On Secret Service (8 page)
Authors: John Jakes
April 1861
The mob's blood was up, excited by blue militia uniforms, rifles with bayonets at shoulder arms. Margaret rammed an elbow into whoever was crushing her from behind. “For God's sake, stop pushing.”
She slipped, would have fallen to be trampled under heels and hobnails if she hadn't held fast to someone's shoulder. She could scarcely breathe. She was trapped in a heaving mass of people who smelled of whiskey and anger. They were throwing things. Rocks, chunks of pavement.
Seven cars carrying soldiers had been pulled through town to the B&O Camden Station. Then the mob dropped a ship's anchor on the tracks, blocking three more cars. Young men of the Sixth Massachusetts jumped off the cars and marched in a lane between ranks of Chief Kane's police. Yesterday, companies of the Twenty-fifth Pennsylvania had passed through with only minor trouble. Cicero had promised more action today. She'd come down to Pratt Street to see the excitement.
The rain of missiles and obscenities continued. The militiamen looked to their officers for a command to defend themselves. A brickbat flung from behind hit Margaret's shoulder. Someone fired a gun. An elderly civilian fell down. The mob screamed.
A man near her drew a pistol. Other guns went off. A soldier flew back against a policeman, an inky red splotch blossoming on his overcoat. A captain clutched his face as a sheet of blood ran down. The gunfire became a din.
She put her hands to her ears. She still heard it. She closed her eyes a moment; she still saw smoky Pratt Street, soldiers and civilians falling. She ground her palms against her ears but the din only grew worse. A soldier with a fixed bayonet charged her, his pink face wild with rage. She threw herself backward but a wall of bodies held her. “Secesh slut,” the boy screamed, stabbing herâ¦
“No!”
Thrashing and crying out, Margaret awoke.
She realized she was safe. Trembling, but safe in her dark bedroom. Her nightdress was soaked through. In her dream she'd relived what she'd witnessed on Pratt Street yesterday, Friday, one week after the Charleston batteries had fired on Sumter, blasting away all hope of peace. On Monday, Lincoln had proclaimed an insurrection and called for seventy-five thousand state militia to defend Washington. What she had hoped would never happen to disturb the peaceful tenor of her life had come after all.
She looked at a clock on the mantel of the bedroom fireplace. Half-past nine. She threw on her robe and rushed downstairs. A foyer table was stacked with secession cards and broadsides. A copy of a two-page special edition of the
Baltimore Independent
lay at her father's place in the dining room.
MURDER OF BALTIMOREANS BY FOREIGN SOLDIERY
!
THIRTEEN CITIZENS SHOT
â
FIVE REPORTED KILLED
!
OUR STREETS DRENCHED WITH BLOOD BY LINCOLN'S HIRELINGS
!
Simms heard her moving about, pushed open the swing door from the kitchen pantry. “Breakfast, Miss Miller?” The elderly black man was solemn, depressed as she was by events of the past week.
“Just coffee, please. I have no appetite. Father and Cicero have gone?”
“To a big secession meeting in Monument Square, then some others, don't know where. Mr. Miller, he's het up, gray as a ghost. I fear for his health. Best you don't go out. When Clarissa come to work, she told me they're still rioting. It's terrible. It's all just so terrible.”
Margaret threw a lock of rebellious dark hair off her forehead. “How was my brother behaving?”
“Coffee be here right away.” Simms backed out of sight as if he hadn't heard the question.
The chicory-laced coffee tasted bitter. She couldn't swallow it. She'd come home a week ago Thursday, one of her regular visits, and been caught in Baltimore by the outbreak of war. Donal was in New York again. She had decided to stay in Baltimore on the assumption that it might be calmer than Washington. The assumption was wrong. Within hours, the mobs were parading. Secession pennants streamed from masts in the harbor. Fireworks displays celebrated the war.
Maryland's governor, Hicks, issued a proclamation calling for order. The response was derision; defiance. Well, Baltimore was known as Mobtown. Lovers of literature said the mysterious Mr. Poe had died at the hands of a mob during the municipal elections of 1849.
