Remarkably, Lawrence did. Sophie’s mind whirred. Does Harrison really intend to stay in Richmond indefinitely? What other aim could he have, if not to spy? Visions of Spencer Kellogg swaying from the end of his rope assaulted her mind. She may have been able to avoid suspicion thus far, but Harrison—if anyone tried looking into the background of Oliver Shaw, they would come up with precious little, or none at all.
Sophie’s appetite fled as worry knotted her stomach. For the rest of the meal, she quietly sipped her water and matched the expressions on the faces around her, though her eyes did not want to shine, and her lips would rather not flatter. All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players …
After dinner, Mrs. Blair kissed Sophie’s cheek in farewell and returned to her home, but the evening was not yet over. In the parlor, with both Harrison and her father as the audience, Sophie could scarcely act the part of Lawrence’s beloved. How could she pretend to be moved by empty compliments when the man she longed for was in the same room? By the time Preston retired to his chamber, Sophie claimed a headache and bid Lawrence a hasty goodnight. A sigh deflated her as she locked the door after him.
“Sophie.”
Face warming immediately to Harrison’s voice, she followed him into the library, and he closed the door but for a few inches.
“Harrison, what are you doing?”
He grasped her hands in his and pulled her deeper into the room. “The same as you.” Flecks of gold glinted in his shining brown eyes. “We are both perfectly positioned, especially if I get the clerkship in the War Department. But your performance with Lawrence Russell was sorely lacking tonight.”
She wriggled free of his grip and dropped her hands into the taffeta folds billowing from her waist. “What?” Her eyes narrowed.
“There it is.” Maddeningly, he chuckled. “I could feel that icy blast coming from your direction even from where I was sitting. Did you hear what he said as he stood to leave?”
A bit too chilly in here for my taste. But, “I don’t love him.” Wetness lined her lashes as she walked away, leaning on the marble mantel above the fireplace. “You already knew that.” You already know who I love.
“But you must not lose him.”
Sophie rounded on him. “I remember a time not so very long ago when you couldn’t understand why I was seeing him at all.”
“I don’t like it. I despise it. But I understand why it must be so. There is a difference.” He gentled his tone. “If you continue to be cold toward his affections, he’ll grow suspicious of either you or of me. Either way, the result could be disastrous.”
“My heart—” She crushed the lace of her neckline beneath her palm. “My heart won’t lie. I don’t want him.” I want you. Surely she did not need to say it.
Harrison’s resolve faltered as she stepped toward him, the dying fire behind her casting a halo around her golden hair. “He must believe you do. At least, for now. Try.”
“How can you ask this of me?”
“Come now, it’s simple. If he smiles at you, return it.” He grinned, and slowly, her lips curved winsomely.
“Good. When he reaches for you, don’t stiffen or pull away.” Harrison wrapped his hand around the hollow of her waist, and with only the slightest pressure, she melted toward him, smelling of roses and violet water.
“If he lifts your face to meet his, make him believe you want him to kiss you. Can you do that?” He tipped her chin with his forefinger, and she looked at him with such pleading, his lesson stalled in his tightening chest. Her eyelids drifted closed, her lips parted slightly, and she warmed beneath his touch. Suddenly he was no longer a spy training another, but a man holding a breathtakingly beautiful woman, with no one else around. Not just any woman. Sophie.
Quickly, he released her, passed his hand over his jaw. “That’s, um, convincing. Well done.”
Crimson flooded her cheeks. “I’m not so expert an actress,” she whispered.
Harrison lifted the sash on the window and let the cool spring air sweep him back to his good senses. When he turned around, Sophie’s hand was on the doorknob.
“Sophie, wait.”
She turned, and he could see in her eyes how much he’d hurt her.
“I don’t know if this will make things easier or harder, but I can’t let you walk away wondering where we stand.” He sighed. “Could you come back in the room please?”
She plopped into an armchair and folded her hands in a pool of twilight taffeta.
