Making his way from room to room, Jonathan was stopped by Charles Eames, his host, who was journalist, lawyer, inventor, and much else besides. There was a rumor, it seemed, that Stanton was going to testify against the President.
“Ridiculous,” said Jonathan, with all the conviction he could muster.
“You’re certain?”
“Yes.”
“But there is some sort of fissure, isn’t there, between Mr. Lincoln and his Secretary of War? Serious differences over Reconstruction?”
Scarcely able to believe that the story had spread that fast, Jonathan nevertheless found a smile somewhere. “Yes, of course. I believe that they plan to arrest each other just as soon as they settle on neutral ground.” Eames laughed dutifully. Jonathan, more worried still, resumed his fruitless search for Bessie.
At last he spotted Mary Henry and Lucretia Garfield, two of Bessie’s closest companions. He charmed his way into the little circle of which they formed a part, and set himself to listen.
He did not have to listen long.
“You must be terribly unhappy, Mr. Hilliman,” said Crete Garfield, eyeing him in that sideways manner so in fashion among ladies who, like Mrs. Garfield herself, expected to become First Lady.
Jonathan gave a small bow. “And why would that be, Mrs. Garfield?”
Mary and Crete exchanged a look. It was Mary who spoke. She was a long-waisted woman, awkward and somehow wobbly, who had grown up in the Smithsonian tower, and lived there still. “Poor lamb,” she said, a sepulchral grin on her pallid face. “Nobody’s told you, have they? Senator Hale arrived yesterday. He’s packing up his Bessie and moving her back to Spain.”
CHAPTER 28
Urgency
I
WITH THE TRIAL set to begin on Monday, the experienced Dennard had decreed that the Sabbath would be a day of rest. Nobody was to go near Fourteenth and G. “Spend the day with your families,” he commanded. And so on Sunday morning, Abigail enjoyed a surprisingly tranquil breakfast with Nanny and Louisa and Michael, who had shown up unexpectedly last night and stayed over in his old room. Nanny Pork made a huge fuss over him, and Abigail fought the urge to jealousy by reminding herself of the story of the prodigal son.
When, over breakfast, Nanny pointed out that Abby was spending all of her time with white mens, Michael came to her defense: The white man, he said gently, held all of the money and all of the power. If their race did not learn to be comfortable around the people who mattered, they would never move forward.
Louisa offered enthusiastic agreement. Nanny sighed and shook her head. Abigail wondered what her brother was up to and why he was suddenly so solicitous. But, being Michael, he could never remain at peace. He began to rail against President Lincoln, who would be remembered, he declared, as the savior of a people perfectly capable of saving itself. “All he did was give white folks a reason to feel proud,” Michael declared. “And now we’re supposed to be grateful.”
Rather than be drawn into an argument, Abigail excused herself from the breakfast table, and decided to take a walk. At Oberlin she had found the beauty of nature a tonic for her unsettled soul.
“Let your brother drive you,” said Nanny, for whom the only purpose of walking was to get from one place to another.
“It’s just a walk,” said Abigail, and braced for a lecture about the highwaymen lurking behind every tree.
“No, no, it’s fine,” said Michael, catching his sister’s mood. “I have errands to run anyway.”
She was careful to make sure that her brother departed first, because she did not want him chasing her down. Finally, she set off, strolling up Tenth Street, free to wander through her own mind. Soon her own home was out of sight. The sky displayed that perfect eggshell clarity that heralds spring. Abigail felt her spirit calming. She waved to old Dr. Sandrin, who was climbing into his trap. As she came abreast of the mansion of the sisters Quillen, she saw Patsy, the older Quillen, on the porch, rocking. Abigail liked the Quillens. Her mother, of course, had never let her daughters go near them, worried, she said, that the girls would become what the sisters Quillen were: that is, not married, and also not sisters. As a child, Abigail had no idea what her mother was talking about. Now she did, and although Nanny maintained the same prohibition, Abigail had come to like them.
And so she stopped for a moment to chat.
