An Extraordinary Union

by Alyssa Cole

  Elle rolled her eyes. “I’d been trying to piece your information together with my information when you . . . interrupted me the other day. You said in one of your letters that one of the men coming into the city on your boat said he had been recruited for a big project at Tredegar. The ironworks,” she said excitedly. “Meanwhile, both Senator Caffrey yesterday and your friend the other day—”

  “Willocks is not my friend,” Malcolm interrupted.

  “—your friend mentioned breaking the blockade. I’m sure you’ve heard about the scuttled Union ironclad that the Rebs scavenged to shore up their paltry navy. Ironclads are the only boats with enough armor to go head-to-head with the boats being used in the blockade. The men on the bluff seemed to want to bring something large along the river. Perhaps parts—”

  “—that are needed to finish repairs to the salvaged ironclad,” Malcolm finished for her. “Given that Tredegar is the only place in the south that could produce the materials needed for such an undertaking, you just might be right.”

  Elle and Malcolm stared at each other in silent communion; both knew what it would mean if her theory was correct. The possession of an ironclad would turn the tide of the war, allowing the South to rip through the blockade and regain control of their coasts and rivers. Once the trade routes were reopened, ships laden with cotton could make sail for England to barter for money and ammunition. The Confederate army could move soldiers freely along the coasts, and the influx of goods and manpower would mean that the rebellion could continue indefinitely. It would mean that the Union could be lost.

  “This cannot be allowed,” Elle said.

  Malcolm gave a brusque nod. “We need to send word immediately. They’re building another Union ironclad, but if it’s not done in time . . .”

  Elle paced the room, unable to still the excitement her deduction had roused in her. She may have recently sent misinformation, but she’d just discovered something huge enough to make up for that error a thousand-fold. If she was right, the course of the war could soon be irretrievably changed, for good or ill.

  “It would be a death blow to us. We have to let the Capital know of our suspicions and that we plan to get them hard proof as soon as we can,” she said, grabbing a sheet of paper and jotting down the information in a code that only her Loyal League brothers would be able to decode. “I’m guessing our best chance to get that proof will be at the ball. All those Rebs drinking and trying to outdo each other with how much classified information they know.”

  “We?” Malcolm asked, his tone just a smidge too pleased for her liking. “A moment ago you nearly killed me, and I don’t mean those little noises you kept making while you were perched in my lap.”

  Elle narrowed her eyes at him. The cheek of him to talk of their momentary distraction when there was work to be done.

  “I shall let you live for now, McCall. But only because I need someone with unfettered access to Caffrey’s heart and mind. Your flirtation with Susie, and the senator for that matter, should make you privy to information I can’t access, and we need as many sources as possible.”

  Even she heard the edge to her words at the mention of Susie’s name. If one were a silly man with ridiculous ideas about what was possible in their world, one might think she was jealous. She knew better than that, though.

  “Yes, I’ll be by soon, and while I’m there I’ll have to flirt with Susie. She’s got connections to the local Vigilance Committee, and even though those groups are usually hokum, she might have information that’s helpful. But don’t dare think I’ll enjoy it knowing that, in a perfect world, I could be spending my time with you instead.”

  “In a perfect world you wouldn’t know me,” she said bluntly. She finished writing the letter and folded it into a neat square. “You don’t have to explain yourself to me.”

  Malcolm stepped close to her, nearly as close as he’d been as they sat on the chairs.

  Comfort. That was all it had been.

  Apparently, Mr. McCall wasn’t of the same opinion. His hand rested atop of hers. “If you feel even a little bit the way I’m feeling, I’d damn well better explain myself before going and flirting with that pile of crinoline known as Miss Susie Caffrey.”

  Elle didn’t know how to react to his words. One part of her felt victorious, while the other hated him for continuing this charade. She pulled her hand away.

  “The quote you scoffed at earlier was from a book called The Scarlet Letter. Do you know what the story entails?”

  Malcolm shook his head.