Margaret rested her elbows on the polished table and pressed her palms to her eyes. She recalled the broad-shouldered stranger in President's Park. He was puffed up with Yankee righteousness; quick to answer her gibes with some of his own. Thoroughly objectionable young man.
Then why had she thought of him often in the past weeks?
Well, he said he read novels. She knew a few Baltimore boys who did that, but they were fops. He had lovely blue eyes, but it was hardly a trait unique in the world. She couldn't explain it. He was the wrong sort, on the wrong side, and yet he stirred her somehow. No doubt he intended to muster in and kill Southern boys, and she'd never see him again.
She fretted about her father. Calhoun Miller had hardly slept the past two weeks, writing increasingly angry editorials and receiving strange visitors in the middle of the night. Virginians, he said, pumping funds into the state to help print the secession literature. Several times Miller had lost his temper with her over trivialities, something he never did. Either the secession effort was failing or going too slowly.
Her brother meanwhile hummed and bustled about the house with unusual good cheer. He even told her the name of his secret group, the Knights of Liberty. He said they would resist the Northern aggressors not with platitudes and printed material, but with explosives, flammable oil, stolen arms. Cicero liked the terrible upheaval.
She feared for his safety in the streets, but she feared even more for the safety and well-being of her right-minded father. When night fell, neither he nor Cicero had come home.
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The warehouse smelled of fish and the damp wool clothing of the two dozen men gathered there. When another arrived, a burly doorkeeper stopped him. Passwords in Latin were exchanged.
A small table held two lamps, the only illumination. Crossed sabers and a Bible lay between them. Six feet behind the table a state flag hung from a beam. Cicero Miller stood to one side, eyes darting over the band of righteous men listening to his father speak.
Calhoun Miller's linen looked soiled. His eyes were gritty with weariness. He'd addressed the public rally at the municipal monument to George Washington, then two other meetings, before this one. Cicero maintained a sober expression but inwardly he was elated. For the first time, events had persuaded Calhoun Miller to speak to the Knights.
“Last year, with pride and hope,” Miller said, “I took part in the nominating convention of the new Constitutional Union party. Before the November elections, we presented ourselves as the alternative to the Douglas Democrats, Southern Democrats, and the despised Republicans. Ours was the party and platform of compromise and moderation.”
Hearing that, some of the Knights grumbled. In the harbor a ship's bell rang. A wagon horse clip-clopped outside, then stopped.
“Our candidates, Mr. Bell and Mr. Everett, were pledged to reject the radical philosophies of both sides. We wished to preserve the Union”âsomeone objected with a loud “No!”â“but also to protect Southern interests. The ascension of Mr. Lincoln has shown me we were in error. There is no spirit of compromise on the other side, so there can be no moderation on ours.” Cicero watched a pair of rats dart through the darkness behind his father.
“The institution of slavery has prevailed in Maryland for generations, and we proudly say we are Southern in practice, Southern in temperament.” Cicero led the applause. “Our timid governor has finally addressed the crisis by ordering rail bridges destroyed north of the city, so no more foreign troops can pass. But much more is required. Maryland must join her sister states of the Confederacy. I charge you as patriotic citizens to make it happen, speedily, using any and all necessary methods, before the egalitarian hordes enthroned in Washington overwhelm us. Peace is no longer possible. Restraint is no longer possible. Very well. I prefer to die defending the Constitution as revered and maintained by the South than to live one hour under what has been revealed as the fanatical tyranny of the North.”
“What we supposed to do, kill anybody who don't want to secede?”
Cicero turned, identifying a man named Scully, who'd recently joined the Knights. Bill Topping, a stouter man who'd joined at the same time, stood next to him.
Calhoun Miller said, “I reluctantly answer yes, if that be necessary.”
“Can't go along, sorry.”
Cicero's crippled foot scraped as he moved to confront the naysayer. “You took an oath of loyalty when you joined this organization. You can't go back on it whenever it suits you.”
Scully said, “Wrong. You men are inciting to riot. This meeting is over.”
“Who the hell are you to issue edicts?”
“You know my name. John Scully.” He pulled a pistol from his jacket. “Of the Pinkerton organization. Bill, call the men from the police wagon.”
Topping rushed for the warehouse door. He had a gun too. Voices clamored:
“Bastard said he was from Alabama.”
