The First Assassin (8 page)

Scott nodded, ever so slightly. “You see, here is the dilemma,” he said. “You seem to be suggesting that people who know Mrs. Grenier can’t be trusted.”

“No, I simply think if anybody is conspiring against our city or our president, keeping an eye on someone like Mrs. Grenier may help us avoid a calamity.”

“Mrs. Grenier is an acquaintance of mine,” said Scott.

“William Seward, the secretary of state, is a frequent caller as well. I will ignore the implications of what you have just said. Do not think on this matter any longer. I will not allow it.” Scott then made a show of taking the list of names and ripping it in half. “Moreover,” he continued, “I just gave you an order to devote your attention to the military security of the city, and away from the rumors that have occupied so much of your time. Our main concern can no longer be spies and collaborators. It must be soldiers who intend to march on Washington.”

“I think that is the correct decision, General,” said Locke.

Rook hardly could believe the man’s posturing. He struggled to hold his tongue.

“Good day, Colonel Rook,” said Scott.

Rook said nothing as he got up and left. He stormed out the door of the Winder Building, fists clenched in anger. Across the street he noticed the dingy, boxlike buildings of the Navy and War departments. He peered around them for a view of the White House in their rear, as he usually did when he emerged from one of these meetings with Scott. He imagined Lincoln inside it right now, still talking with his advisors about what to do.

Rook, for his part, had no doubts about his next move: he would disobey Scott for the sake of the president.

The fort was defeated, not destroyed. Round divots pockmarked its brick walls where cannonballs had crashed into them. But the walls still stood high and appeared serviceable, especially with some patching. The parapet was demolished. A few chimneys peeked over the walls, though a couple of these had been smashed. One looked charred.

A small group of gentlemen and ladies in fine dress stood at one of the fort’s angles. A man was addressing them, waving his arms around in excitement. He was obviously telling a story to a tour group. High over their heads, flapping in an ocean breeze, flew a blue-and-white palmetto flag alongside a flag representing the new Confederate nation. The flag of the United States was gone.

Mazorca studied the scene for a few minutes. He had lingered in Charleston for several days after his meeting with Bennett, reading everything he could find on the current crisis. He wanted a complete understanding of the scene before him, and this excursion was the final part of his research.

The ride out to Cummings Point on Morris Island had been long and roundabout. He could not get any closer to Fort Sumter on dry land than this. Perhaps three-quarters of a mile separated the fort from the Battery on the point, where a slanted wall of railroad iron protected the cannon that had fired on the fort just three days earlier.

When Mazorca was satisfied, he turned his horse around and galloped off. He had a train to catch.

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 17, 1861

Little Maggie was the first to see them. She dropped her basket and sprinted down the tree-lined lane, yelping with the unbridled excitement of childhood. A few others heard her and joined the chase. Soon a dozen dark-skinned kids were running toward the three approaching carriages, whooping all the way.

Bennett always enjoyed the approach to his plantation manor. The innocent glee of these children gave him a deep satisfaction. He felt like a hero returning from a long absence, or a general from a great victory. This first encounter with the children never failed to stir the sensation of fatherhood in him. He loved this moment and looked forward to it every time he departed Charleston and headed for his ancestral home—his true home—in the South Carolina countryside. He leaned forward and waved from the window. The kids kept on running. They seemed oblivious to him, but that was okay. It was dusk, and hard for them to see inside the carriage.

Up ahead, at the foot of the porch, a small group of grownup slaves gathered. Sundown was quitting time, which meant that most of them had come in from the fields for the day and were near the manor. Bennett could see a bustle of activity behind them as several of the house servants performed last-second tidying. He knew they would have a hot meal ready for him by the time he walked through the front door.

The thought of food reminded him that Hughes had not yet made up his mind about staying for dinner. The young man’s own plantation was only a few miles away, and the pair had decided to travel from the city together. Bennett usually made the journey with Lucius, but this time he sat with Hughes, whose small cab was a bit cramped for three. Lucius rode behind in the Bennett carriage. It had been a long day for everybody. Yet neither Bennett nor Hughes was tired. In fact, they were both in an exceptionally good mood.

“So will you join us at the table this evening?” asked Bennett.

Hughes was peering out the window at the assembly of slaves. “I am anxious to get home,” he said, almost to himself. Then he snapped to attention and looked at Bennett. “But yes, I think I will join you, Langston.”

“That is good. You can send your carriage on and take one of my horses when we’re done.”

They rolled to a stop in front of the big house, which gave the children a chance to catch up and scramble around one of the carriages. They must think I’m in that one, Bennett thought.

Hughes hopped from the cab and then turned to help Bennett down. The aging plantation master stepped onto the gravel, treating his peg leg with special care. He expected the slave children to swarm him, but their attention was fixed firmly elsewhere. “Lucius! Lucius!” they cried, first in chaotic shouts and then a chant. Bennett felt abandoned.

“Lucius! Lucius!”

