Fiddlehead (The Clockwork Century)

by Priest, Cherie

  “Precious little,” she confessed. “I only just arrived in D.C. last night, in time for an awkward briefing and a change of clothes.”

  “Why was it awkward?” Sally asked.

  Maria mentally weighed the truth against the potential cost. But she’d gotten this far by being straightforward, so she stayed the course. She kept her voice as soft as possible, while still making herself heard. “Because Abraham Lincoln is the man who hired me. It was a real shock, let me tell you.”

  Sally’s eyes went wide. “No doubt!”

  “But this is what I believe, Captain: Lincoln is working to end the war; he’s struggling to protect this innocent scientist, whose family was kidnapped—though the Pinks are working on that, and I’m told that the missing people have been recovered. The former president is investing a great deal of his personal fortune in a peaceful future, and he’s leveraging every ounce of his remaining reputation to bring this war to a halt. He believes in the machine and the man who built it, but his resources are limited. He no longer commands the federal army, so now he can only buy agents like myself—unless he wants to rely on the Secret Service, which he apparently doesn’t.”

  “But he asked for you?”

  “To no one’s greater surprise than my own.”

  Sally put her elbows down on the desktop and frowned thoughtfully. “Now that I’ve had a moment to consider it, I’m not sure I’m surprised at all. You’re perfect for his purposes, just like you’re perfect for mine.”

  Genuinely confused, she asked, “How so?”

  “Southern in sympathy, from sheer habit if nothing else, but carrying the clout and the badge of a Northern authority. I think Lincoln gambled on you, hoping that you still care enough about the South to help him defeat it, just in time to save it. And save the rest of the world, too.”

  “That’s a grim thing to say. Particularly grim coming from you, Captain. How much of your own fortune have you lost to prolonging the war—cycling these boys back out to the front?”

  “All of it, and then some. At present, the hospital operates on research grants and foreign investment funds, mostly doctors and universities overseas who want to know the secret of our survival rate. I have nothing left of my own, and when the war ends, I do not know what will become of me. But the war does need to end. And you know as well as I do that the CSA is a sinking ship. The only question left is how far it will fall, and how many can be saved before it’s lost altogether.”

  They sat in silence, neither of them happy, yet somehow relieved to have that frightening sentiment out in the open.

  Eventually, Maria spoke—still quite softly, in case anyone listened on the other side of the door. “What can we do?”

  Sally stood up. “For starters, you can come with me. Keys to the kingdom, remember?”

  “Hard to forget an offer like that. So you’ve made up your mind?”

  “I’m running out of time—and if Lincoln will gamble on you, then I will, too.”

  Maria rose to her feet, uncertain but strangely hopeful. She had no idea what these “keys” might be, but this was progress—and she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was on the cusp of something big. She only hoped she’d prove worthy of the captain’s trust. And the former president’s. And the U.S. Marshal’s. And the head Pinkerton’s.

  The captain opened the door, and yes, her brother-in-law was beside it. Whether or not he’d been listening was anybody’s guess, but it didn’t matter. Sally told him, “Everything’s fine, Adam, but follow along and watch our backs, if you don’t mind. I’m taking Miss Boyd downstairs, so I can show her Mercy.”

  “Show me…? What?” Maria asked, but Sally didn’t answer that question, not yet.

  She said instead, “We’re going to the basement, dear. And if you think the main floors smell miserably ripe, then I apologize in advance for the state of our laundry room. It’s an appalling place, something out of Dante’s stories, or so it seems at times. Come, this way. We’ll go down the back stairway, the one the old judge’s servants used.”

  “As you like,” Maria answered, her hopefulness wilting into uncertainty.

  She followed in the captain’s wake. Farther behind came Adam, who pretended he simply had business in this general direction, in case anyone was watching. Down the back corridor they proceeded, all in a line; they descended stairs past nurses in fluttering aprons, they stepped aside for colored women carrying sacks of grain and bales of laundry, and they ducked quickly past a pair of men who were moving a bed from ward to ward, and at the end of the hall they rounded a corner.

