The Secrets of Mary Bowser

by Lois Leveen

  Through the long, labor-filled afternoon that followed, the only way I could distract myself from a nagging tinnitus was by damning Varina Davis and her umbrella. Damning McNiven for expecting me to put up with her. And damning what intelligence I had gathered about the CSS Virginia, for making me feel it was my duty to come back to the Gray House the next day and the next, even if I were beaten for the privilege.

  Wilson was sweeping the stoop of the shop as I came up Broad Street. Or pretending to, moving the broom back and forth as he squinted to make out my arrival, his face ashen with worry.

  He shepherded me through the side gate and inside our door. “You heard?”

  “Haven’t heard a thing but ringing.” I slid off my head wrap, exposing my contusion.

  “How did that happen?”

  “Same way most things happen to slaves. Hot white anger, looking for a place to land.”

  I worried over what he would say, seeing my body bruised by Queen Varina. But he curled into me and kissed my ear, the nearness of him soothing the ache. “I suppose you’re safer than if you’d been on Church Hill.”

  I pulled back and peered into his eyes. “What do you mean?”

  “They’ve been arresting Unionists, all last night and this morning. Richmond is under martial law.”

  Something pulled tight in my chest. “What about Bet?”

  “I don’t know. A man came into the shop just after dinner, boasting to the other customers about all he’d done. Captain Godwin, he called himself, bragging on how they renamed McDaniel’s negro jail Castle Godwin on account of all the white Unionists he locked up there.” Wilson rattled off what names he could remember of those who’d been arrested.

  I recognized some of them, John Botts, Franklin Stearns, Burnham Wardwell. Men I’d waited on at Bet’s table way back during my childhood. “If they have her …” I couldn’t bring myself to finish.

  Bet had been a part of my life as long as I could remember. Not exactly family, not quite friend. Still, there was a bond between us unlike any I had with anyone else.

  Outside our parlor window, the last rays of sunlight were disappearing from the sky. With curfew on, there’d be no news of Bet’s whereabouts unless we had a white person to seek her out, and there was only one to ask. Provided he wasn’t locked up in Castle Godwin.

  “Where’s McNiven?”

  Wilson shrugged. “I wager no one’s thought to arrest him. He hasn’t given anyone reason to think he’s a Unionist.”

  “And given them plenty of reason to think otherwise.”

  “Still, there isn’t any suspicion raised on him, or you.” Seeing there was yet more worrying me, he added, “Probably not on Bet, either.”

  I nodded. But I sat hunched with apprehension while Wilson cooked supper. Wrong as it was to be wasteful with food grown so dear, still I no more than picked over my meager portion before setting all my intelligence about the Virginia down in Bet’s code. Staring at the strange pattern of letters and numbers was like seeing how tangled up everything of mine was with her, as though we were Mr. Barnum’s twins of Siam. My intelligence, her cipher, my hand. One twin of Siam couldn’t dance or ride or even rest without the other doing the same. Without sure word of Bet’s whereabouts, I couldn’t drift to sleep, no matter how late it grew.

  A knock sounded on our door near two o’clock in the morning. We found McNiven on the step, his breath warm with alcohol. “Where have you been?” I asked once we got him upstairs to our parlor.

  “I passed some hours over to the faro parlor favored by the guests o’ the Spotswood Hotel. Partwise to see what I might hear there, but mostwise waiting for the streets to empty enough that I could come here without any taking notice.” Gambling houses, drinking houses, even houses of ill repute had sprung up all over Richmond, filling the streets with rowdies long after decent people had gone to bed. McNiven’s tippling among them provided him with more details than we’d yet had. “Two spies are among those what are arrested.”

  Spies. The word seemed sharp and waspish as he said it. “Who are they?” I asked.

  “Strangers to us. There is a fellow in Washington, Pinkerton. Worked on our Railroad back when in Chicago, and now runs some operations for the Union. From what I gather, these fowk be his.”

  Wilson looked to the hyssop leaf compress he’d bound to my ear. “What does it mean for Mary?”

