The Crescent Spy (21 page)

“It might be another five months still,” Franklin said. “I don’t know. I don’t even know from which direction it will come—upriver, or down. Either way, we’ll have a dogfight. Meanwhile, I’ve got orders, and that is to blow General Lovell’s arsenal straight to Hades.”

A
few days later, Josephine arrived at the Marine Hospital to find reporters from the
Bee
, the
Picayune
, and the
True Delta
already on site and harassing the several patients who had just arrived from Vicksburg by way of a hospital boat.

Rumor had spread among the newspapers that a famous patient was on site. Perhaps the poet Henry Timrod, who was reportedly serving at one of the forts upriver. There was no famous patient; that was a rumor spread by Josephine herself. In reality, she needed cover so she could poke around the hospital without falling under suspicion. She couldn’t have people remembering how she’d shown up a week or two before the sabotage. Her fellow reporters provided cover.

Naturally, one of the other reporters was Stanley Ludd. When Josephine stepped out to take a stroll through the yard, he was already outside having a smoke. He watched her with a beady, pig-like expression.

“A curious waste of time, Miss Breaux. Curious indeed. We all rushed out to chase this phantom story, only to find that the most celebrated patient is a fellow who once won a ribbon at the county fair for the virility of his prize bull.”

“I don’t intend to waste my time, Mr. Ludd,” she said, only catching herself at the last moment from using his nickname at the
Crescent
: Mr. Stinky Lard. “Good stories are everywhere you look.”

And ahead of her, she spotted a very good story indeed. The brick buildings of the factory and arsenal lay at the far end of the hospital lot, where men came and went through a back gate, itself guarded by several armed soldiers. Along that side of the compound lay the stables as well, a ramshackle construction of boards and lumber odds and ends, nailed together in a slipshod manner. The picket fence that encircled the hospital lot followed the back wall of the stables for a stretch. Beyond the fence lay a marshy, poorly drained field.

Ludd puffed his cigarette as he fell in behind her. “You’ve been a machine, Miss Breaux. A veritable one-woman printing press. If the quality of your writing weren’t so uniformly strong, I’d wager that Fein had been throwing your byline onto stories written by his typical stable of hacks.”

“All those stories are mine, Mr. Ludd.”

“So I believe, so I believe. I don’t know how you manage.”

“I am young. I have energy to spare.”

She felt herself puffing. That was only the writing he could see. Ludd knew nothing of her prodigious output on behalf of the Union.

But she couldn’t get carried away. He had to stop following so she could chat with the soldiers at the gate unmolested. She had to get at them from an angle. It would be suspicious to come right out and ask what she needed—when is the change of the guards? how do you secure the powder from theft or sabotage?—but with a few friendly words from a young woman maybe they’d volunteer something useful. But not with Ludd slithering after her.

“Amazing energy,” he said. “I only lament that Mr. Fein enjoys your services, not I. Perhaps my initial offer was insufficiently generous.”

Josephine stopped and put her hands on her hips. She returned his dismissive words from that night on
Calhoun
:
“
‘What are you doing here? Don’t you have society gossip to cover or some such rubbish?
’
”

“Touché. I behaved badly.”

“Yes, you did.”

“I thought I had a scoop. I was irritated that I hadn’t. Then, when I read the broadside of stories you fired off after the battle, I saw how you’d outmaneuvered me. I reported that
Preble
had been sunk. You claimed
Richmond
had been the one damaged, but not sunk. I claimed that the river would henceforth be open to Confederate shipping. You said
Manassas
wasn’t strong enough to break the blockade on its own. I called you a naïve child in print, a defeatist, and you cut me to pieces. When the true facts of the case became known, I saw that you possessed all of the qualities I need.

“I have men who are prolific,” he added, “and men who can put poetry into print. I have never met anyone who could do both.”

She knew it was flattery, but his words filled her with a warm glow, like she had a bellyful of fine whiskey. It was dangerous, this need for praise. Too much, and she’d be drunk on it, and unable to do her duties.

“What is Fein paying you?” Ludd asked.

“Fifteen dollars a week.”

“I’ll give you twenty. That’s a thousand dollars
a year.
”

Josephine’s eyes widened. In reality, Fein was only paying her eight. She’d said fifteen only to put Ludd off.

Her silence seemed to encourage him, and he pressed on. “You have many qualities, Miss Breaux. I need you at the
Picayune.
”

“I do have many qualities, Mr. Ludd,” she said. “And among them is loyalty.”

T
he following Sunday, Josephine and Franklin met near the cathedral instead of at Congo Square. As Christmas approached, the city seemed to forget the war and threw itself into the parades and other celebrations of the season. Josephine and Franklin watched the carolers with their candles and bells, and bought beignets and hot eggnog while strolling past the bonfires lit along the levee to welcome Père Noël.

