The Lincoln Conspiracy

by Timothy L. O'Brien

  “You’re keeping your cuffs on while you spew down at the latrine,” the guard said, placing the torch he was carrying into an iron holder on the wall and slipping his key into the cell door.

  When the guard opened the door and entered the cell, Temple spun on him and pounded a fist into his throat and another into his belly. The guard doubled over, gasping for air, and Temple brought a knee up into his jaw, dropping him to the floor. He took the handcuffs off the bed and clipped the guard’s wrists together behind his back; he had already sheared into strips the single sheet they allotted him, and now he used the pieces to draw a tight gag through the soldier’s mouth, tying it in a heavy knot behind his head. He considered taking the guard’s uniform, but the man was a good five inches shorter than Temple, so he dragged him into a corner, picked up his cane, slipped out the cell door, and locked it.

  As soon as Temple pocketed the key and grabbed the torch, Mary Surratt began to wail again, a low, wandering cry. None of the other conspirators seemed to be stirring. As long as Mrs. Surratt was the only one making a sound, the guards outside the cellblock wouldn’t raise an alarm; her wailings had now become as routine as the crickets chirping on the riverbanks outside.

  He limped down the stairs as quickly as he could and came to a door on the west wall separating the men and women’s cellblocks. The door wasn’t locked, and he passed through into the next cellblock; on the southern wall was another door, locked, that led to the penitentiary’s washhouse. A soldier was seated next to the door snoring, his rifle leaning against the wall next to him. He was a six-footer, so his clothes would be a fit. Temple hobbled up to him and let out a low, flat whistle. The guard shook his head as he awoke and reached to his right for his rifle, but before he could focus on whatever or whoever it was that had roused him, Temple thumped him twice on the side of the head with his cane and put him back to sleep.

  The key he had lifted from his cell worked on the washhouse door as well, and Temple went inside and waved the torch around the room just long enough to register everything that was inside it. There were more than a dozen caped, sky-blue Union greatcoats hanging from pegs on the wall. Several small metal washtubs sat on tables around the room’s perimeter, and a round bathtub on a wooden platform dominated the center of the room—just as Pinkerton had said it would in his note. Temple grabbed a burlap bag from one of the tables, then dunked his torch into a washtub to extinguish it before the light became noticeable outside the washhouse’s windows.

  He dragged the unconscious guard into the washhouse, stripped off the soldier’s trousers, shirt, coat, and hat, and stuffed them into the bag. The fifth greatcoat to the left of the door was the longest one hanging on the pegs, and Temple counted out each one until he came to it and then he stuffed that into the bag as well.

  The next piece of this is where it all rises or falls, doesn’t it, he thought to himself. Well, thinking of you always, Fiona.

  Temple reckoned he had about ten steps to the middle of the room but when his right foot banged into the bathtub’s platform, he realized it was only nine. Damn my leg, he thought. He paused a moment to catch his breath before laying his cane down against the platform and feeling underneath the tub for its drainpipe. When he found the pipe, he circled it with his right hand and put his left on the rim of the tub, lifting it up and off the platform until the pipe cleared. Keeping his weight on his left leg, he rolled the tub onto its side on the floor and then turned it upside down. He nearly lost his balance straightening up before he pushed against the platform to see how tightly secured it was to the floor. If the platform was nailed to the floor, he planned on using his cane like a lever to pry it up. But it moved slightly when he pushed its side, and when he pressed his shoulder into it, wincing from the flash of pain where his bullet wound was still healing, the whole platform slid aside. Beneath it, as Pinkerton had said there would be, was a large metal grate sitting above the sewage line that served the entire penitentiary.

  Although it was one of the few that the District could boast of, the sewer beneath the penitentiary was a simple and haphazard affair. It started below the washhouse and ran beneath the prison yard and the kitchen—which had the only other sewer access point inside the Old Arsenal—and then tunneled out about three hundred yards beyond the penitentiary walls to a point where the spillage emptied into the confluence of the Anacostia and Potomac rivers. Temple raised the grate, put the burlap bag between his teeth, held his cane high, and dropped down about eight feet into the sewer.