The old slave now emerged from his carriage. He wore an enormous grin on his face and greeted several members of his welcoming committee with quick pats to the head and some words Bennett could not hear. Lucius looked up and saw his master about twenty feet away, just standing there and staring. The slave’s smile disappeared.

“Lucius! Lucius!”

Lucius shushed the little throng and reached into his carriage. He pulled out a broad-rimmed hat and a big cane and walked at a brisk pace to where Bennett stood. The slave’s miniature entourage followed right behind, not yelling any longer but giggling the whole way.

“Here you are, sir,” said Lucius as he handed Bennett the hat and cane.

“Thank you, Lucius.”

The two men looked at each other in silence. Bennett could see that Lucius was anxious at the apparent snub his crowd of young admirers had just delivered.

“It must be good to see your family again,” said the master.

“Yessir,” replied the slave. “Sorry, sir.”

“Don’t worry about it, Lucius. I can see a couple of your grandchildren here. Hello, Maggie,” he said, bending over to look at a small girl clutching Lucius’s leg. She took a step back. Bennett smiled and straightened up. “They ought to be happy at the sight of their grandfather!” he laughed, turning to the adult slaves who had just watched all of this. “And look, Lucius: over there is Portia. How this fine granddaughter of yours has become a lovely woman!”

Portia blushed. “Good evening, Mr. Bennett,” she said.

“Good evening, everybody!”

A buzz of activity erupted around the plantation master. A handful of slaves started to tend to the carriage and its horses, a couple more unloaded boxes and trunks, and a few others inquired about the ride. Lucius dashed into the house. As this was going on, a white man came into view from the far side of the manor. He barked orders from a hundred feet away in a booming voice, making it impossible to hear anything but his bellowing:

“Get those bags off and inside right away! Unhitch those horses! I want them cleaned tonight! Make sure there’s a table setting for Mr. Hughes!” The slaves were already attentive, but they seemed to move even more quickly at the sound of this loud man.

“Where did you ever find such an overseer, Langston?” asked Hughes. “I think they can hear him all the way to Charleston.”

“This place would not function without him,” laughed Bennett. “Hello, Mr. Tate.”

“Hello, sir. Welcome back. We missed you a few days ago.”

“Thank you, Mr. Tate. I longed to return too. But I could not ignore the recent events in Charleston.”

“Did you see the bombardment?”

“The whole city did. The entire population must have descended upon the Battery, even before dawn. Hughes and I managed to avoid the crowd by rising above it—we watched for two days through a spyglass on my rooftop. Nobody could actually hear the barrage because a strong wind was blowing out to sea. But we saw the wisps of smoke rise from Fort Moultrie and Morris Island and knew that Sumter was getting pounded. Every puff from our cannons won a cheer from the Battery. Around eight o’clock on Saturday morning, we could see a huge fire at Sumter, with enormous clouds of smoke billowing upward. This gave everybody a thrill. We thought Sumter would surrender at any moment. But the men inside continued to hang on for a few hours more. They must have been covered with soot, and I still wonder how they breathed.”

Bennett leaned on his cane and waved his arm about as he told the story, and Tate listened intently. Several of the slaves paused to hear the tale as well. The only person nearby not to give Bennett his full attention was Hughes, who could not take his eyes off Portia. She was short and fit, with bright eyes and caramel-colored skin that suggested race mixing somewhere in her background. Hughes guessed Portia was about eighteen years old. She was quite pretty—actually, she was beautiful—and he found himself desiring her. He quit looking, though, when he noticed the burly slave beside her. The big man’s arms were as thick as Hughes’s own neck. He stared directly at Hughes. It felt like a challenge. Hughes resented that. He refused to let a slave get in the way of anything he wanted.

As Bennett described Charleston’s jubilation when Sumter finally did surrender—ringing church bells, hot-blooded speeches, and bonfires lighting the sky through the night—Hughes gradually maneuvered himself beside Portia. Her concentration was fixed on the story, and she did not notice him approach. He leaned over and placed his lips next to her ear. “Mr. Bennett was correct,” he whispered. “You are a lovely girl.”

Portia trembled at the words. She looked at Hughes, who gave her a rakish smile. She frowned and took a step toward that big slave. “Joe,” she whispered, though she hardly needed to get his attention. She tried to focus on Bennett again but kept casting nervous glances in the direction of Hughes, who would not stop staring at her.

By now Bennett had returned to the subject of the federal troops trapped for weeks in Sumter and how they must have suffered, especially on the second day of the attack. “It is hard not to admire an enemy like that,” said Bennett. “But it is easy to feel contempt for the man who would force them through it. This Abraham Lincoln is a beast, Tate. He was not within his rights to keep the fort. I didn’t think he could sink further in my estimation, but he did when he made those poor men defend a cause as hopeless as Sumter’s. There was nothing they could do. Their effort went to waste, except that it must have satisfied Lincoln to let them endure pain and privation so that he could frustrate South Carolina, however briefly.”

Bennett’s face reddened as his excitement turned to anger. “Curse that man! He will stop at nothing to confound us. Look around you, Tate,” he said, gesturing to his house, his fields, and finally a few of his slaves. “All of what we have here will be gone if this man has his way. He is a danger to our lives and everything we hold dear. There is no other word for it: Lincoln is evil!”

