The Ironclad Alibi

by Michael Kilian

  “Confederate affairs are in a blue way,” she said. “Roanoke Island’s taken. Fort Henry on the Tennessee River is open to them. We fear the Mississippi, too. We have evacuated Romney—wherever that is. New armies, new fleets, swarming and threatening everywhere.” She wiped at her eye, as though to deal with a small tear. He repressed an impulse to put a comforting hand on her shoulder.

  “There is fear up there as well,” he said.

  “Of what?”

  “You have better generals,” he said, wishing he’d said “we” instead of “you.” “And then, there’s ‘the Monster.’”

  Mrs. Chesnut tilted back her head. Her husband was following their conversation. “What ‘Monster’ is that?” she asked.

  “The great ironclad in Norfolk. They talk of it most fearfully in the Federal City—as they might a dragon in a medieval fairy tale.”

  “How do they know of it?”

  He shrugged. “Newspapers, rumors.”

  “Well, I know nothing of it.”

  The meal was excellent by Southern wartime winter standards: fresh roast pork, forty-five minute biscuits—the intense labor of beating the dough doubtless falling to some slave—pickled turnips, dried butter beans, sweet potatoes, custard pie, and real coffee.

  Harry complimented Mrs. Davis profusely, all the while reminding himself that the servant girl who kept hovering behind him probably was due it more.

  “So, Mr. Raines,” said Bonham. “Have you returned to your native soil to put on the uniform of your country?”

  Harry flushed. He should have expected this query. He’d gotten it enough in the North, where people wondered why he wasn’t in Union blue. “I would like to make my contribution to ending this conflict,” he said. “But I’ve not decided whether it should be shouldering a musket.”

  “I think your father would be happy to have you in his cavalry regiment,” Davis said. “He’s told me you’re an excellent rider—which I suppose accounts for the ease with which you have fetched General Hooker’s horse to us.”

  “I’ve been thinking on it,” Harry said, uncomfortable to have all this attention on him.

  He wished desperately for Louise to prove herself his friend by intervening at this point with some trifling, but distracting turn of conversation, but she simply sat, elbows on the table, following every word with great amusement, as though enjoying his discomfort.

  “I’d think upon it hard, young man,” said Congressman Bonham. “Month from now, you may not have any choice.”

  “Why is that, Sir?” Harry asked.

  Bonham looked to Davis, who gave a slight nod.

  “Conscription bill,” Bonham said.

  The words came as a jolt. No one in the North was talking seriously of a draft. Mr. Lincoln’s calls for volunteers were still being readily met.

  “Conscription?” Harry asked. “A draft?”

  “Yes indeed,” Bonham replied. “Passage is guaranteed. All able-bodied white men subject to military service for the duration of hostilities. Free blacks to be called up, too—that’s in a separate measure—they’re to be used for labor details.” He looked to Chesnut. “I think that may apply to slaves in some circumstances.”

  “Too many slackers,” Chesnut said. “Too many idle Negroes. Got to do it.”

  “It does seem harsh,” said his wife, Mary. “Dragooning young men against their will and sending them off to be killed. But how is our cause to prevail otherwise?”

  “Our cause will prevail—with or without conscription,” Bonham said. “Because it is right.”

  “The South has already given up so much,” interjected Mrs. Davis. “Virginia ceded the Northwest territory to the United States. The Missouri Compromise surrendered all the new territory except Missouri north of thirty-six degrees and thirty seconds. The compromise of 1850 gave up the northern part of Texas, and the North took, by vote of a majority, all the territories acquired by Mexico.”

  “And that war was won by soldiers from the South,” said Bonham. “That’s why they call Tennessee ‘the Volunteer State.’”

  “When you say ‘gave up,’” Harry said, “you mean …”

  “The North and West have made a determined and preconcerted stand against the admission of any territory in the benefits of which the South had any participation, except by the sacrifice of its right of property in slaves,” Mrs. Davis said, perhaps reciting from some official paper of her husband’s.