  “These men hae naught to say on us, even if they wish to tell to save their own necks.” That was all the reassurance McNiven offered. If he marked my injury, he didn’t bother to mention it. “What have you learned over to the Gray House?”

  Passing him the cipher message, I related the information it contained. But he didn’t show even a hint of surprise about the CSS Virginia.

  “We heard such a thing was being builded, from a slave what escaped from the engineer some months ago. The Union has been trying to make a like ship for herself.”

  Wilson frowned. “If this Pinkerton has agents here in Richmond, and the Union already knows about this ship, what need is there for Mary to put herself in danger?”

  “What Mary tells here,” McNiven patted the pocket where he’d tucked my message, “is o’ great use. They hae been building on this Virginia for many, many months. If she be ready for battle, the Union’s Monitor maun be sent straight away to meet her. A day or more delay and the Union would lose ships and men and the hard won surety o’ the blockade.”

  He reached for his wallet, peeling off a half dozen Confederate notes and holding them out to me. I marked how the silver buttons on his frock coat shone like beady rodent eyes as I told him I didn’t want his money. “I’m no mercenary. Whatever I do in the Gray House, it’s only to end slavery.”

  McNiven kept his outstretched hand steady. “Still and all, the payment be yours, what Varina Davis give for the first month’s hire. ’Twill help keep you and Bowser both.”

  Much as I didn’t care to take the bills, I knew he was right. Already Wilson and I passed evenings hungry, food prices had gone so high. Even the sum McNiven insisted was mine would have to be stretched and strung, to last any time at all at the market stalls.

  As I folded the Confederate notes, McNiven consulted his gold pocket watch. “I ride to the Rappahannock in a half hour’s time. Dibrell’s tobacco company has hired me to go to Baltimore and see what product I may arrange for selling. I can pass your news while I am there.”

  “What about Bet?” I asked.

  “There is no talk of any women what are taken in. Any more assurance than that, you’ll need to find for yourself.”

  I had to be in the Gray House all day and was kept penned in by the curfew all night. McNiven knew that, but it was Wilson who spoke to it. “Tomorrow when I close the shop for dinner, I can head over to Church Hill, check on Bet. I’ll stop in on Lewis, too.”

  I knew he put that part about Papa in just to convince me. And much as I always tried to keep Bet and Wilson apart, still I was relieved that he offered to go to her.

  “No need to fret over Bet. That woman is crazy,” Wilson reported when I returned from the Gray House the next day.

  “So much for you feeling more kindly toward her.”

  “I mean no hostility. But she is acting crazy. Be the first to tell you so herself.”

  He explained how he’d come upon her wandering along Grace Street, done up in a calico bonnet, a cotton dress, and buckskin leggings, as though she’d just meandered down from the hill country. Muttering to herself in a little sing-song, scratchy and high.

  “She was doing such a fine job with her play-acting, I might have fallen for it myself. Only, when she looked straight at me, the wildness in her eyes cleared away. Just for a moment she seemed sharp and certain, and then she mumbled in her crazy way”—he raised his voice and intoned in a fine impression of Bet—“Mary had a little lamb, and the lamb were the peacemaker. But we are at war so the lamb is gone. Who’s gonna bring Mary’s lamb back here?” He chuckled and lay off imitating her
. “Then she shrieked a little laugh that scared off some neighborhood children who’d come out to stare at her.”

  I couldn’t make sense of what he said. “Why is she carrying on so?”

  “First lesson of the Railroad. The best way to sneak about is to hide in plain sight. Looks like Bet’s lit on a way to do that.” Just like McNiven, playing the part of the cruel and cunning Confederate slave-trader. And me, the simple-witted slave.

  I shook off the thought by inquiring after the aroma that was coming from our kitchen. “Where’d you get a chicken to roast?”

  “Bet gave it to me, one of the scraggly hens pecking all over that yard of hers.”

  She must have been crazy after all, offering charity to a free negro as proud as Wilson. “Did she just happen to slip a chicken out from under her calico bonnet?”

