Girl in Disguise

by Greer Macallister

  She got a position, an authentic one, as the manager of a boardinghouse on the South Side. We put out subtle whispers and murmurings that it was a good place to lay low, and over time, the city’s criminal element began to send new arrivals her way. She heard their stories over breakfast and conveyed what she’d learned to us. The information was often invaluable. She didn’t have to betray or persuade anyone. She simply listened to what was said, either to her or around her. When they thought no one was paying attention, criminals let each other’s real names slip instead of using their proper aliases. Some used their real backstories when asked where they came from, which was also useful in pinning down who they might be instead of who they said they were. They revealed themselves in their accents, their choice of words, their unguarded moments.

  Her powers weren’t limited just to observation and information. Once suspects were staying in the house, we’d find ways to lure them away, sometimes for an hour or two, sometimes longer. There were countless ways to do it. In their absence, she efficiently and neatly searched their rooms, finding evidence and clues that could point us in the right direction, always returning everything perfectly to where it had been, as if she’d made chalk marks before moving shoes, bags, sheets. She could fold a shirt with crisp corners or sloppy ones, whatever the original folder had done, and precisely place something as large as a lamp or as small as a watch. She was excellent at this work. Finally, we’d found her place. I liked to think I had finally repaid the debt I owed her.

  Unfortunately, I had barely gotten my feet under me as the superintendent of the small force of female detectives when the work changed again. I was pulled into another secret meeting on the floor of the costume closet, hats and shoes and disembodied mustaches piled up around me as I heard news that changed my future.

  Pinkerton told me I was needed elsewhere, and what could I ever say to him but yes?

  Chapter Seventeen

  The Rails

  Miss Kitty Overchurch of Memphis, schoolteacher who feared that Northern progressivism would harm the integrity of age-old Southern tradition. Mrs. Catarine Labreaux of New Orleans, plantation mistress and proud slave owner who thought the Negroes in her employ deserved, like children, to be protected from themselves. Mrs. Kelly O’Reilly, Irish immigrant, whose husband’s livelihood depended wholly on the cotton trade that a war with the North threatened to disrupt. Miss Katherine Filgate of Chattanooga, a spitfire who only wanted to know how Yankee infiltrators might be caught, stopped, and, if necessary, dispatched to their Maker.

  I played all their parts and more.

  We all served the railroad in our own way, in the roles Pinkerton assigned. For me, he chose a grueling schedule, traveling around the slave states, ferreting out intelligence from stationmasters’ wives and daughters. With each one, I might need to be coy or charming, brusque or wheedling, brash or shy. I might pose as a local, or a confident, habitual traveler, or a panicked ingenue uncertain of my surroundings. My job was to quickly surmise what each woman knew that was worth knowing and then move on elsewhere to do it all again. Pinkerton’s old friend McClellan had expanded the Illinois Central southward and also taken on responsibilities at the Ohio and Mississippi Railroad, and though no one said for sure, I suspected he was one of the people reading the reports that we gathered, looking for patterns and forms that might be meaningful. I missed working closely with Hattie and Mrs. Borowski, but the importance of our intelligence work could not be denied.

  I spent three weeks in Bolingbroke, Arkansas, slowly cooking from the outside in. I took a train from there to Memphis that broke down so many times, I suspected I could have made the trip more quickly on foot. From Memphis, I made a stop in Atlanta, but the stationmaster there had sent his wife to her family’s ranch in Texas for the duration, and he looked upon me hungrily, like a hotel meal sent up to satisfy a late-night appetite. The sun did not set on me in Atlanta, and when it rose, I was halfway to Greenville.

  It put me in mind of my parents and the theaters that had been a poor excuse for a home in my childhood. I grew up seeing men who drew pistols on one another onstage raising a whiskey to each other in celebration afterward; whores and mistresses on the stage became churchgoing women on Sundays, hands folded primly. Seeing it over and over again never made it feel more natural. I was deeply accustomed to using other women’s names now, playing other women’s parts, but that didn’t mean it felt easy for me. Indeed, I felt I was losing track of myself under all the disguises.