  “A woman gives in to her desire, partakes in a forbidden romance, and ends up reviled. And her lover, how do you think he fares? If you guess that they’re meted out the same punishment, you are wrong.”

  “What does some work of fiction have to do with the desire we feel for each other?” Malcolm asked.

  “Everything. Why should I believe that were I to proceed with this affair, which I shall not, that you wouldn’t desert me as soon as things get rough? That night on the bluff, you wouldn’t even pretend to introduce me to your parents, and now you want to lay claim to me?” she whispered. “And they say women are fickle.”

  “My father is dead, Elle, so you can’t meet him,” he said. She whipped her head in his direction. “I told you about the Clearances. When the men came to our town, they brutalized the women, some of them in front of their own families. My father was at his shop when the men came. I tried to stop them, but I was too small, too weak. My mother begged them to put me out of the house before they hurt her. . . .”

  The pain in his eyes was so stark as to make Elle believe she was talking to a different man. There was no flirtation, no sly jokes.

  Elle’s breath froze in her lung. The story was so familiar, whispered among the women in the slave quarters and, after she was a freedwoman, at the quilting circles and church dinners. They warned of what could happen if a man, especially a white man, wanted to have his way with you. She didn’t need Malcolm to elaborate; she’d heard of all the ways a man could violate an unwilling woman. Those stories had laid the foundation for why she shouldn’t care about a man who looked like Malcolm, but her heart hurt for him and his mother all the same.

  He continued, not waiting for her to speak. “Mum was bad for a while after, but she recovered eventually. She had to, or what would my siblings and I have done? My father was never the same, though. It was like, in addition to taking all he’d worked for, they had taken my mother from him as well. He’d failed to protect her, and even though she didn’t blame him, he blamed himself. Despite being the one who had been victimized, she poured her energy into bringing him back around once we got to Kentucky. For a while it seemed to work. But he eventually took his own life.”

  Malcolm closed his eyes, as if proofing himself against some memory. For the briefest of moments, he looked very young and very frightened. Elle thought that perhaps that’s who he really was under all the layers of the subterfuge that made him a prized Pinkerton.

  She grasped his hand. “That’s horrible, Malcolm. Unspeakable. I couldn’t have known, but I’m sorry I said something hurtful all the same.”

  Strangely, Malcolm smiled at her. “There’s no need for apology. Besides, I know he would have liked you. When he was well, he loved nothing more than a woman with a smart mouth.”

  Elle’s gaze jerked up to his face. The ridiculous man. He could claim his father would like him gallivanting around with a black woman only because he’d never have to prove it.

  “That’s a compliment,” he said, just as the door to the back room opened. “I’m sure the rest of my family will like you fine, too.”

  He plucked the note out of her hand and handed it to MacTavish. “Apologies, but she decided to let me live. Pass this note along, will you?”

  With that, he swept out of the room, as if he’d been the one in control the entire time.

  “I should have killed him,” Elle said. MacTavish gave her a grim nod in agreement.

&nbs
p; CHAPTER 10

  Elle knew what it was to have a secret, but never one that left her feeling as if her entire being was a vessel designed to keep it safe. She fairly vibrated with excitement at the conclusion she’d come to with Malcolm, but two days had gone by with no word from her superiors. The impatient part of her wanted to scream from the rafters that the ironclad must be stopped. She was finally glad of her subterfuge of muteness; she didn’t trust herself otherwise. After sharing her suspicions with Timothy, she’d kept her mouth shut. Still, every moment spent without taking action seemed like time wasted.

  Her tasks at the Caffrey mansion now chafed even more: unjust, unpaid, and unlikely to let up as the ball approached. While the senator was busy with wartime affairs, his wife had little to do but obsess over the presentation of their home. She took what little power she had quite seriously, and every slave felt her anxieties.

