“Only there are those who claim that the colored girl isn’t doing any of the work. But I suppose she is, isn’t she?”
“She is.”
“And Dennard. He’s happy with this arrangement, is he?”
“Why wouldn’t he be?”
“Because my sources tell me there is some tension between Dennard and the President. It’s my understanding that there might have been some pressure to include Miss Canner as part of the defense.”
“That’s ridiculous,” said Jonathan, his unease growing. “And I fail to see how any such rumor could be related to the murder of Mr. McShane.”
“Don’t you?” He was at the window, tugging the broken handle, producing a terrible growl even though the pane did not budge. “People tell me Dennard didn’t want to take this case. Thought it might be bad for business. Thought McShane was being a bit of a romantic, even.” He left the window, began perusing the shelves. “You do see the pattern, don’t you, Mr. Hilliman? McShane brings in a case that Dennard thinks will wreck the firm, and then McShane conveniently dies.”
“You cannot be serious.” He recovered himself. “And Mr. Dennard has taken the case.”
“But under pressure from the President, you see. That is my point. Maybe he didn’t foresee the pressure.”
Jonathan stared, remembering Dennard’s sudden reversal, on the very day a telegram arrived from two of their railroad clients urging the firm to stand down. “You cannot possibly be serious,” he repeated. “Mr. Dennard is the kindest of men.”
“Not my impression. People tell me Dennard is rude and rather overbearing. Quite a difficult man, actually.” He drew a book out, shoved it back. “Now, tell me, Mr. Hilliman. Why did your employer need fifty dollars?”
“Mr. Dennard? Why not ask him?”
“Not Dennard. McShane.” The policeman had managed, in his traverse of the room, to wind up directly in front of Jonathan. His hands were behind his back, his broad chest thrust aggressively forward. “The morning of the day he was killed, your former employer went to Cooke’s bank, at Pennsylvania and Fifteenth Street, and withdrew fifty dollars from his account. Any idea why?”
“No.”
“Rather expensive for a colored prostitute, I would think. Not my world, you understand, but those with more experience than I assure me that the going rate at Madame Sophie’s establishment is closer to a dollar or two, depending on the girl one chooses. Still, I suppose he might have had it in mind to leave a gratuity.”
“I have no idea what Mr. McShane would need fifty dollars for,” said Jonathan, ignoring the gibe. But he was thinking that no man would be so big a fool as to carry so much money on his person, especially into Hooker’s Division. “Perhaps you should ask Mrs. McShane.”
“She says she has no idea.” The inspector pursed his heavy lips, as if in disapproval of the opposite sex. “The difficulty is that the fifty dollars was not found on the person of either decedent.”
“Then perhaps the crime was a robbery.”
“That is what my commander believes. He tells me that the time has come to turn to more pressing matters. Perhaps he is correct.” He examined the shiny helmet. “But on the off chance that my commander is wrong, and this terrible crime was not after all about the fifty dollars, then the degree of violence proposes a quite different motive.”
“What motive would that be? Anger? Jealousy?”
Varak was at the door. “Panic,” he said; and went out.
III
Senator William Pitt Fessenden lived in a modest house on B Street South, in the shadow of the Capitol. Abigail had to change lines on the horsecars three times to get there, and still wound up walking the last block and a half, so that when she arrived she was half frozen.
Shivering on the cobbled walk, she immediately confronted a dilemma.
At the decent houses of Washington City, as in most of the nation, negroes were expected to go around to the kitchen door. But Abigail had been raised to challenge such strictures by ignoring them: she sat where she liked on the horsecars, and walked past policemen without asking permission. Moreover, she was visiting Fessenden as a more or less official emissary: she had every reason in the world to enter through the front door. Yet there was the danger that such a choice might give away her role: neighbors would wonder why a colored girl showed such effrontery. On the other hand, were she arriving at the house as Abigail Canner, citizen, unconnected to politics or the impeachment trial, she would without question have proceeded to knock at—
The front door opened. A slim redhead beckoned her close, and Abigail, happy to have the weight of decision lifted, hurried forward—to greet, she imagined, Mrs. Fessenden.
