Murder at the Capitol

by C. M. Gleason

  No, Constance shrieked inside her head. She wasn’t going to be thwarted. She knew if something wasn’t done soon for her daddy, he was going to die. And she was determined.

  She slammed her hands on the kitchen table, making hers and Bettie’s coffee cups jump. “Fetch your cloak. I’m going and you’re going with me.”

  “Oh, Miss Constance . . .” Jelly began, then snapped her mouth shut when her mistress gave her a look. Nonetheless, Constance heard her grumbling and sniping under her breath as she went off to do as told.

  But Constance was stubborn. She’d be perfectly safe. It wouldn’t be dark for another two hours. Plenty of time to get to Ballard’s Alley and back, especially if they hired a hack. And then she could make George Hilton come with her. If Midnight hadn’t been injured, Constance could have driven her with the landau, but then she would have had to leave her tied up when they ventured down Ballard’s Alley—for the carriage wouldn’t fit and it was too dangerous to try and drive a horse through the narrow ways.

  Fortunately, earlier Constance had changed into a simple around-the-house-dress that only had one crinoline and no hoops, which would make their journey easier. She found her daddy’s Colt revolver and loaded its six chambers, then carefully tucked it into the deep pocket of her dark cloak. She wasn’t a fool. Not only was Ballard’s Alley not the safest place, but all those wild soldiers could be unpredictable.

  Regardless, neither were a match for a determined Alabama woman. She tucked her hair into a simple bonnet and pulled on her gloves.

  “Miss Constance,” Jelly said one more time in a pleading voice, but Constance just marched out the door.

  She knew the older woman would follow her, and she did.

  It was simple to find a hackney on Seventh Street, and moments later she and her maid were being helped into the carriage by the driver. It was none too clean, but beggars couldn’t be choosers—though Jelly lifted her nose and sniffed with disdain when she was required to whisk Constance’s skirts off the floor and tuck them into the seat.

  “Ain’t gon’ make any difference anyways,” Jelly mumbled. “Streets so filthy here in this town. Miss Constance, are we really goin’ to that alley again?”

  “Mr. Hurst needs help, Jelly, and I have to do this or he’s going to die.” Her voice broke a little, and her maid reached over and patted her hand.

  “It gon’ be all right, little lady,” she said as Constance fought back tears in the dim interior of the carriage. “That Dr. Hilton, he a good man. If we git there safe—and praise be to God if’n we do—then he’ll fix Mr. Hurst up right.”

  All the way to the First Ward, Constance prayed that Jelly was right. If she found it astonishing that she was putting all of her hopes in a Negro doctor, she didn’t examine that fact too much. Instead, she focused on asking the Almighty to look down favorably on her and her family and this mission.

  “Are you sure you wanna get out here, miss?” asked the hackney driver when she and Jelly climbed out of the carriage. He was a black man and scratched his forehead beneath the lip of his cap, but he was looking at Jelly and not Constance when he spoke. He had a large wad of tobacco in his mouth.

  The narrow, refuse-strewn alley angled off into a cluster of shacks and lean-tos. A single scrawny dog prowled around a pile of waste. In the distance, a baby screamed bloody murder and someone shouted from a different direction.

  “Yes,” she replied briskly, and carefully counted out the money for him. The sun was still above the horizon, but it had fallen quite a bit during their ride—faster than she’d anticipated. For the first time, Constance wondered what she would do if George Hilton wasn’t at his office.

  “If you wait here for us for fifteen minutes, I’ll pay you double to take us back,” she said.

  “Yes, miss. But it goin’ on nine o’clock, miss, and I done got the curfew at ten.”

  “We’ll be back in fifteen minutes,” she said firmly, even as Jelly muttered under her breath.

  “Yes, miss. I’ll wait right here for you.”

  As they started into the alley, Constance realized she hadn’t thought to bring a lantern. She hadn’t expected it would be this dark, but with the close buildings crammed in behind the stately homes of the more wealthy white people, there was hardly any way for the lowering sun’s light to filter into the area.

