He dropped into a chair. “You are hardly a stranger to me, Mrs. Jamison.”
In truth, he knew her better than anyone, outside Abraham and Liberty.
“I’m going to do this,” he continued. “Write a letter, and I’ll bring it to Abraham.”
Bella tilted her head and studied him. In his face was all the determination she had ever seen in one man. But, “Your plan has holes.”
“I have time to fine-tune it.”
She shook her head, and something unlocked inside her chest. “Gaping holes. And there is no time.” Her heart thumped as if it had just now been jolted awake.
He squinted at her. “Do you have a solution, or do you just like pointing out—”
“Underground Railroad goes both ways.” She watched the light come back to his eyes as he realized what she was suggesting. It was the best of their options. “They keep travelers safe if their lives depend on it. If you try to travel through the mainstream channels, you’ll have to fib your way through the journey, dodging suspicion the whole way. Too dangerous.”
“Good.” He rubbed his jaw. “That’s good. I can get right into Richmond that way?”
Bella nodded. “And then what?”
“I’ll find Daphne and give her the medicine, of course. And deliver your letter to Abraham if you’ll but write one.”
“A strange white man’s going to visit the Negroes in Libby’s cellar?”
“I could dress like a Confederate guard. I caught Amelia this morning, and she says she can sew me a uniform straightaway, as soon as we get back to Philadelphia. I can feign a Southern accent, I’ve done it before.”
“You’ll stand out, Mr. Caldwell, and be caught before you ever reach the prison.”
“I’ll be careful. I’ve gone undercover before.”
“You need a Negro to deliver it, someone who can blend in.”
“Then I’ll find one.”
“No, no.” They were talking over each other now in a heated crescendo, until Bella put up her hands to silence him. She cut her voice low, spoke slowly. “You can’t trust just anyone. And not everyone on the Underground Railroad is going to trust a solitary white man enough to guide you to the next station. Besides, a new face shows up around Libby’s cellar, even a new colored face, could be enough to arouse suspicion. You need to use someone the guards are already accustomed to seeing. Only a familiar face will do. A face like Daphne’s.” She paused. “Mine.”
Harrison blanched. “You?”
“No one will suspect me.”
At length, he rested his elbows on the red-and-white checked tablecloth and stared at his clasped hands. “It’s too big a risk for you to deliver a letter. If you were discovered, you could be re-enslaved.”
“In their eyes, I’m a slave already, as Daphne. I’ll pose as Miss Kent’s slave while my sister regains her strength with the quinine. I’m sure Miss Kent would let me stay with her.” At least, Bella hoped she would.
“I can do this errand for you.” Storms swirled in his eyes.
“It’s not just quinine Daphne needs. She needs her family now. I have to see her before she dies—that is, if the quinine cannot save her. She’s been sick for weeks. And Abraham—maybe we can do more than give him a letter. Maybe we can give him a way out.”
Harrison’s chair rasped over the floor as he jumped up. “I want you to remember for one moment just exactly how you felt last summer when this place was crawling with Confederate soldiers. Remember what it cost you to stay at Liberty’s farm and help her nurse the Rebel wounded. I could smell the fear on your skin, Mrs. Jamison, and I’m not saying you weren’t justified, because you were. And now you’re telling me you want to go to Richmond, the very capital of the Confederacy, and, in essence, become a slave again after nearly twenty years of freedom.”
“Just so,” she managed to say. The trembling of her hands, the tightening of her chest—it meant nothing.
“Are you not scared?”
Bella swallowed as she stood. “‘Scared’ won’t stop me. I’ll not stand idle when I can help my family. Liberty is taken care of now. Silas can stay in my house while I’m gone. I’m going.”
Harrison exhaled a long breath. “We’ll go together. I’ll do my utmost to protect you, should you need it …”
She nodded triumphantly, even as she gripped the back of the chair for support.
“PERIL AND FATIGUE she courted now so they might escape their prisons.”
