Sophie met Captain Russell’s gaze. With Elizabeth, Mrs. Blair, and a handful of the church’s most prolific busybodies watching, her excuses dissolved. “Fine, thank you, if you’re sure it’s no trouble.”
“On the contrary, nothing would give me more pleasure.”
Sophie nodded, and noticed the ghost of a smile on Elizabeth’s thin lips. Even Mrs. Blair nodded slightly. Captain Russell guided her out of the churchyard, and stares fell away while women resumed their conversations.
As they descended from the church’s bluff down the hill, horses stepped to the ringing of church bells, and carriages rumbled down Church Hill’s considerable grade. Finials and lampposts pointed to clouds tufting the sky, like cotton ready to be spun. Negroes in threadbare Sunday finery dipped into the street, yielding the sidewalk to Sophie and Captain Russell until they passed.
Beside her, Captain Russell bridled his strides to match her pace. From the tightness in his face, she sensed that wasn’t all he held back. At length, he spoke. “I do wish there was something I could do.” A humid gust from the South brought the brackish smell of the James wafting over them.
“I cannot think why you’d feel an obligation. I’m a stranger.”
“A wrong that must be righted.” His eyes sparkled. “And you are a woman in need, and I am a gentleman, or so I’d like to think.”
A laugh broke from her lips. “There are needy women enough in Richmond, Captain, if that is what you seek.”
“Not exactly.” He laughed with her. “Tell me, what is it that you seek?”
“Pardon me?”
“You have a habit of looking everywhere but in my eyes. It’s as though you’re on picket duty.”
A nervous smile parted her lips as she snapped her attention back to him, until she could bear his penetrating gaze no longer. Whether he was teasing or in earnest, his eyes sent a charge down her spine. “Let’s turn here, shall we? My house isn’t far.”
They turned east onto Franklin at Twenty-fifth, where the road slanted uphill once more. Sunlight streamed through the linden trees and live oaks and landed in lacework on the ground. In just two more exhausting blocks, she’d be home.
“What are you looking for?” he prodded.
Something uncurled inside her. Resolution, perhaps, or—“Purpose. I’m looking for my purpose, my place in this miserable mess of a war.” In truth, she’d found it already.
Captain Russell frowned. “The woman’s place is in the home. There is purpose in that, Miss Kent, even—and especially, I would say—in times of war.”
“My home is a shell. An empty tomb, save for our slaves. Those walls hold nothing for me but memories now.”
“But do you knit? Sew? Spin or weave?”
“I can knit, but never learned to sew, spin, or weave. Daddy wouldn’t hear of it, that sort of work being ‘slave labor.’ I can embroider, but of what use is decoration now?”
“‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever.’ More important now than ever, to my thinking.”
She shook her head at his teasing tone. “I will not be useless anymore.”
“Is your purpose really so elusive?”
A wry smile tilting her lips, she fixed her gaze straight ahead. “I do believe I’m gaining on it.” At the bottom of the hill lay the James River and its surrounding factories, where sea gulls squawked, and the air smelled of canal water and tobacco dust. Where prisoners languished for want of human kindness.
“Libby? The prison where—” His gait hitched. Eyes flashed. “The prison where we met.”
“I was in the prison’s hospital room only,” she corrected.
Slowly, he released a long breath. “Of course, I understand your feminine impulse to help those in need.”
“Doing to others as you’d have them do unto you is a tenet of the Christian faith, and one that I desperately hope the women of the North feel as compelled to follow as I do.”
Comprehension lit his eyes. “For your father’s sake.” Dappled sunlight danced across his shoulders.
“Yes.” She had not meant for it to sound so much like a hiss. “For humanity’s sake.”
“And does your instinct to aid your fellow man extend to the patients in grey as well?”
“I want no man to suffer. But I go where the need is the greatest. Tell me, how many women do you suppose already tend the Rebel wounded? And how much help do you suppose the Union wounded receive here in the Confederate capital?”
