A Passionate Girl

by Thomas Fleming

Dan retreated, cursing. The clash spoiled much of the pleasure still throbbing in my body, the way a crude hand flung across a harp’s strings creates a ruinous jangle. I slept poorly, my dreams full of a wild Ireland through which I ran like a hunted felon.

  In the morning, I was visited by Colonel Roberts and Mike Hanrahan before we descended for breakfast. They had the day’s newspapers with them. The Star, the National Intelligencer, and the Republican had lively accounts of the exploits of the Fenian girl, but the Chronicle’s reporter, Colby, told a different story. It was my first encounter with the malice of the press in opposition.

  The fellow began by describing me as a blowsy slattern, with my hair askew and my dress in dirty disarray. He narrated my story with a dozen sarcastic interspersions of his own. Finally he wrote: “As for her claim to have shot up a company of dragoons, the British ambassador has assured me it’s ridiculous. The idea of a woman wielding a pistol with such accuracy is on the face of it absurd. It would not surprise me if the Fenian girl has never seen a pistol in her life, except on the stage. She may well never have seen Ireland, either. Rumor says she is an actress coached for the part by the Fenian leadership to help them swindle money from their gullible countrymen.”

  “Challenge him,” I said.

  “To what?” Colonel Roberts said.

  “To a contest of marksmanship.”

  “That may not be wise. Dan McCaffrey tells me that you have trouble handling a gun.”

  “Dan McCaffrey doesn’t know what he’s talking about. I’ve bought my own gun and I know how to use it.” I opened my portmanteau and took my National Revolver from a pouch I had sewn for it.

  “It would be a singular triumph if—”

  I was scribbling a letter while he hesitated.

  To the reporter named Colby from the Chronicle.

  The Fenian girl would be happy to challenge him to a duel to defend her own and Ireland’s honor. But he would no doubt use the excuse of her sex to disguise his own cowardice. She therefore invites him to a contest of marksmanship at targets of his own choice, as soon as possible. The prize will be the amount the British ambassador bribed him to write his story.

  “Take that to the Star and have them print it tomorrow.”

  “If Bess says she can do it, I believe her,” Red Mike said.

  Roberts yielded to our collective recklessness. He was not so ready to be talked out of the next worry on his mind.

  “Last night I gather you left the hotel for some unknown purpose. This town lives on scandal. I must ask you where you went.”

  “To Fernando Wood.”

  “My dear. His reputation is the worst in Washington.”

  “So I understand. But I deemed it worth the risk.”

  Red Mike rolled his eyes and pretended surprise. “I’m as shocked as you are Bill. But after all, the girl’s of age. And didn’t you say yourself when you were facin’ down O’Mahoney that we couldn’t run a war on Sunday school principles?”

  “True enough, but—”

  I distracted Roberts by plunging into what Fernando Wood had told me about President Johnson, and about Stanton and Seward. Roberts seemed staggered, then angry. “Wood is playing his own game. He’d like to capture us. He hasn’t given up his dreams of glory. Everything about him is pretense. Pretense and—and seduction.”

  “There was no seduction,” I said. “I may be young, but I’m not stupid.”

  “I know, I know,” Roberts said. He paced for a moment, deep in thought. “I know your intentions were of the best, my dear. And you may have brought us valuable intelligence. We may yet have a need to do business with Wood.”

  I saw what Fernando Wood meant by the difference between an honest and a level man. Colonel Roberts was honest; he saw himself as living by a strict moral code. But he was not level.

  Roberts decided he disagreed with Fernando’s assessment of the situation. “Stanton is the strong man in the government,” he said. “Seward is timid. He can be frightened by anything.” Roberts discoursed on the halfhearted way Seward had dealt with England during the war. “If we keep Stanton on our side he’ll bear Seward down, no matter what he thinks,” Roberts said.

  I gave up trying to persuade him, and we joined the others for breakfast. It was not a cheerful meal. We quarreled first over my proposal to challenge the Chronicle reporter. Dan scoffed and said I couldn’t hit any target smaller than the front of the Capitol. I said I was delighted to discover that I was going to surprise him as well as the rest of Washington. Meanwhile Mrs. O’Neil was looking daggers at me.

