The Spymistress

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  “Miss Van Lew has generously offered to act as General Butler’s correspondent in Richmond,” the captain said, looking from her to Mr. Rowley. “The general hopes to enlist your aid too, Mr. Rowley, and he formally requests for you both to become his federal agents in the Confederate capital.”

  “With all my heart, I accept,” said Lizzie promptly, and then she glanced at Mr. Rowley. “Of course, I can speak only for myself.”

  “I accept as well,” said Mr. Rowley somberly.

  The captain smiled, his relief readily apparent, but he cautioned, “Make no mistake, this is dangerous work.”

  “We are well aware of the danger,” said Mr. Rowley. “We’ve been living with it for years.”

  “Yes, indeed,” said Lizzie. “And yet we never let that dissuade us. If we’re going to risk our lives and freedom anyway, why not do so under the auspices of General Butler’s command?”

  “Excellently put, Madam.” Captain Howard took a folded paper from his pocket and handed it to Lizzie. “A letter for you, from an admirer.”

  Lizzie broke the seal and read an innocuous missive from a fellow named James Ap. Jones to his “Dear Aunt”—­someone named Mary was recovering from a bad cough, Jennie sent her love, and Mother had given up all hope of seeing the dear aunt again until they met in heaven. “Should I know these people?” she asked, scanning the letter a second time before returning it to the captain.

  “No, because they don’t exist.” Captain Howard draped his handkerchief over his lap, lay the letter flat upon it, produced a small vial of clear liquid from his pocket, and poured the contents over the page. Lizzie smelled vinegar as he rose and held the letter close to the lamp until the paper was in danger of scorching—­and watched in amazement as more lines of writing appeared perpendicular to those she had already seen. With a satisfied smile, Captain Howard handed her the transformed letter and gestured for her to read it.

  My Dear Miss:

  The doctor who came through and spoke to me said that you would be willing to aid the Union cause by furnishing me with information if I would devise a means. You can write through Flag of Truce, directed to James Ap. Jones, Norfolk, the letter being written as this is, and with the means furnished by the messenger who brings this. I cannot refrain from saying to you, although personally unknown, how much I am rejoiced to hear of the strong feeling for the Union which exists in your breast and among some of the ladies of Richmond. I have the honor to be,

  Very respectfully,

  Your obedient servant.

  Lizzie felt a heady rush of excitement that left her momentarily breathless. She handed the letter to Mr. Rowley, who read it, frowning thoughtfully, and as she studied him, she felt her first twinge of doubt. “Captain,” she said, “we’ve always relied upon our own couriers to smuggle intelligence past Confederate lines. Not one has ever been caught. While it’s true that it would require less risk to life and limb to send letters through the flag of truce boats, we must assume that the Confederates read and censor our mail.”

  Mr. Rowley nodded his agreement. “I would in their place.”

  “If they do, and I’ve no doubt they will, they will read nothing more than an innocently dull conversation between a dutiful nephew and his doting aunt.” Captain Howard reached into his coat pocket and produced two small glass bottles containing a transparent liquid. “This is the same substance General Butler used to write to you. Write with it as you would any ink. The lines will appear with the application of a mild acid and heat.” He handed each of them a bottle. “I will also give you a cipher in case you run out of the fluid, or if you wish to doubly secure your message.”

  The cipher he taught them was a system of converting letters to numbers, a grid of forty-­nine squares with numbers along the left column and bottom row and letters filling the rest. Lizzie and Mr. Rowley copied the key over carefully, and when Captain Howard exhorted them to conceal them in the most secure location they knew, Lizzie needed little time to decide. She folded the paper as small as she could and tucked it into the back of the case of her pocket watch, which she carried with her always.

  When they parted company, Lizzie promised to send General Butler a report on the state of Richmond’s defenses and prisons as soon as she could gather enough credible information. “My code name is Quaker,” Mr. Rowley said ruefully as he escorted her to her carriage, where Peter already had the horses ready. “I’m a Dunkard.”

