Four
Darkness pressed on all sides. Slade said nothing, made no move, but the familiar dread settled into his stomach. The one that said this kind of darkness hid monsters. Not the fanged, hairy kind boys created in their stories, but the ones of true terror—men with hidden hatred.
“Halt.” The voice snaked through the black.
Given the feel of cold steel against his face, Slade happily obliged.
“Those who would pass here must face fire and steel.”
His guide shifted beside him, someone Hughes had introduced as Surratt before he disappeared. “We are willing to face both—for liberty,” the man said.
Liberty, was it? Slade made no move.
The blade lifted. “It shall be ours. Pass!”
A gloved hand gripped his and pulled Slade farther and farther until he wondered if they knew his true identity and were going to take him into a dank basement and leave him there to die like a victim of an Edgar Allan Poe story.
A question that only grew stronger when another set of hands collided with his chest. Someone jerked off his coat, and his wrists were wrenched behind him. Cloth, soft but thick, came over his eyes.
Then a rip, and the sudden influx of wintry air against his chest. Slade clenched his jaw against any reaction as they tore his waistcoat and shirt. If this were to be his last moment, then he would face it with dignity.
He was shoved onward.
Doors opened and closed, but he could detect no light, no warmth. Nothing but the icy darkness and the smell of…earth? A basement lair, then. They must be under Mrs. Hughes’s house. Knowledge that would do little good if that steel bit him.
His guide halted him. A rap upon wood, and then a returning one from the other side.
“Who comes here?”
The man beside him cleared his throat. “One who is true to our cause.”
“How is he known to be true?”
Under the blindfold, Slade squeezed his eyes shut. How indeed.
“By the recommendation of a tried Knight.”
“He can then be trusted?”
His muscles wanted to tense, wanted to coil. But he held himself perfectly still. No tells.
“Such is our belief.”
“Should he fail and betray us, he will learn the penalty soon enough. Advance.”
The door creaked on its hinges, a sound eerie enough to fit into this untold story of Poe. A few steps, and the blade touched him again, bringing him to a quick stop.
“Those who would pass here must face both fire and steel.” A new voice, and he sensed movement from beyond its owner.
“Are you willing to do so?” Hughes now, his voice pitched low.
Slade’s shoulders bunched—a normal reaction, surely. For this must be their usual induction into the circle, and this his last chance to change his mind. If only he had such a luxury. If only his brother hadn’t forced him here, with this one chance to make right all the wrongs committed in his name.
“I am willing.” Father God, help me.
“Advance.”
The blade retreated again, the hands pushed him forward, and Hughes ordered him to kneel. His knees met the icy earth. His right hand was loosed, lifted, and settled on the pages of an open book.
His fingers flexed. Thin paper, smooth and even. A Bible? Despite the freezing air that made his muscles quake, he felt a warmth within. Even here, He was there.
“You must remember every word you have uttered and will yet utter here tonight. And you must forever bar your lips against repeating them to any but a fellow Knight. If you betray us, the penalty is—”
“Death!” It came as a chant from all directions, resonant as a thundering cannon. “Death! Death! Death!”
“You will disclose no names, or you will taste—”
“Death!”
“You will always aid a brother Knight, even unto—”
“Death!”
“You will abide by all orders, carry out all objects, bear witness, and even swear falsely in order to save a brother’s life or liberty.”
Slade forced a swallow. A brother’s life or liberty. Admirable…if only those bonds meant anything. If only he had a brother, a true one, left in this life.
“The business of this new body will be preeminent before all. Before religion. Before political feeling. Before familial duty. It must be first and foremost in everything, at daylight or midnight, at home or abroad, before the law of the land or the affection of wife, mother, or child. It must be all and everything.”
All and everything—he had One of those already.
“Are you willing to abide by this obligation?”
He had nothing left to lose. “I am.”
“Brother Knights! Recall to the mind of him who now kneels here the penalty of betrayal, either by sign, word, or deed!”
Countless blades sang from their sheathes and clanged one to another. Countless voices murmured, groaned, or whispered, “Death! Death! Death!”
Chilling as the pronouncement was, worse was the silence that followed. It seemed Slade could hear his own pulse in his ears, his blood rushing to the point where the blade still rested, threatening.
“Death.” Hughes’s voice rang in a final blow. “Show him all.”
The blindfold was removed, and Slade blinked against the sudden light. Lanterns were placed at intervals along the wood planked walls. They shone on a dozen swords—all of them pointed directly at his chest, a breath away from touching. His gaze followed the blades up to the men holding them, dressed in chain mail and armor, feather-crested helmets obscuring their faces.
A glance to his side proved that the book on which he had sworn was indeed the Bible. Comforting, and yet the irony of it pierced where the swords stopped short. How could these men put their hand upon the Good Book and swear to uphold their brotherhood above its statutes?
“Rise.”
He rose, once the swords all returned to their sheaths, and accepted the shirt someone handed him, and then his frock coat. His gaze fixed upon the central Knight as he lifted his visor.
Hughes. He nodded and made a motion to the men who had led Slade in.
Surratt stepped forward and indicated a door to the left. “Through here for the meeting. It’ll start as soon as the officers take off their armor.”
