The Crescent Spy

by Michael Wallace

  In her hotel room, Josephine pried off the wainscoting and chipped away the plaster behind until she’d created a hollow for her notes meant for Washington. And then she waited impatiently for Franklin Gray. She’d been in New Orleans almost a month and had seen nothing of the man. If he didn’t make an appearance by the first of October, she decided, she would find an excuse to travel to the delta and attempt to make contact with one of the Union ships lurking offshore.

  Then, on September 18, a tip from Fein sent her to the St. Charles Hotel, where she came upon a meeting by two brothers by the name of Tifts with Commodore Hollins of the river fleet. Something about the construction of a new warship. They were close-lipped about the project, but within a few days she had uncovered more details. There was not one, but two big new ironclads being built in the city, named Mississippi and Louisiana. This raised even more questions. Where would they find all of the machine shops? Who would build the boilers and the propellers? Where would they get so many tons of iron plating? Word had it that the boats would be in the water by mid-December and breaking the blockade within days of that. Josephine had her doubts.

  She went upriver a few miles to Jefferson City to where the two boats were being built on adjacent yards. The site was already a hive of activity, but closer inspection revealed chaos: plenty of lumber and unskilled labor, but few tools and little supervision. She was looking for someone named Murray, the man in charge of building the hull of Louisiana, when she spotted Franklin Gray standing on the levee.

  He was arguing with a man delivering lumber from a barge, something about a mismatch between what had been ordered and what had arrived. A score of workers stood listening to the argument instead of unloading the lumber. Franklin glanced her way as she approached, before continuing his argument. In the end, he accepted only a small portion of the shipment.

  “Excuse me, sir,” she said to Franklin when the barge owner stomped off, cursing. “I’m from the Crescent. Can you tell me what seems to be the problem with the lumber?”

  The workers were staring at her.

  “Get back to work!” Franklin snapped at them, then looked at her with a frown. “I’ll tell you, all right.” He showed her a paper with a confusing mishmash of figures and numbers. “This is what I ordered.” He laid the paper flat on a stack of nearby lumber and scratched something with his pencil. “And this is what they delivered.” He pushed the paper in front of her. “Go ahead, see for yourself.”

  She glanced at what he’d written.

  Congo Square.

  There was no day or time written, but she guessed it could only be Sunday afternoon, when the slaves were allowed to gather and dance and the square was a chaotic scene that would make it safe to meet.

  Josephine avoided showing surprise or confusion. “As bad as that?”

  “As bad as that,” he confirmed with a grim nod. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, we have a boat to build.”

  The slaves began dancing in Congo Square at four every Sunday afternoon, and Josephine made sure she arrived well ahead of time. The sun was hot overhead, so she took refuge in the shade of the sycamore trees that lined the square, to watch and wait.

  At first there were more white spectators than slaves, as well as a number of officers from the Third and Fifth Wards armed with billy clubs to break up disturbances, but by three, more and more slaves and freed blacks came streaming into the square. Women in calico dresses wore red and yellow kerchiefs around their heads in the form of a creole tignon, while the men wore fine pants and jackets, albeit a little worn at the knees and elbows, the discarded garments of their masters. Their children wore dyed feathers in their hair and ribbons around their necks and pinned to their clothing.

  Enterprising folk, white, black, and every shade between, set up tables beneath cotton awnings or carried trays hung about their necks. They sold pies, beignets, lemonade, ginger beer, and small ginger cakes that people called “mulatto bellies” for their color. Josephine bought one of these cakes, and, when it was gone, bought another.

  At four, the police blew whistles, and the dancing and music started. A man banged on the head of a cask with two big beef bones, and three others started up with tambourines.

  “Dansez Bamboula!” a tall, slender black man yelled. “Badoum! Badoum!”

