The Lincoln Conspiracy (25 page)

Snapping upright and pulling her sheets around her shoulders, Mrs. Lincoln accused Fiona of deliberately bringing the diary to
cause her pain and slapping at the cloth that Fiona was using to wipe her head. Lizzy asked her to stop screaming, but she continued until her small, pale, fleshy hands were balled into fists.

Just as quickly as the widow had flown into a rage, she stopped.

“May I speak, Mrs. Lincoln?” Fiona asked.

“You may.”

“I only returned the diary to you because it was rightfully yours. I had no other intention.”

“I know, my dear, I know. I become … I become other than myself at times. Please forgive me.”

“You have endured many burdens, ma’am.”

“We nearly escaped our burdens, my husband and I. He wanted to build a home in California when we left the White House, but I insisted that Boston would be better for us. It would have been more genteel. He, of course, would have followed my wishes.”

The widow broke down again, and Lizzy and Fiona let her weeping run its course this time. When she had recomposed herself, Mrs. Lincoln placed her hand on Fiona’s.

“I would like to know more about you, my dear—what you do and where you are from.”

“I was born twenty-one years ago in Oswego, New York, to extraordinary parents. They were abolitionists and freethinkers, and they raised me with an education and with opinions of my own.”

“I was raised with an education, too, in Kentucky, but I was not encouraged to have opinions.”

“Mrs. Lincoln, are you going to let Mrs. McFadden tell you her story or not?” Lizzy asked. “I recall you asked her about herself, ma’am.”

Mrs. Lincoln fell silent as the train rumbled along, from Pittsburgh toward Youngstown and Akron on its way to Chicago, and Fiona spun her history. Her family owned an apple farm—they had cows and chickens on it, too—that her mother, Barbara, oversaw down to every last bushel of fruit and pail of milk; Fiona and her two sisters had worked on the farm as children until—magically it
seemed—they no longer had to work. Fiona had been eight years old when her family’s circumstances elevated. Her father, Arthur, a country doctor, had invested in land and, to his great delight, in a boring little shipping company at the port of Oswego. The port, and Arthur Linton’s investment, boomed when the Erie Canal and the winding skein of railroads linked to the New York Central turned Oswego into a sprawling, bumping transportation hub.

Fiona remembered winters of cascading snowstorms and winds that whipped her wool leggings as she skated on the frozen canal; she remembered her parents’ laughter and her sisters’ games; and she remembered piles of books stacked in the corners and on the tables of almost every room in their house because the bookcases were overflowing.

Books were the family’s only indulgence. Even after they came into money, the Lintons encouraged their daughters to live modestly, and the family never moved out of the simple frame house on a hill surrounded by orchards, the house where all of their daughters were born. They expanded two of the rooms off the back of the house and used them as study halls for the girls, who were instructed by the finest tutors the Lintons could hire.

“I was fortunate enough to grow up in a part of the state singing with reform,” Fiona told Mrs. Lincoln. “The movement for abolition was strong, as was an open-mindedness about religion and the women’s movement. We had a grand meeting for women’s rights not too far from us in Seneca Falls when I was just four years old, and my parents insisted that I be taught and raised in an environment of equality and progress.”

“I have little use for these women on the move,” said Mrs. Lincoln. “I am from old stock and a noble culture that finds women more effective if they press their interests quietly and through the arts of the home and ministrations to their husbands.”

“Mrs. Lincoln, ma’am, you’re taking the conversation into your lap again,” Lizzy said.

The widow fell silent, and Fiona continued on. Her parents, ascribing
to the philosophy of Amelia Bloomer of the nearby town of Homer, had encouraged their daughters to wear comfortable clothing as young teenagers, so Fiona wore dresses only to social functions. As their education continued, Fiona emerged as the brightest of the three Linton girls. Her father told her she had a keen mind; her sisters teased that she was merely keen to have a mind. Such was her parents’ commitment that when she was seventeen, they sent her to Syracuse Medical College so that she could train to be a doctor. The thirty-nine-week course cost $165, and Fiona threw herself into her studies, set on learning all that modern medicine had to offer.

After Fiona earned her certification, Arthur Linton had taken her into his practice, but father and daughter soon discovered that no matter how much upstate New Yorkers convened to preach the notions of equality, few of them were ready to place their faith and their health in the hands of a female doctor. Arthur convinced his daughter to playact at being a nurse, but as the months wore on, Fiona bridled at the arrangement. When she turned eighteen, she decided to be of service in the War Between the States, where the demand for physicians was so great that surely she could practice as a doctor, even if Oswego wouldn’t have her.

One of her predecessors in college, and a mentor, Mary Edwards Walker, had followed this path and introduced Fiona to Dr. Gross, who helped train Fiona and found her medical work at the hospital fashioned inside the Patent Office in Washington. She’d had the joy of meeting her husband in Washington, but also discovered that the men leading the war effort were no more willing to embrace a female doctor than the good people of Oswego.

“What of your husband?” Mrs. Lincoln asked. “How did you meet him?”

“We were introduced,” Fiona said. “We were both new to Washington and we both knew Alexander Gardner. He invited us to a dinner.”

“Mr. Gardner was much admired by my husband. And what convinced you that your husband was someone you would marry?”

Fiona paused at this: a simple question without a simple answer. Although she was barely acquainted with Mrs. Lincoln, the moment offered her a chance to maintain and build upon this small bond. In ways, from what she heard tell of the president, he and Temple were similar men, though Mr. Lincoln was blessed to be without Temple’s impatience and occasional furies. Each man had big, strong hands—the hands of workers. The president was taller than her husband by two inches, but Temple still usually towered over those around him. Like the president, he had knowing gray eyes.

