Spy of Richmond

by Jocelyn Green

  She was not used to living in Richmond, without her freedom. So Bella did what she had always done, in good times and bad. She worked and tried to tie her thoughts to the task at hand. Otherwise, they’d run away with her again. Snow whirled outside the window so thickly it blotted the house from view. Fire licked the pot Pearl had hung above it, and the simmering stew cloyed with the smell of Bella’s laundry. While Pearl turned dried apples into a pie, sixteen-year-old Emiline presided over her own bucket of rinse water for the laundry. Rachel, her older sister, scrubbed the dishes Pearl dirtied. Lois was cleaning in the main house.

  I am not a slave. But surrounded by women who were, Bella could almost feel the shackles of bondage on her ankles even now. Did they know they could be free? Did they even dream of it, or did they feel, as Daphne had, that slavery was their only path? That having a kind master or mistress was the best they could hope for?

  Bella tried to plunge her thoughts into the work before her, squeezing her broomstick as she stirred. But thoughts of her family bobbed stubbornly to the surface of her mind. Liberty, likely wondering where on earth Bella was and possibly upset with her for going at all. Abraham, beside himself that she was still in Richmond, desperate for her to leave. And Daphne, the twin sister she had come to save, now in heaven.

  Lord! Tears mingled with the warm mist on her cheeks. What am I doing here? Hooking her broom handle under a petticoat, Bella lifted it out of the water and let the excess drip off before dunking it into Emiline’s bucket for rinsing.

  Just then, the door opened and Sophie blew through it, snowflakes dusting her hair and shoulders. “Bella? You don’t have to do that.”

  “I don’t mind. Idle hands never suited me, anyhow.”

  Sophie nodded. “May I have a moment of your time? You have your cloak?”

  Emiline took Bella’s broom, and Bella reached for her cloak off the peg on the wall. Wrapping it around her shoulders, she followed Sophie back out to the main house.

  Once inside, they hung up their wraps, brushed the snow from their hair, and entered the library. Two armchairs faced the friendly fire, and Sophie motioned for Bella to be seated.

  “I need your help.” The words burst from her as soon as she sat down. “That is, if you are willing.”

  Take care of Miss Sophie. She needs you, Daphne had said. But Bella hadn’t promised. Still, “What kind of help you need?”

  “The kind that sets men—and women—free. Forever.”

  Outside Libby Prison, Richmond, Virginia,

  Wednesday, January 6, 1864

  Abraham’s nose wrinkled though he held his breath. Emptying pails of greasy kitchen slop into a giant vat on the back of a wagon on Canal Street was far better than moving corpses around, but it still never failed to turn his stomach. At least the cold subdued the stench. It also chilled him through his tattered, threadbare uniform. Snow piled over the tops of his shoes and seeped between the open seams, burning his feet and ankles.

  With a grunt, he lifted his pail and poured it into the waiting vat, turning his face to avoid being splashed.

  “Hello, Abraham.” Robert Ford tipped his hat in greeting, the reins of Dick Turner’s horse in his hand. “Any signs inside to confirm what I told you?”

  Abraham lowered his empty pail and rubbed the back of his neck. “Not yet, thank God.”

  Robert nodded, stroking the horse’s broad neck. Small clouds of breath hung in the air in front of the beast’s nose. “Only a matter of time.”

  “Abraham.”

  He turned. Saw Bella. And his stomach wrenched. Anger boiled in his veins that she now risked being seen by Turner again, and that he, her own husband, was powerless to protect her. The warden could do worse than strip and whip her. “What are you doing here?”

  “Something important.” Eyes burning, she flicked a glance toward Robert, but by now she knew it was safe to speak with him near. In an astonishing economy of words, she revealed her new role in Richmond. Though she did not use the word, she might as well have screamed that she was a spy, so loudly did it clang between his ears.

  “Miss Kent making you do this?”

  “Truth is, she tried for a few weeks to do it on her own. Said she didn’t want me to be at risk. But when she invited me to help in ways she can’t—like coming here and talking to you and Mr. Ford here—I was glad to say yes. It doesn’t suit me to do nothing, you know that.”