  “Did you find out where she went last night?” she asked.

  “It’s not important,” Colonel Roberts said.

  “I heard Fernando Wood inviting you, in the Senate gallery,” she said.

  “How clever of you,” I said.

  “You’ll disgrace us,” Mrs. O’Neil said.

  “Only if you spread the word far and wide, as I fear you will,” I said. “Mr. Wood is a man of honor, who would not do such a thing to a lady.”

  From that moment, Margaret O’Neil became my enemy. She may have left the convent, but she was a nun at heart. She regarded me as a desperate sinner, unworthy of trust and hopeless of redemption. Dan was of a similar opinion, but it troubled his soul in a very different way. He glared at me as if his greatest pleasure would be to clamp his hands around my throat.

  A troubled Colonel Roberts told Red Mike to take my challenge to the papers. The rest of us, except Margaret O’Neil, boarded a rented carriage and drove to the War Department building on 17th Street, where the president had arranged an interview with Secretary of War Stanton. Going in we passed a room that brought Dan McCaffrey to a full stop. It was full of tattered, blood-stained Confederate battle flags, captured in the course of the war. He stared at them for a long moment, then said, “They never captured Jeb Stuart’s flag.”

  We waited in an outer office for the better part of an hour. Clerks hurried past us with sheets of paper in their hands. Somewhere nearby we could hear telegraph keys clicking. Colonel Roberts remarked that the place seemed almost as busy as it had been during the war. Suddenly he sprang to his feet, his hand out. “General Grant. Colonel Bill Roberts from the Commissary Department, now with the Irish Republican Army.”

  “Oh yes,” said General Grant. The victorious commander looked unprepossessing at close range. His uniform was rumpled, his shoes unshined, and he had an unlit cigar stuck in the corner of his mouth. Roberts introduced us, and Grant smiled at me. “This is your female marksman. I read about her.”

  “We’re here to see Secretary Stanton,” Roberts said. “We saw the president last night, and he’s given us full backing for our proposal to conquer Canada. You’ll remember I mentioned it to you on the reviewing stand in New York two days ago. I would hope, General, that we might submit our plan of campaign to you for your approval—or criticism.”

  “I’d be happy to look at it—if the president desires me to,” Grant said. “But I have no doubt you can whip the Brits out of their boots, without my help.”

  A clerk from Stanton’s office interrupted us. We said good-bye to General Grant and were ushered into a room that brought us a step closer to the secretary of war’s inner sanctum. It was the room in which Mr. Stanton received the public. He was already at work behind a high writing desk, which reached to his shoulders. He had the look of a powerful gnome—a round body and short legs. His complexion was dark and mottled, and his face was screwed into impatience and irascibility above his profuse chin whiskers, which seemed to have been tied like a false beard to his large ears. A motley group formed a line in front of him. There were soldiers on crutches, gaudily dressed women whom I guessed to be prostitutes, mournful women in black, well-dressed older men with the look of politicians. Each came before the secretary and stated his request in a low voice, which was nonetheless audible in the silent room.

  Stanton rarely listened for more than a minute, then replied with a harsh, abrupt voice
.

  “No!”

  “Write me a letter.”

  “See the pension clerk.”

  “Get out of here or I’ll put you in jail.”

  “No.”

  It was like a scene in the old court of Versailles, when the absolute monarch held an audience. There was never a word spoken to challenge the secretary’s decisions. “You see what I mean?” Roberts whispered to me. “There’s the man who rules Washington.”

  “Quiet over there,” growled a redheaded sentry by the door. Colonel Roberts obeyed.

  The session ended, leaving a half dozen people still waiting on line. The secretary stamped back into an inner office, and the losers trudged wearily away to return tomorrow. We were left alone for another fifteen minutes. Then the door opened, and the secretary appeared again, looking diminutive beside a tall, straight-backed man in a splendid blue uniform, with the stars of a major general on his shoulders.

  “That’s Stapleton of New Jersey,” Roberts whispered to me. “Old Steady, they called him.”

  “He doesn’t look very old,” I said.

  “It’s a way of speaking in the army. He had the toughest division in the Army of the Potomac.”

