Spy of Richmond

by Jocelyn Green

  “With your father.” Ruby squeezed her hands together in her lap. “How is he?”

  “Fine, thank you.” He paused, spinning the saltshaker around on the table. “Some mansions on Fifth Avenue have been looted and burned, and some homes just a few blocks from here were destroyed, too. They cut the telegraph lines. Sacked Brooks Brothers for its profiteering with uniforms made from shoddy. Thousands of rioters broke into the armory, took carbines—rifles—and then burned the building down even though ten rioters were still inside.”

  “Did they escape?”

  “No.” Folding his hands in his lap, Edward pressed his lips together for a long moment before continuing. “They have made barricades in the streets. I believe they are truly at war. With New York. Including its children.” He shook his head. “They burned down the Colored Orphans Asylum, Ruby.” His voice wavered.

  Nausea rolled Ruby’s stomach as she cast a blurry glance at Aiden. Were her countrymen really so vile? “What happened?” she whispered.

  “Thank God they all escaped alive and by the guidance of an Irishman, word has it. Paddy McCafferty? Do you know him?”

  Ruby shook her head, although she wished she knew this heroic Paddy rather than the rioters she had called by name on Monday.

  “Well, the boys and girls are safe, but they’ll need a different home. Actually, I fear most of the city’s black residents will be looking for another home if they aren’t safe in the arms of Jesus by now.”

  Ruby sucked in a breath. “What?”

  “Have you not read the newspaper?”

  “Only the headlines. I’d rather hear it from you.” She pinned him with her gaze and watched the struggle behind his eyes. Was she selfish for asking him to repeat what he had seen?

  “Whatever violence you can imagine an Irishman doing to a freeman, it has been done.”

  She blinked. “I can imagine quite a lot.” Destroying their property. Beating them. Mutilating them. Drowning them. Shooting. Lynching.

  “It has been done.” He spun the saltshaker still, with trembling hand. “Many times over.”

  The words cost him, she could tell. Edward fell into silence then, and Ruby did not pull him out. She only sat at his elbow, watching Aiden roll around on the rug, his bottom wedged in the colander, and wondered how long her son would believe the world was a beautiful place that existed to make him happy. She wondered what he would do when he discovered it did not. Would he reach for the bottle? Or a gun? Or a noose? Did his Irish blood condemn him to a life of violence? No, please, God. She would raise him different than that. Besides, he was only half-Irish. At least, as far as she knew.

  Edward leaned back in his chair and winced, snapping Ruby from her reverie.

  “Has anyone treated your wounds yet?”

  He grimaced as he leaned away from the rungs of the chair. “You mean there is something that can help these stripes feel better?”

  “Aye,” she said. “Comfrey leaves boiled into a tea should help.” She had used them countless times to soothe Aiden’s cuts and scratches. “You just soak linen strips or towels in the tea and place them on the wounds.”

  “Can you help me?”

  Her heart skipped a beat. What had she done? She couldn’t help him, she couldn’t touch a man, not even this man, not any man, not after—her eyes squeezed shut against the sneering face that surged before her. She could almost smell his pomade and whiskey. Ruby shook her head, trying to loosen memory’s tentacles from her spirit.

  “It’s just that—I don’t have any comfy tea. Can you make it for me?”

  “Comfrey.”

  “Comfrey sounds comfy to me.” The corner of his mouth tipped up.

  “All right. I’ll go make it. It will take a few minutes.”

  By the time Ruby returned carrying a tray of tea-soaked linens, Edward had fallen asleep lying on his stomach on the rug in the rear parlor, Dickens curled next to him. Kneeling down beside him, she could not bring herself to rouse him from his slumber. It was what he needed most of all.

  She looked at the towels, already cooling. They really should be applied when quite warm to do the most good. Come now lassie, you can do better than this. It is only Edward. You are a widow, not a maiden.

  Gingerly, Ruby tugged up his shirttail to expose the tracks the belt had left on his back. The damage may not have been so great save for the brass buckle digging its tooth into his skin before tearing through it. She cringed at the sight. No, she was not cut out to be a nurse like Charlotte, or to visit the wounded in hospitals nearly every day like Edward did. But God help her, she should be able to lay comfrey-soaked strips on top of these scabbed-over gulleys through his flesh. Really, she didn’t even have to touch him.

  Ruby spread the cloths over the inflamed stripes and sat back on her heels. It was a victory, and she thanked God for it.

  Aiden toddled over, tin colander in his chubby hand, and Ruby scooped him up before he could climb on Edward or pull the cat’s tail. “Come, darlin’.” She kissed Aiden’s temple as she peeled his little fingers off the handle. “It’s time we get you to bed.”

  Ka-boom! Ka-boom! Ka-boom!

  Edward jerked awake and stumbled to his feet, wet towels peeling from his back as he did so. His heart hammered against his ribs as comprehension knifed through his drowsiness. New York’s troops had come back from Gettysburg.

  Ka-boom!

  And were firing cannons at the rioters.

  Quickly, he swiped up the towels that had fallen to the carpet and dropped them on the tray at his feet, then rushed to the bottom of the stairway.

  “Ruby!” he called up. “I’ve got to go now. Lock the door behind me!”