  But Jelly had thought ahead, and she produced a lantern from beneath her cloak. “You gonna light this up for us, man?”

  The driver, who had a lantern hanging from his carriage, complied and moments later, Jelly and Constance started into Ballard’s Alley.

  “This ain’t gon’ end well, Miss Constance,” grumbled her maid. “It’s jus’ askin’ for troubles.”

  Constance started to reply, but at the last minute was required to dodge a very large, shiny, pungent pile of something she didn’t care to identify. After that, she paid attention to where her feet were going instead of what her maid was going on about.

  “It’s not much farther,” she said as they turned onto an offshoot of the main alley. She remembered it from her last visit, for there had been a group of women sitting right on that old upended cart there, doing laundry. This evening, there were people—black and white, but all dressed in worn clothing—going about their business—cooking mostly, or taking down laundry and emptying washbasins—and they gave her and Jelly curious looks. But no one spoke to or stopped them, and for that she was grateful—although she kept her hand around the butt of the revolver in her cloak pocket. She noticed that, along with the lantern, Jelly had produced a large wooden stick the size of a baseball bat.

  “There it is,” she said when the gleam of a whitewashed building became discernible in the lowering shadows.

  My goodness, it was getting dark quickly now. Thank Providence they’d made it to Hilton’s place without incident.

  Constance walked more rapidly, and Jelly puffed along behind her, still grumbling—or maybe she was praying—with the lantern swaying in her grip and the club mingling with her skirts. Her heart sank when she saw that the building seemed dark, but then remembered to walk around to the side door and the half-buried windows. A dim light shone through them, but she would have to crouch—a difficult prospect in her corset—to see into them. One of the windows was propped open with a stick, and from inside she heard a loud crash, followed by a tumbling, falling noise.

  Frowning, Constance turned and hurried down the four steps to the door that led into the cellar. She was startled to find it ajar.

  More alarming noises were coming from inside. It sounded like some sort of altercation. Instinct told her to pull out the Colt, and Constance gripped its thick handle in her hands. She stepped through the door, Jelly hot on her heels with the lantern.

  She took in the scene in an instant: three white men were grappling with George Hilton, who was sagging between them as they took turns pummeling him. There was blood everywhere.

  “What is going on here?” she demanded in the imperious voice she used when the slaves needed to be reprimanded. She aimed the revolver in the general vicinity of the combative men and was gratified (and slightly terrified) when they all turned to look at her.

  “Leave that man alone,” she ordered as Jelly moved in close behind her. She had no idea why those men were beating on George Hilton, but she did know that she needed him to help her daddy, and he wouldn’t be able to do that if he was beaten to an insensate pulp. “Step away or I’ll shoot you. And my daddy taught me not to miss,” she added.

  “This nigger,” panted one of the men in a thick German accent, “he’s been cutting up white men. Probably been eating them.”

  “Nonsense,” Constance snapped. She gripped the Colt tighter, hoping her trembling wasn’t visible to the men. She hadn’t lied— she knew how to shoot, and well, but there were three of them and only six shots. “He does work for Mr. Lincoln.”

  “Mr. Lincoln?” sneered the tallest of the three intruders. “A nigger working for the president
, cutting up white men? Who are you? His pretty white nigger-loving bitch? Maybe you could find a better man than this ape to do your—”

  Constance’s vision went red and her finger curled on the trigger before she could stop it. The revolver’s ball blasted into the room in a puff of dust. The sneering man dropped to the ground with a cry, holding his leg at the knee, and the other two men stumbled away from him.

  One of them called her a filthy word and lunged toward her. Jelly bellowed a terrible, blood-curdling yell Constance had never heard as she launched herself between the attacker and her charge, swinging her club. The awful sound of wood cracking against bone reverberated in the small room, but Constance hardly heard it as she pulled the trigger again.

  Boom! Another explosion of powder, and now her wrists were hurting from the double kicks of the firearm, and from a death grip on a handle that was too big and heavy for her hands.

  All at once, there was silence. Her breath heaving, Constance looked around to see one man on the floor, gripping his leg as blood streamed from it. Another man was cursing, curling his arm against his body where, she thought, Jelly had hit him and—from the looks of it—broken his forearm. And the third man was edging toward the door, as if trying to escape.

