Dennard’s argument left a vast silence in the chamber. Once more he had aimed his delicate thrust at the heart of the prosecution’s case. Maybe the President did everything alleged, he was saying. Maybe you think everything he has done is outrageously wrong. But so what? he was asking. These are at best political disagreements. This is why there are elections. True, the proposition would make no impact on the most adamant members of the anti-Lincoln faction; nor on those who, like Sumner, believed to a moral certainty in the principle of parliamentary supremacy. And the newspapers would miss the nuances entirely, and thus continue performing to perfection their task of misinforming the public. But a few wavering moderates might be swayed by the suggestion that there was nothing to this case but a political disagreement dressed in the language of high crimes and misdemeanors.
Or they might not.
Chase finally said, “It is nearly five o’clock. Unless there is objection, we shall adjourn for the day.”
Customarily, a member of the Senate made the motion to end the day’s proceedings. But the Chief Justice had more and more made the trial his own. Today nobody seemed to mind.
IV
Jonathan waited with Margaret in the carriage line. “It is a pity that you must return to the office,” she said. “So many meetings.”
“I have no—”
“No choice. I know. The pressure of work. You are much like Father.” Her grip tightened on his arm. “No doubt that explains my affection.”
“The trial will be over soon,” he said loyally. “Then we will have more time for each other.”
“A lifetime, my love.” But Meg’s words sounded as desperately stilted as his. Her rig drew up, and she pressed her head against his shoulder, then presented her cool cheek to be kissed. He handed her up into the carriage. About to signal the negro driver to depart, she had another thought, and leaned down, beckoning Jonathan close. “Father has to go up to Philadelphia for a few days. He leaves tomorrow.” A pert nod, as if in agreement with herself. “He asked me to join him, but I told him I would like to stay and watch the trial. Father says he is proud of you for trying, but Mr. Lincoln is bound to be removed in the end, and the country will never be the same.”
Smarting from this casual statement of his own deepest fears, Jonathan felt honor-bound to protest. “I hardly think that is the likely conclusion,” he said. “The prosecution has yet to adduce the slightest true evidence of—”
Margaret waved this away. “With Father away, it’s just me and the servants and of course Aunt Clara.” The green eyes held his. Something was shining there: decision, and perhaps invitation. Certainly the glow of competition. “The servants are very discreet, and Aunt Clara, after an evening glass of her favorite, is likely to sleep early.” A suitable pause. “And soundly.”
“I … I see,” said Jonathan, warmth and confusion suffusing him once more. This was a very different Margaret from the one he had courted; her time in Washington City had changed her. Or perhaps it was he who had changed, and what he sensed in Meg was only a reflection. He could, of course, neither accept nor decline the implied invitation; indeed, as a matter of etiquette, although he could be as flirtatious as he liked, he dared not acknowledge the invitation at all. And so he said, “I trust that you will sleep soundly as well.”
“I hope I shall be able.” Meg had not released his hand. “That old house can be so drafty and creaky. Nothing like our house in Philadelphia. It is scary sometimes, down in that first-floor bedroom all alone.”
V
Back at the office, Sickles once more met Abigail and Jonathan to give them orders.
“You will not be at trial tomorrow,” he said. “Speed’s clerk will sit at the table.”
“Why?” asked Jonathan, his voice stricken. Plainly, he feared he had committed some error, and was being replaced by Rellman as punishment.
But Abigail had by now spent enough time with Sickles to understand the subtlety with which his mind worked. “Very well,” she said. “Where will we be?”
“In Richmond.”
She could not help herself. “Richmond, Virginia?” Because, to the colored race, everything across the Potomac River and southward remained enemy territory, where one did not, willingly, go. And Nanny’s grotesquely embroidered tales of her own terrifying trek through Sheol scarcely made matters better.
