The Secrets of Mary Bowser (51 page)

The arc of burns along my neck and arm felt like a thousand hot needles, each peppery point digging deeper as I made my way to the dining room, where Jeff Davis huddled with half a dozen advisers. They’d taken the china and glassware from the étagères, arranging the pieces across the rosewood table to demarcate the positions of the Union and Confederate forces. The porcelain punch bowl stood in the middle of one cluster, representing Atlanta. At the center of another cluster was the silver and crystal berry bowl, Richmond. One of the men adjusted regiments of goblets and corps of saucers, while Burton Harrison read out a dispatch regarding Joe Johnston’s latest clash with General Sherman.

As I hovered about the room refilling glasses, my burns grew harder to bear. I stepped away to grip the sideboard as often as I could, fearful I might faint outright.

“If the mission succeeds,” I heard Custis Lee say, “it will be an end to Lincoln for once and all.”

Those words caught me quick. Forcing myself to listen through the nauseating fog of pain, I struggled to make out what Confederate plotting I’d missed.

“The Union failed at the very same gambit,” Aunt Piss said.

The other men glanced nervously at Jeff Davis while Custis Lee answered, “The Union sent but two thousand men, relying on the command of that imbecile Dahlgren. Even as we speak, Jubal Early is amassing ten thousand of our finest troops, along with munitions to arm all the Confederates that we will liberate from the Federal prisons.”

Rushes of pain swept across my seared flesh, as though the hooves of those ten thousand horses were thudding along each sharp pepper-point of my burns. James Seddon, who’d held the post of Confederate secretary of war nearly as long as his three predecessors put together, leaned forward to pluck a berry from the bowl at the center of the table. He suffered from strabismus, and his lazy eye seemed to linger on the tabletop, even as he fixed the other on Aunt Piss. “So long as Grant does not suspect Early is riding toward Washington, the Union capital and its president will be ours for the picking.”

Despite all the poultices of beeswax and flaxseed resin I laid on my putrefied skin, that whole week just about any labor rubbed my burns raw. Sophronia and Hortense suffered right along with me, slaving extra hard to make up for my slowness. So long as they worked beside me in Jeff Davis’s office, I stayed as far as I could from his papers, lest my curiosity betray me. Mid-day Friday, as we wrang out rags to wash the windowpanes, Queen Varina, still not recovered from delivering a bawling baby daughter four days earlier, shouted for Hortense.

Hortense sucked her teeth and disappeared into the adjacent bedchamber, nodding to me when she returned. “Get the cook to put up a basket a whatever she got for Marse Davis’ dinner, you carry it over to him.” She dropped her voice. “Queen Varina think he too stupid to eat if she ain’t up to feed him herself.”

When I stepped out of the Gray House, the thick July air felt nearly intoxicating. My head echoed from the preternatural quiet of Capitol Square, which stood empty in the noontime heat. White Richmond’s hunger and discontent had grown far worse since the previous year’s Bread Riot. But by now the residents were too weak and wasted to riot. No one even patrolled the Square to enforce the prohibition against negroes crossing the green.

Still and all, a soldier stood guard outside the central archway of the Customs House, and others were stationed on every landing of the stair. I lifted my basket to each one and muttered, “For Marse Davis, from the Gray House,” keeping my eyes low as they waved me past.

When I reached the office that ran the length of the top floor, Burton Harrison gestured for me to set the basket on the massive desk, not even pausing in his address to Jeff Davis, who stood gazing out the window. “We have the report from Early’s scouts today. He’s ridden clear to Winchester with no resistance. He should ford the Potomac within the week.”

Davis kept his back to the room, as though searching the window for a glimpse of his far-off lieutenant general. “A force of ten thousand men riding across Virginia, and Grant without the slightest knowledge of it. Truly, it seems too great a miracle even for us to hope for.”

“Any miracle is but the will of the Lord,” Harrison answered. “He has sustained the Confederacy, and now it seems He sees fit to end Lincoln’s tyranny at last.”

