Spy of Richmond

by Jocelyn Green

  “And here I was afraid I was interrupting something.” He grinned.

  “I only wish you were.” She dropped her pencil on the desk.

  “Can I help?”

  Sophie screwed her lips to one side. “My father said I could write a piece about Castle Thunder. The research alone—”

  Harrison nodded. “Staggering. And maybe, you wonder if you can do it justice?”

  “Yes. I’m afraid I’ll cheapen the truth if I don’t tell it right.”

  “The more important the story, the higher the stakes. The more frightening the prospect of failing. I do understand.”

  She eyed him, warily.

  “Come now, surely you don’t believe that writing comes easily all the time, even to me. It’s work. But work that is worthy of the effort. May I?” He nodded to the script crowding the columns of printed text.

  “Don’t poke fun, now.” But with a half smile slanted on her face, she offered him her seat, and he took it.

  He squinted at her scratches. “Do I need a cipher key for this?”

  Color rose in her cheeks, but a rare burst of laughter spilled from her lips, like music. “Allow me.” She leaned over his shoulder, an errant curl bobbing beside his cheek, and rested her hand on the back of his chair. Pale green satin hugged and draped the lines of her figure so becomingly he forgot what he was about. Focus, Caldwell. He closed his eyes to listen.

  “… and so it proved to many a Confederate soldier, who, lying in the dungeons damp, or crowded into the common pens, for long weeks and months awaiting trial for some violation of army regulation, sickened, and were taken forth—not to the court martial, but to Oakwood Cemetery, where Death was recruiting another great Confederate army.” She paused, and his eyes popped open as she straightened, folding her arms in front of the hourglass curve of her waist. “Well?” She grimaced.

  “I thought you said you were having trouble with it.”

  A smile flickered. “Don’t you want to slash and scrawl?”

  “For old times’ sake? My writing style is tighter than yours, but you need not imitate me in order to succeed. You’ve come into your own, Sophie. You don’t need me. You’re a fine writer. All you need now is the courage to go after it.”

  “Based on one paragraph of text?”

  Harrison shook his head. “We get the Richmond papers in Philadelphia, too, you know. I read your columns.” And cheered you on.

  She looped her curl behind her ear. “How did you know it was me?”

  “John Thornton—the hero of Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel North and South? You loved that book. I couldn’t get you to stop talking about it, along with Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Remember?” He laughed at the surprise on her face. “Charming tale of social ills, even if it is set in England, and full of romance too. Despite regional differences, a dashing, ambitious man from the North falls in love with a willful, yet beautiful woman from the South. Is that about right?”

  Sophie’s eyebrow quirked. “It is. Just right.” Sunlight sparked off the locket at her throat as she smiled at him.

  Harrison stood and tugged at his collar, suddenly hot around his neck. “How are things going with Lawrence?”

  Sophie bristled. Harrison might as well have thrown a bucket of cold water over her. She felt drenched with disappointment. Lawrence had so much of her already, why bring him into this one moment? She lifted her chin slightly, deflecting the emotional blow. “Things are going exactly the way you want them to.”

  His face reddened. “I see. Does he suspect anything?”

  “I quite doubt it.”

  A deeper shade of red. He cleared his throat. “Well. Good, then. I’ll feel better about going away.”

  “Away? Where? When?” Surprise eclipsed her indignation.

  “I’m to be ready to march at a moment’s notice with the Department Battalion.”

  She blinked, at a loss. “The what?”

  “The clerks. The city is calling out the clerks. They went out once already without me, but now they need every man.”

  “But I thought you were exempt from service due to your government position!”

  “You’re not wrong. Exceptions to exemptions have become the general rule, to defend Richmond.”

  For a mere second, she closed her eyes to master herself. Cannonading and musketry could be heard from all quarters, it seemed, and several times a week as General Grant probed at the capital’s defenses. It had not bothered her before now. “Will you fight?” she whispered, her voice gone. “Against the Union?”

  Harrison’s face hardened into tense lines. “I’ll build ditches and fortifications, but I’ll not fire against my own country—assuming I even have a weapon at all. Besides, they say we’ll not see any fighting, but leave that to the regulars.”

