But only a bit.
• • •
Anna was back in our room when I returned. She had flopped wearily upon the bed she could scarcely bear to sit on a few days before. “What did they ask you?” I said when we were alone.
“About the boarders. When we went to bed the night of the assassination. When I last saw Johnny. Who called Saturday and Sunday. How long Johnny was postmaster.” Anna sat up. “Ma, do you think they will find Johnny? Kill him?”
“Child, I know in my heart that he had nothing to do with the assassination. If they find him, he will have no reason to force them to shoot him, as did Mr. Booth. They will put him on trial, and they will hear that he left town two weeks before, and he will go free.”
“But what if they find him guilty?”
“They will not, because you and I will pray that he stays hidden until it is safe, and that if he is found, he is not convicted. Let us do so now.”
Anna looked at me, clearly doubting the efficacy of prayer, but obeyed. As we told our beads, I pondered Colonel Olcott’s reference to my own trial. Was he merely using a form of words he used toward everyone he questioned, or was I to be put on trial, and for what? For bringing those shooting irons? Or for something worse?
Whatever was to come, I knew telling Anna would only upset her more. So I stayed quiet.
• • •
More familiar faces appeared in the men’s exercise yard: Mr. Holohan and—to my horror—my brother. “What has he to do with any of this?” I asked the guard at head count time. “He never met Mr. Booth in his life. He has supported the Union, in fact.”
“He’s your brother. And John Surratt’s uncle.”
In these times, that seemed sufficient to send a man to prison.
On April 30, Mr. Weichmann joined my other boarders in their captivity. He caught sight of Anna and me sitting by our window and waved.
“Even in prison I can’t get away from that man,” Anna muttered.
Mrs. Baxley, who had shown a bit more interest in life as new prisoners were brought in, chuckled. “Not a sweetheart of yours, I gather?”
“No! The horrid creature used to wear blue pantaloons in the house.”
Mrs. Baxley shook her head. “Pity my Willie isn’t here. The two of you would have been a good match.” She looked at the small jacket in her hand. “Except as to height, perhaps,” she added grudgingly.
• • •
That evening, we lady prisoners were clustered in the once luxurious parlor that served as our gathering place when we heard someone bark, “Double the guard!”
We stared at one another. Since Mr. Booth’s death, we no longer lived in fear of our prison being stormed, so what could this mean? Then I realized: they must have Johnny. “No,” I murmured. “Not my son.”
Mrs. Baxley hurried to her room with its view of the street. “They brought a carriage to the door,” she reported in a few minutes, “but there’s no one inside it that I can tell.”
“They must be about to free someone,” Anna said. “Lucky soul.”
“But why double the guard?”
We stood there in silence, waiting for something to answer our question, when Superintendent Wood appeared, followed by another man. “Mrs. Surratt, you are wanted. Please get your bonnet and cloak.”
It was half past six, well past the usual time for interrogating anyone. “Wanted where at this time of night?”
“Please do as you are told, madam, quickly.”
I turned to obey. Both Anna and Mrs. Baxley tried to follow me. Both were stopped.
Trembling, I slowly walked to my room and took my cloak and hat from their nail. Something told me to bring my purse as well. From the window, I heard Anna’s angry voice. “What do you mean, I cannot go with her?”
I hurried back. Anna clutched me. “I will go with her, and you won’t stop me!”
“Miss, I will use force only as the last resort, but I will use it if need be. Don’t make me cause you pain.”
“Anna, do as you are told.”
The commanding tone caused Anna to loosen her grip upon me. Instantly, Superintendent Wood moved in and firmly, yet gently, pulled her from me.
I looked at the semicircle of women standing around me. “Pray for me,” I said. “Take care of my Anna.”
Mrs. Baxley kissed me, and the others followed suit. Then I embraced Anna. “Be brave, child.”
“But where are they taking you?”
No one answered. Instead, Superintendent Wood and the other man hustled me away toward the carriage outside. As the door closed, the last sound I heard from the prison was Annie’s distant screams.
