Fates and Traitors (20 page)

“Oh, Sleepy in his rage and thunder,” said Wilkes dismissively when Asia begged him to hold his tongue when he visited. “I care not one bent penny for his opinion. I wouldn't cross the threshold of this fine house except to see you.”

It truly was a fine home Clarke had recently purchased for their growing family, for a son, Edwin Booth Clarke, had joined the family in 1861, and another daughter, Adrienne, two years later. Their elegant mansion at 229 North Eighteenth Street reflected Clarke's success and prosperity, but Asia was sure she would never know another happy day if Wilkes made himself unwelcome there. Thankfully, Clarke avoided her brother rather than banning him outright, and Wilkes continued to visit her frequently. With the windows shut tight against eavesdroppers, he would sit in her parlor and sip coffee and speak the harshest invective against the Union, against President Lincoln, against the entire cabinet and all the generals of all the armies of the North until her head swam and she begged him to desist.

On one occasion, Wilkes arrived in a fury, scarcely pausing to remove his coat and hat before he began pacing the room, denouncing the mass enlistment of Irish immigrants, who were as eager to prove their loyalty to their new homeland as they were to earn a soldier's pay. “It is the unwisest move this country has yet made,” he thundered. “The pressing of hordes of ignorant foreigners into regiments, buying up citizens before they land, to swell their armies. It is a thing Americans will blush to remember one day when Patrick coolly tells them that
he
won their battles for them, that
he
fought and bled and freed the darkies. The time will come, whether conquered or conqueror, when the braggart North will groan at not being able to swear they fought the South man for man. If the North conquers us it will be by numbers only, not by native grit, not pluck, and not by devotion.”

“If the North conquers
us
,” Asia echoed, aghast. “Wilkes,
we
are of the North.”

“Not I,” he exclaimed. “So help me Holy God, not I. My soul, life, and possessions are for the South.”

“Why not go fight for her, then?” snapped Asia. “Every Marylander worthy of the name is fighting her battles.”

He sank heavily into a chair, running a hand over his beautifully sculpted chin, his handsome brow, a fairer version of their father's. “I have only an arm to give,” he said. “My brains are worth twenty men, my money a hundred. I have a free pass to go anywhere. My name and my profession are my passport. My knowledge of drugs, my money, they provide the means—one of the means—by which I serve the South.”

Asia studied him, dawning awareness sending a shiver up her spine. Even the child within her womb stirred and kicked as if afraid. “Wilkes,” she said in a low voice, suddenly conscious of Clarke toiling over his ledger in his study not far away. “A man came here the other day inquiring for Doctor Booth. I thought perhaps he sought Joseph, but—”

“I am he,” Wilkes admitted, “if by doctor one means a dealer in quinine, which some say is more valuable than food in the South these days.”

“You deliver medicines to the rebels?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“Hidden in horse collars and such.”

“You run the blockade?”

His smile broadening, he crossed the room and took her hands in his, and for the first time she noticed his calloused palms. “I have spent many nights rowing.”

“Wilkes, you must desist,” she implored, shocked. “Think of the danger. Think of the penalties if you were caught.”

But although she argued herself hoarse, she knew that her warnings and admonitions were in vain. The brother she adored was a spy, a smuggler, a rebel, and each terrible word meant death. She knew with chilling horror that if her brother had twenty lives, he would sacrifice each one for the Southern cause. He was and ever had been a man so single-minded in his devotion, so unswerving in his principles, that he would yield everything, everything, for the convictions that had become his consuming passion.

Things base and vile, holding no quantity,

Love can transpose to form and dignity.

Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind.

And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.

—William Shakespeare,
A Midsummer Night's Dream
, Act 1, Scene 1

O
n Election Day, Washington City was hushed and still, cold and gray. By midmorning the thick, ominous clouds hanging low over the capital broke open in a downpour, so although Lucy had hoped to go riding, she, her mother, and her elder sister instead retired to the ladies' parlor of the National Hotel, resigning themselves to a long wait, anxious for news and for Papa's return from New Hampshire, the state he represented so proudly and so well in the Senate.

Senator John Parker Hale had left the previous day for Dover amid a general exodus of men from the capital, all determined to cast their ballots in what Papa said was the most important election the nation had ever faced. Secretary of War Stanton had secured permission for thousands of soldiers from the crucial states of Maryland, New York, and Pennsylvania to go home to vote, confident that the loyal Union
soldiers would overwhelmingly support the Republican ticket as they had in the off-year elections. Hundreds of elected officials and civilian government employees had joined them, emptying the hotels and boardinghouses, packing train cars, and speeding off to determine the fate not only of Mr. Lincoln but of the divided nation and all its inhabitants, Union and Confederate, white and colored, soldier and civilian, free and enslaved.

