On Secret Service

by John Jakes

  A lone cloud passing over the Smithsonian spires caught her eye with its blazing whiteness. She saw Frederick’s face on the cloud, as though on a canvas.

  The journey into Virginia had burned something out of Hanna. She’d proved whatever it was that she needed to prove to herself; she no longer wanted to traipse off to battlefields dressed as a man. She didn’t want to fight the rebels, either. Most especially not Frederick.

  Her hospital shift ended at seven. She went directly to the National Hotel at Sixth Street and the Avenue. Under the gaslights in the marble lobby, young Booth was holding court for a mixed crowd of scruffy journalists and respectable ladies and gentlemen. Hanna recognized the handsome Leonard Grover from Baltimore, who now ran his own theater on E Street.

  She whispered to a stout lady at the rear of the crowd, “Is there any word of a local engagement?”

  “Oh, yes. Mr. Booth announced that he’ll be playing Grover’s in the spring. Have you ever seen someone so unconscionably handsome?”

  She hadn’t. The scion of the Junius Brutus Booth family of Maryland was a slender, superbly built young man in his twenties, with silky dark hair and mustache. His vibrant eyes had a slight exotic uptilt. He was reputed to be athletic, improvising all sorts of hazardous stunts and leaps and furious duels in his performances. Hanna noted a bandage wrapped around one hand.

  “What do I think of it, sir?” Booth was saying in a deep, commanding voice. He addressed a journalist writing in a small notebook. “It’s a disgrace. An abomination. It will not be tolerated by decent white men and women who have an ounce of patriotism in their souls.”

  “Does he mean the Proclamation?” Hanna asked her informant.

  “Yes.”

  “Who’s that with him?” A blonde woman, petite except for her sizable breasts, sat close to Booth on the round velvet sofa. She gazed at the actor worshipfully.

  “His mistress, Ella Turner. Sister keeps a parlor house on Ohio Street. I expect he can have any women he wants. He can have me.” She giggled; people shushed her. Booth threw a hot glance her way before continuing.

  “The President of the so-called Union is a vulgarian. No better than a farmer, with a farmer’s taste in filthy barnyard humor. Alas, his performance is no longer mere comicality. ‘That foul defacer of God’s handiwork, that excellent grand tyrant of the earth,’ as the Bard says, is determined to bring down the whole of society, North and South, with his damnable doctrine of nigger equality. We must turn him out, and you may quote me, sir.”

  Across the lobby, someone hissed. The actor dropped the blond’s hand, leaped to his feet. “Who made that cowardly noise? Speak up. I’ll gladly defend my opinions with your choice of pistol, rapier, or bare knuckles.” A clerk behind the marble counter drooped his head over the guest ledger. A dough-faced man slunk toward the staircase. Another guest hid behind his newspaper.

  Booth took his seat. One of the reporters raised his hand. “You said turn the tyrant out, Mr. Booth. Do you mean by electing General McClellan a year from November?”

  “Far too slow, though I applaud the general’s tolerant position on slavery. It accords with the views of Southerners, with whom I’ve always felt myself most at home.”

  “Well, if you wouldn’t remove Lincoln at the polls, how would you do it?”

  The dark wells of Booth’s eyes seemed to expand. A look came into them that set Hanna on edge. “I leave that to others, along with Macbeth’s reminder that ’twere well if it were done quickly.”

  “Good God, he’s talking treason,” a man said, his words overlapped by Booth’s announcing that he and Miss Turner desired a rest and would retire. The reporter persisted, “Aren’t you afraid of making such inflammatory statements, sir?”

  “I am not, sir. Our forefathers enjoined us to love liberty and justice and, if necessary, to overturn oppressors to gain those civic blessings. Abraham Lincoln is just such an oppressor.”

  “Secretary Stanton’s detectives arrest people for that kind of talk.”

  “I should like to see them try to arrest me. They are welcome to attempt it, though I encourage them to come armed.”

  Scattered applause identified a few secesh in the crowd. Though Hanna didn’t like Booth’s remarks, she’d come here for a purpose. She pressed forward along with others, a small leather-covered book in hand. Booth flourished his pencil as he signed autographs, his smile amiable and winning.