  But she did not register his last sentence. Instead, another thought seized Sophie, even darker than the first. “They won’t hesitate to shoot at you!” You’ll be killed by your own comrades, she did not say.

  “It’s only for three weeks.”

  “It only takes a heartbeat to pull a trigger.” Her hands fluttered to her hair, to the locket sticking to her neck, to the folds of her satin skirt, as if they had a nervous disorder all their own. As if I were my mother. Panic threatened. She could not become her mother. And Harrison could not die.

  “Sophie.” Harrison grabbed her hands and steadied her with his piercing brown eyes. He spoke in low tones, the roll of faraway thunder, lest anyone overhear. “Think. I’m being conscripted by a desperate Confederacy. If I refuse to go, I’ll end up in Castle Thunder for desertion alone. If they suspect enough to look into my background, if they discover no Oliver Shaw worked at a paper in Baltimore, they’ll know I’m a spy. Where does that leave you and your father, for giving me quarter?” She tried to pull away, to be free of the web that entangled them, though it was one of their own making. Harrison pulled her closer, his arms like iron bands around her waist, until her bodice pressed against his linen shirt.

  “You’ll be marked as accomplices at best, spies at worst,” he whispered fiercely. “It will ruin you for Richmond even beyond this blasted war, the way Elizabeth Van Lew is already ruined by ostracism. Your father stands to lose his property, his fortune, his social standing, your inheritance, everything. He’ll be tossed into Thunder right along with me, and you’ll share a cell with Mary Walker.”

  “Stop,” she gasped, and flattened her hands against his chest, for the images that scrolled through her mind as he spoke left her breathless.

  “It’s the truth.” His tone softened, but he did not release his hold.

  “Truth,” she repeated, miserably. Some days she felt like she was swimming in lies, treading water in a sea of deception. One day, surely, she would drown in her own secrets.

  Harrison slid her hand over his pounding heart and held it there. It beat in time to hers. “It’s the truth,” he said once more. Their hands blurred together in her vision.

  When she lifted her face, he wiped a tear from her cheek before dropping his gaze to her lips. He was her safety net, her life raft, and her guide post. How could she manage to send him away again? Without thinking, Sophie’s hands looped behind his neck, her fingertips slipping into his hair above his collar.

  “Sophie.” His voice was gravelly. “I cannot stand for this truth to become one more secret.” Nose tinged with pink, he tenderly unhooked her arms from his neck, kissed the tops of her hands, and released them. “I won’t do this while you are courted by another, even if it’s only a sham. I won’t let you give yourself to two men at once. I’ll wait for your whole heart instead.”

  But when Harrison marched away with his battalion two days later, he took Sophie’s whole heart with him.

  Kent House, Richmond, Virginia

  Thursday, June 9, 1864

  It’s a nightmare.” Lawrence Russell muttered into his tumbler of water and wished for all the world it was whiskey instead. The shots he’d had at the tavern before coming ha
d barely taken the edge off. Sophie calmly rocked in the parlor, a stark contrast to his white-hot fury.

  “What happened?” Her voice, a balm to his frayed nerves. She was an angel, in a froth of white muslin, belted with a ribbon of sunshine to match the golden braid circling her head like a halo. No, she is the goddess Juno. My savior. For without her support, he’d have come unhinged long ago.

  He drew a steadying breath, inhaling the rain-scrubbed breeze drifting through the open window. “Union cavalry raid from West Virginia. Right through the heart of our iron country. They surprised three Tredegar furnaces—three of them!” He clanked his tumbler on the marble-topped table and gripped the arms of his chair until his knuckles shone white.

  “Oh my.”

  Lawrence’s jaw locked tight. Slowly, he worked it loose, pushing his chin from side to side with his hand. “They got Cloverdale furnace, the South’s chief supplier of metal. Grace furnace, which produces cannon iron. And Mount Torry furnace, which Tredegar just purchased in December. All three are nothing but smoldering ruins now.”

