She hated what she’d done, how she’d acted, the things she’d spoken.
Constance stumbled into the quiet house, miserable, angry, bereaved, confused.
It took her a moment to realize, through her tears and fury, that she wasn’t alone.
“Miss? Are you all right?”
It was George Hilton, coming from the parlor where her father’s snores could be heard. He’d been here nearly every day to check on his patient’s progress.
Why did he have to be here now?
Constance dragged a hand across her face, sniveling and stumbling and bedraggled.
She was so tired. So grieved. So angry.
“Come on, miss. Sit down here.” He took her arm and gently led her to a sofa in the front sitting room. “Are you hurt? Did someone hurt you?”
“N-no.” Yes. “Yes. J-Jelly,” she managed to whisper. “She left me. I hate her. I hate her for leaving me.” She dissolved into deep, wracking sobs again—grief that she’d tucked away beneath a brittle exterior for the last few days.
Someone—George—thrust a handkerchief into her hand and she mopped her face with it. She didn’t even care that she was a sopping, watery mess.
“Why did she leave me?” she moaned. Her head hurt and she felt as dry and parched as she imagined a desert would be. “I was good to her. I loved her. I never”—sob—“hurt her.”
He said nothing, merely sat there on the edge of a chair across from her as she bawled and moaned and railed.
“Why?” she demanded, glaring at him through puffy, teary eyes. “How could she?”
“Because, Constance,” he said in a low, deep voice, “she didn’t have a choice. She ran away because she couldn’t leave if she wanted to. So she took her freedom and she ran.”
“Damn her,” she cried as his words pierced her. “Damn her. Damn you.”
And the next thing she knew, she’d erupted from her seat. He stood, catching her before she threw herself across the room in the violent tantrum she intended. Suddenly, she was in his arms, sobbing as if her heart was breaking.
She needed love, needed comfort. Needed to be held.
George was a physician. He was trained to help and to heal.
At least, that was what he told himself when his arms went around the shaking, sobbing, soft, lovely woman.
He thought: Dear God, help me.
* * *
It was after dark by the time Sophie and Adam were able to leave the Monroe house. He insisted on getting a hack to drive her back to the Castle, and for once she didn’t feel like walking and so didn’t argue.
“May I ride with you?” he asked.
“Of course, Mr. Quinn,” she replied haughtily. “You’re quite handy at arranging for hackneys, after all, and so therefore you should enjoy the convenience.”
She moved her legs out of the way as he folded then unfolded his long body to climb in and settle into the seat across from her. His long limbs stretched out in the space between the benches but remained far enough away so they didn’t tangle with her skirts.
With a sigh, she untied the ribbon under her chin and pulled off the bonnet with a groan of relief. It felt so good to let her head and hair breathe. “I hope you don’t mind my informality, Mr. Quinn, but I just couldn’t wear this thing any longer.”
She set the bonnet on the seat next to her, and barely managed to refrain from pulling the pins from her sticky, plastered hair. That would have to wait until she was home.
In the dim light, she looked at him from across the carriage. “How did you know? Was it the flour bags?”
“The flour bags?”
“At the Capitol Bakery. I didn’t put it together until it was too late, but I remembered seeing all the flour bags with the name of the mill stamped on them. Townsend Mills. It didn’t mean anything to me at the time, but I realized that was why Mr. Townsend was roaming around the basement of the Capitol and frightened the Lincoln boys. His family mill in Baltimore was supplying some of the flour for the bakery. I didn’t connect the two until it was too late. But how did you know?”
“It was the sparkling on his trousers,” he replied, and went on to explain. “If you hadn’t noticed that, I probably wouldn’t have made the connection and come looking for you. When I realized you were missing—and so was Miss Monroe, Mr. Monroe, and Townsend, I knew something was wrong. I heard some of what he said from outside the study window on my way to the party in the back, but there was no way I could come in through the window without Townsend seeing me—and putting a bullet in me. So”—his broad shoulders shrugged in the shadows—“I came in the other way.”