  He was nearly overcome by the stench once he began making his way down the sewage line, crouched over at the waist. The walls and floor of the sewer were made of bricks and timber beams, and because the ground in most of the surrounding area was little better than swamp, the walls oozed with water and a silty muck that hung in droplets in between the bricks. It will happen that quick—just blink your eyes, and then the bricks and the timber and the rats will all tumble in on me, Temple thought. Started out trapped in an orphanage and might end up facedown in slop beneath a prison. Other than Fiona, nothing to show for it.

  Slogging beneath a narrow tube of light beaming down from an opening in the kitchen floor, he could hear several men above him playing cards, laughing, and conversing. Flies were crawling on his face, hands, and legs, and his feet got caught up in an ankle-deep pile of rotting meat and vegetables.

  The thoughts we are thinking, our fathers would think;

  From the death we are shrinking, our fathers would shrink;

  To the life we are clinging, they also would cling—

  But it speeds from us all like a bird on the wing.

  He pressed his sleeve across his mouth and nose and moved on, using the burlap bag to knock off rats that were trying to climb his legs.

  The end of the sewage line, which was about twelve feet above the water, appeared at first as a faint purple disk. As Temple got closer, he could hear the river running past. When he reached the opening, he was alone.

  He slid on his back down the muck outside the sewer and onto the marshes by the riverbank, pressing his bag and his cane against his chest as a cloud of mosquitoes swarmed his head. It was so dark that he could barely distinguish the water from the shore, and he thought about whether to make his way up the Potomac or the Anacostia. A man with a cane, reeking of sewage and carrying a burlap bag, wouldn’t go unnoticed, whichever path he took. But he turned his attention back to the river when he heard the faint slapping of paddles against the surface of the water.

  “Tssst, tssst,” Allan Pinkerton whispered from the lead boat, which glided quietly toward the shore. Pinkerton and an oarsman were both hunched over in the skiff, trying to meld into the murk blurring the distinction between the night and the water. A second skiff was just behind Pinkerton’s boat, and two people sat hunched over in that one as well.

  Pinkerton put his finger to his lips to remind Temple to keep quiet, then reached out to help him climb up. Temple waded into the water until it was at his waist, then tossed his bag aboard. He gave Pinkerton his cane and grabbed hold of his arm and the side of the boat, hauling himself up and into the skiff.

  A few lights from the Old Arsenal were visible in the distance, as were the inky outlines of the guard towers, where the sharpshooters were perched. The two boats separated in the darkness without a word. Pinkerton’s went up the Anacostia and the other went up the Potomac.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  THE ASYLUM

  Temple was lying on his back in the middle of the boat. Once they were halfway between the banks of the Anacostia, Pinkerton leaned over him and whispered into his ear.

  “You smell like shit from that sewer, Mr. McFadden,” he said.

  “The river itself smells like shit,” Temple responded. “I want to clean myself before I see my wife.”

  “Won’t be time for that because we’re getting off this boat in about five minutes and I suspect we’ll see her right off.”

  “We’re not heading farther uprive
r?”

  “No, we’re not. And you’re welcome.”

  “Thank you.”

  “For rescuin’ your sorry ass I deserve more than just a thank-you.”

  “My wife rescued me, Mr. Pinkerton,” Temple said. “You just brought a map and a boat to the effort.”

  Both men chuckled as the skiff glided another thousand feet onto the far bank of the Anacostia at St. Elizabeth’s, in view of the Government Hospital for the Insane.

  “You can sit up now,” Pinkerton said. “Your escape is a success, and the drama of your rescue will be the talk of the ages.”

  Temple could still see the imposing pile of the Old Arsenal outlined across the river. If there had been a moon out, one of the sharpshooters in the towers would have been able to pick off him, Pinkerton, or their oarsman.

  “Why was there a second boat?” he asked.

