Unholy Fire (6 page)

“You have my invitation to leave,” I said.

“I'll be leaving soon enough,” he said, puffing on his cigar and blowing the smoke in my direction. “And you're coming with me.”

I laughed in his face.

“You should be ashamed of yourself, slacking here while boys with serious wounds are lying in dog beds,” were his next words.

“You have no right!” I blazed back at him.

“So you had a small intestinal complaint,” he said, without a hint of humor. “Is the army supposed to beg for forgiveness before you to return to duty like a man?”

I saw that he was trying to bait me and held my tongue.

“I have an honest job for you,” he said.

“I'm not looking for a job,” I said, sitting up to see him in better light.

“The choice is yours,” he replied. “You can also be arrested for dereliction of duty”—his eyes bored into my mine—“among other charges.”

In spite of his Falstaffian bulk, I saw now that he was neither fat nor dissolute. Deep-chested and broadly built, his gigantic head had an air of distinction to it, and his restless gray eyes glinted with intelligence. There was an air of authority to him, perhaps a faint echo of ruling blood.

“Who are you?” I said.

“Ahh … you would pluck out the heart of my mystery,” he responded.

“Then go to hell,” I growled, regardless of the consequences.

“My name is Valentine Burdette,” he said, suddenly serious. “I work for General Marsena Patrick, the provost marshal general of the Army of the Potomac. We deal with thieves, murderers, and deserters.”

“You've finally caught up with me then,” I said, sarcastically.

He grinned once more, and deeply furrowed lines etched the corners of his eyes and mouth. I noticed that his long, high-bridged nose was canted over to one side as if someone had hit it repeatedly. With his personality, it wasn't difficult to imagine why.

“There are men seeking to profit from the Union and to destroy it by their actions. It is our job to make sure they are not successful. We also investigate corruption in the delivery to the army of substandard military stores and equipment that has already cost many soldiers their lives.”

“Why me?” I said.

“Why not you?”

I shook my head in disbelief. None of it made sense, at least as far as it affected me.

“The army takes care of its heroes,” he said then.

“I'm no hero,” I said.

“Some others think differently. Let's just leave it at that.”

“And what do you do, Colonel?” I said.

“Thank you for the military courtesy. You can see how important military etiquette is to me,” he replied.

“Yes,” I said, glancing once more at his atrocious uniform.

“I, Lieutenant McKittredge, am a trial lawyer, and a very good one,” he added in a resonant voice that he probably used to good effect on juries. “I know you've been through a lot … but no more than thousands of other unlucky men in this war. Now I have need of someone like you for an important job. You'll just have to trust me on that.”

“I have no qualifications for an important job,” I said.

“Yes, you do,” he came right back.

“What are my qualifications?”

“Before I tell you, I have a question. Are you addicted to opium?”

“No,” I said, looking straight into his eyes and lying.

“All right,” he answered, after a moment's pause. “Now, let's discuss your qualifications. Are you honest?”

“In most things.”

“Do you have common sense?”

“Sometimes.”

“Are you able to write a declarative sentence?”

“Yes,” I said, suppressing a grin.

“You have all the qualifications I'm looking for. Now I have no more time to waste. Are you coming with me?”

I found myself nodding at him.

“What do they call you?”

“Kit,” I said.

“You can call me Val,” he said, as I began gathering up my few belongings in a paper sack. I thought about the pint of laudanum that I had hidden the night before behind the ward privy and immediately regretted my decision. My mind started racing to figure out some reason to explain why I couldn't leave after all.

“You have everything you need in here,” he said, picking up my sack and waiting for me to move past him. As I walked out of the chicken roost for the last time, I saw Walter Clapp preparing his mice troupe for its matinee performance.

“Good luck, Kit,” he called out.

“Good luck to you, too, Walter,” I said.

Outside, Colonel Burdette motioned to two soldiers who were sitting on the driver's box of a small hansom carriage that was waiting near the door. A moment later we were seated in the back of it.