He sat opposite her. “I hate seeing you with another man. I ache to fold you in my arms and kiss you the way you deserve to be kissed, Sophie. But if I do, I can’t imagine sharing you with Russell again, and it won’t make playing the part of his lover any easier for you either. And—perhaps it’s my mother’s training all those years while I lived with her at the boarding school, but I insist on asking your father’s permission to court you properly. I won’t be content stealing moments in the shadows. Only, the timing isn’t right yet.”
“How can I pretend to give Lawrence my whole heart when it has belonged to another for more than five years?” Tears glittered in her eyes, and Harrison hated that he had put them there.
Rising again from his chair, he paced the room to keep from taking her in his arms. He studied the giant peonies blooming beneath his tortured tread. “Then I must return to you the larger portion—at least for now—that you may have enough to share with Lawrence. He will know, Sophie. A man knows when he’s being lied to by his lover. Already he eyes me with distrust. He must not turn on you as well.” He rested his hand on the wing of the chair, and gauged her reaction.
“So.” She swallowed, spine ramrod straight, then hit him with her flashing green gaze. “You and I live in the same house. Spy for the same cause. You feed me your intelligence, and I will send it, along with mine, to Elizabeth Van Lew.”
“Yes. There will be a time for us later. But for now, we work. For the reunification of the nation, yes, but even more, for Bella and Abraham, Lois and Pearl. For millions of souls in bondage today, and the millions of future generations who will be shackled if the Union fails.”
Her face transformed into a mask of firm resolve as she stood. “Yes. For this, we work. We must not fail.”
“We won’t.” As he bade her good night, electricity charging in the air between them, he prayed it would not take long.
Tredegar Iron Works, Richmond, Virginia
Monday, April 4, 1864
At the end of another ten-hour day, Abraham Jamison mopped the sweat from his face and silently cursed his fate. He should have rejoined his own regiment by now. His hands ached to caress his wife and itched to fire his rifle. Instead, they blistered and calloused around the hammer as he beat out heavy iron bands used to reinforce the breeches of Confederate cannon. Being in prison was one thing, he thought, visions of Libby snaking through him. But being forced to labor for the cause that upholds slavery … Words were simply too weak to match his abhorrence. His only solace was that the materials were of substandard quality. And so was his work—at least, as often as he could get away with it.
Mud cushioned Abraham’s footsteps as he left the blacksmith shop jutting into the James River. But the same wind that cooled his sweat-filmed body would dry out the roads soon enough, and the spring’s campaigns would begin. Barely suppressing a groan, he squeezed the burn in his right shoulder and circled his arm to loosen the tightness in his muscles. It would take some time to work back up to his previous blacksmithing physique. If he was lucky, however, he’d be long gone before that happened.
Turning his back to the river’s smooth opal shine, he lifted his gaze above his fellow laborers coming out of the shops and foundries, and scanned the wooded hills against which the city’s spires bristled. They were covered with the lime-green haze of tree branches studded with buds of unopened leaves. His hope was cocooned just as tightly but with little promise of unfurling. Bella was still in Richmond, yet so out of reach sh
e may as well have been in Georgia. Without a pass, she could not come to the iron works, and he was not allowed to leave.
A heavy step announced the approach of another worker. Abraham turned to find John Taylor, a free Negro who worked in the gun foundry, on his way out for the night. “Well, Jamison, does the work suit?” His smile gleamed.
Abraham grunted. “Work’s fine. Location, though—” He shook his head. “Not my first choice.”
“Mm-hmm. If I didn’t have family here, I’d put in for a transfer to one of the furnaces west of here. For the scenery, of course.” He winked. “Now that the shipment of corn is here from Georgia, they’ll be in blast again and needing hands.”
“West of here, you said?” Abraham asked.
“I did. There’s a few south of Winchester, one of which is right on the border of West Virginia. Then there’s a whole slew of them west of Lynchburg, too. Also within riding distance of freedom.”
“Are they not concerned about danger from Union troops?”