Patsy said she was proud of Abigail. Lately, everybody seemed to be on her side. It helped.
“Say,” said Patsy, as Abigail stood to take her leave. “That was some fire last night, wasn’t it?”
“I’m afraid I missed it.”
“Working late again.”
“I think I’ll be working late for the next month.”
“That’s the way,” said Patsy, and resumed her rocking. “Too bad about Sophia, though. I always liked her.”
Abigail, who was halfway down the steps, turned back. “Sophia?”
Patsy Quillen nodded. “Sophia Harbour. Madame Sophie. Her establishment burned to the ground last night, with Sophia in it.”
II
Abigail ran. Ladies never exerted themselves, least of all in public, and her mother would have been scandalized, but she ran anyway, all the way back home, where she told Nanny she was very sorry but she had to take the wagon. Of course, Nanny pointed out that if she wanted to drive she should have gone with her brother, and Abigail said, Yes, Nanny, and I know, Nanny, and I’m sorry, Nanny, and took the wagon anyway.
“Please, God,” she kept saying as she drove the horse much too hard. “God, please, don’t let it be, don’t let it be!”
With Whit Pesky gone from the city, there were only two people left to testify of their own knowledge that Rebecca Deveaux was not a prostitute, and one of them had burned to death last night.
Abigail charged around fancy carriages, and, pressing, even beat a railroad train to a crossing. She turned left and sped along B Street.
“Please, God. Please, God. Please, God.”
She stopped outside a dying hotel, tied up the horse, jumped down, tossing a coin to the valet. Then she was running again, around the corner and down the same alleys. Silver Place looked little different from three days ago. The thaw had snatched most of the snow, but nothing else had changed. The same garbage lying in the same heaps, the same angry eyes staring from the same windows. Abigail expected any moment that someone would accost her, but nobody did. She made her way into the rear lobby of Judith’s building, crept through the darkness toward the same swinging lamp, and climbed the same treacherous stairs to the third floor.
She knocked on her sister’s door … and everything was different.
The door was not locked, and the apartment was empty. No crying baby. No Judith. And nothing intact. Pictures, books, even furniture had been smashed to pieces.
Backing into the hall, Abigail nearly crashed into the same ancient man she had encountered on the night she came up here with Jonathan.
“They’s gone,” he said, grinning madly. Once more, his aged fingers were scrabbling everywhere.
“Where? Where did they go?”
“They’s gone.” He took a shaky step toward her. His aroma was, if anything, more pungent than before. “Mama and baby both.”
“When? Do you know when they left?”
His grizzled face was already so wrinkled that it was difficult to tell whether he was frowning, but, certainly, he paused in his constant scratching, and his eyes fixed on a point in the middle distance. “Yesterday,” he finally said. “Maybe the day before. A man comes to see her, and a minute later she takes the baby and flies the coop. Doesn’t even close the door behind.” He peered past Abigail into the devastation. “I reckon some of the folks who live hereabouts has needs,” he explained. “They finds what they needs where they can.”
Or someone was looking for something; and Judith, praise God, was already gone.
Because she was warned?
And it happened within the past two days: not long after
Whit Pesky received his transfer orders.
“This man who called just before Judith left,” said Abigail. “Can you describe him for me?”
Again the old man fell into thought: fell because he seemed to lapse into an entirely different existence, where he could sift, at leisure, through the memories of what was no doubt a fascinating life. He smiled a bit as he pondered, even laughed, then shook his head as if in pain, and shut his eyes briefly, shuddering.
“Thin,” he finally said.
Abigail was growing exasperated. She had been taught to revere old age, and to respect those who reached it, but just now could hardly stand still. “Is that all?”
“White,” he murmured, after an aeon.
“Please, sir. Can you recall anything else? Was he tall? Short?”
A slow nod. “Yes. Yes.” He began to scratch again. “Well spoken, like. Not from around here. A real nervous kind of fella. Like, maybe he didn’t wanna be here.”
“Nervous?” An idea struck her. She made a washing motion. “Did he rub his hands like this?”
