The Secrets of Mary Bowser (39 page)

Aunt Piss smiled as though he were explaining to a child. “You might say the same for the New England mills, yet the Yankees make war with us.” He scooped up a handful of pecans and reached for the nutcracker, which he used to emphasize his words. “It would be a terrible thing” (crack) “
tant pis pour tous
” (crack) “to ignore the threats” (crack) “that come far from the battlefield” (crack). He rocked back in calculated detachment. “Such as this latest ploy by Lincoln.”

Queen Varina’s face twitched in surprise. “What threats? What new ploy?”

I swooped forward to empty the silver bowl of nutshells, eager to hear his answer. “I have reliable word that Lincoln has proposed a bill to his Congress.” He paused to fume out a ring of cigar smoke. “A bill of emancipation.”

I could have kissed Aunt Piss, stinking cigar and all.

Queen Varina was shrieking in dismay. “Didn’t Jefferson Davis know that Lincoln wanted to take our slaves, even though that Black Republican lied and lied about it?”

“Not take, and not our slaves,” Aunt Piss corrected. “Lincoln proposes to pay four hundred dollars a head to slaveholders in the border states, if they agree to gradual emancipation.”

“Four hundred dollars per slave? Is the Union so rich as that?”

“Four hundred dollars for every slave in Delaware is but half the cost of one day of war for the Union. Four hundred dollars for every slave in Maryland, Missouri, the District of Columbia, and Mrs. Lincoln’s own Kentucky would be the cost of eighty-seven days of war. Lincoln gambles that compensated emancipation will shorten the war by that many days or more, by ensuring the loyalty of the border states.”

Queen Varina puffed up, parroting what she heard her husband say so many times. “We do not fight for slavery, Secretary Benjamin. We fight for the right of States to govern themselves. If Lincoln is too much of a fool to see that—”

“He is no fool, of that we can be sure. He gives the border states the option of compensation and says it is their choice whether to accept. Thus he makes emancipation a grand show of Federal respect for States’ Rights.” Queen Varina squawked an objection, but he continued. “You are correct. We do not fight for slavery. Neither does Lincoln. We fight to win, and so does he. But he is willing to sacrifice slavery in the process, while we are not.”

As far as my espionage went, the conversation was of no consequence, because it revealed something the Federals already knew all about—a presidential proposal that never ended up passing into law. But I was gladder for Aunt Piss’s report than for a stack of Confederate battle plans, proof as it was that I was right. Slavery might at last be done, if all went right with the war.

Not a week after the battle between the ironclads, the Gray House was abuzz with news that Union forces were amassing at Fort Monroe, planning to make their way up the Peninsula toward Richmond. Although Jeff Davis shuffled his cabinet like a deck of cards, appointing Aunt Piss secretary of state, for the next two months it was the Union General McClellan who held the deal.

But this was no card-parlor diversion. Come the twenty-second April, five simple sentences in the Richmond
Dispatch
reminded me of all there was to ante, in what I was playing. Those sentences reported that Timothy Webster, one of the alleged Unionists being held in Castle Godwin, was set to die. The first American to be hanged in nearly one hundred years for spying.

I’d never laid eyes on Timothy Webster, couldn’t have told him from the king of Prussia. But once that article appeared, I seemed to breathe my every breath with his, to echo his numbered heartbeats with my own. Not just during my wakeful hours, but also the long, awful ones at night. Sleep, if it came at all, brought such horrid, vivid visions that nightmare was not grisly enough a word to describe them.

There were rumors the execution would never happen, that the Confederates wanted to make Webster’s life a mere chit in their next round of chaffer and haggle with the Federals. But rumors were like dandelion puffs, they sprung up everywhere those warm spring days, only to prove as delicate as they were plentiful, dissipating in the first hard blow of truth. No one knew when the next blow would come, or what truth it would bring.

By Sunday the twenty-seventh, I was agitated as much with what I didn’t know about Webster’s imminent demise as with what I did. I was so anxious I couldn’t wait for Wilson to return from riding my previous day’s missive to Bet’s market farm, before I set out to see Papa.

“What’s the matter?” Papa asked when I appeared in the doorway of his tiny shed hours earlier than usual.

