Fiddlehead (The Clockwork Century)

by Priest, Cherie

  Grant knew where the study was, but he let the girl lead. She gestured toward the open doorway and then vanished.

  “Grant, what’s the calamity?” asked Lincoln. He was reclined on a settee by the fire, his chair beside him and his long legs stretched out.

  “Sorry to interrupt your nap … or your early bedtime,” he tried.

  Lincoln sighed. “I was reading, and then some lunatic came beating down my door, and here you are. So have out with it.”

  Grant stepped quickly to his old friend’s side. Seeing no chair nearby, he seized a small stool and placed it close enough to share Fowler’s secrets. He reached into his waistcoat and retrieved the documents, all of the sheets rumpled and warmed by his body, and made a show of spreading them out, half on Lincoln’s furniture, and half across his knees.

  “Good God, old man,” Lincoln asked, adjusting his spectacles and noticing the Secretary of State’s letterhead. “What is this? What have you done?”

  “Only a few illegal things, and none of them immoral,” Grant assured him.

  “Well, that’s a relief…”

  “It’s Fowler. Or rather, it’s that woman Katharine Haymes. She’s working him like a sock puppet, her hand right up his backside, making him talk her words, and sign her papers.”

  “Wait, wait, wait. Haymes? I knew of her involvement, and I knew she was in town; Mary saw her at the Senators’ Ball and was all aflutter about it. But…”

  “But nothing. I’ve seen her. Spoken to her. She’s a viper in a dress, Abe. She’s the end of the world in a bonnet, is what she is. Do you know what she’s done? Have you heard?”

  “Bits and pieces. She talked you into a pardon, I heard that much. You’re really going to buy that weapon of hers after all? Please tell me that’s not the case.”

  “It’s not the case. Or it is the case, but it’s not me doing the buying. It’s … it’s Fowler; he’s the one. He’s got the court in his pocket and her hand up his ass. He’s the one who arranged it, structured it, and pulled the trigger. Or so I learned after the fact … well after the fact, and I’m … I’m lost, Abe. You were right about everything, and I tried to assume the best. Never again.”

  “Now, let’s settle down just a moment. It can’t be as bad as all that,” Lincoln said mildly, but his good eye was racing across the pages before him.

  “It’s plenty bad enough. If we try to stop that weapon the official way, it’ll go off before we can force the orders through the bureaucracy. Fowler will see to that.”

  “You’re probably right,” he murmured, still reading.

  “Which bit are you looking at there?” Grant asked, leaning forward and seeing the requisitions report. “Yes, that right there. You see? She’s making more of them, or planning to. It’s not just one weapon—that was never the plan.”

  “I wish I could say I am surprised.” Without looking up, Lincoln asked, “Do you know if she’s approached the South? Do you think she’ll sell to both sides? She was a Southerner by birth, after all. Then again…” He shook his head.

  Grant picked up the thought and said, “I doubt they have the kind of cash she’s chasing. She’s a mercenary, through and through. She’s here in D.C. because we’re the only people on the continent who can afford her. But, look. It gets worse. This one was sealed.”

  “What is it?”

  “A list of targets they’re considering.”

  They fell silent as they skimmed through the pages together—Lincoln for the first time, and Grant for the second, still unable to believe what he was reading.

  Lincoln swallowed, and turned to the next sheet. “None of these are military targets. Except maybe Danville, and that’s only a capital.”

  “That probably won’t be the first pick,” Grant surmised. “She could do some damage in there, absolutely—but it might be too much damage. It might actually shut down their government and end the war in one shot, and she can’t have that. Not when there are eight other moneymakers on deck. No, she’d more likely shoot for New Orleans. It’s their most important port, and there are plenty of civilians to murder.”

  “Yes, but then she’d have to contend with Texas, and that’s no small feat. If it’s civilians she wants to kill, there must be … oh, half a million people in Atlanta, and it’s closer. With no Texian military presence. That’d be a bigger mess, wouldn’t it?”

  “At least half a million. And did you read the part about how the gas cloud will travel? It could wipe out thousands … tens of thousands … beyond its initial targets.”