Their footsteps marked time in the silence that dropped dully between them. It occurred to Sophie that as an officer in the Ordnance Bureau, Captain Russell oversaw the production of weapons that reduced so many soldiers into patients—or corpses—in the first place. Relief expanded in her chest as they neared Franklin Street. In mere moments, their sparring would end.
“That’s my home.” She nodded toward the corner, and hoped he would take his leave graciously.
His eyes narrowed. “Say, do you know that fellow?”
A man’s lanky shadow flitted from between the columns of her porch. In the same instant Sophie saw him, he was already gone, a mirage in broad daylight. She felt the color leech from her face as she shook her head, speechless.
“Halt!” Captain Russell barked, and took off after the man’s trail, dust rising from the dirt road in his wake. The gate to her property, left open by the intruder, creaked on its hinges as the captain barreled through it after him.
Sophie crossed the street and slipped through the gate, as well, then latched it firmly behind her before crossing the short distance to her porch. Stuck in the front door, flapping erratically in the wind, was a brown scrap of paper. With trembling hands, she caught it. The words scrawled inside stole her breath.
Her thoughts still tangling in the dreadful script, Sophie stuffed the note up her sleeve as Captain Russell bounded up the porch. She could barely hear his voice between the drumbeats of her heart.
No sign, she watched him say. Shall I tarry with you? The words curled off his lips and dangled in the space between them, waiting. Miss Kent? But her thoughts were absorbed by the note now branding the inside of her wrist. “Miss Kent?”
She shook her head to clear it, and ringlets swirled against her cheeks and neck, teasing her back to the present moment. The captain’s eyes probed hers as he leaned toward her, and she suddenly worried he would take her hand if she remained silent. “No, thank you,” burst from her. Slowing her speech to a more gracious drawl, she managed to dismiss him with assurances that she’d have Fischer keep a sharp lookout, and that Captain Russell may call on her again. He bowed and took his leave.
With barely a tremor, Sophie let herself into her house and locked the door. Her heels clicked on the hardwood floor of the entrance hall as she passed between the classical bronze statues depicting Venus and Mars. Each echoing footstep magnified the emptiness yawning around her. Drawn by warm voices and the smell of hot bean soup, Sophie swept out the rear door, all the way to the detached kitchen.
Rachel and Emiline, the head housekeeper’s daughters, sat on the stoop, shelling peas into their aprons. “Miss Sophie? You needin’ anything?”
She told them she didn’t, and stepped into the dark, stuffy kitchen. “Smells wonderful, Pearl,” she heard herself say, and strode directly to the stone fireplace. With the slightest flick of her wrist, she sent the stranger’s note into the fire licking at the pot. The edges blackened and crumbled, but the words stayed with her, like the eye’s long memory of flame.
Yankee lover, all alone
You’re still made of flesh and bone.
Daddy’s gone and Mommy’s dead,
Turn your aid to Rebs instead.
Beneath the rhyming lines was written: Big houses still burn. Watch yours!
Sophie was not under the authority of a husband, or a suitor, or her father. She would not be bullied by an unsigned note when she had done no wrong.
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Monday, September 28, 1863
<
br /> The staccato clicks of the telegraph echoing within the Philadelphia Inquirer building became the rattle of musket fire in Harrison Caldwell’s ears. Energy—far more than he needed—surged through his veins in response as he rapped his knuckles on the doorframe of Boris Trent’s office.
Boris jerked his head up. “Thought I got rid of you,” he grunted through his cigar.
Harrison stepped forward. “I’m not here for my old job.” Truly, he did not want to be a war correspondent any longer, not since Gettysburg. But he still wrote his own stories—and every once in a while, he even got paid for them. “I’ve got an exclusive for your paper.” Only because all the other papers in the city already said no.
With a puff on his cigar, Boris leaned back and crossed his ankles on his mahogany desk. His beady eyes skewered Harrison from behind his spectacles. “Don’t tell me you want to write about women and children again. That sort of article doesn’t get me readers, and you know it.”
