The Crescent Spy

by Michael Wallace

  But she couldn’t get carried away. He had to stop following so she could chat with the soldiers at the gate unmolested. She had to get at them from an angle. It would be suspicious to come right out and ask what she needed—when is the change of the guards? how do you secure the powder from theft or sabotage?—but with a few friendly words from a young woman maybe they’d volunteer something useful. But not with Ludd slithering after her.

  “Amazing energy,” he said. “I only lament that Mr. Fein enjoys your services, not I. Perhaps my initial offer was insufficiently generous.”

  Josephine stopped and put her hands on her hips. She returned his dismissive words from that night on Calhoun: “‘What are you doing here? Don’t you have society gossip to cover or some such rubbish?’”

  “Touché. I behaved badly.”

  “Yes, you did.”

  “I thought I had a scoop. I was irritated that I hadn’t. Then, when I read the broadside of stories you fired off after the battle, I saw how you’d outmaneuvered me. I reported that Preble had been sunk. You claimed Richmond had been the one damaged, but not sunk. I claimed that the river would henceforth be open to Confederate shipping. You said Manassas wasn’t strong enough to break the blockade on its own. I called you a naïve child in print, a defeatist, and you cut me to pieces. When the true facts of the case became known, I saw that you possessed all of the qualities I need.

  “I have men who are prolific,” he added, “and men who can put poetry into print. I have never met anyone who could do both.”

  She knew it was flattery, but his words filled her with a warm glow, like she had a bellyful of fine whiskey. It was dangerous, this need for praise. Too much, and she’d be drunk on it, and unable to do her duties.

  “What is Fein paying you?” Ludd asked.

  “Fifteen dollars a week.”

  “I’ll give you twenty. That’s a thousand dollars a year.”

  Josephine’s eyes widened. In reality, Fein was only paying her eight. She’d said fifteen only to put Ludd off.

  Her silence seemed to encourage him, and he pressed on. “You have many qualities, Miss Breaux. I need you at the Picayune.”

  “I do have many qualities, Mr. Ludd,” she said. “And among them is loyalty.”

  The following Sunday, Josephine and Franklin met near the cathedral instead of at Congo Square. As Christmas approached, the city seemed to forget the war and threw itself into the parades and other celebrations of the season. Josephine and Franklin watched the carolers with their candles and bells, and bought beignets and hot eggnog while strolling past the bonfires lit along the levee to welcome Père Noël.

  The alcohol loosened Franklin’s tongue, and he told Josephine stories about his childhood in Massachusetts: the swimming hole where he’d go with his brothers, his kind and tender sister, Ruth, who died of scarlet fever, his dog, Bandit, who once made off with the entire Christmas goose. One of Franklin’s great-grandfathers was still alive. The old man had planted apple trees two years ago at the age of eighty-eight and optimistically thought he would live long enough to get a good harvest.

  Only as Josephine and Franklin walked back along the levee did she realize that his chatter was due as much to nerves as to the eggnog. He told her that he wanted to move against the arsenal at Christmas, while the city was distracted.

  “The soldiers are local militia,” he said. “They’ll be spending time with family, drinking brandy and eating too much goose and turkey. The city itself will be relaxed. It won’t be hard to do what we need to do.”

  Josephine’s pulse quickened. “What is our plan? Sabotage?”

  He nodded. “On a grand scale.”

  “What do we do? What do you need me to do?”

  His brow furrowed. “I only meant ‘we’ in that the information you already collected will help me infiltrate the Marine Hospital.”

  Josephine waited anxiously for news of some disaster at the arsenal, but nothing came. On Christmas Day, her landlady, Nellie, knocked on her bedroom door and said with a knowing smile that a handsome gentleman caller wished to see her. Nellie would give them privacy in the parlor.

  Franklin told her what had gone wrong. Late that very night after the walk along the levee, he had approached the hospital compound through the swampy fields abutting the back side. Armed with a crowbar, he intended to pry off the boards on the rear of the stables to gain entrance to the interior. But before he could move, two guards with muskets and lamps came patrolling around the exterior of the compound, peering into the darkness from beneath forage caps. Franklin was fortunate not to be spotted.

