No newlyweds could have had a more glorious honeymoon than we had in that one night, even though we were no more married than we had been the day before. The night would never have been long enough, but it was perfect and would have to do for now.
• • •
In the morning, we breakfasted together in our room, a rare indulgence. A steaming pot of coffee with elegant porcelain cups, plates of eggs and biscuits and bacon, hotel silver. It would have been a beautiful domestic scene except for Tim’s imminent departure waiting there for us when breakfast was done, looming, undeniable.
And instead of whispering sweet nothings of love, we spent our time between bites and sips getting our stories straight. If questioned—and I knew I would be—I needed something to tell the ladies of our social circle about his departure. Sudden personal business was too vague, so we selected enough details to make the story hang together. We’d say he had been called to report at a base in Mississippi. Our story would be that he would not even tell me where, afraid I’d try to follow. It seemed plausible enough; we’d heard of many wives, both Confederate and Union, putting on men’s clothes and enlisting to follow their husbands to the front. If Annie Armstrong had not previously seemed the type to take such drastic action, no one would deny that war made women do strange things. So her husband would protect her by keeping his whereabouts a secret. The irony was not lost on us that even the people we were pretending to be were keeping secrets from each other.
That business completed, I said baldly, “I don’t know how I’ll live.”
“I do. You’ll soldier on. Kate, you’re the strongest woman I’ve ever met. If there’s anyone who can handle this, it’s you.”
“Strength has nothing to do with it.”
“Doesn’t it?”
I tapped my last bite of biscuit against the silver rim of my plate, grinding it into crumbs, then dust. “We’re at the mercy of the world. There are people who want to hurt us. I’m afraid our luck will run out.”
“And if it runs out, it runs out. We’ll be past caring.”
“One of us will anyhow.”
“Kate, please.” He reached across the table to cover my hand with his. “Let’s not spend these moments in sadness. I want to tell you how very much I love you. And I’ll come back to you. Look forward to that day.”
My voice trembling, I said, “You can’t promise that.”
“We’ll be together,” he said. “I have no doubt. After the war.”
“After the war.”
“We need each other. Who else would have us?”
“Who else indeed.”
Our plates were clean, and the coffeepot was empty. His train would leave in less than an hour. However much more we could have said, given the chance, there was no reason and no time for him to linger.
He lowered his mouth to mine for one more kiss before leaving, a kiss that lasted until our need to breathe forced us apart, both gasping for air.
I stood in the doorway and watched him go down the hall, and then walked to the window to see him leave the front of the building. He did not turn or wave, which we had agreed upon. I watched him until he was out of sight. I had the same feeling I’d had when he rode off to Perrymansville, what seemed like a lifetime ago—would I ever see him again?
I had to. He was my only chance at happiness. As he’d said of both of us, who else would ever have me?
• • •
That night at a ball, I stood as if in a trance, feeling utterly hollow. I feared that anyone who looked at me might know my secret in a glance. I had put on the usual trappings—sprigged gown, silk gloves, golden earbobs, sweet perfume—but they didn’t reach all the way inside.
I nodded to the ladies I recognized, and they nodded back, but for a while, no one tried to engage me in conversation. As luck would have it, the first one to do so was Mrs. Greenhow.
Our elusive target looked brighter and smarter than ever, though that might have been my imagination. My melancholy was coloring the world.
She smiled sweetly and said, “Annie, I was hoping I’d see you! And where is that delightful husband of yours? I thought he was ever by your side.”
“Duty called,” I said.
“Oh no! Where’s he off to?”
I gave her the story, parceling it out in small bites only when she asked exactly the right questions, watching her carefully for any sign of doubt or suspicion. She gave none. It was small comfort. I closed by saying, “He only left a few hours ago, and already, I miss him terribly.”
“Of course you do. You love him to death.”
And beyond, I thought, my eyes filling with tears.
“There, there,” she said soothingly, enfolding me in her arms, and though I wanted to resist, there was something compelling and comforting about her embrace. Ironic, that a woman I was now sure was one of my nation’s deadliest enemies was the closest thing I had in this town to a friend.
And for the next three weeks, I spent as much time as possible in Mrs. Greenhow’s company, for the most complex reasons. Emotionally, she soothed me, and I felt better near her, even though I told her nothing of what truly troubled me. She would have been appalled, to say the least, to know my secrets. I also remained close to her because there was still no absolute proof that she was communicating Union secrets to the Secesh side.
Until there was.
Three weeks after Tim was torn from me and sent to Richmond, I attended yet another party, this one a small affair conducted by the wife of the senator from Kansas. I remembered nothing of the conversation at dinner, which was the usual mix of banal inanities, everyone so scared of saying the wrong thing, they wound up saying nothing at all, myself included.
But afterward, as the women retired to the front parlor for gossip and the men to the rear parlor for cards and cigars, I saw two things. First, a man I didn’t recognize appeared next to Mrs. Greenhow. They did not seem to know each other, nor did they speak, but I saw that he held his hand down at his side in a stiff way, without moving it. First, I thought he might be a soldier, but he did not bear the rest of his body in a military style, only the arm. In a motion so slight I almost didn’t believe I saw it, Mrs. Greenhow let her arm fall to her side too, pressed it against his, and then lifted it away. They then moved away from each other without speaking.