Taylor shrugged. “It’s been the Rebel cavalry stirring up most of the trouble so far. Those furnaces were in place before the western part of Virginia seceded from us. They may be concerned about Yankees, but the furnaces won’t be moved on account of it.” He tipped his hat.
Abraham reached out and touched his arm. “Your wife. Does she go to market?”
“She does that. She’s the assistant cook for her mistress—leastwise, until I can buy her freedom.”
“Do you reckon she’d pass a note to my wife there for me?”
Taylor reckoned she would.
Castle Thunder, Richmond, Virginia
Thursday, April 21, 1864
Spring arrived in Richmond with the fanfare one would expect from a city that did nothing by halves. Cherry trees and dogwoods bloomed pink and white, while live oaks draped moss and shade over streets that never emptied. Roses rambled, wisteria climbed, and azaleas spilled between the iron fence rails marking the officers’ residences. All other fences—including the Kents’—had been removed and made into cannon.
At Castle Thunder, however, the only beauty was in the flaming marigold sunset and the river it turned to gold, just below Canal Street. West of Libby Prison, the Castle was the political prison for spies, refractory Confederate soldiers, deserters, and any civilians considered suspicious or disloyal. Inmates were routinely hanged by their thumbs, whipped, and “bucked” with a board threaded between bent knees and elbows.
“There she is.” Preston pointed to a woman in man’s clothing, being escorted between two of Winder’s detectives at the head of a raucous crowd of Negroes and white boys. “Ready? We must get this to the printer straight off for it to go in tomorrow’s paper.”
Sophie scribbled her pencil over her foolscap pad as Preston dictated the story:
Female Yankee Surgeon.—The female Yankee surgeon captured by our pickets a short time since, in the neighborhood of the army of Tennessee, was received in this city yesterday evening, and sent to the Castle in the charge of a detective. Her appearance on the street in full male costume, with the exception of a gipsey hat, created quite an excitement amongst the idle negroes and boys who followed and surrounded her. She gave her name as Dr. Mary E. Walker, and declared that she had been captured on neutral ground. She was dressed in black pants and black or dark talma or paletot. She was consigned to the female ward of Castle Thunder, there being no accommodations at the Libby for prisoners of her sex.
Sophie looked up, squinting up at the three-story brick structure and tried to imagine what the female ward must be like.
“We must not omit to add that she is ugly and skinny, and apparently above thirty years of age.”
She looked at Preston, to see if he was jesting. Mary Walker was frayed at the edges, and in need of a good bath, but certainly not ugly or skinny.
“Write it, please. ‘We must not omit to add that she is ugly and skinny—”
“I remember,” she muttered, and added the line to his report. She could not afford to question him.
Preston steered her away from the crowd and set them on the path toward the Examiner’s office. “Between you and me, Goldilocks, that woman is a mockery to her sex, and an outright spy. There’s no such thing as a female surgeon.”
Dr. Walker was lucky Preston did not add this to his report, as well. “So you think she’s lying.”
“Isn’t that what spies do best?” His smile sent a shiver down her spine as cardinals trilled above them. “She should hang with the lot of them. Coming from Tennessee, she’s probably got more information about our troop strength and positions tucked away in her little head than any of us realize. Can’t let that kind of information get North.”
Sophie nodded. “Of course not.”
A week later, in the privacy of her chamber, secrets swarmed in Sophie’s mind. Soldiers marched outside on Franklin Street as they had day and night lately, amassing under General Lee. Her head ached as she encrypted the news she’d gathered into the code of numbers and letters. Bella had managed to communicate with Dr. Mary Walker through the fence around the prison yard while the floors were being swabbed, and extracted the very information Preston Kent was right to fear she had. The woman surgeon was no spy. But her recollections of her journey were valuable, indeed.
Abraham had managed to inform Bella of the critical furnaces near the border with West Virginia. A Union cavalry raid can destroy equipment and allow for the slave laborers there to escape, inflicting further damage on the Confederate quest for iron.
Harrison, now firmly in place as a clerk in the War Department, had added his own intelligence. Longstreet’s Corps is joining Lee’s army. The Commissary General’s estimates for the next six months are for four hundred thousand men.
