Capitol Square, Richmond, Virginia
Saturday, October 22, 1864
“Well?”
Susan bristled at Lawrence Russell’s biting tone. “You catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar.” She pouted out of habit, though at this time of night he couldn’t make out her face anyway. Just the way I want it.
He sighed, rubbing at a muscle in his jaw. “You can have no idea how tired I am of this cat-and-mouse charade. None!”
Susan’s chin thrust high in the air. She withdrew Sophie’s papers from inside her cloak, and instantly, he was transformed. Spellbound, even. With her.
“Please tell me that’s something I can use.”
“What if it is?”
“I’ll be grateful.”
“How grateful?”
“Appropriately so.” He reached out and took her hand, removed the glove fingertip by fingertip and pressed a whiskery kiss inside her palm. A thrill swept through her like fire through dry brush. She wanted more. And she knew how to get it. Suddenly, not finding the mysterious folded-up paper from inside the locket did not seem so bad.
“I have nine pages here, Lawrence. Each one full to the edges with anti-slavery, anti-secessionist ravings written in Sophie’s own hand.”
He stretched out his open hand.
“Something for nothing? I don’t think so.”
A low rumble of laughter told her he caught her meaning. “Hard to believe you and Sophie are related sometimes. But I like your style.” He leaned in and swayed his lips against hers, the only part of her face that was free from dimply scars.
Heart prancing with wild delight, she handed him one page, as promised.
He kissed her again, and got another.
And another, and again, until all nine pages were within his hands, and Susan’s lips were hot from his kisses. That she’d had to pay for each one mattered not at all. She’d gotten what she wanted from him, as he had from her. Yet somehow, she realized despondently, she felt as empty as a tomb.
The game was over. She’d betrayed her sister. Quietly, she bade him goodbye.
“Not so fast.” He grabbed her hand and hooked it through the crook of his elbow. “Let’s just see what I paid for, shall we?”
As soon as she realized he was leading her toward the sputtering gaslight, she struggled against his hold. “No tricks, I promise, just let me go.” Her voice was remarkably restrained for the alarm whipping through her spirit.
“Why so anxious to be off?” He pulled her into the pool of light, and she turned her head away, shame coursing through her. Thankfully, he only had eyes for the pages she’d given him. “Marvelous,” he muttered. “Absolutely marvelous! How did you do it?”
In that thin moment of approval, she forgot herself and looked at him, to see clearly the man she had kissed. He was more handsome than she imagined, and in his eyes, she read joy.
Then horror. He was horrified, by her face.
Mortification gripped her, shook her, paralyzed her.
“Ugh!” he yelled, face twisting in obvious revulsion. People turned to stare. “No wonder you wanted to only meet in the dark!” His words hit her like dung.
Hatred surged into every corner of her being. “How dare you!” she screamed, not caring if her shrill voice caused a stir. It was what she was best at, after all. Susan sprang forward, snatched the papers out of his hands, wheeled around, and ran. No one could humiliate her like that and expect to get away with it. No one.
Kent House, Richmond, Virginia
Tuesday, October 25, 1864
Six days, Sophie mused as she smoothed out Elizabeth’s grid on the writing desk. Her body had been racked by a dangerously high fever for six days, Bella had said. Sophie could not recall a single one of them. Bella had safeguarded the cipher, if not the locket, but the necklace was a small price to pay for the quinine. The medicine that had failed to save Daphne had saved Sophie’s life instead.
But there was no time for protracted convalescence. It was time to work. Bella had learned from the Van Lew slaves that the investigation of Elizabeth had ended for lack of hard evidence against her. She was still the funnel through which intelligence reached Sharpe. And Sophie was still one of her main informants. The Confederate Congress was debating whether to conscript and grant freedom to slaves, Bella had told her tonight. The Federals would want to know about it. Sophie dipped the nib of her pen in the inkwell, and suspended it above her paper while she referred to the cipher.
Something was wrong.
She laid down her pen and held the cipher flat with one hand. With her right forefinger, she pinned a letter down onto the grid.