  Louise was fanning herself with great vigor, though the temperature in the presidential dining room was decidedly chill. Despite her considerable experience in the world, she was probably unused to women speaking out so forthrightly on politics in the company of men.

  The president returned the subject to the draft. “We do need the men,” Davis said, his voice very matter-of-fact. “With General Jackson in the Valley, McClellan could well outnumber our army here in Virginia by two to one.”

  Harry smiled to himself. McClellan had told Lincoln he needed another one hundred thousand men.

  “Do you find this amusing, Mr. Raines?” asked Mrs. Davis.

  He was stumbling into trouble with his every step. “No, Ma’am. It’s just that I don’t think McClellan would move against you—against us—with twice the number of men he has now. In the North, they say he has ‘the slows,’ which is a polite term for what ails him.”

  The president cleared his throat. “You understand, Mr. Raines, this discussion is not something we can have repeated in the newspapers.”

  “Of course,” Harry said.

  He stared at the table as a female black servant reached to ladle some soup into his bowl, keeping his eyes from her. Looking into the faces of slaves at their labors upset him. When he lifted his gaze, finally, he noticed General Lee observing him, intently.

  “You say you find General McClellan reluctant to move?” he said. “I’m curious, Sir, how you have come to that conclusion.”

  “It’s something of a national joke,” Harry said. He caught himself. “I mean, it is in Washington City. He drills and drills and drills, and in between the drills, he drills some more. People wonder if he’s going to try to win the war with a parade.”

  There was some polite laughter, but not from Mrs. Chesnut.

  “Not parades,” she said. “Win or lose, it will be with the suffering of great masses of people. Poor and rich. North and South. Their suffering all the same.”

  Mrs. McGuire began to talk about her own suffering, recounting her flight from northern Virginia in the company of General Lee’s wife. She concluded with an anguished recitation of all that the Lees had been compelled to leave behind when the Union army had confiscated their Arlington estate.

  The general coughed, politely, but pointedly. “Our loss is small, compared to that of many,” he said.

  “They have taken your plantation at Arlington,” Harry said.

  The general nodded, somberly. “Houses in North Carolina have been put to the torch. People have lost all their possessions, their livelihoods. Thousands have died. Our loss is small, Sir.”

  “It will all be put right when this war is ended,” said Varina. “The president will see to it.”

  She meant her husband. He said nothing.

  Louise finally leapt into the conversation, retelling her own adventures escaping the clutches of Lincoln and his Yankees, not realizing—as Harry well knew—that the United States president had personally arranged for her escape to spare the Union the shame and foreign scorn attendant upon being the first American government to hang a woman for wartime crimes.

  “I was rowed across the Potomac in the dead of night,” Louise said. “Our little boat was almost run down by a Yankee gunboat, but we managed to elude it and horse patrols as well. A gallant young gentleman did this for me, at great risk to himself. He had no reason to do so except his own natural chivalry, but he brought me through all that—the Union lines, swamps and bogs, and all manner of terrors. I am eternally in his debt.”

 
“Who was that gentleman?” asked Mrs. Chesnut.

  Louise beamed, eyes straight at Harry. “Why, he sits at our table, here before you.”

  Harry heard a sharp intake of breath, not knowing whose.

  “Is that true?” said Mrs. Davis. “You could move that easily from there to here?”

  “It was by no means easy,” said Louise.

  “It was early in the war, is all,” Harry said. “Shortly after Manassas. The situation was more amenable to movement back then. Miss Devereux exaggerates my role. The bravery was all hers.”

  “Then you were in Virginia last summer?” Davis asked.

  “Yes, Sir, for a few days.”

  “You didn’t stay? You went back?”

  Louise had built him a bear trap and neatly put his foot into it. He had to yank it out.

  “I had personal reasons, Mr. President.”

  “Involving the war?”

  Yet now Louise came to his rescue.

  “Involving love, Mr. President,” she said, with a gush. “Harry is sweet on a friend of mine—the actress Caitlin Howard—who resides in Washington City.”

