Fiddlehead (The Clockwork Century)

by Priest, Cherie

  In precisely the same purr he would’ve used to seduce her, he asked, “With an ambulance? I heard that one went missing, and turned up downtown.”

  She performed a girlish giggle, letting the ruse run wild. “It was faster than my feet, and I didn’t see any horses handy. I made do.”

  “Were you followed?”

  “Two men. Neither one worth describing. Lost them on an electric streetcar.”

  He set down his fork and reached one hand across the table to take her fingertips and kiss them. “Is there any chance anyone knew you were headed for the trains?”

  “I couldn’t say, though I did my best to remain ordinary and unremarkable. And I don’t think anyone saw me buy my ticket or get on board. Speaking of which … how did you know I’d be in Tennessee?”

  “I didn’t,” he admitted, releasing her fingers and retrieving his fork. “But based on some … increased media attention, our uncle recommended that I come here and help our incoming visitors with their packing and their papers.”

  Maria gathered the gist and nodded. “I see.”

  “And I thought you’d turn up here next, considering what I heard about the hospital.” He lowered his voice. “You’d need a way out, and you wouldn’t be ready to come home yet. They’d be expecting that, and watching the northbound trains.”

  “Excellent detective work, Mr.… Henry. If you ever tire of the marshals, you should try your luck with the Pinks.”

  “Thank you, ma’am, but I’m happy with the badge I wear already.” He winked at her, and the front door opened, admitting three hungry soldiers into the warm little space.

  The rest of their breakfast was spent in more idle chatter, and when they were finished Henry proposed they find a more private venue. “Under normal circumstances I’d never suggest such a thing, but I think you ought to join me in my hotel room over at the Saint George,” he told her. She did not think it was her imagination that he said it with blushing cheeks.

  She smiled at him, and when he held out his arm at an angle, she took it. She wasn’t so much older that it looked strange—or she didn’t think so, at any rate—and if he thought she’d be embarrassed by the suggestion or even the company, he had another thing coming. He was a polite, intelligent young man, strong and good-looking in an understated, easygoing kind of way, even with the glasses. His nervousness around her might’ve been due to his age—mid-twenties, she would’ve guessed—or her own notoriety, but either way it added to his charm. And anyway, sneaking up to an attractive lad’s hotel room in the middle of the day? Bah. She’d been accused of worse things. This didn’t even break the top ten.

  His room was a clean but empty space, much like any inexpensive hotel room around the world. It was spacious and comfortably private, though it overlooked Broad Street, where the traffic was heavy and sometimes wild. Horses balked at motor vehicles and military men barked orders back and forth across the way; big engines moved big machines up and down the too-narrow thoroughfare, clipping the curbs, scraping stones, and frightening the city’s dog population into a frenzy of howled complaints.

  “It’s not too … quiet,” Henry apologized. “But it’s tidy, and I can sleep through almost anything. Real close to the train station, too. So there’s that.”

  “It’s almost as big as my apartment in Chicago,” she assured him, with only a slight degree of understatement. “And there’s no need to make excuses for the background noise. The more the better, I say. Let it drown out any stray words that might drift through the walls. But, do you mind … could I bother you to turn up the heat? I’m a cold-natured thing, I’m afraid, and the window isn’t keeping enough November outside.”

  He went to the radiator and adjusted its controls, sending pressurized, boiling water squealing through the pipes. “That’s another nice thing about this place,” he said, recoiling from the heater’s valve and waving his hand at it. “Not as much smoke as a fireplace. I hear we’ll have electric warmers in every home one of these days, and won’t that be nice? And maybe they won’t be so uncomfortable to set.”

  “Thank you, Henry. I appreciate it. I hope your hand isn’t burned…?”

  “Just a smidge of pink, ma’am. If that’s the worst I do to myself today, I’ll be in real good shape. Now, at the risk of seeming ungallant, I believe we should sort out our information,” he said stiffly.

