The Spymistress (15 page)

On the first day of August, President Davis and his family moved into the refurbished gray stucco mansion at Twelfth and Clay Streets. Even before they settled in, some proud citizens began calling the residence the White House of the Confederacy, but others rejected the homage to President Lincoln’s mansion in Washington City. The Gray House was a popular alternative, although most residents referred to it simply as the President’s House or the Executive Mansion.

By any name, it was an impressive home, three and a half stories tall, with a small stoop in the front as befitting the elevation facing the busy, unattractive street, and a glorious columned portico to the rear, which offered sweeping vistas of Shockoe Valley beyond a steep, terraced garden and orchard. Lizzie heard others tell of the airy, elaborately decorated rooms and halls, with their high ceilings and beautifully adorned fireplaces and winding staircases, but of course she did not see them herself, because she had not been invited to any of Mrs. Davis’s receptions. John and Mary, however, were invited to a dinner by virtue of John’s considerable status in the business community. When Lizzie and her mother visited John, Mary, and the girls at their new home the following Sunday afternoon, Mary described in rapturous detail the twin statues of the goddesses of comedy and tragedy bearing gas lamps in the entrance hall, the heavy green-and-gold brocatelle draperies in the dining room, the elegant crimson flocked wallpaper in the parlor and drawing room, and the many fine pieces of rosewood furniture and china. As Mary chattered on about the ladies’ dresses, their fascinating conversations, and her friend Mrs. Chesnut’s witty observations of it all, John’s expression became so gloomy that Lizzie realized that he was miserably reliving an evening he had suffered through unwillingly the first time. She could not resist teasing him a little, and so whenever Mary paused to take a breath, she feigned innocence and asked her brother for his impressions of the evening. All that John would allow was that the food was delicious, the president treated everyone courteously but looked as if he found formal social gatherings akin to torture, his wife seemed very clever, and the Davis children were undisciplined little terrors.

“Oh, John.” Mary laughed. “It was nothing like that. I could almost believe we had not attended the same party.”

Lizzie thought that John looked as if he wished they had not.

As the evening approached and Lizzie and her mother called for the carriage, Eliza, who had been sweet and cheerful all afternoon, suddenly planted herself between her grandmother and aunt and the door. “No,” she said firmly, stamping her foot. “Don’t go.”

“Eliza,” exclaimed Mary, as Annie stood nearby, tears filling her eyes as she looked from her sister to her mother to Lizzie. “Behave yourself.”

Lizzie knelt in front of her youngest niece, who thrust out her lower lip and valiantly fought off tears. “Eliza, dearest,” she soothed, embracing her. “I’ll miss you too, but it’s all right. We’ll come back next week, or perhaps you and your mama and papa and big sister shall come to us.”

Eliza peered up at her. “To stay?”

Lizzie felt her heart wrench. “No, my sweet little lamb. You live here now.”

“I hate it here,” she shouted. “I want to go home.”

“Eliza, that is quite enough,” snapped Mary. She glanced about for Hannah, but the nurse was already hurrying over to whisk the unhappy children from the room. She moved stiffly as she crossed the floor, which told Lizzie that Mary had neglected to purchase the liniment Hannah relied upon to ease the pain in her knees. Furious, Lizzie could only murmur a few soothing words to Eliza before Hannah took the girls by the hand and led them off, hobbling slightly.

“You could move back, you know,” Mother said gently, her eyes on John’s. “It might be better for the children.”

“In these times, it’s better for us to live apart,” John said in an undertone. “You know I’m right.”

“Of course he’s right,” Mary chimed in, having easily overheard. “Your Union sentiments mark everyone close to you with the taint of disloyalty. It’s bad enough that we all share the last name. I can’t imagine how much worse it would be for us if we lived beneath the same roof again.”

“My word, yes,” Lizzie retorted. “You might not receive any more invitations to the Gray House, and your dear friend Mrs. Chesnut might pretend not to know you. How dreadful! I can imagine nothing worse. Oh, except, perhaps, for starving in a crowded prison that stinks of piss and vomit and is rife with vermin and disease. Perhaps that!”

“See?” Mary looked to John and gestured toward Lizzie. “This—this vile language is what I must shelter the girls from. In her words, her deeds, and her very ideas, she is a terrible influence.”