  “Hello, my dear,” he said when Hanna reached him. “What’s your name?”

  “Hanna Siegel. I’m an actress.”

  “And a mighty pretty one.” His dark eyes were hypnotic; they could have seduced a virgin cast in bronze. “Are you local?” She said she was. “We usually gather a supporting cast from the town where we appear. The engagement at Grover’s will occur in late April. Apply to Mr. Grover if you’re interested.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Booth. I appreciate that.”

  “Charmed,” he said with a regal bow and a look that spoke unmistakably of bedrooms, assignations, free love. He passed on to the next adoring fan, and Hanna slipped away, the book clasped in her hand like a precious jewel.

  Though he’d offered her a marvelous opportunity, she didn’t know whether she could take advantage of it. Booth’s hatred of the President disturbed her. Besides, handsome as he was, Johnny Booth was no rival for the gallant officer Frederick, whom she thought about all the way home.

  46

  January 1863

  Castle Thunder consisted of three brick buildings. The largest, the original tobacco factory, faced Cary Street. Two smaller buildings formed a quadrangle closed off by high wooden fences and in the rear by a brick wall with sentry booths on the corners. The prison housed Confederate officers awaiting court-martial, civilians suspected of disloyalty, Union deserters, and accused spies. It had gaslight, running water, and the same abysmal stink of human waste as Libby just up the street.

  Lon missed Christmas because he was receiving special attention from four men he came to think of as the four horsemen of the sixth chapter of Revelation: the riders on a white horse, a red horse, a black horse, and a pale horse, death. The first one, and the one who spoke with greatest authority, was the bald man he’d encountered first on the night of his arrest. Cicero Miller was his name, Margaret’s brother. What his position in the government was, Lon couldn’t say. He didn’t suppose Miller would allow a prisoner to question him. That such an icy, calculating man could be related to the woman he loved utterly confounded him.

  Miller received him in a small office, together with the prison’s bizarre warden, George Alexander. Captain Alexander wore black hose, black knee breeches with buckles, and a loose black shirt. His beard was long, and black. Nero, the huge boar hound that padded after him wherever he went, likewise was black.

  Lon stood with his hands manacled behind him. The bald man rested his thick-soled shoe on a stool. It was freezing outside, and chilly in the office.

  “That rogue who brought you in, Mars, failed to interrogate you for useful information. But I’m sure you have things to tell us, Private Rogers. You are continuing the game of calling yourself Rogers?”

  “Albion Rogers is my name.”

  Miller sighed. “Oh, yes, certainly. Now tell me, what ciphers have you memorized?”

  Lon said he didn’t know any ciphers. The bald man repeated the question five times, and Lon returned the same answer each time. “Warden,” Miller said, “show him the inner room.”

  Captain Alexander chattered about himself as he escorted Lon down the hall. He was a native of Georgia. He’d served in the Federal Navy thirteen years. His dog Nero had fought three full-grown bears and killed them. If Lon had been wearing even of a scrap of a blue uniform, Nero would have torn his throat out. Altogether a fountain of cheer, the warden.

  The so-called inner room had gaslight but no windows, a slimy floor, and a sickening stench. Ball and chain for twelve prisoners hung from the sweating walls. At the moment only one man was confin
ed, a skeletal creature Lon recognized. “Scully!”

  John Scully looked up, then quickly turned his watery eyes away. Alexander said, “Drink has rotted his mind. That and a disease he picked up from one of the women we keep here occasionally. We go this way.”

  The door opened into the yard behind the building. Alexander led him to the brick wall, pointed out bullet holes. “The unlucky are executed on this spot. You may be one of them. Meanwhile you can rest in what we call a condemned cell.”

  A black box, off the inner room, with no light, no air; nothing but dreadful silence after Alexander slammed the door.

  When Cicero Miller questioned him again, Lon met the third horseman, a tall, stooping fellow who constantly spat tobacco juice that dribbled into his gray beard. “Mr. Caphart was formerly a police detective in Norfolk,” Miller said. “The prisoners call him the Antichrist.” Caphart smirked. “Give us the names of your contacts in Richmond.”

