By the time Lawrence exchanged introductions with Jefferson and Varina Davis, Sophie had snapped into her role with a commitment that would have made Elizabeth Van Lew proud. All she had to do was adapt the cunning and charm of her sister. Taking Varina’s hand, she gestured to the trinkets displayed on the mantel. “I see you have excellent taste in art.”
Varina’s dark eyes sparked as she nodded, regally. “I keep every item a soldier or prisoner gives me. I believe it’s a mark of respect for them, and a reminder to us in the midst of my civilian comforts, that war goes on.”
It was easy to agree with her on that score.
Jefferson Davis was thoroughly courteous as he took Sophie’s hand, and thoroughly preoccupied. Though tall and straight as a ramrod, all of his fifty-five years seemed etched into his face. And little wonder. Sophie had heard he’d suffered bouts of malaria, neuralgia, and dyspepsia, in addition to the ills of the Confederacy. One of his eyes was apparently blind, but the other, hawklike in its intensity, made up for it.
“Charmed,” Mr. Davis said to Sophie, barely looking at her, as if impatient for the entire social affair to be done with. But it was not Jefferson Davis she needed to charm.
Their respects sufficiently paid to the Davises, Lawrence and Sophie lingered in the parlor only long enough to be polite before returning to the Kent house.
“Where’s Fischer?” Lawrence asked as Sophie closed the door behind them.
“I gave him and the rest the day off for the New Year.” She unpinned her hat from her hair and set it on the hall stand. “Fischer went to visit a friend who works in Court’s End, and I could hear the servants laughing in the kitchen house before we came in.”
“Ah, alone at last,” he teased. “I’m glad you went to the reception. With me.” The playfulness stripped from Lawrence’s tone. Standing behind her, his breath was hot on the nape of her neck. His fingers brushed her skin as he slipped her cloak from her shoulders—and dropped it to the floor. Startled, she turned, and he caught her cold hands in his. Blew on her fingers to warm them.
“Sophie,” he whispered, then kissed her knuckles on both hands. “Please say you’re mine, truly, with no one here but the two of us to see or hear a thing. We’ve been pretending all this time, for show. But I’m not pretending anymore.” He pulled her hands behind his waist in an embrace, then cupped her face in his hands. “Are you?”
His lips swayed against hers, warm and soft, and guilt chugged hotly through her veins. His hands slid down her neck to her bare shoulders as he deepened the kiss. One hand released her shoulder and skimmed a fingertip across the quivering lace trim of her neckline. The rogue.
Alarm coursed through her, and she jerked her head to the side, pressed her hands against his chest until she broke from his hold. “Enough!” she gasped.
He stood back, nose pink. “I beg your pardon, I—you—you’re irresistible.”
So this is what it feels like to be Susan, Sophie thought. She didn’t fancy it.
“Lawrence, darling,” she said, hoping to soothe his ruffled spirit. “Remember what you told me the first day we met? You are a gentleman, and I am a lady. Which means we behave like it, even when no one is watching.” Pulse still whooshing in her ears, she offered him a smile, and he returned it.
“In that case, I must take my leave before I forget myself again.” He tugged on his cloak to straighten it. “But—have we an understanding? You are mine, and not just for show?”
Her hand covered her pounding heart. “I would have thought it was obvious.”
Quickly, he brushed a kiss on her cheek and let himself out, whistling as he went.
God forgive me, she prayed again, and slid to the floor, utterly spent from her charade. Tears welled in her eyes. She had never imagined her first kiss would be a lie.
Neither was she proud of how much she’d been deceiving the captain. Calling him “darling,” returning a kiss she didn’t want … all for the hope of gaining some intelligence that would aid the cause of freedom. Did that make it acceptable in God’s eyes? Or was any lie a sin?
Then the story of Rahab drifted through her weary mind until it pulled her toward the library. Sophie opened the Bible to the Old Testament book of Joshua. And there it was. Rahab, a harlot, had hidden two Israelite spies. She lied to the king of Jericho to keep them safe. Then, when Jericho fell, she and her family were spared. In the New Testament, Rahab was listed in the lineage of Christ, and praised for her actions.