  Edward slammed the door shut after himself and bounded down the steps. The twilight sky was stained a dirty orange, and thick with the smell of turpentine, a choking reminder of the buildings the rioters had torched. The black community downtown had fared the worst, by far, as had the restaurants, saloons, and brothels that had served them. Sidewalk bonfires consumed furniture in these neighborhoods, and kept the skies glowing even after the sun had set. The waterfront had all but emptied of dark-skinned New Yorkers.

  But it was the cannons that concerned Edward now. They seemed close, only blocks away. He jogged on Sixteenth Street east toward the sound, through Union Square Park, past Lexington Avenue, and Third Avenue—and stopped.

  Bronze, short-barreled howitzer cannons gleamed as they spewed grapeshot into the barricades erected at First Avenue. Clouds of gun smoke belched from their mouths, and the taste of saltpeter bit on Edward’s tongue. The earth shuddered, reverberating in his chest.

  The rioters engaged desperately. When a chink was punched through the barricade, bricks came hurling out of the open windows of the tenement behind it. Then came the sniper fire. Soldiers who had survived the battle of Gettysburg and then a hard march back up north were being felled by their own neighbors.

  “Fix bayonets!” The order jolted through Edward like lightning. Bayonets? “Charge!”

  “No wait!” But Edward’s voice was lost in the cacophony of the charge. Did they understand that the building surely held more than just the snipers and stone throwers? That women and children could be huddled in the corners? Visions of the Irishwomen he’d seen on the streets since Monday flitted through his mind then. Women, in fact, had been the ones who crowbarred up the tracks of the Fourth Avenue commuter rail line above Forty-Second Street. They had beaten policemen until they were unrecognizable.

  But of course, those women did not represent the whole. There had to be more like Ruby O’Flannery among the Irishwomen. They just weren’t the type to be seen. They were the type to hide and pray for it all to pass on by.

  “Wait!” Edward cried out again, and pushed through the gap in the barricade and into the bowels of the tenement building. He ran into room after room, calling, listening, looking. Until finally, he heard it.

  “I mean you no harm!” It was not an Irish accent. Perhaps the rea
son she had been spared the soldiers’ steel blade.

  “I am coming, just a moment!”

  Edward found her then, exactly as he had imagined her. Small, unthreatening, yet threatened. “Can you walk?” Edward helped her to her feet.

  “I believe I twisted my ankle.”

  “Here, let me help you.” He wrapped his arm around her waist and ushered her outside. She was so very thin, her weight was nothing for him to support. She was draped in rags, but her hair was pulled neatly into a bun.

  “Are you hurt elsewhere? Other than your ankle?” He eased her down onto a barrel while the firefight continued inside the building.

  She stared at his face, eyes growing wide. Her bony hand fluttered to her heart. “George?” she whispered. “It’s me, Vivian! You have found me!”

  “No, I’m sorry, dear woman, you must be mistaken. My name is—”

  “Of course, of course! It has been so long you see, and you look so much like your father. You are Edward.” Tears glossed her eyes. “My, how you’ve grown!”

  Edward cocked his head and studied her.

  “Edward Goodrich. My nephew.” She clasped his hand in both of hers. “I never thought I’d see you again. You look just like your father did at your age. Oh! I can scarcely believe he sent you for me, after all this time!”

  But Edward had not seen this woman, ever. His father was an only child, like Edward. At least, that’s what he’d always said.

  A few more soldiers jogged up to the tenement, one of them shouting above the rest. As they drew closer, the shouting became louder, more frantic.

  “That’s my building! That’s my home! Hey! My mother’s in there!”

  Vivian whipped her head toward the shouting, eyes blazing. She stood on her good foot.

  “Jack?”

  The soldier froze.

  Vivian shouted again, waving her arms. “Jack! Jack! Over here!”

  Edward stepped back and Jack ran to her, engulfing her thin frame in his arms, and she wept onto his dusty blue frock coat. “I can’t believe you’re here! My son, my son, oh thank You, God, my son is home!”

  She pulled back and removed his kepi, brushed his saddle-brown hair to the side. “It’s you,” she whispered. “Look at you. Nineteen years old now, and taller, too.”

  “And Caitlin? Is she here?” Jack looked over his mother’s head, scanning the faces around them.

  Her smile wilting, two lines appeared between her eyes as she shook her head. “She’d been sending me money for months—never put a note with it, and never a return address, but I recognize her handwriting on the envelope. It’s just the sort of thing she would do, too. Then all of a sudden, the money stopped coming. That was more than a year ago.”

  Jack dropped his chin to his chest and scuffed the dirt with his brogans. “I thought she’d made it home before me.”

  “From where?” The words leapt from Vivian’s throat as her bony fingers clutched his biceps. “Jack, do you know where your sister has been?”

  “She was with me.” The boy’s voice quivered. “But I—I lost her. She’s missing in action.” He winced at his mother’s strangled gasp. “But she might be all right. If Caitlin is alive somewhere—anywhere at all—she will survive.”

  Eyes squeezed shut for a moment, Vivian’s lips trembled even as she nodded. Whatever she whispered in her son’s ear as she embraced him once more, Edward could not hear.

  “Come,” Edward said as soon as Vivian released Jack’s neck. “You need food and rest.” Clearly, she needed more than that. But at least, it was a start.

  * * *

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