  He leaped into the air with a jingle of bells tied around his bare ankles. Other men joined with shouts of their own. They wore bells, ribbons, and shiny, clanking bits of tin around their ankles. Women swayed and joined their voices to the chant. Children came leaping in with shouts or stood swaying and chanting. Soon, the center of the square was a single mass of black, dancing bodies. Of the observers, who seemed equally divided between whites and blacks, a handful of the white men lingered around the edges, almost but not quite swaying, as if they wanted to join in but couldn’t quite bring themselves to do so.

  Josephine spotted Franklin on the opposite side of the square, trying to fight his way around the edges to her side. It took some time before he arrived, and then he led her to one of the quieter parts of the square, where they took refuge between a tall, overhanging tree at the mouth of a narrow alley filled with garbage.

  “Have you been in trouble?” she asked, curious but also a little annoyed that he’d abandoned her for the last month with no direction.

  He rolled up his sleeve to show a pink, freshly formed scar on his forearm. “Knifed and beaten by two men on my first week in the city. If two strong fellows hadn’t surprised my assailants and chased them off, I’d have been done for.”

  “Heavens! I’m glad you’re all right.”

  “I wasn’t on Girod Street, or in the Swamp, either, but a respectable district. And the men didn’t rob me—I was carrying forty dollars of gold to pay off an informer. An informer who disappeared just before we reached New Orleans, by the way. Something bad seems to have befallen him.”

  Her mouth felt suddenly dry. “It wasn’t the man they hung at the fort, was it?”

  “I read about that. No, this was an old Spanish gentleman. The fellow they found floating in the Algiers Canal.”

  “That’s right,” she said. “Delaney wrote something about it in the Crescent. They said he was drunk.”

  “Could be. He liked his whiskey, from what I was told.” Franklin glanced up as a handsome and well-dressed mulatto couple walked past on their way toward the dancing. “Or it could be he was killed by the same men who attacked me. I might have been fingered as a suspected spy. There are some suspicious types at the shipyard—I couldn’t take a chance the other day. If I’m caught, I don’t want you associated with me.”

  “I’ll keep working alone,” she said, “but I need a way to send and receive information.”

  “What do you have so far?”

  Josephine had brought her leather satchel filled with papers, mostly observations and sketches, but also a fair bit of analysis and speculation. She pulled out a sheaf of papers a half inch thick, and Franklin’s eyes widened. She kept watch while he studied the papers.

  “Cocky,” he said at last.

  “Cocky?” It wasn’t the response she’d been expecting. “All that work, and that’s your response? Cocky?”

  “Don’t get me wrong—your eye is keen, your specificity of detail is remarkable. But”—and here he looked over the sheets before beginning to read back one of her lines—“‘The Confederacy has put inferior minds in charge of the work. Any fool could see that the water battery, for example—’”

  “Am I wrong?” she interrupted, remembering full well the line in question without having it thrown back in her face. “After all, you can see it, can’t you?”

  “Josephine, for heaven’s sake. Are you always this touchy about your work? Don’t you work with editors at the paper? How do you possibly manage?”

  “I put the sweat of my brow into that, and your first comment is that I’m cocky. You don’t see how that raises my hackles?”

  He winced. “All right, maybe you have a point.
It’s excellent—you know that. But I wish you could soften your prose. There’s too much of the lurid newspaper writing in it. It overwhelms the rest.”

  “Very well,” she said, a bit grudgingly.

  He looked back and read in silence for a few minutes. “This really is quite good. You have a knack for this work.”

  She liked his new tone better. “The best information came that very first assignment.”

  “Getting inside the fort? That was a stroke of luck.”

  “That’s what I thought at the time,” she said bitterly, “but I’ve been sitting on it for a month. Word has it they’ve got General Lovell in charge now, and as soon as he arrives he’s going to beef up the defenses.”

  “I’m sure you can make a return trip under some pretext.”

  “You’re missing the point. We’ve got to get this to Washington so they can do something with it.”

  “That’s why you’re touchy, isn’t it? You’re upset that you’ve had this analysis for so long and nobody has seen it.”

  “Perhaps,” she admitted. “I have ideas. I want to see them implemented.”