  Mrs. Caffrey had Elle scrub the parlor floor on her hands and knees twice in one afternoon, and when Senator Caffrey lingered too long in appreciation of Elle’s work, the damned woman spilled a glass of port on one of the sofas and demanded Elle make sure the pale blue satin was spotless. “And this time without shoving your behind in the air like a baboon in heat,” she’d said in a sickly sweet voice. Elle wanted to tell the woman to get on all fours and clean herself if she wanted the senator’s attentions so badly—maybe he’d mistake her for a slave and try to mount her—but that wouldn’t have been acceptable. So she’d scrubbed in frustrated silence.

  And then there was Malcolm. He made his regular appearances at the house, glad-handing the men who might have valuable information and spinning yarns about his adventures in thwarting the Union. If she hadn’t known him to be a Pinkerton, she would have believed every word he said without a second thought. She who had been trained in all the tells that showed a man was lying.

  Something about that didn’t sit well. She no longer thought Malcolm a traitor, but the fact he could deceive people so easily was disconcerting. Ms. Mary Shelly’s words appeared in her mind’s eye: “When falsehood can look so like the truth, who can assure themselves of certain happiness?”

  Malcolm wanted her to trust him, but reality made that nearly impossible. She’d heard enough of the exploits of her fellow Loyal League members, and the things the senator’s guests spoke of when the ladies retired to the parlor. Men saw women as playthings more often than not, and she’d been foolish enough to let Malcolm get under her skirts—and her skin.

  His persistence was bothersome, but it also nourished a small, withered place within her that dared to hope someone could want her just as she was. She hated comparing Malcolm to Daniel, but her lost friend had also been her only experience with love. She’d thought herself satisfied with their arrangement, camaraderie, and carnal pleasure, but she’d never felt more than the deep fondness of friendship with Daniel. And it was for the best, in the end. He’d thought her memorizing skill a neat trick, but as they grew older he’d seemed more and more ashamed of it, of the fact that she’d always know more than him no matter how hard he tried to catch up. And he hadn’t thought a woman could handle the rigors of working for the Union, or that one should even try, despite his support for the North and desire for freedom for their people.

  And here I am proving him right, falling for the first man who gives me a tingle, Elle thought as she dabbed at the couch, soaking up the last remnant of dark alcohol. She shook her head and gathered her cleaning supplies. She refused to flagellate herself any further. She’d called herself every despicable insult that could be hurled her way—adventuress, bed wench, traitor to the race—and none of that stopped the ungodly fascination that Malcolm held for her. Even as she watched him lie and told herself not to trust him, she was further ensnared. Charm wasn’t required to be a Pinkerton, so she was told, but in McCall’s case it surely didn’t hurt.

  As the Caffrey house bustled with guests who had arrived for an impromptu gathering, Elle realized she’d been kept so busy with all the small details her position entailed that she hadn’t had time to check the senator’s office that day. With the guests leaving soon, he would retire to his desk to write correspondence that had to be sent off first thing in the morning.

  Elle left the kitchen and moved stealthily toward the servant’s staircase. She grabbed a candle to enter the dark, unlit space and nearly walked right into two warm bodies engaged in less than savory behavior. The two forms quickly jumped away from each other.

  “Please don’t tell anyone,” a familiar voice said. Elle raised the candle, illuminating Althea, one of the kitchen girls. There was a nervous snicker. Ezekiel, one of the cooks in training. His voice, still teetering between boyishness and manhood, cracked as he spoke. “It’s just Elle. She ain’t gonna tell nobody. She can’t tell nobody.”

  The words were harsh, but she knew he meant no harm by them. Elle had noticed growing warmth from the other slaves since she’d had her literal run-in with Susie. It had been much to her benefit, for now they spoke more freely in front of her, spreading the gossip they garnered from others.

  Althea hit at his arm with a rag she had in her hand. “Hush, Zeke!” She turned to Elle and rolled her eyes. “My cousin Ben is coming up from down Carolina with his master. Ben is mighty cute, and I know he’ll want to meet you.”

  Zeke dropped his head back to show his impatience. “Do you gotta talk about this now?”