  Constance whirled on him, her emotions high with fear and anger and determination. She’d never felt so unsettled, so terrified, so furious and vengeful—yet so in control.

  “I’ll have you thrown in jail if y’all ever come back here again,” she cried, unabashedly exaggerating her influence. She could tell from the looks of this man that he was a poor and mean immigrant, and would believe this threat. At least, she hoped he would. “Get your friends and get out of he-ah.” Her accent had gone thick and Southern. “And don’t y’all come crawlin’ back t’ask the doctor he-ah to fix you up after what y’all did to him. You find someone else to do it.”

  She trained the Colt on the trio of attackers as they helped each other out of the cellar, not even attempting to suppress groans of pain. “Cowards, all of y’all,” she panted after them.

  It was only then that she turned her attention to George Hilton, who was standing of his own volition—albeit unsteadily. Jelly was fussing over him like a mother, cleaning off the blood from his nose and cuts on his face with a rag dipped in water. One of his eyes was going to be swollen shut by tomorrow. He was breathing heavily and holding an arm at his ribs—drat, she hoped he wasn’t too injured to fix Daddy after all she’d gone through to get to him—and he was looking at her with baleful dark eyes.

  “I cannot even imagine what brought you here, Miss Lemagne,” he said in a stiff, careful voice. “What a foolish, damned foolish thing to do.”

  Her breathing was finally settling, and the red haze that had colored her vision eased. Her fingers loosened and the revolver threatened to slip from her grip. “I need you to see to my daddy.” Her voice broke.

  He lifted an eyebrow, then winced as if suppressing a gasp or even a hard bark of laughter. “I see.” But he didn’t seem to see; he seemed utterly confused and bothered.

  “I need you to come with me. Are you—are you injured?”

  George looked down at himself as if to check to see whether he was, then looked back up at her with an arrogant expression that, if he’d been her slave, would have prompted her to give him a good tongue-lashing. “Not much—just a fractured rib, I think, and maybe a sprained ankle. A loose tooth here in the side of my jaw, and—”

  “Are you going to come with me or not?” she demanded. She was almost ready to cry, now that the danger and anger were over, and she was only contending with an uppity black man who was her last hope to save her father’s life. Constance’s knees were shaking and her vision was watering up with angry, frustrated tears. She shoved the revolver into her pocket lest she drop it from nerveless fingers.

  “Jes’ hush a minute there, Miss Constance,” Jelly said in an uncharacteristically snappish voice. “This man is hurt and he ain’t gon’ be no good to you if’n he faints dead away.”

  “I’m not going to faint,” replied George flatly. But his voice was more thready than usual, and Constance’s concern grew.

  “Fine. Fix him up then, Jelly. I’ll wait over here.” Constance stalked to the blanket that sagged from where it had been hung to separate the two areas. It appeared to have been halfway torn from its moorings.

  “Don’t go back—”

  But it was too late, of course. And it wasn’t as if Constance hadn’t seen the results of George’s work in the past—so she wasn’t completely horrified by the sight of the body on the table. Fortunately, Mr. Tufts—she did recognize him because his face was the only place she dared look—was mostly covered up from his chest on down. Still, the sheet revealed some red cuts that had obviously been made by the so-called doctor and she had to swallow hard when the smell of dead flesh and organs fully assaulted her.

  Or maybe she just hadn’t noticed the stench in all the excitement earlier.

  By now, her knees were shaking ominously and Constance barely made it to a chair in time before they gave out. She tried to take deep breaths—already restricted by her corset—but every time she did, she inhaled the horrible smell and felt sick again. She needed air.

  She flung the blanket aside and stumbled across the room to the outside entrance. Before she went through the door, she caught a glimpse of Jelly helping the doctor—who’d removed his shirt—to wrap his torso in a tight bandage and then, finally, blessedly, she was outside, gulping in fresh, summer night air. She managed to keep the contents of her stomach inside, but then the tears came.