  She smiled, hoping he understood she was smiling for him, not at him. “At the risk of seeming unladylike, I’ll take the bed. These papers will require some spreading out, and the desk in the corner won’t do the job.”

  Henry drew a chair up to the bed and Maria sat on its edge, emptying the satchel of Captain Sally’s notes and organizing them as best she could. Sometimes the dates were fuzzy or imprecise, and the nurse’s grasp of numbers wasn’t too much keener than her grasp of letters. Still, Maria marveled at the tenacious dedication of a near-illiterate woman writing so much, at such depth and length.

  “There must be a whole novel’s worth of material here!” Henry exclaimed.

  “It’s difficult to read at times, not merely for the content, but for the presentation,” she said gently. And then she walked him through the letters, hitting the high points and marking some of the more interesting bits with a pencil.

  It took two hours, and even then, Maria felt like the summing up had been too shallow.

  Henry stood over the bed, festooned with its brittle sheets of damning paper, and put his hands on his hips. “We should send a telegram back to the Lincoln house and let everybody know what you found in Richmond … but we couldn’t send off enough taps in a week of Sundays. Not even if we cut it down tighter than an obituary.”

  “No, not even then. Here’s what I recommend: We’ll write out the most important parts, digested down from this … this serialized journal. Then we’ll express the important parts up to the Lincolns, and mail the original journals separately. But not to the Lincolns,” she added suddenly.

  “Why not?”

  “Because they’re being watched. Someone wants Gideon Bardsley, and he’s staying there. Lincoln strikes me as a competent man, and with Nelson Wellers there to help, I’m not too worried about his personal safety, but we can’t assume that packages won’t be intercepted.”

  “We could send the originals to the Pinks,” Henry suggested.

  She grinned. “Precisely what I was thinking. I’ll box it up and send it to Mr. Pinkerton for safekeeping. If it’s not secure there with him, there’s no hope for it at all. Is there a Western Union office nearby?”

  “Back at the station, yes. I’ll run around the corner and grab some wrapping paper and twine, and you start jotting down the important bits. I’ll be right back.”

  Maria took out her pencil.

  Regarding the notes of Venita “Mercy” Lynch, nurse formerly of the Robertson Hospital in Richmond, Virginia: Approximately three hundred pages of letters about the northwestern port city of Seattle, where a heavy, poisonous gas has decimated the city, causing it to be largely abandoned.…

  She kept writing until she’d revealed it all: the gas, the city in the Northwest, and the connection between the drug manufactured there … and the weapon proposed by Katharine Haymes.

  In conclusion …

  Maria heard Henry’s feet on the stairs, returning with the promised paper and twine. She thought hard and fast, and gave up on formalities.

  In conclusion, gas weaponry is a dangerous, poorly understood can of worms we can’t afford to open.

  It took four sheets of paper. When Henry let himself inside, she folded them in half and stuffed them into an envelope, then began stacking the nurse’s letters in a tidy pile before wrapping them up.

  Henry took her pencil and reached for the envelope. “I don’t suppose you know the address for the Lincoln estate off the top of your head, do you?”

  “I know it well enough. But let’s not write anything down until we get to the shipping office,” she urged.

  “You’re
right, you’re right. I wasn’t thinking.”

  The war had made mail problematic between the dueling nations, and although the Union still used the United States Postal Service, the Confederacy relied upon independent carriers. If you wanted to pass notes back and forth across the Mason-Dixon line, you either used Western Union or you smuggled the messages yourself. Since everyone knew Western Union was the most reliable way to communicate with the other side, it was watched, and tracked. If you had to use it, you didn’t talk to anyone except the officer who took your money and stamped your package, and even he couldn’t be trusted.

  When both packages had been successfully—if surreptitiously—shipped, Maria and Henry left the Western Union office and stepped back into the chilly afternoon. It was crisp and clear, in the way of such places with brutally cold winters but not much snow. Maria’s breath was cold in her chest and warm in the air, where it crystallized and hung in a satisfying fog that reminded her she was still alive.

