“Fetching, is it?”
“Pay no attention to him, Mandy,” I told her. “He’s just acting up.”
“I know the symptoms,” the pretty little woman replied.
“Aye,” I say. “The Lord made them, and the Devil matched them.”
“I wonder, sir, if she has ever worn a robe that was not fetching.”
Poor dear Paddy could no longer control his laughter.
“A point sir, a point well taken. Now let me put this question to you: Were you able to engage in any speculation about what—if any—garments she was wearing under the robe?”
My face grew very warm. I knew men well enough to know that they cannot help giving way to such fantasies.
“I will hardly be so bold, sir, to speculate on that matter. Again, I’d yield to your superior experience.”
“I had everything on, including my corset.”
They both seemed very pleased with themselves. They knew that their risqué talk was embarrassing me.
“Ah, yes, Counselor. I will agree I am not unfamiliar with that awkward and totally unnecessary contraption … . Now, as I understand the situation, you were without chaperones for some time.”
“I think I could agree with that supposition, Counselor. Actually, her sisters came in eventually and, I assume from the noise I heard, disrobed for bed Naturally, I could not observe this from my, ah, awkward position.”
“Worse luck for you,” I said, getting my two cents in as I always do.
“And a point to you, Mrs. Murray.”
“But then they went to sleep, did they not?”
“I believe so. Certainly they seemed to be asleep when I left the room with Mrs. Murray.”
“So you admit that your entire time with this woman in her bedroom, and herself not completely clothed, was unsupervised?”
“Save by the woman herself, sir. And I believe you will agree with me that her supervision is more than adequate in all circumstances.”
They both guffawed.
“I’m in no position to deny that, Captain Hines.”
“You two stop it!” Miss Amanda ordered us. However, she was laughing, too.
Paddy took up the game, “And thoughts about her were in your mind when you rode off on your return to Ol’ Kentuck?”
“That’s easy to answer, Captain Murray. I thought she was the second most beautiful, the second most generous, and the second bravest woman in the world.”
More laughter.
“I should have left you, Captain Hines, to rot under the bed,” I informed him. “And as for you, Captain Murray, I should have left you waiting at the altar rail of St. Mary’s Church.”
So I got in the last word, as you all know I usually do.
“Nice fella,” Paddy said to me after they had driven off in a cab. “You did a generous thing by saving him.”
“Impulsive folly.”
“Neither of us believe that, ’Titia.”
“Indeed.”
“Clever lawyer, a lot of fun to talk with, not terribly deep.”
“I knew that eleven years ago.”
Our dinner took place the year after General Benjamin Sweet died suddenly of pneumonia at the age of forty-one and was buried up at Rosehill Cemetery on the North Side. All of us went to his funeral mass and to the cemetery.
He was a lawyer, I learned after the war, and had been a member of the Wisconsin legislature. He volunteered as soon as the war started. He was a very ambitious man and had schemed to stir up trouble for his Commander in the Wisconsin infantry and then for Colonel DeLand who had been his superior at Camp Douglas. He had been wounded in action at the battle of Perryville, Kentucky. So he wasn’t a poltroon when I accused him of being one. His wife had died young in a train accident, leaving him four young children, whom he raised himself. His eleven-year-old daughter Ada lived with him in the camp and once helped a prisoner to escape. He had cleaned up the camp and the prisoners, but cut the rations on his own, and no more than anyone else did he cope with the lack of medical care and supplies.
He sent his children to St. Xavier Academy, though none of them were in class with any of us. He became a Catholic on his deathbed.
But before that, after the war was over, he would come to social affairs at the academy. So we encountered him. The Irish Lace cut him cold.
Daddy did not.
“Good evening, Ben,” he said to the general one night at the annual benefit ball for the academy. I remember the day very well because Paddy and I had just that day moved into our new home in the North Division just two blocks away from the river, or the North Side as you call it today.
“Good to see you looking so well, John,” the general replied, his face red with embarrassment.
“I wish you continued good health, Ben.”
Even then the general did not look well
I was not to be outdone by Daddy in my Christianity.
“Good evening, General; it is good of you to come to the ball.”
He bowed ceremoniously. “Marriage certainly becomes you Mrs. Murray.”
“Thank you, General.”
I felt sad for him since he had lost his wife.
At subsequent events, Daddy chatted amiably with him. Occasionally, I would say a word or two to him, always with my very best smile. After a little while, it was not even difficult to smile at him.
“Mrs. Murray,” he said to me at a subsequent ball when Daddy and Patrick were talking to other people, “May I ask you a question?”
“Certainly, General. I promise no answer however.”
“I wondered often where you hid Captain Hines when we raided your house.”
Pretending to be unflustered, I looked him straight in the eye and said, “Under my bed, of course.”
He nodded solemnly.
“That was very clever of you, and, as I presume you know, very dangerous.”
“He had a sweetheart in Kentucky whose life I did not want to see ruined.”
He nodded sadly.
“In the end it was just as well. I tried to save St. Leger Grenfel and as you know now I both succeeded and finally failed. I would not have been able to save his.”
“So I understand, General.”
We bowed politely to one another and he took his leave.
