On Secret Service

by John Jakes

  “Not while the South’s hell-bent on tearing up the Constitution to protect its peculiar institution. You secesh think your way’s the only—”

  “Sorry I left you so long, my dear.” An older man who’d come up behind her grasped her arm. “Ran into an old friend. Do you know this gentleman?” The man had an affected way of speaking. Not British exactly, but crisp enough to establish his superiority and patronize a listener. He was smartly turned out in a long coat with brown velvet lapels, stand-up collar, bow tie, top hat, gloves, and a walking stick.

  “No, Donal. The gentleman bumped into me and knocked my book on the ground. At least he had the courtesy to retrieve it.”

  “Well, thank you very much, sir,” Donal said in a faintly sarcastic way that withheld sincerity. The man moved the young woman away, guiding with a firm hand on her arm. Lon wondered how such an attractive girl could be taken with a man with gray hair and a weak chin. He was probably rich. As she left, the young woman glanced over her shoulder. Lon couldn’t say whether the look was inquisitive or scornful.

  What galled him most wasn’t her sharp tongue; matter of fact, he rather liked her spunk. He was infuriated with himself because he’d given antagonism right back, instead of trying to charm her into liking him. The moment he saw her, admired the curve of her cheek, the shimmer of her hair, he wanted her to like him.

  Don’t waste your time. That’s a road you’ll never travel.

  Too bad. He couldn’t say he’d fallen in love with the attractive stranger in such a short time, but something in his young man’s heart had opened to the possibility.

  Lon had never been in love. He’d enjoyed brief, superficial flirtations with a number of young women, and three episodes of sex. The last time, Sledge had taken him to a Chicago brothel and paid for the girl. Lon found it a mechanical, even sad experience. He didn’t tell Sledge, because Sledge would have scorned him as a bookish romantic.

  Walking away, he saw a colorful paper bookmark lying on the ground where she’d been standing. Another good book from SHILLINGTON’S.

  He’d visited the popular bookstore. He picked up the bookmark, certain that it hadn’t fallen out of the Wilkie Collins. Why had she dropped it? He searched for her in the crowd, as if by finding her he might find the answer. She was gone.

  And he didn’t even know her name.

  He tucked the bookmark into an inner pocket and went back to work.

  Shouts and commotion on the north side of the building signaled the arrival of the official party, bound for the Senate chamber and the swearing-in of Vice President Hamlin. Presently the official party of congressmen, Supreme Court justices, friends, and family emerged from the rotunda and came down the steps to the platform. There was Lincoln, sad-eyed as before, disappointingly ordinary. He took a front-row chair, his gold-knobbed cane across his knees. Senator Baker of Oregon stood behind a cheap little table to introduce him. Lon was fascinated by old Taney, the robed chief justice, seated to Baker’s left. Taney had written the famous Dred Scott decision saying slaves were not citizens, therefore not entitled to protection of the law. Lon disliked the man without knowing anything else about him.

  At the close of the introduction Lincoln stepped forward. He acknowledged the applause and laid his cane across the table. He took off his hat, moved as if to set it down, hesitated. A few snickered at his awkwardness. Up jumped Senator Douglas, the Little Giant. Smiling, Douglas took Lincoln’s tall hat from him. He sat down with the hat held carefully on his knee. The crowd liked the symbolism of last fall’s political opponents united.

  The President’s voice was no different on this occasion. It was thin, high-pitched, and, Lon hated to say, disagreeable. Yet Lincoln’s rhetoric slowly drew him in.

  Lincoln raised the issue of secession, then immediately said such a thing was impossible; the Union was perpetual. It could not be dissolved by individual states. The secession ordinances were null and void.

  “And I therefore consider that, in view of the Constitution and the laws, the Union is unbroken. To the extent of my ability, I shall take care, as the Constitution itself expressly enjoins upon me, that the laws of the Union be faithfully executed in all the states.”

  The crowd held so still, you could almost hear the clouds sailing across the sky. A man behind Lon whispered, “Damn fool means to go to war if the South don’t retreat.”