Sophie sighed as she closed the Bible. Rahab’s situation was different from hers. And yet, she could not help but hope and pray that if Rahab was justified for her deception, Sophie was as well.
Libby Prison, Richmond, Virginia
Monday, January 4, 1864
Harrison Caldwell walked laps around the second floor of Libby Prison. He’d heard from The General that Abraham was still surviving downstairs, but concern for Bella and Sophie wore a track in his mind. Time, useless time, yawned and stretched before him but went nowhere, ever, just like the circuit he paced around the perimeter of the room. Why, he could have walked all the way to Washington by now, or to Fortress Monroe, if it were not for these confounded walls and guards.
He was surrounded by empty moments. He choked on them, drowned in them, convinced he would die by tedium if starvation or Dick Turner did not claim his life first. Harrison’s new friend and fellow prisoner, the wiry-thin Major A. G. Hamilton of the 12th Kentucky Cavalry, said it best when he described the days in Libby as “going by like scarcely moving tears.” The nights, he said, passed “like black blots dying out of a dream of horror.”
Out of habit, Harrison brought his hand to his head, but there was barely any hair left through which to rake. He’d shaved it all off, and the vermin went with it. He was determined to keep it shorn almost to his scalp while at the Libby Hotel, as he had so glibly named it when he’d thought his stay would be as short as the fuzz on his head. Fool. Now he knew the truth.
Last month, Union Gen. Benjamin Butler was named special agent of exchange at Fortress Monroe, with General Meredith his subordinate. His Confederate counterpart, exchange officer Robert Ould, refused to parlay with him.
Early in the war, Butler had declared runaway slaves who made it to Fortress Monroe to be contraband of war, thereby creating asylum for thousands of the South’s bondsmen. Known as “Beast Butler” throughout the South, the general was so reviled that Jefferson Davis had ordered him to be hanged on the spot if he was ever captured.
But it was in 1862 in New Orleans when he issued his infamous “Woman Order,” that sealed his death warrant. Exasperated by numerous complaints that patriotic Confederate women were spitting on and otherwise abusing Union soldiers who occupied the town—one woman had emptied the contents of a chamber pot from a balcony onto Admiral David Farragut—Butler’s order proclaimed that any female who insulted a Union soldier be subjected to the same treatment as a prostitute. Even Harrison had deemed the excessive measure despicable when he covered the story for the Philadelphia Inquirer. But for Robert Ould to cease the exchange of prisoners because of the Woman Order seemed equally unfair.
Thankfully, the Confederacy reluctantly came to agree. On Christmas Day, Butler’s efforts resulted in a man-for-man exchange of 520 prisoners. But since the Rebels stubbornly refused to exchange Negroes, the exchange cartel once again shut down. Harrison, Abraham, Rose, Hamilton, and tens of thousands languishing in prisons all over the South, were there to stay.
A hand squeezed Harrison’s shoulder. “So, how is our fearless editor today?” It was Colonel Thomas Rose, with a smile on his face and dust in his hair, as usual. He fell into step with Harrison as they turned about the room. “Staying busy, I see?”
Harrison laughed darkly. He had accepted the job as editor of the Libby Chronicle, and was gratified by the men’s reception of it, but the investigative reporting he’d done had only served to discourage him. Last month Ould had announced that boxes sent to the prisoners from the
North would no longer be delivered, but would rot in the warehouse next door, or else serve the needs of the Rebels instead. There were now five hundred of these packages. The reason, Harrison discovered, was that the U.S. Sanitary Commission began addressing its boxes to “Our Starving Soldiers in Richmond” or “Our Brave Defenders in Libby Prison.” For these offensive words, Ould cancelled all deliveries completely, which meant no hope of supplementing their diet of rice, water, and half a loaf of rock-hard cornbread.
“Slow news day.” Harrison’s mouth twitched toward half a smile. “I’ve already reported Turner’s throwing George Pratt into the dungeon for missing the spittoon. Nothing else to say on that score until he comes out.”
“Which could be awhile,” Rose added, nodding.
“And if I read one more poem that pines for home and a waiting wife …” Harrison’s footsteps slowed to a halt as he stared out the window into the inky black beyond. “Rose,” he said, rubbing his hand over his sharpening jaw. “There is no light at the end of this tunnel.”