I longed for the sweet words of Sunday comfort he offered all through my girlhood, whenever I recounted receiving a reprimand or the rare slap from Mistress Van Lew during our week apart. But all I answered was, “Not a thing.”

I bent to loose some mud from my shoe, just to keep his large eyes from meeting my own. “Wilson had an errand to run, made such a ruckus getting ready he woke me. Once I was awake, I didn’t see any reason to wait around by myself, when I could be with you instead.”

Though Papa didn’t reply, he regarded me as if I were a child caught filching a pinch from the sugar jar. I could have cussed myself for giving him reason to wonder over what I was concealing, as we closed up his shed and crossed to the front of the lot, then traversed the blocks between Mahon’s smithy and my home—blocks that seemed so much longer when I took them at Papa’s pained pace.

“You go on upstairs,” I said when we arrived. “I’ll be up in a minute, just need to draw some water to boil up supper.”

“I’ll get the water.” He made for the well at the edge of our lot.

I wanted to stop him, but I didn’t. I knew no father wants to be told he’s too debilitated to take care of his own daughter.

But I also knew Papa didn’t have half the strength he once had, between the rheumatism that ached him and the hunger that afflicted all of us. Hungry or not, I grew stronger with each week I slaved in the Gray House. Still, I couldn’t let on to Papa how I spent my days laboring, lest he ask me why.

The secret I kept weighed heavy as I watched him reach for the windlass on our well. Just the week before, I’d asked Wilson to lubricate the crank, but grease and time were both in short enough supply that he hadn’t yet gotten to it.

Papa turned more slow than steady, the bucket creaking out its long climb. The taut rope appeared to twirl as it rose. Though I knew it was only a visual illusion, it made me think of another rope, the one the Confederates might slip around Timothy Webster’s neck that very day. I watched the woven hemp, felt it thick against my throat. Imagined the snap and felt my own body fall.

“No!”

So caught was I in my own gory imaginings, I wouldn’t have realized I’d cried aloud, except for the way Papa whipped round to see what was wrong. The windlass slipped his hand, and the full bucket crashed to the bottom of the well.

“Sorry, Mary El,” Papa said, though what I read across his face was more shame than sorrow, at finding he hadn’t held the windlass sturdy.

“I’m the one who’s sorry,” I said. “Calling out like that, just because a crow flew by and startled me. Making me startle you.”

There didn’t seem to be much more for us to say on it. Just as there didn’t seem much to do about the wooden water bucket, splintered to pieces against the well bottom. Wilson returned within the hour, and the three of us passed a waterless Sunday that seemed to me a dry and certain omen of what the Confederates would finally do to their convicted spy.

Two days later, Webster was hanged at Camp Lee. Wilson and I learned all about it the morning after, when the news-sheets gave out every detail of the event. They took especial care to relate that when the trigger for the drop was first drawn, the hangman’s noose slipped, sending the condemned man falling all the way to the hard-packed earth.
Half hung and partially stunned,
was how the
Dispatch
described him, the reporter telling with greedy, eager words how Webster was raised up a second time, a new rope laid around his neck, and then let to swing in the air, until the very last of life was choked from him. Dead as John Brown was for trying to free the slaves, and Dangerfield Newby for wanting to free his own family. I still couldn’t tell Webster from the king of Prussia. But what worried me was whether I could tell his fate from my own.

I was careful to carry on about the Gray House as though I took no notice of the war, had no inkling of how either soldier or spy was meeting his demise. So I set myself to giggling with Sophronia as we beat the carpets clean on the twelfth May. Mama always made a game of the chore, when we changed the Van Lew mansion over to its summer appurtenances each year. She would pick a bright Saturday morning to hang the carpets in the yard, Daisy and Lilly and I shouting and laughing as we clapped at the heavy weaves. I’d tumble into our pallet more exhausted than usual that night, but happy, too, as I anticipated the scent of the lavender Mama would bathe in the next day at Papa’s cabin.

The memory lightened my vexed mood, and Sophronia met my exuberance with her own. It was easy enough to play frolicsome, with the intoxicating smell of spring in the air. That was a rare joy, given how the odor of rotting flesh clung to the city most days, reeking reminder that in skirmish after skirmish along the Virginia countryside, the Federals were vanquishing the Confederates.