By the time Sophie passed the missive to Bella to tuck inside her hollow egg, her hand was cramped and smudged with ink, her heart sore from its own tug-of-war. Deceiving those around her needled her—and for this she was grateful. But the more intelligence she fed Elizabeth Van Lew, the more the war invaded her dreams, just as it had invaded her city.
Once Franklin Street emptied of its soldiers, her feet carried her to Mrs. Blair’s doorstep, as they so often did after she coded a message. Knitting for Joel and Asher—for Madeline’s hands ached with the change of seasons—calmed her.
Hollywood Cemetery, Richmond, Virginia
Friday, May 13, 1864
For the second time in two weeks, Lawrence Russell stood in dress uniform next to Sophie, again in black, at Hollywood Cemetery. On May 1, President Jefferson and Varina Davis had laid to rest the body of their five-year-old son Joseph, who had fallen to his death from a balcony. Today Confederate General J. E. B. Stuart was buried. Grimly, Lawrence wondered who would be next, and if blue skies and songbirds would mock the Confederacy’s losses forever as they did right now.
A knot formed in his gut as Lawrence considered the great men the South had already lost. Would any of them still be alive if the cannons had not been faulty? If the guns and ammunition had been produced in sufficient supply? These were questions without answers, but as an officer of the Ordnance Bureau, he could not shove them from his mind. How often had General Lee complained of cannons bursting, how much had he begged for more weapons, and those of better aim?
Lawrence shook his head and cast his gaze toward the James River wending its way lethargically along the south edge of the cemetery. Wind sighed through holly trees and brought the pinch of freshly turned earth to his nose. At least the tocsin did not sound today, as it had so often this month. The Yankees had two hundred thousand in Virginia now. The Rebels, but little over half that number. Whatever control Lawrence once felt over his life and the things he held dear was slipping through his hands like water, leaving a residue of helplessness behind. He despised it.
Instinctively, he reached for Sophie’s hand and held it fast. He would not lose her, as he had lost Juliet. Beneath her ostrich-plumed hat, the sun lit her narrowed green ey
es—until a shadow covered her face, and they widened in obvious relief.
Shaw. Lawrence studied the reporter-turned-clerk who had just stepped into the ray of light to block it from Sophie’s eyes. Curious fellow, that one. Congenial, intelligent, and clearly a favorite of Mr. Kent’s, to Lawrence’s irritation. But at the last two parties, Lawrence noticed that Shaw either danced with every woman save Sophie or bowed out completely, refusing to dance at all. And yet, he would block an unwanted glare from her face. Or close a window if she shuddered. Or lift the sash at the flutter of her fan. Lawrence had even caught him sending a slave to her with a glass of water if Sophie so much as licked her lips across a crowded room.
And he got nothing in return. Fool. It was almost pitiful. Did he yearn for Sophie with unrequited love, or did he just have an overgrown sense of chivalry? No matter. Sophie belonged to Lawrence. She confirmed it every time she listened to him share about his woes at the bureau or his concerns about the war. Juliet would have been bored to tears, but Sophie clung to every word he said. Her heart—and her lips—were his alone. As the earth rocked and shuddered beneath his worn-out boots, it was the one thing Lawrence knew to be true.
Slipping his hand into his pocket, his fingers curled around the engagement ring that waited for Sophie’s finger. The ring Juliet rejected. Lately, the timing hadn’t been right for a proposal. But soon it would be. And then he’d have Sophie for the rest of his life.
Kent House, Richmond, Virginia
Tuesday, May 31, 1864
Harrison knocked on the doorframe to the library, but when Sophie did not look up, he quietly entered anyway. She was bent over the desk, winding a strand of blonde hair around her left forefinger while her right hand suspended a pencil above a book.
“What are you reading?” he asked as he approached.
She startled, then leaned back in her chair. “Writing,” she said. “The question is, what am I writing in the margins of the page—since I save the good paper for the final drafts—and the answer is ‘absolutely nothing.’”
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