By the time the couple left, the secret room was still secret, and that was all that mattered. Later that week, however, somehow Mr. Fischer discovered fresh wine stains and a small tear in the wedding gown that had belonged to Mr. Kent’s first wife. It even smelled of perfume, a telltale sign that it had been worn. When Sophie’s father was told, the roar that ripped from his throat rattled the windows in their panes. He questioned each slave individually, but none confessed, enraging him beyond reason.
Then one day Sophie found Esther, one of the maids, weeping behind the kitchen house. “Massa selling me down South, Missy, only I swear I ain’t done nothing wrong. Miss Susan says I messed up that wedding gown, only I ain’t done no such thing.” She was Lois’s younger sister, and aunt to Emiline, Rachel, and Fran—Susan’s maidservant. “He gonna sell me away from my family—my whole family!”
And Sophie could stay silent no longer. Confiding in her mother, however, did not solve the problem. “You can’t prove Esther’s innocence without jeopardizing the hiding place. I know it seems harsh, Sophie, but think what would happen if your father knew what we do,” Eleanor had warned. “Think of all the souls who would never be able to find safety here again. I need you to keep quiet, which you are very good at doing. There’s nothing more we can do. We shall pray for Esther, yes? We’ll pray she finds escape, and that we will meet her again someday. She’ll use our hiding place on her journey North. She will forgive us our debts …” Her mother’s voice quavered. “May they all forgive us. God, forgive us.” A mere whisper.
Still, Sophie stubbornly sought an audience with her father, and prayed he would simply believe her when she said she knew for a fact Esther was not to blame.
“How do you know?” Without looking up from his newspaper, he tapped the ash from his cigar into its tray, as casually as if she had said there would be snow.
Sophie dug the toe of her kid leather boot into the Persian carpet. “Sh-she n-never l-lied before, D-Daddy and I b-believe her.” Humiliation bled from her eyes as her old stutter, the one she thought she’d outgrown, reared up. She sounded like a blathering child again. Her father would never take her seriously now.
He peered at her above his spectacle rims. “Come now, Goldilocks, you’ve upset yourself. Esther hasn’t had a reason to lie before this. Now she does. She’s fooled you. We’ve taught our servants what the Bible says, to obey their masters, to tell the truth, to respect others’ property, and so on. Esther has chosen not to obey those rules, so we can no longer allow her to stay.”
“B-but w-what would she w-want with the g-g-gown? It m-makes n-no s-sense,” she blubbered.
“Who else, then? The gown did not just wreck itself, after all these years of being safely preserved. Who did this, if not Esther?”
It was Susan! She’d wanted to scream, but Eleanor had begged her not to. Her fists trembled with anger and frustration. “P-please d-don’t s-s-s-send her away.” Sophie was sobbing now.
Eleanor rustled into the library. “What’s this?” The roses in her cheeks faded.
“Sophie insists that Esther is innocent and should not be sent away.” He opened his paper and ducked back into it.
Susan swept in next, as porcelain and poised as a china doll. “I thought I heard a baby. Should have known it was Sophie.”
“Es-esther d-didn’t do it!” Sophie hissed, looking directly at Susan, whose face blanched white before blooming a shade of scarlet to match the draperies.
Susan mimicked Sophie then, and shame nearly crippled her.
“Susan,” Preston growled. “Don’t.”
“But she—”
Eleanor waved her hand as if to diffuse the tension in the air. “Yes, dear, Sophie is making up a story, perhaps, the way she always does. All the reading she does has blessed her with such a fanciful imagination.” Her smile was stiff, her eyes pleading as she looked at Sophie, as if to suggest this betrayal was really for the best.
Preston grunted. “She’d do better to stick to the facts. Like a journalist.”
Sophie could almost feel herself shrinking as they discussed her in the third person, as if she were not even there. She had lost, and it was over. Esther would be sold away.
But the hiding place was still safe, and fugitive slaves continued to be secreted in the closet on the other side of Sophie’s bedroom wall—at least, until Eleanor felt ill. They tapped to Sophie when they needed something, and she made sure they were supplied. Two Kent slaves had fled North, eventually, but they never saw Esther again.