  “How awful. Was anyone hurt?”

  “The Confederacy is hurt, my dear, and by extension, thousands of her sons. Tens of thousands. More.” Rain drummed outside the parlor, soaking the heat with humidity. Sweat plastering Lawrence’s collar to his neck; he unfastened the top two buttons. “We cannot fight without weapons. We cannot make weapons without iron, we can’t forge iron without the furnaces, and I’ll be hanged if I know how to run or rebuild furnaces when the slave workers all run to the other side with every blasted Union raid!”

  He stood and trampled the maple leaf patterned carpet as he paced about the room. “They captured large numbers of draft animals we simply can’t replace and destroyed—destroyed, wantonly!—extensive stores of provisions. A criminal waste. The workers will go hungry, the few who didn’t run.” Lawrence paused in front of the mirror above the fireplace, rubbing the muscles in his jaw again. The bags beneath his eyes were growing heavier with each passing week. And no wonder. “General Grant thrusts at our defenses, probing for chinks. We’re short of men. And we’re short of ordnance. Just like we’ve been for the last three bloody—sorry, darling—years. And the administration is so wrapped up in red tape it can scarcely see the scarlet tide of casualties that will soon be rushing in.”

  Frustration ate a hole in his gut, he was sure of it. He needed a tonic. He needed Sophie. Crossing to her rocker, Lawrence took her hand and helped her stand. But when he folded her in his arms, she stiffened.

  “Are you well?” he asked.

  “I’m just tired, that’s all.”

  And distant, when he craved her closeness. Cold, when he was so obviously flaming with fury and in need of her—soothing ministrations. In fact, “You really don’t seem to be much upset by this latest, monumental setback to our country. Were you listening?”

  Her eyes widened innocently. “What? Of course I’m upset! Furnaces ruined, slaves escaped, horses stolen, food destroyed—I heard every word.”

  “Even worse, then.”

  Sophie’s eyes flashed beneath his scrutinizing gaze, and Juliet’s face surged in his mind. Those long bristly lashes, fluttering like a bird’s wings. The feigned innocence. “I don’t know what you mean.” Juliet’s words exactly.

  No. Not again. Not this, too. Not now. Lawrence chased the biting memories away, forbidding them to undermine his new romance. Sophie was not Juliet. He should not assume too much—no matter how clear the parallels.

  “I’m sorry, darling. This was not the conversation I intended to have with you today.” These were not the problems he’d planned on facing. It wasn’t just Lee’s army in need of weapons. In Georgia, General Joe Johnston’s army kept falling back toward Atlanta, clamoring for both food and ordnance.

  “You’re under a great deal of pressure, I know.”

  “Enormous.” He brought her hand to his lips and kissed each of her slender fingers. “We’re getting reports from Johnston, in Georgia, that Sherman has 254 pieces of artillery in the field, to his 154. And Rebel shells are unreliable. Many fail to reach their targets at all, while many that do refuse to explode.” He cut his voice low, for to speak with anything less than bravado about the Confederacy’s godlike generals and soldiers had become tantamount to treason. “If Atlanta falls, which it very well may, Richmond will be the South’s sole source of munitions. And now, when we most need Tredegar to increase production and improve performance, we lose three furnaces and a host of labor.”

  Sophie’s green eyes shone like sea glass as she smoothed the worry from his brow, though her own was lined with concern. “You’re doing all you can. There are simply too many factors you cannot control.”

  And there were some things he could. “Marry me.”

  Sophie’s heart turned violently in her chest. “Lawrence, you jest,” she whispered, and sank down into her chair, hands shaking in the folds of her billowing white skirt.

  “Not at all.” He dropped on one knee and pulled a ring from his pocket. “If the world comes crashing down around us, if I have you, I have enough. Be my wife.”

  She stared at the ring pinched between his fingers. “D-did you already speak with my father?” She was stalling.

  “Come now, darling. At your age, you’re just shy of spinsterhood. I’d say you can make up your own mind, free of guilt, and he’ll be happy enough to have you married off. And as soon as possible, for my sake.”