  He smiled. “No, ma’am, I suppose not even she would make that much of a spectacle of herself. Once she scared those children off, I followed her into the carriage house at the back of her family’s lot. She showed me a little compartment she fitted out under the seat of her gig, where I’ll store your messages.”

  “You?”

  “Fastest way to get what you learn in the Gray House to the Federals is for me to ride your message out to her farm first thing in the morning, while Bet fusses with her prisoners.”

  “But what about the shop, all your customers?” What about your wife, fretting over you?

  “I can open the shop a little later, no one will be the wiser.” He dropped his voice so low, I barely heard what he said next. “The money from McNiven is more than I make anyway. Negro labor is worth more enslaved than free.”

  I felt his ache of crushed pride myself. The sum Queen Varina paid for my hire was far more than I’d earned as a schoolteacher. But I was troubled by more than just pecuniary resentment as I recalled the bully of a picket at the junction of Osborne Turnpike and New Market Road. And I told my husband so.

  “Riding out those messages is no riskier than moving baggage, and I did that long enough.” He’d been restless ever since Virginia’s secession disrupted his Railroad runs. “Who knows but once the sentries see me regular, I might even be able to slip some baggage past without them noticing.”

  I set my safety in jeopardy by working in the Gray House. I knew I hadn’t any right to tell him not to risk his own by carrying my messages, maybe even transporting fugitives along with them.

  Uneasy though I was, I nodded in agreement when he suggested it was best I didn’t tell him what was in the ciphered messages—and he didn’t tell me if he moved any baggage down the James. The better part of intelligence is pretending ignorance. I proved that in the Gray House just as surely as Mama had shown it to me in the days of we in the house. But that wasn’t much comfort to a woman who was a loving wife as well as a Union spy.

  Eighteen

  Any house slave can tell you there’s more to a neat parlor or a laid table than meets the eye. Whatever master, mistress, and their guests take in doesn’t begin to account for all the labor that’s been put out. I’d known as much my whole life, known before I was ever old enough to think on it. But I also knew it was more than just hard labor that escaped the notice of the slaveholder. Every now and again in my childhood, rumors circulated about some slave cook who spitefully snuck emetic, purgative, or worse into her owners’ meals. Maybe it wasn’t many who ever did so, but still we knew they could. Poisoning was an enslaved cook’s prerogative, even if it was seldom exercised. Every house of bondage was webbed with such prerogatives. Serving in the Gray House, I tugged and tightened each possible strand, meaning to unravel slavery’s hold once and for all.

  From the start, Hortense made her prerogative clear. She learned my assigned name quick enough once she was sure it would serve her, calling out “Molly” faster than I could remember to respond. “Too slow to know who you is, or what,” she’d say, if I didn’t snap to servile attention the moment she summoned. But I saw from how she treated Sophronia that slow-witted suited Hortense just fine, so long as being slow-witted kept other slaves subservient to her. Hortense reigned tyrannical in her role as housekeeper, and she hated anything—and anyone—who challenged it.

  Neither the ladies’ maid Betsy nor the nursemaid Catherine were subject to her authority, and, just as Sophronia said, Hortense hated them both. She never even uttered Catherine’s name, calling her “Lazy Irish” as surely as she called me Molly. Lazy Irish slept in the second-floor nursery, but that didn’t rile Hortense nearly so much as the exceptional arrangements made for Betsy. Though she was dark as Dahomey, Betsy had her own small cell of a room on the third floor, right across the hall from where Jeff Davis’s secretary, Burton Harrison, slept and adjacent to the guest chambers kept for whichever of Queen Varina’s pride-rich but cash-poor relations happened to visit. Betsy might be up half the night most days, tending Queen Varina through whatever nervous illness she conjured for herself, but still it galled Hortense that when Betsy finally laid her head down, it was in her own quarter on the very top story of the house, while Hortense, Sophronia, and the rest of the living-in slaves were all crowded together in the cellar. Hortense refused to set foot on the stairs leading to the third floor, and she declared within my first week it would thereafter be my duty to scour and sweep, wipe and wax the entire story, and most of the one below it as well. I didn’t flinch or fuss over such decrees, glad as I was that Hortense’s prerogative gave me leave to exercise my own.

