The Bookman's Promise (17 page)

Burton had come to Washington to see John B. Floyd, Buchanan’s secretary of war. This much we know. What went on in that room no one will ever know.

I had admired Burton from afar but I never trusted Floyd. Yes, I worked for him but I had always considered him a rogue. In the daily job my opinion didn’t matter much, for I did my job diligently and our paths seldom crossed. My work required little contact with the secretary, and I functioned well and was reasonably well satisfied. But I was not at all surprised when history put Floyd in a traitorous light—a man who used his position to transfer tons of arms and materiel to the South, then fled to join the Confederacy when the war finally began. In the department I kept my distance.

Even so, I could not possibly stay away when I learned of Burton’s appointment with Floyd that morning. I must have looked exactly like what I was, a nervous young man waiting in the hall with his hat in his lap. Then the door opened and Burton stepped out, and all that unease disappeared. I walked up boldly and said hello. I told him I had followed his adventures and had ordered his books and read them all. This cheered him enormously. As I later learned, he was particularly open to an admirer after the cutting disappointment of Speke and his own relative eclipse in England. Of all the strange and unexpected things, my sudden appearance flattered him and brightened his day.

To me Richard was the salt of the earth. We liked each other immediately.

He put his hand on my shoulder. Like an old confidant, he drew me to him and I stood tall and felt myself a man among men.

“Say, Charles—”

“Oh, please! All my friends call me Charlie. I’d be honored if you would too.”

“The honor is mine. Is there a grog shop nearby? I’ll buy you a glass of ale.”

“There’s a good water hole just up the street, and a free lunch comes with the brew. But I’ll do the buying, sir—you are a guest in my country.”

“We’ll fight that out at the bar.”

The history books say that Burton intended to leave Washington at once. But he disappeared that spring in 1860. Three months would pass before he surfaced again, in St. Joe, Missouri, to begin his long stagecoach journey west. Of these missing weeks, Burton later said only that he traveled through every state.

But he stayed a week in Washington. He lived in our house. All that week we ate together and were constant companions. We argued politics, history, and the great questions of American slavery, secession, and war.

Burton always hated slavery, but he was no great admirer of the Negro. I was something of an apologist. We had differences that were deep and vast, and still we became fast friends at once.

I knew that something extraordinary was happening. I sensed a great adventure, mine for the taking if only I had the courage to open my hand. On the third day he said as much. “You should travel with me for a while. I’ll change your mind about things.”

“Maybe I’ll change yours,” I said, and he laughed.

I was awed by him and he knew that. But I was never cowed and that was my saving grace. I know he respected me. If I had been a toady or a bootlicker, he’d never have made such a suggestion. Burton was quickly bored by those who fawned.

On the fourth day we had a fierce argument. It ended in red-faced laughter.

“I must leave soon,” Richard said on the fifth day. “Come with me on a journey.”

How many of us ever reach such a clear crossroad? How many shrink from the bold path when they come to it? A hundred will pass before one takes the turn.

I had to follow it. To shy away would have been a betrayal of my life.

All my years I had been cautious. We had some money put away. I had my trade: a dozen private firms in Washington, Baltimore, and New York were eager for my services. I was tired of War Department politics, of bureaucrats pulling every string. If I disappeared for a time with Richard, who would be the worse for it?

I gave my employers short notice and said good-bye to my wife and daughter. I left Washington with Burton on Monday, a week after we met.

On the train for Richmond I asked where we were going and Burton, without hesitation, said, “Charleston.”

My question had been rhetorical. I didn’t care where we went: I was in the throes of a glorious sense of freedom and excitement the like of which I had not known since my graduation from college, long before my marriage and the commencement of my career. If Burton had said “Africa,” I swear I’d have gone, even though I was still thinking like a tourist. I had assumed we’d be going by steamer only because that way was easier. The railroads in 1860 were still fragmentary, with many lines incomplete. An overland passage would require connections on stagecoaches, along roads that could turn impossible in even a moderate rainfall. A ship would avoid most of that. We could board at once, steam down the Potomac, catch the train at Acquia Creek, board another steamer at Wilmington, and go the rest of the way in relative ease. But Richard wanted to see the land. He was not interested in ease for its own sake, or in traveling as a tourist—after all, what fears could even the worst travel in America hold for a man who had just survived that horrific two-year trek across unknown Africa? So we would take the train to Petersburg, on into North Carolina, and from Wilmington depart from the recommended route and instead go inland, into South Carolina.

During this time Burton was a most affable companion. We had many mutually interesting conversations, but there were also times when we each left the other to his private thoughts. At every stop on the long rail journey, Burton sought out the local newspapers and devoured them before passing them on to me. There were tiny towns where the train stopped to take on water and coal, and smaller hamlets through which we sped in the blink of an eye. People everywhere came out to watch us: fools who stood so close to the track that they took their lives in their hands, laughing and refusing to step back even at the angry blast from the engineer. In the smallest towns children and old men gathered and gawked as we whipped through in what must have been a blur. Occasionally I would pick out an individual face and get some notion of character, or perhaps make one up, in the half second it filled my window and then vanished forever. A general impression of poor simpletons began forming in my mind, and in the years since the journey I have often thought of those people and the injustice I did to them. We underestimated them. They were the heart and backbone of the South, and I now believe that my Yankee condescension, repeated on a broad national scale, was a factor in the near-destruction of our great Union.

