The Old Port Chronicles
Volume One
Judith Greene
Copyright 2015 by James C. Burke and Christine Ingram Hockaday
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the expressed written permission of the publisher except for the brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the authors’ imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
For Information contact:
The Old Port Chronicles Project
1630 Forty-First Street
Wilmington, N.C. 28403
CONTENTS
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Epilogue
THE OLD PORT CHRONICLES
Volume One
Judith Greene
Prologue
At six o’clock on March 19, 1882, Andrew Jackson Greene, twenty years old, arrived in Old Port on the evening express. Accompanying him was a tall, soft-spoken, sweet woman in her mid-thirties named Lydia Rhodes, whom he called Aunt Lydi. She tenderly called him “Little Jack.” That name seemed oddly unsuitable since he was as tall as she and had a fine athletic physique. Aunt Lydi clung to the boy’s arm lovingly, occasionally stroking his coat sleeve. He found the gesture slightly annoying, but respectfully tolerated it.
Little Jack received one disturbing revelation after another that week. His mother, a kindhearted, generous, and mysterious woman named Judith that usually visited him once every six weeks, had disappeared. With this news came word that his father was alive and prospering, not killed in the war as his mother claimed. He was an Old Port surgeon named Doctor Phillip Greene. The doctor was as much surprised to learn he had a living son. In the family plot in the Old Port Cemetery there was a grave that supposedly contained the remains of an infant possessing the name of Andrew Jackson Greene.
Little Jack was a confused young man. Aunt Lydi could not offer many answers. She too, remained in the dark about the boy that had been her special darling since her teenage years. Her parents, the postmaster of Oak Crossroads and his wife, had agreed to take care of the child during the war years for a monthly payment from Mrs. Greene. This arrangement ended when the boy left for boarding school near Richmond. Lydi had become attached to Little Jack, and took every opportunity to visit him, and send him parcels of niceties. Her long tender letters came regularly. He often spent his holidays at Oak Crossroads, not realizing that his mother lived sixty miles down the track in Old Port. Her letters, postmarked “Petersburg,” led him to a dead-end when he tried to find her. Lydi too, thought that Judith Greene was a widow living in Petersburg, but never could contact her. The monthly payments from Mrs. Greene to the Rhodes family ended when Little Jack removed to Richmond. Lydi had remained close to the boy because she loved him. The unexpected resurrection of the father took her by surprise, and she wasted no time in rushing off to Jack, now in college, to cushion the blows soon to come.
The welcoming committee for Lydia and Little Jack had assembled on the platform at Union Depot about a half-hour before the evening express arrived. Aside from Doctor Phillip Greene, a distinguished gentleman of fifty-nine years, the party included the county coroner, Doctor Gilbert Lovejoy, and his twenty-one year old niece, Myrtle Klieneburger. Doctor Greene appeared deliberately calm, but his experiences as a battlefield surgeon had forged his emotional armor. His speech or actions belied inner tumult. Yet young Myrtle sensed it, but lacked the years to understand how to respond without feeling foolish. Perhaps even the mature Doctor Lovejoy lacked words of wisdom in such a strange set of circumstances.
Doctor Greene’s wife had deceived him so thoroughly, in so many ways, and for such a prolonged time, that he could hardly wrap his mind around its enormity. She had been living a double life, and not merely a mirror reflection of the woman he knew, but a person foreign to any he could imagine. Adding to his bewilderment was that his best friend knew all about her wartime career, and never said a word. Several prominent gentlemen of the town had been in league with her, all being her childhood friends, and they kept her secret. She spied for the Confederacy, and in a daring way. As the stories of her exploits surfaced, they amazed Greene and understandably, he was secretly proud. The matter of his supposedly dead son, however, overshadowed his admiration. Understanding the motivations behind her deception, he found little satisfaction in her revelation. The recurring threats to her life prevented her from being truthful. Now that all was out, she risked abduction and murder. He reluctantly allowed her allies to take her into hiding. He could only hope that danger would not follow her.
Doctor Lovejoy faced a curious difficulty. The next afternoon, he planned to exhume the grave of Andrew Jackson Greene. If empty, as he suspected, then Mrs. Greene wanted the young man to appear as having died as an infant for some unknown reason. What would he do if the grave contained a body? He also believed there was an unmarked grave in the Greene family plot. Reverend Sykes, the elderly Methodist minister, had told Lovejoy, he had been present at the burial of a young schoolteacher named Sarah Porter during the war. He thought Mrs. Greene had given permission to have her buried in the Greene plot. The cemetery register placed the body of Sarah in the yellow fever section, and her headstone on the grave supported the documentation. The records of the Old Port Academy for Young Ladies disappeared during the Yankee occupation of the town. The few ladies living in Old Port that had attended the school remembered no teacher named Sarah. All the teachers of the old academy, except Mrs. Greene, moved away or had died. Doctor Lovejoy intended to excavate the suspicious spot in the Greene plot - it could be a grave.
