The Spymistress
Authors: Jennifer Chiaverini
ALSO BY JENNIFER CHIAVERINI
Mrs. Lincoln’s Dressmaker
The Giving Quilt
Sonoma Rose
The Wedding Quilt
The Union Quilters
The Aloha Quilt
A Quilter’s Holiday
The Lost Quilter
The Quilter’s Kitchen
The Winding Ways Quilt
The New Year’s Quilt
The Quilter’s Homecoming
Circle of Quilters
The Christmas Quilt
The Sugar Camp Quilt
The Master Quilter
The Quilter’s Legacy
The Runaway Quilt
The Cross-Country Quilters
Round Robin
The Quilter’s Apprentice
Elm Creek Quilts
Return to Elm Creek
More Elm Creek Quilts
Sylvia’s Bridal Sampler from Elm Creek Quilts
Traditions from Elm Creek Quilts
Loyal Union Sampler from Elm Creek Quilts
DUTTON
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Copyright © 2013 by Jennifer Chiaverini
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REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Chiaverini, Jennifer.
The Spymistress : a novel / Jennifer Chiaverini.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-525-95362-3 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-698-13829-2 (eBook)
1. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Fiction. 2. Women spies—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3553.H473S69 2013
813'.54—dc23
2013015945
PUBLISHER’S
NOTE
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
CONTENTS
To Marty, Nick, and Michael, with love and gratitude
Confidential. Hd. Qrs. 18th Army Corps,
Dept. Of Va., and N. C.,
Fortress Monroe, Dec. 19, 1863
Commander Boutelle, U. S. Coast Survey Office,
Washington, D. C.
My dear Boutelle:
You will find enclosed a letter from a dear friend of yours in Richmond. I am informed by the bearer that Miss Van Lieu is a true Union woman as true as steel. She sent me a bouquet, so says the letter carrier.
Now, I much want a correspondent in Richmond, one who will write me of course without name or description of the writer, and she need only incur the risk of dropping an ordinary letter by flag of truce in the Post Office at Richmond, directed to a name at the North. Her messenger thinks Miss Van Lieu will be glad to do it.
I can place my first
and only
letter in her hands for her directions, but I also
place the man’s
life in her hands
who delivers the letter
. Is it safe so to do? Will Miss Van Lieu be willing to either correspond herself or find me such a correspondent? I could pay large rewards, but from what I hear of her I should prefer not to do it, as I think she would be actuated to do what she does by patriotic motives only.
I wish therefore you would write me, confidentially—and as so much is depending, in the strictest secrecy, what you think of the matter. Of course you will readily see that I can furnish means by which a very commonplace letter on family affairs will read very differently when I see it.
Truly yours,
Benj. F. Butler
Chapter One
APRIL 1861
T
he Van Lew mansion in Richmond’s fashionable Church Hill neighborhood had not hosted a wedding gala in many a year, and if the bride-to-be did not emerge from her attic bedroom soon, Lizzie feared it might not that day either.
Turning away from the staircase, Lizzie resisted the urge to check her engraved pocket watch for the fifth time in as many minutes and instead stepped outside onto the side portico, abandoning the mansion to her family, servants, and the apparently bashful bridal party ensconced in the servants’ quarters. Surely Mary Jane wasn’t having second thoughts. She adored Wilson Bowser, and just that morning she had declared him the most excellent man of her acquaintance. A young woman in love would not leave such a man standing at the altar.
Perhaps Mary Jane was merely nervous, or a button had come off her gown, or her flowers were not quite perfect. As hostess, Lizzie ought to go and see, but a strange reluctance held her back. Earlier that morning, when Mary Jane’s friends had arrived—young women of color like Mary Jane herself, some enslaved, some free—Lizzie had felt awkward and unwanted among them, a sensation unfamiliar and particularly unsettling to experience in her own home. None of the girls had spoken impudently to her, but after greeting her politely they had encircled Mary Jane and led her off to her attic bedroom, turning their backs upon Lizzie as if they had quite forgotten she was there. And so she was left to wait, alone and increasingly curious.
Grasping the smooth, whitewashed railing, Lizzie gazed out upon the sun-splashed gardens, where the alluring fragrance of magnolia drifted on the balmy air above the neatly pruned hedgerows. Across the street, a shaft of sunlight bathed the steeple of Saint John’s Church in a rosy glow like a benediction from heaven, blessing the bride and groom, blessing the vows they would soon take. It was a perfect spring day in Richmond, the sort of April morning that inspired bad poetry and impulsive declarations of affection best kept to oneself. Lizzie could almost forget that not far away, in the heart of the city, a furious debate was raging, a searing prelude to the vote that would determine whether her beloved Virginia would follow the Southern cotton states out of the fragmenting nation.
Despite the clamor and frenzy that had surged in Richmond in the weeks leading up to the secession convention, Lizzie staunchly believed that reason, pragmatism, and loyalty would triumph in the end. Unionist delegates outnumbered secessionist fire-eaters two to one, and Virginians were too proud of their heritage as the birthplace of Washington, Jefferson, and Madison to leave the nation their honored forebears had founded.
Still, she had to admit that John Lewis’s increasing pessimism troubled her. Mr. Lewis, a longtime family friend serving as a delegate from Rockingham County, had been the Van Lews’ guest throughout the convention, and his ominous reports of shouting matches erupting in closed sessions made her uneasy. So too did the gathering of a splinter group of adamant secessionists only a block and a half away from the Capitol, although outwardly she made light of the so-called Spontaneous People’s Convention. “How can a convention be both spontaneous and arranged well in advance, with time for the sending and accepting of invitations?” she had mocked, but the tentative, worried smiles her mother and brother had given her in reply were but a small reward.