All Other Nights (34 page)

“You’re welcome,” he replied.

He ought to have felt self-righteous, he supposed, but the entire exchange only left him more ashamed. He sat down quickly and returned to the papers on his desk, crouching back over them. His head was throbbing. He tried to begin reading again, but he couldn’t, not while she was there. He listened as she scrubbed, hoping that she would soon be gone.

But a moment later the scrubbing paused, and he heard her voice again. “Sir, you’s one of them who’s tryin’ to kidnap Lincoln, ain’t you?”

The space behind his missing eye was pulsing again, currents of pain coursing through his head. “Pardon me?”

The girl still knelt on the floor, scrubbing the sides of the fireplace as she spoke. “I heard ’em talkin’ about it upstairs, just like they was talkin’ about it last fall, before you came,” she continued. “That ain’t Christian, you know. Lord Jesus ain’t forgivin’ nobody for that.”

He sat back in his seat, astounded. Could it be?
This is not an assassination plot
, he heard Benjamin repeat in his head. He thought of everything he had collected so far—the line of agents from Washington to Richmond, the notices of farmhouses that had been “secured” along the way, the boats and measurements across the Potomac, Little Johnny’s ramblings about hogtying people in barns—and held his breath.

The girl was still talking as his head reeled. “If you wanna whup me for sayin’ so, go right ahead,” she told him. “But you seem like a good Christian, so I know I oughta try an’ save your soul. You ain’t makin’ it to heaven if you do that. Oh no. If you do that, you gonna be cussed for all time.”

He couldn’t hold back his smile. He was elated, flying on air. “Unfortunately, I am already cursed for all time,” he said.

The girl frowned at him. “Don’t you smile like that. You still got time to repent.”

He kept smiling. He was knee-deep in repentance already, gathering up the pieces of a broken world. “And you’ve still got time to get your new pair of shoes,” he said. “Go now, and save your own soles.” Rose might have laughed, but Sally failed to appreciate his poor attempt at humor. She frowned again. “If anyone misses you,” he added, “I shall tell them you were here the whole time, mopping the floor.”

She looked doubtful, but all her life she had followed orders. She rose quickly and scurried to the doorway, leaving both mop and bucket behind. “Lord bless you,” she murmured, and rushed out the door.

He sat in silence, seeing, with his remaining eye closed, how life and death had been set before him, the blessing and the curse. The glimmering possibility unfurled once more before his missing eye: redemption.

It took all of his strength just to limp back to the rooming house that evening to cipher his message in privacy. When he went to the cobbler’s to deliver it, Jacob found him cutting out a leather sole for a foot about Sally’s size, and smiling. Sally never returned to the office, and Jacob never saw her again. But one week later on Main Street, the Lord blessed him, and that was when he saw Rose.

T
HE PART OF MAIN STREET WHERE JACOB HAD FIRST SEEN ROSE
had been nicknamed the Trenches, as a tribute to all the crippled begging veterans languishing on its cobblestones. As the only fool who didn’t thrust a cup in the faces of passersby, he was easily overlooked. The vendors were almost as desperate as the beggars, and Jacob watched every morning as they pulled at their customers’ sleeves and pleaded with them for the price. The customers were beggars too; nearly every transaction began with a long speech from the potential buyer about how there wasn’t anything left to eat and how many children in the household needed to be fed. The entire city was on its knees.

Jacob had been waiting there each morning for weeks, hoping to see Rose again. But when he actually saw her, it was late afternoon, on a day when he had taken advantage of Benjamin’s absence to leave a bit early, to clear his head. He had just passed through to a quieter part of the street, leaving the largest cluster of beggars about half a block behind him. Across the street, he saw her.

It was astonishing to him how much she had changed. When he had last seen her at her father’s house, she had been a little girl, not even twelve years old. But the two years that he had spent in hell had been, for her, the two years during which she had grown into a young woman. It was apparent now that she was the sort of girl who matures quickly; at fourteen, her body was already equal to any woman’s. She was too thin, but nearly everyone in Richmond was. He watched her as she began negotiating with the same potato vendor, turning red with humiliation as he shouted in her face. Today, he noticed, she was wearing an apron tied around her waist, over what was once Jeannie’s dress. He could barely imagine what her life was like now. Was she working somewhere?

He observed her, holding his breath as she left the vendor’s stand with a bulging burlap sack. He waited, unable to chase after her, praying that she would cross the street as she had the first time he had seen her. She didn’t. Instead she walked toward the end of the block, and he watched, devastated, as she entered a store on the corner. Only a few moments passed before she came out again and crossed to his side of the street. Soon she was approaching him.

The begging veterans farther down the block heralded her arrival with wolf whistles. In the Trenches, apparently, the rules of chivalry did not apply. It seemed she was used to this. She began walking faster, with her dark eyes fixed right in front of her, not even blushing as she ignored the catcalls of the crippled men on the sidewalks. But she was slowed somewhat by the sack of potatoes she was hauling along, and it was easy for Jacob to intercept her. When she reached the spot where he was standing, he stepped into her path, and extended his hand.

