But Abigail did her tidying, then sat down with the same first volume of Blackstone she had been examining in her private hours for the past two weeks. Mr. Little, who seemed to come and go as he pleased, had caught her more than once, but never said anything about it. Since Jonathan did not seem to mind, and even encouraged her, she supposed that the only person from whom she was hiding her secret studies was Mr. McShane, who turned out to be serious in his intention to limit her to chores scarcely removed from those assigned to Mr. Little. She was busily making notes about feudal land tenures when a knock on the door announced a visitor, who walked in without ever quite being invited: David Grafton, a lawyer with offices down on the first floor.
“I gather that you are here alone for the moment,” he said. “Good. I have been looking forward to this chance.”
He was an elegantly attired but oddly bent man, hips one way, torso the other, shoulders a third. He looked as if he had been twisted into a corkscrew by inhuman hands: the crooked man from the fairy tale. The truth was, he had been run over by a horsecar ten years ago, and should have died from the experience. But David Grafton was a man of indomitable will. Until two years ago, he had been the middle partner in what was then known as Dennard, Grafton & McShane. Jonathan was hazy on what had led to the crooked man’s departure, but on one rule he was crystal clear: Abigail was not to speak to him, at any time, for any reason.
“But why not?” she had asked. “He said hello to me the other day in the street.”
“Because he is evil come to earth,” said Jonathan, by no means a religious man. “Because he has made it his life’s work to sow discord, and to see to it that others reap the whirlwind.”
III
“Mr. McShane is not in,” said Abigail, on her feet, fists tightly clenched. “I shall tell him you were here.”
“Tell him what you like,” said Grafton lightly; his dark cloak fit perfectly the image Jonathan had sketched. “I am not here to see McShane, Miss Canner. I am here to see you.”
“I … I am rather busy.”
“I see that.” Eyeing the volume of Blackstone, then turning toward the wood stove. He stooped, opened the door, peered in. “Quite a fire burning there. Your work, or Mr. Little’s?” He slammed the door, then crossed his arms over his chest and rubbed his upper arms. “The others are over at the Mansion, but not you, eh?”
“I am … holding the fort.”
“Indeed. In my offices, there is a man who keeps the fire burning and there are clerks who work on legal matters. Only on legal matters. They do not hold the fort.” He was near the window now. He had pulled a pipe from somewhere in his cloak and made to clean the bowl. “Perhaps you would like to make a change.”
He has made it his life’s work to sow discord.
“You are very kind, Mr. Grafton, but I am quite happy where I am.”
“Pity.”
“I am afraid I must—”
“McShane is a good man,” said Grafton, as if Dennard was not. The visitor was prodding inside his pipe with a metal reamer. He turned the bowl upside down, rapped it on the side table. Wet dottle fell onto a silk handkerchief he had thoughtfully laid out. “A fine lawyer. Sound in his politics,” Grafton continued. He spooned fresh tobacco from a pouch. “Rather a rare thing these days, isn’t it?”
“I wouldn’t know, Mr. Grafton.”
“Sorry Dennard snared you first. Wish I’d had a shot at you.”
“Very kind of you, sir.”
“Suppose I were to double what Dennard & McShane are paying you.” His smile was sudden, and feral, the smile of a hunting cat. “If you were my law clerk, Miss Canner, I would not have you waste your time dusting and running errands. I would spend two years training you, after which you would sit for the bar. No woman in this Republic has ever sat for the bar. You could be the first. How does that sound?”
Abigail wondered whether her hearing was off, or whether she might be dreaming, asleep in the bedroom she shared with her younger sister, Louisa. She stared in determined fascination at Grafton’s pipe tool, imported from the look of it: all those shining attachments on a single stem. Nanny Pork smoked a pipe, too, but cleaned the bowl with bits of this and that. Abigail stared at the gleaming tool and concentrated on the great mystery of how one properly cleaned a pipe, because something about this conversation scared her half to death.