  She fought them back when she heard voices from inside coming closer, but the moment of indulgence had helped. She waited for Jelly and the doctor to come out of his office. At least, she hoped he was going to come. He hadn’t looked all that healthy. Nor all that willing.

  But when the door opened and her maid stepped out, she was followed by George Hilton. He was carrying a large black bag and though he moved slowly, he was moving.

  And he was coming to help her daddy. Constance nearly wept again with relief and hoped, once more, that all of this had not been in vain.

  * * *

  George was not at all happy about the turn of events. Here it was, after nine o’clock—only an hour until curfew, which, though he’d broken it many times in the past still was a risk—and he was sitting in a hackney with a beautiful, stubborn, arrogant white woman and her slave maid. His head throbbed from the beating he’d taken, and his ribs ached like a son of a bitch, and he wasn’t going to be able to open his left eye come morning.

  He knew it could have been worse, much worse, and so he leaned back in the carriage and closed his eyes in an attempt to stave off the pounding in his head.

  What in the hell was she thinking, coming to his office?

  George stifled a moan. Considering the entirety of the situation, it would be a miracle if he woke up tomorrow still a free man without any more bruises or aches. And another miracle still if his office was still intact and his work untouched.

  After a ride that was both interminably long and far too brief, the hackney carriage pulled up in front of a pleasant-looking house at G Street, near Twelfth. George managed not to groan as he bestirred his aching body to climb down first, then to offer a hand to each of the women in turn. Miss Lemagne was wearing gloves, of course, and once on the ground, she moved briskly past him toward the house without saying a word.

  He and the maid walked more slowly, which gave him the opportunity to ask, “How is that aching middle toe of yours, Miss Jelly?” He’d been too stunned and confused to mention it when she was tending to him back at the office.

  “Why, it’s still givin’ me a world of pain, Dr. Hilton. Isn’t there anything you can do about it?”

  “I’m fixing to have a new remedy that might work. You’ll have to come visit me at my office”—if he still had an office—“next week, then, all right? Tuesday?” When there was a new moon and it
was as dark as it got in the summer.

  “I’ll do that, Dr. Hilton,” she said, opening the door to the house. “I’ll shore do that.”

  Miss Lemagne was already inside waiting for them, and to George’s surprise, she was holding one of the largest slabs of meat he’d ever seen. “You’d best put this on that eye, uh,” she said, clearly not sure how to address him and obviously unwilling to use his title. “Or y’all won’t be able to see what you’re doing. Daddy’s this way. Dr. Forthruth”—no hesitation on the title that time—“says his thigh bone’s broken, but he wasn’t able to pull it back, to put it into place so the bones could heal. He said he’s going to have to amputate or Daddy’s going to die.”

  The cold meat felt like Heaven on his angry, hot, swelling eye. “Thank you,” he said.

  “Would you—would you like some coffee? Or some whiskey?” Miss Lemagne asked, surprising him again.

  “No, thank you, miss,” he replied. “I’d like to see your daddy. That’s why you brought me here, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.” She spun abruptly in a rustle of skirts and he followed her into a small parlor. “Jelly, bring some more lamps so—uh—so he can see what he’s doing.”

  Hurst Lemagne lay on a narrow bed in the parlor. He was dressed only in a nightshirt and stockings. His pallor was sickly, and when George touched his forehead, he felt the burn of fever and the clamminess of pain. He had to relinquish the comfort of the slab of meat in order to do a thorough examination, and he gave it to Jelly after she’d brought in a sufficient number of lamps.

  Even with them, the parlor wasn’t as well-illuminated as his morgue, but he could see well enough to note that Hurst Lemagne was dehydrated, in extreme pain, and his life was fading. Dr. Forthruth’s assessment in that, at least, was correct.

  He pulled back the blankets to reveal two pale legs, uncovered from above the knee to the top of the stockings. The left femur was adducted and the entire leg appeared to be shortened, with the knee rotated and turned into the other thigh. George frowned as he dunked his meat-scented hands into a basin, then wiped them on a towel Miss Lemagne had provided. Something wasn’t right.