The Secrets of Mary Bowser (36 page)

“My bones ache whatever I do or don’t. Ache even in my sleep. Ache no matter what awful-tasting things I drink or awful-smelling poultices I lay on,” he added, eyeballing me before I could even reach for the packet of prickly ash decoction I’d brought.

I tried to seem more sanguine than I truly was, eyeballing him right back and waiting for him to take a bite or two of the food I’d laid out, though I knew whole pharmacopeias could not remedy all that he suffered. “Weather this cold is hard on everybody,” I said. “But spring will be on us soon enough, you’ll feel better then.”

“Till summer comes, hot and bothersome. You in your spring now, you and Wilson both. Young and full of blooms. But I’m in winter for good. Last of the seasons a person gets.”

“Winters can turn mild, melt into a new spring without a person even noticing,” I reminded him as I kissed him farewell, not wanting to let on how his despondence gnawed at me.

Winter had yet to turn mild, I admitted to myself as I headed home. Crossing west along Broad Street, the cold gashed against me, numbness in my toes and chilblains in my hands. I pulled my neckcloth tighter as I passed through Devil’s Half-Acre.

A whimper, more animal than human, sounded from Silas Omohundro’s slave pens.

“Damn wench is froze in place.” A young pen-hand jabbed his toe at a rag-clad form on the ground. “Omohundro ain’t gonna care for no damaged merchandise.”

“Ain’t his merchandise,” replied his workmate, rubbing his hands together against the frosty air. “Just a runner caught outside town. Holding her for the bounty.”

“Maybe won’t be any to collect,” the younger man said. “Ain’t likely this one’ll make it through another night out here.”

Between the city’s crowding and the state’s inflation, Confederate clerks were so pinched that they were reduced to laying their heads down in whatever accommodation they could find. Every cell at Omohundro’s slave pen had long been rented over to these white men, leaving only the exposed yard for Omohundro’s stock of slaves.

“What it ain’t is ain’t your concern,” the older hand said. “Now help me get this wench up. He’s got someone coming by, gonna turn her in for the bounty, down to the Scuppernong River.”

“North Carolina? My cousin writ Yankees took them parts last week. Satan hisself couldn’t get through there now.”

The pen-hand jerked his shoulders back like he was proud to do a demon’s dirtywork. “What old man Omohundro say, this catcher’s mean as Satan, rich as Satan, too. Running slaves all over the South ever since the War started.”

One man is a slave to his lusts, another is a slave to greed, another a slave of ambition, and all are slaves to hope and fear.
There was nothing more hateful than making bounties off runaways, battered souls who’d gotten that much closer to freedom only to have it snatched from them. I tacitly cursed the slave-catcher. But before I could hurry off, I witnessed something that froze me in place just as surely as the long February night had frozen that slavewoman.

“Bi crivens! I told Silas to hae her ready. If you two canna get her to her feet, step aside for one what can.”

McNiven’s whip cracked the air within an inch of the woman’s face. He stormed over and grabbed her short nap of hair, yanking her to her feet. Omohundro’s hands unlocked the chain that held the woman to the pen. Wrenching her arm behind her, he pushed the slave through the gate. “Tell Silas I will be back within the week, with his bounty share.”

I shook myself into movement, meaning to scurry away before he saw me. But in the moment that I passed him, McNiven’s eyes met mine.

I spent the sixth anniversary of my mama’s death at her graveside, hoping she might have a word or two for me, of comfort or warning or plain old directive about what I’d witnessed at Devil’s Half-Acre the week before. But after passing the whole day without the slightest sign from her, I crossed out of the burying ground. As I made my way along the hard-packed dirt of Coutts Street, a man’s shadow came up from behind me. He caught my arm, pulling me round to face him.

“I been searching on you, lass. Found a use for you.”

I yanked myself free of McNiven’s grasp. “Like you found a use for that captured slavewoman?”

“Ay, a mighty ugly business, that. But it needed doing.”

“Dragging a fugitive back to a master never needs doing.” I spat the words at him.

“Union forces camp but ten miles from that plantation. I sent an agent to be looking for the slavewoman, and any others nearby what are wanting to escape. She is probably free again by now.”

“So why return her in the first place?”

