The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln (72 page)

“Don’t do that again,” he said.

He grabbed for her, and this time Abigail sliced downward, catching his wrist, which spurted blood. Waverly looked at the cut. He seemed impressed, but not frightened: he had been stabbed before.

“I warned you,” he said, and, with a sigh, swiped at her with his huge hand. The almost casual blow knocked Abigail to the ground. She could not catch her breath.

Waverly leaned over her, and that was when the boiler exploded.

The sound deafened her.

The corporal crouched and spun, and a piece of metal caught him in the face; and Abigail, with what strength she had left, drove the knife into his thigh. As he began to turn, Jonathan, a trickle of blood on his own forehead, smashed a plank against Waverly’s ear.

The giant went down.

But, again, only to his knees.

He shook his head, blood flying, and punched Jonathan in the groin. The young man folded to the ground. Waverly kicked him in the chest, then turned to Abigail. He grabbed her leg, dragging her toward him. Jonathan managed to get a hand on the giant’s neck, and bent his head back. Waverly stood with a roar, and threw him off.

“Enough,” he wheezed, and drew the Colt.

The crack of a gunshot seemed to surprise him, for he spun around and clawed at his back. A second shot missed him and nearly hit Abigail, but the third put the corporal down on the frozen mud.

Looming from the darkness were several figures in dark uniforms. Two of them held rifles.

A scrawny, familiar figure emerged from the shadows between two freight cars. He was carrying a large pistol, and looked straight and confident and not the least bit nervous.

“The boiler was an excellent idea,” said Mr. Plum. “Otherwise I might not have found you in time.”

Jonathan stooped for the Colt that had fallen from the giant’s twitching hand.

“Please don’t do that,” said Plum.

“Who are you working for? Grafton? Belmont? Who?”

Plum ignored the question. He was crouching beside Waverly, checking for signs of life, and finding none.

Abigail had managed to sit up. “I think he’s on our side,” she said, shakily.

“Why?”

“Because unless I am mistaken, those are Union soldiers approaching. And General Baker is with them.”

I

THERE WAS EVEN
an ambulance wagon, where they patched up Jonathan’s forehead and Abigail’s hand. There were soldiers and police and quiet men not in uniform who were evidently federal detectives. And the part that worried Abigail most was that she had no clear picture of how long they had been watching before they intervened; she wondered whether, had Waverly managed to kill them both before being stopped, Baker would have been entirely disappointed.

“So Plum works for you,” said Jonathan, as a surgeon cleaned the gash on his head. “He used to be at the War Department. I suppose Grafton thought Plum was giving him information from the files, but it was the other way around, wasn’t it? Plum has been working for you all along. Keeping an eye on Grafton.” A grimace of pain from a stitch. “And maybe on Dennard & McShane as well.”

“Mr. Plum is a valued member of the Service,” said Baker, primly.

The subject of their conversation was several yards away, conferring in hushed tones with the detectives, and it was plain from their deference that Plum was the one giving orders.

“I suppose that Plum arrested Mr. Grafton for you,” said Jonathan. “Everyone thinks he’s missing, but you have him locked up somewhere, don’t you? Undergoing interrogation? Or was he just shot?”

But Baker preferred not to answer questions. His illness had left him pale, and a good deal thinner, but his contempt was undiminished. “When we reached Mrs. Sprague’s, we were told that you had just left.
We searched the area, but it took us some time to imagine that you might have gone into the railroad yard.”

“You must have heard the explosion,” said Jonathan.

“That’s what brought us running.”

“But I don’t understand,” said Abigail. “Why were you looking for us to begin with? And why on earth did you think we had been to see Mrs. Sprague?”

Baker smiled blandly. “I have my sources.”

Someone was watching. That was the only answer. One of Baker’s detectives had followed them from the office to Kate’s house, then gone to summon the general, only to return and find them gone.

“I believe you have something for me,” said Baker.

“Something like what?” asked Abigail, innocent.

“I am quite sure that Mrs. Sprague gave you Chanticleer’s deposit.”

“I beg your pardon.”

“The letters she was holding. She gave them to you.”

Abigail knew her friend. “Did Mrs. Sprague tell you that?”

“Yes.”

“Actually, General Baker, I don’t believe you.”

He wanted to hit her; that was plain. He wanted to grab her, shake her, place her under arrest, drag her off for interrogation. But he dared not touch her, and they all knew it. Not only because she had just made a deal with the President of the United States; but also because Jonathan Hilliman was there to watch, and there were families whose wrath one did not risk.

General Lafayette Baker believed, albeit mistakenly, that the Hillimans were still of that ilk. Furious, he strode away.

Mr. Plum joined them. “Now would be an excellent time for the two of you to depart,” he said softly. “I fear that the general’s recent illness has left him highly irascible.”

They had questions, of course, but Plum offered no answers.

“If we are not going to give the list to General Baker,” said Jonathan as he drove a freshly borrowed carriage across the Island, “what exactly are we going to do with it?”

“Use it as evidence.”

“The Chief Justice will never admit the letters into evidence.”

Abigail’s eyes were shut. “We are not going to ask him.” Her voice was crisp. “Don’t you see, Jonathan? Corporal Waverly kept asking about the
list
. Singular. General Baker mentioned the
letters
. Plural.
The corporal didn’t know there was a second envelope. Baker did.” Her bandaged hand waved away his questions. “We have been making a false assumption, Jonathan. Perhaps when we have examined the list of names, we will know where we went wrong.”

