The Ironclad Alibi

by Michael Kilian

  “My thanks to you, sir,” Harry said, swinging into the saddle of Caesar Augustus’s mount. “My compliments.”

  “But …”

  Harry gave the man no opportunity for further comment, spurring the animal he’d borrowed from his manservant into a quick trot out of the courtyard. The black man followed, trotting along unhappily, glowering at Harry with no small displeasure when he finally reined to a stop at the next corner.

  Slipping out of the saddle, Harry dropped to the dirt street. They were on a prominence that looked down upon the Capitol and the masses of people spread over the lawn and square below it. Davis’s words, if he was on the rostrum speaking them, did not carry to Harry’s ears, but the crowd was being held in thrall by something.

  “I think we have established our bonafides,” said Harry.

  “Marse Harry? Sometimes I think you are the craziest man there is.”

  “I would ask you to suspend that judgment until we’re done here.” He reached into a pocket of his coat, removing a leather bag and, from it, five $20 gold pieces.

  “If you would, sir,” Harry continued, “go to Sloane’s stable, if it’s still there, and buy me a replacement horse and saddle. Then bring it and this animal to the Exchange, secure my rooms, and wait for me there.”

  “You gonna start now on what we came down here for?”

  “Presently, Caesar Augustus. Presently.”

  Happy to be stretching his legs, despite the rotten weather, Harry turned and started walking toward Seventh and Broad Streets and the Marshall Theatre—in hopes of finding there an actress he’d last looked upon sleeping prettily on a counterpane in this city in the heat of the preceding summer.

  Chapter 2

  Harry knew very well that, as one of the Confederacy’s leading espionage agents, Louise Devereux probably had it in her power to have him arrested and, for all he knew, shot or hanged on the spot. In extremis, he supposed, he could seek the intervention of his well-born, Confederate colonel father, and upon his family’s longstanding friendship with President Davis. But even that might not suffice to overcome the connections and influence to be wielded by a woman of such abundant wiles, attractions, and local celebrity.

  Still, theirs had been an amicable and, for a time, even intimate relationship while she was residing in the Federal capital, and there was a chance she might be willing to resume their friendship. It was he who had brought her through the Union lines to Richmond when there was a price upon her head in Washington. Even spies were occasionally grateful.

  However she was inclined toward him, he doubted he could accomplish much without her. He’d made a list of people it was imperative for him to meet during this visit, and Louise’s name was at the top of the list.

  She was not as accomplished an actress as her erstwhile friend, the British-born Caitlin Howard, long the object of Harry’s unrequited adoration. But, in her time upon the Washington stage—before she’d been publicly accused as a Confederate spy—the raven-haired, New Orleans-born Miss Devereux had been universally held to be the most beautiful lady to grace the theater in the Federal City. It was an attribute that had served her extremely well in both her careers.

  With Louise, though, one could never count upon much of anything—except charm, quick wit, and devilishly clever deceit. And a willingness, when necessary, to kill her fellow human beings. She’d murdered a politically well-connected Union officer when he’d threatened to reveal her true wartime occupation.

  Harry had been told by Caitlin Howard that Louise was working at the Southern capital’s Marshall Theatre, but hurrying to that fondly remembered establishment now, he was stunned to find a burned out ruin. An inquiry made of an old vagrant near the premises produced the explanation that the management had staged a melodrama called The Old Log Fort that featured a realistic battle scene complete to the firing of a cannon. On a cold January night a few weeks before, the presentation had become entirely too authentic when some gunpowder had accidentally ignited. No serious injuries were reported from the fire and explosions that had resulted, but they’d left the place largely rubble.

  The vagrant directed him to the city’s Richmond Varieties Theatre, at Franklin and Fourteenth, where he said Louise had quickly been hired and the February bill rescheduled to permit the staging of a play that would accommodate her—a popular Irish-set drama by Dion Boucicault called Colleen Bawn.