“To the asylum!” shouted Burdette.

I assumed he was making a joke.

C
HAPTER
T
HREE

The Carriage came out of dense woods and emerged onto the Maryland heights above Washington City. Below us, military encampments covered the landscape to the east as far as the eye could see. There were a dozen fortified redoubts, each sprouting scores of cannons. An intricate network of trenches and elevated rifle pits connected all the forts together. To the south, a great stone bridge spanned the Potomac River.

After spending the entire winter in hospital, it was exciting to see that spring had actually arrived. On both sides of the road, wild dogwoods were alive with white blossoms, and the bright pink redbuds dazzled the eye.

In the distance, there were several massive buildings. I recognized the highest one as the Capitol Building, its dome still only half complete. Then the carriage descended from the heights, coming out on a road that ran alongside a shallow, marshy canal. The canal meandered eastward, and we followed it into the city.

The first thing that struck me about our capital was the smell. One source of the stink became evident when we rode by the carcasses of several horribly bloated horses floating on the surface of the canal. They looked like they had been there for some time and were covered by a horde of flies and insects.

“Behold, our Athens along the Potomac,” said Valentine Burdette.

The smell got worse as we went along. At times the color of the canal was actually yellow, like a gigantic flow of infected mucous. It was as wide as a small river, maybe sixty yards across. Along the opposite bank, we began to pass makeshift tent camps interspersed with roadhouses, saloons, sawmills, warehouses, and towering mounds of coal and firewood.

A monstrous mechanical contraption on wheels came groaning toward us from one of the wooden bridges that spanned the canal. Pulled along by a tired, sway-backed mule, its cargo was another dead horse. The animal was riding on its back with its legs extended upward in the air, suspended by a block and tackle from the timber framework above the cart.

“Twenty dollars says I know exactly where that horse is going,” said Colonel Burdette, and I had no doubt he was right.

We rode past the president's mansion, where a dozen sentries lounged at their posts. The grounds of the mansion seemed more befitting a prison yard than the home of the president. Unlike the carefully trimmed parks in Cambridge, the grass was as high as my ankle, and the flowerbeds were choked with weeds. The mansion itself was badly in need of a coat of paint.

Then we turned onto a broad avenue, and suddenly the Capitol Building loomed up ahead of us, high on the far hill, completely dominating the landscape. Traffic now came toward us in a constant stream of drays, farm carts, hansom cabs, and military traffic. An artillery battery roared past along the cobbled section of the roadway, creating a formidable din. Behind it came a horse-drawn omnibus. In addition to the passengers inside, there were another dozen people lying or sitting on the roof, most of them clinging to a low railing that ran around the edge. They were all black.

“So much for the equality of the races,” said Colonel Burdette, caustically.

The north side of the avenue was filled with important brick buildings, including hotels, restaurants, and fine shops. The other side boasted an unbroken vista of dingy saloons, weed-filled open lots, and decrepit rooming houses. Street peddlers shouted their wares on every corner. A large sow lay sprawled in one of the doorways.

The carriage turned into one of the side streets, and we rode north for another mile or so, passing wood-framed row houses, small shops, and livery stables, until the buildings thinned out and gave way to patches of open land where cattle stood munching at hayracks.

Just when I was beginning to wonder if the whole strange journey wasn't part of an opium-inspired dream, I spied another massive building ahead of us. It was located in a tree park and surrounded by an eight-foot-high brick wall. Armed sentries stood guard at the iron-gated entrance.

We came to a stop long enough for one of the sentries to glance inside the coach. Upon seeing Colonel Burdette, he saluted and waved us forward. As we rolled past the iron gates, I noticed a sign engraved in the high brick wall that read:
WASHINGTON ASYLUM FOR THE MENTALLY AFFLICTED
.

“So this is where you're taking me,” I said, downcast at the thought that I was to be finally committed because of my addiction. I looked up to see Colonel Burdette grinning at me.