  The general was not handsome, but he was formidable looking in a narrow-faced, frowning way. He looked as if he had not smiled in a decade. He spoke to Stanton in a solemn, intense voice. “I’ve tried to keep faith with the dead of both sides, Mr. Secretary,” he said.

  “I understand,” Stanton said, pulling on his chin whiskers. “It’s something we must all try to do, according to our lights.”

  “This is the last day I’ll wear this uniform,” Stapleton said.

  “You can doff it with pride, General,” Stanton said. “Few have given as much to the cause as you.”

  “Thank you,” Stapleton said.

  General Stapleton passed us with long sweeping strides. For a split second our eyes met. Lacking an ability to foretell the future, neither of us found anything portentous in the brief encounter.

  Secretary Stanton stood in the doorway of his office, studying us. “Is this the Irish Brigade, or the Army of the Tennessee?” he asked.

  “A little of both, Mr. Secretary,” Colonel Roberts said, springing up. “You remember me, Roberts of the Commissary Department?”

  “Yes, certainly,” Stanton said. “Come along. I can give you only ten minutes. That’s scarcely time for an Irishman to get through his first sentence, but our rebel friends are keeping me as busy as they did when the bullets were flying.”

  As he talked, he led us into a simply furnished office. He gestured to a pile of papers on his desk. “A single morning’s telegrams. Officers telling me how the South is responding to the president’s benevolence. In Alabama, they’re plowing up the graves of Union soldiers. In Georgia, a mob burned the house of a loyal Georgia man who went home after fighting with Sherman. In North Carolina, a state judge dismissed a clear-cut case of assault on a Union officer in full uniform.”

  Roberts glanced nervously at Dan, obviously wishing he had left him at the hotel with Mrs. O’Neil. He decided to take the plunge and identify him. “Maybe it’s not all that bad, Mr. Secretary,” he said. “We’ve got two good men here, O’Neil and McCaffrey, who fought on opposite sides but are standing here with me as comrades in arms in the army of the Fenian Brotherhood.”

  “I’ve had reports on them,” Stanton said. “No one registers at a hotel in Washington without my knowing a great deal about them within twenty-four hours. And this is our Fenian girl?”

  “Miss Fitzmaurice,” Roberts said.

  “Is she an actress, as the Chronicle claims?”

  “Not a bit of it. She’s exactly what she looks to be, a brave Irish girl who’s risked her life for her country’s sake.”

  “She risked more than her life last night,” Stanton said, “when she spent four hours with Fernando Wood.”

  My face was aflame. Roberts was too astonished to say a word. We were finding out one of the prime sources of Mr. Stanton’s power. He controlled the National Detective Police, the army’s secret service, which had agents throughout Washington.

  “If you people want my cooperation—and the support of other honest men,” Stanton said, “you must convince us of your loyalty to the Union. The president says you have a scheme to conquer Canada, the way Sam Houston conquered Texas. I reminded him that the conquest of Texas led to the Mexican War and the conquest of Canada might lead to a war with England, which men like Fernando Wood and his friends in the South would welcome. It would be the perfect excuse to abandon all pretense of correcting once and for all the evils that created the rebellion. I’m not afraid of a war with England. Grant’s army alone could take on the entire empire. But I am afraid of what sort of men are behind your combination. I dislike secret societies.”

  “There’s not a Fenian, so help me, Mr. Secretary, not a Fenian who doesn’t have the greater good and glory of these United States at his heart’s core,” Roberts said. “We believe that the conquest of Canada and the freedom of Ireland that must inevitably follow from it will signal the breakup of the British Empire, the destruction of our country’s bitterest enemy.”

  Stanton began nodding impatiently when Roberts was halfway through his oration. “I’m as eager to teach them a lesson as you. Without their encouragement the Confederacy might have collapsed two years ago. There are a hundred thousand Union graves from Arlington to Arkansas that can be blamed on England. But we’re not going to risk losing the war we’ve just won. We must have proof—dramatic proof—of your loyalty to this government. And an end to playing games with people like Mr. Wood. He’s a traitor. One of my chief regrets has been our failure to hang him.”

  It was clear that Stanton was yielding, with extreme reluctance, to the president’s wish to help us. It confirmed everything Fernando Wood had said about the relationship of Mr. Johnson to his cabinet.