“How'd he get the passwords?”
Cicero's was loudest: “Seize them.”
Topping rolled back the door on its rusty track. In the street, haloed by lamplight, Baltimore police stepped from behind their wagon. Enraged, Cicero limped to the table, blew out one lamp. Someone fired a shot that struck the other one, shattering the chimney and spattering hot oil. Policemen charged into the warehouse swinging clubs.
One of the Yankee detectives fired shots; one of the Knights fired back. Instantly there was a pandemonium of shouts, weapons going off, men running, fire spreading from the lamp on the floor. Cicero dragged himself to his father.
“We have to get out. That way.” Practically at his ear, another gun went off. Miller looked startled. Then he fell.
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“Simms.” The voice downstairs belonged to Margaret's brother. “Simms, you lazy nigger, get up here!”
Margaret threw her book aside and ran downstairs as Simms stumbled up from his cellar room, emerging through a small door under the staircase.
“Get dressed, get the carriage.” Cicero was leaning against the wall, disheveled, sooty-faced. Margaret froze at the sight of a long smear of red on the wallpaper behind him.
“Why do you need the carriage at this time of night?” she said.
“To bring a body back to the house.”
“Body? Oh my God, notâ”
“Yes. Police broke up our meeting. A man who pretended to hail from Alabama sold us out. He was really a Yankee detective. I don't know who fired the shot at Pa, but they killed him.”
“I'm going with you.”
Simms lashed the horse through smoky streets where ragged boys stoned pedestrians and set off squibs that hissed and fumed. Bonfires burned unattended, consuming fixtures from looted stores, discarded clothing, an overturned pony cart. Bands of rioters fled past the rockaway like hounds on a hunt.
In the wharf warehouse, two city patrolmen guarded the supine body of Calhoun Miller. Margaret sank to her knees beside her father. She touched his white face. “No, Papa. Oh, no.”
“Mayor Brown's coming to inspect,” a policeman said.
Cicero snarled, “Let him.” Brown was antislavery. “For Christ's sake stand back, where's your respect? This is Calhoun Miller, the newspaper editor. He was shot down at a peaceful gathering. Help me roll him in the blanket, Simms.”
In the rockaway with the sad heap of Miller's corpse lying on the opposite seat, Margaret wanted to weep and rant, but she wouldn't allow herself.
Cicero clutched her hand. “They'll pay for what they did, I'll make sure.”
Margaret looked into her brother's gleaming eyes. He might be half-mad. But the murder had made them allies. She squeezed his clammy fingers.
“So will I. We'll both make them pay. I was a fool to say the struggle didn't matter.”
S
PIES
May 1861
Washington was a carnival or a cesspool, according to your politics. Margaret thought it the latter. After a perilous April week of railroad bridges burned and telegraph wires cut, a week that had left the city trembling with fear of invasion, the wires were spliced, the trestles repaired, and southbound trains again delivered soldiers to the capital.
She thought of them as Attila's Huns. They sneered at the muddy, dilapidated city they were called to defend. They slept and built cook fires in government buildings. They disfigured open spaces with sprawling tent villages. They were serviced by greedy sutlers and enterprising soiled doves arriving on every train from the West. They held target practice on the Smithsonian grounds with no thought for civilians close by. Whether ruffianly Zouaves from Brooklyn fire engine companies or kid-glove playboys from the Seventh New York, they savagely beat citizens for any fancied slur or slight.
They drilled, drummed, and bugled at all hours. They brawled and rioted in the taverns and the streets until the provost guard subdued them with fire hoses. They presented regimental band concerts under the trees of President's Park. They protected the Potomac bridges with mounted sentries. They refused to dig latrines and urinated and defecated wherever they chose. With its fouled canals and sewage-ridden river, Washington had always smelled; now it stank unspeakably.
On a mild May afternoon, Margaret left Franklin Square in her smart little piano-box buggy. When the buggy stalled behind a broken-down dray, one of the Yankee vulgarians lurched off the curb to accost her, heedless of her black bombazine dress, black gloves, black hat.
The man had yellow chevrons on his blue flannel shirt. His breath smelled like gin-soaked garbage. He laid a hand on her leg and asked wouldn't she sleep with a defender of freedom?
