A House Divided

by Jonathan F. Putnam

  Lincoln sighed and turned to face William. “Are you saying Fisher’s still alive?”

  “Could be,” William replied. His jaw was thrust forward, and he stood in front of Archibald with his hands on his hips.

  My temper surged at the man’s interference. “What about the matter of the inheritance?” I asked. “There’s a story around town that you were spending all manner of gold coins back in LaSalle, saying you’d inherited a fortune from Fisher.”

  “Where’d you hear that?” William asked.

  “Keyes, our postmaster, has been telling the story to everyone in town who wants to know it, and plenty who don’t. I don’t think there’ll be a man on your jury who hasn’t heard it in one form or another.”

  Lincoln murmured in agreement.

  William seemed unmoved, and he shrugged. “I can’t very well control what other people think, can I?”

  “So the story’s untrue?”

  “’Course it is. I didn’t inherit anything from Fisher.”

  “And he’s alive and well?”

  “That’s what Lincoln just asked. The answer is, could be.”

  Lincoln expelled his breath with frustration. “We don’t have time to keep spinning in circles. Here’s the nub of it. Your brother Henry says the two of you murdered this Fisher. Why would Henry say that if it isn’t true?”

  William spat on the ground inside the cell and stared at Lincoln. “How many brothers did you grow up beside?” he asked.

  “One,” said Lincoln, “after my father remarried. My stepbrother, John Johnston.”

  “Are you close to him today?”

  Lincoln shook his head. “The only time I hear from John these days is when he’s got my father tangled in another money-losing scheme and they want me to help get them out of it.”

  William Trailor nodded with satisfaction. “You’ve answered your own question.”

  “But surely it’s another matter altogether to falsely accuse your brothers of murder,” I said. “Surely there’s some notion of brotherly love, or brotherly sympathy at the least, that would prevent his putting your lives in jeopardy.”

  “That hasn’t been my experience,” William Trailor said.

  “What about you, Archibald?” Lincoln asked. Archibald had been standing a half step behind his older brother during the exchange. “Can you think of any reason why Henry would want to malign the two of you?”

  Archibald turned to his brother and said, “Do you think it could be because of—”

  “Shut up!” I thought I saw William aim a swift kick at his brother’s shin. “Mr. Lincoln’s not interested in anything along them lines. And we agreed we’d keep it as Trailor family business, didn’t we?”

  Lincoln took two steps forward so that his face was pressed up against the vertical bars of the cell door. “Look here, Archibald,” he said. “This is serious jeopardy you’re in. If there’s any fact you know that might help me with your defense, I implore you to share it with me. Your brother William will tell you the same thing, assuming he’s truly got your interests at heart.” Lincoln said this last sentence while glaring at William, but the man returned the stare, unblinking and unyielding. For his part, Archibald was looking down at the dirt floor of the jail cell, refusing to meet Lincoln’s gaze.

  “We’ve answered all your questions, the pertinent ones, anyway,” William said. “Ever since Cain and Abel, there’s been private business between brothers. Now go and get to work so I can get out of this damp, disgusting dungeon.”

  Lincoln gave one last glare at William and said, “Let’s be off, Speed. We’ve learned all we need to know, at least for this one night.”

  “Say, Mr. Lincoln,” Archibald called as we headed toward Hutchason’s gate. “What happens if you can’t make the jury understand I’m innocent? How many days will I have to stay here then?”

  Lincoln glanced over at me and turned back to Archibald. “Let’s take the climb a step at a time. Hopefully it’ll never come to that.”

  CHAPTER 17

  A light rain began falling during the walk back to our lodgings, and the storm had matured into a downpour when I woke the next morning. The pelting rain continued all day and the next one as well. By the morning after that, when the rain finally stopped, the streets surrounding the public square resembled an undrained swamp.

  A steady trickle of customers came into my store that morning, each carrying on the soles of their shoes a generous portion of Central Illinois’s sticky black loam. Every one of them knocked off his or her boots immediately upon entering. Soon I’d accumulated enough soil inside my doorway that I could have planted my own crop of wheat when the growing season came.