  “Your doppelgänger. We have you headed up to the Long Bridge in that skiff,” Pinkerton said. “You will arrive there with your cane, damp clothes, and muddy boots—though not quite as, ah, pungent—and there will be a horse waiting for you. There won’t be many people to see you on the District side, but when you cross into Virginia, you’ll pass the army fortifications and the military will see you ride by, cane and all. Tomorrow, when Stanton, Wood, and Hartranft discover that you’ve abandoned their holding pen at the Old Arsenal, they’ll notify all forts and officers asking if an unusually tall man with a cane might have crossed any of the bridges late the night before. After they get a confirmation of your sighting at the Long Bridge, those crackerjacks are going to send dozens of men into Virginia to ferret you out. But they’ll never find you there. For all purposes, you will have vanished.”

  “Where will I actually be?”

  “Right here. The Government Hospital for the Insane. There are large, comfortable rooms. Anyhow, an asylum is the perfect residence for you.”

  “And why are we still so damn close to the penitentiary?”

  “Hiding in plain sight. They’ll never imagine that you’re within spittin’ distance just across the Anacostia. Your wife arranged our stay here, and the location was her inspired idea. Now, out of this boat and up to the madhouse. Mrs. McFadden and Mr. Spriggs await your arrival.”

  DOROTHEA DIX WAS at the entrance to the asylum, a large brass ring with a heavily populated circlet of keys in one hand and a lantern in the other.

  “You’ll need to wash before you enter St. Elizabeth’s, Mr. McFadden. I run a clean and tidy establishment.”

  Temple welcomed her offer, knowing from what Fiona had once told him that it was folly anyhow to argue with Dorothea Dix. As superintendent of Union army nurses, she had won the devotion of Fiona and other women who tended to the wounded and dying, Confederate and Union alike. She was outspoken in her views of proper medical care, and that put her at odds with the phalanx of male doctors in the army who guarded their prerogatives. Removed from her position for insubordination and what the military characterized as a “generally disruptive and free-ranging running off at the mouth,” she continued overseeing the asylum she had founded several years earlier.

  Government funding had made the Hospital for the Insane possible, but it was Dorothea Dix who made it function and took an abiding interest in meeting the needs of the feeble-minded who had been committed there. It was she who had insisted that the hospital be known by the more anodyne name of the grounds upon which it stood: St. Elizabeth’s.

  Pinkerton took the burlap bag from Temple and went inside the asylum. Mrs. Dix led Temple around the side of the building to where a tall wooden stall was affixed to the facility’s ochre-hued wall. A fresh set of clothing, a new pair of boots, and a large tub of water were inside the shed.

  “Where did these boots come from?” Temple asked.

  “Your wife arranged for them. She said you ruin your boots and your clothing.”

  “It’s discouraging to be predictable.”

  “Predictability can be a virtue. You’ll find a bar of soap in that tub, and I expect you to make good use of the towels. We plan to give you shelter and food here. But we can’t have you trudging into our hospital smelling like a swamp rat.”

  FIONA WAS WAITING at the foot of a broad staircase in the entrance hall when Temple came inside, holding the burlap bag that Pinkerton had handed off to her. Temple’s hair was still damp, and he pushed it back from his face, glad that he had washed before seeing her. He dropped his cane as he rushed to Fiona and nearly stumbled when he reached her, steadying himself on the balustrade behind her and burying his face in her neck. She put both of her hands on his cheeks and raised his face to hers so that she could kiss him, pressing her lips into his until she became short of breath. He leaned on her as they retrieved his cane, and then she led him by the hand up the stairs to their room.

  AUGUSTUS AND PINKERTON were seated by a window in a corner of the dining room the next morning when Temple and Fiona came downstairs to eat. Augustus dropped his fork and leapt up to embrace Temple as he neared the table. Two patients at a nearby table clapped and giggled, then banged their forks against their plates. A short, pudgy patient with cuts on his arms and neck was spinning in a slow circle in the middle of the room, singing to himself in a soft, drooling mumble.

  “Did you decide on this locale, Mrs. McFadden, so you and your husband would present more favorably in comparison to those around us?” Pinkerton asked.