I slumped in a corner of the carriage. Even if I was disposed to look outside to see where I was being taken, I could not; the curtains were drawn shut.
At last we stopped. My companion, who at some point introduced himself to me as Colonel Lafayette Baker, handed me out. Nothing around me looked the least bit familiar, though the walls surrounding me left no doubt I was in a prison of some sort. “Where am I? Surely you can tell me that much.”
“Old Arsenal Penitentiary.”
I nodded, having heard of this place. “I didn’t think they were using it as a prison anymore.”
“They weren’t. Now they are again. Come along.”
Though I could not see it due to the walls, I knew we were surrounded by water on three sides in this part of the city, and a breeze coming off the river made me shiver as Colonel Baker led me to an office where a man sat behind a desk. “General Hartranft. Your name, madam?”
“Mrs. John Surratt.”
“Yes, as expected. A formality we have to go through.” He gave a very slight smile, and I sensed a kindness in him. “Please hand me your purse.”
I complied. He opened it and neatly laid out the contents, then scribbled on a piece of paper. A gold watch ring. “Very pretty,” he commented. A five-dollar note. Three bank bills. A thimble. Some needles attached to a strip of red velvet. My house key. My rosary, which he handed back to me without comment. As he finished writing and placed these items in a little box, it was the disappearance of the house key that pained me most.
“Sir, please tell me. Why was I moved here? Am I to stay here? Am I to be tried, and for what? Why cannot my daughter join me?”
“I cannot answer your questions, madam. I am very sorry. Now, let me take you to your cell.”
Unlike Carroll Annex, this place had been built to hold prisoners, and the cell he led me to was exactly that, with iron bars and no furnishings but a straw pallet on the floor. The only light came from General Hartranft’s lantern. “Can I not have a candle?”
“No, madam. They are not allowed. I suggest you sleep. I will check on you at seven in the morning.”
He nodded a good-bye and locked the door.
I had never been alone like this before. For years, there had always been someone close by—family, servants, boarders. Even when I had not shared my bed, there had always been someone I knew and trusted within call.
Were there other prisoners here? There must have been—surely this place was too large to keep one lone woman—but if there were, they were quiet. I heard only some crickets chirping and the sounds of some night birds.
I knelt and said my prayers, but God seemed very, very far away. Those being done, I lay down on the hard pallet and pulled the blanket around me. What was my poor Anna doing now?
It was the thought of her, motherless, in our room at Carroll Annex that finally, for the first time since my arrest, broke me. I sat up and wept into my hands until I could weep no more.
36
NORA
APRIL 24 TO 30, 1865
For days I remained shut up in my solitary room at Carroll Annex, without a soul to talk to. I thought for certain that my captors were trying to drive me mad. But for my two diversions—killing bugs and watching the men exercising in the yard—they might well have succeeded.
What a capital cockroach killer I bec
ame! Since then, I have read various memoirs of others, mostly men, imprisoned during the war, and while I cannot pretend to have possessed the military skills my male counterparts brought to their task of ridding themselves of six-legged creatures, I did the best I could, armed with my shoes. At first, it was my greatest regret that I had been arrested at the church fair, to which I had worn my dainty slippers rather than my practical boots, as the latter were, of course, far better suited to my murderous task. As the days passed and I grew more to hate my enemy, however, I found my slipper put less a barrier between it and myself, and therefore was far more satisfying than using a sturdier boot would have been.
But while I could report some success against the cockroaches, I was helpless against the bedbugs. They tormented me so much when I tried to sleep that I finally gave it up and paced around the chamber at night until I dropped at the foot of my bed in exhaustion.
When not engaged in hostilities with the insect world, I sat at my window and watched the men take their exercise. There was a rule at the prison, unwritten but nonetheless most vigorously enforced, that we could not stick our heads or hands outside our windows, which made it almost impossible for me to converse with anyone, but there were a few kind souls, most of whose names I never learned, who would pass by and give me an encouraging smile or a wave, making me feel less alone. Each day, there were more men in the yard to watch: no one seemed to be leaving, only coming.