The fire popped in the fireplace, and Sophie’s memories released her to the present, but the words, “There’s nothing more we can do,” reached through time to haunt her still. A fresh wave of regret washed over her for Esther and Daphne both.
Van Lew Kitchen House, Richmond, Virginia
Tuesday, December 15, 1863
“There’s something more you can do.” Firelit shadows flickered over Elizabeth Van Lew and Caroline, behind her, while griddle cakes and bacon hissed in the skillet. Elizabeth looked sharply down her nose at Sophie, as if assessing whether she were up for the task. Sophie was not sure yet herself, although when Mr. McNiven had rolled up to her rear entrance again before dawn today, she had behaved as though she’d ordered him there herself. By the time he dropped her off at the Van Lew kitchen house, suspense strummed her nerves. She had to know—
“Did Dr. Lansing make it through the lines?”
“He did more than that, my dear.” A rare smile softened Elizabeth’s angular face. “While Libby Prison was busy establishing the new office of ‘dead-house keeper’ to make sure no more deceased officers resurrect themselves, he arrived safely in Washington City. From there, he reported to General Benjamin Butler at Fortress Monroe. Told him that I was ‘true as steel’ to the Union cause and described to him our underground network. You, me, McNiven, Lucy Rice, Abby Green, Samuel Ruth, William Rowley, Robert Ford—not to mention the many slaves who faithfully render aid.” Her eyes shone. “Butler desires a correspondent here in Richmond, one who will write to him using a false name and drop the letter by flag of truce in the Post Office, directed to a name at the North.”
“General Butler.” Bringing her cup of genuine coffee to her lips, Sophie sipped the steamy brew gratefully. She had a feeling she’d need the caffeine to keep up with Elizabeth.
“By a false name, but yes. Military information can be delivered into military hands, perhaps in the same day.” She folded her hands in her lap as Caroline set a plate of thick fried bacon next to the box of McNiven’s pastries.
“And you will be the correspondent.” Sophie broke off a piece of bacon and popped it in her mouth, savoring the smoky flavor.
“Without a doubt. If I were a man, I would have voted against secession, and then I would have taken up arms to put down the Rebellion. Do you know, Miss Kent, that the day before the firing on Fort Sumter, fully two-thirds of the Virginia legislature opposed secession? Then the firing happened, and Lincoln called for his seventy-five thousand volunteers, and Richmond went mad, positively mad. Do you remember April 1861?”
Sophie remembered trying to explain it all to her mother. A mistake. Eleanor didn’t need to know the world outside her shuttered windows convulsed with revolution, or that battle lines had been drawn between the home she’d left in Philadelphia and the home she now occupied in Richmond. It baffled her. Driven away by her endless questions and childlike petulance, Preston stopped trying to help her understand. Sophie, however, stayed with Eleanor, to help her gather her thoughts every day. But it was as useless as chasing leaves scattered by the wind. “I remember enough.”
“Well. We who were not bullied by the fire-eaters are the loyal ones. Virginia—the home of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson—removing itself from the Union—it’s disgraceful! Unthinkable!” With fork and knife, she dissected a piece of sweet potato pie into minuscule bites as she spoke. Sophie imagined she would do the same to the Confederacy given the chance. “If I can
aid the cause of the United States of America with information rather than a musket, I do it eagerly, and with a clean conscience. But I can’t do it alone.” Elizabeth’s eyes bore into Sophie’s.
By degrees, understanding filtered through Sophie. “You’re asking for help? From me?”
Elizabeth speared a piece of pie with her fork, suspended it aloft. “I will be Butler’s correspondent, but I need eyes and ears everywhere. You feed me intelligence—I’ll tell you how later—and I take the risk of sending it to Butler.”
Sophie could barely believe her ears. “Elizabeth, I am already under surveillance. My house was searched by Turner himself, an event my neighbors must have noticed.” Surely Madeline Blair was the only one who dismissed it as a blustery show of authority brought on by Sophie’s help at Libby’s hospital room, and her connection to Philadelphia.