  Harry blushed, his mind devoid of any word to add.

  “And now?” Mrs. Davis asked.

  “She has decamped,” said Louise. “And so my gallant has come to live in Richmond, and I rejoice.”

  She pushed back her chair. “I do beg your indulgence, Excellencies,” she said. “This has been the loveliest of evenings, and I do thank you so much for it. But I fear I must now myself decamp. For an actress, all the world truly is a stage, and mine beckons.”

  The men rose, Harry, still a little dazed by the run of conversation, the last to do so. Louise turned to him. “If you would see me to my carriage, sir,” she said, “I would again be in your debt.”

  After saying her goodnights around the room, she took Harry’s arm and led him with a prancing step out through the succession of parlors to the foyer. He waited as she put on her cloak and bonnet and long black gloves.

  “What were you trying to do, Louise?” he said, as they descended the front steps into the clammy cold, “Send me to the gallows?”

  “On the contrary, Sir,” she whispered, as they moved across the gravel to the coach, whose driver sat huddled in his high seat. “Tryin’ to save you from it. You’ve been under suspicion. Now you are not.”

  “And how do you think you have managed that?” He opened the door to the coach, waiting for her to put her dainty foot upon the step.

  “I arranged your invitation to this dinner tonight, Harry. Mr. Bonham is a good friend of mine. Your bonafides are now established. You will be viewed as a friend of the president’s. You will have nothing to fear.”

  “Then I am obliged to you.”

  She rested her hand on his arm as she put foot to step and swung herself into the carriage, leaning out the open window of the door after he shut it. “You are very, very, very obliged to me, and don’t forget it.”

  “I won’t. May I presume you no longer now consider me a Yankee spy?”

  “I’m still not sure.”

  “Why not?”

  “You’re a puzzle, Harrison Raines.”

  “And if I am a Yankee spy after all?”

  “I’ve prepared for that, too.” She leaned out to kiss him on the cheek.

  “Good night—sweet prince.” She laughed.

  She rapped twice on the side of the coach. The driver stirred, flicked his whip, and the carriage clanked into motion, rolling out of the yard with its side lamps flickering in the mist.

  When Harry returned, the remaining ladies had retired from the table. President Davis had invited the men into his library. Harry accepted a cigar and glass of French brandy, contenting himself with listening to the others in hopes they’d turn to the subject of “the Monster” without his prompting.

  They did not. The talk was all of politics—and of the refusal of England and France to recognize the Confederacy as a sovereign nation. As Bonham noted, England had for more than half a century adhered to a North American policy aimed at preventing the United States from expanding into a transcontinental power. Britain had tried to keep Texas independent; had invaded Louisiana in the War of 1812 in hopes of prying that region loose from the United States’ grip.

  Yet now, with all they had then wished handed to them on a silver tray, they had shrunk from its prospect.

  “Perhaps another victory,” said Chesnut. “Smash up the Yankees good. Give them another thumping. Perhaps then.”

  General Lee seized this moment to beg his leave. Harry leapt at the opportunity to do the same. When the Davises did not beg either to remain, the others took it for a signal and rose to depart as well.

  Harry walked with Lee as far as the latter’s coach, which stood in the street.

  “I am residing at the Spotswood,” the General said to Harry, as he helped Mrs. McGuire into the conveyance. “May I offer you a ride?”

  “I’m a short walk away,” Harry said. “At the Exchange.”

  “I have an office at the War Department on Ninth Street,” Lee said. “If you have a moment, Mr. Raines, I’d appreciate it if you might drop by and tell me what you know of the situation north of the Rappahannock.”

  “Certainly,” said Harry, hoping he’d be gone from Richmond before Lee got too serious about that invitation.

  Lee put a foot on the coach step. “The cavalry needs good officers,” he said. “You have amply demonstrated your worth.”

  “Thank you, General. You are kind to say so.”

  Harry made no more commitment than that.