“Nothing like that, no.”
Not Plum, then. “Is there anything else you can tell me?”
Again the old man drifted into his netherworld. And again, after a bit of reflection, he returned. “He had those big whiskers.” Brushing his fingers along his cheeks. “But he was all bald and shiny up top. Sounded educated. Young fella. Thirty, I reckon. Not too much more, anyway.”
Descending the stairs, Abigail strove to calm herself. There had to be a hundred men in Washington who fit that description. A thousand. Even so, she would at that moment have given a great deal to know where exactly Noah Brooks, private secretary to the President of the United States, might have been on the night Judith Canner disappeared.
CHAPTER 29
Managers
I
“GENTLEMEN,” SAID CHIEF Justice Salmon P. Chase, “the Senate is now sitting for the trial of articles of impeachment. The President of the United States appears by counsel.” A learned frown in their direction. “The Court will now hear you.”
Chase sat upon the high dais usually occupied by the Senate’s presiding officer. Between him and the Senators, two long tables had been set. The prosecution sat to Chase’s right—the left of the audience—and the defense counsel opposite. Now the Chief Justice rapped his gavel. The tittering in the audience ceased.
Abigail watched from the crowded gallery. There were few vacant seats, but two of them bookended hers. It was just past noon on Monday, March 18, and the faint sunlight of late winter lazed through the clerestory windows high in the walls. The gallery ran like a mezzanine around three sides of the chamber. This is where they debate the future of my race, she kept thinking. This is where they vote. She craned her neck, trying to take in the opulence. She had lived in Washington City all her life but had never been inside the legislative chambers of the Capitol. Even after the frenzy of recent weeks, an unexpected excitement seized her. Although she allowed nothing to show on her face, Abigail fancied that others could hear the swift, unladylike pounding of her heart. This is where. The Senate Chamber was a great oval, several stories high, all marble and polished wood. In Washington most things were filthy, but here even the spittoons gleamed. The Capitol building, with its granite and marble and sparkling new dome, was beautiful and vast, designed to intimidate even European dignitaries, who had vast, beautiful buildings of their own. But, for all its outward glory, the Capitol was really a glorified men’s club, purchased at enormous expense by the people of the United States for the benefit of those who ruled them without ever quite representing them. The part of Abigail that had learned under the tutelage of Professor Charles Finney to adore the republican principle was repelled by the presumption of aristocracy that the building presented. Professor Finney used to say that the Congress could as well meet in a theater or an auditorium, dispensing with the ostentation.
And yet she could not deny the chamber’s breathtaking beauty.
Around her, the ladies of Washington leaned toward each other, whispering. Nobody leaned toward Abigail. Nobody whispered to her. Nobody was sure what she was doing there. The struggle to get a colored woman admitted had been protracted. Down the hall from the chamber was a suite of rooms set aside for the President’s use whenever he might come up to Capitol Hill. During the course of the trial, Lincoln’s lawyers would use the suite as an office, but they had learned early that Abigail would not be allowed inside. The exclusion was not because of her color but because of her sex: the rules of the men’s club. So they obtained for Abigail a ticket entitling her to a seat in the reserved gallery. The ticket had her name on it, but when she presented it at the Capitol this morning, the usher had seemed to lose the ability to read; or else he thought she had stolen it from some whiter Abigail Canner. He told her to leave. She stood her ground. She might have sent a note to the conference room, but just now she did not want some white man straightening out the question of her rights. The great of Washington City flowed by, giving the contretemps a wide berth. Perplexed by her persistence, the usher called over a guard. The guard spoke in the slow, measured tones appropriate to instructing an imbecile. His brass buttons sparkled. His moustache was damp with this morning’s bracer. The colored, he said, were not allowed in the reserved gallery. That was how he put it, the colored, as if naming a clan. The colored had to sit with the rest of the public in the place set aside for them, he said. The stair was around the back. And I would hurry, he added: the seats are pretty much taken. Abigail had learned long ago that most of life’s barriers were surmountable through a combination of intelligence, charm, and obstinacy. She tried the first, asking if the guard had a rule book handy, and whether he could perhaps point to the relevant rule. She tried the second, offering a cute smile and an all-but-giggling assurance that she would behave herself. And she tried the third, informing him that she planned to enter the gallery in any event. If he stopped her, or sought to place her under arrest, he could explain his action to Senator Sumner, who was a personal friend. This was not entirely true, but neither, Abigail told herself, was the guard’s fantasy of the rule barring her entrance. She had never caviled at the occasional exaggeration for the sake of navigating the system of injustice under which she lived. Nanny Pork said men lied all the time but a lady never should, unless she was a trollop, or a wife, or both. Yet Nanny would lie to every farmer at the Center Market to save half a penny on a chicken.