  “You’ll be killed if you aren’t careful.”

  “Didn’t stop you from enlisting.” Her voice was low, but steady. “You wanted to fight. Now so do I. This is how I can. With information.” Her staccato-style sentences were like bullets firing into his chest. “I won’t stay here idle, when I can help.”

  Her words jolted through him, an echo of his own argument. Abraham had wanted to join up to have a part in the war that would make men free. But Bella?

  “And if I say no?” he said.

  “You mean like I said no to your soldiering without pay?” A smile slanted on her lips, and he knew she wouldn’t back down, just as he had not. “We’re on the same side, Love. Work with me.”

  “You say you can get information to Butler?” Robert Ford jumped in.

  Bella nodded. The wind tugged her hair from beneath her head scarf and twirled it in front of her eyes, yet she didn’t seem to notice.

  “Then you tell him this.” Ford slid his hand over the horse’s nose again, smiling as he spoke, as if he was crooning his pet rather than passing intelligence. “Winder’s planning to remove to Georgia all the Federal prisoners. Butchers and bakers are to go at once. They are already notified and selected. Rebs are building batteries on the Danville road.” Ford clucked to his horse, and led him through the snow, leaving Bella and Abraham alone.

  “Georgia?” she asked, tone laced with apprehension. She’d been born a slave in Georgia, and grown up there until sold to a man in Virginia.

  “Looks like.” Georgia was also the place where Abraham’s regiment had joined with Montgomery’s for that awful raid on the town of Darien in June 1863. Aside from being too far from Union lines for escape, he’d be a tempting target for anyone in Georgia looking for vengeance for the burned-up town.

  A Confederate sentinel neared, and Abraham twitched his head toward the road. Go on.

  Without another word, Bella ducked her head and walked away. She was a spy, and there was nothing he could do to keep her safe. There was only one way she’d go back to Gettysburg now.

  I’ll have to take her there myself.

  Libby Prison, Richmond, Virginia

  Sunday, January 17, 1864

  Rebel guards are industriously engaged this week in making Libby a safer place, Harrison had reported in the Libby Chronicle on Friday. Wooden window bars are being replaced with those of iron as a deterrent to would-be burglars and thieves. The sarcastic story had drawn some chuckles from the prisoners, but the last laugh was on the Rebels. For in seeking to make Libby escape-proof, they had provided the tunnelers with the escape tools they needed most: a hatchet, an auger, and a piece of iron bar. Harrison and Colonel Rose had distracted the Rebel construction workers, while Major Hamilton darted in and out like a shadow to get the tools.

  A pale gloom slanted across the chimney bricks behind the kitchen stove. Though his hands were scraped raw from gripping their rough edges to pull them free from the wall, a smile lurked on Harrison’s face. It was the smile that would have worried his mother most—and she had been right to worry. Ever since he could remember, Harrison found trouble, and wallowed in it. But it all comes to rights in the end. Usually.

  Climbing down the rope ladder through the fireplace chute, Harrison braced himself for the night’s work. If it wasn’t for the choking stench of raw sewage, it would be easier to be grateful for the relative warmth of the east cellar. In the upper rooms, whether the windows were barred with wood or iron, they did nothing to keep out the gusts of wind and snow. Five inches of snow blanketed Richmond the first week of January, and
the temperatures hadn’t climbed above freezing since. By day, Libby prisoners watched ice skaters glide over the frozen James and thanked God that at least they were not in the prison on Belle Isle in the middle of the river, where thousands had no shelter but tents and ditches, and the skeletal forms of each other. By night, they shivered in their rags.

  Unless, of course, they were here, underground. After the first tunnel’s failure, Rose remained convinced their best route was still via the sewer. And he’d found a new one to try. A smaller sewer connected to the one large enough to walk through. It was toward this small sewer they dug, from the cellar’s southeast corner.