  Gravely, Lincoln told them there would be no violence or bloodletting unless it was forced on the national government. “In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without yourselves being the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the government, while I have the most solemn one to preserve, protect, and defend it.”

  His melancholy eyes held the crowd. “Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

  After the applause, Justice Taney brought out a Bible. He swore in the President and it was done. Without violence, thankfully. The phrase “bonds of affection” lingered in Lon’s mind along with a sense of loss.

  Before Allan Pinkerton and his men left Washington on Wednesday, Lon called at Shillington’s bookstore. After almost a year as an operative, he could present a story convincingly.

  “A young woman dropped a copy of The Woman in White in President’s Park on Monday. I found it but she disappeared before I could hand it back. I’d like to return it if she wasn’t an out-of-town visitor, but I don’t know her name or where to find her. A bookmark from your store told me she must have bought it here.”

  Lon’s guileless expression and his blue eyes overcame any suspicion on the clerk’s part. He fetched a tin box. “We sold quite a few of the Collins since it was published last year, but we keep cards on local customers. Will you describe her?”

  Lon did. The clerk found her card. “Miss Miller.” Lon had trained himself to read handwriting upside down. First name Margaret. The clerk’s thumb hid the address.

  “From Washington?”

  “Baltimore. But her family keeps a second residence in Franklin Square.” The clerk showed him the number. Something jogged the clerk’s memory hard enough to bring a smile. “She’s not afraid to talk politics with some of our gentleman customers. She’s a hot secesh.”

  “That’s Baltimore,” Lon agreed, tipping his hat.

  He dashed away and after dark went to Franklin Square in a rainstorm, only to stand soaked and disappointed on the stoop. Not a light showed anywhere. He backed down the steps with rain dripping from his hat brim. She must have left. He was leaving in the morning. Damn. No chance to meet her again or even put his toe in the door.

  On the westbound Baltimore & Ohio, the passenger car was overheated, the weather outside damp and dismal. Windows steamed up. Pryce Lewis sat next to Lon, going through the Washington and New York papers. “By God, they’re rattling the sword down South. Listen to this from Arkansas. ‘If declaring the Union perpetual means coercion, then Lincoln’s inaugural means war.’ The Montgomery Advertiser said, ‘War, war, and nothing less than war will satisfy the abolition chief.’ I fancy we’re in for—Lon, what on earth are you doing? Who is Margaret?”

  Lon smeared away the name traced in the steam on the glass. “Just a lady I met at the inaugural.” He rested his chin in his palm and stared through the hole in the steam at rain falling on the winter woods. They looked as forlorn as he felt.

  12

  April 1861

  The mob’s blood was up, excited by blue militia uniforms, rifles with bayonets at shoulder arms. Margaret rammed an elbow into whoever was crushing her from behind. “For God’s sake, stop pushing.”

  She slipped, would have fallen to
be trampled under heels and hobnails if she hadn’t held fast to someone’s shoulder. She could scarcely breathe. She was trapped in a heaving mass of people who smelled of whiskey and anger. They were throwing things. Rocks, chunks of pavement.

  Seven cars carrying soldiers had been pulled through town to the B&O Camden Station. Then the mob dropped a ship’s anchor on the tracks, blocking three more cars. Young men of the Sixth Massachusetts jumped off the cars and marched in a lane between ranks of Chief Kane’s police. Yesterday, companies of the Twenty-fifth Pennsylvania had passed through with only minor trouble. Cicero had promised more action today. She’d come down to Pratt Street to see the excitement.

  The rain of missiles and obscenities continued. The militiamen looked to their officers for a command to defend themselves. A brickbat flung from behind hit Margaret’s shoulder. Someone fired a gun. An elderly civilian fell down. The mob screamed.

  A man near her drew a pistol. Other guns went off. A soldier flew back against a policeman, an inky red splotch blossoming on his overcoat. A captain clutched his face as a sheet of blood ran down. The gunfire became a din.