  But during the six months I spent away from Chicago, seeking intelligence for the railroads, I was not the only one coming unmoored.

  Chicago had lulled me into complacency. We were like-minded people among other like-minded people, and besides the rallies, little of the Southern strife had bubbled up to interrupt our daily lives. But in the cities of the slave states, I couldn’t deny the air was sour with resentment and ire. The streets were alive with militia. The headlines screamed rebellion. In my youth, the South had felt like a different country; now, it felt like a different world.

  For one thing, no Negroes walked alone on the streets. If I saw them, they were trailing behind their masters, with downcast eyes and slumped shoulders. Not for a minute did I believe they truly thought themselves inferior to the men who walked ahead of them, but I was looking at them through Yankee eyes. In my childhood, I’d never known anyone who owned slaves. The people we associated with didn’t even have enough money to own a second pair of shoes.

  Or perhaps my memories were all tainted by what I saw once on the street in Murfreesboro. A slave walked behind his master and tripped in the dirt. The white man turned and beat the black man, savagely, silently. Just as silently, the black man wrestled the whip from the white man’s hand and beat him with it. He got in two good strokes before someone shot him. Then everyone went about their business. I wanted to help, but what could be done at that point? The man was already dead, and I was beholden to my duty. I could not give myself away. There had been no opportunity, but I knew the more time I spent in these places, the more outrages like this I would see. And I would let them happen, because the woman I was pretending to be would never intervene. It joined the long list of things that troubled my sleep.

  • • •

  Pinkerton called me home in June of 1860, and as soon as I saw the skyline of Chicago again, a wave of gratitude washed over me. I spent a week at home, being myself. I needed it so badly.

  For the first time in a long time, I could walk down the street without my neck on a swivel, trying to capture every action of every person in my mental record. For once, I could have a meal without trying to persuade my companion to disclose some kind of secret. It was unfortunate that I didn’t get to see DeForest, but I knew he was on an important assignment, and all I could do was pray for his safe return.

  I dined out with Hattie, catching up as best we could, and she told me she missed our conversations, which warmed my heart. She asked my advice on her current case, an impersonation of a fortune-teller, which reminded me of the time I’d taken on a similar role. I told her the story of my stained skin, and she laughed so hard, she spat wine onto the table. This sent me into gales of laughter as well, and we both ended by wiping away hysterical tears.

  My brief time in the office reminded me why I liked the operatives I liked and why I didn’t like the ones I didn’t. I fell into our old patterns immediately; it was such a relief to do so. These were the people who knew me, as much as I could be known.

  Bellamy stared when I walked in, so outwardly astonished to see me that he stood slack-jawed for several seconds.

  “What?” I asked. “Were you hoping I’d died?”

  He began to shake his head but then stilled himself, apparently thinking better of responding. He turned his attention to other matters, tucking one case file into a drawer, pulling another one out, and opening it flat on the desk. I thought his cheeks pinked a little, bu
t who knew the cause of that? He always did hate attention, unless it was praise, which he seemed to like just fine. Then again, I supposed the same could be said of me.

  The only words he actually spoke to me the whole week were part of a conversation that Taylor started.

  “Have you heard, Warne? The Republicans have their nominee for the presidency now.”

  “Do they?”

  “You’ll never guess who it is.”

  “You’re right about that,” I said, busying myself with papers that didn’t necessarily need to be filed right that minute.

  “Go on, guess.”

  “I don’t know. Did McClellan jump the fence?” He’d been a vocal Democrat in our dealings with him, and he was really the one and only political animal I knew. He never had warmed to me, not even after I brought in the evidence on Mr. Vincent, so I wasn’t inclined to think the best of him.

  “Not till pigs fly. C’mon, try again.”

