Swiping her pockmarked cheeks, Susan slogged up Church Hill through thick, damp air. She was exhausted, famished, filthy, and vexed that she had no idea if she’d be welcomed home. In fact, her father had made it clear she was never to return. She could only hope her reduced condition might invoke the necessary pity. By the time she reached the corner of Twenty-seventh and Franklin Streets, her nerves were buzzing like horseflies.
Susan knocked on the front door and waited to be greeted by Otto Fischer. When the door opened, however, it was as if she was looking at a younger version of herself. Blonde, curly hair. Creamy skin. A figure that would turn heads if she knew how to use it properly. But the eyes were green, like Susan’s stepmother, Eleanor, rather than Susan’s blue.
“Sophie.” Susan tried on a tight smile, and found it ill-fitting.
But Sophie frowned. “May I help you?”
Susan’s pride turned inside out. Her pocked skin and gaunt form had rendered her a stranger to her own sister.
Preston came to the door then, placing his hand on Sophie’s shoulder. “If you’re looking for lodging, ma’am, I’m afraid we’re not taking boarders. Good afternoon.” He moved to close the door, but she thrust her hand out to stop him.
“Daddy.”
His face went pale, his blue eyes narrow. They were Susan’s eyes. Surely he could see that, though the rest of her was altered beyond repair.
“Susan?” Sophie looked to Preston. “She’s been ill,” she whispered.
His cheeks reddened above his beard. “I told you never to come here again, and I meant it. Scars or not. I have but one daughter now, and she’s right here.” He wrapped his arm around Sophie’s shoulders, but Sophie shrugged out of his affection.
“You would not even listen to what she has to say?”
“The time for discussing ended years ago.” A scowl slashed his face as he peered over her shoulder. “Where’s your husband?”
“The foreign immigrant you forced me to marry right before he moved me away? That one?”
“Is there another?”
Susan snorted. Well played. “No. I have no husband.” She lifted her left hand to display her ringless finger. “Divorced me after I was ravaged by smallpox.” Utterly false. But the truth—that she had already been pregnant with another man’s baby when she wed, refused to consummate her marriage, annulled it, and left the baby with Noah to raise—why, that story was far less sympathetic.
Sophie gasped. “I’m so sorry. I thought he was an honorable man.”
Honor. A useless quality these days. Still, Susan attempted to appear grieved.
“Please,” Sophie said to their father, the one thing they had in common anymore. “She is the prodigal daughter, come home at last!”
Preston faced Susan then. “Prodigal daughter, eh?”
The title chafed and fell to the ground. Susan’s only regret was that she was reduced to beg shelter from her father. “I have nothing.” She spread her hands. “No means at all by which to support myself.”
“You never wanted to support yourself,” he hissed. “And you would not have had to if you had obeyed our rules.” His gaze shifted to scan the street behind her, and she knew exactly what he was thinking. Whatever will the neighbors think? She smirked at his obvious discomfort.
“Tongues will wag, Daddy.” And she pushed past him and into the home she had lived in from childhood, when he’d had it built with Eleanor’s money, their first house too full of the memory of Susan’s deceased mother for Preston’s comfort. “Where is Fischer, anyhow?”
A hint of color touched Sophie’s cheeks. “No longer employed here.”
Susan shrugged, then ambled into the parlor with confidence, as if she were the favored child she had been until Sophie had usurped her. The room was largely the same as when she’d left nine years ago. She’d been a child of nineteen then. Now she was a “ma’am,” not a “miss.”
“… can’t turn her out onto the street, not with crime and vice now so rampant in Richmond …” she heard Sophie say. The girl had a point.
“I don’t take up much room.”
Preston glowered. “Do you repent of your scandalous ways?”
If Susan knew what was good for her, she should grovel. Instead, she laughed. “‘Do you repent?’” she mocked him. “‘Do you recant?’ Come now, is this the Spanish Inquisition or is this a family? What was it you used to say? ‘There’s nothing more important than family.’ But oh, that’s right. What you meant to say was, ‘There’s nothing more important than the family name.’”