“Thank goodness you did.”
“When I heard the shot . . . Damn it, Sophie, I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know it was you—I thought one of you had been shot.”
“If I hadn’t been snooping around earlier, I wouldn’t have known about the revolver in the drawer.”
“Thank God for that.” She saw his mouth twitch in the dim light. “Although I reckoned that your little drawstring bag might have had a derringer in it, from the way it looked so heavy, dangling from your wrist.”
She gave a short, surprised laugh. “A candle, a magnifying glass, and a penknife—but I had recently thought I should get a derringer to keep on hand for such occasions. I suppose I’d better do that, now that this is the second time I’ve come face-to-face with a killer.” She shivered a little. “Thank you again, Mr. Quinn. If you hadn’t come along—”
“Sophie.”
“What?”
“My name is Adam.”
He sounded angry, and she looked across at him. “Yes, of course. I just . . . well, drat it, Adam, I didn’t realize you were courting Constance Lemagne.” She managed to leave off the too, but just barely. How mortifying. She didn’t want him to think she cared, but, blast it all, she discovered that she did. Or had, anyway.
And of course, her big mouth had to actually say it.
Adam’s eyes flew open wide as he looked across at her in the drassy light. “Courting Miss Lemagne? How . . . did you come to that conclusion? Surely not simply because I helped her to get a hackney?”
“Of course not. But when a man escorts a woman to her house at almost eleven o’clock at night, it seems quite obvious that he’s courting her.”
Sophie’s heart sank a little when he didn’t seem to know how to respond. But his hesitation lasted only a moment. “In fact, that is something I wanted to talk to you about. I did bring Miss Lemagne home very late on Tuesday night because she was crossing the Chain Bridge back into Washington—not because I’m courting her. When I accidentally saw her at the bridge, I discovered she’d given her name as Wisteria Jones in order to cross over.”
“Wisteria Jones—what on earth? Why would she lie about her name?” Despite the fact that she was bone-tired, Sophie sat upright in her seat.
“I happened to recognize her, and of course when she saw me, she knew she’d been caught. But I wasn’t certain what she’d been caught doing. She claimed she was meeting someone, and she made it clear that it was a—uh—a man that she was meeting in secret, and she’d gotten a ride in a tanner’s cart.”
“Oh.” Sophie clamped her mouth closed after that single syllable. A myriad of thoughts raced through her mind, but for once she decided to be like Adam and wait for the other person to say all there was to say.
“I don’t know whether to believe her, or—well, I reckoned because of what you’d told me about Mrs. Greenhow, and from what I know about Miss Lemagne, she might have been bringing secrets to the Confederates.”
“You think she might be a spy?” Sophie sat back in her seat and thought about that.
She could see it. Oh, she could definitely see Constance Lemagne as a Confederate spy.
“I don’t know. That was the first thing I thought when I saw her and heard her giving out a wrong name.”
Sophie nodded, leaning forward a little. “So she wanted you to think she was meeting a ma
n, in secret, across the river in Virginia? I doubt that very much, to be honest. Constance wouldn’t meet a man who wasn’t—well, a city man. And there are plenty of places to meet someone in the city. Tell me, what was she wearing?”
Adam blinked at her. “A bonnet. A dress. A cloak?”
She sighed. “Were there any flowers on the bonnet? Was it fancy?” He shook his head, and she went on, “What about the dress? Was it lacy, fancy, wide?” She gave an exasperated sigh, “You must have helped her down from whatever she was riding in.... Were there a lot of skirts and fabric that got in the way? Or was it . . . simpler?”
“There wasn’t a lot—not like what she was wearing today. Or even you, now.” He gestured vaguely at her skirts.
Sophie smiled complacently and settled back. “Then she wasn’t meeting a man. Constance Lemagne wouldn’t go to a romantic clandestine meeting dressed in a simple gown and a plain bonnet. Absolutely not. I think you’re safe in your initial assessment that she is—or was—a spy.”