  “More than that if the wind, the water, the … God almighty. She can’t possibly realize what she’s unleashing.”

  “On the contrary,” Grant argued. “No one else on earth knows as much about the gas weapon as she does. She’s the one who developed it.”

  A quiet knock on the door frame announced an interruption. It was Mary, holding a package. She smiled and said, “Sorry to break up the chatter, boys, but this just arrived from Fort Chattanooga.”

  Lincoln frowned quizzically. “Chattanooga? That doesn’t sound right. Miss Boyd was just in Richmond, getting into trouble at the Robertson Hospital.” Then to Grant, he said, “There was an incident. I don’t know the specifics yet.”

  “Miss Boyd?”

  “A Pinkerton agent,” he replied vaguely. “I thought she’d be on her way back to D.C. by now.”

  Mary handed him the package, a large envelope. “Perhaps not. This looks like a woman’s script to me.”

  She left them to continue their conversation. Once she was gone, Lincoln said, “I think she’s right. Let’s find out for certain, then.” He tore the envelope and extracted Maria’s letter. On top was a cover sheet, from which he read aloud. “Dear Mr. Lincoln: Included, you will find a series of notes taken hastily by hand, condensed from a much larger set of documents. The original documents—a series of missives from a nurse on the Western shore—have been sent elsewhere for safekeeping, as I’m sure you will understand. Please forgive me for not including the particulars of the Robertson incident. I will save those for later, as this is far more important. I will remain in Chattanooga through Friday, visiting with our distant family and inquiring after the camp workers who were present during Miss Haymes’s weapon testing. Depending on where this line of enquiry leads, I may either pursue the case elsewhere or return to D.C. at that time. Will keep you abreast of matters. Yours, Maria B.”

  Lincoln turned his attention to the remaining pages of the message, and Grant read over his shoulder.

  They finished at approximately the same time.

  Lincoln turned to Grant, and said quietly, “Perhaps there is someone who knows more about the gas and its workings than Miss Haymes, after all.”

  “This nurse … wherever she is,” Grant agreed.

  Lincoln shook his head, but he did so with a hopeful smile. “Yes, the nurse, but also Sally Louisa Tompkins, and now Miss Boyd, for they have read the nurse’s letters. Likewise, if Henry is there with Miss Boyd, then he knows, too; and we also know, if only an abbreviated form. This is the way word spreads, my friend: hand by hand, reader by reader. This nurse from the Robertson … she might well have saved us all, if we can heed her warnings in time.

  “Now,” Lincoln said, shifting his tone and setting the papers on the armrest beside him. “I must ask your assistance. My chair is beside you there, you see? Help me into it, if you would. I need to get to my desk and write a telegram. You and I have a Union to save.”

  Thirteen

  Grant very much wished his wife was there, but he’d sent her away the night before.

  At the time it’d been little more than a drunken dismissal, for all he’d insisted otherwise—to her, and to himself. Now he was torn because he wished fervently to have her present, yet he was glad that she was gone. She must be safer in Baltimore with her family. He took comfort from the thought, or tried to, at any rate.

  The White House was cold again. The afternoon was growing late. That calle
d for a drink, but he didn’t make one. He wondered how Abe’s telegrams had gone off. Had they been received? Answered? No one sent him any word, or if anyone had, the Secret Service agents must’ve intercepted it.

  Or maybe he was becoming paranoid.

  He stood in the yellow oval and watched the window behind the desk. The curtains were open, and beyond them a tree shook and scraped its limbs across the glass. A storm had rolled up, all bluster and blow but no ice.

  Left unattended, the fire had burned low. The fractured, watery light of the coals did nothing to warm the place.

  Julia was gone to her mother’s. He’d sent here there, without even thinking.

  Only that wasn’t true, was it? Some instinct must have provoked it. Some leftover warning that muttered deep within his brain … some trigger from his youth on the battlefield, when he knew that a fight was coming even though the skies were calm and the taps were silent, and his fellow soldiers lounged in their tents, wearing their warmest wools and playing cards to temper the relentless boredom.