  Blindly, Harrison inched his way through Tunnel Two. When he found where last night’s workers had stopped, he set to work hacking at the hard, wet clay. He was getting quite good at it. Like father, like son. As a child, Harrison thought his coal miner father’s skin color was black. He was surprised one day to find it white beneath the soot, but the color never mattered. It was the same dad either way.

  Carefully, Harrison scooped the loosened dirt and clay into the spittoon and twanged the clothesline for it to be emptied. Again he clawed at the earth, and though his stomach protested the foul vapors filling the small space, he lasted longer in the tunnel than the rest of his team. Perhaps it was because it felt so good to be getting somewhere, even if it was only an inch at a time. Or perhaps it was because he felt closer to his father this way. When Ian Caldwell had died, Harrison’s mother, Christine, had done the only thing she could to survive—packed up Harrison and moved back to Philadelphia where she accepted a job teaching at her alma mater. Room and board were included of course, which made it a miraculous arrangement for her, and a nightmarish one for Harrison. His father and everything familiar had been stripped away almost all at once.

  At thirteen years old, all he wanted was his father. But since Ian was gone, male companionship of almost any sort would do. Instead, he found himself living at a female boarding school, surrounded by women. Christine tried to include him in her new teaching life as much as possible, but he’d rebelled against her, and against his own teachers at the public school. A boy needed his father. That was all. Harrison paused for a moment to rest his burning shoulder muscles, and thought of the countless boys, both North and South, who had become fatherless during the war. He rolled onto his back. Chest heaving for breath, he deliberately breathed through his nose to slow his pace. Whoever was working the fan at the tunnel’s mouth was doing the best he could. The air was simply scarce.

  Suddenly, dirt sprayed Harrison’s face from above. Earth shook down around him, filling his nose and mouth. The tunnel was caving. Writhing, thrashing, kicking, punching, he fought to break free of his tomb. God! He prayed but did not hope. He was being buried alive. Just like Dad. Drowning in dirt, he groped for the clothesline to signal for help.

  There. He grasped it. Plucked, pulled, shook, twanged. But spots burst upon his mind’s eye. His hand relaxed, and all he felt was dirt in his palm, between his fingers. It filled him and covered him, strangely comforting now, like a warm blanket. His mind unanchored, drifted, like a rudderless craft on a black sea, beneath a moonless, starless sky.

  Harrison was on the deck, pitching and rolling but seeing and hearing nothing. Stepped inside a coil of rope. It cinched around his ankle, knocking him off balance. In the next instant he was flat on his back, being dragged toward the edge of the deck. Was he being pulled overboard into a watery void? The fibers bit his skin. Pain flashed across his ankle and burned up his leg as the force of the pull seemed intent upon separating his foot from his limb. Then, nothing. Numbness overtook him completely.

  I am dreaming, he told himself, and settled into the soft folds of his slumber.

  Then rough hands shook him awake. Choking, retching, Harrison was in the stinking east cellar again.

  The next morning, Harrison and Colonel Rose awoke to a cluster of voices below the window. Peering down through the bars, Harrison saw immediately what had happened last night. But so did the Confederate sentinels, whose path skirted the cast-off brick furnace now tipped mysteriously into a hole outside the prison wall.

  “We dug directly beneath it!” Rose whispered, forgetting his oath of silence. Harrison quieted him with a stern gaze before daring to look down again. A knot of Rebel officers had joined the sentinels. Stamping their feet and rubbing their hands in the chill air, they discussed what may have caused the collapse beneath the massive weight.

  Hornets buzzed in Harrison’s stomach, and his limbs prickled with a thousand stings. They’d been found out. He held Rose’s horrified gaze as they listened intently to the snatches that filtered up to them.

  “Tunneling … river …”

  Harrison braced himself.

  “Rats.”

  “Rats,” someone said again. And again. Then once more.

  “Tunneling river rats.” The verdict.

  Colonel Rose wiped his hand over his broad face and down his beard, and Harrison almost laughed aloud in relief.

  Rose pointed out the window, then made a slashing motion across his neck. Harrison understood him fully. They’d need to seal off Tunnel Two. It would be far too dangerous to continue.