Harrison clamped down on the frustration swelling in his chest. After the battle of Gettysburg, he’d written a story about the townspeople who had been caught in the crosshairs. Boris wouldn’t print it. Not nearly ghastly enough for his taste.
“No, nothing so decent as that, after all. There’s a story right under our noses, practically. Fort Delaware.”
“The prison camp? On the island in the river?”
“The very same.”
Boris folded his legs beneath the desk once more and leaned forward on his elbows, tapped ash into a walnut tray. “All right. Let’s hear it.”
“We complain of the South’s prisons for Yankee soldiers, but Fort Delaware holds twelve thousand Rebel prisoners when it should only hold four. The island is situated on the same level as the river, and at high tide it is submerged up to six feet. Twenty die each day of dysentery brought on by the poor conditions of the prison, and—”
“No,” Boris growled. “No one is going to pay good money to feel guilty about the prison camp in our own backyard.”
“Let me finish. There have also been escape attempts, if it’s excitement you’re after. The ones who failed have lots of stories to tell, not just about their daring but about what’s waiting for them at home. Human interest stories, you know? A glimpse into the Southern home front through the eyes of the loved ones risking life and limb to get back home to them.” Or perhaps, back to their regiments …
“Exactly whose flag are you flying, Caldwell?” Blue wisps puffed from his mouth, drying Harrison’s eyes, tickling his throat.
“This isn’t about patriotism. It’s about people.” Harrison needed to sell a story. True, this wasn’t the most compelling idea he’d ever had, but he had to try. He was hungry. Boris’s disapproval cloyed with his cigar smoke, upsetting Harrison’s empty stomach. Sweat prickled his scalp, though the weather was mild. Turning to hide his anger he crossed to the window and opened it. A gust of wind slammed the door, and his body, already tense, jolted.
“Still jumpy, I see.” Boris’s chuckle was vinegar on Harrison’s frayed nerves.
His knuckles whitened on the windowsill as he struggled to master himself. Six stories below, carriages clattered over cobblestones as business downtown went on as usual. Stockbrokers hustled to the Merchant Exchange and ladies to their shopping. Beyond the Greek edifice of the National Bank, the spire of Independence Hall stood sentinel over the city. Newsboys leaned on gaslights and called out their headlines, and for one fleeting moment, he saw his former self among them. Thirteen years old, fresh without a father, and only too happy to be shouting headlines to drown out the grief that constantly whispered his name.
“You would do well to listen, Caldwell. Those are the headlines that sell. You used to know that. Here.” The familiar rustle of newsprint turned Harrison’s head. “Today’s issue. Take it. Tell me what you see.”
Tossing his hat onto the desk, Harrison dropped into the chair opposite Boris. “Spencer Kellogg Brown was hanged last Friday at Camp Lee, outside Richmond.”
“Yes. Espionage, death, a martyr to the Union. Very good. Go on.”
“Three hundred Union prisoners were released.”
“Aha. Our own boys, with their own tales to tell of the horrors of Richmond’s prisons. Stokes the fire of public sentiment. What else?”
“A bread riot took place in Mobile, Alabama. This is the third bread riot we’ve heard of this year, isn’t it?” Both Atlanta and Richmond had their own in the spring.
“The third in six months’ time. What does that tell you about the Confederacy?” Boris drew the ghost of a circle in the air with his diminishing cigar. “Empty bellies. If the home front is hungry, so is the army, and hungry men can’t fight for long. These are front page stories, Caldwell, mark it well. Spies. Union soldiers in captivity. Desperation in Dixie.”
Harrison’s own stomach gnawed on itself. “I still think a story on our own Fort Delaware—”
Boris slammed his fist down on his desk again, and Harrison started. “Quit wasting my time! I will not print a self-righteous sermon of Northern atrocities against Rebel prisoners. Now leave. Some of us still have deadlines to meet.”
Harrison grabbed his hat and stalked out, smarting as though he’d just been taken to the woodshed. Before covering battles for two years had unhinged him, he had been Boris’s best correspondent. Now he was begging for crumbs of work—and still rejected.
