The Crescent Spy (3 page)

She put her hands on her hips. “Let me get this straight. Your jealous rival suggests you fire your best writer, and you entertain the notion?”

“I have no choice, don’t you see?” To his credit, Barnhart sounded anguished, and she almost forgot that he was playing the part of a weasel in this little drama. “We were a Democrat paper before the war. I urged reconciliation before Fort Sumter, and people remember that. Our enemies already call us disunionists. Copperheads.”

“I know that. The beast just called me a treasonous snake. I’m a copperhead, that’s what he means. But you’ll only embolden our enemies if you send me off.”

“Your article is a scathing indictment of the prosecution of the battle. Some might call it defeatist, and expect the next piece you write to call for peaceful separation.”

“You know that’s a lie.”

“Of course, of course,” he said. “And I’m as pro-Union as the publisher of that rag attacking you. But it doesn’t look that way. Not at all, not with this.”

“So that’s your decision? I am off the paper?”

Barnhart licked his lips. “For now, yes. Perhaps in a few months . . . but I would never leave you destitute. Heavens! Let me pay you your wages, send you off with a little extra.”

“I don’t need your charity, Mr. Barnhart. This was never about money.”

“Still,” he said. “Please, allow me.” He turned toward the bookshelf with its copies of
Webster’s Dictionary
and
The Old Farmer’s Almanac
and pulled out a few books. He had a safe behind them where he kept the working funds of the paper in the form of several hundred dollars of banknotes.

But Josephine wasn’t about to give him satisfaction. She grabbed her bonnet and was out the door before he could get the safe open, and into the hot Washington sun. Let him run her off. She’d collect her things from the boarding house and catch the next train to New York. They wouldn’t be so fussy at the
Herald
or the
Tribune.

She’d forgotten about the men slouching at the front door, and now they gathered around her, staring. Yes, that one with the yellow-toothed grin was one of the sleazy fellows at the
National Republican
, specialists in stories about runaway slaves and poxied whores whose bodies turned up dead in the Washington Canal. If he’d been with the
Washington Standard
she’d have punched him in the nose.

“Josephine, wait!” Barnhart called from behind her.

She ignored him and stomped down the street, one eye on horse droppings as she tied on her bonnet. Two of the men fell in beside her.

“Have you no shame?” she asked without looking at them. “Following a lady down the street. The lowest field hand in South Carolina has better manners.”

“You’re no lady,” one of them said in a gravelly voice with a Scottish burr. “You’re a strumpet and a traitor.”

Josephine turned, fuming. “If I were a man, sir, I would demand satisfaction for that insult.” She pointed to the soldiers drilling on the opposite side of the street. “There are a dozen hot-blooded men who will happily put a ball in your head when they hear of your insult to my honor.”

She was only warming up, and intended to let loose a scathing barrage to atone for all the things she wished she’d said to Barnhart for his craven failure to defend her against slander. Instead, she stopped with her mouth open as she recognized the speaker.

It was the fellow with the bushy beard who had been questioning people last night as they entered the Virginia side of the Long Bridge. Josephine prided herself on her ability to identify accents and should have recognized him from his voice alone. But she’d been distracted.

The second man had slick, neatly parted hair and a thick mustache. With a strong chin and broad shoulders, he managed to seem both cultured and yet have the look of a man who could crack the skulls of street toughs or clear out an opium den by showing his fists. Both men carried Colt revolvers in holsters.

“Who are you?” she asked in a quiet voice, her heart thumping.

As she spoke, some of the other men who’d been waiting outside the newspaper offices now caught up with them. They whispered back and forth.

“Allan Pinkerton,” the bearded man said.

Pinkerton! Head of the famous private-detective force, who had helped smuggle Lincoln through the hostile secessionists in Maryland before the inauguration and was now reputed to be organizing a secret service to root out spies and purge Washington of secessionists.

Under other circumstances, Josephine would have relished the opportunity to meet the man. She could test her charms, see if she could get him to spill information as willingly as she’d managed with the generals of the two armies. So many interesting stories to write if she could loosen his tongue.

But under the present circumstances, the name filled her with terror. She was already rattled and only just managed to keep her composure.