Slade finished buttoning the shirt. Hopefully they hadn’t ruined his waistcoat—Ross had only commissioned him that one for evening wear. The warmth of the frock coat was as welcome as sunshine. He followed Surratt through the door and then into a chamber with dozens of men jammed within and papers tacked to the walls. A defaced poster of Lincoln drew his eye.
“Here.” Surratt held out a mug.
He had no idea what was in it, but it steamed, so he took it. “Thanks.” He sipped—coffee—and noted the men milling about.
That dread in his stomach churned. Too many were familiar. Cabinet members. Congressmen. Judges. Actors and editors and…
“Osborne, isn’t it?” Surratt drank from his own mug, his gaze darting about the room before landing on Slade again. “We were all surprised to hear Hughes was bringing someone in. He hasn’t nominated anyone since the start of the war. Something about too much rabble who are not dedicated to the Cause.”
Slade merely took another drink.
Surratt—a shrewd-looking fellow, with a beard only upon his chin that gave him a rather pointed face—shifted from one foot to the other. “He must know you very well.”
Another man sidled toward them with a grin. He looked familiar…an actor, wasn’t he? Name started with a B. Or was it a P?
“Ah, Booth.” Surratt greeted him with a smile just warm enough to speak of friendship and just small enough to speak of one too familiar to need formality. “Come to meet our newest brother?”
Booth, right. John something-or-another Booth. He held out a hand, spurring Slade to switch his mug to his left hand and hold out his right.
The actor pumped it. “Is it true? You we
re a member of Pinkerton’s security for King Abraham?”
Surratt froze with his mug halfway to his lips.
Slade reclaimed his fingers. They wouldn’t say such things if they actually knew the man. If they saw his daily struggles, the way he sorrowed at the divide in the nation he loved.
But they saw only their own side. A side he must convince them was now his. “I was.”
“Then you know his routine. You know the weak spots in his security. You know—”
“I know what they were three months ago, before I left.” Slade took another drink and another glance around the room. According to the information Pinkerton had put together, most of the men were already suspected Southern sympathizers. But a few had fooled them.
Surratt and Booth exchanged a glance, dark hope in both sets of eyes. “Well,” Surratt said, “I suppose it’s no wonder, then, that Hughes recommended you. What convinced you to join us?”
He knew what he had to say. Still, the words tasted like bile.
Ross’s words. Ross’s sympathies. Ross’s betrayal.
“When one is that close to the tyrant for that long, it’s hard to ignore his failings.” Sorry, Mr. President.
Surratt smiled. “Well, we welcome you eagerly to the ranks. Are you staying here in Baltimore or going back to Washington? My mother runs a boardinghouse there if you are in need of new rooms.”
He certainly hadn’t gone back to his old ones, not since that night. “Hughes invited me to be his guest for a while.”
Another look between the two. Serious and sober, but then Booth grinned. “Lucky you. You will get to spend time in the company of his lady, then. Have you seen her?”
Surratt sent his gaze to the ceiling. “Forgive him. He has a weakness for anything in a skirt.”
“And you a prejudice against them.”
“Because,” Surratt said in an even tone, “they are faithless, fickle, and false.”
Booth shook his head, exaggerated disappointment upon his countenance. “You are too determined to remain unattached, John. How you can be unmoved when a pretty girl bats her lashes at you I will never understand.”
“You would do well to try, as often as they have led you into trouble. And as for Hughes’s molly…” he turned back to Slade and used his mug to point at him. “Steer clear. He has killed men before over her.”
Booth grunted. “Too true.”
Slade gazed first at one John and then at the other. “How long have they had an understanding?”
Surratt snorted. “Since the day Lucien died, he has made it quite clear she was his. Makes one wonder if she had been all along, and the poor sap of a brother just didn’t know it.”
Lucien Hughes, from what Slade had gleaned, had been no sap. “I’ve heard about the late Mr. Hughes.”
“He was a strong leader, a good captain. We were all sorry when he fell to the streets.” Booth edged a bit closer. “But Devereaux has a sharper approach that we need now. We have had too many failures.”
“Just don’t anger him,” Surratt said. “A quicker man to issue a challenge I have never met, nor a better shot.”
Slade took another sip of coffee. “Why does anyone accept his challenges then? Or choose pistols?”
“He knows how to put a man’s pride against the wall.” Surratt leaned against the planking behind him. “And he’s as proficient with a blade as a gun. At this point, everyone knows it and does their best to remain on his good side. Which means, to circle back to the point, avoid anything more than polite flirtation with the widowed-and-soon-to-be-anew Mrs. Hughes.”
Advice Slade certainly didn’t require. Marietta Hughes may be beautiful and charming—and perhaps mysterious—but Hughes had no more than to crook a finger to bring her flying to him.
Did she know what he was? Part of him wanted to think not, given the Unionist family from which she hailed, the brother she had lost at Gettysburg. But how could she not, if she were as close to him as she seemed?
And how dangerous did that make her, if she did? The daughter of a commodore in league with the captain of a KGC castle. One alluring enough that she could no doubt smile at many a man and get whatever information from him Hughes wanted.