—ELIZABETH VAN LEW, referring to Unionist Lucy Rice
Blair House, Richmond, Virginia
Monday, November 23, 1863
Afternoon sun threw golden stripes across Madeline Blair’s parlor, warming the cobalt blue carpet and bouncing off the gilded mirror. As Sophie listened to all the words Mrs. Blair had obviously saved up for her, she could not help but smile at the sleek white cat watching the yarn dance from their needles.
“You work yourself too hard, and I don’t mind being the one to say so,” Mrs. Blair was saying, her voice silky smooth above the staccato clicks of their knitting.
Sophie glanced up to measure her neighbor’s face, pale against the coffee brown hair that framed it. “I’ve never known you to be idle, either.” With two sons in the army, she was never without something to knit or sew, even with company present.
“But the work you do will waste you clean away.”
Sophie shook her head. “Daphne is wasting away. Not me.” Aside from visiting Mrs. Blair and Libby’s hospital, much of her time was spent in the sickroom at her own house, warding off chill with a mixture of red pepper, tea, and table salt. When fever was present, she tipped dogwood bark tea past Daphne’s lips—just in case Dr. Lansing had been wrong about its being useless.
Mrs. Blair sighed. “I worry it’s taking a toll on you, spending so much time with the ill. Not just Daphne. I know you visit the Yankees down at Libby’s hospital room, as well. Talk flies faster than even your needles, you know.”
Sophie’s hands slowed for a moment. “Yes, I do.”
“Well, it’s right Christian of you to love your enemies that way.” She laid her work in her brown silk lap and stretched her fingers. “And there aren’t many of us who dare to follow suit, it being quite an unpopular form of the Golden Rule at the moment. But if any of my boys were captured, I’d want some compassionate soul to do the same for them. I suspect thoughts of your father may have steered you that way, too, am I right?”
Sophie nodded. “Precisely.”
“I completely understand. They are in need, no one can deny that. It’s charity to try to help. Even though they’re on the wrong side of this war. But enough of that. I’ve noticed Captain Russell has been calling on you routinely. Things must be going well.” Her voice tilted up, questioningly, an obvious invitation for more details.
“Just fine.” A smile tugged at her lips at the merriment on Mrs. Blair’s face. Sophie had grown to look forward to the captain’s reassuring presence, his manners and charm a reminder that she was still a lady, despite the unending work of war. And he had learned to accept that she would not abandon her instinct to help the prisoners in need. You realize this only means I must spend more time with you, in order to offset your actions, he’d said with a twinkle in his eye, on the chance that anyone is still watching you, of course. But certainly no one watched her more than Lawrence Russell himself, whenever he had the chance.
“He does appear smitten with you, dear, and I can’t say I blame him. I always hoped one of my boys would end up with you or your sister. But then—”
“Susan married Noah Becker.” Sophie finished for her before it was necessary to say that Thomas and Solomon were dead.
“Yes. Broke poor Asher’s heart clean in two.”
She broke more hearts than that, her father’s being one of them. But all Sophie said was, “Poor Asher,” and picked up her knitting again.
After five more rows around the sock, Sophie bundled her knitting into her basket and bid her kind ne
ighbor goodbye. “You’re another day closer to Asher and Joel coming home,” she offered, and prayed again they would be preserved.
Mrs. Blair smiled wistfully as she walked Sophie to the door. “God bless them and keep them. And you come again soon.”
With one step inside Libby Prison’s hospital room, Sophie’s thoughts were yanked from Daphne, Captain Russell, and Madeline Blair. Dread drizzled coldly over her as she noted how large Dr. Lansing’s eyes were in his face, the growing gap between his neck and his collar. Even in the dusty beam of sunlight, his straw-colored hair was lifeless and dull. His skin had faded from the sun-browned hue of a soldier in camp, to the pasty shade of captivity.
His stethoscope clattered to the floor as it slipped from his hand. He bent to retrieve it, then stood, and swayed. Fearing he was about to faint, Sophie reached out and steadied him. The doctor shook his head, eyes shut tight.
“Take a break, Dr. Lansing,” Dr. Wilkes called from three beds away. “Five minutes.”