“Mr. Grafton—”
“Think of it, Miss Canner. At this very moment, over at the Mansion, they are working out the strategy to defend in the Senate the President who freed the slaves. And you are here. Left behind. Holding the fort. Is that the life you prefer?”
She felt quite breathless, as if she were halfway up a very steep hill. “Mr. Grafton, please. I have duties to attend to.”
“Yes, I do believe I noticed a bit of dust in the corner.” He wobbled to the closet, took out the broom. “I imagine you’ll be needing this.”
IV
“Were you out with Miss Hale last night? Henry Foreman says he saw you dining together at Willard’s.”
“Mr. McShane has encouraged me to spend time with her,” said Jonathan, who had hoped, foolishly, that his employer would forbid him instead. He and Fielding were eating a dinner of cold chop in the dining room. Ellenborough and a footman were serving. With the rest of the family in Europe, most of the house staff had been furloughed. “He believes she might provide useful information.”
“And should you refuse her, Miss Hale might take offense and complain to her father, eh? And there would go any chance of picking up the vote of one of his New Hampshire friends in the Senate. You would seem to be trapped both ways, wouldn’t you, Hills? Still, Henry says the two of you looked rather cozy. I do wonder what my cousin would say.”
“Meg would not understand—”
“Oh, I would never tell. Gentlemen do not tell other gentlemen’s secrets. Now, Henry, on the other hand, fancies Meg. Did you know that? I believe that he would be delighted were your engagement to fracture. And he is no gentleman.” Signaling for more wine. “By the by, you haven’t forgotten, I hope, that I wish an introduction to Miss Canner? You really have no right to keep her to yourself, Hills. Not her and Miss Hale.”
Jonathan, spreading butter on bread, eyed his friend curiously. He longed to share with someone his fears about McShane’s increasingly lurid conspiracy theories. But Fielding was not the man. Fielding would only endorse them.
V
Abigail dined that night at the home of the Mellisons, a colored family who had prospered in the dry-goods trade. In the course of the evening, several of the many evil Mellison daughters taunted her about the fact that she had not yet met Mr. Lincoln; and Abigail, with Grafton’s taunts ringing in her ears, could hardly leave fast enough. She rode with Dinah, whose coachman, Cutler, kept a shotgun under his seat, for Washington City was thick with criminals, all set to prey on innocent young ladies; or so the Berryhills believed.
The night fog swirled around the carriage, softening the glow from the gas lamps along the avenue. The buildings beyond were hidden by a wall of gray gauze. Here and there they passed a soldier, or a beggar, or a man pushing a cart. The frozen ground was rutted, and the rig bumped and swayed.
“Don’t pay any attention to them,” said Dinah. “Everybody is proud of you.”
“Not everybody.”
“You know how the Mellison girls are. They want all the attention, but in that room the conversation was all about you and Mr. Lincoln.”
“I know how they are.”
“Don’t worry,” said Dinah, touching her friend’s hand. “My parents dined last night at Edgewood, with Senator and Mrs. Sprague.” The most sought-after table in Washington City, now that the President no longer entertained. “Senator Sprague assured my father that the President will not be convicted. Even now, negotiations are under way at the highest level. So, you see, all will work out for the best, as it always does.”
Abigail refused to be consoled, least of all by a remin
der that, in the midst of an impeachment crisis in which the firm that employed her was intimately involved, the Berryhill family had better information about the affairs of Mr. Lincoln than she did. Beneath the blanket, she clenched her fists. She had been made to look a fool, a role she hated at the best of times; but tonight of all nights, when the whole table had been impressed by her employment at the firm that was defending the President that colored America so adored! It had been a deliberate provocation, of course. The Mellison sisters did such things, sometimes out of envy, sometimes for sport, always dripping with malice. She should have known better. She had told Dinah she would rather not attend the dinner, and Dinah had insisted that she go and show off. And now—
“What is that?” said Dinah, suddenly.
“What is what?”
“Behind us.”
Abigail craned her neck. Another carriage might have been back there, black and vague in the night fog. “Someone’s rig.”