“And how can I help you, Mr. Pinkerton?”

Pinkerton glanced at the gathering crowd of people. The yellow-toothed fellow from the
National Republican
was scribbling furiously in a notebook.

“You can come with us quietly,” Pinkerton said. “I would prefer not to have a disturbance.”

“As you can imagine, I am disinclined to follow strange men who demand my cooperation without explanation. So I ask you, sir, where would you have me go?”

“If you come quietly, no harm will befall you.”

“Listen to me, I—”

“But if you cause trouble,” he interrupted, eyes narrowing, “I will arrest you as a traitor and see you hanged.”

T
o Josephine’s horror, Pinkerton didn’t take her back to his offices near the White House, but instead marched her toward the canal via B Street. This area of low-slung, rickety buildings was sometimes known as Rum Row. It reeked of outhouses and garbage, except when the wind shifted and brought over the stink of the fish market on Fifteenth Street.

A few Cyprians—as the papers delicately called whores—stood on their stoops smoking and watching with interest. One woman with red-dyed hair and an inch of face paint made Josephine a sneering offer of employment. Then the woman spotted the rabble following the detectives and their prisoner and started making offers of a different kind.

Pinkerton gave a disgusted snort, and this offered Josephine an opening.

“Please, Mr. Pinkerton, could we not take another route? Perhaps to your office to discuss your concerns in a reasonable way?”

He shot her a withering look. “I know what you did in Virginia. If you don’t care to be treated as a woman plying her trade, you should have chosen a more virtuous path in life.”

“None of it is true.” She staggered forward as he jabbed her with an elbow to get her to speed up. “Please, could we find a place to talk?”

They passed two gambling houses and Miss Izzy’s Hotel—another notorious whorehouse—and then finally emerged into the open air near the canal. The air was even worse here, as the sluggish waters of the canal badly needed rain to flush out the garbage and human waste floating in the green, scummy water. She put a hand over her mouth until they’d crossed the canal and passed the sea of tents and milling soldiers encamped around the stumpy, unfinished Washington Monument. Several hundred yards up toward the Capitol lay the Smithsonian Institution, which loomed like a castle of red Seneca sandstone over another large encampment.

Pinkerton didn’t take her to the Long Bridge, as she guessed. She’d expected him to dump her in Alexandria or Arlington on the Virginia side of the river, but that was Union-controlled territory, so perhaps he figured she would simply wait there until things quieted down and slip back into the city. That had been her own hope, once she confirmed his implacable insistence that she be expelled from Washington.

But instead, he kept her marching south for block after block, until they reached the arsenal on the spit of land where the Potomac met the Anacostia River.

Pinkerton stopped before the arsenal gates and said to his fellow agent, “I’ll tell the president you’re off with her. Send me a courier when it’s done.”

“When what’s done?” Josephine asked.

Pinkerton ignored her and turned around to go back the way they’d come, pushing past the rabble, now grown to a dozen men. That left Josephine with the young, broad-shouldered Pinkerton agent with the thick mustache. She sized him up and decided to try again.

“I am sorry, we haven’t met, Mr.—”

“Franklin Gray.”

“Gray, that’s another Scottish name. But I don’t hear an accent. Did your parents come over, then? Or has your family been here since the Revolution?”

She was hoping to draw him out, but he gave her a hard look and turned away. He showed the soldiers at the arsenal gates some sort of pass, and the men let them in. The rabble, however, was turned back with a good deal of grumbling. A couple were scribbling in notepads, and one man shouted a question at her that she didn’t quite catch but wouldn’t have answered if she had.

Dozens of troops guarded the arsenal, and guard towers bristled along the river. Row after row of newly cast cannons lined up waiting to be finished and then fitted onto gun carriages. They all pointed toward the river, as if already preparing to blast their way into Virginia.

After crossing the arsenal grounds, Gray showed his pass again, this time to one of the sentries who patrolled the shoreline. The man ran off to fetch a boat. Josephine asked if they might wait in the shade instead of under the sun. Gray consented, and they retreated to the shade of a tree filled with buzzing cicadas.