After he died, he was charged with being involved in bribery in the Chicago Federal Pension Office of which he had been the director. No one I know doubts the charge.
He was a much more complicated man, I must assume, than we had thought in 1865. He had his own share of sufferings. I no longer judge him because I have come to believe that only God judges—and He much less harshly than we do. I mourn his death as I mourn the death of every fellow human. May God have mercy on his soul.
That is my story. I hope, beloved children and grandchildren, that you have enjoyed reading it and have not laughed too much at what a fierce young woman I was back in those days. You may read my story in comparison with that of Mr. Bross and judge which you believe.
I am confident that you will decide that the “Great Camp Douglas Conspiracy” was a conspiracy that never was. Deacon Bross played a very old game: You dream up a conspiracy and then you take credit for opposing it. General Sweet showed some signs of regretting his lies. The Deacon never did. 1 don’t think he knows the difference between truth and falsehood.
I hope that someday the story I have told you will come to public attention so that everyone will know the truth about the “Camp Douglas Conspiracy.” Now, however, is not the time.
I wish I had saved the letter Mr. Lincoln sent me when I wrote him about the trial. It would prove that what I say was true. However, I did not think much of him in those days and put the letter somewhere, but never could remember where. Later on, I realized how important it was.
In conclusion, I love you all very much, and I thank God every day for you and my wonderful Captain Murray and for all the graces in my life.
Letitia Walsh Murray
Lace Maker
There it is, Nuala Anne. I’m sure you will like Titia. She reminds me of certain other young Irishwomen I have met in my life.
A few additional observations:
Someone recently discovered a letter from Sweet to General Hoffman asking permission to pay Shanks $100 a month for a year to reward him for his work as he “detected and identified the presence of some of the officers and prisoners engaged in the conspiracy.” There is no record of Hoffman’s approval, but presumably Shanks was paid. This letter confirms the claim by Letitia Walsh that both Shanks and Sweet had perjured themselves at the trial.
Most of the writing after the war about the “corispiracy” reflected the opinion of the Tribune and William Bross. Letitia’s memoir was never published. However, recent writers like Chicago’s George Levy in his fine book To Die in Chicago (1994) finds the same weakness in the Great Conspiracy theory that she attempted to explode in her memoir—though Levy did not have her memoir available. He comments that it requires an act of faith to believe in the “conspiracy.” If we are to judge by Letitia’s words and by John Walsh’s subsequent successes, not many people believed in it after the war despite the propaganda of the Tribune and its allies. Perhaps the historical record has been clarified because now both sides have told their story—long after anyone but a few historians, and you and I, bother to care about it.
Despite our sympathy for “The Irish Lace”, you might want to consider that our memoirist is curiously vague about the weapons stored in her father’s barn. The records show that the Union troops took away 142 shotguns and 349 revolvers that night, along with 13,412 cartridges and 8 bags of buckshot. This is a small arsenal, though it probably would not have been enough with which to storm the camp.
John Walsh’s claim that the weapons were merely for the protection of the Sons of Liberty and Chicago Democrats against riots by Republicans may seem a little thin.
That is for you to judge.
I’ll be fascinated to hear your opinions about all of this and how it might have relevance to us.
Dermot Michael Vincent Coyne
Aspiring Seanachie
10
“SOMETIMES I frighten myself,” Nuala said with a shiver. “I don’t like it at all, at all.”
“More voices, Nuala?”
She hugged herself as if she were walking down a dark street on a cold winter night.
“Wasn’t this the first house they lived in, Dermot Michael?”
“Who lived in?”
“’Titia and her Paddy. Doesn’t one of my colleagues at work look up the old censuses for the fun of it? And didn’t he tell me that this house was built right after your Civil War? And didn’t the 1870 census list the people who lived in it as Patrick Murray, Attorney at Law, and Letitia Walsh Murray, Lace Maker—and themselves with two children already?”
It was my turn to feel the winter winds that had swept into Nuala’s little apartment.
“Nuala, that’s—”
“I know it is, Dermot, but here’s the memo he sent me.”
There it was—on Arthur Andersen stationery in neat computer type: a hint of a voice from the past.
In response to your question about the house in which you live on Southport, the first owners were a Captain and Mrs. Patrick Murray. He was an officer in the Union Army during the Civil War and she was a famous lace maker. Her father was alleged to be involved in the famous Camp Douglas Conspiracy.
“I wondered whether this old house might be source of my visions. So didn’t I ask your man last week if he could look it up, and didn’t he send it over here this afternoon?”
“That’s why you phoned me?”
“Well,” she blushed, “didn’t I want to make supper for you, too?”
“You think there’s a connection between the fact that the two of them sat together in this room a century and a quarter ago and what you felt out at 31st Street?”
“Slept here, Dermot. Before they split this poor old place up into two apartments, this must have been the master bedroom.”
She hugged herself again.
For a moment I felt pure terror, a sense of the uncanny enveloping me like a vampire’s cloak. I wanted to get out of that room, then and there.
“So we’d better listen to her.”
The voice was that of Nuala the matriarch: the matter was settled, and that was that.