Though I fought to keep my features blank and my gait steady as I left the room, what I heard had me foundering. I’d taken even greater care than usual when I prepared my report the Monday previous. By Tuesday morning, what information I had of Early’s planned attack on Lincoln should have been on its way out of the city. With Union troops only a dozen miles away, it would take no more than one day, two at the most, for the message to reach Grant’s own eyes. Surely he had it by now. What could be keeping him from acting on my intelligence—and what would the price of ignoring it be?

For three years, Mr. Lincoln had prosecuted the war with a constancy that awed even his foes. The Union had lost far more men than the Confederates, was losing still more with every week of Grant’s campaign, Unconditional Surrender sacrificing his own men corpse by corps. But Lincoln never wavered in his determination to preserve the Union, though it might cost deaths another hundred thousandfold. The would-be Confederate assassins knew that without Lincoln in command, Northern politicians might be done enough with death to choose peace over victory. And if they did, the Emancipation Proclamation would have no more force than a fistful of sand tossed into a hurricane wind.

Through every bloody season of the war, the Confederacy had clung to slavery even over the lives of its own sons. If Lincoln’s successor accepted a peaceful dissolution of the Union, the Confederate States of America would never free their slaves.

As Bet pulled her gig up beside the darkened cabin that night, I gagged at the sickly stench of rotting fruit. The people of Richmond were slowly starving, yet here was some farmer letting his crop molder in the field. Bet didn’t seem to pay the least mind to this wonderment, though hunger must have pinched at her stomach just as constantly as at mine.

I’d gone to her as soon as my day’s labor was done in the Gray House, figuring I could count on her devotion to Lincoln. Sure enough, she shared my consternation over how Monday’s report could go unheeded this long. But relieved as I was when she harnessed up her horse and rode us out to where we could get word to the Union command, still I braced myself for whatever she might do, given how reckless she’d grown.

Jumping down from the gig, she secured the reins to the split rail fence, strode to the door of the cabin, and let out a series of short whistles.

The door cracked just wide enough for a hard voice inside to ask, “What do you want?”

Bet answered with her usual self-pride. “I am a lady from Richmond whom Sharpe knows well.”

The door shut, and we heard murmurings inside, low and unintelligible. A bearded face hovered at the cabin window and then disappeared. The door opened again, a pale hand gesturing us inside.

The three men occupying the little room were so scrawny I could tell none of them did a farm man’s physical labor. The crop gone to waste in the field wasn’t their concern. Whether the farm was abandoned, seized, or willingly lent, I couldn’t say. But I guessed from their wary expressions that they occupied the farmstead solely because it sat halfway between the Confederate capital and General Grant’s latest headquarters.

“Who is this Sharpe fellow?” one of the men asked.

“This is no time for nonsense play.” Bet spoke as though the men were her servants, and it were her burden to order them about. “I am a true Unionist, and you know as well as I what that means to Colonel Sharpe.” She let out how Sharpe, Butler, and the rest before them had been the glad recipients of the correspondence she left at the edge of her family’s market farm, farther up the Osborne Turnpike.

The men showed no flicker of acknowledgment, though one of the three likely rode her missives out to City Point himself.

“A message was sent earlier this week, that we fear has been apprehended.” Bet nudged me forward. “Tell them, Mary.”

I didn’t much care to be ordered to speak in front of strange white men. Searching for my voice in the close air of the cabin, I was as nervous as the day I made my first recitation to Miss Douglass. And even less expectant of an approving audience than with my stern schoolmistress.

“Jubal Early is riding north through the Shenandoah with ten thousand men, to attack Washington.”

The men stayed quiet and still. They might have been a father and his two grown sons, the way they shared the same stony semblance.

“Early is within a week of Washington.” Bet’s voice turned high and tight, she was so agitated at their silence. “Grant must be informed.”

“General Grant is quite aware of Early’s location,” the man who’d peered out the window at us said. “He is facing Grant’s troops, before Petersburg. Along with the rest of Lee’s army.”

“No.” I needed no prodding now, knowing how important it was to convince them. “He is past Winchester already. He means to kill Lincoln.”

The man sneered, not at me but at Bet. “A Southerner comes to us from Richmond, driving a finer horse than many a Confederate cavalryman has these days, to bring news of Early that contradicts Grant’s own observations.” He grabbed her arm, twisting it behind her back until she cried out. “Do the Confederates believe we will fall for such deception? Do they send women and niggers to lead us astray?”