  She tucked her hands into her jacket pockets and wormed her chin deeper into her scarf, until only her eyes and nose poked out.

  “And now,” she said, the words warming her lips against the wool. “We need to find … a porter, you said?”

  “Ah. Yes.” Henry checked his pocket watch and nodded. “Down at the landing, in an hour. He’ll meet us there, and perhaps we’ll talk him into a late lunch. Have you ever had catfish fried right out of the river?”

  “I don’t think so…?”

  “That means ‘no,’ because if you’d ever tasted it, you’d never forget it. Come on now, this way. We’ll have better luck finding a cab on the next street over, where the army vehicles don’t block up all the roads. It’s only a short walk to the landing, but you look like you’re half frozen to death already, and we’ve only been outside a minute. I swear, you must be a little icicle all the time, up there in … in your new hometown,” he caught himself. He ducked quickly aside as two soldiers carrying a steamer trunk between them begged his pardon.

  He was right, so Maria played along. Keep the public chatter friendly. Let the city hear their accents and know they were local enough, and here on friendly business, and not anyone to be given a second glance. Maria attracted a second glance or two, but she’d become adept at hiding behind her hair, her hat, and now—conveniently enough—her scarf.

  True to his guess, Henry found them a carriage to hasten the ride to Ross’s Landing, a wide dock on the river that had developed into its own small neighborhood, serving the merchants who came and went in the steamboats, riverboats, paddlers, flat-bottom barges, and military freighters alike. It was a rougher part of the city—if roughness might be gauged by how few women were present, and how many men were out of uniform.

  She saw boat workers and army boys on leave, dockhands and shipping magnates, laboring men, and white and colored men in big wool coats and boots caked with riverbank mud. She scanned the labels stenciled on crates as they were stacked and loaded by big-armed fellows on the curb, under the watchful eyes of an occasional officer or overseer. They seemed to hold mostly munitions and military necessities: tents, blankets, uniforms, horse tack, diesel fuel, motor parts, tools, engine grease, satchels, mess kits, bulk bags of flour and corn, and heaven only knew what else.

  Down by the river’s edge where the boats docked close, the piers were shiny and scrubbed, painted and repainted to rebuff the elements and rust. Street vendors offered newspapers, coffee, and fried fish wrapped in paper; they quietly hawked black-market passes for rations, and sold information by the scrap.

  Maria and Henry stopped at a boat called the Memphis Queen, which was moored permanently at the edge of the landing and served as a saloon and meeting place on the water. The gangplank swayed under Maria’s feet, bobbing with the slap and fall of short waves against the boat’s sides, left over from the wakes of the big CSA crafts that puttered down the river’s center. Once on board, the motion was minimal. She was glad—after spending the night on the rails, she wouldn’t have ruled out a minor case of seasickness, even with the sea a thousand miles away.

  “This was our contact’s suggestion,” Henry explained. “He likes this place.”

  Out of date and out of service, the Memphis Queen was nonetheless a pretty thing, with gingerbread rails and a cheerful blue-and-white paint job that called to mind the Bonnie Blue Flag. An old-fashioned paddler, it had been retired in favor of the diesel models that had become more popular, courtesy of Texas. Best of all, the ship felt private. Full of nooks and crannies, doors that locked, and shades that were easily drawn.

  So bright on the outside. So shadowed within.

  Henry promised the barkeep a fee if he’d leave them alone, then he and Maria took a seat in a back corner without any windows, and only a low-slung coffee table between them.

  The porter was right on time.

  He didn’t so much enter the darkened room as appear within it, standing beside Henry’s seat as if he never walked anywhere, only manifested wherever he wished to be.

  Maria managed to not look startled, but it took some effort. One minute he wasn’t there, and the next minute … a smallish white man in a brown hat stood next to Henry, near enough that he might’ve stabbed him and walked away without anyone ever noticing. Probably an inch or two shorter than Maria herself, the porter wore woven tweed pants and boots so clean that they reflected what little light came around the window shades. Everything fit him as if it’d been made for him, even the leather gloves and workmanlike gray coat. He was neither attractive nor unattractive, with brown hair and dark eyes. There was absolutely nothing remarkable about him in the slightest.