  Lizzie, whose alias was the straightforward Eliza A. Jones, laughed. “Perhaps that’s all a part of the ruse. If you were called Dunkard, it would lead the rebels right to your doorstep.”

  It was easy to be lighthearted in that moment, when they had at last made contact with the gentlemen most likely to put their hard-­won intelligence to good use. But as Lizzie rode home in the gathering twilight, she knew that invisible ink and an impenetrable code provided them with but scant protection. If it fell into the wrong hands, a message written in an indecipherable string of numbers would incriminate them as swiftly as one put down in plain English.

  Although the Union army did not threaten the capital directly as that bleak January dragged on, disturbances within the borders of its defenses unsettled the populace. Almost daily the newspapers reported escapes from Castle Thunder, and on a single night, eighteen Yankee deserters believed to be spies fled the provost prison established in the Palmer & Allison tobacco warehouse on Cary Street by cutting through a wall into an adjoining commissary storehouse. Five nights later, on the same evening the president and Mrs. Davis hosted a gala reception at the Executive Mansion, an arsonist attempted to burn down the residence by placing a large quantity of combustible matter in one of the basement rooms and setting it on fire. Smoke billowing up the basement stairs alerted the occupants in time for them to extinguish the fire before much damage was done, but too late to prevent the culprit from helping himself to a quantity of groceries. Two days after that, arson or accident destroyed seven buildings at Camp Winder. Although the fire caused no injuries or deaths, more than fifty thousand dollars’ worth of damage was done, including the loss of the commissary’s building and most of the contents.

  Compounding the pervasive anxiety was the dire scarcity of food. Lizzie’s heart ached for the suffering of the very poor. Women who had never had to resort to begging before now stood on the sidewalks pleading for bread with tears in their eyes, often with hungry children clinging to their skirts. One day Lizzie went to the market to buy cornmeal, only to learn there was not a grain to be found. Undaunted, she proceeded to the City Mills, where she was told they had no corn and could procure none.

  “But I hear the grinding of the mill,” protested Lizzie. The noise of the millstones turning was loud and unmistakable.

  “We grind what people bring to us,” the miller explained. “If not for the toll we keep, I would have nothing to provide my own family. The people come to me crying for meal and I don’t know what to do. I have nothing to give them, so they must starve.”

  “What shall we do?” said Lizzie faintly, more to herself than to him. She felt her knees grow weak and wished she could sit down. How would the city survive? It was too early in the year to plant a kitchen garden, much less harvest anything from one, and the Van Lews’ winter stores of their farm’s bounty were almost depleted. Their family was wealthier than most, but no fortune could buy what could not be had.

  “I hear they’re grinding at a little mill on the dock,” the miller told her. “If you go there at once, they might have some left.”

  Lizzie thanked him and quickly raced off to Rocketts Wharf, where she found crowds swarming near the mill. They were indeed selling cornmeal, but they refused to sell more than a single peck to each family at any price. Although Lizzie would have preferred to acquire more, she supposed the rationing was only fair and promoted the greater good of all. A peck for her family cost her five dollars, astonishingly inexpensive for th
e times.

  A few days later, she managed to obtain one hundred pounds of rice for fifty dollars, and soon thereafter she bought a bushel of cornmeal for seventy. That would keep the household fed for a while, but not forever. A starvation panic had gripped the city, and when she thought back to the Bread Riots of the previous spring, she realized that the fear of starvation could prove as dangerous as starvation itself.

  All the while, compelled, perhaps, in part by hunger, Lizzie avidly searched for useful information to send to General Butler, determined to do her part to hasten the liberation of Richmond. At the end of the month, employing the cipher and the mysterious ink, she wrote her first official dispatch, hidden beneath a pleasantly boring letter from an aunt to her nephew about inflation and the weather.