And then, as she spoke those words, Sophie realized what they meant. What they could portend. She could be sentencing a woman—an almost friend—for something she wasn’t certain of. What did they do to spies, anyway? “But of course, that’s just my opinion.”
“I’ll make note of that, Miss Gates. Your opinion.” He smiled at her from across the way as the hackney rolled to a stop in front of the Smithsonian Castle.
“Thank you so much for seeing me home, Mr. Quinn. Adam,” she corrected herself. “Adam.”
He climbed out of the carriage and helped her down. “I reckon I should clarify one thing.”
“And that is . . . ?”
“Since it’s after eleven o’clock—and apparently that’s the criteria for whether a man’s courting a woman—I confess there is a woman I’m intending to be courting.”
Sophie’s heart did that funny little trip as she looked up at him, bonnet in hand. “Oh?”
He gazed down at her and took both of her hands in his large warm one. “I hope she’ll agree to it. Since it’s after eleven o’clock and all.”
She couldn’t seem to look away from his dark, sober, waiting gaze, and smiled. “She’d be a fool not to.”
AFTERWORD
One week later, on Sunday, July 21, 1861, all of the shops in Washington were crowded and busy.
People were ordering hampers filled with food, and the shopkeepers and French cooks could hardly keep up with them. They tripled their prices for wine, oysters, meat pies, pastries, and other delicacies, packing the baskets full of rich meals and fine linens—and collecting hefty fees for doing so.
Every carriage, wagon, gig, and cart available for rent in the city had been spoken for at increased rates, and loaded up with enthusiastic congressmen, businessmen, and even a few bold women, along with their meals, spyglasses, fans, and firearms.
Carriages and wagons rolled nonstop over the bridges into Virginia, and excitement pervaded conversation of everyone in the city.
Today was the day! Today the Big Battle would be fought—the Union troops and the Confederate army were meeting near a small creek named Bull Run, just outside of Manassas—barely thirty miles from the city.
General McDowell’s men had been leaving the city in stages over the last week, and at last they would meet in a decisive battle that would crush the Confederates once and for all.
Spectators—for that was who’d leased the carriages and ordered elegant luncheons—drove their carriages to Centreville, where a small rise of hillocks overlooked the clearing near Bull Run Creek. They jockeyed their vehicles about, lining up along the rise in order to get the best view possible. Even as they approached, dressed in their Sunday best with spyglasses at the ready, they could hear the distant sound of artillery in the distance. Clouds of smoke and stirred-up dirt filled the air, obstructing their view.
But they knew a battle was going on, and they ate and drank merrily as the troops slaughtered each other below.
Matthew Brady, a photographer, had the idea that he could be the first man to ever photograph a battlefield. He loaded up his carriage with equipment and trundled out of town with the rest of the city, riding over the Long Bridge into Virginia.
Henry Wilson, the senator in charge of the Military Affairs Committee and particular friend of Rose Greenhow, was also one of the audience who rode out to Centreville to watch the battle. Unbeknownst to him, days earlier General Beauregard had received a copy of the committee’s map that showed the Union troops’ route to Manassas, thanks to Rose Greenhow and her spy network.
Back in Washington, telegrams came in to the War Department throughout the day, assuring Lincoln and his cabinet of great success for the Federals. Their troops were moving forward, pressing on, and all was well. The news was all good.
But at six o’clock the final message came in: The battle is lost. McDowell is in full retreat and General Scott must save the capital.
As the inexperienced, green Union army retreated, blind with terror and the realities of a war they’d never imagined, their disorganized, pell-mell flight caught up with the spectators in their carriages. It was a mess of dust, terror, smashing and spilling wagons, carts, carriages, sutlers’ teams, and panicked soldiers. Some of the spectators’ vehicles crashed; others were commandeered to transport the wounded.
Overnight and through the next day, soldiers, vehicles, spectators, and the wounded straggled into the city—exhausted, terrified, and shocked.