It looked exactly to me like a way of passing intelligence that I had learned in my early Pinkerton training days. I’d learned it from Paretsky. I’d taught it to Hattie. I was sure no one else in the room had spotted it. They were good. That they had not escaped my notice was more testament to my hawklike attention than it was to their degree of skill.
No more than a minute later, I watched the guest of honor, a Union corporal, draw near to Mrs. Greenhow. She failed to hide the expression of annoyance that flashed across her face at his approach. She recovered quickly and cozied up to him, but she’d drawn my attention once more.
I saw her stroking the arm of the corporal with her delicate fingers, as she’d done a thousand times before. Other arms, other generals, but the same motion. This time, I noticed something new. She kept her thumb firmly against her palm, using only the tips of her four other fingers to stroke.
She was holding something in her hand. Something small.
Something she didn’t want the corporal to see.
Now convinced that the unknown man had put a small note into Mrs. Greenhow’s hand, I hovered only feet away from her, watching as closely as I could without giving myself away. She might just tuck the note away in her bosom or do something else to secret it, but I didn’t think so. If that were the case, she would have hidden it away before the Union corporal had gotten so close to her. No, she must need to have it readily to hand, which meant she was going to pass it to someone else in the room, which meant I might see who it was.
The senator’s wife’s maid came int
o the room and began to clear away empty glasses. It was unusual to have the help intrude in this way; usually, they waited until everyone had gone or at least moved into the next room. So either the senator’s wife was showing off the fact that her servants were white, which was a bold statement, or there was another reason the girl appeared.
Sure enough, a minute later, I saw Mrs. Greenhow draw near to her and grasp the girl’s wrist. I was close enough that I could tell what she was doing, though it would have been easy to miss. She laid the palm of her hand over the girl’s wrist and, with a single, smooth motion of one finger, tucked the note into the sleeve of the servant’s dress. And then it was done. The note had been received and then passed, all smoothly, all done by an expert.
Mrs. Greenhow was most certainly a Confederate spy. I’d seen it firsthand.
Now, I had to decide what to do about it.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Mrs. Van Lew
A day passed, then another, then another. Three days after I had seen Mrs. Greenhow passing notes at the ball, I still had said nothing to anyone. If it had happened a month before, I wouldn’t have hesitated for a moment—I would have put it in a report to Pinkerton, marked urgent, before night fell. Now, I stewed. If Tim were here, I was sure he’d counsel me to disclose everything. But he wasn’t here, and that was Pinkerton’s fault. I had not forgiven him.
The other part of the equation was Little Rose. If her mother went to prison, what would happen to her? Shuttled around between relatives? Despite the terrible things her mother was doing, it would hurt the girl to be taken from her. I thought of Cath and Violet Maroney, who were likely still separated from one another, years later. Was it my business to tear apart families when the war was already ripping us limb from limb on a nationwide scale?
When I came home from the latest party, I had just vowed to myself that it was time to put aside my fury at Pinkerton, at least temporarily, to report the news. Then the desk clerk signaled to me.
“Telegram for you, Mrs. Armstrong,” he said.
The small square of paper gave no clue as to its contents. I climbed the stairs swiftly but did not want to be seen rushing and forced myself to slow down. It could be anything. Perhaps Tim had found a way to communicate with me without revealing himself. Or perhaps Pinkerton was ready to apologize. Or it could be bad news too—I could be fired, if he were still holding his grudge. And now that I was finally sure Mrs. Greenhow was doing the things she was suspected of doing, that would be a shame. If the telegram showed Pinkerton bowing even slightly, I resolved to give him a full report immediately. Perhaps this meant he had calmed down and remembered to focus on the importance of our mission, not his personal feelings about my relationship with Tim.
Up in my room, with a mixture of hope and dread, I unfolded the telegram with trembling fingers.
TWO FRIENDS TAKEN ASIDE STOP SO SORRY
The dread broke over me in a wave, and my throat closed. There could be only one interpretation.
Hattie and Tim had been captured.
What had happened to them, I could only guess and did not want to.
My dread was washed away by fury. Pinkerton probably thought that being vague would drive me to his doorstep. That would have worked with the woman I was pretending to be, and the woman I had been once upon a time, but not the woman I had now become. Now, I trusted no one, and my heart had been wrenched and twisted. It took me only a moment to decide. I would go to Richmond.
It was a fool’s errand. I knew that and went anyway. Perhaps I would be sacrificed in the rescue, but that was fine. If Pinkerton thought he could do without me, let him find out what it was truly like. If I could save Tim, I would. If I couldn’t, death held no fear for me. For years, I had been sure I would never find a man to love me for the rest of my life. Now that I thought I might have done just that, the length of the life seemed unimportant.