To Lucy the city's apprehension was as tangible as the falling rain, and she yearned to go out, to call on knowledgeable friends, to gather facts as if they were precious jewels with which she could bribe the capricious Fates. She wished even more fervently that she could vote, that women had some voice in selecting the leaders whose decisions shaped the course of their lives as much as any man's. She would have cast her ballot for Mr. Lincoln, not out of blind loyalty to the Republican Party, but because she was certain that Mr. Lincoln must remain at the helm of the ship of state if it were ever to reach the calm waters of peace.

She had good reason to hope that the voters would choose wisely. After a dismal summer full of stalemate, discouragement, and defeat on the battlefield, General Sherman's capture of Atlanta in early September had suddenly transformed Mr. Lincoln from an embattled administrator into a triumphant commander in chief. As hope for an imminent victory had spread throughout the Union, Radical Democracy Party candidate General Frémont had withdrawn from the presidential race, and as Election Day approached, Democrat general George B. McClellan, the popular but hesitant military commander who did not advocate his own party's platform of peace through concessions, had increasingly seemed a dangerously imprudent choice.

“If Abraham Lincoln is reelected, the war will continue and many thousands more will suffer and die,” Papa had conceded the previous day as she helped him pack his bag for the overnight journey. “However, his reelection would mean that eventually the war will be won, the nation reunited, and the poor souls now held in bondage forever free. Abraham Lincoln is not only the wisest choice. He is the only choice.”

Lucy wholeheartedly agreed, and when she kissed her father's cheek as he set out for the train station, she prayed that when he returned to Washington, he would find the entire city resounding with the glorious pealing of bells announcing Mr. Lincoln's victory.

To while away the hours, Lucy, her mother, and her sister sewed, read, knit socks and scarves for the soldiers, and wrote letters to friends. Shortly after noon, a telegram arrived from Papa announcing that he had voted and he expected to be back in Washington in time for supper.

“That's all?” asked Lucy, dismayed. “Not a word of the elections?”

Lizzie, her elder by six years, smiled as she held up the narrow paper by two corners. “It's only a telegram, dearest sister, not a lengthy dispatch from the field, and it cannot predict the future.”

“Yes, of course, but even so I had hoped Papa could tell us something of voter turnout or the mood of the people.”

“There probably isn't much to tell yet,” said their mother, smiling fondly. At fifty, she was wise and loving, and very much adored by their father, who consulted her in all matters domestic and political, even if he did not always take her advice. She had been a great beauty in her day, and although Lucy, not yet twenty-four, would never wish to be thought vain, she was secretly thankful that she had inherited her mother's lustrous black hair, enchanting blue-gray eyes, and porcelain complexion. She knew that twenty-nine-year-old Lizzie, similarly blessed, was thankful also.

“I suppose it
is
too early for any news,” Lucy admitted, sighing as she settled into a chair by the window. The downpour had turned the streets of Washington City into rivers of mud, and she spotted only two gentlemen making their careful way through it, and one slow carriage pulled by two diligent horses turning the corner from Sixth Street onto Pennsylvania Avenue. In such foul conditions, only the most passionate voters would make it to the polls.

“Perhaps one of your White House beaus will call with early returns,” teased Lizzie, taking up her knitting again.

Lucy turned away from the window, all innocence. “I don't know whom you could possibly mean.”

“Mr. Robert Lincoln, for one.”

“He is not my beau.” Robert did not like to contend with rivals for any woman's affections, so he had abandoned his pursuit of Lucy early in their acquaintance. Rumor had it he had recently begun courting Miss Harlan, daughter of the senator from Iowa. “Regardless, he's off at Harvard and probably knows no more about the election than we do.”

“Mr. John Hay, then.”

“He too is no more than a very dear friend, as you well know.” Lucy put her head to one side, considering. “Although as the president's secretary, he'll surely know how the election is going as soon as anyone in the White House does. Perhaps we should invite him to join us for tea.”

“Yes, let's,” said Lizzie, brightening.

“Girls, I'm surprised at you,” their mother said with mock sternness. “We cannot invite such a busy young man to tea on such short notice on such an important day merely to pump him for information.”

“Why not?” asked Lucy.

“Because we're already expecting other guests, or have you forgotten?”

In her concern for the election, Lucy entirely had, but she gladly welcomed the distraction of visiting friends—even if they were not handsome beaus with news from the polls.

The downpour had slowed to a steady drizzle by midafternoon, when a few ladies of their acquaintance, politicians' wives and daughters like themselves, arrived to discuss plans for an upcoming fair to raise funds for the United States Sanitary Commission, which provided medicines, bandages, food, and other essential goods to the Union soldiers. Although General Grant's advances upon the Confederate capital of Richmond and General Sherman's victories in Georgia made victory and peace seem tantalizingly near, the Union Army's need for supplies was as urgent as ever, and it fell to the women at home to provide.