Another of the men yanked me from behind. “Did they tell you what would happen if you were suspected?” he breathed into my ear. “What happens to Confederate spies who are caught by the Federals?”

“Arrest us, then,” I said, “only tell General Grant to send troops against Early. Once they find him, you can free us.”

“I’m not about to send Federal forces on a wild goose chase, weakening our line and giving the Confederates a chance to break the siege at Petersburg. Or to tell General Grant he is wrong, because some ignorant darky appearing out of the night says so.”

“She is not ignorant,” Bet insisted. “She is—”

Hoofbeats thundering toward the cabin cut her off. The rider jumped down just outside the door, not bothering to whistle or knock before he pushed his way in. Shouting his news before he was even fully inside.

“ ’Tis a mercy I hae reached you at last. I am riding two days and nights, over the Blue Ridge from Mount Jackson. Ten thousand rebels came through the very hamlet, telling that they were going on to Washington.”

McNiven didn’t let out a flicker of recognition for me or Bet. He just stood more wild-eyed than I’d ever seen him, as the older man asked, “You are sure of this?”

“As sure as the beating o’ my own heart, rapid grown from journeying fifty hours with nary a rest, to bring the news.” McNiven held out a sealed report.

The man tore open the packet and skimmed the page. “Grant will get this before dawn,” he promised McNiven. He barely took time to order his comrades to let us go, before he stormed out the cabin door and disappeared toward the barn.

“How fortuitous that Thomas arrived just when he did.” We’d ridden in silence for the first mile back to Richmond, McNiven slowing his horse to keep pace with Bet’s gig. But now Bet seemed eager to converse, pleased as she was with the excitement of the evening. “It was most exceptional, don’t you think?”

“Nothing too exceptional about being called a nigger and a darky.” I was more than a little piqued that she could overlook such a thing.

She bristled stiff beside me. “The burden of race prejudice is a terrible one, as we both know. Once the threat to the Union has been put down, surely that grave problem will be addressed.”

I was ready to address it right there and then. “Maybe you believe that. But I’ve seen enough race prejudice among Unionists, Northerners, even Quakers, that I can’t agree.”

She reined Frances Burney to a halt and turned to face me. “Race prejudice is nothing more than ignorance, something all people, white and colored, should and will be taught to overcome. Surely you know that.”

I was in no mood for her telling me what I knew. So I bit my tongue, like I’d seen my mama do a thousand times. Mama who’d taught me that anyone trying to talk sense to a fool just makes himself a fool as well. And a winded fool at that.

Unsatisfied with my silence, Bet turned to McNiven. “Don’t you concur that once the Union is preserved and the scourge of slavery removed, race prejudice will be eliminated?”

“I canna predict what is to come. But for now I ken that what be most easeful is to show people the very thing they want to see.”

McNiven’s bay snorted and pawed the ground, as if to agree. The horse hadn’t settled well into the slow pace of our travel, and he seemed even more restless now that we’d stopped entirely.

Not at all like a horse that had been ridden hard for two days across the Blue Ridge.

Watching the eager hoof, I realized it wasn’t a damn bit of fortuity that McNiven had turned up at that cabin. It was a bamboozlement.

I looked hard at McNiven. “How did you know where we might be?” I asked.

“ ’Tis my work to know what passes ’tween Confederate and Union lines, lass. The two of you were not so hard to track.”

Track. That word put me in mind of how slave-catchers hunted negroes down with dogs. It didn’t lighten the unyielding truth that already darkened my spirits: McNiven had shown the Federals the thing they wanted to see—a white man with a report purportedly from some garrison commander out in the Shenandoah—while Bet and I might have wasted away in prison without persuading them to trust my word. “So I should be glad a white liar is believed when a colored intelligence agent, ready to swear on her life, isn’t?”

“Them what did not mind your words might just as well mind mine, though yours be true and mine false. ’Tis a thing neither for us to be glad nor sorry on, only to act upon as we maun.” He softened his voice. “The wisest soul is one what takes a curse and disparagement, and makes an advantage o’ them, as you have showed these last years.”