Fiddlehead (The Clockwork Century) (26 page)

Lincoln finished his coughing fit, then rallied himself to speak. “We’ve heard nothing from him since yesterday morning, and no mention of Maynard.”

“If anyone can track it down, he can,” Wellers said with desperate confidence.

Gideon didn’t argue, but he worried all the same. Troost was one of a kind, but he already had one mission on deck: bringing the Bardsleys to safety on the northern side of the line. He could swing the impossible, yes, absolutely. But how many impossible things could he juggle at once?

Grimly, he warned, “We can count on Kirby Troost to do his job, and more. But right now, we need a plan. We need to get our story straight and our actions in order before Haymes makes her next move.” He straightened the bookcase he’d knocked ajar in his moment of anger, nudging it back into place and setting two books aright. “We need to send word to our operatives before the police find their way back here, as they inevitably
shall.
And when Troost finishes evacuating my family, he’ll be back. We must be certain that we are ready for
him.
”

Fifteen

On Monday morning, Maria awoke to a knock on her hotel room door. She threw her coat over her dressing gown and fished around on the cold wood floor for her slippers, but couldn’t find them, so she gave up and tiptoed from rug to rug, turning up the heat as she passed the radiator. “I’m coming,” she called sleepily. She wondered what time it was, but could see through the crack in the curtains that it must be an hour past dawn at least. She hadn’t meant to sleep so late.

Henry Epperson was staying right across the hall, so she assumed that it must be him, but when she opened the door, she found an errand boy of perhaps ten or eleven years old with a stack of telegrams in his fist. “Are you Miss Boyd?” he asked. She nodded. He thrust the loose papers forward. “Here.”

“Thank you,” she said, rubbing her eyes. Seeing that the boy lingered, she added, “One moment, dear.” Her bag was sitting next to the washbasin. She stuffed her fingers into the side pocket and pulled out some pennies. “Here you go.”

She closed the door behind him and sorted the messages by the time they’d been sent—which was trickier than it should’ve been, as they were entirely out of order. But once she’d corrected the situation, she knew she needed to rouse Henry
immediately.

She located her slippers, which had been kicked beneath the bed. She pulled on a pair of socks before donning them, not caring how silly it looked and doubting that anyone would notice. Across the hall she went, where she rapped her fist heartily, repeatedly on Henry’s door. “Henry? Are you up yet?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said through the door, then opened it with a smile. “I’ve got some coffee in here. Can I talk you into sharing?”

“Coffee sounds wonderful.” She stepped past him as he held the door ajar. “But there’s no time to dillydally!”

He looked confused. “Not even for coffee?”

“An errand boy brought me these.” She showed him the notes. “They’ve been piling up overnight, apparently. One in particular is marked for urgent, immediate delivery, but it would seem that the taps aren’t manned as thoroughly as one might wish.”

Henry shook his head. “The military missives get first handling. Civilian messages get processed whenever the intake officer feels like sorting them out.”

“That’s a bum deal if you need to send a note in a hurry,” she complained.

“Far be it from me to argue with you. So what’s the rush?”

She fed him the telegrams one by one.

SUMMARY OF NURSING NOTES RECEIVED STOP AGREE ON ALL POINTS REGARDING GAS AND WEAPONS PROJECT DESIGNATED MAYNARD STOP WILL EXPECT REPORT ON ROBERTSON UPON YOUR RETURN FRIDAY STOP UNCLE A

MAYNARD IS ON THE MOVE STOP AUTHORIZATION GIVEN SANS UNCLE G STOP TARGETS CIVILIAN NOT MILITARY STOP ALERT OUR COUSIN KT TO WITHDRAW TO OTHER SIDE OF MD IMMEDIATELY STOP YOURS DR W ON AUTHORITY AND APPROVAL OF UNCLE A

“MD?” Henry frowned.

“Mason-Dixon, I should think,” she replied. “But Project Maynard … if Troost was right, now’s the time to
really
worry.”

Oh, I’m already worried plenty,” he said, and fiddled with the small slip of paper. “
Civilian targets.
That’s not good.”

“It’s not a surprise, either. Everything I’ve heard of Haymes suggests she’s utterly soulless. But it doesn’t stop there. Look, here’s the next one.”