  Sally opened another door and a wave of steam gusted forth, shocking both for how pleasant the sudden warmth was, and for how bad it smelled—even there, in a land of terrible smells.

  Maria winced. Sally said, “I would’ve grabbed you a vial of perfume, if I’d thought about it. Most of us become accustomed to the air here, eventually. You can always tell the newer workers, men and women both, because they’re the ones still carrying such things.”

  “No, it’s fine. I can take it,” she insisted, even as she wished she’d taken a smaller breakfast so there’d be less to throw up later.

  “I believe you. Now come along, it’s not much farther.”

  “I still don’t understand why … why the laundry room?”

  “Because,” Sally said, taking her arm and whispering the rest into her ear. “We hide our secrets where no one will ever wish to look for them.”

  The laundry room had overtaken the entire basement, and if there was nothing else to be said for it, the temperature was a welcome change. Great furnaces boiled water nonstop, and enormous tubs collected it, brimming with the foam of industrial soaps and bleaching powders; vats simmered and bubbled with the tart, faint tang of peroxide. The room bustled with strong-armed, stern-faced women both colored and white, women who heaved and dragged sacks of wet laundry along tracks above their heads—drawing it forward and then yanking the cord to open the bags, dumping the contents into carts for sorting and drying. Some of the women wore nurse’s uniforms, some did not. They all wore sturdy boots made for workmen, unless Maria missed her guess; and when she slipped almost badly enough to fall, she understood why.

  “The floors are wet. Always,” Sally told her. “Be extra careful past these tubs; yes, that’s right. It’s soapy over here, too. Good morning, Edna,” she added to a tall woman whose arms were blotchy and red up to the elbows. “Everything running smoothly today?”

  “Yes, ma’am, though furnace number three is being fussy. Might want to send David along to take a look at it.”

  “Yes, I’ll do that. Thank you for the suggestion.”

  Edna paused and dragged the back of her wrist across her sweaty brow. “The incoming room is fresh, I hate to tell you. If that’s where you’re headed.”

  Without breaking her stride, Sally said over her shoulder, “It won’t be the end of us.”

  Maria tried not to worry about how bad it must be, if this hardened laundress felt the need to hand out warnings. She asked, “The incoming room? Is that…?”

  “It’s where the dirty laundry dumps down the main chute. It’s sorted according to type. Pillowcases, sheets, blankets. Clothing. Bandages that are good enough to reuse. I don’t like putting the bandages back into circulation—it feels … dirty, somehow, and I can’t abide dirt. I believe in the bottom of my heart that this hospital’s lack of dirt is its saving grace. Literally, perhaps. But we get the wraps as white as we can before we give them back to the doctors and put them back into service. Cotton isn’t the disposable commodity it once was, and we must conserve every scrap.”

  She stopped at a basket hanging on a wall beside a set of double doors. She reached into the basket and retrieved a pair of masks—one for her, and one for Maria. Presumably, Adam would wait out this particular leg of the adventure; he lingered back at the end of the corridor, looking out of place and distinctly uncomfortable.

  Maria took the mask, a cotton one
with straps to tie behind her ears. The mask was scented with lavender oil and a hint of eucalyptus.

  Sally said, “We all wear them, down here. Put it on, or you’ll wish you hadn’t.”

  Maria gratefully donned the mask, and when Sally opened the double doors enough to let them both inside, she was glad for the distraction of the fragranced cloth across her face. The incoming room truly was hell on earth.

  One large metal chute dumped an intermittent tumble of filthy laundry into a terrifying heap, confined by a bin so large it could’ve comfortably held a pair of horses. Each new bundle was announced by the muffled clatter of its descent from the floors above, falling wetly, gruesomely into a heap like a blood-and-vomit-soaked pyramid of human misery.

  Maria gagged.

  Sally sniffed and cleared her throat. “Only a little farther. Back behind the mountain of things you don’t want to touch.”