  January 30, 1864

  Dear Sir:

  It is intended to remove to Georgia very soon all the Federal prisoners; butchers and bakers to go at once. They are already notified and selected. Quaker knows this to be true. Are building batteries on the Danville road.

  This from Quaker: Beware of new and rash council! Beware! This I send you by direction of all your friends. No attempt should be made with less than 30,000 cavalry, from 10,000 to 15,000 infantry to support them, amounting in all to 40,000 or 45,000 troops. Do not underrate their strength and desperation. Forces could probably be called into action in from five to ten days; 25,000, mostly artillery. Hoke’s and Kemper’s brigades gone to North Carolina; Pickett’s in or about Petersburg. Three regiments of cavalry disbanded by General Lee for want of horses. Morgan is applying for 1,000 choice men for a raid.

  Lizzie fervently wanted General Butler to understand that time was of the essence if he wanted to capture Richmond before thousands of prisoners were conveyed south beyond his reach, but he must strike with abundant forces or not at all, or the consequences would be disastrous. Her message was too urgent and too important to trust to the flag of truce ships, despite the protections of aliases and ciphers and invisible writing. To her relief, Merritt Rowley offered to carry the letter to General Butler himself. When his parents consented, Lizzie gratefully accepted, and after Mr. Rowley found Merritt a trustworthy guide, she sent off her dispatch with prayers for the youth’s safety.

  Lizzie knew she had given General Butler wise council founded upon sound observations and facts, painstakingly gathered and scrupulously interpreted. The course of action he decided to set in response was entirely out of her hands.

  Chapter Eighteen

  * * *

  FEBRUARY 1864

  A

  t a time when the Van Lew family was so preoccupied with other grave concerns that they had almost forgotten the danger, the day they had dreaded ever since the age limit for conscription was raised finally came.

  John was drafted.

  Over the previous year, he had received a series of medical deferments due to an old injury that made it painful for him to raise his left arm higher than his shoulder, but the Confederacy was running too low on vigorous young men to allow the slightly imperfect to be exempt any longer.

  “I will not fight for a government I abhor,” John said, utterly resolute. “I cannot do it. Nor can I turn my rifle upon a Union soldier knowing that his cause is just, even at the cost of my own life.”

  “What will you do?” asked Mother.

  He spread his hands, a helpless gesture that told them he would resort to the best of the few options remaining to him. “I’ll desert.”

  Lizzie nodded—­she had expected as much—­but Mother gasped. “Oh, John. Must you?”

  “He must, and he will,” said Lizzie firmly. They could not waste a moment in debate, not when John had already decided and they had so little time to plan.

  John would have to close the hardware store and, with his income sharply curtailed, give up the residence on Canal Street. Annie and little Eliza would stay on at the Church Hill mansion, but when Mother offered to take in Mary too, John flatly refused. Despite his best efforts, Mary had fallen back into her disgraceful habits, and he did not want her anywhere near their daughters. She had a widowed cousin in the city who had offered to take her in before and likely would again if John prevailed upon her. As for John, their network of Unionist friends included several farmers outside the city; he could stay with one of them until it was safe for him to flee to Union lines, and from there, to Anna’s home in Philadelphia.

  Once resolved, they swiftly made the necessary arrangements, and after a tearful parting with his mother, sister, and daughters, John slipped away in the night to the farm of Jeb and Charlotte Hawkins about a mile northeast of the pickets guarding the road into the city. He carried with him gifts of gratitude for the Hawkins family, letters for Anna and her daughters, and all their hopes and prayers for his safety.

  On the first Saturday of February, rumors circulated wildly throughout the city of a Union advance on Raccoon Ford and Morton’s Ford on the Rapidan. For the next two days, Lizzie gathered all the information she could, her anticipation mounting as one source after another confirmed the presence of Union brigades in the area. Did this mark the opening sorties of General Butler’s response to her dispatch? Was he, even now, mounting a raid upon Richmond to liberate its suffering prisoners?