“Then it’s time to dig a real one,” he whispered. “But strictly off the record, of course. Want to?”
Harrison jerked his gaze to meet Rose’s shining eyes.
“After dark. Follow me.”
Night was thick with the snores of twelve hundred men in Libby Prison as Harrison and several others followed Thomas Rose down the stairs, through the dining room, and into the kitchen, where Major Hamilton waited by the stoves. Confidence surged in Harrison to see he was leading the operation with Rose. Before the war, Hamilton was a builder of homes. Surely he knows the best way to tunnel through a building.
“Behind the stove is a tunnel Rose and I have dug, which leads to the east cellar,” Hamilton explained in hushed tones to the thirteen men huddled around him and Rose. “Once we go through it, we work without light, and in absolute silence. A sentinel paces ten feet from our positions.”
Rose nodded. “We’ve begun digging through the east foundation wall. Our plan is to continue down, under the east wall, then turn south toward the six-foot-high sewer, less than twenty feet away, that empties into the canal. Once we breach the pipe, we can travel inside it to the canal and just—”
“Vanish,” Harrison finished for him, and subdued murmurs of excitement rippled through the men. His hands already itched to work. “What do we do?”
“What we need are three five-man digging teams,” Hamilton said. “Team A will work all night, then rest for two nights and keep lookout for the guards, while Teams B and then C take their turns with the tunnel. Each man on the squad will take a specific task. One man digs and fills the spittoon with the dirt. A spittoon emptier will pull it out and empty it beneath piles of discarded straw from hospital mattresses and relief boxes before sending it back through to the digger. Also required is someone to fan air into the tunnel for the digger, using a rubber blanket stretched over a frame. It won’t be much oxygen, but God willing, it’s enough for a man to stay alive.”
Harrison shifted uncomfortably at the mention of “God willing.”
“A fourth man will be the relief spittoon emptier and fanner, and a fifth will serve as the lookout.”
Rose cleared his throat. “When you hear the sentinels issue their four o’clock calls, stop immediately, climb back up into the kitchen, replace the bricks over the hole behind the stove—there are between fifty and seventy-five of them—and fling handfuls of soot over them. In places where mortar was removed, carefully insert that back between the bricks as well. Only then is your work here done before you slip back upstairs to sleep.”
“You must swear to secrecy.” Hamilton’s voice was as hard and rough as the bricks that lay on the rubber blanket beside him. “There are spies in our midst.”
The thirteen agreed, and with Rose and Hamilton, the men divided themselves into three squads. Harrison volunteered to be Team A’s digger. A fleeting memory of his father flashed through him as he climbed down the rope ladder through the fireplace chute and into a darkness so profound he felt as though he’d gone blind.
His nose, unfortunately, still worked. Sharpened by the humidity, the east cellar reeked of sewage, rancid pork fat, wet clay, and the pervasive, thick odor of rats. Harrison’s stomach lurched, but he muscled it back into place while groping for the tunnel’s entrance.
There you are. With a rope tied around his ankle as a routine precaution, and a broken shovel in one hand, he wormed through the tunnel’s two-foot diameter mouth and into its throat, for the first time grateful that he’d shed so many pounds since coming to Libby. As he inched forward, all the frustrations that had gnawed at him since arriving channeled into a singular purpose: Dig.
Two glowing red dots bounced toward him, accompanied by the scamper of four not-so-little feet. With a swipe of his shovel, he sent the rat squealing out of his way, but not before he felt the whip of its naked tail against his face. Resolutely, he crept forward like a mole in the tomblike darkness.
Finally, his hand found a wall of dirt. Packed in on three sides, Harrison clawed at it with his hands before scooping the loose dirt into the wooden spittoon fastened to a clothesline. Alternately, he lay on his stomach, then his side, then his back, until each side of his body ached from his contortions. Dirt and clay sprayed his face, and at one point a reef of earth gave way and half buried him. But he did not rescind his post. If Dad could spend thirteen years in a Pittsburgh coal mine, I can stand one night in a tunnel.