  Elle stifled a laugh. She remembered her first kiss, how they’d fumbled and groped until they both burst out laughing at the ridiculousness of it. The memory was bittersweet because, of course, she had to think of where Daniel must be now, and the life he was consigned to. She sighed and raised a hand, pretending to cover her eyes as she passed by the teenage lovers. She moved the hand to the side and winked at Althea, drawing surprised laughter from the girl. The sound soothed Elle’s sadness; who knew what the future held for Althea and Zeke as the war marched on without an end in sight. If they could snatch a few moments of euphoria in a stairwell, she wished them well. Best that they enjoy such amusements while they could.

  Elle left thoughts of the teenaged sweethearts behind as she crept into the senator’s office. Luckily for her, his confidence in the sanctity of his home meant he wasn’t overly cautious with his affairs. There was a pile of correspondence, but it had yet to be opened and she didn’t have enough time to reproduce a seal. She was about to give the situation up for lost when she noticed a folded-up billet. She snatched it up, hoping it was a something that could be of use, but it was a list of names and, next to those names, prices. The list of slaves for sale in Richmond that week. She thought about the boy Timothy had gone to pick up and the plentiful household staff and wondered if Caffrey intended to keep buying humans just because he could, like Susie with her baubles. Her stomach lurched at the thought.

  She was turning to leave, the list she had scanned already imprinted in her memory, when an entry three lines down from the bottom became more than an innocuous jumble of words. What she’d read without thinking now stopped her in her tracks.

  Daniel—$800—28-year-old male, healthy stock, uppity but will be a great asset once broken. Broad, strong, good teeth. No abnormalities save for a missing left earlobe.

  It had to be a coincidence. It had to. But she remembered the day the neighbor’s savage dog had gotten loose and tackled the gangly young man to the ground. She’d jumped on the dog’s back and nearly gotten her hand mauled, but Daniel had escaped intact—minus one earlobe.

  The room seemed to tilt as she resumed her stride toward the door. Her body was heavy as she forced herself out of the office and toward the stairwell—it wouldn’t do to be found insensate in the senator’s office when she had no reason to be there. It was some survival instinct that guided her, because grief had seized every other part of her mind and held it tight.

  Once broken. Broken.

  Daniel could be in Richmond. Daniel, who had been in her life for almost as long as she could remember living, and
who she had hurt so badly during their last encounter. Elle was halfway down the now-deserted stairwell when she realized she had forgotten her candle. For a moment, she thought to leave it; she didn’t know if she could go back in knowing that foul document lay on his desk, innocuous in its pure evil. But if she didn’t, she risked more than herself. If Caffrey found a burning candle in his office he would demand to know who had been lazy enough to forget such a thing, and it would reflect on all the other slaves.

  She whirled and retraced her steps, hurrying now. She’d already pressed her luck in entering unnoticed once. She slipped in, retrieved the candle, and slipped out. She realized she’d been holding her breath, as if to protect herself from the corruption of the sales billet. She was almost through the door of the servants’ staircase again when a hand closed on her shoulder. To her great surprise, she didn’t drop the candle. And to her great chagrin, relief coursed through her at the familiar touch.

  “Susie started caterwauling about you not bringing her a tisane,” Malcolm said. “I thought . . . I had a feeling you might be up here. You should get downstairs before she gets out of hand.”

  Elle had been holding herself together, but Malcolm’s words slammed into the most sensitive part of her, shattering her self-control. She had put up with so much, with so little complaint, but she wasn’t allowed even a moment for her own grief. For the first time since arriving at the Caffreys’, Elle forgot why she was there and what she was doing. Not so much forgot as couldn’t be bothered to temper herself.

  “I should get downstairs, should I? So I can wait hand and foot on a spoiled chit who’s never done a day’s work, unless you count batting your lashes as hard labor?” The words came out low and harsh, and the hot tears that spilled out enraged her even more. “Let her get out of hand. Let her lay one hand on me and I’ll . . . I’ll . . .” She gasped back a sob. There was nothing she could do. Nothing.