  By lunchtime, the sun looked as though it was finally going to reappear, and I decided to take a turn around the square. I pulled on my boots and went out. There was an auspicious March breeze blowing, giving hope Spring was about to make her long-awaited return. I breathed in deeply, trying to ignore the mud clutching at my ankles at every step.

  I had reached the far corner of the square and was just turning onto Sixth Street when I glanced in the other direction and saw a bizarre apparition.

  Three women—my sister Martha, Mary Todd, and her cousin Matilda Edwards—stood stock-still directly in the middle of Sixth Street. The women were lined up, one behind another, with Mary in front, and they were all dressed as if for a formal occasion, with long, full dresses in shades of green and blue. Each woman was wearing a white bonnet trimmed with ribbon matching the color of her dress. The bonnets framed cheeks pleasingly colored from mild exertion.

  Each young woman wore what looked like the remains of satin slippers, although mud coated their feet, ankles, and the bottom hem of their gowns. Their feet were firmly rooted to the ground even as they swayed back and forth slightly, as if they were trying to maintain their balance on wet rocks while crossing a swiftly flowing stream.

  Most puzzling of all, however, was the irregular line of flat stones that trailed away on the road behind them, like the tail of a kite swaying back and forth in the breeze. I certainly didn’t remember seeing those stones the last time I had walked down Sixth.

  Martha, who was standing a step behind Mary, was the first to notice my approach. “Just in time, Joshua,” said my sister. “We could use a little help, I’m afraid.”

  “Good day. Miss Todd and Miss Edwards.” I gave a half bow. “I hope you won’t consider it impertinent if I ask what on earth you’re doing.”

  “What does it look like?” asked Mary. I could not gauge whether her tone suggested impatience or pride, or an admixture of the two. “We’re out for a walk around town, now that the skies have cleared. No different than you, it appears.”

  “But surely Ninian’s coachman could have driven the three of you down from Quality Hill, if he thought the roads fit for carriages.”

  Martha laughed and said, “That’s what I told Mary, but—”

  “I decided it would be much more interesting to walk,” said Mary. “Besides, I believed we could get all the way to the square without too much trouble as long as we brought along enough shingles.”

  “Yes, the shingles,” Miss Edwards repeated, glancing at her mud-entombed feet before collapsing into a gale of laughter.

  I looked again at what I had taken to be the irregular trail of flat stones stretching out behind the women and realized it was actually the path they had walked. Then I glanced down at Mary’s right hand and saw that she clutched a thin parcel of black, rectangular squares. Shingles, the sort used to cover the sides of more substantial houses. I realized each woman was presently balancing on shingles, one under each foot, in the middle of the muddy street.

  “You’ve walked all the way to town on those?” I asked.

  Mary smiled. This time, the pride was unmistakable. “We had it all worked out. It’s six blocks, give-and-take, from my sister’s house to the square. If each block takes us thirty steps, we needed only one hundred eighty shingles to keep our feet out o
f the muck during the journey. I figured we could hop from one to the next, throwing them in front of ourselves as we went. So I told Ninian’s boy Joseph we needed to borrow that many shingles from his stash. He looked at us like he thought us crazy, but he couldn’t very well refuse.”

  “The problem was your arithmetic was faulty,” said Martha. “Our strides weren’t nearly so long as you thought.”

  “No, they weren’t,” admitted Mary. “We’ve been averaging about thirty-five paces per block, with one shingle per step, which leaves us with”—she paused to count the ones remaining in her hand—“six shingles, and one very long block to go. I daresay not even the most heroic series of jumps could get us to the square from here.”

  “I don’t think they’ve done a particularly good job of protecting your feet, either,” I said, pointing to the ground and trying to suppress a smile.

  Mary nodded thoughtfully. “That was the other problem, as it turned out. I know Springfield’s streets are muddy, but it still seems to me the shingles should have done a better job of protecting our feet.”

  “I don’t wish to sound rude,” I said, “but surely there was a more productive use of your time and talents.”