Sickles yawned. He was sprawled, as usual, on the settee beside the coal stove. His eyes were in their accustomed position: all but completely shut. When he spoke, he seemed to have missed her point, perhaps intentionally. “Don’t worry. You two won’t miss much. We’ll have a couple of aggrieved newspaper editors to cross-examine tomorrow, and the next day they’ll find some widow who lost her house when Seward locked up her husband for sedition. Doesn’t mean a thing legally, but it’ll play to the masses of men, who don’t exactly want to be reminded of what Lincoln had to do to win the war, mainly because they all went along with it.” Another yawn. “Remind them that what he did, he had to do, or Mr. Jefferson Davis would now be in the White House, arguing with his Congress.”
Abigail spoke gently. “About Richmond.”
“Mmmm? Oh, right. Right. Remember your idea about the Chanticleer letters?”
“Yes,” said Abigail, quite surprised.
“What idea?” asked Jonathan.
But Sickles preferred to take the long route around. “The package from Chanticleer arrived two weeks before the trial. With the mail at the South being what it is, he must have sent it at least a week or two before that. And God alone knows how long it took him to gather the information, including all the way from Atlanta. He might have been running around for months. Now do you see?”
“Not quite,” Jonathan admitted.
Sickles shifted his gaze. “Miss Canner?”
She saw; and was furious at herself for not having seen sooner. “We did not know that Mr. Yardley was on the witness list until a few days before trial. But this Chanticleer knew a month or two earlier.” Her excitement grew. “Chanticleer has connections to the Radicals, connections strong enough that he knows their trial strategy.” A frown. “But why Richmond?”
“This is the interesting part.” Sickles addressed himself to Jonathan. “Yesterday afternoon, Miss Canner had an excellent idea. She said she thought Chanticleer might have been a Union spy, because the code names of Union spies were mostly bird names, and ‘chanticleer’ is just another word for rooster.”
Abigail could not restrain herself. “You mean I was right?”
“Yes, Miss Canner. You were right. Chanticleer was a Union spy.” Sickles grinned. “Now, Stanton doesn’t know about the Chanticleer letters, and I mean to keep it that way. But I have a source at the War Department. A source who’s loyal to the President, not to Stanton. My source has access to the files, and, well, we’re ahead of the Radicals for once. That is why the two of you are going to take the cars to Richmond tomorrow morning. By now, Chanticleer must know that McShane is dead. We need to find out what else he knows, and what else he is willing to tell.”
“Are you saying you know who he is?” said Abigail.
“I do. The Reverend Dr. Hollis Chastain. Pastor of a big Presbyterian church down there. I don’t think you’ll have any trouble finding him.”
“Why us?” asked Abigail.
“Because I trust you.”
“There must be others you trust,” she said, a bit desperate now.
“Not at the moment. Too many folks we thought were on our side have gone over to Mr. Wade.”
“I appreciate that, Mr. Sickles, but I must confess that the idea of going down to southern Virginia—”
The roguish grin. “Don’t worry, Miss Canner. We won the war.” He sat up, eyelids at half-mast. “Mr. Dennard and I sort of came up with this ourselves. Mr. Lincoln is busy. We have not bothered him with any of this. Neither should you.”
They could hardly mistake his meaning: If anything went wrong, the President would deny knowledge of what the
y were up to. The price would be on their heads, not Lincoln’s.
VI
Nanny Pork was against the trip. Nanny was against everything these days. She sat Abigail down in the kitchen and told her stories, some of which Abigail had heard before, some of which she hadn’t, and some of which she was certain Nanny was making up on the spot: stories of slavery, and of how black folk were treated at the South. And Virginia, said Nanny Pork, was the worst. Abigail objected that she had always heard that the slaves were treated better in Virginia than elsewhere, but Nanny was making a different point. All over the South, said Nanny, there was slaves to pick the cotton and slaves to do the laundry and slaves to raise the chilluns. The slaves did the work; the white folks counted the money. In Virginia, said Nanny, it was different. In Virginia, people made they’s slaves have chilluns, and more chilluns, but not to do any work. To sell them. The rest of the South, said Nanny, bought slaves and made them work. In Virginia, they raised slaves like cattle, and sold them to the rest of the South.