By four o’clock, he had advanced the tunnel by yards. The spittoon emptier waggled the clothesline, the signal to quit for the night, and he inched backwards until he could take a deep, albeit foul, breath of air once more. After caching their crude tools in the cellar, Harrison’s team climbed the rope ladder back up through the fireplace chute, painstakingly replaced the bricks and mortar to hide the hole, and threw soot on the surface to complete the effect before lugging the stove back into place in front of it.
Wearily, he returned to his patch of tobacco-stained floor, and eased down onto it. He was filthy with dirt, clay, soot, and rat feces, and smelled like it, too. Shoulders burning, back aching, hands and knees and elbows skinned and bruised, he fell deeply to sleep.
Thoughts of the tunnel consumed his waking hours, whenever he was not working on the Libby Chronicle or reading it to the men. He ate every bite of his skimpy, repulsive rations with one enduring thought—that every ounce of strength he could muster would further the tunnel’s progress.
Several nights later, however, the digging came to an abrupt halt when his shovel thudded against wood. Chisels and case knives were no match for it. Sick with disappointment, he backed out and motioned to his team to gather up in the kitchen. Their work in the tunnel was done.
“Timbers,” he told them, as soon as it was safe.
Hamilton groaned. “I’ll bet they’re a foot thick, each one of them. They must be the ones supporting the east warehouse.”
Two of the men growled that it was over, but Hamilton stayed them with gentling, downward movements of his hands. “We can remake the knives into miniature saws, with teeth. We will saw our way through. Our work is not yet done.”
By the time Harrison’s team took its next shift, Major Hamilton had transformed the knives into tiny cutting tools, and Teams B and C had already spent two nights using them to hack away at the wood. Harrison drew his breath deeply in the kitchen before descending into the cellar, and the tunnel for his turn.
After several hours and what seemed like infinite labor making thousands of cuts in the wood, he was digging in red clay once again. His lungs filled with hope—but not air. Nearly gasping for breath, he inched backward out of the tunnel and let Colonel Rose take his place. Once the rope was secured around the colonel’s ankle, Harrison crouched by the mouth of the tunnel and fanned air in after him. Silence pulsing in his ears, his shoulders and biceps burned from the effort, and his thighs ached, yet he would not slow his pace. Rose would suffocate if he did.
Rats skitt
ered across straw and the tops of Harrison’s feet. The spittoon whined on the clothesline. Straw rustled as the spittoon was emptied beneath it. These were the only sounds that broke the almost deafening quiet.
But then, something else. A trickle. Water? Harrison dropped to all fours and crawled halfway into the tunnel, straining his ears toward the distant echo. A gurgle, a gush, a gasping. He groped for the coil of rope snaking out from the darkness. Grasped it. Felt it jump like a fish in his hands. Snapped his fingers for the others to help, then heaved on the rope as hard and fast as he could. The fibers squeaked and creaked in their hands, and lengths of rope thudded in an invisible pile at their feet. Finally, Rose emerged, coughing and sucking at the air, soaked with icy water.
It was over for the night, again. Only this time, there would be no going back. Later, after Rose was dry and daylight had struggled in and out of Libby’s prison bars once more, he and Hamilton held a conference with the three work squads.
“We angled too steeply downward from the cellar to the sewer,” said Hamilton. “We dug below the level of the Kanawha Canal.”
Harrison blinked, looked around at the other men, reading fatigue and frustration in the lines of their faces. Waited for the verdict from Rose.
“The tunnel is of no further use to us and must be sealed. We must leave no trace of our work.”
“And then?” Harrison prodded, for he did not see defeat in Rose’s eyes.
“Then we begin again. On Tunnel Two.”
Grimly, Harrison thinned his lips and nodded.
Richmond, Virginia
Tuesday, January 5, 1864
I am not a slave. I am free. But either way, the work was the same for Bella Jamison. Inside the kitchen house, steam rose from her bucket of lye-laced water and filmed her face as she swirled undergarments with the handle of a broomstick.
Not that Sophie Kent had asked her to do it. In fact, she’d made it clear that Bella was a guest. She slept in the main house, and no labor was expected of her. But a three-day visit had stretched to thirty-six, with no end in sight. The sharp edges of her grief for Daphne had dulled to a fading ache. After all, up until recently Bella had lived without her for twenty years. She was used to her absence.
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