“My dear,” said my unreal husband, “do you want to retire?”
“No reason to, not yet,” I said with false gaiety. I could tell by the way he’d said it that he didn’t yet think it was time for us to leave. He was reminding me to pay more attention to my demeanor. He was right. This was no place for sentiment. I told myself I was just getting used to the assignment, and that once we’d settled in, I’d be able to regard Mrs. Greenhow and her friends with some dispassionate distance.
One could view these people as people—as I had with Cath Maroney, once upon a time—or as chess pieces, with the queen and the rook and the bishop all playing their parts but with no more will than a painted piece upon a painted board. The chess image was more soothing to my soul.
If they were all chess pieces, then I, a chess piece also, could do no harm. It was simply a game. No one knew whether black or white would win. But we would all play until the game was over, in hope of victory for our side, until the bitter end.
• • •
The bridges of western Virginia were burning. If there was a single action that would harm an army, it was to cut off access to the railroad. The Southern army was outnumbered and outgunned and smart enough to know it. Sabotage could turn the tide. I’d heard whispers that our men planned to corner and kill Jefferson Davis or General Jackson, but all those plans seemed like folly. Slaying a leader only gave rise to another leader. They were easily elected and installed. The building of a bridge was a much more complicated act and could have a more lasting impression on the future, all things considered.
There was nothing we could do to stop the burning. We did hear that McClellan, who I remembered well from the railroad embezzlement case, had promised in public that the Union military had no intention of helping slaves rebel and would even put down any such rebellions with our own might. It was a nonsensical thing to say. I could be certain it would infuriate Lincoln, who had enough to handle without his most trusted generals disagreeing with the fundamental operations of his war.
And danger seemed to draw ever closer. Virginia—mere miles away—announced its secession from the Union into the Confederate States, and its capital, Richmond, became the capital of the entire Confederacy. We hadn’t moved at all, but we felt an impossible distance from our home in Chicago, and the wolves were at our door.
We shook our heads. What else could we do? We had enough to deal with already. We could only try our best to solve the problem in front of us without worrying what lay beyond.
• • •
After establishing the Armstrongs in the city, Tim and I settled in, and I even came to enjoy having him to talk to at night instead of retiring to a solo room. We used the time to discuss plans, to perfect our strategy, and sometimes to jointly compose our bulletins back to Pinkerton. The room had only a single bed in it, and Bellamy, chivalrous to a fault, had set up a bed of sorts for himself on a fainting couch. One night, I absolutely insisted he let me take a turn sleeping on the couch while he had the bed. Whether he believed my argument that we were equal or whether he just wanted to teach me a lesson, he swapped sleeping spaces with me that night. I woke up feeling black and blue in my joints, my muscles, and all over. The next night, I walked to the bed and lay down in it with no protests. He smiled ruefully, said good night, and lay himself down in his nest of blankets again.
One night, we discussed possible new approaches to Mrs. Greenhow, things we hadn’t dreamed of trying before.
“I could seduce her,” he said.
“Could you now?” My voice was sharper than I intended.
“We need to think of all the possibilities.”
“And what would your wife think of that?”
“I don’t know. What do you think?”
“I mean your real wife,” I said, thinking of the pretty doll on his arm at Pinkerton’s party on the night DeForest proposed. It seemed a lifetime ago. I’d been wondering about her since we arrived, but I hadn’t ginned up the courage to ask him outright.
“I don’t have one. I had a fiancée, but she…”
“Didn’t like the work?” I prompted.
He nodded. “She…wanted more attention than I could give. Told me to choose the work or her. And you see what I chose.”
“Oh.” DeForest had been right after all. How I wished he were here to congratulate.
“Now focus. What’s my best angle to get close to Greenhow?”
“I’m not sure it’s a good idea. I just—we’ve taken pains to portray a happy marriage for the Armstrongs, and that would certainly give her other ideas.”
“Which might work in our favor.”
“I suppose so.” I was beginning to see the sense in it, once I brushed off my irrational feelings of ownership. “If you do me wrong, she might turn more to me, feeling sorry.”
“Or I suppose it could go the other way. She could freeze you out as a response to her own guilt.”
“You’ve seen her. Do you think guilt plays much of a part in her thoughts?”
“We should think it through,” he said.
“You’re the one who suggested it.”
“Please,” he said. “It is not my intent to make your life harder, believe it or not. It never has been.”
I decided to address the contradiction head-on. “Even on the first night we met, when I solved that case, and you weren’t going to tell Pinkerton?”
“I was. Truly. Going to tell him. I meant to, anyway, in my head.” He looked down, tugging at a loose thread on his cuff. “I just started telling the story without you—I was so excited we’d pulled it off—and I—well, I’m sorry.”
“How can I trust that you’re telling the truth?”
“If you don’t trust me by now, I can’t imagine how much you must be suffering.” He smiled, but I could hear his worry underneath the joking words. He was right. We were in this together and no mistake.