  Sally was right. Maria didn’t want to touch it. She didn’t want to see it, either. She didn’t want to know it existed at all, and if she could retrace her steps for a minute or two and smudge out the memory with a piece of India rubber, she would’ve given her soul to do so.

  Stumbling behind Sally, Maria followed—almost blindly, her eyes watering from the vapors of stomach bile and pus, the old-penny scent of drying blood, the slick yellow stink of feverish sweat, the porklike odor of burned flesh, and a hundred other things too horrible to tease out from the whole. And the laundry fell and fell, bundle after bundle, dropping down the tin chute and sometimes landing with a thump, sometimes with a squish, sometimes with a splash. The laundry mountain grew and shrank, fed and whittled down at a similar tempo as masked women with elbow-length gloves and leather aprons removed it, one nasty armload at a time, for sorting in the bins along the wall. Almost as if it were alive and breathing—but that was a thought so impossibly awful that Maria choked on it, and swallowed it down lest she throw it up.

  Sally pressed onward until she reached a small cupboard door behind the massive pyramid of disgusting cloth. “Here,” the captain said. Her voice was thick but satisfied as she drew out a leather satchel that was stuffed quite full. “This is what they want. Take it with you. Keep it safe. Give it to Mr. Lincoln and his scientist, and see if it can help them. Because if it can’t, then God help us all.”

  Seven

  “What do you mean, they won’t let me on the floor?” Gideon came very close to shouting. Only the near proximity of Abraham Lincoln’s face prevented him, and even so, this measure of restraint took a great deal of self-control.

  “Not at this time,” he replied carefully. “Sessions are closed this week, and they aren’t admitting any new testimony until Wednesday. But Wednesday,” he emphasized, “you’re first on the list. Eight o’clock in the morning, you can say whatever you like. It’s a good thing, I think. This way, we have time to plan. Time to decide and prepare.”

  Gideon crossed his arms and leaned up against the cold, hard wall of the Capitol building.

  For twenty-four hours he’d been ready to storm Congress with facts, figures, and numbers. He was ready to present proof of what had befallen him, his machine, and his family; he was prepared to offer evidence about the coming plague that would end the nation more surely than the war could ever do. He’d swallowed all the outrage he could swallow, and he needed to unload it—and he’d been counting on doing so here and now.

  “I don’t want more time to plan. I already know what to say.”

  “Yes, but I think you and I can work together, with regards to how you might say it. Gideon,” Lincoln said more gently. “You have a mind without equal, but a tongue that costs you listeners. To be honest, I’m relieved that you won’t go up on the podium today.”

  “Sir, I can’t agree. The sooner we get the message out, the sooner the world will know, and…” He moved away from the wall now, leaning over the man in the mechanized chair. Not for menace, but for emphasis. “Nothing else will help us. If we make the information public, we take away the power of those who wish to conceal it.”

  “You and I agree on the fundamental principles; we only disagree in the execution. We won’t get a second chance to introduce the world to the goings-on that your machine has brought to light. The presentation is almost as important as the message itself, and so is the presenter; if we alienate those we wish to sway, we will accomplish little, or nothing.”

  “Mr. Lincoln, if the facts aren’t enough to sway them, then we’re worse than doomed—we’re surrounded by fools who don’t want to be saved.” He jammed his hands into his pockets, turned around, and walked away, trusting that Lincoln would know better than to call him back.

  Gideon left the premises to the tune of Lincoln’s chair puttering in the opposite direction, down a different marbled corridor, rolling deeper into the bowels of a building Gideon viewed with deep-seated loathing. This wasn’t a place to be heard. It was a place for men of power to meet and conspire.

  His long, old-fashioned coat dusted the back of his thighs as he barreled outside, into the blinding light that seared the city every time it snowed.

  A thin crust of powder and ice coated every building, tree, and walkway with a sharp, chilly sheen. Not much had fallen, but everything that fell froze, and now the world was slick as well as frigid. Gideon didn’t mind. If it was going to be this cold, the city might as well have something pretty to show for it.