DO NOT RETURN TO DC STOP FIND OUR COUSIN KT FOR ASSISTANCE STOP MOST LIKELY TARGETS LARGE CITIES STOP MAYNARD COULD CLEAR A SQUARE MILE STOP RESULTING CLOUD MAY TRAVEL MILES FURTHER STOP WILL SEND WHATEVER HELP WE CAN MANAGE STOP

“I don’t even know who sent this one,” she said in a whisper. “Dr. Wellers, I expect, though it might be Dr. Bardsley.”

Henry didn’t dwell on that part. “Oh, God,” he said again.

“We need to find Kirby Troost, unless you think ‘KT’ stands for anybody else. But it’s his job to get Gideon’s family out of the South. I’m not sure how much assistance he can be to us until he does.”

He smiled weakly. “Only because you don’t know Kirby. He can handle more than one task at a time, and you can bet he’ll have some ideas and some connections. He always does. Come on—get yourself dressed, and I’ll get us a carriage. A clean carriage,” he emphasized, meaning one that wouldn’t need a driver.

“Five minutes, and I’ll meet you downstairs.”

In five minutes she dressed herself, threw on her boots, and lit a tiny fire in the enamel basin to destroy the telegrams. When they were reduced entirely to ashes, she grabbed her tapestry cloth bag and dashed down the stairs to find Henry standing beside a tiny cabriolet with a puttering, sputtering engine that shook the whole frame as it idled.

“After you, ma’am,” he said, holding the door open and offering his hand for her to climb up inside. She took it and ascended into the narrow cab, adjusting her skirts so he could shut the door. He crawled up into the other side, shut his own door, and adjusted the levers and wheel. He wrenched the vehicle into gear and it rambled forward, then he hit the brakes to avoid hitting a newspaper seller who’d dropped something in the road. “Sorry!” he shouted out the window. “Sorry,” he said again, and set the car moving forward, more carefully this time.

“It’s a shame there’s no glass in these windows, don’t you think?” Maria asked with a shudder. She tightened her coat and twisted her gloved hands up in her scarf, but that wasn’t enough to make her comfortable, not with the wind rushing inside the cab.

“Not such a shame if you’re keen to keep breathing. The exhaust creeps up from the engine—that’s why the windows are fixed this way. It’ll warm up a bit as we go, I promise. Heat also creeps inside, especially at your feet.”

They drove a few blocks east, which was not at all in the direction of Lookout Mountain—a fact that Maria knew because she could see its craggy, winter-bald point off to the south. She was on the verge of asking why they were taking this path when Henry explained, “We have to get past the wall, and the nearest gate is over here. Under different circumstances, I’d take the long way around to cover our tracks … but we’re short on time, and I don’t know about you, but I haven’t seen anyone following us.”

“No, we’ve been fortunate so far,” she said, with more confidence than she felt.

Before long, the wall loomed up close.

It was a sheer, flat, inscrutable thing—a vast construction designed with traditional military precision and lack of finer detail. A massive half-moon over a hundred feet high, it was painted Confederate gray, partly as a patriotic statement, partly to protect it from the elements, and partly because gray paint was cheap. A wide double gate hung open, with one lane of traffic spilling slowly inward, and one lane of traffic proceeding outward at a somewhat faster pace.

Maria reached into her bag for the papers identifying her as a nurse, but Henry told her not to bother. “They check you coming in, not going out.”

“They didn’t check
me
coming in.”

“You came in on the train.”

“Ah.” That was true—and her papers on the far end had been carefully scrutinized, now that she was awake enough to remember the process.

Henry waved to the guard, who waved back in a casual, unconcerned manner. Then they were outside, in the poorer suburbs that had been chopped off from the urban military center. Off in one direction, Maria saw Missionary Ridge curving gently around the valley; and to the right, she could barely see the leaning tip of the mountain peeking over the wall. It all felt very medieval to her, like a castle surrounded by serfs.

Henry guided the car to an overgrown side road, where they could watch travelers come and go through the gate without being easily observed. Several minutes passed without anything suspicious happening, so he and Maria concluded that they hadn’t been followed, and were on their way with a somewhat greater sense of security.