“Turner found nothing. You passed muster already, you see, and you have the rare luxury of being alone in your house.”
Strange luxury indeed, thought Sophie, to have a mother in the grave, a father in prison, and a half sister who disappeared. Hands suddenly cold, she wrapped them around her cup.
“Your business within your own walls is yours alone, if you can trust your servants. Your father’s status as a prisoner of war provides a smokescreen for your sentiments.”
Elizabeth’s persistence closed in around Sophie. But it wasn’t just Dick Turner, or her father she was concerned about. “Captain Russell is—”
“An asset, Sophie. Work him.” Elizabeth’s voice was soft, but her words and eyes were granite hard. “He has always been an asset, has he not? You’ve been using him almost since the day you met him. Your relationship is a gesture, a token of your loyalty, just as the dinners I hold for my nephew’s regiment, the Richmond Howitzers, are a token of mine. Keep Russell as a shield, but tap him for information at the same time.”
Sophie twisted her handkerchief until it was nearly knotted. “How?”
“Listen to him. Listen to those who speak to him in your presence, especially in those parties you hold. It isn’t eavesdropping if you’re standing right there. Think back to the last party.”
It had been November 30. The day Harrison escorted Bella to Sophie’s front door.
“What did you hear that night that the Union might find useful? Think now.”
Her mind scrolled back. “It’s old news now.”
“But do you remember?”
Sophie pursed her lips. “A woman from Baltimore arrived on November 19 and handed Secretary of War Seddon a complete drawing of all the defenses of Baltimore.”
Elizabeth inhaled sharply, clasped her hands. “Following the examples of Belle Boyd and Rose O’Neal Greenhow and countless other women less famous than they. Information is powerful. Union intelligence is already leaking south. And you, my dear, are in a perfect position to help feed Rebel intelligence to the North.”
The fire crackled in the silence that followed. The magnitude of Elizabeth’s suggestion thudded like a chunk of ore to the pit of Sophie’s stomach. “You’re asking me to be a spy.”
“I am asking you—and several others—to join me in giving information to people who can use it to end the war. I’m already under suspicion merely for what I think. If I’m going to be imprisoned, then God help me, I will do something useful first to earn those chains.”
Sophie wavered. “I don’t want to be responsible for hurting my fellow Southerners.” Bringing food to Union prisoners at the hospital was unpopular, and helping Dr. Lansing escape was illegal, yes. But these actions didn’t bring harm to anyone. Would spying? As much as she abhorred slavery, she was still a Richmonder, whether she agreed with her neighbors on all points or not.
“Look around you, my dear! The South is already hurt! We are ravaged! Ending the war helps everyone. Hunger, death, disease from filthy army camps, loss of limbs—it all stops throughout both North and South when the war stops.”
Sophie turned her gaze to the window, and her own reflection stared back as Elizabeth’s words burrowed into her. The Yankees kept coming. And the Rebels kept fighting them even when they were hungry, barefoot, sick, too young, too old. Jefferson Davis would never surrender. Every family she knew in Richmond suffered loss of some kind, and she could only imagine it was the same all across the South. It had to stop, before thousands more men were sacrificed for The Cause, before every acre of Virginia was ravaged into barrenness. The carnage—on both sides—had to end.
“The North wins, and our slaves are released from their shackles,” Elizabeth continued. “Yours. Mine. Everyone’s, plus all future generations.” Eyes misting, her voice shook with conviction. “Forever free, at last. Don’t you want that?” Her thin lips drew a straight line on her resolute face.
“Of course I do,” Sophie whispered.
“I know.” Elizabeth grasped Sophie’s hands. “I knew it the first time I realized you were the writer behind Thornton’s columns in the paper. But you understand now, that it isn’t your words that matter anymore. It’s theirs. What you hear from Mr. Hayes, or Captain Russell, or any of their friends, or what your servants tell you they overheard in the markets—those are the words that matter. Who knows but that God has placed you to hear them for such a time as this?”
