The Crescent Spy (6 page)

G
iven that Josephine had abandoned her plan of searching for employment in New York in order to work for the government, it was ironic that the first thing she did after leaving the White House was take a night coach to Baltimore, followed by a train ride to the heart of Manhattan, where she disembarked at a depot on Twenty-Seventh Street. She hired a hansom cab to carry her downtown, where she checked into the dingy Luxor Hotel, only a few blocks from Newspaper Row.

But instead of marching triumphantly into the
Herald
, the
Times
, or the
Tribune
flourishing clips from her most triumphant articles, she skulked about the hotel for several days, waiting for Pinkerton to send instructions. Pinkerton had seemed worried that she would be recognized in Washington, which was why he’d sent her north from Washington to await transport.

Josephine took one of the horsecars that ran on rails up to Central Park, where she munched on a bratwurst bought from a German with a cart and watched a group of sweating Irish laborers dig a pond with pick and shovel. She bought all the newspapers and read them front to back. When an article seemed particularly well written, she tore it out and tucked it into her satchel to study later. Meanwhile, she caught up on events following the disaster at Bull Run.

Lincoln had demoted McDowell and brought in General George McClellan to lead the Army of the Potomac. A dashing young West Pointer, McClellan was said to be quickly whipping the troops into shape, and had succeeded in stemming the panic that Washington would soon be overrun. It remained to be seen how he would fare against the Confederates.

As for her humiliation, there were a few small articles, mostly in the
Tribune,
about the unmasking of “Joseph” Breaux, and speculation on whether or not she was a secessionist spy. The jaded New York press said no. The
Tribune
slyly suggested it might offer her a job if she were to resurface. Her heart ached at this, but now that she’d committed to President Lincoln and his spies, she wouldn’t renege.

On the fourth morning, Josephine got a telegram from the cryptically named E. J. Allen, which instructed her to collect her bags and proceed to Brooklyn, where her passage was booked on a clipper named
The Flying Siam
, destination Havana. She hired a cab, which joined a press of horses, carts, and foot traffic to the East River, then took the ferry across. Once in Brooklyn, she boarded the clipper and took the small stateroom that had been designated for her use.

Josephine had no sooner tossed her bags onto her bunk than the bell clanged, and the whistles blasted on the docks. She hurried out to join the other passengers and crew on the deck. The ship flew a Canadian flag, but she heard German, Irish brogues, Spanish, and broad Canadian French among the crew. The passengers were largely Americans and Europeans, with a handful of Cubans sprinkled into the mix.

The Flying Siam
hoisted her sails and came down the East River with the outgoing tide, where she joined the larger harbor. From there, they struggled to maneuver among the smoke-belching tugs, the clippers coming off the ocean, and the heavy traffic of light barges, fishing smacks, and the ferries heav
ing back and forth between New York and New Jersey. A mighty sloop of war wallowed offshore, its guns bristling. Gulls wheeled overhead, their calls mingling with the sounds of bells and whistles from the various ships, coastal forts, and lighthouses.

This burst of clandestine activity was mysterious and exciting, and it wasn’t until they were well offshore that the first worry tickled at her belly. She’d expected to receive more instructions on the ship, but so far, nothing.

The bells rang for supper, and after she’d eaten a dinner of quahogs and beans cooked in salt pork, she returned briefly to her stateroom, a small, dingy space that smelled of its previous occupant. There were tobacco stains on the wall, and the spittoon had been emptied but not cleaned. At least they’d changed the sheet on the cot.

Instead of lingering in the room, Josephine made her way to the deck to watch the sun sinking in the west. A fresh, briny breeze snapped in off the sea and tugged at her black curls, trying to pull them free from her bonnet. All was quiet on deck except for the slap of waves against the hull, the creak of ropes and canvas, and the occasional calling of sailors. A lighthouse blinked several miles off the starboard bow. She pulled her shawl around her shoulders, suddenly chilly.

Was she really going to Havana? And what in heaven’s name would she do when she got there? Look for the American legation or settle into a hotel and wait for someone to find her?

“Enjoying the night?” a man said behind her.

She recognized the voice and was relieved when she turned to see Franklin Gray approaching. He wore a dark wool jacket with trousers and a felt bowler, pulled down so it wouldn’t blow away in the breeze.

“You weren’t at supper,” she said.

“I stayed in my room until dark. Seemed prudent. Did you spot any suspicious characters?”

“Several. But nobody who seemed particularly interested in me. Are we being watched?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “We carry illicit cargo. After Havana, we’ll carry still more. If there are Union agents aboard, they haven’t been warned of our presence. Mr. Pinkerton wanted as few people as possible to know of our departure.”

“So we
are
going to Cuba. I’d wondered if we’d get around Key West and make straight for the delta with a load of contraband for the enemy.”

Mr. Gray took out a silver case and offered her a cigarette before he lit his own. She declined.

“
The Flying Siam
will never run the blockade. It’s too big, too easily recognized. We’ll transfer to something even less luxurious, I’m afraid. I apologize for the room. A lady should have something more accommodating.”

“If you knew the kinds of things I saw growing up on the river . . .” She smiled. “I’m not bothered by the conditions.”