  As he walked to his new destination, following a route that led him through the main commercial district, Harry was struck by the high prices proclaimed by the window signs. Coffee had risen to $1.50 a pound—ten times what it had been when he’d been living here. Apples were $20 a barrel!

  The North was being victimized by unscrupulous manufacturers and wholesalers who sold shoddy goods to the military to reap enormous profits. The South was at the mercy of profiteers and smugglers—and vile, greedy merchants who charged a fortune for basic necessities.

  Of course, the North would be blamed for all that. The Union blockade was proving to be Mr. Lincoln’s most effective counter to the rebellion. The Federal navy now controlled virtually all of Chesapeake Bay, including the approaches to the Virginia capes and the estuaries of the James and York Rivers. Though Confederates had seized the U.S. Navy’s big Gosport base at Norfolk at the start of the war, the Union still held mighty Fortress Monroe across Hampton Roads from it. A Yankee fleet had just penetrated the barrier reefs of North Carolina’s Outer Banks and was moving against the nests of blockage runners operating from the sheltered waters of Pamlico and Albermarle Sounds, with Roanoke Island the principal target. The Union stranglehold on this part of the Confederacy was unbreakable.

  For now.

  The streets Harry followed gave glimpses of Richmond’s wide James River. It was scarcely navigable this far upstream, and the fall line was visible in a series of rapids between the city’s main bridges. But downstream, somewhere beyond the mists of the rainy February gloom, lurked a monster thought to be capable of brushing the blockade aside as one might crumbs from a tabletop, a monster that had already begun to unnerve the more timid residents of Washington City, though they knew few if any facts about it.

  Harry’s job was to discover those facts—and soon. He quickened his step.

  “I know you,” said the drunken actor who greeted him just within the theater’s stage door. “You’re Harry Raines. What the devil are you doing here? I thought you turned Yankee and went North.”

  The poor old fellow’s better days were not only long behind him, but hadn’t amounted to that much in his prime. His specialty was pathos. He was a popular Polonius, if only because audiences were so pleased to have Hamlet run him through. Then, rather than simply expire behind the arras, he’d stagger forth, clutching his belly and bulging his eyes, moaning and wailing, tottering about the stage, and, given his usual state of inebriation, nearly toppling off it. Once Caitlin Howard, playing Gertrude in that scene, had lost patience and tripped him with that end in mind.

  The South was likely now short of actors, as it was everything else, so the drunken man was likely enjoying unusual favor among theater managers, if not audiences. Certainly he seemed able to afford drinking a better grade of whiskey—Old Overholtz ’58, Harry’s favorite tipple. How this got through the Atlantic blockade or the Union lines to the North was an interesting question.

  Harry had always enjoyed the company of theater folk. When he’d lived in Richmond before the war, he’d bought this man countless numbers of drinks in recompense for his amusing backstage stories.

  Inviting Harry further within, the actor moved to the throne that was the centerpiece of the set occupying the stage, wielding his whiskey bottle as though it was a scepter.

  “I’ve not gone Yankee,” said Harry, after declining a sip. “I’ve come home. The prodigal son—with his slave.”

  “Then I’m disappointed in you, Raines. I’ve got no love for the darkies, but by God I cannot abide this abominable institution which regards them as min
dless beasts.” He drank, straight from the bottle, then fixed Harry with his bleary gaze, and smiled. “How fares the fair Caitlin?”

  Harry was often reminded in this rude fashion that he was not the only man bearing affection for Miss Howard. Her own passions, alas, were directed at a man Harry thoroughly despised.

  “Haven’t seen her for a while,” Harry said. “She’s traveling with John Wilkes Booth, who’s on a grand tour of sorts. Last I heard, they were in Cincinnati.”

  “Have no respect for that man,” said the actor. “Nothing but a gymnast. Never be the actor his father was.”

  Indeed, no one on an American stage had yet shown himself the equal of the late and very great Junius Brutus Booth, though his son Edwin, John Wilkes’s brother, showed considerable promise.