“Pardon me, miss,” he said.

She was about to brush by, but he thrust one arm in front of her, blocking her path, and angled his cane in front of her feet. She stopped.

His heart pounded, but she didn’t look at him. Of course not; no one ever did. He watched as she reached into the pocket of the apron tied around her waist and fished something out. Without looking at him, she pressed it into his palm. When he glanced down at his hand, he was surprised to see that it was a ten-dollar Rebel bill, until he remembered that the money had become almost worthless. “Now, sir, a war is won,” she said with a smile, and began to walk away.

For an instant he gazed at her, enjoying the strange and delectable taste of a memory long forgotten. He marveled at how an old routine could be recalled so physically, so unthinkingly: he heard Rose’s little palindrome as though it were a smell. He couldn’t let his life pass by again. He balanced himself on his cane with one hand and seized her by the arm.

She stopped, caught. Her thin arm felt fragile in his grip, like the wing of a little bird. His heart fluttered; he hadn’t touched a woman in over two years, other than his mother. And how close he was to Jeannie now, how agonizingly close!

Rose turned and glanced at him, then quickly looked away, watching his hand clutching the worn sleeve of Jeannie’s old dress. Jacob felt that familiar sleeve against his fingers and almost took her whole body in his arms, swooning from mere memory. But he held himself steady, clutching her, a slow ache seeping into his locked knees. Rose looked at him again, and then fixed her gaze on the ground. All she had seen was his eye patch.

“I don’t have any more money, sir,” she said. Her voice was higher than it had been before, weaker. He could hear how she tried to keep her words firm, and failed. “Really, it’s true. I have nothing more to give you. I’m—I’m—I’m sorry, sir. Please—please let me go.”

The sidewalk where they were standing was becoming too crowded, with too many people jostling them; he couldn’t speak to her there. He glanced to his left and saw a narrow alley. With agonizing pain pulsing through his legs, he moved as quickly as he could. He clutched her arm in one hand and his cane in the other, and then pulled her around the corner until she was facing him, her back to the alley’s brick wall. She gasped, of course, a cry smothered by shock, but no one heard her. If any of the chivalrous gentlemen on the street saw a disfigured cripple accosting a pretty young lady and dragging her into an alley, they gave no notice.

Now Rose was standing before him, her whole narrow body trapped, braced against the brick wall between his left hand and his cane. He looked at her face and saw the absolute terror in her eyes. He recognized that fear from every place he had seen it, imagined it, and lived it—from Dorrie at the slave auction, from Jeannie on the floor at their wedding, from old Isaacs telling him about his first wife, from the moment he was ordered to his knees at Solomon’s Inn, and the moment he first stood before the tribunal in Washington: the frightening instant when you realize that your life depends entirely on someone else’s whim.

“Please, sir, please,” she begged, and looked down at the bag of potatoes that she was still clutching in her hands. “Take the potatoes. You may have them all,” she said, her words a desperate blur as she dropped the bag on the ground at his feet. “Please, only let me go.”

“I don’t want your money or your food,” he said.

She looked up at him, judging. In the light of her dark brown eyes he recognized a depth of beauty that he hadn’t even remembered, Jeannie’s beauty. He smiled at her, startled to find himself on the verge of tears. But his face was a hideous mask, and she misunderstood his smile. She panicked, and tried to duck, nearly slipping out from under his arms. He panicked in turn, and braced his cane against her waist, pushing her back against the wall. Just as she began to open her mouth to scream, he touched her shoulder with his hand, and to his shock she didn’t flinch.

“Rose Levy,” he said. “Don’t you recognize me?”

She started at her name, and shuddered in horror. At length she looked at the scars on his cheek below his eye patch. She began to shake her head. But then he perceived the precise moment when she looked at the unscarred side of his face, stared into his remaining eye, and knew.

“A parrot’s pappy,” she breathed.
RAPPAPORT, A SPY.

Now Jacob was the one who was frightened. Suddenly he felt the full weight of where they were, of what it meant: a fourteen-year-old girl in the enemy’s capital knew precisely who he was, and could give him away to absolutely anyone. There was no longer any way to return. But he had to risk everything. “Rose, please, tell me,” he said, swallowing his own desperation whole. “Is Jeannie still alive?”

Rose stood still. Finally she spoke.

“I won’t tell you anything,” she said, glaring at his remaining eye. Her face was a mask, revealing no emotion. “You destroyed us.”

This reply electrified him, leaving him pulsing both with thundering despair and lightning bolts of irrational hope. He gathered his strength.

“Rose, listen to me,” he said. He glanced behind him. The street was still crowded; at any moment his unchivalrous position might be noticed, or Rose might suddenly call for help. “I have a message for you, from your father.”

Her stoic mask seemed to fall to the ground, revealing the little girl he had known, long ago. “From Papa?”

He nodded. “He asked me to find you.”

She bit her lip, her eyes wide. She was on the brink of tears. He looked at her dark eyes, Jeannie’s eyes, and knew how close he was. He saw his chance and seized it.