Far as the horror of war seemed from the Gray House yard that warm morning, still it was close. When we carried the parlor carpet inside to the storage cupboard in the basement, a loud clap marked precisely how near.

“Just the front door slamming,” I reassured Sophronia. With the woolen floor coverings taken up from the hall overhead, any noise came down to us.

“What is it, Jefferson?” we heard from above. “You look a fright.”

“They are near, my dear, very near. You and the children must leave Richmond at once.”

“But it would take a month to pack up the house! And we couldn’t leave you, why who would—”

“You will go,” Davis cut off his wife with a rare firmness. “I am putting you on the train to Danville tomorrow morning. I was lucky to get the tickets, with the number of people fleeing the city.”

Furniture legs screeched against the bare floor. Queen Varina must have slumped hard into the hall chair.

“We have lost Yorktown and Norfolk, Portsmouth and Gosport, all in a week.” Jeff Davis intoned the names like a preacher pronouncing a funereal benediction. “Our navy has destroyed the
Virginia,
to keep it from falling into their hands. We expect Federal boats at Drewry’s Bluff within the week.”

Drewry’s Bluff was all of eight miles, nine at most, from where we stood.

“What it mean, Molly?” Sophronia whispered.

I blinked at her, as though I were as addle-headed as she was. “Who knows what half they say means? He put Mistress in a tizzy, make more trouble for us. And Hortense have our hides if we don’t get the rest a them carpets inside.”

I strode purposefully back out to the yard, hoping Sophronia hadn’t read the interest on my face.

The final day of May was stormy, claps of thunder indistinguishable from the cannon fire that rang outside Richmond. But the morning of Sunday the first June dawned clear. At half-past seven, I made my way past the bodies piled around the Broad Street train station, dead and wounded evidence of the latest Confederate defeat. I was still queasy by the time I crested Church Hill. Though Bet’s note said she had a delightful surprise, the visit didn’t bode much pleasure for me. Not when it took me away from my only time with Papa.

Bet was pacing the back veranda when I came into the yard, and she fairly pulled me after her into the house, through the hall, and up the stairs. Her pinched face shone with pride as she pushed open the door to what had been her brother John’s room. The dark curtains and bed hangings had been changed for new brocatelle in a bright floral pattern, and a vase of oleander stood on the night table.

“Wasn’t Mother clever for purchasing the fabric and storing it away all these months? I never would have seen the need. But General McClellan must long for a decent room, after living in camp all this time.”

Musket fire crackled in the distance like corn kernels popping in a skillet. How could Bet worry about window dressings, with battle raging so close by? Did she really expect Lincoln’s general-in-chief to reside with her if Richmond fell?

She nodded toward a spyglass that stood before the window. “I had Thomas McNiven bring that a month ago, and it’s been such a use the past day. Do try it.”

I crossed the room and leaned to the eyepiece. It reminded me of Theodore’s treasured opera glasses, which he loved to show off but had little chance to use, since Philadelphia’s Music Academy didn’t allow colored patrons, no matter how rich, among its audience. Bet had better opportunity to put her ocular device to service. She might have been instructing me in some ancient religious rite, her tone was so reverent as she showed me how to aim the scope.

My gaze swept over the acres of low buildings at Chimborazo, the massive army hospital the Confederates pitched up a half dozen blocks from the grand homes of Church Hill. Beyond them I saw a strange little globule hovering in the sky due east of the city, just above the Williamsburg Road. A square form dangled beneath it. I wondered to Bet over what it could be.

“Another great work of Union ingenuity,” she told me. “A balloon big enough to lift men into the air and carry them over the battle lines, so they may observe the Confederate defenses.”

I’d found notes among Jeff Davis’s papers about such a thing. A Confederate detail was hastily piecing together precious swathes of silk and varnishing the resulting form, hoping to make a balloon that equaled those of the Federals. But they couldn’t master the chemistry to maneuver their aerostat aloft. The Confederates filled their balloon first with hot air, then with gas from the city gasworks, but nothing they tried could give it the rise of the Union air-craft that had Bet beaming so. She might have believed McClellan was up in the balloon himself, admiring the linens she’d put out for him.