of one of the most devout members of St. Patrick’s.”

  “Mrs. Surratt.”

  “Yes, Mary Surratt.”

  “She is why I’m here,” Fiona said.

  “I assumed as much, although I would have been more pleased to encounter you here in search of your Maker.”

  Father Walter drew the Bible closer to his body, enveloping it inside his arms and the folds of his cassock and reciting yet another passage. “ ‘Do not judge, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven.’ ”

  “Luke, chapter six, verse thirty-seven,” Fiona replied.

  Father Walter suggested that they visit the garden outside his office, where a trio of bees buzzed around a large wisteria arbor and several rosebushes. A magnolia tree, a black locust, a host of marigolds and lilacs, and clusters of purple hydrangeas were showing their buds or blo
ssoming around a long wooden bench that spanned part of the garden’s perimeter. Father Walter sat down and offered Fiona details about each of the flowers and trees before them: the wisteria vine’s tendency to grow rapidly and out of control unless cut back frequently; the mix of soil and space around St. Patrick’s stunting the black locust to thirty-five feet instead of the one hundred feet it could reach in the countryside; the magnolia tree’s shabby appearance in the spring, with a gnarled trunk and limbs and brown, pockmarked leaves, soon to be transformed by an eruption of brilliant pink blossoms. He had planted the garden himself years earlier, he said, and nurturing it offered a respite from his concerns about Mrs. Surratt—and from his worry that forgiveness would elude her.

  “I do not believe her to be guilty of playing any role in the conspiracy to murder President Lincoln,” Father Walter said. “And I am not sure in my soul whether the men running our government and hunting these assassins have read or have taken to heart Colossians and Matthew. Mary Surratt deserves forgiveness, and I shall be vocal in asserting that on her behalf at the President’s House and in whatever courtroom in which they try her.”

  Fiona paused a moment, considering her words, and then asked a question she had been wanting to pose since arriving.

  “The press describes her boardinghouse on H Street as the haven for the conspirators—they all convened there, including Booth, and she presided over that house, did she not?” she asked. “And did she not provide the assassins with firing irons?”

  “What else does the press say about her?”

  “They describe her as a large woman, of the Amazonian style, with masculine hands and a swarthy complexion.”

  For the first time that morning Father Walter laughed, a staccato burst that rolled out from him with an abandon he rarely displayed in public.

  “And you say that I have unfairly categorized the poet Whitman! Yes, you should meet with her and decide for yourself whether the newspapers are to be believed. I’ve told the authorities that Mary is innocent, and I’ve told them that if they hang her, that act will weigh heavily upon them for eternity.”

  He tilted his head back into the sunlight and closed his eyes, his fingers wrapped around a cross hanging from his neck. The priest sighed and opened his eyes again, pivoting away from his struggle to reconcile Mary Surratt’s plight with his belief in the righteousness of the good Lord.

  “Why do you desire a meeting with Mary?” Father Walter asked. “You must share this with me if I am to do anything on your behalf.”

  “We have a number of things, documents, that involve communications about the president’s assassination. My husband has pursued this and is now in the same prison as Mrs. Surratt. I have spent time with Mrs. Lincoln, traveled with her, and have shared her intimacies. I would like to convey Mrs. Lincoln’s thoughts to Mrs. Surratt. And I most desperately want to see my husband.”

  “The Old Capitol is a hard, bitter place, and if your husband has alienated our government to the same degree that Mrs. Surratt has, then I consider his incarceration an equal abomination,” the priest said. “You must know you are on a perilous course. So, tell me: what do you fear?”

  “Oh my, I fear many things. I fear aging, and death, and the loss of my husband. I fear a life without children of my own.”

  “I can say that I do not fear aging or death, but I fear evil in the world,” the priest said. “I fear the injustices of mankind.”

  “I have come here to try to right an injustice.”

  “You can save Mrs. Surratt?”

  “No, I don’t believe I can.”

  A flock of red-winged blackbirds landed in a spiraling flutter atop the magnolia tree, shaking their wings and bouncing from branch to branch.

  “Mrs. Surratt used to sit with me in this garden and tell me about a dream she often had,” the priest said. “She would dream that one of the roses in the garden had grown thick and mighty as an oak, its stem swelling and swirling for hundreds of thousands of feet, climbing and climbing and climbing, until it reached to heaven. She would climb the stem of that rose, pulling herself up and around its thorns, cutting her arms and hands and legs all along the way, and praying to the good Lord to give her the strength she needed to complete her journey. At the end of her dream she always reached an enormous burst of silky red petals at the top of the stem. And then she would find her way to bliss.”