“It’s following us.”
“This is a public street, Dinah. Anybody can use it.”
“Nonsense.” Even in worry, Dinah was brisk, and in charge. “Nobody would bring so fancy a rig down to this neighborhood.” More Washington mythology.
“The Island is no more dangerous than any other part of the city. And, besides, Dinah, your carriage is quite fancy.”
“I do not live here. I am dropping you.”
“Perhaps he is heading to the ferry.”
“At this hour?” Dinah snorted; and said something to the driver, who, touched by the urgency in her voice, picked up the pace. The black carriage fell behind, but whenever Abigail turned to look, she fancied she could discern its wavery lines, and hear the steady clopping of hooves.
CHAPTER 5
Ambition
I
WASHINGTON WAS A modern city, alive with sound: streetcars rattling, horses whinnying, shopkeepers shouting their prices through half-open doors, machinery thudding and pumping in the factories, crowds thronging the avenues in hopes of glimpsing the rich and the powerful in their grand homes, trains rumbling through the middle of town on their way south and then others rumbling north, beggars calling as you passed, builders constructing ever-larger edifices for the government and its departments. At night some parts of the city grew silent, but for the susurration of the gas lamps. In other neighborhoods different sounds were heard, sounds proper to activities that the well-bred avoided: the angry remonstrances of the inebriated, the brassy boister of the illicit clubs, the whispered threats of the gangs, and the softly compelling calls of the streetwalkers. And coiling through it all came the whipping winter wind that rose or fell but never quite faded, winding along the streets, slithering frigidly through cracks into the smallest room of the largest house.
Alive with sound.
The city’s separate neighborhoods had their own rhythms. The farms to the north and east awoke to the lowing of cattle and the cries of the roosters. Nearer Capitol Hill, the householders were roused by the sound of wagons brattling to the Eastern and Center Markets for a long day of haggling. Among the shanties of George Town, it was the cries of the junk man and the street peddler; in the retreating forests of Tennally Town, the factory whistles; and in the mansions north of Pennsylvania Avenue, the quiet rapping of a servant at the bedroom door. On the Island, as it was known, the irregular southwest corner of the city, bounded by the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers and the fetid remains of the barge canal to the north, the new day was announced by the bells of the dairy wagon on its rounds, and the clattering of hooves as cabs and horsecars arrived at the Seventh Street Wharf, disgorging passengers and cargo to catch the first ferry of the day over to the Virginia side.
These were the sounds to which Abigail Canner opened her eyes each day, precisely at dawn, unless she had awakened earlier: for it was a peculiarity of her family that the women needed little sleep. Her father, a plumber and bricklayer, had constructed the two-story brick house on Tenth Street, about half a mile south of the towers of the Smithsonian Institution. Several of the better colored families had built nearby, but most of those living on the Island were poor. Now and then the entire house would be jolted from dreams by the thunder of a train rattling off the Long Bridge. Cars moving at that hour almost always carried troops, and Abigail, ever since her return from Oberlin, would lie in her bed, eyes boring into the gray, dreamless dark, hoping against hope that this at last might be the transport bringing Aaron back to her arms.
But it never was.
She would rise from the bed she shared with her younger sister, Louisa, who would groan and snuffle and snatch at the covers. Abigail would sit in the window overlooking the frozen mud of Tenth Street, reading her Bible and saying her morning prayers at the ugly brass tripod table, made in England, of which their late mother had been so proud. Then she would perform her ablutions and dress for work in a satin-and-muslin walking dress. She had several, and never wore anything else to the office, even though Dinah said the outfits made Abigail look like her own grandmother. She would wake Louisa, who did not rise easily, making sure that the child was not late for the carriage that collected her and a few others from the Island for transport to the Quaker Method school near the end of Massachusetts Avenue, just below the Patent Office—which, in some peculiar testament to the changing times, stood on the grand hill set aside, in the original plan of the city, for the federal government’s official cathedral.