Despite the fact that my letter to my father during my first captivity had never reached him, I again begged pencil and paper to write to him and to the Misses Donovan, who must have been frantic, poor things, when I failed to return home from the church fair. A pencil was soon brought, but no paper, and when I made the eminently reasonable suggestion that both would be helpful for writing a letter, I received only a blank stare for my pains. I could only hope that Father Wiget had sent word to them and my father. The pencil, however, did afford me a new pastime. Both here and upstairs, the walls were scrawled over with the signatures of my predecessors, along with the occasional scrap of verse, and I dutifully added my own name to the wall:
Miss Nora Fitzpatrick
In durance vile from April 24, 1865, to ____
• • •
On Thursday, the fourth day of my captivity (I kept a little calendar on the wall in time-honored style), a guard pushed open the door and thrust in a basket, for which the roaches and I all scrambled. It was a selection of little cakes from my favorite bakery and could have been brought to me by none other than my father. I pictured him standing at the counter, worried to death about me, yet making certain all of my favorites were well represented, and my heart ached. Why had I ever brought all of this trouble upon him by wanting to leave the Misses Donovan in the first place?
The next day, toward dusk, my door banged open again. This time, it was a woman who was unceremoniously pushed into my cell by the guard, who muttered something about bringing in another bed and left her staring around in horror.
She was a maiden in her midthirties, and I shortly learned that her name was Miss Mattie Virginia Lomax and that she was a schoolteacher from Baltimore. “I was put in here merely for inquiring about my relations, the Greens, who are in here simply for having a nodding acquaintance with Mr. Surratt,” she said. “And you?”
I hesitated, having heeded Mrs. Baxley’s warning about spies. “I was Mrs. Surratt’s boarder.”
This seemed enough for Miss Lomax. “Yes, I’ve read about the arrests. I believe I met your father in the office. He is an older gentleman with white hair that hangs to his shoulders?”
I nodded. “That’s Father.”
“He said that he had been coming here every day, asking to see you, and bringing you food and other gifts.”
My eyes filled with tears. “I have never been allowed to see him, and have received only one basket of cakes from him.” I pointed to my shawl hanging from a nail on the wall. “I keep them tied up in there to keep them from the roaches. We can share them.”
“That is kind of you, but is the food really that bad here?”
“Indeed it is,” I said with all of the relish of a boarding school pupil introducing a new girl to the place. “The food is awful and the place is full of bugs and there is a guard in front of our room at all times. You will see his eye at the door from time to time, especially when he thinks we might be in a state of undress. I stop up the keyhole with my handkerchief, but he pushes it right out.”
“Mercy,” Miss Lomax said faintly.
“We must never stick our head out of the window, or we will be shot—at least that is what they told me when I tried.” I was fairly chattering away, for the relief of having a human being with me, even one who was a complete stranger and who might be a spy, was almost too great to bear.
I began giving her a rundown of our schedule—breakfast at eight, dinner at three, supper at eight, morning and evening head counts. Poor Miss Lomax was looking rather overwhelmed and in need of a bed to sink upon when that very article arrived, carried in by two men who dropped it in the corner with a grunt. “No blanket?”
I looked out at the yard, where one of the women who brought us our meals was vigorously shaking a brown blanket. Miss Lomax’s eyes followed mine. “Oh,” she said faintly.
I decided not to dishearten Miss Lomax by mentioning the blood on her sheet (which at least had had a chance to dry), but she noticed it presently, just as the woman bore in the blanket, on which my experienced eye soon detected the omnipresent bedbugs. “You can have the stool,” I offered.
“Thank you, but where on earth can I hang my things?’
I pointed to an unoccupied nail on the wall, which, like the one on which my own things hung, clearly had been intended for a more Amazonian creature than either Miss Lomax or me. “You’ll have to stand on the stool as I do.”