  Ever since his evening with Abe, he’d felt it creeping along his bones.

  And now he waited.

  Not for long, he didn’t think. No, the wearying tension had ratcheted tighter overnight, and all through the day, as the District churned onward without him. But this time, he’d withdrawn at his own behest, not as part of some gentling ploy by Fowler or another advisor to get him out of the way.

  Today he wanted to be out of the way. He wanted a retreat, and needed one. He’d been too close to the situation, even as he’d been so unceremoniously cut out of it. Present, but not accounted for. Muzzled and leashed like an old dog who could watch, but not run.

  No, he told himself. Like an old lion.

  The carpet pattern beneath his feet called to mind crests, seals, and caves. It was meaningless. Julia would’ve said it was only a design, and he was silly. She would’ve been right, but he saw it all the same, and a Biblical phrase swept through his sober, unhappy mind.

  A den of roaring lions, seeking whom they may devour.

  They would not devour him.

  In his right hand he held a loaded Remington, the sturdy 1858 he’d picked up in the war. In his left he held a second cylinder, all its chambers loaded and capped. He had six more stuffed into his pockets, ready to go.

  He stood very still and listened, because yes, it was coming.

  Or anyway, someone was coming.

  Footsteps in the hall, faster than a servant would run if decorum ruled the day. He clenched the gun, and slipped the last cylinder into his pocket to join the rest. Instinct told him the runner would knock, because the runner was not sneaking up on him. An assassin would move more quietly, if with no less urgency.

  No. This was a message. A friendly one, if not a good one.

  A series of swift raps upon the office door.

  He answered: “It’s open.”

  And the door crept inward, letting in a long sliver of yellow light from the gas lamps in the hall. Were they lit already? It wasn’t that dark, was it? Well, the sun would be down in another two hours, and the halls of the White House were dark enough even when the days weren’t dreary.

  His visitor was a young woman. She was familiar, but it took him a moment to place her. He finally recalled her as a member of the housekeeping staff, but couldn’t think of her name.

  “Mr. President,” she gasped, her breath lost somewhere down on the first floor, on another wing. Had she run the whole way? He thought so, from her rumpled dress and loosened bonnet. “It’s Andrews.”

  He was honestly taken aback. Of all the subjects he’d expected to hear breathlessly broached, the old man was not among them.

  “Andrews? What of him? He’s gone home to his wife by now. Or maybe not; have you checked the kitchen?”

  She swallowed hard, shook her head, and only just then noticed the gun. She mustered a “Sir? It’s not that,” but didn’t ask if everything was all right. She knew otherwise, every bit as well as Grant did.

  “Then what is it?” he prompted her.

  “Sir, it’s a terrible thing—him and Helen both, sir. Murdered!”

  He nearly dropped the gun on the floor. Only years of training prevented it. It was that training, rather than any conscious instructions he could muster, that guided him as he slipped the gun into his right pocket. “I’m sorry, you’ll have to … what do you mean, murdered?”

  Grant heard the prickling pinpoints of hysteria in her voice when she replied, “Oh, Mr. President, I mean murdered with guns and knives! In their home. Helen made it out to the street for help, but then collapsed.” She stepped inside the office and stood there before the door—still backlit, and casting a witchy puddle of shadow on the floor.

  It wasn’t hysteria that he felt oozing through the surface of his thoughts, but something colder and more numb. Something familiar.

  This is what happens when it begins, when the last domino is pushed. When the hammer has dropped. This is the sound when the fuse is lit.

  “Andrews,” he said the man’s name, not really believing it. Not choosing to believe it. Why Andrews? What did he have to do with anything? And how could the White House function without him? The man was an institution. “And Helen, too,” he added, only then realizing that the woman’s name was all he knew about her. He’d seen her a handful of times, coming and going from the kitchen or laundry.

  It hadn’t always been like that. He hadn’t always been the kind of man who knew nothing about the people who managed his life and home. Once he’d been a soldier, hadn’t he? A good one. A great one. A serving man of a different sort.

