Mary and the boys were already asleep when I returned to the Mansion with Bob. We walked through the ceremonial rooms like a pair of stragglers in the semidarkness; one chandelier blazed above our heads, and the halls could have been some vast echo chamber. The night watchman was snoring in a gilded chair. I could tell that Bob’s mind was on those wild horses that only Little Mac could tame, like some circus master. I didn’t have that talent. But I didn’t want to lose my boy to this circus master. I squinted hard into the last glimmers of light and could see that Bob’s lazy eye was trembling.
“Goodnight, Son,” I said.
He trod upstairs on Mother’s Manhattan carpets. The watchman’s stentorian snores sounded like the thunder of horses’ hooves.
“Goodnight, Father,” Bob replied from the top of the stairs, his voice wafting above the watchman’s rumble, like some sweet serenade, while I stood there, a President with black snow on his boots.
30.
The White House & Vinegar Hill
A BLACK MAN WAS found frozen in his tracks on Vinegar Hill that January, like a hunter who had nothing to hunt—took half a day to dig his legs out of the ice. Folks trudged all the way from the Willard to have a look at the frozen man. It was the bitterest January in years, and Tad’s spotted pony had to wear leggings and a winter hood in a barn that still smoldered. Vinegar Hill had been a haven for free blacks until Army engineers pilfered their land to put up Fort Massachusetts, but McClellan’s engineers didn’t have to bust up little farms and let these farmers freeze to death.
I could have gone to Vinegar Hill with the War Department, but I decided to visit on my own, without a White House detective on my tail. I climbed on Old Tom and rode along the Seventh Street Pike, with rifle pits everywhere I looked. Hotels were boarded up near this part of the pike—it was meant for military traffic. And I realized for the first time that most of Vinegar Hill was gone. It was swallowed up by rifle pits, an ammunitions dump, a blockhouse, and Fort Massachusetts, built right out of the bones and timber and orchards of the old farms. The farmers were still around; they lived in the ruins near the fort—many of them were women who had nowhere else to park their feet. They wore rags in winter, and leggings cut from strips of paper. I met a farmer lady, who had an infant in her arms. Called herself Aunt Bertha, and she had every right to cuss at me. My troopers had destroyed her farmhouse and driven her off her land. I told her she could stay in the fort with her child whenever the wind was riding hard.
She ignored my summons and offered me a hunk of johnnycake. Her teeth were chattering, her lips had turned blue. I rounded up all the farmers I could find and stood under the ramparts of the fort with them.
The engineers must have forgotten to build a gate; you had to climb the ramparts if you wanted to get in. “We’re coming up,” I had to holler into the wind.
The commandant called down to me from the ramparts, wrapped in a cape that covered half his mouth. “You can’t bring in the niggers, Mr. President. Those are orders from the General-in-Chief.”
“Son,” I had to shout, “Mr. McClellan works for me.”
I climbed up to the ramparts with these colored pilgrims. I could see clear to the White House in the wind. The District had become one huge military camp, alive with a metal gleam that looked like a labyrinth of rifle pits and Parrott guns mounted on little silver trucks.
The commandant was a young captain who couldn’t have been more than twenty-five. I told him to feed the farmers and their children and to house them best he could, and if there was the least bit of bellicosity from Mr. McClellan, the captain was to remind the general that this fort was part of the President’s own domain.
I bid goodbye to Aunt Bertha and went back to the White House, where I got into a scrape with my new Secretary of War, Mr. Stanton, an irascible sort of feller, with the long unruly beard of a prophet. He commenced to tear into me at a Cabinet meeting.
“Sir, the Lady President can do what she likes with her own clique, but I will not sign up unqualified men. Are you fond of this Wikoff?”
Mary must have tried to palm off the Chevalier on Mr. Stanton. “Mr. President, why is he always here? I keep running into him on my way to our meetings.”
“Well, he’s kind of Mary’s major domo.”
He was also a rogue reporter sent by the New York Herald to spy on the White House. The Herald had the largest circulation in the world, according to its editor, Gordon Bennett, who idolized Little Mac, and wanted to see this general in my chair. Bennett would have used his considerable power to ruin me, and he must have pulled Wikoff out of some old shoebox. The Chevalier was a relic before he came to Washington. He advertised himself as Louis Napoleon’s friend and Queen Isabella’s confidant, but Isabella couldn’t keep him out of jail in Italy or Spain. He must have visited every bordello in the District, but that wasn’t why he was here.