“Space in the nation's capital is at a premium, Lieutenant McKittredge,” he said, as we arrived at a brick-sided entrance portico. “This is the headquarters of the provost marshal general of the Army of the Potomac.”

It was a forbidding fortress of a place with iron bars covering all the windows on the first and second floors. There were three separate wings to the main building. One wing still served its intended purpose as a hospital for the insane. The others had been converted into office space for the Provost Marshal General Department. Part of our wing also contained several convalescent suites for wounded, high-ranking officers.

The dark, cavernous halls were filled with soldiers rushing in all directions, their boot heels clattering on the polished oak floors. Hand-lettered signs were tacked onto the door of each office identifying the activities being conducted inside. Colonel Burdette escorted me to a small room in the middle of a long corridor on the second floor. The barred windows let in very little natural light. The principal illumination came from a gas lamp mounted below the ceiling.

There were two desks in the room. A lawyer assigned to the Judge Advocate General's Office occupied the first one. His name turned out to be named Harold Tubshawe, and he was very stout, with a ruddy cherubic face. Perhaps to compensate for the fact that he was prematurely bald, he had cultivated a luxuriant beard.

It then being Saturday, Colonel Burdette informed me that on Monday morning, I would begin conducting background investigations into pending court-martial cases to determine which ones warranted prosecution by the judge advocate general. Only the most serious cases required trained lawyers, he said. The rest were dealt with in trials presided over by regular officers who served on rotating adjudication boards.

“I'm assigning you five cases to start with,” said Colonel Burdette, handing me a batch of file folders. I scanned the cover sheets. Four of them involved enlisted men who had left their military units without proper authorization. In the fifth case, a federal paymaster was suspected of embezzling two hundred dollars. None of them seemed remotely important.

“Take the files home with you,” he said, after providing me with a set of keys for the doors and file cupboards. “Be prepared to act on them as I direct you on Monday.”

I remembered then that I did not have a home.

“I've taken the liberty of securing a room for you at Mrs. Warden's,” he said, as if again divining my thoughts. “It is a pestilential hole by official Washington standards, but a definite step up from your chicken shed in Glen Echo.”

Mrs. Warden's turned out to be an old, sagging frame house in a small mew near Lafayette Square. Colonel Burdette accompanied me there in his carriage, alighting just long enough to escort me inside and introduce me to Mrs. Warden, the proprietor. It was obvious from his greeting that they were well acquainted, but neither made mention of how or why. She was about sixty years old, with mocking eyes and a sturdy frame.

“Well, I'm glad to see a young officer who doesn't favor mutton chops and chin whiskers,” were her first words. “Give me a clean-shaven man every time to see if he has character in his face.”

“I believe he will benefit from your ministering soul, as black as it is, Ella,” said Colonel Burdette, turning to leave, “that and your prowess with butter and chocolate.”

His parting words to me were, “She was born in the garret, but to the kitchen bred.”

I understood his import after sitting down to supper an hour later. First, however, she showed me to my room, which was on the top floor of the house and looked out onto the roof of a small livery stable. It was very close in the room, and when I raised the window to let in some fresh air, I could hear voices coming from the room directly below mine. A man and woman were arguing, their words indistinct. Mrs. Warden heard them as well.

“The Masseys,” she said. “Mrs. Massey is twenty-three; her husband is fifty-one. She is in love with Captain Spellman, who lives on the first floor. She doesn't think anyone else knows. Of course, everyone in the house knows, with the exception of Mr. Massey.”

I agreed to pay her four dollars per week for the room and an additional fifty cents per day for my morning and evening meals. That proved to be a sound investment. Mrs. Warden and a hired girl served the meals family-style around a large dining table in the front parlor. That first night the main course consisted of an Irish stew served from an enormous tureen. She had eight boarders aside from me, including two aging civil servants, an Italian vegetable grocer, and a blind man with shoulder-length silver hair. I sat between Mr. Bliss, a linguistics expert at the Library of Congress, and a lovely young woman with a French accent who turned out to be the notorious Mrs. Massey.