He turned down the lamp, and we lay down in our sleeping places, but I was not ready yet for rest. I remembered how cruel I had thought Bellamy when we first met, but spending hours on end with him now, I realized what had given me that impression. He had a way of closing himself off, holding himself back, in public. Those piercing blue eyes were intent, but you couldn’t see any of what was behind them, not if he didn’t want you to. Either he couldn’t keep up the pretense around the clock, or he had made a deliberate decision, but when we were alone in the hotel together, his face was not closed off like that. I could see him feel things deeply. As an operative, he chose to act from a place of intellect, but it wasn’t because he lacked the heart to feel. He just knew when it would hold him back instead of moving him forward.
Bellamy was an excellent detective and a powerful ally. Pinkerton had made the right assignment, trusting the two of us to bring down Mrs. Greenhow. Now, all we needed to do was deliver on that promise.
Somehow.
Chapter Twenty-Two
The Study
In July, we were struck again with terrible news. We had spent the day apart, chasing intelligence from different quarters, and the first thing Tim said to me when I walked in the door of our hotel room was, “We’ve been defeated at Bull Run.”
“Bull Run? I hear Manassas.”
“Same thing. The Northern name, the Southern name.”
I said, with an attempt at gallows humor, “I supposed I should be used to multiple names of things by now.”
“We were winning,” he said, “and then reinforcements came. Turned the tide, and we were defeated. Terribly.”
“The numbers. You have them?”
“Five hundred dead,” he said, his voice tight. “Twice that wounded. The same number missing or captured. More almost than can be imagined.”
“Their losses?”
“Far less.”
I didn’t press him for specifics. Each individual life
mattered to the people who knew the light before it went out. But we were already so deep into the war, and this would just press us in deeper. We would have to grow accustomed to losses in the hundreds and thousands. My gut ached, my heart ached, everything ached.
Tim said, “Only one thing I can’t figure. Why would they send reinforcements to that place? They shouldn’t have known we were coming.”
“But you think they did.”
“I think spies got word to the Confederacy of our plans.”
“You think it was Mrs. Greenhow?”
“Impossible to say.”
I said, with a slight edge of despair I couldn’t keep out of my voice, “We have to do something about her.”
“If it’s her.”
I had an overwhelming urge to lay my head against his shoulder. In public, I was so used to doing things like that, as if they were natural. Our cover was complete. We kept making physical contact, running our fingers along each other’s arms, clasping hands, gently bumping shoulders, from the moment we left our room in the morning until we returned to it at night. In private, though, we sat at a strict distance from each other. Together alone, we were impeccably proper.
No matter how much I wanted comfort, I wouldn’t get it from him. If the news from the front didn’t get better, I doubted I’d be able to get comfort from anywhere.
• • •
Mrs. Greenhow was getting more comfortable with me or just in general. I knew the members of her social circle, insinuating myself with each over time, and they seemed comfortable as well. She was not the boldest of her peers. That was Mrs. Melanie Chalmers, the wife of a member of the House of Representatives from Kansas.
But even I did not know how far Mrs. Chalmers would go until I heard her say, “That fool Lincoln is forcing the manhood of the Union into service. Another five hundred thousand troops, they say. A million would not be enough to stand against us.”
I was shocked that she would be so open in mixed company and watched Mrs. Greenhow closely for a reaction. She gave none.
I said neutrally, “The loss of young men is a tragedy on both sides. Perhaps there will come a day again where there is only one side, and we can all be on it.”
“And who will be left by then?” asked Mrs. Greenhow. “Just us, the women. Not much of a nation, then.”
“America will always rise.”
“Well said, Mrs. Armstrong.”
“I believe it,” I said and sipped my champagne, wishing I did.
“And why does your husband not serve, Mrs. Armstrong?” asked the pink-cheeked older woman. Her champagne glass was empty every time I looked at her; this might account for her intemperate speech.
I answered smoothly, “He will be called soon. In the meantime, he is here on behalf of his brother’s estate, seeking a good price for his horses and other property. The transactions are rather complicated, I understand. We are trying to enjoy our last days together. I try not to think about it, truthfully. I will miss him so.”
“You poor dear,” said Mrs. Greenhow. “Times like this, it’s not so bad to be a widow. A woman without her husband has already lost everything she has to lose.”
I nodded silently, with a neutral expression, but inside, I was in turmoil. If that was how she thought, then I suspected her even more strongly of being a spy. If she was a wife only to her country, she might be capable of anything. Though of course, I was a widow too, and the same could be said of me.
• • •
While we learned a great deal from watching Mrs. Greenhow during the day, I knew there was more to be learned by watching her at other times too. If she was entangling herself with generals and senators, she wasn’t doing it at dinner parties but in more secret places.
So one night, I set myself the task of watching her. I told Tim what I was doing, and he offered to do it instead, but I insisted. If caught, it would be far easier for me to come up with a plausible story than it would be for him. Besides, I was finding the closeness of our hotel room a bit excessive, and spending a few nighttime hours outside on my own would be welcome.