Sophie stepped backward, twisted her hands together. Susan smirked. “I forgot about that thing you do with your hands when you’re uncomfortable. Your mother did that, too. Where is Eleanor, by the way?”
Instantly, Sophie dropped her hands by her sides. Preston glared.
“Dead yet? Yes? Well, in any case, I should think having another family member come home would be welcome.”
Preston thrust his finger in Susan’s face, and she shrunk back instinctively. “You will never replace Eleanor, if that’s what you’re hinting at. Never. If you want to stay, you may do so as hired help. Earn your keep that way, save up, and be gone.”
Susan gasped, genuinely shocked. “Hired help? And I suppose I’d stay in the slave quarters on a pallet in the loft?”
“There happen to be two vacancies. Laundress and scrub maid. Lois and Pearl would be happy to have you.”
Susan inhaled sharply, and exhaled indignation like an atmosphere. “I will do no such thing!” Her voice trembled with barely restrained rage. “I will stay in this house with the same privileges as Sophie—”
“You forfeited the right nearly a decade ago.”
“I’ll stay here as your daughter, your firstborn child, born of your first beloved wife, or I will go out there and survive the only way I know how.” She pointed a bony finger toward the street. “As a woman of the night. I may be scarred, but what does that matter in the dark? And I will drag your precious family name through the vilest muck of the slums until neither of you are received by society again.” Her words boiled out of her. “Don’t think I won’t. As you already know, Daddy, I have a knack for creating scandal. And I’ve only gotten better at it.” Her lips curled with slippery satisfaction.
There now, she thought, quite comfortably. This smile was a perfect fit. It felt so good to win.
First Market, Richmond, Virginia
Tuesday, August 2, 1864
Beneath the bright and brassy sky, Bella zigzagged between carriages, horses, and piles of manure as she crossed Seventeenth Street on Franklin. She could barely breathe. Tears thickened in her throat as she immersed herself in the morning crowd streaming into the huge brick marketplace. Steaming from the recent rain, the building teemed with threadbare buyers orbiting hard-faced sellers. Pound of coffee, twenty dollars! Pound of sugar, ten dollars! Two quarts milk, five dollars! Two pounds rice, five dollars! Barrel of flour, four hundred dollars! Their clamor was nothing compared to Harrison’s voice still clanging in her ears.
News from Pennsylvania, he’d told her last night. The lines framing his mouth, his hand on her arm had raised the hair on her neck. Chambersburg. Twenty-five miles west of Liberty and Silas in Gettysburg. Confederate raiders burned the town for failure to pay the Rebels $500,000 in U.S. currency or $100,000 in gold. The only civilian who died was an elderly Negro, Harrison said. But the citizens were so enraged they killed five Rebel soldiers themselves.
Liberty was fine, Harrison had suggested, though his brown eyes were dark with concern. He was likely right. But danger had come too close. How could the Union have allowed this to happen, little more than a year after the battle of Gettysburg ripped through their lives and homes? Who could say that it wouldn’t happen again? There is no safe place. Not here, not in Pennsylvania. Sweat itched beneath Bella’s head scarf. All the more reason to bring down the Confederacy from the inside.
Bella’s face hardened with resolve even as
she traded a thick stack of Confederate dollars for a quart of white beans, one of new potatoes, and a bushel of cornmeal.
Her errand complete, she pushed her way out of the stalls, and found Edith Taylor with a basket over her arm.
“Good morning, Edith! How is your husband?” John Taylor was the freeman Tredegar employee who, along with his wife, Edith, were the conduits of communication between Abraham and Bella.
“Just fine, just fine.” Edith smiled, but did not reach for any note tucked inside her apron pocket.
Bella deflated. “No word from Abraham, then?” It had been weeks.
“And there won’t be, neither, I guess.”
“What?” Bella’s pulse trotted. “Why?”
“John says he’s gone. Transferred to Columbia furnace on the border of West Virginny.” She dropped her voice as she shifted her market basket to her other arm. “Reckon he’ll run? Without you?”