Suddenly Bennett quit his harangue. The sermon had exhausted him. He breathed heavily. His forehead glistened with sweat. He removed his hat and rubbed his face with a handkerchief. Tate and the slaves wondered whether he was done and did not move. The old man replaced his hat and looked at the porch of his manor, where Lucius now stood. He had come back outside just as Bennett was concluding his outburst.

“Mr. Bennett,” called Lucius. “Dinner is ready for you and Mr. Hughes.”

“Well, Mr. Hughes, shall we venture in?” asked Bennett.

“Let’s do that,” said Hughes. He made eye contact one more time with Portia and winked at her. She looked away. Then Hughes locked arms with Bennett and helped the old man climb the steps of his home. At the top, he turned and spoke. “Mr. Tate, please be good enough to see that my carriage gets off.” He went inside without waiting for a response.

Tate began shouting orders again. His first one went to the huge slave near Portia. “Get a move on, Big Joe. Start unloading that carriage.” The slaves who had halted their work to listen to Bennett returned to their labors. Portia was the only one not to budge. It was almost as if she did not hear Tate. She just stared at the ground.

Lucius saw her. After Bennett and Hughes entered the house, he moved down the steps and touched her chin. She looked up at her grandfather.

“What’s the matter, Portia?”

“It’s nothin’. I just been a little tired.”

“I hope it ain’t more than that.” Lucius slipped into an informal dialect that he tried to avoid around Bennett.

“Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.”

She took a step toward the house, where she knew she was needed. But Lucius clasped her elbow. She stopped and gave him a questioning look.

“Portia, we need to talk about something very important.”

Lucius glanced quickly in all directions to make sure they could not be overheard. Then he leaned forward. “Meet me by the stables later tonight, after Mr. Bennett has gone to bed.”

A woman seated beside a window was the first to see it. “There’s a secession flag flying over the Virginia capitol!” she said. This prompted a general commotion on the train. Passengers scrambled for a view. Atop a hill sat a white building that was designed by Thomas Jefferson and looked like a Roman temple. Above it flew a red, white, and blue flag, but not the federal one. In the fading daylight, they could see that it had three stripes, with a handful of stars displayed on a blue field.

“The stars and bars!” shouted a voice from somewhere within the train. The formerly subdued car burst into cheers. Had Virginia really seceded? What else could it mean? Just about everybody on board was thrilled at the prospect. This would give the Confederacy a fighting chance. The silence of nervous anticipation soon took over as the train slowed down on a bridge over the James River and then stopped at a depot on the other side of the water.

Within seconds it was confirmed: that very day, Virginia had voted to leave the Union. Strangers who had not spoken to each other on the ride now embraced. Men made martial boasts, and a group of women near the front cried with joy. “We shall have war now,” one of them announced amid her own laughter and tears, “if Lincoln is not a coward.” Her equally ecstatic friend replied, “But he is a coward! He is a coward!”

In the very last row of the car, a man with a hat pulled down to cover his face did not move. Mazorca pretended to sleep.

Corporal William Clark tried to suppress a yawn and failed. It had been a long day, sitting in the foyer of Brown’s Hotel and reading the same newspaper over and over again. It was not even a newspaper he wanted to read. The
National Intelligencer
was Washington’s leading daily for Southern sympathizers. Clark, a native of Maine, certainly felt no sympathy. He would have preferred not to hide this fact, but his current assignment called on him to wear something other than the blue dress of a federal solider. Ordinary street clothes were his uniform now. The
Intelligencer
was a part of his disguise as well. It helped him blend in and perform his job, which was to loiter around the lobby of Brown’s, observe the comings and goings of its patrons, and listen to their conversations. If any of them acted strangely or said something interesting, he was under orders to report the information to Colonel Rook.

Like the other hotels along Pennsylvania Avenue, Brown’s was big and ugly. Southerners from around the city congregated in its lobby, and many of those from out of town slept under its roof. Located at Sixth Street, it was convenient to the Capitol and therefore a favorite of Southern politicians. When Congress was in session, dozens of them stayed there. Even when it was not, the hotel’s lobby remained a favorite meeting place and watering hole.

It had become even more popular following a scandal at its main competitor, the National, which sat on the other side of Sixth Street. Four years earlier, around the time of President Buchanan’s inauguration, scores of people fell sick with what became known as “National Hotel disease.” One of them was Buchanan himself, who was bedridden for the first several weeks of his presidency. Many wild-eyed partisans were convinced that National Hotel disease was not a disease at all, but rather a poisoning—a sinister plot, hatched by abolitionists, to contaminate the food at a place frequented by Southerners and their political allies. The real source of the problem was most likely a sewage backup that had flooded the kitchen, but flamboyant conspiracy theories rarely lacked for believers, especially in a Washington divided by regional loyalties and mutual suspicion. Although the National was forced to shut down briefly, it had recently begun to regain its former popularity. For now, however, Brown’s Hotel was on top.