As I suspected, after dark had fully fallen, Mrs. Greenhow slipped out the back door of her house and down the street. I tailed her, calling upon my old tracking techniques, and fetched up only a few blocks away in front of a familiar house that belonged to Senator Wilson.
A door opened, feeding a slice of light into the darkness, and she disappeared inside. I had no idea how long I’d be waiting, but in the meantime, I’d have plenty of time to think as I lurked in the dark.
I thought first of Graham DeForest, who I’d tracked so long ago. Last I’d known, Pinkerton had put him on a long-term assignment in southern Illinois, traveling between the small towns on the railroad to suss out any evidence of sabotage, the region being such an important gateway to Missouri and Kentucky, not to mention Arkansas and Tennessee. Communication hadn’t been good, and we weren’t encouraged to communicate without a solid purpose in any case. Still, he’d been a good friend, and I hoped against hope he’d make it through this war alive. Doubt flickered in my mind: perhaps he’d make it, and I wouldn’t. No one could know.
The breezeless summer evening turned into pitch-dark night, and I watched and watched. The progress of my targets was easily tracked by watching the light and shadows in each room, the movement of curtains, things that were obvious to anyone who was watching. If they assumed no one was paying attention, they were fools. Perhaps he was a fool anyway. If she was seducing him in exchange for military secrets, only one fool was required. She clearly didn’t care whether people talked about her; she had the town wrapped around her finger. The society ladies sometimes whispered behind their fans about her reputation, but they always, always went to her parties.
The shadow I knew to be Mrs. Greenhow passed in front of the window and drew near the shadow I believed to be the senator, until one could not be told apart from the other. I thought of Little Rose. Did she wake in the night, wondering where her mother was? Or was there a servant close by who would respond to her cries more quickly and care for her better? I tried to put thoughts of Little Rose out of my mind. More than Mrs. Maroney’s daughter Violet, her welfare haunted me. If I succeeded in my mission, her mother would go to prison—or worse. I couldn’t let that get in my way.
Dawn was touching the sky when Mrs. Greenhow emerged from the house, drawing her shawl over her head like a hood, to hustle quickly through the semidarkness. I didn’t bother to shadow her back home. I already knew what I needed to know and headed back to the hotel to share it with Tim.
He was still asleep when I arrived. I thought he might take the bed in my absence, knowing I’d be out all night, but he was curled in his nest of blankets on the uncomfortable couch. The couch wasn’t tall enough for his long body, and he’d drawn up his knees toward his stomach, giving him an odd aspect, half giant, half boy. He’d gripped a handful of the blankets tight in one fist. His other hand dangled, open, off the side of the couch, reaching for nothing.
For long moments, I stood over him, watching. He looked innocent this way, but we’d both left innocence behind long ago. Would he do what was necessary, what Mrs. Greenhow did, in order to obtain secrets? Would he take her in his arms, take possession of her naked body, give her possession of his? I didn’t like how that idea made me feel. And yet, I knew I myself would do anything necessary for the sake of our nation. I could not ask less—or more—of him.
I didn’t wake him. Instead, I walked soundlessly to the bed and lay my head down on the pillow. Eventually, I sank into a restless sleep, my head and heart full of confusing ideas.
After weeks, Tim and I reached a shared conclusion. We could learn nothing more from mere social contact, but we knew there was a very good chance Mrs. Greenhow had something to hide. Any such evidence would have to be found in her house, and we would have to find it ourselves.
; And so, we made a plan. The next time she hosted a gathering at her lovely mansion at Thirteenth and I Street, we would find a way to search the house. Anything we found, we would leave in place, then take our next steps based on what we had discovered. If we found nothing, we would be no worse off than we already were, wondering every day if our mission was a fool’s pursuit or if we were only a heartbeat away from making a substantial difference in the future of this terrible war. Could we save lives? Or were we just marking time, following a blind alley? Something bolder had to be done if we were to find out for sure.
We managed to sneak away separately. First I left, pretending to search out water to clean a spot on my skirt, and then he melted away from a conversation and stepped backward through an open door at an opportune moment. Our destination was a small office, unlocked, near the back bedrooms. My heart hammered in my chest.
We didn’t speak. He pointed silently to the desk, and I nodded. In my bodice, I carried a small set of lock picks I’d procured in Chicago, and while I didn’t consider myself a true expert, I could handle most locks within five minutes. A simple desk lock like this should take no more than three. I drew the packet out, pinched a slender rod between my thumb and forefinger, and bent to the task.
While I worked on the desk, Tim quickly scanned the books on the shelf, tapping and nudging to look for anything out of place. A book either more or less dusty than its neighbors might hold a secret compartment. A shocking number of people went to the trouble of hiding things yet did it poorly. A quick inspection, however hasty, might turn up anything.
After the books, Tim moved on to the wall, lifting each painting to check behind it for a wall safe. He was quick and nearly silent. I was breathing softly, systematically working the lock from a succession of angles, waiting for the click of the tumblers.
Girl in Disguise Page 19