  “I really don’t follow politics.”

  “You should,” chipped in Bellamy.

  My best response to him was no response, which I gave.

  Tired of waiting for me to play along, Taylor gave the answer. “It’s Lincoln.”

  Now, he had my attention. “Abraham Lincoln? Our Lincoln? The lawyer?” I knew he’d had some political dealings, but I couldn’t help but think of him as the scarecrow lawyer I’d met, years ago now, in Springfield. Together, we’d brought the embezzling accountant to justice, though I still remembered the hearts I’d broken to do it, including my own.

  “The very same.”

  “What did he have to go do a fool thing like that for?” I said incredulously.

  Bellamy mumbled, “Maybe he wants to be president?”

  “It’ll never happen,” said Taylor, shaking his head.

  I had to agree, as much as it pained me. The South would never stand for a president openly against slavery, whether or not he was well-spoken and intelligent. He was the wrong man for the job. We needed someone who could appeal to both sides, though I couldn’t be sure that such a man existed. And certainly, I would rather have a man of our cause in the White House, if the alternative was a slaver. Lincoln would never be the kind of compromise that both sides could buy into. But maybe I was fooling myself that compromise was an option for our country. I thought back to Murfreesboro. We were already two countries.

  We even spoke different languages. Southerners who agitated for secession were referred to as Secesh, but never south of the Mason-Dixon Line, where the term was considered an insult. A Northerner who felt the same was a copperhead, but only in the North. I had to be fluent in both languages and remember what to speak to whom, at all moments, in all places. I had no illusions about what would happen if I were discovered in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  One misstep was all it would take.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Baltimore

  All of Richmond’s finest hotels were located only a few blocks from the slave market. No matter where I stayed, I would pass within feet of the notorious Lumpkin’s Jail, where the howls and cries of those within never fell silent. To keep myself from reacting, I watched the reactions of others, to see if they felt anything. Some did, and some didn’t. I had seen men spit and women weep, as well as the other way around, but most seemed to make an effort not to notice. As I passed the rotten structure with a stationmaster’s teenage daughter in November 1860, she rolled her eyes. It was all I could do not to cuff her and stamp her bonnet strings in the mud.

  Instead, we continued our walk to take tea at the Spotswood, the city’s newest hotel and its crown jewel. My room was at the Exchange down the street, a marble palace that was hardly less luxurious, but the Spotswood was more fashionable, and Letty was a creature of fashion.

  I was pretending to be a Mrs. Barley, a former resident of the town who had moved away years before, calling on the thinnest of threads to visit with the stationmaster’s family. The mother was busy with her sewing circle, but the teenage Letty proved a most willing gossip, and I hoped the tea would yield some results. My favorite trick with young women was to ask where all the handsome young men could be found: it was a good way to keep tabs on the development and movements of any local militia, and it was a topic upon which they could be counted to expand at length.

  The front of the Spotswood was tall and imposing, dwarfing everything nearby with its five stories of brick and a woven ornamentation of iron at the ground level. The tearoom itself had all the modern touches: a golden brocade on the walls, generously padded chairs, teacups of porcelain so thin the light shone through them. It was all graceful curves and elegance.

  Letty was nattering away, periodically straightening the front of her fashionable navy-blue Zouave jacket in a way calculated to make sure everyone noticed it. I nodded and encouraged her, periodically stirring sugar into my Darjeeling tea, until a disheveled young man suddenly came charging into the room through the far entrance, shouting at the top of his lungs. I couldn’t make out what he was saying, but whatever it was, a great grumbling noise like thunder began to fill the room.

  In the hubbub, my young companion, a wrinkle of confusion on her pretty brow, reached over to the table next to us and politely asked the man there what the news had been.

  “They elected that bastard Lincoln,” snarled the man, and now I understood the wave of feeling in the room. It was not excitement but anger. Teacups rattled in their saucers; every once in a while, a profanity soared above the other noises to echo like a gunshot.

