Unholy Fire (41 page)

“Colonel Burdette sent me,” I croaked. “I've come all the way from Fredericksburg … must see the president.”

As I swayed back and forth, neither one of them moved or said anything. My principal fear at that point was that I would lose consciousness and be senseless to any efforts to revive me.

“Did you hear me?” I cried out hoarsely.

Continuing to pitch forward, my knees began to buckle again. I saw one of them finally coming toward me, but do not remember him ever reaching my side. I awoke to find myself lying on a couch in a large, high-ceilinged room. Its walls were painted a garish red. For a moment I thought I was back in one of the Marble Alley whorehouses. A young man was peering down at me. His face was somehow familiar.

“A doctor will be right here for you, Captain McKittredge,” he said.

“John Hay,” I rasped.

He nodded as I spoke his name.

“You told the soldiers outside that Valentine Burdette sent you,” he said.

“Yes.”

“And you want to see the president?”

A portly man with gold-rimmed spectacles and a shock of white hair appeared over his right shoulder. He put down a well-worn leather satchel on the marble-top table next to the couch.

“Is he here?” I asked, grasping Hay's arm.

“He is about to present some military commendations,” he said, standing up to let the older man reach my side.

“I have … have to see him now,” I said, gasping like a spent fish.

“Dr. Matz must treat your wound first, Captain McKittredge. You have lost a great deal of blood.”

“Sam Hathaway,” I said.

“Yes,” said John Hay, “the general is one of those here to receive a commendation for bravery in action.”

“You don't understand,” I said.

The doctor was standing directly over me. He grasped the hilt of the bayonet in his pudgy fingers and gave it an exploratory tug. Hay's face swam out of view, and I felt myself dropping away.

I returned to life to find myself lying alone in the same gaudy red room. Even the far door was painted red. It was shut. Except for the faint noise of street traffic through the shuttered windows, I could hear no sound.

There was no way of knowing how long I had been unconscious, but the bayonet was no longer inside me. My uniform blouse was gone. In its place, a large white gauze bandage was strapped tightly around my naked chest and back. Someone had covered me with a woolen blanket.

I slowly raised myself to a sitting position and moved my legs to the floor. A tufted easy chair stood halfway to the red door. My first goal was to reach it. Using the arm of the couch for support, I stood up. Once on my feet, I willed myself to move one foot in front of the other, shambling forward across the room. I could not turn my body without feeling a stab of white-hot pain in my chest.

After reaching the chair, I paused to rest for a moment and then hobbled over to the red door. It opened into another empty room, this one decorated in dark blue. There was another door at the far end of it. It was painted blue. Although that door was also closed, I could now hear what sounded like a band performing in the room beyond. It was playing a slow rendition of “When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again.”

As I lurched toward the blue door, it was opened from the other side. A young man wearing a white steward's jacket stepped into the room. He was carrying a silver tray full of empty glasses suspended over his right hand. Upon seeing me, he lost his balance, and the tray sailed out of his hand, crashing to the floor.

I trudged past him through the open doorway into the next room. Unlike the first two, this one was large enough to hold a Roman legion. It ran all the way from the back to the front of the mansion. Interspersed with the magnificent ten-foot-high windows were life-size oil paintings of past presidents. Gigantic crystal chandeliers hung from the high ceiling, casting a warm golden glow over the crowd assembled there for the awards ceremony.

I looked for the president and saw him immediately, his tall, spare frame towering over the others at the far end of the room. He was slowly working his way down a receiving line of men in uniform. There were about twenty of them, officers and enlisted men from every branch of the military, proudly standing side by side at attention. I looked for General Hathaway, but could not see him in his wheelchair through the crowd of onlookers.

There was no simple way to warn the president of his mortal danger. A military band in bright orange tunics was compacted into the space directly ahead of me, their backs to the corner where I was standing. Beyond the band several hundred guests were observing the ceremony. Most of the women were seated in the rows of spindle-back chairs that ran the entire width of the ballroom. A majority of the men were standing in smoke-wreathed clusters around the spittoons and ashtrays that were conveniently deployed across the open floor and along both walls.

The first challenge was to get past the band, and my strength was ebbing away with each passing second. I plunged forward through the woodwinds, knocking over two music stands, and drawing dirty looks from all the musicians in my path. To their credit they continued playing without the loss of a note, even making a smooth transition into “When This Cruel War Is Over.”

The men standing near the spittoons turned to stare at me as I reeled past them across the ballroom floor. Seeing me wrapped in bandages and dressed in army trousers and boots, they may have thought I had been sent straight on from the battlefield to receive my commendation. It was too late to matter. Looking down, I saw a spreading stain of red on my chest.

President Lincoln was spending a few moments with each man before he presented him with his award. As he shook the hand of a cavalryman in a cherry-picker jacket, I could see that he was already about halfway down the receiving line. Although Sam was seated too low in his wheelchair for me to see him through the crowd, I realized that he must be the last one in line.

A narrow aisle along the side wall allowed me to bypass the rows of chairs, and I headed toward the end of the receiving line at the front of the room. Wobbling forward, I placed one boot in front of the other like a stiff-legged mechanical toy, maneuvering around the backs of the men blocking the aisle. At one point I blundered into a chair at the end of one of the rows, almost landing in the lap of an elderly man wearing a white suit.

“I believe you are wounded, sir,” he said in a kindly way, as my fingers left a large blood smear on the sleeve of his coat.

Dizzy and disoriented, I felt as if the last measure of blood was spilling out of my chest. Although I willed myself to continue struggling toward the receiving line, my legs would no longer cooperate.

I froze there in the side aisle, hunched forward. Fifty feet still separated me from President Lincoln. That is when I looked to the end of the receiving line and saw Sam in his wheelchair, about halfway to the president.