Grimly, Miss Lomax complied, and I looked at the keyhole. Sure enough, the eye was pressed against it. I rather doubted the guard could get much of a peep up her skirts from this point, but as our sex had to stick together, I stood and blocked his view. “I suppose you have heard the news,” she said when she had accomplished her task and dismounted.
“No. I have heard nothing.”
“Booth is dead.”
All of the pleasure I had been taking in inducting this fresh fish into our company vanished. I took the newspaper she offered me, and as I read the account of Mr. Booth’s last hours on earth, I began to cry.
I should not have cried for him, knowing what he had done and how many lives he had devastated—but I did. I cried for his poor mother, of whom he’d spoken in his dying hours, and of whom he had spoken so fondly in Mrs. Surratt’s parlor. I cried for poor Miss Hale, who would soon be whisked off to Spain by her father, not to set foot in America for many years. I cried for poor Anna, who had loved him. I cried for the sheer waste of Mr. Booth’s finer qualities in the pursuance of a mad idea that hadn’t saved a single life or made a single person the happier for it.
Most of all, I cried because he had given me my first kiss, and I couldn’t forget that special bond between us even though he had shot the president. And that night, I prayed for his soul with all of my might.
• • •
Despite the assurance that all I had to do was to tell all I knew about Mr. Booth and Mrs. Surratt, there had been no opportunity for me to tell, for I had not been questioned since my return here. This all changed on the day after Miss Lomax’s arrival and the news of Mr. Booth’s death, when I was summoned to the office. I was greeted by Tall One, my interrogator from the other day. “Good morning, Miss Fitzpatrick,” he said genially. “I trust you will be more cooperative than you have been in the past?”
“I have not been uncooperative in the past, sir. I simply do not know what you seem to think I do.”
“We’ll be the judge of that.”
He started out by asking me to name Mrs. Surratt’s boarders. When I came to Port Tobacco, it seemed to please him very much. The
n he began to fire questions at me. When did Port Tobacco come? How long did he stay? Did he come alone? Did he ask for Mr. Surratt? Had they been previously acquainted? Had Mr. Surratt been out of town before Port Tobacco came? Was Mr. Booth with him? When I gave what appeared to be the wrong answer, I trembled under his steely gaze, as if I were a private he was getting ready to send to the stocks, and when I gave an answer that appeared to suit him, I trembled to think of the consequences to Port Tobacco or Mr. Surratt, if they ever found him.
The subject of Port Tobacco being exhausted, Tall One turned to Mr. Payne. He had not, I admitted, looked like much of a Baptist preacher to me, and yes, he did have a bit of a fierce look to him, I supposed. Then why had I not recognized him the night of my arrest?
“I was frightened that night,” I said quite truthfully, “and he had a thing on his head.”
“Would you have told anybody that night if they had asked you whether you recognized him?”
As I had recognized him at the provost marshal’s office but had not said a thing to anybody, I said only, “I was frightened when they arrested me.”
“When did you last see John H. Surratt?”
This was a familiar question, though I could answer it to no one’s satisfaction. “Three weeks ago last Monday.”
“Did you never have any suspicion that all these men were contriving something? Did you never hear them talking as though they were?”
“No, sir. I never heard them say anything of the sort.”
“When was it that Mr. Surratt burned some papers, do you remember?”
“If he burned any, I didn’t know that he did it.”
“You were not there at the time?”
My head began to throb. “I never saw him burn any papers,” I snapped. “What he did when I was not around I cannot say.”
Tall One seemed to concede my point. After questioning me about my whereabouts on Easter Sunday (church, which he seemed to find vaguely sinister), he terminated our interview. I followed the guard dejectedly back to my quarters, which after my visit to the comparative luxury of the office looked worse than ever. Miss Lomax was perched upon the stool, reading. “The oddest gift has arrived for us, Miss Fitzpatrick. Harper’s Weekly, and a perfectly dreadful dime novel.”
Hanging Mary Page 25