Fiona remembered how pained Temple had been when word of the assassination first reached them, how the anguish had creased his eyes. He’d gone to his little shelf of books and come back to her with a ragged copy of
Julius Caesar
, flipping through the pages until he found the passage he wanted, which he read to her aloud.

Still, similarities were not familiarities, and Fiona hesitated an instant longer before deciding to share her affections for Temple with Mrs. Lincoln.

“He gave me a sense of security and belonging that I never understood I hadn’t had before in my life until I had it with him,” Fiona responded to Mrs. Lincoln. “At his core he is true and good and resolute as an oak, yet kind to me beyond measure. He is a wonderful and patient listener, and he can fill me with laughter. I feel utterly well met and well matched in Temple. I am devoted to him.”

“He has no flaws?”

“He does.”

“Well, then?”

“I find it harder to discuss his flaws than his strengths, I’m afraid.”

“Mrs. McFadden.”

“Ma’am?”

“These men are all scarred. They bring their bad to us with their
good—as sons and as husbands. The boardinghouse owner, she had a son.”

“Mrs. Surratt.”

“Yes, her. Her son is said to be a confidant of my husband’s murderer, but it is only the mother they have imprisoned. And me, here now on this train and abandoned by my husband—the entire world feels like a prison to me. My son Robert aspires to keep it as such. I tell you, these men visit as many ills upon us as they do joys. Perhaps more.”

“My husband gambles and is loose with money,” Fiona said. “And I fear that he doesn’t want me to bear him children.”

“You are steady with your passions and with money?”

“I am far steadier with vice and with money than my husband, yes.”

“You anchor him as my husband anchored me,” the widow replied. “You and my Abraham have interior discipline. He grew weary of me many times. Are you weary of your husband?”

“No, I am not weary of him. I am unsure of him.”

“Why does he not favor children?”

“He is an orphan. He also feels constrained by normal living.”

“Yet you are bound to him.”

“Am I?”

“We all are, my dear. Bound to men. It is the way of the world. What measures do you know of that he favors in you?”

“He said he was enthralled by my eyes and my love of medicine. He said I challenged him and that being with me gave him a sense of purpose. And he respected my opinions!”

“Yes, yes, yes. Opinions. Yes, yes. Oh, I fear my opinions were just a lashing for Mr. Lincoln. Yes, yes. Like a whipping.”

The widow broke down crying again, pulling the sheet up to her face and moaning softly. Robert looked in from the parlor car, saw that his mother was sobbing, and closed the door.

As the door shut, Mrs. Lincoln stopped crying, pulled the sheet
from her face, and glared at the spot where Robert once stood. Her voice steadied and she sat up, transformed into a woman so cool and deliberate as to be unrecognizable as the wailing, damaged creature huddling under her sheets only a moment before.

“The lawyer overseeing my husband’s estate extends me only a hundred and thirty dollars each month for my living expenses. I stand to inherit almost forty thousand dollars, but until then I am entirely dependent on the character of our lawyer and Robert’s support. And Robert,” she said, turning toward Fiona, “wants that money for himself.”

“Ma’am, do you really want to speak about money issues around Fiona?” Lizzy asked.

“I want her—I want everyone—to understand why I don’t trust my son. I will speak of it on the streets if it suits me, and I will speak of it with perfect strangers.”

“Ma’am, don’t you—”

“I also have debts of seventy thousand dollars from my four years in the President’s House. Decorating. Clothing. I have much to attend to. Yes, yes, yes.”

“Were you happy in the President’s House, Mrs. Lincoln?” Fiona asked.

“Only in the beginning, in the first months we were there. But we have other paths to occupy us now, and other things to talk about. Yes. Other matters. Tell me about your husband.”

“I do believe that he is the best man I have ever met; he is my partner and I am his. And he is a detective with the Metropolitan Police Department.”

“Is that how he came to possess my diary?”

Fiona explained the fighting at the B&O to Mrs. Lincoln and that amid the brawling, Temple had come upon her diary quite accidentally. The widow pulled her journal from beneath the blankets and began flipping through it.

“Did he read through all of this?”

“No, Mrs. Lincoln. I wouldn’t have allowed that. He said there were many letters and entries in your journal that he did not explore once I raised the matter of your privacy with him.”

“What are his interests in my diary?”

“I believe he cares about the railroads, Mrs. Lincoln, but beyond that I confess to not having a very complete sense of what exactly it is that he is pursuing.”

“Railroads. Yes, yes, yes. We mustn’t talk of railroads when Robert nears. My husband and he were divided over the railroad men. Our Robert began trooping them through the President’s House like salesmen in our last year there.”

Mrs. Lincoln sobbed again, and her head drooped into her bedding. Fiona slipped her hand into Mrs. Lincoln’s, but the widow didn’t seem to notice. A moment later Mrs. Lincoln began flipping through her diary, fanning the pages so rapidly that Fiona thought some of them might tear. When Mrs. Lincoln found the section she wanted, she plucked out a letter that had been pressed between two pages and was written in the late president’s hand. She studied it at length, moving her head back and forth in small bursts and shaping the words she was scanning with her lips. She paused, read more, stopped, then looked at Lizzy and Fiona and began reading:

Mrs. Lincoln looked up from the letter, awaiting a response. None came. Fiona was uncertain what to say and looked to Lizzy, who was equally at a loss. As the train rumbled along, passing into the western flats of Pennsylvania, the widow stared back quietly at Fiona and Lizzy, then slapped the letter and her arms down on her lap.

“Don’t you understand? It’s to Mr. Scott!”

“But who is Mr. Scott?” Fiona asked.

“He is Thomas Scott. He works closely with Mr. Stanton as the assistant war secretary, and he was a railroad man before Mr. Stanton and my husband called him to Washington,” she said, her voice slipping into a low, breathy whisper as she leaned forward in her bed toward Fiona and Lizzy.