With Louisa safely launched, Abigail would see to any needs of Nanny Pork, who was likely at the kitchen table, smoking her pipe and glaring disapproval at whatever caught her glance. Thrice a week a silly young thing named Tilly came to clean and cook and lug coal and do the washing, and on those days Abigail would wait until the girl arrived and give her stern instructions, because Nanny liked to take herself off visiting or shopping when Tilly was in the house, leaving her unsupervised. They had already learned to lock up the silver whenever Tilly or any of her predecessors was due. Nanny liked to say that if Tilly stole anything it would serve Abigail right for going off every day to do men’s work.
When Nanny finished listing her niece’s latest sins and errors, Abigail would leave the house at last, walking three blocks to catch the cars of the Metropolitan Line for the ride to the office. She would march past the familiar houses, now dusted with bright snowy coverlets: there the home of Mr. and Mrs. Amos, who owned a lumberyard down near the wharf; next the dwelling of old Dr. Sandrin, whose credentials to practice medicine were suspect; and finally, at the corner of Seventh Street, the grand mansion of the sisters Quillen, widows of a certain age who nobody believed were actually sisters, or had ever been married—the young ladies of the neighborhood were forbidden to go near them. There were shanties, too, and the dilapidated farmhouses of the penurious, and from these, too, Abigail kept a safe distance, not out of physical fear but out of an ineffable worry that if she did not remain upon the narrow path, she, too, might wind up as an ordinary colored girl.
At Seventh Street, she would queue for the streetcar, along with washerwomen and valets headed to work at the hotels and grand houses north of Pennsylvania Avenue. She sat near the center of the car, and always had a book or two tucked beneath her arm, because, even before Jonathan Hilliman’s oddly shamefaced announcement that she would be helping prepare for the impeachment trial, she had grown accustomed to cajoling him into advising her on what she should read. The normal length of an apprenticeship in preparation for the bar was two years, and Abigail supposed it was longer when your reading was surreptitious, and largely unguided by actual lawyers. But her determination never flagged. She had been encouraged by the example of a man named George Vashon, a friend of her mother’s family, who was the first negro admitted to the bar of New York, and would have been the first negro admitted in Pennsylvania, too, had the bar of that fine abolitionist state not rewritten its rules to keep negroes out. Vashon spoke half a dozen languages, several of them dead, and in his time he had taught everything from mathematics
to literature to philosophy. He had been working with General Oliver O. Howard, known as “the Christian general,” at the Freedmen’s Bureau, and recently had been appointed as the first professor at the newly opened colored university in Washington, named in Howard’s honor. It was Vashon who had suggested to the Canners six years ago that they send their peculiar daughter to Oberlin Collegiate Institute, where he himself had matriculated.
“Do they take girls there?” her father had exclaimed, very surprised: for the great universities of New England did not.
“Sir,” said Vashon, with pride, “they are good Christian people. They take everyone.”
And so, in 1861, at the age of fifteen, Abigail took the cars for Pittsburgh and then onward to Ohio, a decision taken in equal measure to further her education and to protect her from the war; for in those early days, as defeats mounted, the Union victory was anything but inevitable, and the capital seemed doomed to fall any day. Across America, negroes trembled, and made provisions. They bought guns, they formed protective associations, they tried to erect walls around their families. Children were sent to what the wags called the Deep North. Louisa, ten, went to live with relatives in Boston. Michael was thirteen, apprenticed to a printer and living in Baltimore. Worried that Maryland was not far enough, the Canners found him a position in Syracuse, New York, where George Vashon had briefly practiced law. But Michael, who already had his own way of looking at the world, refused to go.
It was at Oberlin that Abigail met Aaron Yount, who entranced her, and who was himself entranced by Charles Finney’s sermons declaring the battle to end slavery a holy war in which every Christian man should enlist. Finney, by that time close to eighty, would raise both fists and shout his righteous fury, looking energetic enough at those moments to join the army himself. And of course he never allowed them to forget that two of John Brown’s raiders were Oberlin men. So Aaron went to war, and Abigail returned to Washington to await his return.
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