  On Monday morning, the Examiner weighed in: “How many of the startling stories circulated on yesterday, were mere Sunday rumors, and how much foundation of truth supported others, are questions not now to be completely answered,” the reporter admitted. “It is at least certain that the enemy have advanced up the Peninsula, and their pickets can be seen from the railroad bridge over the Chickahominy. So far as is known, this column consists of eight thousand men; but it may be the advance of a more considerable force.”

  It had to be, Lizzie thought, dismay warring with hope in her heart. In her report to General Butler, she had been emphatically clear that Richmond could not be taken with fewer than tens of thousands of troops. Perhaps these eight thousand men the Examiner had counted were a diversionary body, and a more substantial force was even then stealing toward the city.

  Within days, her suspicions were proven true, and her hopes for the success of the raid utterly dashed.

  The Union demonstration along the Rapidan had indeed been a diversion, intended to distract the rebel army away from Bottom’s Bridge, twelve miles east of the capital. There, convinced that a powerful and sudden surge would allow him to breach the city’s defenses and liberate the prisons, Brigadier General Isaac J. Wistar sent forth a single cavalry brigade to capture and hold the bridge until he could send the infantry through. He did not realize that the excursion was doomed from the beginning. On the night before the attack, a private from New York, accused of murdering his lieutenant, escaped from his Union guards, fled to the rebel lines, and promptly divulged all he knew about the planned raid. Unaware of this betrayal, General Wistar’s forces reached Bottom’s Bridge only to find the road blocked by felled trees, the bridge destroyed, and Confederate artillery batteries and infantry regiments firmly entrenched within extensive earthworks and rifle pits. Though the Union brigade valiantly charged by the only passable route, the Confederates handily repulsed their assault, and since the element of surprise had obviously been lost, General Wistar broke off the attack and withdrew.

  As Lizzie gathered scraps of information and pieced together the story of what had unfolded, she felt profoundly sorry for the Union prisoners, who might have been liberated that day if not for the betrayal of one of their own. If any good came of the failed raid, perhaps it would be that General Butler surely now understood that when Lizzie reported that an attack would require a substantial force, she meant it, and no half measures would suffice.

  General Wistar’s failed raid added to the urgency of John’s predicament, and Lizzie knew he would have to attempt to escape to Union lines soon. After he made it to the North—­or God forbid, if he was captured on the way—­none of them knew w
hen they might be reunited. Determined to see him one last time before he departed and well aware that she might not have another chance, Lizzie decided to visit him at the Hawkins farm. Rather than lead the authorities right to her brother, she donned a disguise she had employed successfully before—­a coarse, ill-­fitting dress; a heavy shawl; a deep, sun-­bleached calico bonnet; and a battered market basket to carry on her arm—­and as she walked, she adopted a stooping posture and a shuffling gait. Whether anyone recognized her she could not say, but no one stopped her except the pickets guarding the road at the city limits, and they took one look at her, gave her forged pass a single bored glance, and waved her through.

  Jeb and Charlotte Hawkins were poor but industrious, the proud owners of ten rocky acres from which they reliably eked out enough corn and oats each year to feed themselves, their four children, and their livestock—­a plow horse, a cow, and Charlotte’s pride and joy, a flock of chickens reputed to be the most prolific layers in the county. John remained inside out of sight as Lizzie shuffled up the dirt path to the cottage, but Mrs. Hawkins spied her from the window and hurried outside to greet her, a wool wrap thrown over her faded calico dress, her long blond braid coiled around her head with only a few wisps out of place. She was five years younger than Lizzie but looked ten years older, toil in the sunshine and the cares of poverty having cruelly aged her beyond her years. And yet she had a beautiful smile, Jeb adored her, and her children admired and obeyed her, and she seemed to consider herself blessed.

  “How glad I am to see you,” she cried, beaming as she hurried to meet Lizzie halfway down the path. Charlotte was clever too, Lizzie noted; she had not called out Lizzie’s name in greeting just in case an enemy was lurking nearby.