  “Such as what?” asked Mary, perfectly serious. Next to her, Martha gave me a concentrated look as well.

  “I should think—” I stopped. The truth was I had little idea how unmarried women, with no house or family to care for, occupied their time.

  Mary must have sensed my thoughts. “It has been five days, I believe, Mr. Speed, since you came up Quality Hill to call upon Ninian and found him absent.” I reddened at the memory. “What is it you’ve done in that time?”

  I thought back. Until the rains interceded, it had been a busy few days. “I’ve been quite preoccupied with the Trailors’ saga, I suppose. Took part in questioning Henry Trailor, then participated in the search for the body of his brothers’ supposed victim, and then helped out Lincoln with his defense of Archibald Trailor.”

  “So you’ve been challenged physically, and intellectually, too,” said my sister. She turned to Mary’s cousin. “Miss Edwards, what is it we did yesterday?”

  “Same as we always do, Miss Speed,” Miss Edwards returned, an expression of confusion on her face. She seemed not to have been following her sisters’ line of argument. “We dressed. We sewed. We wrote an awful lot of letters. Mary, you’ve been working on that very long letter to your dearest Merce. Then it was suppertime, near about, and we dressed for supper. And after we ate, we worked on our letters some more, before it was time to retire to our rooms for the night.”

  “And the day before?”

  “The same. Surely you remember!”

  “And before that? Never mind, there’s no need to answer.” Mary turned back to me. “Tell me, Mr. Speed, whether you would find yourself satisfied with such a routine?”

  I was lost for words. Fortunately, my sister interrupted, saying, “There was one thing out of the ordinary we accomplished yesterday, Miss Todd.”

  Mary nodded. “That’s the other reason for our excursion today. We’re coming to see Mr. Lincoln. We think we may have discovered evidence related to his defense of Archibald Trailor.”

  “We found a stagecoach trunk,” added Martha. “In the barn out behind the Edwardses’ house.”

  “A trunk? What’s that got to do with Archibald?”

  “At the gala at the American House,” said Mary, “I overheard William Trailor asking Ninian if he could store a trunk in his barn. Said something about leaving town in the morning, but planning to return in the coming months, and not wanting to have to lug all of his papers and effects away and then back to Springfield on his next visit.”

  It took me a moment to digest this. Then I shouted, “The hiding spot—” Several men passing by us on the street slowed and turned to stare. I motioned for them to be on their way and continued, in a lower tone, “For the body!”

  “That’s what I wondered,” said Mary. “I tried to remind Ninian the other day about his conversation with William Trailor, when I heard of the draining of the millpond, but he wasn’t paying any attention to me. As usual. He thought I was asking for a trunk to store my winter clothes. So he merely sighed grandly and said I should talk to my sister Elizabeth if I really felt I needed another one.” Mary gave me a severe look. “His emphases. The possibility I could be talking about something serious, something relevant to public affairs, never occurred to him.” Martha laughed at Mary’s bold tone, while Miss Edwards looked scandalized.

  Mary tossed her head dismissively. “My brother Ninian wouldn’t know a clue if it ran headlong into him.”

  “While we were stuck inside yesterday, with all the rains,” Martha said, “Miss Todd told me about the trunk, and I convinced her we should search for it.”

  “You found the body?”

  Martha shook her head. “We did find the trunk, hidden in the hayloft of the barn. But it doesn’t appear large enough to have a body inside. Still, we thought Mr. Lincoln would want to know.”

  “Didn’t you open it?”

  “It was locked,” said Mary, “and I didn’t think it proper—”

  “Blast proper! A man’s life may be at stake. And you’re right, Lincoln will be most interested. We’ve got to force open that trunk at once.”

  We had been, this whole time, talking in the middle of the street. A number of passersby had stopped to gawk. And we were quite a sight, the three women balancing on their slowly sinking shingles, like statues being pulled down into the deep by an unseen sea monster, while I paced around them in the mud.

  At that moment, the drayman Hart turned onto Sixth with his horse and cart. The front of the cart was laden with a few casks, but the back half was empty. “Will you ladies object if I arrange a more conventional mode of transportation to take you home?” I asked.