“And Richmond was the worst. Richmond was where they sold us south. You didn’t even get to say goodbye to your family. They took you down to the market in a cart. The market was right next to the train station. Once you was sold, they put you right on the train and took you to your new owner. The whole South was Hell, but Richmond was the capital of Hell.”
Abigail believed every word. Yet she remained undeterred. After her initial reluctance, she had made up her mind. She had not found her sister only to lose her again. Judith had told her about Rebecca Deveaux, and then had promptly disappeared. Yes, it was possible that Judith had run away for her own protection. But the events of the past month cast a dire shadow. Whatever the truth of her sister’s situation, Abigail had to know.
And she would walk into Hell itself to learn the truth.
CHAPTER 38
Spy
I
RICHMOND WAS RUBBLE.
Two years after the end of the war, the city was a long way from repairing the damage from Union shelling, and the even greater damage from the fires that had consumed half the city on the day the Confederate government loaded its treasury onto a train and fled before Grant’s advancing army. Although residents blamed the North for the disaster, the truth was that Jefferson Davis, before abandoning his capital, had ordered the stores of food and tobacco and ammunition put to the torch, and the blaze had quickly roared out of control.
Jonathan took lodging for the night at the Lexington House. Abigail found a colored matron near the river who let rooms. Nor was this distinction their only reminder of the state of things. They had made the ride down in the third-class compartment, changing trains in Warrenton, all the while the objects of part-conjecturing, part-hostile scrutiny from fellow passengers. Actually, Jonathan had assumed that they would travel second class—the first-class car was full—but the clerk at the Baltimore and Potomac depot in Washington City had refused to sell Abigail a second-class ticket. It would be different, he said, if she were taking the cars for Philadelphia and parts north, although maybe not—he was unprepared to say for sure. Jonathan had tried to argue, on the ground that the railroads were common carriers, legally bound to sell space to all who were willing to pay. The clerk had shrugged. Railroad policy, he said. Jonathan was prepared to be angry, and a Hilliman in high dudgeon could be very angry indeed, but Abigail hissed that he must pick his battles, and must not embarrass Mr. Lincoln.
“He is the President,” Abigail had reminded him as they dodged the beggars on the way to the platform. “And our client.”
They sat side by side, Abigail in the window. The car was half empty. The other passengers were poor whites and a scattering of quiet negroes, who kept their eyes down. As Abigail watched the passing landscape, Jonathan told her how several Southern states were considering laws that would require separation of the races on the trains and other conveyances.
“And what will Mr. Lincoln do in that event?” she asked.
“He supports the Civil Rights Acts, which would hold such discrimination to be a violation of federal law.”
“You say that he supports the Acts.” They stopped somewhere, and the car began to fill. “Would he enforce them?”
Jonathan was uneasy. “You are beginning to sound like the Radicals.”
The rest of the trip passed mostly in silence. Her eyes closed, and Jonathan wondered whether she was feigning, to avoid further argument. He wondered, too, how that peculiar head would feel on his shoulder. But Abigail, even in sleep, faced the window, the entirety of her self locked against his affection. Jonathan opened his newspaper and read for a bit. A report said Lincoln was going to call for repeal of the Morrill Tariff, but named no sources. Maybe. Maybe not. Jonathan turned the page, conscious of the stares all around. Maybe the other passengers thought him a carpetbagger, heading south to make his fortune. What, then, must they think of Abigail? His partner in corruption? His concubine? His wife? With speculations, not all of them proper, sloshing about his mind, Jonathan, too, very suddenly, escaped into sleep.
As for Abigail, she was wide awake. She regretted having spoken harshly. Alas, she could not control her growing tension as they progressed southward. Perhaps she was simply experiencing the understandable revulsion of her people at their treatment in the land of Dixie. But it was also possible that with every mile traveled toward Richmond, where her Aaron had been captured, she found herself closer to a simple reality: he was never coming home.