“
I’m
a terrible influence?” echoed Lizzie, astonished. “Which of us sips whiskey from a hidden flask when no one is watching? Which of us takes laudanum when the days are too dull and the children too lively?”

Mary’s mouth fell open in shock. “John,” she spluttered, “husband, are you just going to stand there and—”

“I agree it is bad that we all share the same last name, Mary,” Lizzie said tightly, “but not for the reasons you do.”

“That is quite enough,” said John firmly. He took Lizzie by the arm, offered his other elbow to Mother, and steered them toward the front door. “Sister, if you want to persuade her to never let you see your nieces again, keep behaving as you are right now.”

The bright, swift flare of her anger had burned out, leaving a fading residue of remorse. “I’m sorry,” she said as they stepped onto the small front porch. Peter, waiting with the carriage on the street, was watching them, his brow furrowed in concern. “When she said that about the Van Lew name—”

“I am no less offended, and I will speak to her about it.” John’s voice was grim, and his grasp on her arm eased. “I—I suspected about the whiskey, but I knew nothing of the laudanum.”

“Neither did I, until she did not deny it,” Lizzie admitted. “The remedy Mrs. Chesnut recommended for headaches—do you recall Mary mentioning it a few months ago? Her behavior changed for the worse shortly thereafter.”

He stood with head bowed for a long moment, then straightened and escorted them to the carriage. Lizzie could not be certain, but she thought his eyes glistened with tears.

“The longer this war endures, the harder it will be for Unionists to remain undetected,” he said, leaning into the carriage while they settled into their seats. “You’ve heard about the arrests.”

“Men of the lower classes only,” said Lizzie, feigning nonchalance. “Drunkards, criminals, the insane. Undesirables the war excused the new government to clear off the streets.”

“They will not stop with the undesirables,” John said. “They will not stop with men.”

“They would not arrest a lady from a good family,” protested Mother.

“Not today they wouldn’t,” said John. “But someday soon. Enemies wear petticoats as well as pantaloons, or so the papers warn us, remember?” He shut the carriage door and regarded them through the window. “I will speak with Mary.”

“And in the meantime, Lizzie will write her a sincere letter of apology,” said Mother.

Lizzie knew better than to argue. “I won’t sleep tonight until it is finished and perfect. I will be as humble and ingratiating as I can possibly be.”

“Be sure to have Mother read it over before you send it,” said John. “I don’t want to worry you, but all of Richmond is going to suffer in the months ahead, even Church Hill. The time may come when all we will have is one another, and you may be grateful for Mary’s friendship then.”

It was difficult to be grateful for something she’d never had, Lizzie almost said, but instead she merely pressed her lips together and nodded as the carriage pulled away.

It occurred to Lizzie, later, that perhaps something John had overheard at the Davises’ levee accounted for his uncanny prescience.

Soon after the unfortunate dinner at John and Mary’s home, the newspapers buzzed with the story of a Mrs. Curtis from Rochester, New York, the sister of a soldier with the Rochester Regiment, who had been captured at Falls Church dressed in military attire. The
Dispatch
called her a “Female Hessian,” the
Whig
described her as “quite young, but by no means prepossessing,” and all agreed that she did not disguise her animosity toward the South, and that she was certainly a spy.

Lizzie’s nerves frayed as she followed the story through newspapers and the rumor mill, wondering what terrible fate awaited the accused spy. Although she was somewhat comforted to learn that Mrs. Curtis was being detained in a private home rather than some dark corner of the prison complex, Lizzie was plagued by nightmares and waking dread until the middle of the month, when Mrs. Curtis was unconditionally discharged and returned to the North.

If Lizzie were arrested for spying, and thereafter convicted, would she be banished to the North? It might not be so terrible to wait out the war in Philadelphia with her sister, Anna, who would surely take her in. Or instead, since she was Richmond born and bred, would the authorities imprison her with murderesses and women of the streets, or execute her for treason as an example to others?

The very thought of it made her dizzy and sick, but as the days passed, one unerring truth emerged from the fog of her apprehension: She must protect her mother—not only her health and security, but also her reputation. If accusations of treason fell upon the household with the full force of the Confederate government, Mother must be blameless.