When the passengers of the train came strolling on the platform, Lydia and Myrtle were the only two that exchanged greetings with constrained enthusiasm. They met and became fast friends while she and her uncle visited Oak Crossroads. A tangle of cryptic clues had led them there. They suspected the secretive, seductive, young wife of the late superintendent of the railroad, Jane Morris Wyche, tried to rebury the coffin from the Greene plot. Her family lived near Oak Crossroads. Her “sister,” actually a cousin, grew up on the same plantation. Laura Wyche McAdams was a strange woman with a special talent and an imaginary friend. Daughter of the deceased superintendent of the Central Railroad, she was a former student of Mrs. Greene. Unknown to anybody the “sisters” unintentionally opened the floodgate of ruin for the leading citizens of Old Port.
My name is Anna Everett, daughter of Doctor Myrtle Klieneburger Everett, longtime professor of chemistry at the Women’s College at Old Port. My mother’s career began when her uncle asked her to help him in his office with a string of baffling murders. The victims were prominent men of the city. The ways in which they died were dramatic. The citizenry feared a fiend deliberately planned the murders to strike fear in their hearts. All efforts by the authorities proved fruitless. They did not have a likely suspect, nor could they discover a motive. As the evidence would prove much later, a hired assassin committed the crimes. My mother through her work with Doctor Lovejoy, was an active participant in the investigation. Her journals record the progress of the investigation and her later research reveals more about this baffling case.
CHAPTER ONE
April 28, 1863. Sarah Hamilton Porter was a sweet young woman. Always a cheerful soul,
she brought a ray of light to the darkest room. To her elderly uncle and benefactor, nothing in his life gave him greater pride than to see her accepted as a teacher at the Old Port Academy for Young Ladies. This is the school where she received her education. Just turned nineteen when the headmistress asked her to teach French to the girls, she only recently was their classmate. Before her birthday, she married her childhood sweetheart John Porter. Johnny, like her, had lost his parents in the yellow fever epidemic of 1854. Sarah’s uncle had approved the marriage on the condition that Johnny work as bookkeeper in the office of his business, Lucian Hamilton & Son, Commission Merchants. The son was the generous uncle, Lucian Hamilton Jr., and he had never married. When he died suddenly in early 1862, shortly after Sarah and Johnny had married, the will of Lucian Jr. provided amply for the young couple when one reached the age of twenty-one years. John would not reach twenty-one years until 1864. Sarah had to wait until 1865. This was not the old man’s design, but the way fate dealt the cards.
When his brother, a cavalry officer named Edward Porter died in battle in March of 1863, John volunteered. This decision would have enormous consequence not only for John and Sarah, but for many over the next two decades.
Poor John did not make it to the field of glory to find his end. He contracted dysentery or “bloody flux” as some called it, and died a miserable death in the camp. Sarah was saved the pain of learning about his death by a merciful captain who in his letter stated he succumbed to illness after receiving a sabre wound. He even stabbed the corpse in the shoulder to give his account some credibility should his body ever be returned home. Sarah was left with few resources other than her salary as a teacher. Adding to her concerns, she had given birth to a child after John left for war.
Exactly why the fates singled out a kind-hearted young woman to heap misfortune on misfortune is beyond human understanding. She was, however, given a brief respite from the discomforts that attended the tragic turns when Mrs. Judith Greene took her into her home. Judith, the wife of Doctor Phillip Greene was a teacher at the Old Port Academy. Living also in the Greene household was a sixteen year old girl who attended the academy named Laura Wyche.
Laura was the daughter of Colonel Joseph Wyche, superintendent of the Central Railroad. Her mother had died in childbirth. Because of her father being away so often, she was raised by relatives of her mother, the Morris family. Then her father sent her to boarding schools. Colonel Wyche was an officer in the United States Army during the war with Mexico. In the 1850s, he worked as a civil engineer with various railroad companies. Months before the start of the war with the North, the Colonel’s grand home near the railroad depot was almost completed. He planned to provide his daughter with a home she could call her own in early 1861. The war, however, prevented him from realizing the dream; and he placed Laura in the care of the most beloved lady of the town, Judith Ward Greene. Mrs. Greene welcomed the company, and she loved both young women as if they were her own children. The good Doctor Greene had busied himself as a field surgeon with his protégé Doctor Jacob Lowe and his friend, Doctor Gilbert Lovejoy. Judith Greene was a thorough Confederate, and had persuaded her husband to offer his craft in the service of the army. She, however resented not being able to follow him. When alone in the dark interior of the Greene ancestral home, the periodic compulsion to join her husband almost always verged on overwhelming her.
The old brick house was in the Georgian style with four rooms over four with a massive chimney flanking each side. Built in colonial times for Doctor Ezekiel Greene and his wife, it had served as the home for one Doctor Greene or another for slightly over one-hundred years. Drafty, dark and leaky, it was not a comfortable house. Because of its distance from the gasworks, the house was still lit with oil lamps. Still, it was a better built house than most in Old Port. Some called it a relic of the town’s heroic past.