It jumped. Right out of its square.
Astonished, Sophie jerked back, then leaned forward and watched as the lines and circles jumped around on the paper like fleas, one hopping over another. She shook her head, rubbed her eyes, squinted again. The letters wiggled in their boxes, changing shape.
Her gut twisted. Breath shortened. This can’t be happening. I must be dreaming. But she wasn’t. Frantically, she grabbed her Bible and opened to where the psalms should be, searching for comfort, or wisdom, or truth.
She couldn’t read a thing. The letters danced on the page in drunken revelry, and would not, could not be tamed. If it were not a holy book she would have thrown it against the wall. She picked up Les Miserables, and couldn’t read that either. Great Expectations. North and South. Soon her floor was littered with open books she could not read. Panic rose, the room spun. Was this how it began for Mother? A silver blade flashed in memory’s eye. A scream. A slice. An arc of blood. Sophie grabbed the scar on her wrist.
A knock on her door and she jumped.
“Sophie?” Harrison’s voice.
She ran to meet him in the doorway, nearly fell upon his neck. Her feet left the floor as he picked her up in a fierce embrace. “Bella said you were so ill,” he said. “But the quinine saved you. And I wasn’t here for you. If I had lost you …”
“But Harrison,” she whispered desperately, tears spilling down her cheeks. “I’m losing my mind!”
Days passed, and still she could not read or write. Preston learned of it right away, since it halted her ability to assist him. She read in his eyes and heard in his voice the terror she kept barely contained. In whispered conference with Pearl, he ordered her treatment. She drank whatever was given her, until mercifully, she barely did anything but sleep.
Voices drifted in and out of her consciousness, and every once in a while, she was aware of the pull of a brush through her hair. Hands turning her onto her back. Damp, cold cloths across her forehead—but these she brushed off as quickly as they came, for they felt like the hands of the dead being laid across her skin. Why, why were they here? Had she killed them somehow, though she only ever wanted to stop the bloodletting by helping to end the war? If they were ghosts of Rebel soldiers killed by information she had passed, or of Union soldiers, killed by faulty intelligence she fed them, she should not have been surprised. If losing the ability to read and write was her punishment, Sophie would pray she could accept it. Salty tears slid down to her lips. She did not bother to lick them away.
“More laudanum,” Sophie heard her father say from somewhere beyond the fog. “Give her more laudanum. Do not hold back.”
“Yes, Massa.” An unattached voice.
“I will not stand to lose her the way I lost her mother, do you understand me? If she awakes, give her laudanum!”
Sophie rolled onto her side, grabbed a bedpan, and retched into it. She could not become her mother.
But Daughter, you’ve already begun.
Eleanor appeared before Sophie as she had at the end, her eerie smile just one more slit on her body among dozens of scabbed-over slashes. Too much blood, she’d said. Bad humors. Let them out, you must let them out.
“No,” Sophie said to the vapor in her mind. But her mother’s voice was so loud, she cringed.
Why yes, of course, it’s better this
way, dear. Now the blood on our hands is our own. The blood on your hands is your own.
Sophie brought her hands to her face and saw curtains of blood flowing from the slits on her wrists. A scream ripped from her throat, wrenching her back to consciousness. Breathless, crying, she wiped her hands on her sheets before daring to look at them. They were dry. She was whole. Just one little scar on her wrist, and that not of her own making. Yes, she was thinking clearly now. She’d only been taking the knife from her mother. It was an accident.
Is that how you saw it, Dear? I’m so glad.
“See how wildly she stares!”
“More laudanum!”
And Sophie drank what they brought to her lips. Her mind retreated from itself, her tortured thoughts buried like a twisted sheet beneath a thickly padded quilt. Voices seemed shrouded in bolts of batting. Meaning was severed from their sound.
Eventually, words worked their way through the batting. “How are you today?”
“I am mad,” she would reply without looking at the one who hovered near. How odd, that she should feel so calm.