The tide had turned, and it was clear the war would not be over soon.
* * *
In the first battle of Bull Run, over sixty thousand forces were engaged. The Union army boasted over twenty-eight thousand troops, and the Confederates had thirty-two thousand. Nearly five thousand casualties resulted from the “big battle.”
The Confederates would hang on, fighting for their way of life, for another four years.
A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
As I research more deeply into this time period, I find more and more fascinating things that simply have to find their way into my books.
For the most part, any historical detail that appears in the Lincoln White House Mysteries is as accurate as I can make it. The only true fictional elements are those around the specific crime and my fictional characters, like Adam, Sophie, George, Constance, and Brian.
Thus, the description of how the Capitol Dome was being built and the mess in and around the building is true. The destruction by the troops in both the Capitol and the Patent Office, as well as throughout the city, is accurate as well.
Yes, there was really a slaughterhouse built on the National Mall, and yes, a herd of cattle really did fall into the Canal and needed to be fished out.
The bakery in the basement of the Capitol remained there until the summer of 1862, despite complaints from members of Congress about the smell, the noise, and the destruction from the chimneys. In fact, someone had the brilliant idea of connecting the basement bakery chimneys to those running up into the Library of Congress . . . which resulted in a significant amount of destruction from smoke and soot to many documents.
And yes, the Lincoln boys and their cohorts, Bud and Holly Taft, really did go missing one day and really were found late in the evening in the Capitol basement bakery. Tad and Willie Lincoln were just as boisterous and wild as I’ve portrayed them in this book, and their father just as indulgent and loving toward them.
Finally, the story about Rose Greenhow and her spy network is quite true. The description of how Constance brought the map to the Confederates is how Bettie Duvall and other real-life members carried such documents, which were often written in a special code that Rose used. The packets were rolled up and bundled in her hair as she sneaked across the lines to the Rebels.
Whether Rose Greenhow and Senator Wilson had a love affair is a question that may never be answered; there are arguments both for and against it and it’s clear she did obtain confidential information available only to his Committee on Military
Affairs.
Rose’s spy network was cut off when she was arrested on August 23, 1861, after months of being watched by the Pinkertons (in my mind, this was ultimately because of the suspicions Sophie shared with Adam). Rose Greenhow was subsequently imprisoned as a spy, and eventually she was allowed to exile herself to London until the war was over.
I hope you enjoyed these historical details as much as I did, and I look forward to sharing more fascinating information in future books.
—C.M. Gleason
February 2020
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
With this third book in the Lincoln’s White House Mystery Series, I have an ever-growing list of people to thank for their support and efforts in bringing the story to life, and the books to the stores!
The team at Kensington—especially my editor Wendy McCurdy and her brilliant assistant Norma Perez-Hernandez—has been a pleasure to work with, and I’m grateful to be in such expert hands. Larissa Ackerman and Michelle Ado round out a great team of thoughtful, savvy, and enthusiastic publicity professionals. And the new cover design is absolutely brilliant—I was so delighted to see that the actual crane for the Capitol Dome was incorporated in the illustration—and I’m forever grateful to the Kensington Art Department for such a great cover.
My fantastic, patient agent, Maura Kye-Casella, has, as always, been a firm guide as well as an energetic and savvy advocate for me, my books, and my career overall.
Gary March, D.O., continues to be my number-one go-to for all things medical. Any errors are mine alone, for he’s spent far too much time helping me to determine just how a leg could be broken—but not really broken, so that George Hilton could save the day. Dr. March is not only creative but detailed in helping me with all the medical questions and issues in these books.
I am so very grateful to my friends, family, and readers who’ve supported this series from the very first book—especially Mark Clark, Susan Judd, and Denise Phillips (owner of a the fantastic indie bookstore Gathering Volumes in Ohio)—and the gals from the 12TTRT who helped promote the books at Malice Domestic: MaryAlice, Diane, Erin, Darlene, and Donna.
Murder at the Capitol Page 29