Suddenly I started to see peculiar tidbits in the Herald—my own private words and whispers. If I’d been a lady and not some sucker with long elbows and a beard, I would have gambled that Wikoff had crept right into my boudoir. I’d been working on my annual address to Congress, and the notes were locked away in a drawer, but whole paragraphs had been ripped out of that address and appeared in the Herald.
Congress decided to look into those damn leaks, and Mary was furious when the Chevalier was invited to appear before the Judiciary Committee. She put her hot little hands over her eyes and said Congress was picking on her protégé. Should have scolded her like a child, even if she was the Lady President . . .
Wikoff appeared before the committee next morning and said it was Major Watt, the White House gardener, who had rifled my drawer. I knew it was a lie. No one but Mary could read my scrawl. So I climbed up to the Capitol and met with the Republicans on the Judiciary Committee in one of their private chambers—it was laden with spittoons and hissing lamps. I had to squint through a miasma of cigar smoke to make out each member of the committee. They were flabbergasted to see me in their headquarters—the Capitol was far from a President’s haunts.
“Friends,” I said, “you’ll have to forgive me for coming here, but I’d be obliged if you released Wikoff. The longer you hold him, the more of a scrape I’ll be in—it’s a family affair.”
I didn’t leave them much choice, even if a few Congressmen tittered at my remarks. But they wouldn’t have wrecked the Party’s chances over one Chevalier. Mary welcomed him back to the White House like some prodigal son who’d wandered from the grasp of evil jailors. She fed him champagne. I knew she’d also fed him my speech, word for word, and I didn’t know why.
While Mary reveled one floor below, Nicolay & Hay tiptoed into my office. I couldn’t always trust my little detective bureau in matters concerning my wife, but they’d found the Chevalier’s diary.
“Nico, did you pick his pocket?”
“We’d do anything to protect our Titan,” they said. “But he was vain enough to leave his little book lying around.”
It troubled me to read a man’s private words—reminders to himself. But these were more than reminders. They were a battle plan. And the Chevalier’s scrawl was much clearer than mine, like a child’s script.
He wasn’t only writing for the Herald, it seems. The Chevalier had been in touch with Rebel spies. He was a hopeless amateur and couldn’t have harmed us much. But his impressions of Mary hurt the most.
I own that little woman. She’d run off to the moon if I ever asked.
I had to quit reading. I called in my own pair of bodyguards from the Metropolitan Police—they liked to pose as stewards.
“Please march into the Crimson Room and bring me Wikoff.”
“Should we knock, sir? The Lady President might be upset.”
“Just bring him to me.”
I kept thinking of Aunt Bertha and the other pilgrims left out in the cold by McClellan. I’m the one who had asked him to build a ring of forts around the capital, and so he’d usurped property in my name. But each of
those farmers was worth much more than Wikoff, who lied his way into the White House and bamboozled my wife.
I’d dealt with fakers before, one-eyed men who sold cures for every affliction under the sun, and carried little hatchets in their back pockets, if ever they had to flee, spoke like minstrels and wandering players with honey under their tongues, but could turn into a viper at any moment. I’d met them in Springfield, or at country inns, while I was traveling the circuit. And I expected the Chevalier to be much the same, even if he’d practiced his craft abroad.
Wikoff was wearing a Prince Albert coat with buttons made of bone. He had a supple ash cane and a silk hat. Metropolitan detectives couldn’t seem to bother him. I hoped he would come upstairs shaking a little. But he was petulant, and annoyed. He had a purplish knot in the middle of his forehead.
“Mr. Lincoln, do you have some use for me? You’ve interrupted my affairs. I was performing some shadow tricks, Monsieur.”
I didn’t take kindly to him monsieuring me. I felt every bit a backwoodsman, and it threw me off the mark.
“Chevalier,” I said, “shut your mouth and listen.”