  Out on the street, horses stamped and shot clouds of steam from their nostrils. Women drew their coats tighter and walked more quickly, prancing from step to step in fancy shoes; and the old men at the newsstands clapped their hands together, teeth biting hard on hand-rolled cigarettes and the stems of pipes.

  Gideon adjusted his scarf and worked his hands open and closed, open and closed. His fingerless gloves were warm knitted wool, made for him by Polly as a Christmas present the year before. The gesture had touched him more than he’d admitted, and he made a point to wear them not only because he liked them, but because he wanted her to know that they were appreciated.

  He buttoned his coat up to his neck and drew the scarf up over his face. It wasn’t quite cold enough to warrant such measures, at least so far as the locals were concerned. But he wasn’t a local, not in any original sense, and though he appreciated the freeze for its change of pace, he wasn’t so accustomed to the weather as someone who’d lived with it for a lifetime.

  Much as he hated to consider it, and his innate impatience bristled at the prospect … he suspected that Lincoln was right.

  He found it virtually impossible to pretend to the niceties that served as social lubricant for the masses. He did not like all the runaround and flowery difficulty that accompanied even the simplest transactions. Why couldn’t everyone just say what they meant? Why did they need to couch everything so cautiously? The truth should always be enough, regardless of its delivery.

  He stamped his feet while he walked, as the chill worked its way through the soles of his shoes. His socks were thick and warm, but they were damp with mud and melted ice, and now he carried the slush of the streets along for the ride.

  He considered catching a cab, but to where? Back to the Lincolns’ home, where he lurked in unhappy hiding? How could he rest under the ostensible guard of Nelson Wellers, a man who looked too fragile to wind a watch? He needed to stretch his legs. He needed to stretch his brain.

  Abraham Lincoln was not wrong. But at the moment, he wasn’t interested in the president’s help. It wasn’t that he didn’t value the assistance and patronage; far from it. But there was some gap, some disconnect between them that occasionally could not be traversed. It might’ve been as simple as money, except that Lincoln had grown up poor as well … though not enslaved. It could’ve been as complicated as power, but were those two things different? Money and power? Gideon thought so, but he would have been the first to admit that the line between the two was thinner than D.C.’s icy air, and the overlap between them could not be overstated.

  In simple fa
ct, they did not always understand each other. And while Lincoln was a great speaker, a great writer, a great orator, even … he wasn’t the man whose audience Gideon craved right then.

  And just like that, he knew where he wanted to go.

  He hailed a cab after all, climbed inside, and gave directions to a townhome on the other side of the Capitol.

  On the way, he stared out the window and watched the city churn, slipping across the ice and pushing through the weather to run the daily errands that would only become more difficult as winter established itself in earnest. He was glad that it wasn’t any worse, not yet. Not while he needed to come and go, and while the carriages pulled by horses, or driven by diesel engines, had to chain up their wheels and trudge through the streets like everyone else.

  The carriage took him all the way over the Anacostia River, through some wooded, then swampy acreage, and up to a house called Cedar Hill. It left him at a curb that had been swept clean of ice and snow. Up a spate of stacked stone stairs he climbed, stopping at a door painted a tasteful shade of red. He gave the brass knocker a couple of good gongs and shifted his weight from foot to foot while he waited for an answer.

  It arrived momentarily, when the door was opened by a teenage colored girl in the plain domestic outfit of a maid. “Can I help you?” she asked.

  She was new. “I’m here to see Mr. Douglass.”

  “Do you have an appointment?”

  “Tell him Dr. Bardsley is here to see him, and if he leaves me standing on the stoop for too much longer, I’m likely to be shot.”

  The girl’s eyes widened in alarm. “Shot?”

  “Stabbed. Poisoned. The possibilities are endless. This having been established, I need a word with your employer.”

  But she was stubborn, and perhaps not completely stupid. “I’m sorry if that’s true, about someone wanting to shoot you, but you’ll have to wait here. I’ll try to ask quickly. I’d rather nobody shot you on the stoop,” she confessed, and she closed the door.