  Then Rose held up three fingers. Harrison nodded. Third time’s a charm.

  Libby Prison, Richmond, Virginia

  Monday, January 18, 1864

  Abraham felt the Rebel guard’s eyes on him as he unloaded crates of rations from the wagon on Canal Street. As he carried them into the prison and went back for more, he gave the sentry no reason to lift an eyebrow, let alone his trigger finger. He did what he was told to stay alive for Bella’s sake, just as he’d been doing for the last 120 days of captivity. He should be grateful he’d lasted this long.

  But that’s not enough. Not anymore. Abraham’s muscles pulled tight as he hefted another crate from the wagon and trudged through slush and snow, but his mind filled with Bella’s beautiful, serious face. And her back, already a latticework of scar tissue. She was twenty years old when they married, and he twenty-five, but in some ways, she had aged far more than he already. All that’s done now, Love, he’d told her as he kissed every ridge on her skin. You’re free. You’ll never know fear and pain again.

  It was a promise Abraham intended to keep, despite her new surge of principled patriotism. If it weren’t for him, she’d still be safe in Gettysburg. He would take her home, or die trying. Either way, she’d no longer be compelled to stay here.

  But how?

  Uncertainty needled him now like the sleet now pelting his face. Of the five white prisoners who had simply walked out the doors recently, four had been recaptured and were now in shackles in the dungeon. Black prisoners who attempted escape were lashed within an inch of their lives. Still, he could not stay here while Bella threw herself into peril.

  Forgetting himself for but a moment, he looked up—and straight into the eyes of Libby clerk Erasmus Ross. Inexplicably, the small man offered an odd little half smile and a nod. Confusion grooved Abraham’s brow, but he returned the nod before dropping his gaze to his chilled, sodden feet and shuffled back to the wagon for more.

  Lord, he prayed, wiping winter’s spit from his eyes. Show me the way.

  Richmond Theater, Richmond, Virginia

  Tuesday, January 19, 1864

  In the dark, with the actors onstage just as dim as the houselights, Lawrence laid his hand on Sophie’s knee. He leaned into her, his musk cologne thickening in her throat. “So the performance was guiltless of talent. At least we are together.” When his lips brushed her earlobe, she did not turn away from him. Allowing him to believe her heart was true to him was not as difficult as it had been a month ago.

  That worried her. Even if her deception with Lawrence was justified for a greater purpose, the unintended result was the same. Dishonesty had become commonplace. Soon she suspected it would be easy. She only prayed she could stop before lying became as natural as breathing. Sophie wasn’t ready to reject Law
rence yet, but neither did she want to grow comfortable with deception. After all, she mused, I’m supposed to repent of sin, not perfect it.

  On the stage before her, the curtains dropped, and the play was over. The lights flared, and the theater erupted in applause that was more than generous. When the clapping died down, however, a thunderous noise continued.

  Galloping. Just outside.

  Lawrence’s face pulled tight as he listened. Then his brow knitted together. Sophie heard it, too. Alarm bells. The tocsin on Capitol Square.

  “Come.” He grasped her hand and pulled her out of the gallery after him. Without stopping at the cloakroom, he hurried her outside.

  Mounted policemen and fire engine wagons roared past them, bells clanging. Pedestrians spilled from buildings and leaned from windows and balconies to see the commotion. Smoke peppered the air. Something was burning.

  “Clear the way!” cried a fireman en route. “The Davis house has been set ablaze!”

  The Confederate White House was only six blocks from the Richmond Theater. No flames leapt into the sky.

  Lawrence wrapped his arm around Sophie’s shivering shoulders. “Arson, I wager,” he said coldly. “May the criminal be caught and hanged.” He led her back inside and retrieved their cloaks.

  By the time they’d hailed a cab outside the theater, reports had already filtered back to them that the fire had been started in the Davises’ basement but discovered and contained before it could do much damage.

  “Could have been a slave,” Lawrence said over the rumble of the wheels beneath their seats. “I believe two Davis slaves ran away this month already. Perhaps another one decided to leave his calling card before making his escape.”