  Surrounded by fury and disappointment, with a private joy and pride singing in my heart, I had never been so alone. Any one of the people here, told my true identity and loyalties, would tear me apart. The young lady across from me, her eyes wide with surprise at the turn of events, looked innocent enough. But if I told her my high opinion of Lincoln, she would likely have clawed my face with her elegant, long nails hard enough to draw blood.

  It was the best possible news and the worst possible news, all at once.

  I considered sending a telegram of congratulations to Lincoln, but for two reasons, I refrained. One, I figured my small tidings would be lost in a sea of good wishes. Second and more importantly, no matter how careful we were with identities and codes, there was always a chance my activities would be found out, and I couldn’t take the chance, not with the stakes higher and higher every day. It was hard enough to keep track of all my identities as it was.

  I submitted my report to Pinkerton, detailing what Letty had told me, and I left Richmond behind for another Southern city to do it all over again.

  • • •

  Train after train near the port of New Orleans had broken down just in time to fail to take assigned cargo northward. While a string of such accidents seemed barely plausible, no one could be completely sure it was sabotage, nor could they identify a saboteur. I entered the city with the New Year of 1861 and had not yet left by February. The city itself was lovely, elegant buildings lining every narrow street, the sweet smell of pralines and beignets wafting across the Vieux Carré. But I was uneasy.

  All during January, one after another, Southern states had announced their secession from the Union; Texas’s declaration on the first day of February had brought the total to seven. With each state, I grew more desperate and more sure we would never be able to turn the tide.

  And I was exhausted. All the women to talk to and deceive, all the detailed dispatches to write, all the secrets to keep. I was undercover as Miss Filgate, the role I found most exhausting, as she was so fired up about everything, there was never any rest. She advocated violence against Yankees and darkies alike, and my own stomach turned at some of the things that came out of her—my—mouth.

  Miss Filgate celebrated with the other citizens of the Crescent City when it was announced that the seceded states—South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Geor
gia, Louisiana, and Texas—had formed a new nation, the Confederate States. She brandished her fists from an iron balcony high above Royal Street, whooping with joy. She shouted her enthusiasm for the new President Jefferson Davis and told anyone who would listen that she prayed for his strength and wisdom to guide us into a new age.

  Inside, I wept.

  The next day, I stopped by the telegram office, which I had also done on the other thirty-nine days I’d been in New Orleans.

  “Anything for Miss Filgate?” I asked as I always did, my mind already on the next conversation I would have back at the St. Charles that afternoon. Should I push Mrs. Jennings harder today? Should I only listen? Should I ask for an introduction to her husband and try to pry information from him directly? Such risk, no matter which way I turned.

  But the clerk surprised me. “Here you go.”

  I took the paper from his hand and sat on a bench to open it, making sure there were no eyes near to see.

  The telegram had only two words:

  COME HOME

  I engaged a hackman for the station and was on the next train.

  Hour after hour, we moved smoothly through the night, rolling north. Around midnight, I got the irrational sense that something was going to go terribly wrong. After all, half a dozen Pinkerton agents had been assigned to investigate the possibility of railroad sabotage, including me. The train I was on would make a perfect target. Full of Northerners returning to a stronghold of liberalism. Our deaths would send a clear signal.

  I walked the train the rest of the night, passing through every car, looking for suspicious characters. After the third time I passed the engineer, he took me aside and asked what I was up to. Given the choice to reveal my true identity or give up my efforts, I simply told him that I had a nervous stomach, and he offered me a zinc tablet. I thanked him warmly and returned to my seat. I imagined myself revealing the truth, telling him to be on the lookout, but there were too many possibilities—I couldn’t be sure, but I thought his voice had a slight softness around the vowels, like the accents I’d heard in western Tennessee. He could be part of any conspiracy just as easily as he could be the savior who would foil it.