  Mary gazed down at her ruined silk slippers and sighed. “I suppose not.”

  As the drayman approached, his four wheels churning reluctantly through the mire, I flagged him down.

  “This is Mr. Ninian Edwards’s sister-in-law,” I explained, “and two of her intimates. They find themselves in need of a ride back to the Edwards house. Can you transport them without delay?”

  The old drayman took the cap off his bald head and gave an ungainly nod. “’Course, Mr. Speed,” he said. His eyes darted back and forth between the women and the muddy ground, but he had the manners not to voice aloud his curiosity.

  “Good man.”

  Hart swatted his animal, and it pulled the low, flatbed wagon forward a bit, such that the cart’s back ledge was even with where Mary stood. The level of the cart was just above her waistline.

  “Will you permit me?” I asked.

  “If you please,” Mary responded, her face composed.

  I reached my arms out on either side of Mary’s waist. My hands felt her dress and petticoat compress over her firm hips underneath. I smelled the honey in her hair. Mary gave a little hop and I lifted her up and it was over. I placed her down, carefully, on the back of the wagon. Her legs dangled off the edge, and she crossed her muddy feet demurely, as I tried to still my racing heart.

  Hart pulled his cart forward, and I helped Martha and Miss Edwards in turn onto the back of the cart as well.

  “I’ll get Lincoln at once,” I said, “and we’ll meet you up on Quality Hill to examine the trunk together. Make haste,” I shouted to the drayman, rapping the side of his wagon.

  CHAPTER 18

  As I pushed open the door to Hoffman’s Row, I ran headlong into Big Red May, coming down the stairs from Lincoln’s office at full tilt.

  “I think you’ll be interested—” I began.

  But the mayor pushed past me, saying, “No time, I’m afraid,” and hurried out into the street. I did not follow. It made sense to see what was in William Trailor’s trunk, I figured, before telling the mayor about the development.

  Upstairs, Lincoln was seated at the large, square table th
at dominated the room, scrawling away at some court document. He nodded at my entrance but remained hunched over his pleading. Lincoln’s office boy, young Milton Hay, stood next to him, jingling his legs nervously. Belmont sat on Stuart’s lounge, wearing an immaculate frockcoat as usual, his legs crossed and his walking stick balanced under one palm. Belmont gave me a half smile as I entered.

  “I’m waiting for his attention, too,” said the banker. “As was your mayor. We are all in line behind a series of overdue pleadings.”

  As I waited for Lincoln to look up, the sound of angry shouts floated through the room. I went out into the hallway to investigate, but glancing up and down the dimly lit corridor, I found it empty.

  “Who’s carrying on?” I asked, ducking back into the office.

  “Judge Treat,” Lincoln replied, as he dipped his pen into the inkwell. “He’s hearing Douglas in the Purkapile case at this hour. I was down there earlier, arguing one of the Wrenwag cases, and His Honor was in a foul mood already.”

  Lincoln still had not moved his eyes from his pleading. A shout that sounded very much like “hold you in contempt” floated up through the floorboards.

  I cleared my throat.

  “Yes?” Lincoln prompted, still scrawling away.

  “I’ve come to talk to you about the case.”

  After a pause, filled only by the sound of Lincoln’s nib dashing across the page, he asked, “Which case?”

  “Which one could it be?” I said. Finally, Lincoln looked up. His brow was clenched with concentration and his gray eyes were streaked with tiny red lines. He gestured impatiently. “Archibald’s, of course,” I explained.

  “Oh.” Lincoln looked down again and resumed his writing. “Because it could have been the Wrenwag cases. Those hearings continue tomorrow morning. Or perhaps the four Harris brothers and their horse. Two of the brothers are due here later to explain their side to me. Or perhaps O’Fraim and his assault trial. He goes into the dock in less than a fortnight, and I have yet to talk to any witness I might call for the defense. And of course that leaves aside Belmont and arrangements for shipping the gold to Chicago.”