Across the parlor from Susan, Preston’s cigar smoke puffed from behind the newspaper he held in front of his face, though surely his eyes were too weak to read it. With a stab, she wondered if he was deliberately ignoring her.
Nearly two weeks had passed since Susan had snatched the evidence of Sophie’s disloyalty from the greedy hands of Lawrence Russell. It burned within her possession, still, as she carefully considered her next move. If she showed it to her father, would it drive a wedge between him and Sophie? Or would he condemn Susan as a conniving, bitter woman bent on spreading malicious lies out of spite? Susan had feared it would be the latter.
No matter. With Sophie ill, she need not take the risk of exposing her. By the simple process of elimination, her father’s affections must turn toward Susan once again. Sheer loneliness—or at least nostalgia—ought to soften him at least a trifle toward her. And it wouldn’t hurt anyone if I were to file down my edges, too.
She cleared her throat. “Daddy, may I read that to you? Save on your eyes when you can.”
He peered at her over the top of his paper, then set it aside with a sigh. “I wasn’t really reading, anyway.”
Susan screwed her lips to the side. “Thinking about Sophie?”
He grunted, and she prickled.
“She’s not coming back, you know.” Her mind was clearly gone, even if Susan was the only one who could admit it. Right now, Madeline Blair was upstairs reading to her, though the girl had been unresponsive all day.
Preston shifted on the settee and turned his tired gaze to the fire wavering behind its grate.
Sophie’s going the way of her mother, I suppose. She had more sense to say it aloud. From what the servants had told Susan, Eleanor had gone stark raving mad and now it was her daughter’s turn. Her father must be haunted by it.
“We used to be close,” she said. “You used to love me. But you weren’t there for me when I needed you the most.”
His eyes met hers. “What are you talking about? You were the one who flaunted yourself about with reckless abandon, virtually begging for scandal and vice.”
“No. Not as a child. I needed you with me after Mother died, but you left me alone with the servants while you chased the news.”
“Only for days, or weeks at a time.”
“An eternity to a child.”
“To provide for you!”
To run away from your pain! She shook her head, breathed deeply, tried desperately to tame her tongue. “Other reporters stayed close to home, you could have too. I needed you.” Her lips trembled. “I never stopped.”
Surprise registered in his eyes. “Susan, I’m sorry if you felt left behind as a child. But certainly now as a grown woman you can understand that I did what I had to do. Besides, if I hadn’t left Richmond to cover stories elsewhere, I never would have met and married Eleanor and had Sophie.”
“What a shame that would have been.” The poisonous words flicked out from Susan’s lips before she could stop them. Heat blazed beneath the collar of her gown. Would her stepmother trump her still, even from the grave? Would her half sister be uppermost in his heart, even from the clutches of insanity?
Preston’s eyes threw daggers across the room. “Regardless of your feelings toward your late stepmother, it was her fortune that built this house and kept you in the lifestyle you always felt so entitled to. In fact, it keeps us going still, while the rest of Richmond staggers about in rags!”
He was missing the point entirely. “I’m your daughter.”
“Don’t you remember? You decided not to be when you refused to live under my authority so many years ago. It was you, Susan, who turned from me.” He rose and slowly, stiffly covered the space between them. “And still, you’re not truly home.”
Susan stood to meet his misty gaze. “What can you mean? I’m right here!”
“Your body is, my dear. But not your heart.”
“You speak in riddles,” she said. But a thaw crept over her at the sound of “my dear” on his lips.
His shoulders sagged. “Oh, Susan. You are so very hard.”
“Sophie is nearly gone,” she tried again, bewildered. “I’m the only family you’ve got.”
“I have no one.” He wiped his hand over his beard and leaned against the doorway before half turning back to her. “I’m leaving in the morning.”
“What? Now?”
“Sophie doesn’t know whether I’m here or not. Besides, newspaper editors are no longer exempt from service. I’m going to serve with the local troops defending Richmond.”
“But—your heart!” It was a miracle he’d survived combat at Gettysburg with his condition.