Throughout August, while Lizzie brought food and money and goods into the prisons and smuggled incriminating letters out, the Confederate Congress took aggressive measures to thwart Union sympathizers. First they passed the Alien Enemies Act, which compelled men over fourteen who were not citizens of Southern states to swear an oath of allegiance to the Confederate government. If they refused, after a forty-day grace period, they would be deported. John was a citizen of Virginia, so he was not obliged to take the oath, and as women, Lizzie and her mother were exempt, but the law’s foreboding overtones filled Lizzie with apprehension for what might come next. She did not have to wait long to find out. At the end of the month, Congress passed the Sequestration Act, which authorized the seizure of property belonging to Unionists—men and women alike.

The dreadful law strengthened Lizzie’s resolve to disentangle her mother from her clandestine activities. The Church Hill mansion and the rest of Father’s estate were in Mother’s name, so even if Lizzie were caught and convicted, the Confederacy could confiscate only her personal fortune of nearly ten thousand dollars. Mother would not lose her home, nor could their servants be taken away and sold.

Mother would be protected, Lizzie reassured herself when she woke at night in a sweat, her heart pounding from fear-induced nightmares. Mother would be protected, but only as long as she could not be implicated in her daughter’s deeds.

Perhaps Lizzie should have moved out, she thought miserably, and left the home to her family, for their own good. But it was too late for that now—and where would she have gone?

The harrowing month ended with the revelation of a cautionary tale that, under other circumstances, would have overjoyed Lizzie—the arrest and imprisonment of a Confederate spy in Washington City. Born in Maryland, Rose O’Neal Greenhow had been orphaned at age sixteen after her father was killed by his own slaves, and she had moved to the nation’s capital to live with an aunt. Later she married a prominent doctor and became a popular hostess among the city’s social elite, and when secession fever broke out, the newly widowed Washingtonian pledged her fealty to the rebels. Since the beautiful, wealthy, and vivacious Mrs. Greenhow had an utterly unimpeachable history of entertaining distinguished politicians of all party affiliations at her mansion on Sixteenth Street, Confederate General Beauregard’s adjutant recruited her to gather information about Union military operations from her unsuspecting guests. Some admirers credited her with gathering and smuggling out crucial secrets that led to the Confederate victory at Manassas, but the praise brought her to the attention of the famous detective Allan Pinkerton, who placed her home under surveillance and arrested her a few weeks later. Mr. Pinkerton’s detectives tore apart her home searching for evidence, recklessly knocking down shelves and strewing the family’s possessions upon the floors, with utter disregard for precious mementos, including the belongings of Mrs. Greenhow’s recently deceased child, which had become cherished relics.

As August drew to a close, Mrs. Greenhow, her young daughter, and a few other women accused of corresponding with the enemy remained under house arrest in her Washington mansion, which soon became known as The House of Detention for Female Rebels or Fort Greenhow. There they awaited their unknown fate.

While newspapers across the South lauded their loyal daughter of the Confederacy for her courageous devotion and denounced the Yankees for treating a woman so harshly, Lizzie knew that, woman though she was, she herself could expect no gentler treatment if the Confederates discovered the Union sympathizer in their own midst.

Chapter Eight

SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 1861

S
eptember brought no relief from the torrid summer, nor from threats against Unionists. Throughout the South, but especially in the mountains of western Virginia and eastern Tennessee, men who refused to disavow their loyalty to Mr. Lincoln’s government were arrested for treason and sent to Richmond to be incarcerated. Lizzie expected one day to discover Mr. Lewis among a new shipment of prisoners, but until then, she liked to think of him still free and unharmed, still urging his fellow Western Virginians to break away from the Confederacy and return to the Union as a new state.

By the first week of September, there were nearly fourteen hundred Union men confined within the four prisons on Main Street, and three hundred fifty more, the most desperately sick and wounded, at the hospital. The prisoners included about sixty officers and a handful of civilians like Congressman Ely and the lawyer Mr. Huson, who, Lizzie was surprised to discover, had run against Mr. Ely in the election for his seat in the House, and like his former opponent had been captured in the chaos after the Union rout at Manassas.