Sumner’s was a magical name in the city; evidently, neither the guard nor the usher could imagine anybody, least of all a negress, taking it in vain. Marveling at the state of the world, they stepped aside and allowed her to pass.
When she reached the sweeping marble stair to the gallery, the ladies of Washington stepped aside, too. This obstreperous colored woman, well spoken yet devious in the manner they had thought peculiarly their own, was an entirely new species to most of them, but they knew already that they didn’t care for her.
II
Abigail was in a better mood than she would have expected. Upon arriving at the office early this morning, she had told Dennard about Judith’s disappearance. The lawyer listened impassively, but was unimpressed. If she hoped to be a lawyer, he said, shaking his jowly head, she would have to learn how to honor her commitments notwithstanding whatever private griefs might occur. He told her how, on the eve of a major trial four years ago, he had received word that his brother-in-law, a dear friend, had been killed in action. The body was on its way back to Kentucky for burial.
“I sought no postponement. I let my sister stand at the funeral without my support. And do you know why?” His glare dared Abigail to attempt an answer, but she was remembering how Grafton had told her that Dennard family members died fighting on the Confederate side. “Because life is rich with tragedy. If you are willing to be delayed by the inevitable pains and horrors that will befall, you have no business pursuing a profession.”
Chastened, she returned to her work. Sickles h
ad letters for her to deliver to the post office. She drove herself across town in the wagon. A light snow was falling. Gentle flakes fluttered like insects across her eyes. Or maybe it was her own tears that made it hard to see. Either way, she ran the wagon into a ditch, just in front of a quartet of stout mansions on Ninth Street, but although pale faces appeared at the windows, no one emerged to help.
One of the mansions belonged to the Bannermans.
Abigail hesitated, then marched up the walk and pulled the bell. Ellenborough, the mulatto butler, somehow contrived to look down on her, although in actual fact they were the same height. She explained what had happened. Ellenborough explained that she should run along. He closed the door. It opened again an instant later, and Fielding Bannerman invited her in.
She had not laid eyes on Fielding since the night they had walked in to find Jonathan drunk in the library, but he was all smiles. A footman was sent to hitch horses to Abigail’s wagon and pull it out of the ditch. Fielding apologized for the “smallness” of the staff: two maids, a cook, two footmen, and Ellenborough. The rest were on furlough until the bulk of the family returned.
“Of course, we have a lot more at the lake house,” he added, perhaps worried about what she would think. They were in the front parlor, sipping lemonade.
“Of course,” she said.
“Hills will be sorry he missed you.”
“He is at the office. I shall see him shortly.”
“Repairs could take some time. Let me drive you.”
On the way, Abigail found herself telling Fielding about her sister’s disappearance. She had his sympathy, he said, and if there was any way in which his humble talents or resources might be of service, she had only to ask—
“You are very kind,” she said, and squeezed his hand briefly.
She arrived at Dennard & McShane just as the group was leaving for Capitol Hill. She could tell from his face that Jonathan had been worrying. Probably he knew by now about Judith: Dennard would have told Sickles, and Sickles was too mischievous to restrain himself. Had Jonathan made a consoling remark, or even an overly friendly one, she would have turned on him. But he seemed to sense that, and contented himself with handing her a sealed brown envelope.
The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln Page 28