Bella had no idea.
Mechanics Hall, Richmond, Virginia
Tuesday, August 2, 1864
Stifling a yawn, Harrison Caldwell bent over his work in the cramped space outside Secretary of War Seddon’s office. He was grateful to be out of the trenches, but now he was buried in clerical work following the Departmental Battalion’s recent, albeit brief, deployment. Nearby, Richmonders and refugees strolled through Capitol Square before the sun burned off the morning haze. Turning his gaze from the streaked windows of Mechanics Hall, Harrison fought through a haze of his own. The day they returned to the city, the battle of the Crater had been fought at Petersburg, just south of them. That was two days ago, and Harrison’s ears were ringing still. The quake of battle yet thrummed in his veins, along with the roar of the fire he imagined he could hear all the way from Chambersburg. Will this cursed war never end?
Sighing, he turned his attention to the letter in his hand. It was from Isaac Carrington, the provost marshal of Richmond since General Winder had gone to Georgia to command Andersonville, the prison camp at Camp Sumter. Carrington was also a habeas corpus commissioner, empowered by the War Department to investigate cases of citizens charged with disloyalty and held in Castle Thunder. As such, he sent his reports to Secretary of War Seddon, Harrison’s boss.
If the reports did not hold such power over the imprisoned, Harrison would call them laughable. They were mere notes, and not all well-written. Seddon did not require the commissioners to record testimonies, from the imprisoned or witnesses, so no story was complete. They were ordered to report their findings, but given no deadline and no uniform categories of information to collect. There was no requirement that every prisoner be reported on and no penalties for failing to report, lost reports, or inaccurate reports. Commissioners could recommend a prisoner be set free, but their greatest power was in simply not recommending freedom. It was tantamount to a sentence lasting for the duration of the war.
Rubbing his hand over his face, Harrison scanned Carrington’s letter now and was relieved to read that Dr. Mary Walker, the Union surgeon imprisoned in April, would be released this month. Sophie would be especially glad of that.
Next, there was a list of prisoners, long overdue, along with the charges. Harrison’s brow knitted. Beside one out of every ten names was the simple phrase: Union man. Below the list, more notes from Carrington, this time on the case of one John Miller from Henry County, Virginia. Arrested for saying he wished the Yankees would invade the county, that he would not help the Southern cause, and that he wished every secessionist was hanged. “No case can be made in court for the utterance of the Treasonable language imputed to the prisoner,” Carrington wrote. But, he added, “It is inexpedient to allow men who utter such sentiments to go at large during the present crisis.”
Dread snaked through Harrison. If Miller would remain in Castle Thunder for his words, what would they do to Harrison if he was discovered? When, he corrected himself. When I’m discovered. For surely, it was only a matter of time. And he already knew what they would do to him.
Folding the papers into thirds, he slipped them back into their envelope and printed a brief description of the contents for Secretary Seddon on the outside of it. After tossing it into a basket on the corner of his table, he picked up the next piece of correspondence addressed to the Secretary and opened it. Scanned the script. And read it again. Cold alarm coursed through him.
I submit that the person of Sophie Kent, 27th and Franklin Streets, be a subject of investigation on charges of disloyalty. She is a known abolitionist, and favors the Union, as her previous activities at Libby Prison indicate, though she has since ceased. She is a danger to the security of the Confederacy and as such, should be locked away.
Harrison turned the paper over and studied the envelope but could not find a signature. The accusing words were written in bold, slashing strokes. A man’s hand. But who? Lawrence Russell knew Harrison worked for Seddon. Would he dare send a note across his desk?
Quietly, Harrison folded the charge and stuffed it, along with its envelope, into his trousers pocket, where it burned against his thigh until he went home for the night and watched it burn to ashes.
If it had landed on a different clerk’s desk … Harrison shuddered. Then a sickening realization hit him in the gut. Just what do you suppose will happen next time you’re called to the trenches?