  “Our job is to report, not to decide.” Franklin had reached the part where she described the defenses of Fort Jackson, and was studying it with a thoughtful expression. “We’re not military experts, after all.”

  “I’m expert enough. No chain barrier across the river. Old guns sitting on rotting carriages. Ten minutes of firing and they’d be out of powder. Get a few boats over the bar and into the river and they could capture the forts with two hundred men.”

  And now Franklin came to the part where she’d sketched out a battle plan to do just that. Yes, it was highly presumptuous, but it was also obvious once she’d put her mind to figuring out how to seize New Orleans for the Union. Capture the downriver forts while they were weak, then bring the entire fleet outside the city and force its capitulation.

  “We can’t send this.”

  Josephine put her hands on her hips. “Why not?”

  “Because you’re . . .”

  “A woman?”

  He grimaced. “Yes, to be blunt. Not that I personally think that matters,” he added hastily. “And even if you were a man, you have no military experience. A woman and a civilian—they’ll dismiss it at once.”

  “Is there something wrong with my analysis?” she demanded.

  “Not at all. I’m surprised, of course. Not one civilian in ten would know what a water battery was or would have so clearly identified where the secessionists should place their chains. I’m only glad this is in our hands and not the enemy’s.”

  “You see. I do know my military details.”

  “That was never in doubt. It was your analysis of Bull Run that brought you into our service. But imagine putting this in front of the men of the Union War Department. Here’s a plan for capturing New Orleans, as envisioned by a twenty-year-old girl. I suppose I could put my name to it.”

  “No, you will not. Nobody steals my byline.”

  “All right, I won’t take your idea and call it my own, but surely you see my point.”

  “Maybe a little,” she admitted grudgingly. “Listen, I have plenty of experience rewriting to specification. I’ll soften my language. Instead of saying ‘Do this, do that,’ I can equivocate. Something like this: ‘One might observe the desultory preparations and suppose that the rebels have denied the possibility of a naval assault from below the city. They appear unwilling to entertain the notion that a well-armed fleet of steamers, accompanied by troop transports sufficient to hold the city . . .’ And so on and so forth.”

  He chewed on his lip. “Fine. But if we send this through and it earns me an angry retort from Washington, then no more extemporizing.” He handed back the papers, which she put into her satchel. “You’ll deliver these yourself.”

  “How will I do that?”

  “First, rewrite that bit, like you said. After that, wrap them in paper, seal them in wax, and deliver them personally. Try not to be conspicuous.” He gave a name and an address, which she recognized.

  “Mrs. Dubreuil! I met her at a party raising funds for the war. I thought she was the perfect Southern patriot.”

  “And she no doubt thought the same of you. Well, that will complicate things. You’d best go at night, come around into her gardens, and stay out of the gaslights when you pass off the papers.” He glanced around. “And now, I’d better leave you.”

  “So, what? Keep doing what I’m doing? Don’t you have any more instructions?”

  He rubbed at his chin, brow furrowed. “Have you seen Manassas?”

  “The ram? Yes, it’s in my reports. It went steaming downstream about a week ago.”

  She had stifled a laugh at her first glimpse of the converted tugboat. A crowd had gathered on the levee to watch the strange contraption, which people said looked like a turtle, but to her eye it was more like an enormous, half-submerged metal cucumber with a huffing smokestack. At first glance, it was more amusing than threatening in appearance. It only had a single forward-facing gun, was poorly maneuverable, and was barely strong enough to breast the current. But on second thought she was able to imagine how it might be used in battle. Sent downstream against a fleet, shells would bounce harmlessly off its plating while it maneuvered to drive its point through a wooden hull.

  Complicating matters, Manassas was owned by private investors who had a prize-money agreement with Richmond that allowed them to raid Union shipping across the world, from the seas of China to the Greenland whaling fleet. If Manassas could only reach the Gulf. Which it couldn’t, thanks to the federal fleet.

  “We need to find it,” Franklin said. “Most importantly, is it still in private hands? Or has the Confederate navy seized it? There was some talk of that.”

  “Is there a naval action planned?”