  And was a Lincoln man.

  “Where is Louise Devereux?” Harry asked.

  “Ah, Louise. Many a man asks that question these days.” He drank. “But as she is not with me, I cannot answer your query with any certainty.”

  “Would you tell her I have returned to Richmond and would be pleased to call upon her? And, if it’s agreeable to her, would she be so kind as to send word to the Exchange Hotel, where I am staying?”

  “Swounds, Raines. You do put on airs. At all events, I don’t know when I can get your message to her, as there is no performance tonight—on account of the great presidential occasion.”

  “The Exchange Hotel,” Harry said, and quickly took his leave.

  He had intended to go to his rooms, presuming Caesar Augustus had attended to their arrangement. But every turning in this once familiar city produced something well remembered, or something foreign and new, and so distracted him. Harry found himself stunned by the proliferation of brothels along Cary Street, extending almost to Capitol Square—their inhabitants perched in windows or lounging in doorways despite the rain. There was a whorehouse established even opposite the hospital at Tenth and Main, with a few of its inmates bold enough to open windows and call to him tauntingly. The great occasion on the capitol lawn had doubtless deprived them of customers for the day—though Harry assumed the lack would be made up for that night.

  Washington City was suffering from the same explosion of corruption, moral and fiduciary, but the provost marshal’s office there was at least containing it—confining such activity largely to the area south of Pennsylvania Avenue. Richmond, which had prided itself so much on its refinement and respectability, seemed hardly to care.

  Win or lose, this war was going to bring the South something more than independence. In the end, it might not recognize itself at all.

  He had always been fond of this old Southern City, despite the hateful institution it fostered. Before the war, Richmond had been a much more substantial city than the Federal capital. The outbreak of hostilities and Richmond’s new prominence as center of the Rebel government had made it a more busy and lively place, but beyond all the earnest bustle, there was an unsettling, almost morbid grimness to it. He wondered if he should want ever to live here again.

  It seemed curious that, six months after her escape from Washington, Louise Devereux was still residing in this town—as a Southern spy would have little useful work to do in these environs. She might more logically have been sent West to do her mischief, where she was less well known.

  Harry, however, was precisely where he ought to be.

  Avoiding the capitol grounds, Harry decided to take the opportunity to range further and take note of where the Confederate government had situated various of its departments and military facilities. He needed to make contact with someone involved with the Confederate Navy, but he could recall no one among his old friends and acquaintances so situated.

  Perhaps Miss Van Lew would have some ideas.

  There was a crowd of citizenry, mostly men in both military and civilian dress, gathered outside the Exchange when Harry finally reached the hotel. The rain was drizzle now, and they paid it little mind. The formal ceremonies at the capitol lawn had concluded, giving way to more boisterous celebration. One imposing fellow, leaning against the entranceway with arms folded across his chest, looked not at all merry, however. He reminded Harry quite a bit of a colleague in Mr. Pinkerton’s U.S. Secret Service named Boston Leahy.

  “Are you Harrison Raines?”

  “I am, Sir.” Harry didn’t recognize the man.

  “What’s your business here?”

  “I’m staying at the hotel.”

  “You had your Negro register.”

  “No, I had him bring my bags here. I’m going to register now.”

  “He put your name in the registry. Where’d he learn to write?”

  “He was a house servant on my father’s plantation.” Harry pulled himself up very straight again. “The Belle Haven Plantation. Whom am I addressing, may I ask.”

  The man leaned close. “Mark my name well, for you will not want to run afoul of me. It’s Nestor Maccubbin and I am with both the State Guard and the municipal police. I work for Captain A. C. Godwin, the assistant Provost Marshal. On his orders, we have arrested six men this day.”

  “Spies?”

  “Lincolnites. You didn’t answer my question. Your business in Richmond.”

  “It was my home, and now I’ve returned to it.”