A tense nod, and Dr. Lansing extracted himself from between the rows of patients. On the perimeter of the room, he leaned against the wall and settled his gaze on the window.
“You’re unwell.” Sophie kept her voice low.
A moment’s pause. “No worse than most.” He held his hand up, and it shook. “We are starving, Miss Kent.”
“The patients?”
“And the prisoners. All of us.”
No.
“Even the ones you don’t see, the ones who are not ill enough to get a bed. I’ve shed thirty pounds in less than two months.”
Thirteen thousand prisoners and no one wants to feed them. Mr. Hayes’s words echoed in her mind then. But that was weeks ago. “Is there still so very little beef? Has the situation not improved in the last month?”
“Improved? Heavens, no.” His voice was so quiet, Sophie leaned in to catch every word. She flicked a glance toward Dr. Wilkes on the other side of the room before studying Dr. Lansing’s face once more.
“It used to be we went ten days or so without meat,” he went on. “Our rations have been nine ounces of corn bread and a cup of water per day—although Dr. Wilkes has given me more water than that, but it’s pumped directly from the James and not altogether potable. These days, we’re lucky to see two ounces of beef every four weeks. And from what we hear from the cellar, our colored comrades fare even worse.” Cringing, he covered one ear with his large-knuckled fingers.
“What? What is it?”
“My ears are ringing.” A hoarse chuckle broke from his lips as he dropped his hand. “Everyone’s ears are ringing, unless they’ve only just arrived. Everyone gets dizzy when they stand up too quickly—like I just did. We all get headaches when we concentrate, whether our focus is tending the sick, or on an improvised chessboard on the floor. Some men faint before they finish the game. Checkmate.”
Tears pooled in Sophie’s eyes. The need was so great! Flour was $120 a barrel in the market right now, and meat becoming so dear that possums were now hung in butchers’ windows. It would take a king’s ransom to feed these men adequately. “My help has been—” She spread her hands.
“An extraordinary gesture,” Dr. Lansing finished for her, his eyes sparking. “The very thread between life and death for so many of these men. We cannot save them all, Miss Kent. As a physician, that’s been a hard truth to reconcile. You can have no idea how many patients I’ve lost in this war, even in this building alone. But remember this: we must work as hard as we can at what we’ve been called to do and leave the outcome up to God. If we don’t, we’ll lose hope. And that is one thing we must not do.”
The doctor looked out over his patients, for whom there was very little hope indeed. They had told Sophie of their homes and loved ones whenever she was near, their fond memories their only comfort. With a start, she realized she’d never heard the doctor speak of anything but his work. Perhaps … “Would you like to tell me about home?”
A sad smile bent his lips. “I lived in Connecticut before the war. Beautiful place. But my heart is in Rhode Island.”
“You have a sweetheart there?”
He nodded. “Charlotte, a nurse—co-director, actually—in a military hospital. We will marry, if we can only survive this war.” His eyes misted uncharacteristically, and Sophie wondered if bringing up home had been a mistake.
A lump shifted in his throat before he turned back to her. “Do you believe in a sovereign God?”
She nodded.
“Then you understand me when I say He is the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. We may not see how all of this ends in His master plan. But we are to be faithful in the middle just the same.” He cleared his throat, rubbed his eyes. “Now if you’ll excuse me.”
Sophie watched him go. His movements were stiff and slow, as though he were walking under water. Then, before she realized what was happening, his knees buckled, and he collapsed to the floor.
“Doctor!” she heard herself cry out and in an instant Dr. Wilkes was on the floor with Dr. Lansing.
“Just a fainting spell, that’s all.” Dr. Wilkes’s words were nonchalant, but his eyes betrayed him.
Sophie stared at the young doctor crumpled on the floor, and at the older doctor pretending not to be troubled, and at the hollow-eyed patients all around her who, mere months ago, had been hearty and hale. She thought of the Negroes suffering in the cellar, and the rest of Richmond’s prisoners wasting away for want of food.