Outside the wall, the roads were not made for horseless travel. They took it slowly because the engine was quieter in a lower gear, and because the brick-paved streets were rough on the hard-rubber wheels of the car, never mind its occupants. Horses came and went, sometimes ridden, and sometimes pulling loads; children dashed out into the slow-moving traffic, chasing dogs, toys, or one another. Potholes abounded, for bricks were sometimes pulled from the street and used to patch, repair, restore, and rebuild outhouses, sheds, and crumbling foundations. Intersections did not always meet at the correct angles, and no signs indicated which way traffic was expected to flow.

Big trees stood seasonally naked on corners and in yards, and their brittle branches reached high overhead, throwing scattered shadows around these outlying places. The houses were small and fiercely guarded, or else they were large and in uncertain repair. The people were overwhelmingly poor and not in the military—Maria did not spy a single uniform. And the closer they came to the mountain, the more colored families she saw.

“I feel … conspicuous,” she whispered as softly as she could, while still making herself heard above the engine.

“We
are
conspicuous. But we are relatively safe.”

“What if someone comes along behind us and asks if anyone has seen a carriage like ours?”

He shrugged. “The locals will say they’ve seen no such thing. No one who asks them questions has their best interests in mind. It’s safer for them to see nothing, and say nothing. But they won’t hand us over, because they know what we’re doing.”

“They can’t possibly.
We
barely know what we’re doing.”

“They know we’re going to the Church. Pretty much any white people who come out this way … that’s where they’re headed. And most of the people who live out here keep themselves blind and quiet, because it’s the only way to help without putting themselves in danger.”

Up to the long, narrow mountain’s ridge they rode, rattling past the edge of the river’s bend and along a packed dirt road that led under the railroad overpass that took all the trains around Lookout. The arch was overgrown with the dead trees left behind by winter—long branches, stripped roots, and a dangling lattice of Japanese weed, gone brown from the dry and chill. Along the arch’s top a train crept slowly, its wheels churning, its cars hauling coal or timber from east to west, or farther down south.

Under the arch, a horse appeared, galloping quickly toward them. Its rider almost lost his hat as he rode beneath the train, but he held it fast—and he drew his horse up short when he reached their car. Its hooves scattered bits of brick and pebbles, which clanged against the car’s metal plating, and the animal shifted nervously from foot to foot.

“Henry, don’t tell me that’s you…?” the rider called. He firmly reined the horse up to Henry’s window, and leaned his head down low. “Well, I’ll be damned. My luck ain’t usually this good.”

Maria leaned over, cocking her head to the side a bit so she could look up at him. “Mr. Troost! Just the man we were coming to see.”

He spit a gob of tobacco to the side of the horse, away from the car. “I should damn well hope so. Can’t imagine why else you’d be out this way. Anyway, I’m glad to see you’ve saved me a trip downtown. We got problems.”

“We got telegrams,” Maria agreed.

“And I got another one just now,” he said. His eyes were hard, and his hands were tight on the reins of the unhappy horse. “Follow me back to the Church and I’ll give you what I know. And jack that thing a little faster. We haven’t got all day. Shit, we might not have all
morning.
”

He nudged the horse back the way he came, and kicked it into a gallop once more.

Henry urged the car through first gear and into second, which had Maria clinging to the door and wondering if she might be sick. The vehicle tumbled over the lumpy roads, shuddering like it might come apart at any moment, but it stayed intact as it trailed Kirby Troost’s horse through an overgrown neighborhood of small, cheaply built bungalows with rickety porches and crooked steps. They gave friendly chase down a narrow street, Maria praying at every moment that they wouldn’t meet anyone or anything coming the opposite direction.

They passed one church on the left, a tall, flat-faced wooden structure painted white, but apparently this wasn’t the Station. They kept going until they found a sturdy stone African Methodist Episcopal church a few blocks farther down and partway up a steep embankment that disappeared into the mountain itself. Kirby Troost disappeared behind this church, down two scuffed ruts that passed for an alley. Henry followed him as far as he dared, until the winter-dead foliage threatened to bog down the car and stop it for good.

He pushed his foot down on the brake and hopped out.

Maria waited for him to open her door, then took his hand as she descended into the grass.

Kirby tied his horse to a post beside the church steps and then joined them. “Y’all’d better come inside.”

Inside, everything was dark except for the colored light that trickled through the tinted glass windows. The place was wired for electricity and gas lamps, and she could see how old fixtures had been refitted for the newer technology. But nothing was turned on, and the place was cold. There was certainly a furnace, but no one had lit it. The church looked deserted. Maybe that was the intent.