  She put her hands to her ears. She still heard it. She closed her eyes a moment; she still saw smoky Pratt Street, soldiers and civilians falling. She ground her palms against her ears but the din only grew worse. A soldier with a fixed bayonet charged her, his pink face wild with rage. She threw herself backward but a wall of bodies held her. “Secesh slut,” the boy screamed, stabbing her…

  “No!”

  Thrashing and crying out, Margaret awoke.

  She realized she was safe. Trembling, but safe in her dark bedroom. Her nightdress was soaked through. In her dream she’d relived what she’d witnessed on Pratt Street yesterday, Friday, one week after the Charleston batteries had fired on Sumter, blasting away all hope of peace. On Monday, Lincoln had proclaimed an insurrection and called for seventy-five thousand state militia to defend Washington. What she had hoped would never happen to disturb the peaceful tenor of her life had come after all.

  She looked at a clock on the mantel of the bedroom fireplace. Half-past nine. She threw on her robe and rushed downstairs. A foyer table was stacked with secession cards and broadsides. A copy of a two-page special edition of the Baltimore Independent lay at her father’s place in the dining room. MURDER OF BALTIMOREANS BY FOREIGN SOLDIERY! THIRTEEN CITIZENS SHOT—FIVE REPORTED KILLED! OUR STREETS DRENCHED WITH BLOOD BY LINCOLN’S HIRELINGS!

  Simms heard her moving about, pushed open the swing door from the kitchen pantry. “Breakfast, Miss Miller?” The elderly black man was solemn, depressed as she was by events of the past week.

  “Just coffee, please. I have no appetite. Father and Cicero have gone?”

  “To a big secession meeting in Monument Square, then some others, don’t know where. Mr. Miller, he’s het up, gray as a ghost. I fear for his health. Best you don’t go out. When Clarissa come to work, she told me they’re still rioting. It’s terrible. It’s all just so terrible.”

  Margaret threw a lock of rebellious dark hair off her forehead. “How was my brother behaving?”

  “Coffee be here right away.” Simms backed out of sight as if he hadn’t heard the question.

  The chicory-laced coffee tasted bitter. She couldn’t swallow it. She’d come home a week ago Thursday, one of her regular visits, and been caught in Baltimore by the outbreak of war. Donal was in New York again. She had decided to stay in Baltimore on the assumption that it might be calmer than Washington. The assumption was wrong. Within hours, the mobs were parading. Secession pennants streamed from masts in the harbor. Fireworks displays celebrated the war.

  Maryland’s governor, Hicks, issued a proclamation calling for order. The response was derision; defiance. Well, Baltimore was known as Mobtown. Lovers of literature said the mysterious Mr. Poe had died at the hands of a mob during the municipal elections of 1849.

  Margaret rested her elbows on the polished table and pressed her palms to her eyes. She recalled the broad-shouldered stranger in President’s Park. He was puffed up with Yankee righteousness; quick to answer her gibes with some of his own. Thoroughly objectionable young man.

  Then why had she thought of him often in the past weeks?

  Well, he said he read novels. She knew a few Baltimore boys who did that, but they were fops. He had lovely blue eyes, but it was hardly a trait unique in the world. She couldn’t explain it. He was the wrong sort, on the wrong side, and yet he stirred her somehow. No doubt he intended to muster in and kill Southern boys, and she’d never see him again.

  She fretted about her father. Calhoun Miller had hardly slept the past two weeks, writing increasingly angry editorials and receiving strange visitors in the middle of the night. Virginians, he said, pumping funds into the state to help print the secession literature. Several times Miller had lost his temper with her over trivialities, something he never did. Either the secession effort was failing or going too slowly.

  Her brother meanwhile hummed and bustled about the house with unusual good cheer. He even told her the name of his secret group, the Knights of Liberty. He said they would resist the Northern aggressors not with platitudes and printed material, but with explosives, flammable oil, stolen arms. Cicero liked the terrible upheaval.

  She feared for his safety in the streets, but she feared even more for the safety and well-being of her right-minded father. When night fell, neither he nor Cicero had come home.

  The warehouse smelled of fish and the damp wool clothing of the two dozen men gathered there. When another arrived, a burly doorkeeper stopped him. Passwords in Latin were exchanged.