Libby Prison, Richmond, Virginia
Friday, October 2, 1863
Wind chilled the sweat trickling from Abraham’s brow to the bandana tied over his nose and mouth. The thin layer of cotton kept the flies and mosquitoes off his face, but was no barrier from the eye-watering, gut-twisting stench. “Ready?”
Henry, the colored prisoner assigned to share the task, nodded, and lifted the corpse under the knees, and Abraham scooped beneath the armpits. Together, they hoisted the body off the stack in the dead-house and staggered through leaden air toward a pile of empty green pine coffins. Though Abraham did not look directly at the dead man’s face, the movement of vermin over the ridges and valleys of his face swam in the corners of his vision. This Union officer had melted away while living at Libby, but in death he had swelled enough to strain the few buttons he had left. The remains thudded dully in the box.
Raindrops began to fall on Abraham’s bare head as he and Henry loaded the coffin onto the wagon and ducked back into Libby’s cellar for the next corpse. There were twenty more bodies to load. Tomorrow it will be someone else’s turn, he reminded himself.
In the meantime, Abraham scanned Canal Street and the vacant lot east of the prison with every trip outside. Since he’d first seen the woman wearing Bella’s face, he’d glimpsed her twice more, but only through the prison bars. If only he could see her today, he might get some answers. White folks—including the guards and sentinels—always gave the Negro prisoners a wide berth when they were loading the dead. But some slaves dared approach, knowing they’d not be overheard if they spoke.
Pain seared Abraham’s burning ribs as he lifted another body, reminding him that though he was outside the prison walls for the moment, he was never far from the warden’s blows. He held his head high as he carried his decomposing burden to its narrow box, though his stomach retched and his muscles hardened beneath the rain.
With a grunt, Abraham and Henry shoved the coffin onto the wagon, then turned back toward Libby to fetch another from the cellar.
And there she was. The woman masquerading as his wife stepped around puddles as she made her way toward him. “My mistress thought you’d be hungry.” Her nose wrinkled as she spoke, and no wonder. The odor of spoiling meat sharpened in the wet air. “Seems like no one’s got stomach enough to watch us now, if you’d want to just take a few loaves …”
Abraham tugged his kerchief down to his neck, smiled his thanks, and accepted the welcome gift without a word. Her voice, if not her words, belonged to Bella, too. After all this time, can she possibly be—
“I best
be going. We pray for you.” She spun on her heel to leave.
“Daphne.”
She whirled to face him. “What you say?”
“Is your name Daphne?” He looked around.
She nodded.
“You have a twin sister? Bella?”
She flinched. “Who told you that?”
He held out his hands as he would to steady a skittish horse.
She took a step back, shaking her head. “I don’t know who you been talking to around here but I ain’t seen Bella in sixteen years. Don’t even know if she’s dead or alive, let alone where she is.” Her eyes flickered over him, clearly suspicious. Alarmed, even.
“I don’t mean to startle you. But Bella is your sister?”
A short nod, more like a twitch. “I had a sister named Bella once, but it’s not such an uncommon name.”
“But she’s your twin. You are nearly her looking-glass double. You were raised on the Pierce Butler plantation on St. Simons Island, Georgia, your mother’s name was Judy, and you had no other siblings besides Bella. Correct?”
Daphne covered her mouth with her hand. “Don’t you tease me about that.”
“I have no reason to.” Rain dripped from his hair into his eyes as he pinned her with his gaze. “Bella worked in the rice fields and you were a servant in the big house, a reward for your beauty and compliant behavior. You had babies starting at age fifteen, but—”
“Stop,” she begged him, lunging forward. “Stop talking!” Her knees gave way, and he caught her before she fell.
“Your sister says that too.”
“You know her? Is she safe?”
“She is well, and free, in Gettysburg.” Even as Abraham said it, the contrast between the twin sisters struck him.
Daphne pulled back. “Who are you?”
“Abraham Jamison. Your brother-in-law. Your sister, Bella, is my wife.”
Kent House, Richmond, Virginia
Spy of Richmond Page 5