  Her lips refused to return his smile. Goosebumps covered her skin. She could not reach for the ring, even as the next step in her deepening deception. Even for the sake of the Union, she could not play this game a moment longer. It was Harrison she wanted, not Lawrence. As much as she was loath to hurt the man kneeling before her, if she accepted his offer now, breaking the engagement later would only inflict greater pain. It was not fair to Lawrence, or to Harrison, not to mention her own shredded heart. Tears welled in Sophie’s eyes. But words remained locked in her aching chest. How does one go about breaking another’s heart?

  Lawrence moved to slide the ring on her finger, but she curled her hand into a fist, and held it tight against her waist.

  The shock in his wide blue eyes cut through her.

  That’s how. Her stomach pitched and rolled. “I—I never meant to hurt you.” Yet how could this have ended without pain?

  “You reject me?”

  Sophie rolled her lips between her teeth, her silence her answer. Please, let it be enough. She willed Lawrence to leave with his dignity intact.

  His eyes narrowed, flickering. “So all this time, it was a game for you? As it was in the beginning, you never stopped playing?” Lawrence was on his feet now, pacing feverishly, rubbing at the muscle bunching in his jaw. “I’ve been a fool. Again.”

  She stood. “You’re not a fool,” she tried. “Dozens of women would rejoice to have even a portion of your affections.”

  “But not you,” he snarled. “I give you my entire heart, offer you my life, my future, after months of courtship and suddenly you’re not interested. Why?”

  He strode toward her, his chestnut hair falling over his forehead. She stepped back. He caught her wrist in his hand, eyes wild and rimmed with red.

  “Let me go.” Her blood rushed in her ears.

  “Ah, the one thing I want least to do.” His lips curled. “But aren’t you gone already?”

  Nothing she could say would make this better.

  “Have you betrayed me, then?” He grabbed her other wrist. Yanking her to himself, he crossed her hands behind his back in a forced embrace, the brass buttons of his jacket marching up and down her bodice. “To whom? Another man. Or another country?” Sophie caught the odor of liquor on his breath. He cinched her tighter, and her fingers tingled, then numbed.

  “Captain Russell!” Her voice shook. “Unhand me! You are no gentleman to treat me so harshly. You will not call on me again.”

  He released her, only to slap her across the mouth, sending her st
umbling back into the table and upsetting the glass he’d placed there. “And you are no lady. How dare you do this to me? How dare you?” He moved to strike her again, but she darted from his path.

  “You’ve been drinking. I want you to leave. It’s over.”

  “Ah, so this is my fault, is it? You would blame your disloyalty on me when it is you who have turned coat?”

  “Captain Russell. The lady asked you to leave.” Bella, standing tall a few feet from him, looking directly into his eyes. Her face a mask of stone.

  Lawrence’s dark laughter raised the hair on Sophie’s arms. “The Negress is giving a Confederate officer an order? Am I completely emasculated then? By war, by women, by slaves?” He shook his head and a pang of pity flitted through Sophie for what he must be feeling. “Your mistress would do well to learn from your loyalty. But my business isn’t finished here yet.”

  Bella stepped closer, muscles taut. “Yes, sir. It is.” She did not want to engage with this feral man, but she had a sight more fight in her than Sophie did. The captain and Mr. Kent—not to mention the entire neighborhood—still believed Bella was Daphne, the slave who would not rebel. But Bella knew who she was. And she would not stand by while that girl was beaten, which she believed without a doubt the captain would do. She knew his kind. Could smell the desperation in his sweat. He hungered for control and figured a woman, of all people, ought to give it to him.

  Ignoring Bella, Lawrence turned once more to his prey. “When did it happen? How long has that light in your eyes been shining for another?”

  He lunged toward Sophie, and Bella threw herself against him, knocking him sideways into the piano. A discordant crash filled the room until he righted himself and turned on Bella, eyes wild. “Do you not know the law?”

  She knew the punishment for attacking a white man, according to Richmond courts. But, “‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind … Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.’ I know the law, Captain Russell. The question is, do you?”