  Far from relaxing security, it seemed that General Lovell had increased scrutiny on the exterior approaches.

  “Work is accelerating,” Franklin told Josephine in a low voice, with a glance at the parlor door, as if worried that Nellie would be eavesdropping. “Another shipment of powder came in from upriver three days ago. And Lovell is casting shells in the city foundries, bringing them in for storage. I’ve got to find a way inside.”

  “What’s wrong with the front door? It’s a hospital, not a prison. You enter the hospital, leave through the back, and cut across to the arsenal.”

  “The front has guards, too. I’ll be challenged.”

  “Not if you enter as a patient. A gentleman soldier, so you can get to the back ward, where the officers stay. Frank Beaudoin, creole planter, lately commissioned as an officer in glorious service of the cause.”

  He looked intrigued, but cautious. “They’ll hear my accent the moment I open my mouth.”

  “So change your story. There are plenty of Yankees in New Orleans.”

  “Maybe at the yards, but not among the officers.”

  “Then don’t talk. There was a mishap with a firearm, and you have a wounded jaw. But being a gentleman, you have your own private nurse.” She loosened her mouth and let a full New Orleans accent pass through. “And she can do all of the talking.”

  A cab pulled up in front of the Marine Hospital later that week, and Josephine helped Franklin out, who gave a dramatic groan, as if the very movement caused him pain. Cotton bandages wrapped around his head and jaw. She’d dabbed them with pig blood, which had now dried, leaving a caked mess. He wore a uniform with a captain’s bars that she’d procured on Exchange Alley.

  While Franklin stood swaying, Josephine took out a carpetbag, so full that it couldn’t be latched. The edge of a pair of trousers peeked out. She paid the cab driver, who drove his horse on with a flick of the whip and disappeared, jouncing, into the night mist.

  Josephine eyed the two soldiers in butternut jackets and forage caps who stood on the porch of the two-story brick building. Gaslights flickered on either side of the door, reflecting on their young faces as they peered down at the newcomers.

  “Please, sirs,” Josephine said, “could you help me with the captain?”

  They came trotting down the stairs and took Franklin’s arms. He took a few shaky steps toward the front door. She’d had him swish his mouth with whiskey before they left the cab so he’d have the smell of a man trying to drink away his pain.

  “What happened to him?” one of the soldiers asked. “Yanks?”

  “Not hardly,” she said. “He did this all by his lonesome.”

  The other one whistled. “You don’t say. At home, or were it with his men?”

  Franklin groaned, and held up a hand, as if trying to keep Josephine from telling the story.

  “Now you hush,” she told him. “It’s the foolhardiest thing I ever heard, and it’ll serve you right to hear it a few times. Live fire drilling,” she told the men. “Shot himself straight through the cheeks. Fortunate he only lost two of his teeth, not his tongue.”

  “Or his brains,” the first one said.

  “Sound like he don’t have none to spare,” the other said with a grin.

  She chuckled at this. “I was wondering. Anyhow, I ’spect he’ll recover, if the doctor is any good.”

  “Doc Gi
bbons is the best, they say. ’Course, he won’t be in ’til morning.”

  Franklin groaned.

  “I figured as much,” Josephine said with a glance at her patient. “But the captain’ll be needing something stronger than whiskey for the pain. There now,” she said as they got him up the stairs and in the front door. “I don’t suppose one of you boys could help me find a bed for Captain Beaudoin?”

  “Be happy to, miss.”

  “I’ll come, too,” the other said.

  She’d meant the query as a way of discerning their general discipline. Could they be coaxed away from their posts? But she realized an added benefit as they picked their way through the first building and into the rear ward where the officers kept beds. They passed two orderlies, but because she was being escorted, nobody questioned Josephine and Franklin.