  A small table held two lamps, the only illumination. Crossed sabers and a Bible lay between them. Six feet behind the table a state flag hung from a beam. Cicero Miller stood to one side, eyes darting over the band of righteous men listening to his father speak.

  Calhoun Miller’s linen looked soiled. His eyes were gritty with weariness. He’d addressed the public rally at the municipal monument to George Washington, then two other meetings, before this one. Cicero maintained a sober expression but inwardly he was elated. For the first time, events had persuaded Calhoun Miller to speak to the Knights.

  “Last year, with pride and hope,” Miller said, “I took part in the nominating convention of the new Constitutional Union party. Before the November elections, we presented ourselves as the alternative to the Douglas Democrats, Southern Democrats, and the despised Republicans. Ours was the party and platform of compromise and moderation.”

  Hearing that, some of the Knights grumbled. In the harbor a ship’s bell rang. A wagon horse clip-clopped outside, then stopped.

  “Our candidates, Mr. Bell and Mr. Everett, were pledged to reject the radical philosophies of both sides. We wished to preserve the Union”—someone objected with a loud “No!”—“but also to protect Southern interests. The ascension of Mr. Lincoln has shown me we were in error. There is no spirit of compromise on the other side, so there can be no moderation on ours.” Cicero watched a pair of rats dart through the darkness behind his father.

  “The institution of slavery has prevailed in Maryland for generations, and we proudly say we are Southern in practice, Southern in temperament.” Cicero led the applause. “Our timid governor has finally addressed the crisis by ordering rail bridges destroyed north of the city, so no more foreign troops can pass. But much more is required. Maryland must join her sister states of the Confederacy. I charge you as patriotic citizens to make it happen, speedily, using any and all necessary methods, before the egalitarian hordes enthroned in Washington overwhelm us. Peace is no longer possible. Restraint is no longer possible. Very well. I prefer to die defending the Constitution as revered and maintained by the South than to live one hour under what has been revealed as the fanatical tyranny of the North.”

  “What we supposed to do, kill anybody who don’t want to secede?”

  Cicero turned, identifying a man named Scully, who’d recently joined the Knights.
Bill Topping, a stouter man who’d joined at the same time, stood next to him.

  Calhoun Miller said, “I reluctantly answer yes, if that be necessary.”

  “Can’t go along, sorry.”

  Cicero’s crippled foot scraped as he moved to confront the naysayer. “You took an oath of loyalty when you joined this organization. You can’t go back on it whenever it suits you.”

  Scully said, “Wrong. You men are inciting to riot. This meeting is over.”

  “Who the hell are you to issue edicts?”

  “You know my name. John Scully.” He pulled a pistol from his jacket. “Of the Pinkerton organization. Bill, call the men from the police wagon.”

  Topping rushed for the warehouse door. He had a gun too. Voices clamored:

  “Bastard said he was from Alabama.”

  “How’d he get the passwords?”

  Cicero’s was loudest: “Seize them.”

  Topping rolled back the door on its rusty track. In the street, haloed by lamplight, Baltimore police stepped from behind their wagon. Enraged, Cicero limped to the table, blew out one lamp. Someone fired a shot that struck the other one, shattering the chimney and spattering hot oil. Policemen charged into the warehouse swinging clubs.

  One of the Yankee detectives fired shots; one of the Knights fired back. Instantly there was a pandemonium of shouts, weapons going off, men running, fire spreading from the lamp on the floor. Cicero dragged himself to his father.

  “We have to get out. That way.” Practically at his ear, another gun went off. Miller looked startled. Then he fell.

  “Simms.” The voice downstairs belonged to Margaret’s brother. “Simms, you lazy nigger, get up here!”

  Margaret threw her book aside and ran downstairs as Simms stumbled up from his cellar room, emerging through a small door under the staircase.

  “Get dressed, get the carriage.” Cicero was leaning against the wall, disheveled, sooty-faced. Margaret froze at the sight of a long smear of red on the wallpaper behind him.