He laughed. He had wined and dined with courtesans at Versailles, and here he was in an office covered with oilcloth. It wasn’t like the Crimson Room downstairs, with Parisian wallpaper that could remind him of Louis Napoleon’s palace. He sniffed about with an air of contempt. He could have wiped me off the map with one of his looks.
“The Presidential chair means nothing to me. I won’t be quiet. You’re a commoner, Monsieur. And I’m a titled man. Why did you summon me? I was looking forward to a marvelous game of hearts with your wife.”
“It’s the last game of hearts you’ll ever play in this house.”
His laugh turned into a sinister bark. “Are you threatening me, Monsieur? I have the whole New York Herald behind me. I’m their star reporter.”
“No—you’re a spy.”
“Ha!” he said. “I’ve been called a secret agent many times. And I’ve sat in many jails. But my friends are much more powerful than my enemies. You will discover that on very short notice.”
He was starting to wear me down with his palaver. I was glad I’d never faced him in court. He could have won a jury over with his aristocratic ways, but he was in Lincoln’s court right now—all alone with the Titan, without Mary to help him. And I wasn’t partial to furriners. It was a frontiersman’s prejudice, I suppose. Only Wikoff wasn’t a furriner. He was born in Philadelphia, had gone to Yale and had studied the law on his own, like me, but abandoned his studies and wandered through Europe as the heir to a private fortune. He was a libertine and a liar, according to my secretaries.
“You should have been more careful with your little black book.”
He wasn’t scared. “Ah, one of your own agents must have picked my pocket—it’s not even safe in the President’s hotel. And why should you be interested in my ramblings?”
“You’ve been in touch with Richmond.”
He danced on his toes. “You’re the one who should be frightened, Monsieur.”
He reached inside his coat and pulled out a packet of letters, roped together with a black velvet ribbon. It wasn’t the letters that unmanned me, it was the ribbon—it had come from Mary’s own ribbon box.
“Excellency, shall I recite some of Mrs. Lincoln’s best lines? She writes a beautiful letter. She has all the ardor of a well-bred Southern lady. I imagine you wouldn’t want Mrs. Lincoln’s lines to stray too far abroad. The Herald is dying to have a look. But mind you, I’m not a rattlesnake. I might let you have the whole bundle for ten thousand dollars—and an appointment at the War Department. I wouldn’t mind being a colonel near Mr. Stanton’s desk.”
I seized the letters, shoving them back inside his coat.
“Chevalier, whatever Mrs. Lincoln wrote you, she wrote as a friend. And you shouldn’t be selling her letters to a damn newspaper in Manhattan.”
He wasn’t a battler, like Jack Armstrong. He didn’t have Jack’s princely grace. I twirled the Chevalier around with my left hand and carried him to the door. Down the stairs we went, while White House workers stood inside their cubbyholes and Mary wandered out of the Crimson Room with a puzzled look.
“What on earth is going on?”
She could see the wildness in my eyes—and she panicked, stood there in a frozen trance. No one could rescue her now, certainly not the Chevalier. He’d never been bundled up like that by someone who could wield an axe in either hand. I left him on the lawn.
“Chevalier, don’t you ever come here again.”
I walked back inside the White House. Mary was still standing there. I wouldn’t release her. I kept seeing that delicate rope of ribbon from her ribbon box, imagining it in her hair, and I had the worst case of the unholies I’d ever had. There was no cure. I locked myself in my office and wouldn’t see a soul, not Willie, not Tad, not my Secretary of War, not McClellan’s senior generals—the country hung on a strange cord, where every article and action was suspended, waiting for the President’s perusal or signature. I stared out the window, beyond the Washington Monument with its marble mask, and onto the mudflats, and felt like a sleepwalker. I was furious when I heard a knock on my door.
“Who is it?” I growled.
“Mrs. Small. I once rode with you into Baltimore, sir.”
That lady Pinkerton entered with her rough, rawboned look. She had nasty scars on her cheek from where that barber had nicked her with his razor. I remembered the pearl handle, could see it still. She’d rescued me from the barber and that rogue marshal in Baltimore. The Pinkertons were now in McClellan’s employ as Union spies.