She slashed his cheek with the buggy whip and drove through a narrow lane that opened next to the dray.
With a shaky hand, she returned the whip to its socket. A thread of bright blood stained the shaft. She hadn't known so much accumulated rage was still buried within her.
She tied the horse to a ring post in front of the brick manse at Sixteenth and I Streets. Her face, powdered carelessly, resembled a grotesque white mask in the sunshine. She noticed unweeded flower beds. The Negro gardener who tended them must have abandoned his job.
When the door opened, Margaret said, “Rose, do you know the Yankees killed my father?”
“Yes, I heard. I am so terribly sorry.”
“I'm here because I've been indifferent to important things. That was wrong. You're acquainted with so many people who must be in sympathy with Mr. Davis and his new government. Is there any way I can help them?”
Rose Greenhow smiled in a slow, warm, almost seductive way. “Of course. Come in. We'll talk.”
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Rose's parlor had an airless and dusty feel. Only thin blades of sunshine slipped between closed draperies. Margaret heard no one in the house except little Rose, who was stomping upstairs.
Rose looked stunning in dark red silk with pagoda sleeves and a tightly fitted bodice that flattered her ample figure. When she sat down, Margaret glimpsed scarlet stockings.
“I'm sorry you have been through an ordeal,” Rose said. “Will you tell me the tragic details?”
Margaret related the story. “I've worn these weeds for a month. It's time I put them away. My brother, Cicero, left for Richmond last week.”
“It will soon be the capital of the Confederacy, I hear. Montgomery will be abandoned.”
“Cicero's determined to help the cause, as I am. With his infirmity he'll never be a soldier, but he's clever. He'll find a place.”
Little Rose flounced into the parlor. She darted behind her mother and deliberately tipped a vase of tulips. Water ran over a fine inlaid table. When Rose scolded her, little Rose bawled, threw herself on the carpet, and bit a table leg, leaving deep teeth marks.
“Excuse me, Margaret.” Rose dragged the screaming child upstairs by the ear, locked her in her room, and came down again.
“When I deny the little imp anything at all, she retaliates for hours. I'm afraid she has the true rebel spirit.”
Margaret smiled. “I've closed the house in Baltimore. Simms, our colored man, will continue to live there as caretaker. Father's estate will pay him. I don't intend to go back to Baltimore until the war's over in ninety days or so.”
“That may be optimistic. Captain Jordanâdo you remember him?” Margaret said she did. “He's back and forth to Richmond, and he says Beauregard will soon come up from Charleston to take command of the Alexandria line. Did you hear that Lincoln offered command of the Army to Bob Lee and Lee turned him down? He's joining Virginia.”
“Will the armies fight there?”
“Undoubtedly. It will be crucial for Beauregard to have information about enemy strength. Let me show you something.”
Skirts rustling, Rose took Margaret into a small library where she displayed a sizable stack of newspapers. “
New York Herald. Washington Evening Star.
Here's the filthy rag the local Republicans publish. The editors have one thing in common. Great generosity with reports of the Yankee regiments, where they are, where they're going, in fulsome detail. Until our Northern friends realize how stupid that is, we are in their debt. Captain Jordan takes care of forwarding papers to Richmond. He's resigning his commission, by the way.”
“Isn't he a West Point man?”
“What of it? Some of the best graduates of that place have already come over. Lee is the most brilliant of them. If only Jeff Davis will give him his head! Davis graduated from the Academy and served in Mexico, so he mistakenly fancies himself a supreme strategist.”
Rose shut the library door and they returned to the parlor. Margaret realized the house was deserted, the Negro servants gone, for a more subtle reason than a desire for privacy.
“If you join us, you'll learn of some other work the captain's doing,” Rose said.
“Then there's a place for me?”
“Yes, in a small, select circle of refined ladies and gentlemen who will take on the clandestine task of supplying military information to our generals in Virginia. The South needs far more than newspaper subscriptions.” Margaret's heart began to beat hard in her breast.
“The work will call for keen wits, and the courage to face down some of these Yankee ruffians in an emergency. We do have an advantage. Most of them are ignorant peasants. Will you take a day or two to think about it?”