Then she stared at her basket, sitting empty by the door. Her pathetic, pitiful basket. What good had she done, really? With so little food for so many men, it was like spitting on the Sahara and expecting it to bring forth fruit.
Libby Prison, Richmond, Virginia
Wednesday, November 25, 1863
Abraham Jamison covered his nose and mouth with his handkerchief and knotted the ends tightly at the back of his head. “Would you believe I hoped I’d get used to this smell?”
Peter Colson slanted a glance at him as he adjusted his own kerchief on the bridge of his nose. “Boy, were you wrong.”
“Dead wrong,” Abraham said, and Peter’s eyes crinkled. Dark as it seemed, they took their humor where they could get it.
Especially on days like today, when forty-five corpses waited to be loaded into the dead-cart. The Rebels had dispensed with using coffins altogether, which made the job a sight quicker, but far more disagreeable. It was an impossible stink of which to rid oneself.
Though the loads were lighter without the wooden boxes, Abraham still tired alarmingly quickly. The muscles he’d built as a blacksmith in Gettysburg were withering away for lack of fuel. Worse than the regular reminder of his sapping strength, however, was the starker reminder of his own mortality.
He shuddered, and prayed for the thousandth time that Bella had received his letter. She deserved to know what happened to her husband. So very many wives would never know. Lord, he prayed, help them find peace. A supernatural feat if ever there was one.
Hoofbeats and footsteps plodded in the alley. Merciful distraction. It was Robert Ford, a Negro who’d been a Union army teamster until he was captured in May 1862, and was now pressed into service as the hostler for Dick Turner, Libby Prison’s despised warden. His nose wrinkled as he approached, but his eyes shone with intelligence—the kind Abraham was only too eager to hear. The stomach-turning stench gave them a wide perimeter from other would-be listening ears as Robert passed along information he’d gleaned from the Unionist slave and free black population of Richmond.
“Well, what’s it been, Ford? A week?” Abraham lost track of the days. “You look like the fox who got the hen.”
Robert’s smile flashed brightly in response. “Sure did taste good going down, too!” He rubbed his belly, chuckling.
“Save us any?” Peter asked.
“Oh, I got plenty of morsels for you today.”
Cary Street’s clattering merchant district seemed to hush as Abraham focused on the words falling fro
m Robert’s lips as if they were crumbs, and Abraham were a begging dog. If only words were food, indeed. His head ached with the effort to hear past the ringing in his ears.
“Believe it or not, Turner still requests meat for us prisoners,” Ford began, “and still Northrop refuses. The Commissary General is terrified that if we are strong enough, we’ll break free and attack our captors, or the whole city of Richmond.”
Not likely. They were far too weak to revolt. Especially the poor souls on Belle Isle, whose skeletal forms all but disappeared in the stacks of corpses they handled. Going mad with hunger, Robert had said earlier. They hunted the guard dogs for meat.
“Northrop is so paranoid,” Ford continued, “that when the U.S. steamer Convoy arrived from Fortress Monroe last week, bearing clothing and forty thousand rations for Union prisoners, the ship was turned away. They refused one hundred tons of food though it would have cost them nothing to distribute it. Could have fed all of us for three days.”
Enough food for three days! Abraham could scarcely suppress the groan pushing up from the pit of his cavernous belly. Surely it would not have been the fried chicken, boiled ham, baked potatoes, roast beef and gravy they dreamed about, but to come so close to quelling hunger—and then to be refused—it was almost more than Abraham could bear. The look of despair in Peter’s eyes told Abraham he felt the same.
“Northrop isn’t the only one concerned about a breakout. Being so close to Washington to the north, and Union-held Williamsburg to the southeast, General Winder says it’s a constant temptation to prisoners, and that he’ll be forever hassled with Union raids to free us, like a puppy nipping at his heels.”
Abraham frowned. “The provost marshal compared the Union army to a puppy? The man must not be facing reality.” The Yankees outnumbered the Rebels in every way.
“Yesterday he dispatched his son to canvass the deep South, looking for a place to build a new war prison.”
Spy of Richmond Page 9