  All those months in the prisons, I’d meticulously recorded what Timothy Smith and the other prisoners sent out, embellished whenever possible with things I observed myself. But seeing and telling weren’t the half of spying, no more than poking the parlor fire or refilling the guest’s wineglass is all there is to house service. Just as a slave cook might slip something into the white family’s fare or a housekeeper might wage a war of resentment over the rest of the servants, even the supposedly simple serving gal could manage her own prerogatival campaign. This was the truth I relished and relied on. It rendered even the most loathsome tasks bearable. And before too long, it let me see new ways I might set the slaves freedom bound.

  Some of my best days in the Gray House were when the portly, bearded Judah Benjamin called on Queen Varina. “Secretary Benjamin” was how she always addressed him, fawning over his every word. Even if she’d spent the whole morning in bed with a sick-headache, she perked up as soon as he arrived, fluttering down to receive him. He complained constantly about how hard he worked to serve the Confederacy, and she always responded with a tant pis, thinking herself quite cosmopolitan for uttering her sympathies to a Louisianan en français. I imagined the fit Miss Douglass and Miss Mapps would have if they heard her Mississippi accent mutilating those delicate French syllables, tant pis coming out more like tante piss.

  Aunt Piss was secretary of war when I started at the Gray House, though from his visits with Queen Varina, I could see he meant to be more than that. The two of them would sit in the library, she arrayed on the meridienne like a roast goose served up with trimmings, he rocking furiously away in the president’s favorite chair, plotting to advance his own career.

  Queen Varina adored being confidante to a cabinet member, and she shone with self-importance whenever she promised to intercede on his behalf with the president. Despite her grumblings that the president’s wife must guard the meager resources bought with the president’s paltry salary, she lavished indulgence on Aunt Piss.

  I was grateful for the way he gobbled down Jeff Davis’s pecans, drank Jeff Davis’s whiskey, and puffed Jeff Davis’s cigars. All that gluttony meant someone was needed to clear away pecan shells, refill the whiskey glass, and clean up cigar ash. Hortense wouldn’t do anything she could order Sophronia or me to, and Sophronia cowed so around whites she was glad to be scrubbing Queen Varina’s boudoir while the serving fell to the new maid. So I came to pass an hour or more most afternoons listening to whatever news Aunt Piss shared with Queen Varina.

 
; On the ninth March he told how the CSS Virginia had attacked the USS Cumberland, the USS Roanoke, and the USS Minnesota the day before. He boasted of it as though he had personally captained the lethal ironclad. But on the tenth March he neglected to report that the USS Monitor had arrived from New York and engaged the Virginia to a draw. I’d nearly let out a peacock’s caw of joy when I saw the telegraphed report on Jeff Davis’s desk, knowing the part my very first Gray House report had in the Union victory. But it didn’t surprise me not to hear a whiff about it down in the library. Though Aunt Piss moaned over how his rivals criticized his work as secretary of war, he never acknowledged a hint of his own failings.

  “Such censure I face, my dear Mrs. Davis, when all I do is for the good of our Confederacy. My enemies, like those of our president, show no shame.” He waited just long enough for Queen Varina to murmur tant pis before continuing. “After all, with a president who is as fine a general as your husband, what is there left for a secretary of war to do?”

  Queen Varina wallowed in his flattery. “We all know Mr. Davis would be proud to lead his men to battle, but the president must serve in the capacity that has been thrust upon him,” she answered, conveniently overlooking how she preferred the First Lady’s life of hosting receptions to the worry that plagued generals’ wives.

  “The battles are important, but I do not believe that is where the war will be won, or lost. It is diplomacy we need.” Aunt Piss swirled his tumbler of whiskey before taking a sip. “Britain must be made to recognize the Confederacy.”

  “Britain needs us as much as we need her,” Queen Varina said. “Why, without Confederate cotton, what use are English mills?” It was the same argument she’d heard a cocksure South Carolinian make to her husband at dinner the day before.