The alcohol loosened Franklin’s tongue, and he told Josephine stories about his childhood in Massachusetts: the swimming hole where he’d go with his brothers, his kind and tender sister, Ruth, who died of scarlet fever, his dog, Bandit, who once made off with the entire Christmas goose. One of Franklin’s great-grandfathers was still alive. The old man had planted apple trees two years ago at the age of eighty-eight and optimistically thought he would live long enough to get a good harvest.

Only as Josephine and Franklin walked back along the levee did she realize that his chatter was due as much to nerves as to the eggnog. He told her that he wanted to move against the arsenal at Christmas, while the city was distracted.

“The soldiers are local militia,” he said. “They’ll be spending time with family, drinking brandy and eating too much goose and turkey. The city itself will be relaxed. It won’t be hard to do what we need to do.”

Josephine’s pulse quickened. “What is our plan? Sabotage?”

He nodded. “On a grand scale.”

“What do we do? What do you need
me
to do?”

His brow furrowed. “I only meant ‘we’ in that the information you already collected will help me infiltrate the Marine Hospital.”

J
osephine waited anxiously for news of some disaster at the arsenal, but nothing came. On Christmas Day, her landlady, Nellie, knocked on her bedroom door and said with a knowing smile that a handsome gentleman caller wished to see her. Nellie would give them privacy in the parlor.

Franklin told her what had gone wrong. Late that very night after the walk along the levee, he had approached the hospital compound through the swampy fields abutting the back side. Armed with a crowbar, he intended to pry off the boards on the rear of the stables to gain entrance to the interior. But before he could move, two guards with muskets and lamps came patrolling around the exterior of the compound, peering into the darkness from beneath forage caps. Franklin was fortunate not to be spotted.

Far from relaxing security, it seemed that General Lovell had increased scrutiny on the exterior approaches.

“Work is accelerating,” Franklin told Josephine in a low voice, with a glance at the parlor door, as if worried that Nellie would be eavesdropping. “Another shipment of powder came in from upriver three days ago. And Lovell is casting shells in the city foundries, bringing them in for storage. I’ve got to find a way inside.”

“What’s wrong with the front door? It’s a hospital, not a prison. You enter the hospital, leave through the back, and cut across to the arsenal.”

“The front has guards, too. I’ll be challenged.”

“Not if you enter as a patient. A gentleman soldier, so you can get to the back ward, where the officers stay. Frank Beaudoin, creole planter, lately commissioned as an officer in glorious service of the cause.”

He looked intrigued, but cautious. “They’ll hear my accent the moment I open my mouth.”

“So change your story. There are plenty of Yankees in New Orleans.”

“Maybe at the yards, but not among the officers.”

“Then don’t talk. There was a mishap with a firearm, and you have a wounded jaw. But being a gentleman, you have your own private nurse.” She loosened her mouth and let a full New Orleans accent pass through. “And she can do all of the talking.”

A
cab pulled up in front of the Marine Hospital later that week, and Josephine helped Franklin out, who gave a dramatic groan, as if the very movement caused him pain. Cotton bandages wrapped around his head and jaw. She’d dabbed them with pig blood, which had now dried, leaving a caked mess. He wore a uniform with a captain’s bars that she’d procured on Exchange Alley.

While Franklin stood swaying, Josephine took out a carpetbag, so full that it couldn’t be latched. The edge of a pair of trousers peeked out. She paid the cab driver, who drove his horse on with a flick of the whip and disappeared, jouncing, into the night mist.

Josephine eyed the two soldiers in butternut jackets and forage caps who stood on the porch of the two-story brick building. Gaslights flickered on either side of the door, reflecting on their young faces as they peered down at the newcomers.

“Please, sirs,” Josephine said, “could you help me with the captain?”

They came trotting down the stairs and took Franklin’s arms. He took a few shaky steps toward the front door. She’d had him swish his mouth with whiskey before they left the cab so he’d have the smell of a man trying to drink away his pain.

“What happened to him?” one of the soldiers asked. “Yanks?”

“Not hardly,” she said. “He did this all by his lonesome.”

The other one whistled. “You don’t say. At home, or were it with his men?”

Franklin groaned, and held up a hand, as if trying to keep Josephine from telling the story.

“Now you hush,” she told him. “It’s the foolhardiest thing I ever heard, and it’ll serve you right to hear it a few times. Live fire drilling,” she told the men. “Shot himself straight through the cheeks. Fortunate he only lost two of his teeth, not his tongue.”