She made another attempt. “I am a newspaper writer, Mr. Gray. Naturally, I used feminine charms to get close to the rebel officers—I can play the coquette when I must. But I did not betray our secrets. I’m a patriot, like you.”

Gray lit a cigarette. “You are a spy and a traitor. If I had my way, you’d be hung. Count yourself fortunate that Mr. Pinkerton has a soft spot for women.”

“What evidence do you have that I’m a spy?” she persisted. “Because of what you read in the
Standard
? They’re our enemies, you know. You can’t trust those scoundrels.”

“Be quiet, I’m weary of your company.”

She fell silent. The air grew hotter and hotter, and trickles of perspiration ran down her back and dampened her armpits. At last the soldier returned, this time with four of his fellows, carrying a rowboat between them.

They heaved the boat halfway into the water, where one of the men held it against the current so it wouldn’t drift off.

“Go on, then,” Gray told Josephine, who was eying the rowboat doubtfully. “Get in.”

“Don’t tell me I’m supposed to row across by myself.”

“I wish it were so. Indeed, I’d send you halfway out and let the guns of the fort sink you like a Confederate raider.” He shook his head. “Mr. Pinkerton’s orders are to take you to Manassas under white flag and trade you for one of our colonels taken in the battle.”

“Nobody will trade for me for a colonel. I told you, I’m not a spy. The rebs wouldn’t give you two cents.”

Gray smiled. “Mr. Pinkerton telegraphed Richmond this morning. They agreed at once to the trade.”

“They did?”

The only way it could be true would be if the Confederates somehow thought she’d betrayed them as well. In that case, she’d be trading humiliation in Washington for a jail cell in Richmond.

One of the soldiers held out a hand to help Josephine into the boat. She folded her arms and clenched her jaw.

Gray drew his gun. “Get in that boat or by God I’ll be trading your dead body to the rebs.”

Josephine gave it a moment of thought. She couldn’t let him take her to Manassas to face angry accusations from Beauregard’s staff. But there might be opportunities to escape along the way. Then she could figure out what to do.

After she’d climbed in, Gray put away his gun and took his place at the oars. The soldiers pushed them into the current. Gray let them drift for several seconds, then fit the oars into the oarlocks and dipped them in the water. He began to row almost casually for the opposite side of the Potomac. His oars creaked in the oarlocks, and eddies swirled around the paddles with each stroke. Sitting near the bow, Gray had his back to Virginia. Josephine faced the agent and looked across to the woods and fields of the other side. A small force of laborers were constructing yet another Union fort on the Virginia side of the river.

Any hope that a river breeze would cool her disappeared. The air was steamy, the sun like a hammer. Sweat was soon running down Gray’s face and dripping from his mustache.

“Well?” he said. “Are you going to tell me why you’re innocent?”

“I thought you said you had orders.”

“I do. You have until the opposite shore to convince me.”

“You want me to explain now? You’ve wasted my entire afternoon, refused to let me speak, but now that we’re rowing across the confounded river, you want me to make my case?”

“It’s up to you. If you’d rather go back to your Confederate lover, that’s your prerogative.”

This insinuation disgusted her so much that she at first turned away and refused to look at this man. But she’d be a fool to let him best her through her sheer stubbornness, so she relented.

“I only crossed into rebel lines to get a good story. I was nobody’s lover, and I told the Confederates nothing they couldn’t have read in the papers.”

“The blooming fools of the press are all too happy to report every regiment who marches in and out of the city,” Gray agreed. “But when enemy reinforcements arrived all the way from the Shenandoah just in time to turn McDowell’s attack, we knew they’d received advance warning. There’s a spy in Washington, someone who can speak to our generals.”

“I’m aware of that,” she said. “There have been hints before.”

“And we believe she’s a woman.”

“I know that, too. I’ve given the matter much thought.”

His eyes narrowed. “You have?”

She glared back at him, unwilling to say more. Information was not free, and in this case, she wanted him to think she had more than she possessed.

Gray stopped and took off his jacket. He rolled up his shirtsleeves to reveal powerful forearms. They’d drifted a greater distance downstream than the distance he’d rowed toward the far shore, but his slow, powerful strokes had still carried them right into the middle of the river.