“She was half starved and froze near to death in a slave pen here. If she be taken as Union contraband doun in North Carolina, she’ll be fed and clothed and maybe schooled some. Surely the slave be none the worse off for that.”

“And you are rather the better off.” I eyed the silk lapel on his new wool frock coat. He couldn’t have afforded such a fine garment a year ago, and in the interval clothing had grown ten times more expensive, thanks to the blockade.

“An operative need look the part he intends on playing, doun to the very silver o’ his buttons. As long as Omohundro and the rest believe me a slave-trader, it gives me means to rove about the Confederacy. ’Tis important for our work.”

“Our work is to free slaves,” I said. “Not trade in them.”

But McNiven answered me just as I’d been answering Wilson the whole year past. “If we want to win the bigger prize, we need be making a gamble or two along the way.”

Still, I wasn’t ready to shake off the risk to that fugitive. “You’re gambling with the lives of colored people.”

“And with none whiter than myself, for what the Confederates would do if they discover what I am really about.”

I weighed his words carefully. Hattie’s father had long entrusted McNiven with Railroad baggage. Mr. Jones’s own life had come safe, and only barely so, because of the Scotsman. And for nearly the whole year past, McNiven had set himself to living clandestine in Richmond, just as I had—without the pull that Papa’s presence had on me. The risk he took was every bit as real as my own.

I wasn’t sure I was ready to forgive the part he’d played at Omohundro’s. But still I asked, “What did you mean, when you said you have a use for me?”

“ ’Tis some work for our side, and you are just the one for it.”

“I already have work, in the prisons.”

“Bet can do such by herself. This will be something only you can do, for you are dark, and smart, and they never expect the two together. None will suspect you for copying out the things you hear and see for Mr. Lincoln’s army, when you be in the Gray House.”

The Gray House, Richmond slang for the Shockoe Hill mansion where Jefferson Davis lived. The building perched pelican sure above Butchertown, its back to most of the city. Since I had no call to pass down Clay Street, that rear wall was about all I ever saw of it. “Why would I be there?”

“Waiting on Varina Davis, what has run an ad in the
Enquirer
this very day, for a serving gal and maid. She maun be a cruel one, she canna keep free nor slave working for her long. But the slave she’s hired for from me will last the whole war through, I wager.”

It was one thing to play-act at serving Bet, who knew me free and educated. Who gave me both those things herself, when no one else in the world but Mama and Papa thought I deserved them. But to serve the First Lady of the Confederacy, cleaning and tending all day, was something else again. “So while you play the wealthy slave-trader, I’m to be the misused slave?”

“We’d not have much sense to try it the other way round, would we, lass?” Though McNiven wasn’t much for kindly gestures or comforting phrases, he added, “We maun be doing so, for the sake o’ them that canna yet do for themselves.”

I’d come back to Virginia with only the vaguest sense of what I was meant to do, had carved conviction from danger to secret the prisoners’ communications out to the Union, never doubting I’d set myself the proper course. That same surety told me now that McNiven was right—Bet could manage on her own in the prisons. Whether I could manage walking back into the lows and depths of slavery, I wasn’t nearly as certain. But I thought about the woman from Omohundro’s, and about Papa. About the millions of bondspeople that I’d been telling Wilson this war would free.

If my being a slave might hasten the day when Papa and countless others weren’t, I had to try my hand in the Gray House, whatever the risk might be.

I barely had time to take to the plan myself, before I was back home telling Wilson about it. And he made his opinion on it quite clear.

“How am I supposed to feel about my wife working as a slave to some white family?”

“I’m none too keen on it myself. But there’s a war on, and—”

He didn’t so much as let me finish. “Don’t start with all your
the war’s going to end slavery, Mr. Lincoln just doesn’t know it yet
business. I’ll believe that when it comes to pass, and not a moment before.”

“What if I mean to have a part in making it come to pass?” I put all the indignance and insistence I could muster into what I said out loud. But that was just blustery cover for what I felt deep inside, which was utter trepidation. Not trepidation over what it would be like to wait on the most powerful white man in all of the Confederacy. Trepidation my convictions might cost me Wilson, like they did Theodore. “I thought you loved me because I’m contrary enough to favor doing what’s right over doing what’s easy.”