• • •
There was so much to do. I needed a horse, I needed a map, and I needed clothes that didn’t give away my identity. Keeping my focus on activity made it easier not to cry, not to think about the fact that the man I had finally realized I loved had been taken from me almost as soon as we’d truly found each other.
I lost myself in the procedure, in the checklist. Horse. Map. Two new dresses in an old suitcase. An old cover identity, one I had ready to hand, with a forged pass to deflect any suspicion if I met Secesh barricades on the road. Brief, vague apologies to the desk clerk at the hotel to make sure no one became too interested in my absence. I badly wanted a gun, but I didn’t have one, and obtaining one in a hurry would raise far too many questions.
I found what I needed, and within hours, I was on the road south.
Unfortunately, as I rode, there was less for my mind to focus on, and it kept inevitably returning to the same questions: What had happened to him? What would happen? What could I even do when I got there to save him? I concocted dozens of positive scenarios to smother the dozens of negative ones that were already at the top of my mind and spilling out like rich milk from a full jug.
I had never ridden this particular road south before, but I knew it had changed a great deal from a few years before. Everywhere I looked, there were signs of war. Some were obvious, like a scorched field or a torn, stained blue uniform jacket hanging from a fence post. Some were more subtle, like a schoolhouse sitting silent and empty at midday.
I hadn’t been able to gather fresh intelligence before I left, for fear someone would realize where I was going and why. I did not stop to rest overnight. My horse put one foot in front of the other, strolling sometimes, cantering sometimes, as the road allowed.
In the beginning, I feared falling asleep in the saddle, but as the journey went on, it became clear that I would not relax into unconsciousness no matter how tired I became. Too much depended on this ride, and I was so consumed by worry, anger, fear. I heard a man’s scream from the west, then another, then half a dozen more, and I took a long loop around to the east to avoid the next town on the road, just in case. But mostly, I went straight south, as fast as I could, to reach my destination.
In the end, I got there almost without delay and still arrived too late.
For all of my thinking on the road, I hadn’t decided exactly how I would go about gathering intelligence when I arrived. Maybe I was trusting my operative’s instincts to carry me through, or maybe my mind was too clouded with thoughts of Tim—what if we’d never admitted our feelings to each other? What if I’d been able to stop him before he told Pinkerton? What would be happening to me at this moment instead of chasing him on a fool’s errand into enemy territory? As it turned out, planning would have been moot in any case.
I stopped on the outskirts of town to rest my horse and gather my strength at a roadside tavern before crossing the line into Richmond proper. I had barely found a seat and begun to read the bill of fare when I heard the whispers all around me. It quickly became clear that the whole place was buzzing with gossip. They were thrilled by something bloody. They had been waiting for something like this to happen, and it finally had. A hanging had taken place that day.
I rose immediately and fled outside. I didn’t run, because drawing attention was the last thing I needed to do in that hornet’s nest, but I went out and forced myself not to collapse. I took the reins off my horse’s neck and mounted. Another man was retrieving his horse at the same time, and in the most offhanded tone I could muster, I told him I’d missed the day’s excitement and asked if he happened to know where the enemies of the state had been hanged.
“Over there a ways,” said the man in a heavy accent, and I followed where he pointed, over a low green hill and a mile down the road beyond.
Had I been on foot, I would have gone slowly, dragging at every step, as I feared the outcome. The horse carried me whether I liked it or not. As soon as I rode over the ridge, I could not look directly at the sight, b
ut the horse kept carrying me forward. I did not have the presence of mind to pull back hard on the reins. The sight was too terrible and too near.
Half a dozen bodies dangled from the makeshift gallows. Six men, no women. Had I not already guessed the identity of one of them, I would have been thrilled to know that Hattie, at least, had escaped.
They would have swung in the breeze had there been one. Signs hung around their necks, too far off to read. I didn’t need to get any closer. I knew at least one of the signs read TRAITOR.
And I knew who that body belonged to, the second from the left. Even slumped, I recognized the shape of his body, the long legs, the once-quick fingers. I would never get this image out of my head. Riding closer would only give me more images I couldn’t banish.
I rode away then, without any sense of where to go.
I could not let myself feel. There would be time for that later.
• • •
At the first likely-looking hotel, I stabled my horse and asked for a room. I steered clear of the fashionable hotels downtown that I’d once stayed in; I knew I would not be able to stand the hoarse cries of the slaves in Lumpkin’s Jail, not this time.
When the desk clerk asked how long I’d stay, it took all I had not to burst into tears. Collecting myself, I mumbled something about “three days at least” and was handed my keys. I paid with the Confederate scrip I’d secured back in Washington, feeling it might burn my fingers. I lay across the bed fully clothed. I think I slept.
In the morning, my eyes flying open with the sunrise, I considered my options, poor as they were. Even if I went back to Washington right that minute, my position was almost certainly forfeit. By now, Pinkerton would have noticed my absence, my lack of communication. But my fury at him knew no limits. Was he the one who betrayed Tim, acting not as our boss but as a jealous rival? It would have been easy for him to do so. And now a good man was dead, and I still didn’t know what had happened to Hattie. I couldn’t go, and I couldn’t stay.
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