“I don't need a day, Rose. I came to you hoping for something like this. What you've told me exceeds my hopes.”
Rose swept to her feet. “Be very sure of your decision.”
“I am.”
“You are pledging yourself to loyalty and secrecy, no matter what hazards may arise. You must obey instructions without question or hesitation.”
“I will.”
Rose embraced her warmly. “Then you'll be a great asset. Attractive young women won't be suspected by these Yankee clods. Do you have servants here in Washington?”
“Only a marvelous cook who's a perfectly awful and lazy housekeeper.”
“Discharge her. Colored people can't be trusted. Not in these times. The paramount thing to remember is this: We're at war. We must win the war even if we sink to behavior none of us would have contemplated before.”
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Two nights later, Margaret returned to Rose's house and repeated her declaration of intent to Captain Thomas Jordan. At the end she asked, “Did it cause you pain to abandon your commission?”
Jordan snorted and tugged his beard. “General Scott's staff was a fine source of information for a while, but my sentiments were known, and they began to restrict what I could see. Otherwise I have no regrets. The volunteers backslap their commanders, address them by first namesâwon't obey an order if they don't happen to like it. They elect all officers but the colonel according to popularity. That isn't an Armyâit's a rabble. I'm glad to be free. Furthermore, within our new organization, Captain Jordan no longer exists. I'm Rayford. Assumed names are a necessary protection.”
Jordan told her he was establishing safe houses in southern Maryland and recruiting watermen to ferry couriers across the Potomac to Virginia. Rose's men and women would be called on to carry coded messages out of the city to the couriers waiting at the safe houses.
“Do you know anything about codes and ciphers, Margaret?”
“Just what little I came across in Edgar Poe's stories.”
“Let me show you one cipher we'll use. It's called the pigpen cipher, or sometimes the Rosicrucian cipher, because the sect used it for secret documents. It's very old, but once you understand it, you'll find that you can easily encrypt a message.”
He spread writing paper on the lamplit table. “It's a symbol cipher, not a substitution code that uses patterns of words to stand for other words that are the nulls and clears.”
“I beg your pardon. Nulls andâ¦?”
“Clears. Nulls are words in an encrypted message that have no meaning. Only the clears reveal the content. Here's the pigpen.” He drew two horizontal lines, crossed them with two verticals, creating an open-sided grid of nine boxes. Starting with ABC in the upper left box, he filled each with three letters. The lower right box held only Y and Z.
“Because the grid's open on all sides, no two boxes are alike. For a coded message, you draw the shape of the box required for the letter you want, then put in one dot for the second letter in that box, two if you want the third letter, or if it's the first letter, none. You repeat the process for the rest of the letters in the message. I'll write the word
cat
.”
Jordan laid his pencil beside the paper. “You can see it isn't sophisticated. Hardly worthy of an Army in the field. But we aren't yet an Army, so we make do. We will be an army soon. This house will help bring that to pass. Therefore let me say welcome.”
He offered his hand. Margaret took it, shivering with uncontrollable excitement.
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Next day she was browsing among Shillington's books when a voice startled her. “Margaret?”
“Good heavens. Hanna.” Her friend was unflatteringly dressed in trousers and a mannish frock coat. Her blonde hair was barbarously short. A clerk stared; two patrons whispered.
Margaret wrapped Hanna in a hug. “How are you? It's been ages since we've seen each other.”
Hanna touched Margaret's black silk sleeve. “Has there been a death in the family?” Margaret told her about Calhoun Miller. Hanna squeezed Margaret's hand.
“How dreadful. I remember meeting your father. He was such a smart, polite gentleman.”
“He was callously murdered by a pair of Yankee detectives, though I don't know which one fired the shot. I'll be a long while getting over it. How is the major?”
“Much better than he's been in a while. He's working for Secretary Cameron in the War Department.” Margaret thought of her new allegiance to Rose and “Mr. Rayford.” All other relationships had to be scrutinized in light of it.
“He's happy to be in the center of the war,” Hanna went on, “but of course he's dissatisfied with the pittance they pay him. He'll never rest till he makes a fortune, though I don't see how he will in Washington. Is Rose still conducting her salon?”