Lucy, Lizzie, and their friends staunchly believed that their service was essential to the Union cause, that they too had enlisted for the duration of the war, though they wore no uniforms and held no rank. Earlier in the war, Lucy had wanted very much to answer the call for women to train as nurses for military hospitals, but her ambitions were quashed when the superintendent of army nurses, Miss Dorothea Dix, decreed that she would hire only matronly women of at least thirty years, plain in appearance and in dress. To be included among their ranks Lucy would readily don a simple brown dress without hoops and assume an expression of unsmiling seriousness, but she could do nothing about her age or her beauty.

Thus vastly unqualified to be a nurse according to Superintendent Dix, Lucy had thrown herself into the work of fund-raising, sewing, knitting, and visiting bedridden soldiers in the vast number of military hospitals scattered throughout Washington City. She cheered up the wounded men with pleasant conversation, wrote letters home for those who could not write their own, held trembling hands, soothed troubled minds with gentle songs, bathed feverish brows with cool cloths. She felt necessary and needed and useful, and although she prayed for a swift end to the death and destruction of war, she dreaded to think that victory and peace would mean the constriction of her life to a small circle of domesticity in her father's house, or some future husband's.

Her mother's example encouraged her not only to hope for more but to aspire to it. “I wasted my youth, but I was saved by an excellent wife,” Lucy had overheard her father confess to friends on more than one occasion. While her mother was by every measure the very ideal of womanly devotion to family, hearth, and home, she was also shrewd and intelligent, the first reader of her husband's most important speeches, an attentive editor of his drafts of legislation. Whenever significant measures came to the floor of the Senate, she would spend hours observing the contentious debates from the visitors' gallery. “Your mother's queries force me to sharpen my arguments,” Papa had told his young daughters on the eve of what became his famous 1856 address to the Senate indicting President Franklin Pierce's Kansas policies and defending the Republican response to the crisis. Though she had been but a girl of fifteen at the time, Lucy had never forgotten how her father's voice had rung with pride, how deeply he appreciated his wife's insight and wisdom. At that moment she resolved that when she was a woman grown, she too would endeavor to be so valued a partner to so great a man.

Through the years, Lucy had given much thought to her future husband, to the mysterious someone she was fated to meet and marry. He would almost certainly have to be a man of politics or the law, so that she might serve her country as her mother did. He would have to be an abolitionist like herself, of course, and he would have to support woman's suffrage. Most important, he would have to be a man of great moral courage, like her father, willing to defy party leadership if they cared more about accumulating wealth and power than serving the
needs of the country, unafraid to voice unpopular opinions in the cause of justice. If a gentleman possessed these excellent qualities of mind and character, and if he were devoted and kind, she would marry him even if he were plain and poor—although she would not object if he were handsome and wealthy too.

The Sanitary Fair meeting made an hour pass swiftly by, but eventually the animated discussion ended, their guests departed, and the interminable waiting resumed. Lucy imagined John Hay conferring with Mr. Lincoln at the War Department as they awaited the telegrams that would announce the fate of the president and the destiny of the nation. If only she could contrive some excuse to join them there—but of course, no well-bred young lady could do such a thing without risking scandal, or at least disapproval. Papa's position was too uncertain for her to satisfy her curiosity at such a price.

At six o'clock the Hale ladies withdrew to their suite to dress for dinner. Lucy finished first, and as she waited for Lizzie and their mother, she studied the scene outside her window. In the light of the gas lamps lining the street below, she observed many gentlemen with umbrellas and rolled-up trousers braving the mud and rain on Pennsylvania Avenue and Sixth Street, undoubtedly searching out news of the election, although the early returns were not expected until eight o'clock. Shortly before seven, Papa at last arrived, the faint odor of tobacco smoke lingering about him, his coat and hat damp from rain though he had carefully brushed them before entering. “What have you heard, Papa?” Lucy asked, kissing his cheek in welcome.

Travel weary though he was, her father smiled, his relief and joy evident. “The soldiers are turning out in droves throughout the North, and they have ever been loyal to Mr. Lincoln. We have every reason to hope that he will win the day.”

Delighted, Lucy laughed and flung her arms around him. “Thank goodness,” her mother said fervently, hand to her heart, and Lizzie swiftly chimed in with her agreement.

“I won't be able to sleep tonight until I receive official word,” said Papa, raising a hand to dissuade them from celebrating too soon, “but for now, I am very much encouraged.”

Their hearts immeasurably lighter, the family went down to the hotel's dining room, careful to modulate their speech and expressions,
well aware of the many pairs of eyes and ears turned their way. Twice messengers interrupted their supper with notes for Papa, which he accepted graciously and read slowly and carefully, his expression betraying nothing. Each time he gave his wife the barest of nods as he tucked the telegrams into his breast pocket, and Lucy inwardly rejoiced. Although her father and Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles did not get along, her father had many friends in that department, having toiled for seven long years to pass legislation abolishing flogging and, more recently, serving as chairman of the Senate Naval Affairs Committee. Surely, Lucy surmised, the messages came from well-placed officials within those ranks, and just as surely, they brought good news that her father would reveal as soon as the family retired to the privacy of their own rooms.