He was staring straight back at me. I knew what he was thinking, even though the placid expression on his bespectacled face never changed. He was gauging whether I had the strength to reach him before he had his opportunity to shoot the president. Both of his hands were resting on his lap. A blanket covered his knees. His Colt revolver had to be under the blanket.

At first it appeared that he was effectively trapped at the end of the receiving line. The other honorees were standing with their backs no more than a foot away from the wall, and with the dense, milling crowd in front of them, it looked impossible for Sam to move his chair any closer to the president. From where he was seated, he did not yet have a clear shot at him.

The president had his back to the crowd and was talking animatedly to a naval officer when I saw Sam pivot the wheelchair toward the young private standing next to him in the receiving line. He was ordering him to do something, and a moment later, the private took a step forward. As soon as he did so, Sam moved his chair through the narrow gap along the wall until he reached the next soldier. Now, only seven honorees separated him from Mr. Lincoln.

The president had finished shaking the naval officer's hand. He moved two steps to the left until he was facing the next man in line. In that time General Hathaway had moved another man closer.

I knew that I could very well change the course of my nation's history if I could just stay conscious long enough to act. It was this immutable reality that gave me the strength to go on. Using the arms and shoulders of the men standing ahead of me for support, I forced myself to move forward once more, slowly closing the gap.

Reaching the front of the room, I swerved right to force a passage through the last cluster of guests standing next to the receiving line. By then Sam had already moved past two more of the men who had been ahead of him and was within ten feet of the president. The general swung his head around just long enough to see me closing in before pivoting back to order another soldier out of his way.

Pushing through the last group of guests, I hugged the ivory-colored wall behind the receiving line, leaving behind a chest-high stain of red as I lurched toward Sam's chair. I was no more than five feet away from him when he swung back again and saw me coming.

Smoothly wheeling the chair sideways, his right hand disappeared beneath the blanket for a second, coming right back up with the revolver. He cocked the hammer and trained it on me, all the while looking in the direction of the president. His movements were masked from the crowd by the honorees standing close beside him, both of whom were watching Mr. Lincoln as he stepped toward them.

Looking past Sam, I saw that President Lincoln was no more than five feet away. In another moment Sam would have a clear shot. As I covered the last few yards between us, he turned away from the president, and his eyes came to rest on mine. He could have killed me then and still completed his deadly mission.

Behind the spectacles his eyes seemed as tranquil as I imagined them to be when he had led his men toward the Rebel artillery at Williamsburg with an umbrella under his arm. I waited for the gun to explode in his hand, but for some reason he never pulled the trigger. I launched myself the last few feet and toppled over onto his chair.

There was no fight left in me. It was only my size and weight that kept him from acting as he wished. I tried to lock my fingers around the wrist of his shooting hand, but they possessed no strength. From three inches away, I watched as the barrel of his revolver pulled free.

The band had suddenly stopped playing. There was dead silence for a moment, and then people began shouting from all over the room. As I looked up across Sam's right shoulder, I saw the president being pulled back from the receiving line by John Hay. The young aide was frantically whispering something into his ear as he dragged him along. They were already twenty feet away and lengthening the gap with every stride.

Even then Sam could have killed me as easily as he had dispatched Laird Hawkinshield. My last coherent recollection was of the expression on his face, the haunted look of a soul from hell, as the barrel moved slowly past my eyes again and came to rest above his heart.

“God forgive me,” he whispered, just before the gun exploded.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-FOUR

Monhegan Island, Maine

December 24, 1920

A frozen curtain of salt-crusted ocean spray covered my study windows like tattered lace, but there was enough rum in me to think I could almost see the coast of Ireland two thousand miles across the Atlantic.

Close to the edge of the cliff, a black-backed gull hovered motionless in the wind, screaming raucously for my attention. Above him, the darkening sky was filled with low, sodden clouds that threatened more snow. The island was already buried under three feet of it.

I hadn't moved from my easy chair in the study all day. The fire had gone out some time during the night, and I could see my breath condensing in the frosty air. As the wind growled down the chimney, I briefly considered the idea of going outside for more wood. Instead, I reached down and took another swig of dark rum.

At some point I drifted off to sleep. When I opened my bleary eyes, it was to the sight of a man furiously digging a path through the snow toward my cottage. The drifts were almost eight feet high along one stretch of the cliff path, but he began tunneling straight through it. A second figure was bringing up the rear, dragging a sled.

My first instinct was to run, but even to my rum-soaked brain, the idea that someone was still searching for me was ludicrous. I waited for what fate had in store. Ten minutes later I heard raised voices outside the kitchen window, followed by a shrieking blast of wind as the door swung open and slammed hard against the inside wall.

The first man through the opening was George Cabot. Although he was covered with snow, I recognized him by the bright red beard that protruded almost a foot beneath his yellow sou'wester. The second man was wearing a hooded leather cloak over corduroy trousers and calf-length boots. It was only when he removed the cloak that I was startled to discover he was a woman.

“Happy Christmas!” she proclaimed in a booming voice, her short, blonde hair framing the blunt face like a Viking helmet. She headed straight to my chair and proceeded to wrap me in her arms. I didn't have the energy to protest. Stepping away, she took in the bewilderment in my eyes.

“I'm Nancy Hollowell,” she said. “Barbara's daughter.”

Nancy Hollowell was my only living relative, the daughter of my late niece. Although I had never met her, I instinctively knew why she was there. By the time Cabot was finished hauling in the supplies, there was enough food stacked in the kitchen to feed me for a month. It included two fresh hams, a massive round brick of cheddar cheese, tinned fruits, a cask full of shortbread cookies, a mixed case of French wines, and a crate of fresh citrus. It suddenly occurred to me that she wasn't planning to leave.