“What do you want?” demanded the redhead suspiciously, and Abigail realized that the woman was a good deal younger than she: no more than fifteen. And although she had drawn a shawl around her shoulders before opening the door, it was obvious now that she wore a uniform.
A housemaid.
“I have come to see the Senator.” When the maid looked skeptical, Abigail handed over the note from James Speed. “Please give him this.”
The redhead hesitated, and for a bad instant Abigail wondered whether this child intended to leave her standing on the porch in the icy wind. “You wait in the kitchen,” the maid finally said, and led the way. And Abigail, even in the midst of her considerable relief at getting out of the cold, found herself irritated at not having been invited to sit in the parlor.
IV
“I was under the impression that the matter had been settled,” said Dennard when Jonathan was finished. The lawyer was out of breath as usual, sprawling more than sitting behind the wide desk as Jonathan remained on his feet. “I have been assured by General Baker that the investigation is closed.”
“Evidently, the inspector disagrees.”
“Yes. Yes.” Dennard’s soft hands were pawing through a file that lay open on his desk, his eyes drifting over the words, a trick he often used to gain time to ponder. “And the man actually implied that I might have—Well, never mind. I shall take care of the matter.” His pouchy gaze rose. “Was there something else, Hilliman?”
Jonathan hesitated. He was wondering whether Varak might be right. Not his innuendos about Dennard, but on the larger matter, that the motive for the murder was not robbery but panic. He met his employer’s scrutiny. He dared not raise the matter: Dennard has already told him to forget McShane and concentrate on representing their client.
“No, sir.”
“Good. Any word from Miss Canner?”
“She has not yet returned, sir.”
The aged eyes narrowed. The news seemed to bother Dennard a good deal more than the inspector’s visit.
“Well, that is most unfortunate,” the lawyer finally said.
“Surely her absence means that progress is being made.”
“No, Hilliman. I rather suspect that it augurs the opposite.”
V
“He refused to see me,” said Abigail.
Jonathan was hanging her hooded coat in the cabinet. A sullen Washington rain pattered the windows without enthusiasm. “I don’t understand.”
“I went to Senator Fessenden’s home, just as you told me. The maid admitted me. The housemaid told me that the Senator was in. I waited for three hours, but he wouldn’t see me.”
“Did you give him the card? The one from Speed?”
“No, Jonathan. I am the village idiot.”
He faced the full fury of those wide gray eyes. Most women, in Jonathan’s experience, grew uglier when angry; as did most men. Abigail was as much an exception to that rule as she was to so many others: the rising color in her sandy cheeks simply made her more beautiful. And yet the pain in her expression was undeniable. It occurred to him that she had been humiliated by Fessenden, and did not much care for it. “I apologize. I just wanted to be sure—”
“Three hours!”
“Yes, I—”
“In the kitchen, Jonathan
. He kept me waiting in the kitchen, like a servant!” Abigail regained her control. “Never mind. It makes no difference. What matters is that he would not see me. He has changed his mind.” She nodded toward the door to Dennard’s office. “You will have to tell your employer.”
“He is your employer as well. We shall both tell him.”
“No. There is a chain of command. The President and his men talked to you, you talked to me. The commands made their way down the chain. The bad news must make its way back up.” She went to the side table, picked up a broom. “I have chores.”
Jonathan watched as she turned her back. Then he straightened his tie and knocked on Dennard’s door. There was a protocol for these meetings. Jonathan remained standing while the lawyer sat. Usually, Dennard was giving instructions. Now and then he would assign reading and test his clerk on various fine points of the law, as preparation for Jonathan’s coming examinations for the bar. Today, however, Jonathan did the talking, relating everything Abigail had told him, and then, on a nod from Dennard, going over it again.