  When did it get away from him? Had it been bought with this distancing ease? Too many years riding on the shoulders of others?

  “Sir? What should we do?” she asked him.

  A pitiful question, yet one he couldn’t answer. Send flowers? Console his family? Summon the authorities? A better suggestion, yes. “Have the appropriate authorities been called?”

  Fiercely she nodded. “The police, sir. They’re coming to talk to you, I think. Almost unseemly, one of ’em said, that they’d bother interviewing the president about a nigger, but it was Andrews, sir.” The note of pleading nearly broke his heart. “You’ll speak to them, won’t you? You’ll help them find out what happened?”

  “Of course I will, and you mustn’t hold any questions or ill will against the police. When a man’s been murdered—any man—one must always investigate. Especially when he has such ties to … to government. To the president.”

  He wished for Julia again, and then unwished for her. He congratulated himself instead on sending her away. Then his warm confidence faded as he wondered: was Maryland far enough?

  Still fidgeting and fretting, the girl added, “They say another colored man did it, sir.”

  He frowned. “I’m sorry, come again?”

  “That scientist. I think you know him. Been living over with the Lincolns, I think.”

  “Bardsley…? No, I don’t think so. Not for a moment. They didn’t even know one another, and if they did, there would be no reason … no reason at all for Bardsley to…”

  But the story was already arranging itself in his head. No, there was no reason for the scientist to kill an old couple in a small house. But there might be an excellent reason for someone else to raise the question—to cast suspicion, and remove credibility.

  Grant had seen the editorial. He’d read it himself, and his skin had crawled. He’d felt it then, too, the coming battle. Gideon Bardsley. The walking plague. Project Maynard. The Fiddlehead. All these things, bubbling together and finding their way into print, into the public. Into the light, for scrutiny.

  Readers were talking. Editors were talking. Last he’d heard from Abe, the warning letter was about to run in New York. That’d drum up some real interest, wouldn’t it? A thousand paperboys crying out, screaming the truth on the busiest streets in the world.

  Unless.

  Unless
the truth was coming from a known murderer. Sometimes the answers are so simple.

  “And sir? A message. I’m sorry, I almost forgot it.” She came forward, holding a scrap of folded paper in trembling hands. “A lady gave it to me, and said I should give it to you. She said it was important, but I was so … I heard about Andrews, sir, that’s all. I only just now remembered.”

  “It’s fine,” he lied. He took it from her hands and read.

  Even the smallest actions of great men come with tremendous consequences. Now hold still and be careful not to touch anything else. I can take more from you than your pawns. Baltimore isn’t so far off.

  “You can’t threaten me,” he said to the note, or to the woman who must have written it.

  The serving girl gave him a puzzled look. “Sir?”

  “Not you, dear,” he replied without taking his eyes off the page. “Not you. But I want you to do something for me. I want you to tell the agent outside that I’m retiring for the night. Tell him to stay where he is, and his relief should remain downstairs, too, for I’m not feeling well. Then build me a stack of pillows in my bed, and don’t say a word when I leave through the kitchen.”

  Fourteen

  “How does it look?” Gideon called to Nelson Wellers from the ruined basement of the Jefferson. He could smell a storm brewing even down there, below the surface; the cold, shifting winds whistled through holes in the floor and spit through the remains of the scientist’s printer upstairs. They rustled the ashes of paper, and scattered the broken press keys like so many pebbles.

  The doctor cried back, “As bad as before, if less cluttered. They’ve been taking away the trash, at least. Getting the place cleaned up.”

  Gideon shuttered the lantern and stepped past a pile of cables, a stack of paper, and a splintered set of desk drawers. “Getting dark, isn’t it?”

  “Starting to. The weather isn’t helping. Can you see all right?”

  “Yes.”

  “How bad is it down there?”

  “Bad.” He looked up through the hole above, and imagined he felt a drop of very cold rain. A second spitting drop very nearly convinced him, but when he didn’t feel a third, he began to hope it was a fluke. “How much waxed canvas did you get?”