  “I don’t have any. I don’t know what you mean.” Lon was starved, exhausted, fighting depression after three days and nights in the condemned cell.

  The questioning went on for fifteen minutes. Then the bald man gave up. “He’s yours, John.”

  Caphart marched Lon to one of the smaller buildings, a room with a dirt floor and a post about seven feet high in the center. Two sets of handcuffs dangled from the top. Caphart ordered Lon to remove his shirt, then stretch on his toes so his wrists fit into one set of cuffs. Caphart locked the cuffs and opened a toolbox, producing a leather strap. He laid a stroke on Lon’s back, plainly enjoying himself. Lon clenched his teeth.

  Caphart laid on nine more, each cutting deeper, bringing more blood. Lon hugged the post and jammed his cheek against it to keep from crying out.

  “That’s enough. For now.” Caphart wiped the bloody strap with a rag. He left Lon hanging on the post, his back and shoulders afire with pain.

  At the end of twenty-four hours they took him down. A guard dressed his back with a stinging salve and returned his shirt. Groggy, Lon stumbled through a downpour to the office in the main building. There he met the fourth horseman, a man he’d seen before.

  “Yes, sir, good morning, sir,” Hummy Cridge said. “I hope you’re enjoying our hospitality?” Lon told him to go to hell. Cridge slapped him.

  “Now, now, we have business,” Miller said. Outside the barred window, a freak winter storm raged, rain and lightning instead of snow. “Let’s discuss another issue, Mr. Price. Yes, I said Price. Never mind how I know your name. Who sent you to Richmond? Who do you work for?”

  Weaving on his feet, Lon said, “No one. I belonged to Heintzelman’s—” Cridge slapped him.

  “Again, please,” Miller said. “Who do you work for?”

  The repetitious exchange of question and denial continued for a while. Finally Miller said, “Take him out to the cage. The weather may restore his reason if nothing else will.” Lon had a renewed sense of the evil of the man. His three henchmen were thugs with sadistic tendencies they might exercise indiscriminately. Miller’s cruelty was measured, calculated. He was the pale horse.

  Cridge donned a slicker. He and a guard marched Lon to the open yard, pushed him into a rusty iron cage in one corner. Cridge raised his eyes to the storm. “‘For they have sown the wind and they shall reap the whirlwind. So persecute them with thy tempest, and make them afraid with thy storm.’”

  The guard locked the cage. The black sky lit with blinding whiteness. Cridge’s merry face streamed with rain, then disappeared. Lon sank to his knees in mud, holding the bars and trying at the same time to hold on to what was left of his courage.

  They kept him in the cage two days and nights. A sweep of polar air followed the storm. When they lifted him from the ground where he lay shivering and mumbling, snowflakes were whitening his hair.

  Fever burned and froze him for a week. He survived by willing it; by saying over and over to himself that the fiery sweats and convulsive chills would pass if only he refused to surrender to them. When he came back to a semblance of life, he was a bearded skeleton. He had a new homespun shirt, straw for a bed on the floor, and a block of wood for a pillow. His jackknife had long ago been confiscated.

  He was quartered in what was called the citizens’ room, at one end of a long hall on the second floor of the main building. Three others shared the room, a fat man named Rampling, who sat staring at his hands for hours; John Scully; and Lon’s colleague Pryce Lewis, a bitter ghost of his old self.

  “That fucking devil Pinkerton abandoned us in here. I’ve suffered the torments of hell and I hold him responsible. When I get back to Washington—”

  “You won’t find him,” Lon said. “He’s in Chicago. He quit when McClellan did.”

  “Then who’s in charge?”

  “I don’t know.”

  As January passed, Lon’s pain lessened a little each day. He slowly regained his strength. The bald man didn’t reappear, so Lon assumed he’d temporarily shifted his attention to other matters.

  They were allowed the run of the second floor, which included the so-called prison parlor, a whitewashed room with barred windows at the other end of the hall. Here prisoners met and filled the hours with conversation. They speculated on their food. “Notice how we always have a lot more meat after a cavalry engagement?” There was endless talk of escape, of digging tunnels and other schemes. “Lad I know over in Palmer’s Factory, he used a red-hot needle on his face. Jesus, it must have hurt. They thought it was smallpox and threw him in the prison hospital. He climbed out the window at night. Nobody’s pulled that off a second time.”