“I do love you, more than I’ve ever loved any person on this earth. But can’t you see it’s hard for a man to have a wife he can’t protect?”

Looking into my dear husband’s eyes, I couldn’t help but see it. But I could see, too, that Wilson was no easy-smile Handsome Hinton, who adored me only so long as I was willing to be his adornment. “I love you, too. And it breaks my heart to think that though my mama and papa loved each other, they never could look after each other like we do, that so many slaves today still can’t.” I took his hand in mine. “I’m not loving you any less if I work to change that.”

“And I’m not loving you less if I don’t much care for all the worry you put me through when you do.”

We left it that way—neither of us quite satisfied, though at least we each begrudgingly understood the other.

Two mornings later, I had my first good look at the facade facing out from Clay Street and Twelfth. Square and plain, the house was built of gray stucco cut to look like masonry. Bigger but less comely than the Van Lew mansion, and likely to stink all summer long, with the stables set just behind a low wall on the side of the residence.

There wasn’t a soul in the yard, but as I passed through the servants’ entry into the basement, cries and yelps sounded off the whitewashed walls and brick floors. I followed the noise to an unornamented room where three olive-skinned children were shrieking at each other. The eldest, a girl of about seven, had porridge in her hair. Brandishing a lob of butter, she chased her two brothers around a long plank table. As they rounded the corner, the smaller of the boys careened into my legs, howling and flailing against me.

“Where is Nurse? Where is Nurse?” A tall woman in a purple broché morning dress appeared in the opposite doorway, shrilling out the question. Her mannish height and her coloring, as olive as the children’s, set her off from any Richmond matron I’d ever seen. Her eyebrows pinched in permanent glower, and her dark brown hair was pulled back from her face as severely as a plaited mane on a show horse. Though younger than Bet, she was already thick around the middle, with jowls that shook as she spoke. “I have told Nurse a hundred times that she is to keep you quiet while the president is in the house.”

The children scrambled to their places on a low wooden bench before the table. “Nurse says she has too much to do tending Billy, and we are to look after ourselves,” the older boy said.

“She has too much to do?” The woman scowled at the notion of an overworked servant. “The president has too much to do running the Confederacy, and I have too much to do running the household that runs the Confederacy, to have the president’s children tearing about like wild Comanches.”

The girl inspected a spoonful of porridge. “Yesterday you said we were as wild as African savages, Mother. Which is wilder?”

At the mention of African savages, Varina Davis took her first notice of me. “Who are you?”

Before I could answer, the older boy pushed the younger off the wooden bench, sending a creamer tumbling after him. I snatched up the crying child, using my apron to wipe the milk-white splatters from his face.

“She’s as fast on the cream as kitty,” the older boy said.

The observation set his sister whining. “I miss kitty. Why couldn’t we bring her to this dull old house?”

“Kitty could not be brought all the way from Brierfield to Montgomery and then here, as you have already been told. I will not have the president’s children complaining about that animal anymore.” The woman’s eyes bore hard on me as I gathered up shards of porcelain and set them on the table, then passed her the slip of paper McNiven had written out.

“Marse say you hired for me.”

“Hired, indeed. These Richmonders should be glad to give their servants to tend the president’s house, instead of charging us a fortune for such barest of necessities. Richmond grows rich off the Confederacy, while the president himself grows poor.”

I marked the yards of periwinkle silk ribbon that crisscrossed her full skirt. The trim on her jacket alone must have cost more than an army private or a government clerk made in two months’ time.

She tucked McNiven’s note into the clip on her chatelaine. “Go on up to the parlor, you’ll find the rest of them there.” As I passed toward the doorway, she asked, “What do they call you?”

“Mary.”

The girl wriggled along the bench toward her younger brother. “That’s aunt’s name, and Mrs. Chesnut’s as well.”

“Indeed, it will not do to have a negro named Mary about,” her mother said. “We shall call her Molly.”

I hadn’t even set to work for the Davises, and already I felt as used-up as my crumpled, cream-soaked apron. A mistress who took every other sentence to bray about how important her husband is. A gaggle of children competing to be the most ill behaved. A nursemaid no one could find. And not even my own name to see me through. I ticked off all I had to contend with, as I made my way through the basement and up to the dining room, then passed through the entry hall to the parlor.