The lawyer heard him out, then nodded. “About what I expected.”
“Would you like to speak to Miss Canner?”
“There’s no need.”
“Maybe we should send her back to Fessenden.”
“To what end?”
“I thought we were expecting to negotiate.”
The lawyer stood. His office was smaller than McShane’s but nearly filled by the huge mahogany desk, with its twin kneeholes—known in the parlance as a partners desk—with room to sit on either side, and a plentitude of slots and drawers and cubbyholes to help keep things sorted. Bundled files lay neatly atop a cabinet, each tied with green or blue string, the records of lawsuits Dennard had put aside to handle the impeachment. Now he turned to the window and folded his arms.
“You are an intelligent young man,” said Dennard, “and I am sure you will be a fine lawyer. But you have a good deal to learn about the ways of Washington. This was never a negotiation, Hilliman. Never. It was a test of wills.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Consider. Fessenden is an ally of the President’s. That much you know. Wade and his people hate the President, et cetera. You know that, too. The Radicals think they have the battle won. They do not think Mr. Lincoln can escape. Now, I’m not sure they’re right. Trial has yet to begin. The most brilliant evidence, once challenged, often loses its luster. My point is, they sent a message through Fessenden for one reason only: to find out whether the President is as confident as they are. If he was confident, he would reject their overture. If he was worried, he would accept it.”
Jonathan tried to work this out. “We sent Abigail—Miss Canner—with the intention of negotiating further.”
“Remember your elementary contract law, Hilliman. If I offer to purchase your house for five hundred dollars, and you make me a counteroffer of six, your counteroffer serves as a rejection of my original offer. We sent Miss Canner with a counteroffer. Her very presence made plain that we were rejecting what the Radicals had proposed. If we meant to accept, I would have gone, or Stanton, or Speed. Even you. Sending Miss Canner, however, was a slap in the face.”
“What!”
“She is nobody, Hilliman. Oh, don’t give me that look. One doesn’t mean literally. She is smart. She will be a fine lawyer, et cetera. Finney adores her. Sumner. Everybody. But she holds no official rank. She is not in the Cabinet, et cetera. She is not a lawyer. She is a clerk. She is also a woman, and she is colored. She could not possibly be carrying a secret message from the President, because nobody would believe she was in the President’s confidence. That is why Fessenden refused to see her. He knew as soon as Miss Canner arrived at his home that Mr. Lincoln had rejected the offer. By making her wait, he is telling us he knows—and that the opportunity for negotiation is over. We’re going to have ourselves a trial, Hilliman.”
“But you used her!”
“No, Jonathan.” A rare use of his Christian name. “We used you. You used her. That is the way of Washington, my boy. You’d better get used to it.”
CHAPTER 16
Nocturne
I
NIGHT.
Abigail decided to treat herself to a bath. She would have to heat the water in the kitchen and carry it down the hall to the back of the house, but that was a chore she had performed hundreds of times. She turned the knob and water came gushing out, first brown-tinged, then gray. When the water cleared, she put a big kettle under the tap and waited. Her late father had installed the attic tank, which was kept full by a combination of rainwater and regular purchases from the water sellers who drove their wagons through the neighborhood twice a week. The tank was just one way in which the Canner house differed from its neighbors. Her father had considered himself an inventor. They even had a bathing-tub, fashioned by her father from wood and stone and copper. The bathing-room had a stone sink fed by pipes leading to the attic tank. The room also featured what Abigail suspected was the only flush toilet south of the Smithsonian and west of the Navy Yard. Edolphus Canner had improved, he claimed, on the toilets of the rich, which he in his trade as a plumber had helped construct. The one in the Canner bathing-room used the siphoning action of three water pipes, all controlled by a single lever, and the system made a terrible racket, shaking the entire house and frightening the dogs, but no one in Washington City—insisted her father—could claim its like.