  The officer ward only had three other patients. One lay in bed on the far end of a long, open hall, a book on his chest, an oil lamp at a little desk next to his bed. Even from a distance, she could see the mass of blisters and scabs on his face and neck. A second man, this one nearer, was also reading a book by lamplight.

  As soon as Josephine had Franklin’s boots off and got him in bed, she sent the young soldiers back to their post. She found a chair and pulled it up next to the bed.

  “Now we wait?” she asked in a low voice. He nodded without speaking.

  The nurse appeared a few minutes later. She was heading toward the poxied man in the corner, but veered in their direction as soon as she spotted them. Josephine rose to her feet.

  “Who is the patient?” the woman asked.

  “Captain Beaudoin. I’m his private nurse, but I won’t get in your way.” Josephine sketched out the same story she’d told the soldier, then added, “I promised to stay with the captain until Dr. Gibbons arrives in the morning. I don’t mean to be any trouble—I’ll only sit here waiting.”

  “Of course. Do you need anything else?”

  “I don’t suppose you have laudanum? I gave him whiskey, but he’s still in pain.”

  On cue, Franklin let out a groan.

  “I’m afraid not. If we did, it would be shipped to Virginia for our boys on the front line.”

  The woman looked familiar to Josephine from her visit to the hospital a couple of weeks earlier, but it was dark in the hall, and with Josephine’s accent disguised, she hoped she wouldn’t be recognized.

  The woman looked like she was going to say something else, so Josephine spoke first to put off any potentially difficult questions. “They don’t have a quarantine room for smallpox?”

  The woman glanced toward the patient in the corner. “It’s not smallpox. It’s something . . . more delicate.” She reached into the pocket of her apron and pulled out a little vial. “A night with Venus, a lifetime with Mercury.”

  Ah. The man was suffering from syphilis, the treatment of which was mercury salts. One more soldier who had succumbed to the fleeting pleasures offered by the bordellos of the Irish Channel. Better the smallpox. If it didn’t kill you, it left you scarred, but you’d never suffer it twice. Syphilis was a lifelong companion.

  “Well, thank you,” Josephine said. “Please don’t trouble yourself with us. The captain only needs some rest and a visit from the doc.”

  As soon as the nurse left, the third patient in the room got out of his bed and hobbled over using a pair of crutches. He had a bandaged leg, but there was nothing wrong with his tongue. He wanted to know what unit the captain served with. Josephine stammered something about the Eleventh Louisiana Rifles, to which Franklin shook his head and muttered something incomprehensible. It seemed really important for the second man, a fellow captain, to figure out, and he kept at it for several rounds before he gave up.

  Josephine took it only as excessive inquisitiveness, because the man then went on to proudly explain how he was the head of the Wilson Rangers, a group of “gentlemen who would defend the honor of the city against Yankee scoundrels.”

  She almost laughed. She’d written a story about the rangers, who called themselves the Blackleg Cavalry—former river gamblers and other sorts who’d gained large sums of money through sharp practice. Her article in the Crescent had been glowing, speaking of their fine spirit, the handsome figures they cut in the saddle. Her private report for Northern eyes had painted a different picture. She told how they spent more time lounging in the shade reading and swilling beer from jugs than they did drilling. How they seemed to be in it for the adventure and the opportunity to romance grateful Southern girls. If trouble came, the company would melt away like sugar snipped into hot coffee.

  “Finally,” Franklin muttered when the man had returned to his bed. “I thought I’d need to knock him over the head.”

  An hour passed before the syphilis patient turned down his oil lamp, followed by the other reader. The Blackleg fellow turned his light down last, and then the nurse made a final pass through the ward, her footsteps quiet as she walked up and down the mostly empty aisle between the beds. When she was gone, they were plunged into darkness, with only a tiny bit of moonlight filtering through a high window to form a luminous square on the middle of the plank floor. And still Josephine and Franklin remained quiet.

  It must have been nigh on midnight before Franklin sat up on his cot and grabbed for his boots. He stripped away the bandages and stuffed them into his pockets. Josephine waited until his dark shadow rose in front of her; then she grabbed the carpetbag and led him quietly toward the far door.