“I want to help you, Rose,” he told her. “I know that your family needs help. But I need you to tell me about Jeannie.”

“Doom an evil deed, liven a mood,” she intoned.

This was excruciating, both mentally and physically. His legs were beginning to buckle. He lowered his cane to the ground and pressed his other arm against the wall, putting his weight on his hands. “Rose, I’m begging you,” he pleaded. “I can give you anything you want. I have money, I have food. I can contact your father for you. Only speak to me.”

She blushed, looking down at the ground. “Never, even,” she said.

The maddening word puzzles continued even now. In the time he had known the Levy girls, he had never thought about Rose’s motivation for her odd obsession. He had simply considered it yet another Levy eccentricity, on a par with Lottie’s broken engagements or Phoebe’s boyish whittling or Jeannie’s sleight of hand. It was only now that he saw how clearly it served a purpose, the same purpose that all of the girls’ idiosyncrasies served. It was a way of digging an impassable ditch between themselves and others, a mined trench of protection for those who had seen the wreckage that could be inflicted upon the heart.

“Rose, I know you loved your mother, even if you hardly knew her,” he said slowly. “I know you love your father. I know you love your sisters. And I know what you think I did to your family.” She was watching him now, a knot of anger loosening between her dark eyebrows. “But I haven’t stopped thinking of your family for the past two years,” he said. “I freed your father from prison. I even freed your cousin Abigail from jail in Mississippi, when the army detained her.” These claims were too simple to be precisely true, but they were the only deeds he had—his feeble, best attempts at redeeming captives. He watched Rose, wondering how much of this she knew. Very little, it seemed.

“Look at me, Rose,” he said. “You can’t be afraid of me anymore. You can run away, and I can’t run after you. Look where we are. Think of who I am. You are safe here. I am not. You can send me off to the gallows any time you’d like. But I came here for you and your sisters, because I promised your father that I would find you.” He paused, a dull lump of pain throbbing behind his missing eye. Rose was examining him now, inspecting his eye patch, his legs, his cane. “I don’t expect your forgiveness, Rose,” he said at last. “All I can ask for is your mercy. I love your sister, and I always will. Please just tell me if she’s alive.”

He watched as little Rose, Philip’s treasure, cracked before his eyes. She didn’t weep, of course. She was Philip’s daughter, too smart and too proud. Instead he saw how her face softened, her breath slowing as she began to think.

“Could you send my father a letter for me?” she whispered.

“Yes,” he said.

For the first time in two years, Jacob saw Rose smile, a Levy smile, like her sister’s. The beauty in that smile was unfathomable, almost unreal.

“I shall write it this evening and bring it to you,” she said, her voice full of joy. “Shall I find you here tomorrow morning?”

“Yes,” he said. “But only if you tell me—”

But she was wriggling now, edging her way out of where he had braced her against the wall. He tried to stop her, but he had been standing too long; he no longer had the strength. He held her wrist, and she looked at him. “Please let me go,” she finally said. “I shall come back tomorrow, I promise. But I must go now. I’m expected.”

Should he believe her? “Where are you going?” he asked.

She shrank down into herself, her shoulders rising as she bowed her head. She looked back at him, and he saw that she had caved in completely, that he had succeeded in breaching the deep trench of distrust. “I have to go home. My aunt isn’t well, and I have to stay with Deborah.”

The name was familiar to him, though at first he couldn’t place it. It was someone in the Levy family—a cousin he had met at the wedding, in that hour before William Williams arrived? Then he remembered where he had seen the name Deborah: on the gravestone in the cemetery, where he had held Jeannie for the last time. Now he was confused, absurdly imagining Rose guarding their mother’s grave.

“Who is Deborah?” he asked.

Rose swallowed, and looked down at her own feet. “Jeannie’s daughter,” she said.

Jacob stood still, stunned. The beauty of the world lay revealed before him, a tantalizing glimpse at a vast continent of happiness just beyond reach. He couldn’t even begin to imagine her—
her
, a daughter!

“Rose,” he gasped. “I need to meet her.” He gripped her thin arm. “And I need to see Jeannie.”
To see Jeannie!
The words washed through his shameful life like a cleansing rain. “Please, Rose, take me home with you.”

Rose shook her head. “I can’t,” she said.

For an instant he thought this was her defiance again, and he wondered why she hadn’t used some sort of word puzzle to express it. He saw how her face was tightening, her little-girl eyebrows furrowing back into worry and grief.

“Why not?” he demanded.

“Because of Lottie,” Rose said. “If she sees you, she’ll have you killed. She said she would, if she ever sees you again.”

He thought of what Philip had said about how Lottie had looked when they were exchanged:
She was so angry, so full of fury. I almost didn’t recognize my own child.
But now he was the one who wouldn’t recognize his own child.

“I don’t care,” he said. “I need to meet—I need to meet Deborah.” He tasted the name in his mouth, imagining a little dark-eyed, dark-haired, miniature Levy girl. Jeannie’s daughter. “And I need to see Jeannie.” He allowed himself to think the words:
My wife. My daughter. My family.