  “You will have proof, ample proof, of our loyalty,” Roberts said. “As for Congressman Wood, he forced himself on us and, I fear, misled this young girl into placing her confidence in him.”

  And I still do, I thought, far more than in anything I hear from your wordy mouth.

  “We have too many women like her in Washington,” Stanton said.

  I watched Roberts weigh the advisability of defending my virtue once more and decide against it. He went back to promising Stanton that the Fenians would demonstrate their trustworthiness. The secretary of war nodded impatiently. “I’m glad we understand each other,” he said. “Just remember I have ways of learning things if you’re tempted to be insincere.”

  We found ourselves out on the street in the scorching sunlight. Gaily dressed women strolled past, twirling bright parasols. “I don’t like that man,” I said.

  “No one does, except perhaps Mrs. Stanton,” Colonel Roberts said. “But he’s the most powerful man in the United States right now. We must study how to make him like us.”

  I suspected that would never come to pass. But I said nothing. I was brooding over my designation as a scarlet woman. I did not realize how soon I was to believe it.

  Keep the Heart Cold and Private

  The next day, the Star and the National Intelligencer both printed my challenge to Colby, the reporter from the Chronicle. Before the end of the day, we heard that Fernando Wood had made a bet of five hundred dollars with Congressman Ashley, the president’s chief critic in the House of Representatives, that I would worst the penpusher. Since the Chronicle was the creature of the Radical Republicans in Congress, Colby was forced to respond. He announced that he would meet me in the President’s Park, south of the White House, at high noon the following day.

  Colonel Roberts was in a sweat, intensified by Mrs. O’Neil, over Fernando’s espousal of my cause. I sent my patron a note, assuring him that he would not be disapppointed in me as a markswoman. I then retired to the woods of Rock Creek with my pistol and a large supply of ammunition to spend the afternoon practicing. I preva
iled upon Colonel O’Neil to join me as a mentor. He agreed despite his wife’s frowns. He proved to be a good-natured and encouraging instructor. By the end of the afternoon I was striking a twelve-inch paper target eight times out of ten, at twenty paces.

  “By God, I think I’ll put some money down on you myself,” Colonel O’Neil said in his mild, easy way. “Don’t mention that to Mrs. O’Neil,” he added.

  That night in the huge bar of the Willard Hotel, betting for and against the Fenian girl became feverish. Dan McCaffrey emerged from the swirling blue smoke and told me Colby’s backers were giving three-to-one odds. “Take them, and make some money for the cause,” I said. “Tell everyone who bets on me I expect twenty percent for the Irish Republic.”

  “I wish I could believe you and O’Neil,” Dan said through gritted teeth. Colonel O’Neil had spent the dinner hour boasting about my marksmanship.

  “Swallow your pride and bet,” I told him.

  Swaggering to Dan’s side was Robert Johnson, the president’s son, not a little drunk. “M’fellow Tennessean says it’s a waste of money to bet on you,” he said.

  “Your fellow Tennessean entertains dark prejudices against me,” I said. “He’s loath to believe in the possibility that a woman can do anything as well as a man, except cook.”

  “N’me,” said Johnson. “I’m in favor of givin’ you the vote. How’s that for advanced ideas? Know why? Women are natural Democrats.”

  “We must talk more of such things,” I said.

  “Yeah. I was talkin’ to my friend Fernando Wood. He said you were real good company.”

  He was not very subtle. Dan strode back into the bar. I forced a smile and said I must retire early. Under no circumstances, said the forceful Mr. Johnson. Before I knew what was happening, I was dragged into the bar, a champagne glass was shoved into my hand, and a dozen arms thrust bottles at me. I smiled and drank more champagne than was recommended for a clear head and steady hand on the morrow. Still, I stayed well within my margin of sobriety and studied Robert Johnson as he presided over a circle of hard drinkers that included a glowering Dan McCaffrey and a smiling John O’Neil. Robert Johnson was obviously enjoying the role of presidential son. At least a dozen men drew him aside to murmur confidentially in his ear. Sometimes he shook his head; sometimes he assured them that all was well. I saw several slip envelopes into his pocket, to which he paid no attention.