I was much more comfortable with Mrs. Small than with McClellan and my Secretary of State—she was no damn aristocrat. Allan Pinkerton had told me all about her. She’d grown up in one of Illinois’ poorest provinces without a Pa, her face marked with smallpox, and moved to Chicago as a pickpocket by the time she was twelve. She taught herself to read and write while riding the cars Pinkerton had been paid to protect. She was nineteen when he found her with another man’s wallet. He didn’t handcuff her. He saw her talent and claimed her as his first female detective. I’m not sure what name she had. Pinkerton dubbed her Mrs. Small, though she was never married or even engaged to a man. And she’d been a ghost in his service ever since.
She put Mary’s packet of letters on the table, roped up with the same velvet cord.
“Sir, the Chevalier Wikoff tried to load off these letters on me. Someone must have told him I was a Rebel courier.”
I was silent for a moment. “Did you show that packet to McClellan?”
“No, Mr. President.”
I couldn’t read her face—it was like a dim lantern in the raw light of the room. My question must have troubled her. She was in Little Mac’s secret service and should have reported to him.
“But you’re my Commander-in-Chief,” she said, and suddenly I could catch a smile on her scarred face. I was feeling mighty low.
“Did you read my wife’s letters, Mrs. Small?”
“I would have been derelict if I hadn’t, sir. I was your courier now. I had to memorize whatever was writ, in case circumstances obliged me to destroy the packet, sir. I couldn’t let it fall into Rebel hands.”
There was another matter, a little more complicated. She wasn’t that fond of McClellan, I could tell, but she wouldn’t have been disloyal under normal circumstances. Little Mac was a Democrat, supported by the Herald, and she knew what would happen if the Herald ever got its hands on Mother’s letters to Wikoff. I couldn’t have lasted out my own administration.
She must have seen how bereft I was, how lost—a husband with his wife’s secret sentiments sitting on the table.
“Forgive me, sir, but Mrs. Lincoln doesn’t have the right sauce for the District—it’s filled with imposters, like the Chevalier. All she ever did was hold his hand on a carriage ride to Silver Spring, surrounded by four or five other phony dukes. I would
n’t imagine they were ever alone for a minute. And Madame wrote some silly things. She sounds more like a fifteen-year-old convent girl than the Lady President. Should I burn the whole caboodle?”
“Yes,” I whispered, but I preserved that rope of ribbon, remembered it around Mary’s neck, or knotted in her hair. And I couldn’t have borne to watch it sizzle and smoke.
The lady Pinkerton and I tore into that packet and threw every last shred onto the fire in my office. I was stunned to hear myself sniffle. I still had that rope of ribbon in my hand.
“Ma’am, I could be the one who doesn’t have the right sauce for this town.”
The lady Pinkerton chided me. “That’s balderdash, Mr. President. The likes of Mr. Buchanan would have let the Republic slide. But we’re still the United States, thanks to you.”
And she was halfway into the hall before I had the chance to thank her.
“Mrs. Small, won’t you stay and have some supper with me and my boys?”
Her face was in the shadows again. I couldn’t tell if she was mocking me a little.
“Mr. Lincoln, I was never here, and we never had this conversation. I’m not listed in the logbook downstairs. Little Mac would have a fit if he ever knew I was here. He’s kind of solicitous about his property. We’re his agents. And he doesn’t like to lend us around.”
I was quick enough to clutch her hand.
“My, my,” she said. “A body might think I was a baroness.”
And then she was gone.
I invited Willie and Tad into my office, had the butler bring us up some provisions. We dined on apples and cheese and water from the White House well. Tad asked about the mysterious lady with the pocks on her face.
“Paw, she rode out right with the wind. Wasn’t she in the cars with us last year?”
I couldn’t tell him much about Mrs. Small, else he would have started his own pickpockets’ society at the White House. She’d been in some kind of paid bondage to Allan Pinkerton ever since he nearly arrested her in a car outside Chicago. And now she was McClellan’s slave and a spy for the Federals who had stumbled upon Mary’s letters and didn’t reveal them to Pinkerton or McClellan. It was like having a pockmarked angel in my camp—a secret agent who could guard the President’s secrets and steal into the White House with an invisible cloak. Pinkerton had trained her well, even if he damn near robbed her of her life.
I Am Abraham Page 22