Regardless of its defects and charms, Sarah had enjoyed living there. She and Laura became close during the year. With the birth of Sarah’s son Jackson, the household became much livelier. Then Sarah fell ill with what Doctor Andrews called “inflammation of the brain,” or more precisely “encephalitis” – a term that Laura found in Doctor Greene’s copy of Dunglison’s Lexicon. The illness began with a headache, but within a day she became comatose; and two days later on April 28th, 1863, Sarah Porter nineteen years old, died at 3:08 in the afternoon. Shortly after that, Doctor Andrews left Judith and Laura to attend to Sarah’s remains.
Judith (speaking gently) said, “Laura, we must do this with the utmost care and reverence –Poor thing she had such a pure heart. We mustn’t drop her.”
Less than a foot from the bed where Sarah lay, two long planks had been placed between four simple wooden chairs with a wooden bucket supporting the center of the span. Ever so carefully, the two moved the dead woman, first the upper portion of her body and then her feet onto the planks. After aligning Sarah straight on the planks Mrs. Greene said,
“Now wipe her face with warm water –gently – and I will take care of her after you are done. Then we will wash and dress her together.”
After Laura had wiped Sarah’s face, Mrs. Greene placed a bandage torn from a sheet under the dead woman’s chin, tied it off at the crown of her head, and closed her eyes. Mrs. Greene placed a laced edged kerchief over Sarah’s face.
Laura (somewhat shaken) asked, “I thought she was getting better. Didn’t you think so?”
Mrs. Greene wiped the tears starting to fall from her eyes, and steeled herself for the difficult answer,
“I don’t know. Doctor Andrews seemed to think so, but I suppose she wasn’t strong enough. If Doctor Greene were home, he might have done better; but we will never know. I think we’ll put her in her white Sunday dress? When she is dressed it will be necessary to cross her arms in the proper fashion. We will need to run a bandage around her so they will stay in place. And Laura, after we’re done, I want you to bring my jewelry box. She should have a few more rings on her fingers like a proper lady.”
Laura replied, “Yes Mrs. Greene.”
“I prefer to think that she would have wanted us to care for her. Poor thing, she was such a sweet girl – only about four or five years older than you dear. She loved you like a sister She told me so. Think of it Laura: Married widowed having a child and dying. So much life so quickly and so young at that! Your father will have none of that for you my dear Laura.”
Mrs. Greene lifted Sarah to an upright position.
“We must pull off her nightgown. Then I want you to wash her front and back and after that, dry her with the large cotton cloth. Be gentle with her, but don’t tarry.
“Do you plan to keep little Jackson?”
Looking at Laura with a pained expression, Judith answered,
“If we cannot find any of her people, I will surely keep him. Doctor Greene would not deny me that if it were possible. I certainly will not let him go to the poorhouse! Please be careful with her Laura! We can’t let her fall!”
When the coffin arrived, Sarah appeared properly dressed for her final class. Mrs. Greene, with the help of her neighbor Mr. Mitchell, had disassembled the bed on which Sarah had died. They set it on fire behind the house. Bedding, linens, and cloth used to clean the corpse went into the fire. Judith wanted nothing connected to that tragic event to remain. Another teacher took Laura to the school. There, the six teachers and the remaining girls waited for the undertaker. Sarah’s body stayed in the parlor until the funeral; and all that knew the young teacher sat with the body until the morning. Meanwhile Mrs. Greene arranged with the Methodist preacher, Reverend Sykes for services. Sarah was buried in the Greene plot in the county cemetery as if she was a member of the family.
The death of Sarah however, presented Judith Greene with several new challenges: besides attending to Laura’s well-being and education unaided, she had given herself over to motherhood. Her decision to accept Little Jack as her own would have terrible consequences for many eventually, including the prec
ocious Laura. The tragic death of Sarah casts a pall over the spirited atmosphere that prevailed in the barely functioning Old Port Academy for Young Ladies.
****
May 14, 1863. Colonel Wyche and Laura were travelling to Oak Crossroads, about sixty miles northwest of Old Port on the Central Railroad. After remaining quiet for most of the trip, Laura suddenly said,
“My friend died father. I know Mrs. Greene told you, but she acts like things are not as bad as they really are, she plays at not being upset. But she cried and you rarely see her cry even when you know she wants to.” The Colonel replied,
“I’m sorry you lost your friend Laura I know it hurts. But you’ve had enough schooling for the time being. It is the sickly season in Old Port. Besides, there is a war and all the better sort in the town have made tracks to their country places. The streets are filthy, and that’s only a start! There are all sorts of speculators and unsavory characters running about that you never see in the good times. I’m afraid for you. Since the machine shops had to be moved to Oak Crossroads, I have to stay there all the time. The only way I can keep my eye on you is to have you with me.”
Beaming at the prospect of staying with her father, Laura said, “I would like that father!”
“No you won’t, snapped Wyche, I will put you to work. You will be my aide-de-camp, washwoman and cook all in one! Young lady, come the first frost we’ll get you back to school if it is still open. I really don’t think you should go back until the end of the war.”
JUDITH GREENE: The Old Port Chronicles, Part 1 Page 1