When the kettle was full, she hung it in the hearth and, by the light of the fire, sat down to study. She was still frustrated—well, furious—about being made to wait in Senator Fessenden’s kitchen for three hours and then coming away with nothing, and hoped that reading law would calm her. And so opened her notebook and began to review what she had copied out from Blackstone’s Commentaries today on the forms of trespass. If you poisoned a man’s dogs or shot his cattle, wrote Blackstone (in England, it seemed, things were always happening to dogs and cattle, or so one would gather from reading Blackstone), then you were guilty of trespass vi et armis, but only if the act was “immediately injurious” and involved force. If, on the other hand, your action involved no force and caused only indirect injury to a man or his property—never a woman in Blackstone and certainly never a woman’s property—then you were guilty only of trespass on the case. She did not yet know what either term meant, because she had been sent off to deliver some papers before she had the opportunity to copy the next page. But already she was wondering what possible difference it made to the man injured whether the injury arose directly or indirectly from the act of another—
A sharp knock at the front door drew her from her legal meditations. She glanced around in surprise, although the door was not visible from the kitchen. A thrill of fear danced through her tired body.
No sane black family opened the door after dark—not these days. Not with the White Camellia and the Ku Klux and the Southern Cross on the rampage. Hundreds of freedmen had been killed over the past two years; some said thousands. The Union troops seemed helpless. Northern newspapers insisted that the night riders were a Southern phenomenon, but Abigail remembered what most Washingtonians had schooled themselves to forget: Maryland was a Southern state, a slaveholding state, kept from joining the rebellion only because Lincoln had sent troops to occupy Annapolis.
Besides, Virginia was right across the river.
The knock came a second time.
Varak, she told herself. The inspector was back for a further interrogation. Her brother, Michael, come to hector her. Or Jonathan, wishing once more to apologize. Perhaps wishing for more: she knew how he looked at her. But if he imagined for an instant that she—
A third knock.
Abigail left the kettle and crept into the parlor, staying beneath the window. She glanced toward the stairs. No movement. A fourth knock. She reached beneath the sofa until her fingers touched metal. She pulled out the shotgun, and, sitting on the floor, broke it to be sure it was loaded. She scampered into the
hallway and crouched beside the door.
She waited.
Another knock.
“Who is it?” she called, voice trembling.
“It’s me, honey,” said a woman’s voice, the tone mildly amused. “Don’t shoot, okay?”
Judith.
II
“I am surprised to see you,” said Abigail, feeling a bit stupid and a bit superior, the way she always did around Judith. Abigail’s tone was frosty. She tended to see the moral world through Nanny Pork’s eyes, and although she had missed her sister, she was unable quite to approve of her.
Judith was amused. “Aren’t you going to ask where I have been keeping myself?”
“I understood that you had moved south.”
“Well, I am back.”
Abigail could not help herself. Every word out of her sister’s mouth left her angrier. “It is the middle of the night. Who comes calling at this hour?”
“We must talk,” said her sister, ignoring Abigail’s remark.
“What can there possibly be for us to talk about?”
“A great deal.” Judith had moved to the stove. “Bathing yourself, I see. You always were a great one for decadence.”
Abigail’s face flared.
“How dare you come here to insult me—”
Again Judith spoke right over her. “Silly girl. I’m not here to insult you. I’m here to help you.”
“I am in no trouble. And if I were, it is not you I would approach for assistance.”
Judith spun toward her. Abigail was surprised to see tears in her older sister’s eyes. “Is that what they taught you at your little Christian college out west? To slap the sinner on the other cheek?”
Abigail felt her face burn. Her mouth moved, but for a few seconds, no sound emerged. “I am sorry,” she said finally. “I should not have spoken harshly.”
Her older sister’s gaze rejected this confession. “I don’t suppose you will ever change. You’re Nanny Pork all over again, aren’t you? There is no forgiveness in your soul. No love for anything less than perfection.”
The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln Page 16