  “The registry says you are from Washington City.”

  “It was my home, and now I’ve fled from it.”

  “Fled?”

  “I am wanted by the military authorities there.”

  “Anyone here who can vouch for you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who?”

  “President Jefferson Davis.”

  Harry gave a quick, curt nod and moved on past the man into the hotel. The smoky lobby was crowded, but none there moved to impede him. When he looked back to the doorway, the Maccubbin man had vanished.

  The desk clerk eyed him curiously, but treated him with courtesy. The rooms he’d been given included a large corner one, with windows looking out both over the street and toward the river. His luggage was there. Caesar Augustus was not.

  His former slave was one of the most resourceful men Harry knew, so he decided to forego any serious concern and attend to his numerous grooming needs, starting with a hot bath and shave and concluding with clean clothes and a fresh cravat. This consumed the better part of an hour, during which Caesar Augustus persisted in his absence.

  Standing before the mirror in his room, he decided he still looked the wealthy plantation owner’s son he’d been when last resident of this city—an image that might serve him well. The Southern caste system was so deeply entrenched that “gentlemen” privates in the Confederate army often refused orders from officers of “common” origin. The spacious, elegant corner room he’d been given by the hotel management was testament that he continued to merit this kind of respect.

  Harry didn’t much cotton to these snobbish notions. The man he admired most in the United States of America—the country’s president, Abraham Lincoln—was as “common” as they came, yet uncommon in all respects.

  Pulling out his pocket watch, Harry at last began to fret about his missing friend. He knew how unhappy Miss Van Lew would be if he appeared without Caesar Augustus in tow. He supposed he’d soon have to go searching for him. The black man had numerous friends in Richmond—all slaves but for one freedman. They were largely quartered in the back lanes and alleys behind their masters’ grand houses. It would be dark soon. Not the best time to go a wandering in the shadows.

  He turned the gaslights up against the gathering gloom. The room boasted an elaborate chandelier. Its brightness was cheering.

  Harry felt in need of more cheer than that. His traveling flask was still half full of whiskey. He went to where it stood upon the dresser and took a happy swig. He was contemplating another when there came a knocking at the door. Wondering if Caesar Augustus had forgotten to take a key—a most uncharacteristic lapse—he went to it.

  “Where in blazes hav
e you been?” he said, as he pulled the door open.

  Caesar Augustus was not there. Instead, he found himself looking into the beautiful face of a very expensively dressed young woman with copper-colored curls and bright green eyes, who smiled radiantly and then flung herself into his arms.

  It was not Louise.

  Chapter 3

  Harry stepped abruptly back, stood helplessly flustered a moment, then moved quickly to shut the door behind her as she entered in a great flurry of hoop skirt and cape.

  “Bella, are you mad?”

  She came up against him again, lifting her chin in an assertive invitation to a kiss. When he did not respond, she at last turned away.

  Her full name was Arabella Armstrong Mills. When they both were all of seventeen years of age, and she the belle of Charles City County, he had loved her with a passion that had consumed his every waking moment. Now he could respond to her only with alarm. She was married to his erstwhile rival, Palmer Mills, a young Tidewater aristocrat whose qualities included a ferocious tendency to jealousy and an ill-kept temper.

  “You think I’m crazy, Harrison Raines? I was crazy to let you ride out of Richmond when you did, you foolish, foolish man.”

  She came toward him again, but he retreated farther, to the window that fronted the street, hoping she’d not be so brazen as to follow him there. Her behavior was not simply brazen, it was unthinkable—even lunatic. A respectable married woman did not call upon a man not her husband at his hotel room unless she wished immediately to shed both the “respectable” and the “married,” even though in the Commonwealth of Virginia the latter required an act of the legislature.

  “You had reason enough to let me go,” he said. “Just as I had mine to leave.”

  “False reasons. Dumb reasons. No reasons, really.” She looked about the room, her eyes lingering on the bed. “But all that’s vanished now.”