“My heart is not your concern,” he rasped. “It never was.”
Susan stared at his broad back as he walked away, tears welling in her eyes. But as his footsteps faded, another set quietly took their place.
“Susan, honey?”
Susan jerked at the touch of Mrs. Blair’s arm around her shoulders. She sank down onto the sofa, and Mrs. Blair sank with her. “You were listening?”
The older woman sighed. “I couldn’t help but overhear a little.” She offered an embroidered handkerchief, and Susan took it. “I see your hurt, and I know you’re prickly as a porcupine because of it. Now, I’m not your mother, God rest her, and I don’t pretend to be. But I’m a mother, and I do believe it would do us both some good if I could spread a little mothering over you.”
Susan shrugged. “I don’t need a mother.”
Mrs. Blair held her tight. “And yet you need your father.”
Susan opened her mouth, but Mrs. Blair held up her hand to stop her. “Dry your eyes, honey, but you let me do the talking for just a spell. I can see that you’ve suffered mightily, and my guess is that some of it’s your own doing, and some of it isn’t. You’ve got bitterness written all over you. Now you think it’s your daddy’s job to make you happy again, but you’re wrong. Each of us is in charge of our own happiness. We can’t wait for someone else—anyone else—to hand it to us.”
“But I’m his daughter and he doesn’t even—”
“You have a lot to say. But have you once said the words your daddy is longing to hear?”
Susan squinted at her. What business of Madeline Blair’s was it anyway?
“Apologize, honey.”
She huffed. “Like the prodigal son. Is that the idea?” Father, I have sinned against heaven, and in thy sight … The parable trailed through Susan’s mind.
“Your daddy is just waiting to love you if you would only make things right.”
Grunting, Susan wiped her nose. Shook her head. “He isn’t. It’s Sophie he loves, not me.”
A sad smile softened Mrs. Blair’s face. “Sounds like you need to ask the Almighty for help.”
“Help with what?”
“Ask Him to help you know the right thing to do—and then ask Him to help you
do it. One without the other is no good, you know.”
Susan closed her eyes to keep from glaring at her neighbor. Then, coolly, “You must be very tired, Mrs. Blair. I understand you have a cat waiting for you at home.” A twinge of guilt shot through her. What a cruel thing to say to a woman with a husband and two sons in the grave, and two more sons dodging death every day.
Mrs. Blair kissed Susan’s pockmarked cheek. “Good night, then. And Susan—pray.”
But Susan had forgotten how.
Kent House, Richmond, Virginia
Monday, November 9, 1864
“Pearl. I can do that.” Bella bade the older woman sit down. The poor woman had been brewing tea and cooking what scant supplies she had for Sophie until she teetered toward collapse. Gratitude written on her face, Pearl slid onto the bench with a heavy sigh.
“Was it like this when Eleanor started going?” Bella dared to ask, not sure if she wanted the answer.
“Seems like,” said Pearl, yawning. “It was bad. Tell you that much. Fits, and then nothing, just lying around like the dead, then fits again. … And she saw things. People. She’d talk to them.”
“Sophie saw all that happen to her mother?”
“Saw it? She spent her best years trying to pull her out of it. We followed the doctor’s orders precisely, just like we’re doing now.”
Bella frowned. “Has a doctor seen Sophie?”
“Nah. He saw Missus Eleanor, though, and it’s the same thing, just a different soul. Massa remembers what to do.”
Carefully, Bella poured boiling water into a cup and added a wire basket of tea leaves. “Like this?”
“That’s right. Then you add the laudanum. It’s right there.”
“Laudanum,” Bella repeated. “That’s made from opium, isn’t it?” She’d seen enough opium at Gettysburg to last her a lifetime.
“Believe it is, baby.” Pearl stretched her arms over her head and yawned again. “We got lucky with this one. Opium and laudanum so scarce you can’t hardly find it anywhere in the South these days. But we had a store set by for the Missus from years ago. Otherwise, Missy would be up a creek.”
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