Kent House, Richmond, Virginia
Wednesday, August 3, 1864
Sophie brushed out her hair for the night and wondered how long Susan would hover over her. Her questions about Eleanor’s death had not been welcome. Sophie’s answers had been truthful, but brief enough that they raised Susan’s eyebrows.
“You’ve grown into a beautiful woman, Sophie.” A smile slithered across her face. “It’s all right, I know you can’t say the same about me.” Her laughter prickled Sophie’s skin.
“I’m so sorry you went through all of that.”
“Not nearly as sorry as I am.”
Sophie set down her brush and began plaiting her hair. Nothing she said to her sister seemed to satisfy.
“Your suitor—Oliver, is it?” She wrinkled her nose. “Not really a masculine name, is it? No matter. He’s handsome enough, I suppose. He must be quite a man for Daddy to have him stay here. He told me you weren’t taking boarders, remember? He was ready to turn me out straight away. And yet Oliver Shaw is just downstairs, staying in our home as comfortable as you please. Clearly, Daddy is as smitten with him as Oliver is smitten with you.”
Sophie’s gaze darted to her sister’s for a moment, wondering what game she was playing.
“It’s adorable. You two must be very happy together. Do you love him?”
“Yes.”
“And he loves you?”
“So he says,” Sophie murmured, “and I believe him.”
“Marvelous. It shows, really. You have nothing to worry about on that account.”
Sophie frowned as she tied a ribbon around the end of her braid. “Why should I worry?”
Susan’s eyebrows spiked into her pockmarked brow. “You shouldn’t! Didn’t I just say that? My, what a lovely locket you wear. Here, let me help you take it off for bed.”
“No, thank you.” Her hand went instinctively to the oval silver pendant that encased Elizabeth’s cipher.
“You sleep with your jewelry on? The chain will kink, you know.” She clucked her tongue and shook her head, as though she was really concerned.
“It’s fine. Do you mind, Susan? I’m exhausted.” Spreading open the mosquito net draped over her bed, she climbed inside, tied the linen strips to close the net, and pulled the sheet to her chin.
“It must be a gift then, for you to guard it so carefully. From Oliver? Come now, you can tell me. I’m very good at keeping secrets.”
I’m better. “Good night, Susan.” And she rolled onto her side, toward the wall.
Kent House, Richmond, Virginia
Monday, August 15, 1864
The front door slammed behind Susan as she stormed out onto the porc
h, unable to endure the sticky sweetness between Oliver and Sophie. How had she managed to catch him? Though she’d never admit as much to her little sister, he was actually quite charming. His lean frame, which everyone had these days, was not skinny by any means, but defined with hard, muscular curves, thanks to his labor in the city’s fortifications. To have a man like that wrap his arms around her just once more … Susan’s face scorched with anger. It would never happen again.
Exhaling her frustration, she leaned against a pillar and looked out over Church Hill. Fireflies blinked their yellow lights, and wind rustled through dogwood and magnolia trees. The shadows agreed with Susan. This is where I belong. Alone, and in the dark.
A branch snapped just beyond the porch. She wasn’t alone, after all. “Who’s there?” She marched down the stairs, in the mood to pick a fight. “Show yourself!”
A man’s silhouette came into view. Slowly. Unthreatening. Susan could handle herself with a man, especially in the dark.
“What are you doing here? This is private property, you know.” She moved closer to him, joining his shadow beneath the tree.
“Forgive me—do you live here?” he asked.
“Of course I do.”
“Are you—family? Your voice sounds so much like Sophie’s.”
She squinted up at his face, unable to make out his features. Good. Then he’d be unable to see her scars.
“I’m her sister, not that I had any say in the matter. Susan. Who are you?”
He removed his hat and bowed to her. A charming gesture. One she’d not been paid in quite some time. “You have a quarrel with her?”
“I might.” She crossed her arms. “You still haven’t told me who you are.”
“Captain Lawrence Russell. Charmed, I’m sure. And if I could see well enough to find your hand, I’d kiss it.”
Spy of Richmond Page 29