“We’re halfway across,” he said. “I’m not convinced.”

“What do you want me to say? I’m a writer, not a spy. How am I supposed to prove that?”

“Why did you enter Washington wearing nothing but your bloomers?”

“I dismounted my horse to give water to a dying Confederate soldier,” she said. “But I couldn’t regain the saddle because of the crinoline. The Union soldiers were in a panic—nobody would help me. So I cut off the dress and the underwire.”

“Why not just take it off?”

She gave him a sharp look. “You’ve never put on a dress and hoops or you wouldn’t ask that. There was gunfire, I was afraid of getting killed. I needed to get back on that horse.”

“You weren’t mounted when you approached the bridge.”

“A Union officer commandeered my horse and left me to be mocked by foot soldiers. Mrs. Stanley Lamont took pity on me and carried me into Washington.”

Gray was silent for a few minutes, his brow furrowed in thought as he rowed. “And how did you gain access to General Beauregard’s camp? You simply walked in with your pen and paper and started asking questions?”

“Of course not. Two days before the battle I approached the Confederate camp posing as a secessionist Marylander.” Josephine changed her accent to someone from the Chesapeake:
“
‘General, I’ve brought a few things to raise your spirits and help you whip them Yankees and abolitionists. Twenty pounds of coffee, fifty pounds of chewing tobacco. Barrels of flour and salted pork. And these home-baked huckleberry pies for you and your staff.
’
”

Gray raised his eyebrows. “Impressive accent.”

“My mother was an actress and dancer on a Mississippi steamboat. She taught me the tricks of the trade. And I’ve heard all sorts of accents in my life.” Now she turned to Pinkerton’s Scottish burr: “And believe me when I say that I can mimic them at will.”

“Hmm,” Gray said, seemingly less impressed this time. “The suspicious part is that the newspaper would pay for all those goods that you gave to the enemy. Why, to get one story? An important story, yes, but you couldn’t know that at the time. Not for sure.”

“I didn’t ask Mr. Barnhart to buy the supplies. And he wouldn’t have paid if I had. I have my own funds. That’s all I’ll say about that.”

Gray let his oars fold in against the boat, dipped his hands into the water, and splashed his face and neck, then eyed the opposite shore and began to row again. They were now so far downstream that it would be a long walk west to reach the road to Manassas. Again, she was confused as to why Mr. Pinkerton and Mr. Gray hadn’t simply hired a carriage and taken her out of the city by way of the Long Bridge.

“If you’re not a spy,” Gray said, as if in answer to her unspoken question, “there are plenty in Washington who are. I needed to make a spectacle of your departure. Word will get back to the enemy.”

Josephine allowed herself to hope she would get out of this predicament. “Does that mean you knew all along? Was my arrest at the
Morning Clarion
a charade?”

“You are sharp, you understand most of it. The answer is no, not entirely a charade. Mr. Pinkerton wanted to be sure. And I’m not yet convinced.” A smile crossed his lips, and for the first time he didn’t look like an unfeeling beast. “But almost.”

“After I gave Beauregard’s staff the supplies,” Josephine said, continuing her story with less reluctance, “they were happy to lead me through their encampment, proudly showing me this regiment and that. Telling how they meant to lick the Yanks and march on Washington. I was in Beauregard’s camp for most of the battle, and only slipped away near the end.”

“
Will
the enemy march on Washington? We were routed yesterday, scattered. Completely disorganized. If they came now . . .”

“So are they. Almost as disorganized in victory as we are in defeat.”

“I am glad to hear it.” Gray glanced over his shoulder at the opposite bank, now drawing near. He was breathing heavily but did not appear exhausted. “What drives you, Miss Breaux? What is your personal philosophy?”

“Mr. Gray, I write lurid prose to be consumed by the masses. My philosophy, my motive, is personal glory.”

He laughed at this. “Very well. But are you seeking glory under the Union flag or with the secessionists?”

“I am a Union girl, sir. Secession is simply another word for treason. And slavery is a canker and an embarrassment, and must be swept away.” Josephine nodded. “So long as it does not get in the way of a good story, of course.”