“I like the woman,” she said as she lifted my third report from the floor next to her chair and arranged it on the coffee table beside the teapot.
“Letitia?” I said stupidly.
“Isn’t she the brave and clever woman? Doesn’t she tell nice little secrets about her sex life to titillate her readers and win them even more to her side?”
“You noticed that?”
“Doesn’t she say that she knew the same feelings when she was their age and that she still does? And, sure, didn’t she show it to himself before she gives it to anyone else to read?”
“Do you hear her voice as you read it, Nuala, like you heard Ma’s voice when you were translating her diary in Dublin?”
“Och, don’t you know that I do?”
I shivered. More of Nuala Anne’s spooks.
“And weren’t them Irish Lace trio a powerful bunch?”
“They were indeed.”
“Sure she cuts things a little fine when it suits her purpose, like never telling them or us how many guns her father had stashed away in the barn.”
“She did that.”
Nuala lifted my text and weighed it in her hand, as if measuring the truthfulness.
“She’s telling the truth—mostly, anyway. I think she was never quite sure what her daddy was up to and didn’t want to speculate.”
“There were not enough guns in the barn to break open the camp—not without a serious risk of failure. John Walsh was not the man to try something like that.”
“And, besides, they had nowhere near enough men, did they, now?”
“They did not.”
“Do you want to know what I think?”
“Naturally!”
“Well, won’t you have to wait till I make another ham-and-cheese sandwich for you?”
“I guess so,” I said, as she grabbed my plate and bounded out to the tiny kitchen.
In a few moments, she bounded back, sandwich on a new plate. As she put it on the table, she ran her hand quickly along the side of my face. I gulped.
“Well, now, where was I? Och, wasn’t I about to tell you what I think?”
“Woman, you were.”
“I think that your man was so obsessed with the prisoners, poor men, that he would have led a breakin—and himself the father of twelve!—if there was a good chance to free them and send them home, and if there were not eejits dreaming about burning down Chicago. She suspected that, but had no proof and was not going to put her suspicions down on paper because that friggin Sack of the City gobshite Bross had already roused enough suspicion. So your man listens to Hines and his crowd because he thought this might be a chance to get the prisoners out. He quickly realizes that they are frigging amadons altogether, and maybe dangerous, too. Still, he hangs on because doesn’t he think there might be a last chance to free the prisoners? He hangs on a little too long and gets caught.”
“He would have stormed the camp with the small amount of weaponry at his disposal?”
“Not with the Hines bunch, because they are a bunch of shallow dreamers with no knowledge about how to do it right. With the right people at the right time, and himself knowing about tactics from his years in the army, sure I think he would have done it, wouldn’t he?”
“How would he do it?”
“Maybe a quiet attack in the early-morning hours when everyone is asleep. He tells no one of the plans except the men who are in on the plot. And they’re the kind who don’t talk. He doesn’t tell the prisoners either, because he knows there are spies all over that place. He and his people sneak up at night, overpower some of the g
uards, and most of them probably sleeping anyway. Then don’t they sneak into the camp, disarm more of the guards, throw open the gates, and tell the prisoners to run for it?”
“Risky.”
“He’s a brave man with strong principles. He’s ready to take a chance to end the suffering in the camp, and who is to say he’s not morally right? Wouldn’t we praise Germans who broke into the concentration camps and freed as many of the prisoners as they could?”
“I see your point.”
“Except he’s a frigging eejit, and himself with twelve children.”
“He probably figured that he and his men could slip away in the darkness as soon as they opened the gates and before the boys in blue knew what was happenning.”
“And he had enough weapons so they could maybe get themselves home to the South, but not enough to burn down the city.”
She peered at me anxiously, hoping I would not ridicule her theory.
I had learned my lesson in Dublin. When Nuala Anne, girl detective, was on a roll, you let her roll.
“Makes sense.”
“So, don’t you see, Derm, that was another conspiracy that never was?”
“Is the woman mad at you for figuring it all out?”
“Certainly NOT! Doesn’t she believe that now it’s time for the whole truth to be told?”
I shivered again. I had yet to figure out how much of this talking with dead people was just Nuala’s West of Ireland mysticism and how much of it was real. Probably the question was irrelevant, anyway.
“I’m sure she would.”
“Would you have stayed under her bed, Dermot Michael?”
“That’s a very personal question, Nuala Anne. If I had a Miss Amanda waiting for me home in Ol’ Kentucky, I think I would have, though the temptation would have been strong to engage in other activities. I wouldn’t have wanted to mess with her if she decided to fight me off.”
“And herself half in love with him anyway.”
That shook me up. “Really!”
“Sure isn’t that obvious? Halfway through the story, she starts to call him ‘Tom.’ At that silly age, a woman might be truly in love with her soldier boy. But he’s a long way from home and might never come back. And this young man is right there and very nice and very darling. And you’re lonely and your emotions are volatile, as they are at that age. In a way aren’t you happy to see him riding off through the prairies in the dark because that removes the temptation? Sure, she half loved him, poor child. Not that she ever would have been unfaithful to her Paddy, if you take my meaning.”
Irish Lace Page 19