  He walked the few blocks downhill to the Exchange briskly, trying to ignore the cold. It was probably foolish to be out alone on so dark a night with the city so full of roughnecks, sharpers, and brigands. But he needed to think. Though none at the table had been willing to take up the subject in front of him, Harry was fully convinced now that the Southern ironclad would be launched very soon. The North needed to know, and know quickly.

  He looked east over toward Church Hill, the height on which stood the very grand Van Lew house. If lamps were lit, they were not visible. Perhaps it wasn’t worth the risk of visiting this night. He’d find a way to get a message to Miss Van Lew on the morrow.

  Harry was just approaching the Exchange’s main entrance when a realization of his inestimable folly suddenly occurred to him. The readiness of the Monster for combat was far from the most important news he had to deliver. He’d heard something of much more consequence, and completely ignored it.

  Conscription. The South was so desperate for men it was going to initiate a draft—within a month. If the Union struck soon, it would catch the Confederacy at a decided disadvantage. McClellan had to march immediately. Harry had to get word to those in the Union who could make him do it.

  But that was something more to sleep on. He was so weary he could barely think.

  Pausing before his door, he took the key from his pocket, then hesitated, listening—a practiced habit for those in Mr. Pinkerton’s line of work. Maccubbin might well be in his rooms waiting for him, or conducting a browse.

  He opened the door slowly, hearing nothing. The light from the corridor penetrated the chamber beyond only enough for Harry to see the vague outline of a large dark shape partially obscuring the window.

  He shrank back, hand going to his pocket pistol, trying to focus on the form. It seemed to move, but slowly, from side to side.

  Stepping inside, he struck a match, stumbling backward a little before the awful sight that flickering light revealed. There above him, hanging from the chandelier like some lifeless doll, twisting slowly and completely naked, was Arabella Mills. What he could see of the tormented look upon her face made him glad the room was so dark.

  Chapter 6

  Shivering now from more than the cold and damp, Harry stood collecting his courage for a long moment, then drew a deep breath and stepped forward, striking another match. Something else had caught his eye—in t
he far corner. A dark face.

  “I didn’t do it, Marse Harry,” Caesar Augustus said. “I just found her like that.”

  Harry wanted to turn on the gaslight, but the dead Arabella was hanging from its principal fixture. Before anything else, he had to get her down.

  There was a candle on the table. Lighting it, waiting for the flickering flame to grow, he felt himself in some weird, macabre tale—one worthy of the great Poe. Calming himself, he took out the thin sheath knife he routinely carried inside his right boot. Gently pushing aside poor Bella’s clothing from where it lay on the floor, he picked up the chair that had been overturned and placed it beneath her. Climbing upon it, he had to hold on to her cold body while he sawed at the rope. He’d rather be among all the dead of the Bull Run battlefield than endure this dreadful experience, but he had no choice.

  At length the rope gave way, dropping Bella down and against him. He wavered, then lost his balance. The chair tipped, falling to the side with a crash. He came down hard on his back, with Bella’s body sprawled across him.

  “Help me, damn it!” he hissed to Caesar Augustus.

  Too slowly, the black man rose and approached, just as Harry pulled himself free, and, with jittery knees, got to his feet.

  “Didn’t do it,” Caesar Augustus said. “Came in, and there she was. Hanging like a chicken.”

  “Why didn’t you go for help?”

  Caesar Augustus gave him a hurt look. “I’m a darky, Marse Harry. I do that, and they drag me off to jail fore I can say a word. Maybe shoot me right here. On the spot.”

  “So you just sat in the corner waiting for me?”

  “Couldn’t think of anything else to do.”

  “How long have you been here, Caesar Augustus?”

  “Don’t know. Half hour maybe.”

  “Where have you been tonight?”

  “Scoutin’ ’round, like you told me to do.”

  Harry shook his head, then knelt beside Bella, arranging her body in a more seemly manner, wondering if he should remove the rope, then deciding against it. The law would be unhappy with what he’d done as it was.

  “Fetch me a blanket from my bed, so I can cover her.”