II

They sat in the kitchen of the house Abigail’s father had built, the list of conspirators—“potential conspirators,” Abigail kept warning him—on the table. The list ran to four pages, in an aggressively slanted copperplate that she did not recognize. The two of them sat side by side so that they could read the names together by the light of a single sputtery lamp, the candle within almost down to the nub. Jonathan had argued that they would be safer at the Bannerman manse, or even the office, but Abigail said she wanted to go home. And she had run upstairs to check on Nanny and Louisa before allowing him to slit the envelopes. When she returned, she placed a derringer on the table and leaned a shotgun against the wall.

Jonathan said nothing.

The thinner envelope contained what appeared to be two pages from Stanton’s private diary. The first entry, dated a year and a half ago, began with the observation that the writer was beginning to harbor reservations concerning “certain policies pursued by the President whom I loyally serve.” Jonathan was about to comment, when Abigail slipped the pages from his hand and put them away.

“The other is more important,” she said.

They turned to the list of conspirators: “Potential conspirators,” she cautioned again. “People they considered approaching.”

There were about forty names, and over half were unfamiliar to her. Jonathan pointed out a few industrialists whom he knew by reputation.

“I would like to know whose handwriting this is,” she said.

Some were politicians. James Blaine was on the list, along with five other members of the House. No Senators.

But …

“Oh, Jonathan.”

He had found it already. Was staring. Trembling. The name was sixth down on page three, in that same beautiful hand: “Elise Hilliman.”

Not Brighton after all. His mother, not his uncle.

There was nothing to say, but she slipped an arm around his shoulders,
and drew him by instinct against her own: a gesture she had never performed for any man but Aaron.

“I should have known,” he whispered through gritted teeth. “Oh, Mother.”

“You had no way to know.”

“I had many ways to know.” Turning the page. “We have to finish.”

So they did, sitting very straight now, finishing the page—a reporter here, a lawyer there, the owner of a steel mill—and then, page four—

“Oh, Jonathan,” she said again.

“Abigail, I—I don’t know what to say.”

Not possible.

“
Potential
conspirators,” she breathed, as they stared together at the name. “Some of them must have said no.”

“We have to find out.”

III

They headed north, then watched the houses thin and the forests gather as the borrowed rig proceeded northwest along Massachusetts Avenue. There were boulders in the road, and the going was slow. There were fewer lamps the farther one moved from the center of things. Night shadows crowded the road. No other carriages were in evidence; no horses.

They were not being followed.

“Maybe your mother turned them down,” said Abigail. The shotgun was under the seat. The derringer was lying between them. “The list is potential conspirators. Your mother might never have been contacted. Or she might have said no.”

“Never. She hated Lincoln after my brother died.”

“But the risk—”

“Mother has never been one to worry about risk. She worries about revenge.” He was silent for a moment, watching the trees. Here and there, a wavery brightness was the lighted window of a distant house. The coach lamps along both sides of the carriage provided a choking, sooty illumination. “Let me tell you a story. You know that my older brother died in the war. I also have a younger brother. Calloway. Mother calls him her miracle child, because he was born when she forty-three. What nobody in the family ever mentions is that my father died when Mother was forty. About eight years ago, a Providence newspaper published
a tiny item in the gossip column—two sentences, no more—about the ‘miraculous birth’ of the youngest son of a prominent but unnamed Newport widow. Mother bought the paper, fired the staff, and flattened the building. She left the lot empty. She still owns the lot, and it’s still empty.” His eyes were very red. “Turn them down? Mother would join them because her toast was buttered wrong way up the day they asked.”

Abigail squeezed his hand; said nothing; reminded herself that, just as there were people in the world who had grown up loved, there were people who had grown up the other way around. Jonathan, despite his insistence that his family was merely “decently off,” had grown up with everything money could buy. But Abigail would not trade an hour of her childhood for a year of his.

“We are very near my school,” she said when she could no longer bear the silence.

“The Quaker school?”

She nodded, nervous excitement making the color rise girlishly in her cheeks. “On the original plan of the city, that bluff up ahead is supposed to hold the national cathedral. But nobody expects it to be built. Look how long it took them to put the new dome on the Capitol, and of course poor General Washington’s monument looks as if it will never be finished.” She laughed, lightly. “Anyway, my school is right down there, a little bit south of here. My sister attends now.”

They were turning right. The road flattened, and the land opened out. Tennally Town was farm country, with the occasional factory or warehouse sprinkled in.

“Why don’t you want to look in Stanton’s envelope?” he asked suddenly.

Abigail stiffened. “The pages are from a private diary, Jonathan. Surely you as a fellow gentleman—”

“You’re afraid of what you’ll find there, aren’t you? You’re afraid that the pages Rebecca stole may prove that Mr. Lincoln did indeed give serious consideration to establishing the Department of the Atlantic.” She looked away; said nothing. “Or is it the other fear? Are you worried that Stanton might have been a conspirator after all? Perhaps the rumors are even true, and Baker was poisoned. For investigating Stanton!”

“You are being very silly,” Abigail said.

“And you are being very secretive. Most of the time you’re bursting to tell me what you suspect.” Jonathan’s hands trembled as he drew in the rein. He nodded toward the frozen lane. “We have arrived,” he said.

The house was small and sedate, set back from the road, screened by trees. Another carriage stood in the driveway.

Jonathan slipped the derringer into his coat.

“Is that really necessary?” said Abigail.

“He may have a visitor.” Jonathan was scrutinizing windows and trees with an intensity she had not seen in him before: soldier’s eyes, she realized. “You should wait here.”

“No.”

“Abigail—”

“I am not staying out here by myself.”

“Very well.” He helped her down. They walked slowly up the path. Lights were burning in two lower windows. Jonathan pulled the bell rope, but kept his right hand near his jacket pocket.