  “People with unhinged mentalities are cared for in our society by chaining them in jail cells with common criminals, Mr. Pinkerton,” Fiona said. “Mrs. Dix has given these poor souls a refuge. You should have more sympathy.”

  “People need to be responsible for themselves and their own misfortunes,” Pinkerton said. “We cannot always keep life’s miseries from intruding upon the lives of our fellow man.”

  “For someone who has gone so far out of his way to aid us, you remain extravagantly hostile,” Temple said, cutting into the ham on his plate and spreading jam across his bread.

  “You deceived me in a graveyard, tried to blackmail me with a madam in Alexandria, and have withheld the diaries from me—even after I saved your life in the Center Market. I have reason to be hostile.”

  “Which is why I’m confounded about your assistance to me and my wife.”

  “If either of you should perish, I imagine the world would lose one or both of the diaries. Such an outcome would spare the war secretary, Lafayette Baker, and the others from greater scrutiny.”

  “But how do you know that?”

  “Know what?”

  “That the diaries have information that would implicate Stanton and Baker or anyone else. Had you read them previously?”

  Pinkerton put down his knife and fork and pulled the napkin from the top of his shirt, balling it up and putting it on the table in front of him.

  “I might remind you that I oversaw the Secret Service for a goodly amount of time before the war secretary relieved General McClellan and me of our duties. I had extensive lines of information in every corner of the District.”

  “Of course, you did, Mr. Pinkerton,” Temple said, putting his own napkin on the table. “I hope you’ll excuse my failure to recognize your prowess.”

  “Apology accepted. Now, might I see the diaries?”

  “I think the time has come for that. But I need to confer with Mr. Spriggs. I have had an evening with my wife but no time with him, and he and I have much with which to reacquaint ourselves. Might I leave you in my wife’s good hands and we can discuss the diaries later in the day?”

  “I find your wife more pleasing company than you, and I look forward to conversing later in the day.”

  Temple and Augustus got up from the table.

  “Mr. McFadden.”

  “Yes?”

  “It is only just that I view the diaries. I am owed what I am owed.”

  “Indeed you are.”

  AUGUSTUS’S ROOM WAS on a floor beneath Temple and Fiona’s, and the rooms near his were more acti
ve. A patient a few doors down the hall had built a tiny monument from a collection of small, speckled river stones and was diligently knocking them from their pile and reassembling them, again and again, without looking up from his work.

  “Fiona said you got lost in your opium when she stayed with you,” Temple said to Augustus.

  “It has never been something I’ve hidden from you.”

  “Yes, but it was something you agreed to keep from her.”

  “It has gotten to a state in which it’s impossible for me to hide it from anyone.”

  “Well, we won’t have Pint to help us raise cash anymore. Maybe it’s time to purge ourselves.”

  “I think that is an easier challenge for you,” Augustus said.

  “You have no idea how gambling can consume the soul.”

  Another monument of river stones toppled onto the floor down the hallway, and a patient in another room began cackling.

  “Temple, we must not show anything to Pinkerton. He’s not to be trusted.”

  “I know that. It wasn’t only the war secretary who removed him and McClellan from their duties. President Lincoln ordered it as well. He had grown weary of McClellan, and he ignored Pinkerton’s entreaties not to cashier him also. I don’t think justice has anything to do with why Allan Pinkerton wants the diaries.”

  “Why does he want them?”

  “I don’t know, but I will be finding out soon enough.”

  “How?”

  “I’ll need to go to New York to do that.”

  “I think New York is a fine destination.”

  “And why is that?”

  Augustus pulled the Booth diary from a desk drawer and opened it to the back pages, where another telegram from Patriot to Avenger sat next to a version of the same message that he had decoded onto a fresh sheet of paper. Augustus spread them open across the top of the desk and raised a shade to allow more light into the room.

  Temple bent over the desk to look at the pages. A familiar sensation coursed through his body, the rush of excitement and anticipation he got when people and events overlapped.