The tip of his cigarette glowed. “Wait until you see the rats scurry up and down the ropes at Havana.”

“If a man—or woman—gets hungry enough, he’ll
eat
a rat.”

He laughed at this. “I was skeptical about Mr. Pinkerton’s plans for you. But now I see that you are the perfect woman for the business at hand.”

“A woman is always underestimated. A clever woman doubly so.”

“How did you gain General Beauregard’s confidence at the battle?” he asked. “It surely wasn’t only your huckleberry pie.”

“Don’t discount my pie, Mr. Gray. It has weakened the knees of many a man.”

Josephine may have fought and scrabbled in a world of men, but she was not above using those feminine charms she had learned from her mother, and if Gray wasn’t a fool, he would see that she was doing the same thing to him right now that she had done to the rebel general. She decided to test him.

She took the cigarette from his fingers and brought it to her lips. “Do you know what I asked General Beauregard when I gave him the pies?” She changed her voice to mimic the Chesapeake accent she had affected with Beauregard.
“
‘How do you intend to whip the Yanks, General? They seem powerful determined.
’
” She handed back the cigarette. “That’s all it took. He laid out his entire order of battle.”

“I’m glad you’re on our side, and not the enemy’s, Miss Breaux.”

“There are women in Washington who are spying on you at this moment. If you think our generals and congressmen are more tight-lipped than theirs, you are deceiving yourself.” Josephine leaned in confidentially. “May I call you by your given name, Franklin? Or is it Frank?”

“Please do. And Franklin is fine. There were a million and one Franks where I grew up.”

“I am pleased to meet you properly, Franklin.” She held out a gloved hand, which he took. “I prefer Josephine to Miss Breaux . . . if you feel comfortable, of course. But not Jo or Josie, or anything like that. They make me sound like a child.”

“We wouldn’t want to remind anyone that you are only twenty years old.”

She forced a laugh and hoped it sounded bright and cheery and not defensive. “That is true.”

“Where is your mother? And this man you call the Colonel—where is he?”

The questions caught her off guard. She had been thinking how easily she had broken the stiff exterior Franklin had carried in Washington and wondering whether she could simply ask him how they meant to use her spying in the Confederacy. Only now he had turned the tables.

“That is . . . indelicate.”

“It’s not puerile curiosity. I have several possibilities of how to bring you into New Orleans, and I want to be sure we won’t stumble into any of your relations.”

“Neither the Colonel nor my mother will be in New Orleans, I promise. If I do see relations, there will be no problem. I wouldn’t recognize them, and they wouldn’t recognize me.”

A knot of pain formed in Josephine’s belly. She wouldn’t see her mother, because her mother was dead. The Colonel wasn’t, so far as she knew, but he may as well be.

“I am glad to hear it,” Franklin said, “but I would still like to hear the details. Whenever you are comfortable, of course.”

But Josephine had soured on the conversation, and she was now more keen to return to her quarters than to stay and gnaw at old wounds. She feigned a yawn.

“Perhaps another time, Mr. Gray,” she said, dropping the informality so recently established. “I am tired, and I have a book I am reading that will occupy my mind until bedtime. Good evening to you.”

T
he book was a slim volume discussing
Vom Kriege
—
On War
—by the Prussian General Clausewitz. Josephine had purchased it from an elderly Jewish bookseller in Central Park for a dime, marked down from fifteen cents after she’d greeted him with a Yiddish phrase she’d learned from a traveler on the Mississippi. A West Point officer had once told her about the book, claiming that it was the best discussion of war theory, and she’d been excited to find it. Unfortunately, it wasn’t
On War
itself but a treatise discussing certain points of the book. The chapter about what Clausewitz called “the fog of war” was fascinating, but frustratingly incomplete, and the British naval officer who’d penned the treatise wrote with such leaden prose that she had to set it aside.

Josephine turned down the oil lamp and lay on her cot in the darkness, her porthole window opened to air out the stateroom. The smell of the ocean was different than the river, but the gentle motion and the sound of the calm water gliding along the hull only dragged her deeper into her memories. She turned up the lamp again, changed into her long nightgown, brushed out her hair, and washed her face from the metal pitcher with the stopper that hung by its neck from a rope next to the washbasin. Before she climbed into bed, she opened her Oriental box and took out the picture of her mother in the sequined dress. After a few minutes, she put it away and turned down the light for good.

Josephine lay down on the cot, pulled the sheet up to her neck, and stared into the darkness overhead.

She was eight when that picture was taken, and must have known the Colonel for a long time already, but the day of the photograph was one of her earliest, strongest memories of the man. That morning,
Crescent Queen
had come out of the Ohio River where it met the Mississippi, and Josephine was on the deck with her bare, tanned legs hanging over the edge of the promenade, looking down at the two powerful currents sliding by each other, one gray and sleek, the other the color of muddy coffee. Only gradually did they mix.

A flatboat drifted off stern, and men danced on its deck, one man playing a fiddle and the others kicking their heels and waving knit caps. A keelboat heaved alongside the flatboat, and here several more men from the long, slender craft joined their voices. A third boat, this one another keel, heard the singing and rowed over to join the little flotilla. The men were Cajun and Irish and wild-haired Buckeyes and Hoosiers with beards halfway down their chests.