II
The coachman they hailed was black, and liveried, and polite in a silky way suggesting a shared experience of life. Jonathan supposed it was because Abigail was with him, although it was always possible that this projection of intimacy was simply one of the driver’s gifts, for it would likely lead to frequent hires, and excellent gratuities. Although he was very skinny and very dark, he asked them to call him Big Red, and promised to wait on them exclusively, and take them anywhere they might choose to go, at any time of day or night, for what he called the “duritation” of their stay. As they rode in from the depot, he pointed to the few public buildings that had survived the devastation: the post office, the patent office, a handful of others. There were great piles of masonry everywhere, and sullen, defeated people who watched, empty-eyed, as mounted Union patrols passed by.
“In case we gets out of hand again,” Big Red explained helpfully.
We: meaning, the Confederacy.
Big Red dropped Abigail first, then Jonathan, promising to be back in the morning to collect them, after they’d had the chance to “fresher” themselves. Jonathan gave him a couple of coins to be sure.
Inside the Lexington House, Jonathan wrote out a wire to inform Sickles that they had arrived, then went into the dining room, where nothing was left but overdone lamb. He slept poorly, haunted by memories of the terrible battles his regiment had fought on the outskirts of this city. In the morning, at the appointed time, Jonathan stepped outside the hotel, and, sure enough, there was Big Red. They drove over to the colored part of town to get Abigail, then headed for the hills on the outskirts of the city.
“Do you know Dr. Chastain?” asked Abigail.
“Everybody knows Dr. Chastain.”
“What can you tell us about him?”
“Everybody likes Dr. Chastain.”
Abigail frowned. “He was a supporter of slavery.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Doesn’t that bother you?”
The coachman thought this over. “Ma’am, all the white folks was supporters of slavery. Am I spose to hate all the white folks?”
Abigail nibbled at her lip. She had no answer, and so she changed the subject. “It is just that Dr. Chastain was rather … ardent.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Big Red.
After that, Abigail fell silent. She marveled that so fanatical a defender of slavery could have been a Union spy, but she had learned over these past weeks that few people were precisely as they appeared.
The carriag
e rolled through the streets of the shattered city. Twice they were stopped by soldiers, and twice the pass Sickles had obtained, signed by General Grant’s adjutant, got them through without trouble. Abigail wondered what it would be like to live under occupation this way, no matter how great your crimes, and whether there might not be wisdom in Lincoln’s rush to lift the Northern boot from the Southern neck. Memories lingered.
The carriage slowed, then stopped.
“Don’t antagonize him, Abigail,” Jonathan whispered. “Please. Don’t argue with him.”
“What are you saying?”
“That you do not suffer fools.” He said it warmly. “We need his trust. We need to charm him.”
“I can be charming,” she huffed.
They alighted. The clapboard house was modest but somehow defiant: freshly painted, gleaming bright white in the early-spring sun. The flowers were tended, and the sense one had, mounting the steps, was of a prosperity that had miraculously survived the forces that had led to the dilapidated circumstances of the homes on either side.
The man who opened the door was tall—freakishly so, with a full head or more to brandish over Jonathan—and yet so thin that one felt from him a sense less of strength than of fragility. His expensive black suit hung loosely. Wispy white hair decorated his temples, but the bald pate shone. His eyes were small and disagreeable behind thick lenses, and his hand was clutching something just out of sight beyond the edge of the door frame: presumably a pistol.
“I have no need of clothing or food from your missionary society,” he said, without preamble. His voice was thick and rolling, a preacher’s voice. The accent suggested a provenance deeper in the South. “I have no need of an assistance from any Yankees. You have done enough damage to my country. Please leave.”
All the while, his eyes were on the white man on the porch, as if he could not bear to look at a black woman. But all the same it was Abigail who spoke, before Jonathan could quite come up with an answer.
The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln Page 38