“You’re asking me to be a spy,” Sophie said again, trying to grasp exactly what this would mean. Surely, a betrayal of her homeland and of her father, who she loved even for all his faults. But was it possible to remain loyal to them and to her convictions both?
Silverware clinked on Elizabeth’s plate. “I am asking for your help, if you’d rather think of it that way. The cause of freedom needs your help. How will you answer?”
Sophie could barely hear Elizabeth over the sound of General Winder echoing in her mind. Spies hang. I win. Take heed. She closed her eyes and heard the sickening bang of a floor dropping away from the feet of Spencer Kellogg. The squeak of stretching, jerking rope. Spies hang.
Then another thought eclipsed the fear. There’s nothing you can do, Lawrence had told her, and in one bleak moment she had almost believed him. Now here was a chance to do more—to be more—than she ever had before. For this was not just about hiding one fugitive but about setting all of them free at once, and ending the war.
Sophie’s eyes opened to meet Elizabeth’s unyielding gaze, and her loyalty to Virginia seceded from her loyalty to freedom. With divided conscience, she gave her answer. “Yes.”
“OUR TRUE HEARTS grew brave. Love of our country in its trials absorbed our being; enthusiasm lightened gloom. … I have known the best of men feel their lives in danger from their partners in business & from their sons-in-law, who felt differently from them. Some aged parents endured much from their children who were disloyal. … [I] have turned to speak to a friend and found a detective at my elbow. Strange faces could sometimes be seen peeping around the columns and pillars of the back portico, & I can name gentlemen, some of our oldest and best citizens, who trembled when their door bell rang, fearing arrest.”
—ELIZABETH VAN LEW, Union agent in Richmond
Confederate White House, Richmond, Virginia
Friday, January 1, 1864
Too warm, darling?” Lawrence cocked an eyebrow at the black lace fan Sophie fluttered in front of her chest. Or was he looking at what she was trying to conceal? The expression on his handsome face flashed heat across her cheeks.
“Quite.” In fact, Sophie’s face felt as though it were on fire. She felt practically naked in front of all these people gathered in the connecting parlors of the Confederate White House. Lawrence had given her this gown as a Christmas gift to wear here, to Jefferson and Varina Davis’s New Year’s Day reception, since none of her dingy mourning clothes would suit the occasion. It was a personal, extravagant gift she could not refuse without offending. The dress now skimming Sophie’s curves before spreading gracefully over her hoops was a respectable, true black silk. But the formal off-the-shoulder neckline dipped dangerously clos
e to the cleft between her breasts. To compensate, she kept her matching fan wide open and as close as possible as they stood in line to greet the president and first lady of the Confederacy.
The line of guests crept forward toward their host and hostess, bringing Sophie near the crackling heat radiating from the marble fireplace. Careful to stand far enough away so sparks would not land on her skirt, she gazed at the gilded portrait of President Davis, which looked sternly down at her from its position above two crossed Confederate flags. On the red velvet-draped mantel below the flags, jewelry, and knickknacks, said to have been made for Varina by Confederate prisoners of war, were proudly on display. The contrast between the crude carvings and the opulence that cushioned them jarred Sophie. She could not help but think of the Libby prisoners in their rags, while here she stood in silk and lace. Nor could she help but think of Harrison.
Lawrence’s chuckle pulled her back to him, though his low rumble was almost lost in the drone of the crowd. “I must say it’s so refreshing to see you in something that flatters.”
Sophie laughed at the backhanded compliment. “Well, for your sake, I hope the change of scenery is worth it. I can’t imagine what it must have cost you.” She’d seen a man’s suit selling for six hundred dollars last week. An imported French gown of silk and lace would be well over one thousand dollars.
“I’m more interested in what it might cost you. Later.” He winked, and she pulled the corner of her mouth into a half smile. His eyes sparkled with boyish mischief. But his touch had become almost hungry, lately. Clearly, Lawrence thought her coy, when truly, she didn’t love him. She felt wicked. She felt like Susan.
Forgive me, she prayed, and fanned her burning face. Blessedly, someone cracked open a window in the crowded parlor. The breeze scampered across her bare shoulders and breathed a welcome chill down her spine.
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