  Josephine’s heart was pounding as she held the back door cracked for Franklin to slip outside. It was a dark night, the barest sliver of moon in the sky. They waited in the shadows of the hospital building, looking across the yard.

  The two-story brick arsenal sat next to the cartridge factory and its now-quiet smokestack but otherwise was apart from any other buildings in the hospital compound. Even the stables lay some seventy or eighty yards east of the arsenal. This was good. Somehow she’d misremembered the arsenal on the other side, nearer the stables, and worried about the need to throw open the stable doors before the attack. A good horse was also valuable war material, but she didn’t have it in her to burn all those animals alive, never mind the strategic expediency. Fortunately, she now saw that the stables were on the far side of the cartridge factory, which would shield the horses from the blast.

  Frogs croaked and trilled from the marshy fields beyond the fence, joining their chorus to the hum, buzz, and chirp of insects. After about ten minutes, a solitary figure trudged through the yard, a musket over one shoulder, and a lamp held in his free hand, swarming with moths. The watchman gave a casual inspection to the shadowy places near the arsenal before disappearing around the corner of the building.

  Franklin looked up and down the yard. “Now!” he whispered.

  They ran across the open space until they reached the safety of the other building. Franklin fished out a set of keys that clinked noisily. He spent precious moments testing one key after another in the lock.

  While he did this, Josephine prepared the rest of the material. First, she checked the fuses to make sure that they were still held together and hadn’t been knocked apart. The fuses were of Confederate design, and likely unreliable, but the general idea was simple. A tapered cylinder of paper was filled with mealed powder soaked in whiskey and marked in tenths of inches. The fuse would be cut to length and stuffed into a shell, enabling it to detonate after five, seven, or ten seconds. In this case, they’d gummed three fuses together, which, after testing on other fuses, seemed to give about twenty-five to thirty seconds. In case of failure, there was a second set of fuses so they could return and try again. Half a minute wasn’t much time to run away, and neither of them could guess at the size of the explosion.

  When Josephine was satisfied with the fuses, she verified that the white phosphorus matches were dry, and then wadded up bits of cotton and stuffed them in her ears. She balled two more pieces for Franklin.

  It took him several
attempts to find the right key, but at last the latch clicked and the door creaked open. He put away the keys, and twisted the cotton and stuffed it into his ears.

  “Should I wait here with the spare fuses, or go in with you?” she asked, her voice sounding muffled through the cotton stopping up her ears.

  He took the fuses and the matches. “Go back to the ward and wait. I’ll come running and we can join the general evacuation.”

  “I’ll stay here. You might need help.”

  “I won’t need help, and I worry if you go running around in the dark you’ll trip over your skirts.”

  “Don’t worry about me. I won’t trip.”

  “Once I get inside I have to light some of these matches just to see where I’m going. If there’s loose powder in the air . . . boom.”

  “I’ve got good night eyes. I’ll help.”

  “No time to argue. Go.”

  He slipped inside and pulled the door shut behind him. She thought about following anyway but swallowed her pride and hurried back across the yard instead. Once there, however, she couldn’t bring herself to go inside and wait by his empty hospital bed. Any of a dozen things might go wrong, and there was no way she’d be waiting helplessly inside if that happened.

  Long seconds passed. Her heart was pounding in her temples, and it felt like a swarm of crickets had been turned loose in her belly. She stared at a spot in the black wall opposite her where she supposed the door must be, willing it to open. It had been too long. Something had gone wrong. The guard would be returning shortly. She set down the carpetbag and descended the porch, ready to cross over and go inside.

  The door swung open on the factory. A figure came running across the flat, muddy ground. There wasn’t enough moonlight to pick out his features, but his wildly churning legs and flailing arms bespoke panic. He seemed to spot her, and waved wildly.

  “Go! Get inside. Too close!”

  There was a low thump, like an artillery shell burying itself in the ground and detonating, together with a flash of light in the windows of the factory. Josephine threw herself to the ground.