  From the embittered Pryce Lewis, Lon learned that Hattie Lawton had been exchanged after Webster’s hanging. Lon said nothing about his own work. He didn’t know Lewis’s strength, whether he might suddenly bargain for his freedom by betraying others.

  A small, frail, middle-aged woman with a hooked nose and a basket on her arm visited the prison regularly. She distributed hard candy, blankets, playing cards, pencils, and used books. “That’s Miss Van Lew,” Caphart informed him. “Crazy Bet. Old bitch loves the Union and everybody knows it, but she’s a friend of Winder. He thinks she’s harmless. Give her to me, I’d flay the skin off her back.” Caphart regularly performed that service for prisoners chosen at random. They were hauled off to the other building and returned in a bloody heap. One had died minutes after Caphart threw him on the parlor floor. A bored prisoner shouted, “Man in here just got his discharge.” Guards came for the corpse several hours later.

  A January thaw set in. Sunshine flooded the rooms and brought small crowds to the streets to gawk. Castle Thunder had no rule about prisoners staying away from windows; Warden Alexander liked subjecting his prisoners to the abuse of the public. Lon was sitting by a window in the citizens’ room one sunny morning when a piping voice said, “Beg pardon, sir, I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure.” There stood the hook-nosed lady, her head tilted to one side like a curious bird’s. Matted curls that might once have been blonde were faded to yellow-gray. A threadbare cotton dress enhanced her shabby appearance. Her hand was dry as paper when he shook it.

  “Elizabeth Van Lew, sir. Your name?”

  “Private Albion Rogers.”

  “Oh, yes; oh, yes, Rogers.” She smiled in a vacant way and rummaged in her basket. “I have one comb left. I have some stomach pills. Oh, and this book. I’m afraid it isn’t quite suitable for adult gentlemen, but there are some pretty illustrations. Won’t you please take it to pass the time?”

  Keeping her back to the room, she thrust the book at him. Her blue eyes were so clear and intense, it changed his impression of her instantly. The worn book, faded gold letters on a brown cover, was a Mother Goose. As soon as he took it, she exclaimed, “La-la, off I go,” and tripped away down the hall, singing to herself.

  Seated again, he turned the faded pages. He stopped at the page with the verse about Mistress Mary. In the line asking how Mary’s garden grew, the word your was lightly under
lined in pencil. A few pages on, “Hi-ho, what can the matter be?” he found a second underline in “tie up my pretty brown hair.”

  On the illustrated page for “Rub-A-Dub-Dub,” baker was underlined, and a circle drawn around the bulbous nose of the baker afloat in the tub.

  He found no other marks. He laid the book down and covered it with straw. Was the underlining random, or did it mean something? Because of that moment in which Miss Van Lew had tried to communicate something with her eyes, he decided it could be the latter.

  Your. Hair. Baker. Nose. Baker, nose, hair, your.

  He caught his breath. Baker, capital B. His mind raced, sorting the words.

  Baker, nose, your, hair.

  Baker knows you’re here.

  47

  February–March 1863

  In February, Miss Van Lew visited Castle Thunder twice a week. Lon only glimpsed her; she didn’t approach him. Her behavior left him confused and frustrated. Had he invented the message in the book out of desperation and misguided hope?

  The last day of the month, a Saturday, was bright and mild. Lon joined a dozen prisoners for a half hour’s freedom in the walled yard. It was no great boon; the overflowing latrine pits steamed in the sun.

  Miss Van Lew, typically unkempt, appeared with a basket of flowers. She looked at the prisoners apathetically shuffling around the yard, spied Lon, and came toward him with mincing steps and a foolish grin.

  “Care for a posy, sir? Brighten your day.”

  The flowers were poor, ugly things, wire and wallpaper scraps to which watercolors had been applied. He chose one. “Thank you.” He wished she’d brought bread. The prison was observing one of Jefferson Davis’s fast days, decreed by the President to conserve food and test the loyalty of all good rebels. Stores and markets closed for the day.