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I’ve been ordered to locate the ram, that’s all. It’s giving Washington fits—they don’t know how it will fare in battle against our wooden sloops. But if I’m being watched and I suddenly start leaving the shipyard to go looking for it . . .”

  “I’ll find Manassas.”

  “Good. We’ll meet here every Sunday afternoon to share intelligence. With any luck, I’ll figure out if I’m being followed.” He gave a wry smile. “And whether or not I’ve been cashiered for allowing you to draw up military campaigns in your leisure time.”

  “Stop worrying. At worst, the War Department will prove themselves fools and ignore it. But if they don’t, you’ll end up looking mighty clever for encouraging me.”

  “Be careful on the river,” he said. “The time will come when they’ll hang female spies the same as any man.”

  And with that, Franklin fought upstream against the crowd and was shortly out of sight, leaving Josephine with her leather satchel filled with papers. She left the shade of the sycamore trees, bought another ginger cake, this time with some lemonade to wash it down, and watched the dancing in the center of the square. A creeping sense of loneliness came over her, in spite of the fact that she was mobbed by people. The crowds only emphasized her isolation, as if she were a single grain of sand cast on a wide beach.

  The dancing, singing slaves kept up their celebration without break, the beef bones marking an endless rhythm on the cask head. The leaping, the prancing, the shouting and song, all combined with the drowsy heat to lull her into something akin to a trance, and she found herself on the edge of the mass of slaves, swaying, humming with the tune. At last, the sun dropped behind the buildings, and when it did, the police whistled the end of the dancing. The beef bones stopped their banging. A long, disappointed groan went through the crowd, and it began to dissolve away.

  As the mass of people thinned, Josephine spotted a white woman in a taffeta gown with hoopskirts. She held the arm of a dignified gentleman with one hand and leaned against an ivory-topped cane with the other. Josephine was studying the pair, thinking there was something familiar about them, when the
woman turned and their gazes met.

  It was Francesca Díaz, or Mrs. Hancock, as she styled herself now. Josephine should have recognized her by the red-dyed hair, if nothing else. The man must be her husband, the trader from Memphis, although Francesca had claimed he was unwelcome in New Orleans. Before Josephine could turn away, Francesca whispered something in her partner’s ear. He turned to look.

  Josephine’s heart froze. Her legs wobbled.

  It was the Colonel. Their eyes met, and though he was fifty feet away, his expression wouldn’t have been more readable if they’d been standing face-to-face. Not only did he recognize her, but he had been expecting her, too.

  Josephine picked up her skirts and fled.

  Josephine took a cab to the hotel. When she arrived, she ordered the driver to wait, rushed to her room, stuffed all of her possessions in her trunk and carpetbag, and hurried downstairs to find a bellhop to load up her trunk while she settled accounts. An hour later the cab was clattering away from the hotel. She watched the streets for any sign that Francesca and the Colonel were on their way to the hotel to look for her.

  About an hour later, she found new lodging near the elegant French Opera House at Bourbon and Toulouse Streets, in a place called the Jefferson. The hotel had lovely, well-shaded gardens with fountains and flowering wisteria vines. Her room was twice as large. And twice as expensive. But she liked the privacy of the walled gardens and a back entrance of the hotel that didn’t open onto a square or busy street. The hotel manager recognized her and let her stay under an assumed name.

  When she was safely in her room that night, she tried to write about what she’d seen at Congo Square, but her mind kept wandering. She took out the Oriental box and opened it, first to look at the photograph taken with the Colonel and then to flip the catch and run her finger along the secret compartment. She wrestled with her memories of that horrible night when her mother died, but couldn’t put them out of her mind.

  There had been a rough stretch of several weeks on the river after losing their position on Crescent Queen, when money ran dry and Claire was unable to find work. There were plenty of offers, but only on disreputable vessels that were little more than floating brothels. One slummocky Yankee fellow had even suggested in his oily way that Josephine could also find employment with his boat. Mother and daughter could make a team. Claire had drawn her pepperbox and threatened to blow his brains out.