  The blackbirds stirred and flew up from the magnolia, trading places in tight little loops as they glided over one another on their way toward the Potomac.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  THE ALLY

  Fiona left St. Patrick’s through the garden and exited onto 9th Street, walking all the way up to New York Avenue and back down to 13th Street to see if she was being followed, checking over her shoulder and scrutinizing passersby until she was back at H Street again and the Lee house. When she got there, Alexander Gardner was seated at the top of the front porch waiting for her, a long blade of grass in his mouth. He had a broad-brimmed straw hat on for the sun, and wide crescents of sweat soaked his shirt at the armpits. Alexander stirred at the sight of her, sitting upright and spitting the grass from his mouth.

  “You stranded me at the train station in Cumberland,” he said to her. “But I have to admit that seeing you back in the District soothes the nerves.”

  “You would be less uncomfortable in the heat if you shaved your beard,” she said, waiting for him to move so she could climb the stairs. “Then again, a man with a brogue like yours needs a beard, I suspect. I trust you made your way back without incident.”

  Alexander held Fiona’s eyes and tipped his head over his left shoulder toward the corner of 12th Street, guiding her view down the block to where a small group of soldiers were gathered. Fiona hadn’t seen them thanks to the path she took from St. Patrick’s, and now she cursed herself. The Surratt boardinghouse was only several blocks away, down near 6th Street, and of course there would be soldiers circulating in this neighborhood. Why hadn’t she considered that earlier? Why hadn’t Augustus? Temple would have spotted this the first moment in. Empty-headed. Alexander saw the anxiety sweeping across her face and leaned toward her, patting her hand.

  “I don’t think you need to worry, Fiona. There isn’t a chance on this green earth that those boys are going to notice you. Take a harder look at them.”

  None of the four Union soldiers gathered at the corner was scanning the street or even seemed to have a destination in mind. Instead, they had formed a small, tight circle and were facing one another as if they were on the verge of performing a sacred ritual or exchanging the passwords of a secret society. Their rifles were lying in a scattered heap by the base of a town house, not propped against a wall in a trim line as they would be normally. In their right minds, following training and orders, they would never be so jumbled of wits as to make a pile of their weapons. The Union boys’ dynamic revealed itself to Fiona in the rhythmic swaying of their entire group. They were rolling slowly forward and then back again on the balls of their feet, a subtle wave of blue uniforms. Fiona couldn’t see any detail in the soldiers’ faces at this distance, but she was certain that if she could, she would find all of their eyes to be moony and unfocused.

  “They’re addicts,” she said.

  “Through and through,” Alexander replied. “Opium.”

  Fiona had already seen ready evidence of this scourge in the military hospitals. Soldiers, many of them barely older than boys, had endured such unbearable pain from a bullet wound or the gouging of a bayonet that they were given large and frequent doses of opium to blunt the trauma and soothe their nerves. Morphine addiction was common enough, too, particularly because the army gave soldiers doses to take home with them. Now, thousands of war veterans—perhaps even tens of thousands, if the most dire of calculations were true—had the “army disease.” With the war over and soldiers only starting to separate from their units to return home, groups of Union boys were seeking out one another to share opium and mo
rphine. Whether they were doing so as recreation or self-medication didn’t really matter. The fact was, a good number of the soldiers had mentalities so wallpapered by drugs that they weren’t much better than bummers.

  While it wasn’t uncommon for the soldiers to share their addictions in camp or in taverns near the Potomac docks, it was more than passing strange to find them openly enjoying or riding out their latest medicinal spree—and in their uniforms, no less. No more than bummers with rifles, she thought.

  Alexander could barely contain his disgust with the group, as was his wont lately. He had started the war with great enthusiasm for the entire vast enterprise and for his role in chronicling its realities, idiosyncrasies, heroes, and heroics. But the battlefields had carved their own peculiar and wearing places into his imagination, and he no longer wanted to train his lenses on whatever was going to be left behind as the war machine unwound itself. Lincoln’s murder had only furthered his bitterness.

  “I am so tired of the District,” he said to Fiona, his eyes fixed on the group of soldiers down the street. “I want to trail and photograph the Comanche and the Lakota, and I want to photograph the railroads. I want to leave here and find my fortune in the West.”

  He stood up. “We should go inside,” he said. As he pushed open the door for Fiona, he stopped to confide in her. “There was a Pinkerton agent in Cumberland.”

  “Fancy that. I encountered my own Pinkerton in Defiance, Ohio.”

  “But I had the Pinkerton. Allan. I wasn’t going to tell you because of the trepidation I was worried you might feel about the Pinkertons’ return. More aggravation for you,” he said. “Temple went to very elaborate and fruitful ends to convince Pinkerton that the time had arrived for him to leave the District. We thought we were successful in that regard.”

  “What did Temple do to intimidate him?”

  “Photographs.”

  “Of whom or what?”

  “Of Pinkerton and a woman of ill repute together in Alexandria.”

  “I don’t imagine I’ll ever meet the enterprising photographer who managed to take those photographs?”