  Just like the men who’d been following her.

  For one nervous split second, she racked her brain trying to remember the two men in Richmond … but swiftly concluded that, no, he hadn’t been one of them. It was just something about the breed, about a man who can be present without attracting attention. Maria had spent a lifetime trying to play up her appearance. This phenomenon, or trait, or knack for being invisible was something she’d only noticed—and attempted to cultivate—since starting to work for the Pinkertons.

  If Henry was surprised to find himself suddenly accompanied, he didn’t show it. Without looking, he put up one hand and punched the newcomer gently in the shoulder. “Ha!” he exclaimed, and then grinned up at the man who stood beside him. “Not even a minute late. A man could set his watch by you, Mr. Troost.”

  “And some men do,” he smiled, cataloging Maria from the ground up as he responded to Henry. “Hello there, ma’am. My name’s Kirby Troost. I’d give you a fake one, but that don’t seem fair, since he knows mine already, and I know who you are.” He reached behind himself and drew up a seat, then removed his gloves and rolled himself a cigarette from a pouch he kept in his left breast pocket. “It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

  “Is it?”

  He shrugged. “I meet a lot of shady customers. Not many are women of your stature. Or caliber.”

  “I’m not sure if I should take that as a compliment or not.”

  “Take it however you like; I meant only what I said. I’ve heard great things about you, from a surprising source or two.”

  “Oh, really? Care to name your sources?”

  “A certain Captain Hainey sends his regards.”

  She was pleased, but did her best to keep from letting on. Besides the fact that she didn’t wish to admit he’d surprised her, she didn’t feel like recounting her old adventures to Henry. It’d take too much explaining, and he’d have too many questions.

  While she calculated a response, Troost continued, sparing her the trouble. “I must say, I never would’ve pegged you for a pirate queen … but if Hainey says you’re all right, I’ll take his word for it. Now, Henry,” he changed the subject, then paused while he lit his tobacco. “I understand you’ve got something for me.”

  Henry looked back and forth between Kirby and Belle with no small measure of confusion, but wh
en no one seemed ready to fill him in on the secret, he produced a thick envelope. “This is everything you ought to need. Next stop’s … well, won’t be Oak Grove, I don’t expect.”

  Troost shook his head. “Not doing Indiana. Shooting for Middlesboro instead. It’ll put us up closer to our favorite uncle.”

  “How long you think it’ll take?”

  Troost considered this while he took a long draw on the handmade cigarette. The paper crinkled, burned, and flicked away to ash. “To Middlesboro? No more than a night or two, assuming nothing goes wrong with the travel arrangements. The rest of the way? Another couple of days. Shouldn’t be too bad, once we’re past the bluegrass.”

  “Travel arrangements?” Maria was perplexed. “Middlesboro … Are you going by air?”

  “Unless you know a better way to get there in less than a week. The train lines don’t run that way, not since Sherman went barreling through the place in the seventies. But I’ve got a small rig set up on the Georgia side of Lookout. Would’ve rather come with my own crew, but the summons didn’t give them time to make arrangements. So I’m here on my own.”

  Henry’s left eyebrow lifted. “Your own crew? You’re not an air captain these days, are you?”

  “Captain? Who wants that kind of responsibility? Not me. I ride with a good bunch, though. The kind who don’t mind if I keep my head down.”

  “Pirates,” Maria said flatly.

  “Unincorporated merchants,” he corrected her. “Nobody worse than anyone you already know, madam. And the Naamah Darling’s gone about as straight as possible, these days. Her captain wants out of the nasty side of the business. Got a lady to impress, and she ain’t impressed with what he was running before.”

  “So what’s he running now?”

  “Supplies,” he said vaguely. “Now, Henry, where will we put our cargo when it arrives? Are we headed for the Land of Lincoln, or does the uncle have other ideas?”