A cunning enemy indeed. He took another drink of his coffee and held his tongue. But the rust-red gash across the printed face of Lincoln said plenty.
These were men out for blood. And very little stood between them and it.
Marietta eased the door closed, silent but for the faintest of clicks. Behind her, the soft glow of the banked fire lit her chamber, its warmth scarcely making a dent in the January chill.
But that was nothing. Nothing compared to the chill in her core.
Her hand still touching the place where door and jamb met, she rested her forehead against the solid wood. Tears burned.
She shouldn’t have gone. Shouldn’t have crept from her room after she dismissed Cora for the night, shouldn’t have snuck out the back door and over to the carriage house. She shouldn’t have returned to that tunnel of nightmares and shattered dreams.
Shouldn’t have pressed her ear to the wall nor followed the sounds farther down than they had gone earlier.
She shouldn’t have listened. Because now the words would never leave her. They would forever echo in her mind, another memory to chain her down. To rattle around and rise to the fore when she least wanted it.
…preeminent before all…before the affection of wife, mother, or child.
Her tears felt scalding upon her cheek. Before all. Her hand slid down, and she let it dangle there between her and the door, with nothing but frigid air to hold it. No warm fingers around it, no lips upon its knuckles. No love.
If Dev could issue that oath, he had sworn it himself. As had Lucien. The two men who had claimed to cherish her above all. Both had turned around and sworn to put these brothers above her. Was she anything to them? Was it love they felt or, as Stephen had insisted when she announced her engagement, something baser?
Maybe it was. Maybe that was all any man could ever feel for her. Maybe she was nothing but a fool to ever think she could find something real, some genuine affection to carry her through life.
A fool. A wicked, selfish fool who had done nothing but chase her own desires, and who had nothing to show for it but a stone heart crushed to pieces.
She ought to have learned her lesson the first time, when she stood in the summer-warm stable and saw her dreams stomped to dust. She ought to have turned around right then and sworn off men.
Or the second time, when that bolt of attraction to Dev proved false her feelings for Lucien. She should have canceled the wedding and…and joined a nunnery. Or at the very least, taken the train to Connecticut and let Grandpapa Alain hold her tight to his chest and whisper French assurances into her ear.
And now here she was again. Her memory etched with the proof that nothing was what she thought it.
She turned, put her back to the door, and slid down. Maybe if she were lucky, her bones would turn into nothing but a mound of dust on the floor, to be swept away.
The hand of the Lord was upon me, and carried me out in the spirit of the Lord, and set me down in the midst of the valley which was full of bones…
The floor was like ice against her legs. Perhaps that was what Hades really was, ice rather than fire. For she had tasted fire, had let it consume her—and this was worse. This was the punishment. Not an inferno of feeling, but a total lack of it.
And caused me to pass by them round about: and, behold, there were very many in the open valley; and, lo, they were very dry.
The time had come to learn. That was what Stephen had said to her when he confessed he had enlisted. “You can list every mistake you ever made, Mari, but at some point you have to learn from them. You have to recognize them for what they are. You have to take consequences into account.”
Her own voice echoed back through her head, tinged with anger—anger at him for saying the words, and more, for leaving he
r alone to hear them again and again. “You can’t understand, Stephen. You speak of consequences as if the future matters, but if you had these bells of memory forever clanging in your head, you would understand why I only want now.”
“If you gave more thought to the future, maybe the past wouldn’t hurt so much.” Oh, how those words echoed. He had spoken them with such disappointment. As if he had known she would never listen. As if he mourned for her long before she had mourned for him.
And he said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live?
A shiver coursed through her and stole any energy she had left. Her eyes focused on the red-orange glow of coals, she drew in a quavering breath. The tears had already given up. She was empty inside. Dry. Dust. Bone.
Her eyes slid shut. “ ‘And I answered, O Lord God, thou knowest.’ ”
Five
Walker tossed fresh hay into the stall and smiled at the nicker of the horse. “You’re welcome, Bay. Now, you need anything else before I go get my Elsie?”
The mare whinnied and bumped his arm with her nose, eliciting a chuckle. He obliged her with a rub. If only the other females in his life were so easy to please. He checked her feed and water, glanced down the line of other horses, and then stepped away.
And frowned. The mound of hay in the last stall wasn’t as he had left it yesterday morning after showing Mr. Lane and Marietta the tunnel. He had arranged it very deliberately so he would know if it were disturbed.
It was disturbed.
“Blast it, Yetta.” He planted his hands on his hips and scowled. She must have come out here after she dismissed Cora. Hadn’t he found it strange that his wife had come so early to their apartment?
He should have known she would come back alone. That she would ignore the risk and focus only on what she wanted, what she needed. In this case, proof. Shaken as she had been when they explained the situation, he had seen in her eyes that she wanted desperately to believe they were wrong.
Well, if she had timed it right, she would have heard an earful. Maybe that was what she needed to rouse her from her stupor, proof that her precious Dev wasn’t the kind of Knight she wanted him to be. Proof that she had let a brood of snakes, of Copperheads no less, into her family.
Circle of Spies Page 5