Whenever our stop was of sufficient duration, we would get off the train and mingle with the natives, who were noisy and anxious to share their outrage at the national government. Often we were challenged on our political beliefs, but Burton billowed among them like a kite of many colors, always getting more than he gave, and I had at least enough good sense not to stir them up with my opinions on their peculiar institution and their absurd noises of secession and war. I had never been south of Fredericksburg and I found the press full of rabble-rousing nonsense. But as we went deeper into the country, I began to understand a little of what they cherished and why. The landscape was singularly beautiful. I saw peach orchards and cotton farms stretching away in the distance, and now and then we came upon the edges of a great plantation with long dusty roads and enormous live oaks and slaves working in the fields. But much of our journey was through dense wilderness, across vast pine forests with occasional swamps.

Everywhere we went Burton used up all his spare moments making notes.

At Wilmington we bought our passage only as far as the village of Marion, which I remembered as a spot on the map about thirty miles into South Carolina. Soon we were in a dismal swampy area of lower North Carolina. I couldn’t help seeing the land in terms of cartography, but I quickly realized that Burton had also studied his maps and had committed them to memory. Until now I had said nothing: I had come as his traveling companion, content to let him plot our course. But this stoppage in such a small hamlet seemed curious and at last I said so. “What’s in Marion?” I asked. “And why are we taking such a roundabout route?” For the first time, I had begun to feel slightly superfluous, almost enough to laughingly add, “And by the way, why am I here?” But this would have been much too pointed, even as a jest: there would be time enough later if the notion persisted. I do remember it was in that swamp, a few miles from the Rebel state, when the thought first crossed my mind that I might have a purpose other than what had been stated, to be merely a friend for the road. Burton gave my question a halfhearted reply.

“I imagine there’s a tavern and an inn at Marion, where we can stay and browse among the people, get a tolerable supper, and then get pleasantly drunk together. In the morning, or the next day, we can go on to Florence.”

I must have still had a quizzical look on my face, for Burton then said, “Are you getting impatient, Charlie? Are you becoming anxious to see the nest of rebellion that is about to bring so much grief to your country?” In fact, I
was
curious, and a year later when Burton sent me the two volumes of
The Lake Regions of Central Africa
just before the war broke, I found an amusing handwritten footnote in one of the page margins that I believe refers obliquely to Speke:
You reminded me, but only briefly, of another traveler I knew, who always wanted to get there, wherever there happened to be, and as a result missed what was all around him at the time
.

There wasn’t much to see of Marion. My memory is of a muddy street and a collection of crude buildings along it, but Burton found it satisfactory. As he predicted, we did find an inn, taking a pair of rooms upstairs facing the street, and that evening we had a surprisingly good supper. It took Burton no time at all to become acquainted with other travelers and with the town’s natives: he was extremely gregarious, but again I noticed his way of telling them nothing about himself, of asking questions and becoming alert whenever the volatile issues of slavery and secession arose. He had also begun speaking in a much more Americanized English. Completely gone was his British accent, and when I remarked on it later, he said, “That’s just my way. Wherever I go, I make an attempt to learn the language.” We shared a laugh, but then he said, “Don’t be surprised if I change even more as we go along. I like to experiment with words, and these crackers, as they are called down here, do have a language of their own.”

It was at that moment when I had the first vague thought that would change things between us. I suddenly wondered if he was slipping into some kind of disguise. After a while this led to a far more unsettling thought, that I might somehow be an unwitting part of it. Years later, in biographies by his widow, Isabel, by his niece Georgiana Stisted, and by a man named Thomas Wright, there were references to the nature of his intelligence work in India. He alludes to this in his own early books: how he would pass among the people as one of them, having fluently learned their language in a few weeks or even days, darkened his skin, made himself up to look the part, and ply his secret service work. And already in print, of course, was his account of the epic journey, in the flawless disguise of an Arab, to Mecca and Medina. Richard could be anyone, and this fact led to a disturbing new thought. Could he now be spying on my country—was that what this journey was? Had he been sent here to assess the likelihood of civil war, when it might come, and how England could exploit it? Such a mission made chilling sense. On the surface, relations between England and the United States had been warm enough since our last war had ended in 1814, but it was common knowledge that many in the British government still seethed with anger and wished us ill. Lord Palmerston, for one, had never forgiven us for that last defeat, when he had been secretary of war. Now that he was prime minister, was he plotting, after all these years, to get his revenge, and was Burton the advance scout for his ambitions?

I felt a great anger come over me at such a thought, and I decided to confront Richard and have it out. I was ready to declare our brief friendship finished if he had undertaken such a deception, and to catch the next steamer north out of Wilmington. But when the moment came, I wavered. As we sat over dinner, I tried and failed to formulate the question, which could result in a grave insult and ruin a friendship that might in fact be innocent. Burton had said or done nothing specific to justify my suspicion: only what he always did, as he said himself. By the end of the evening I had decided to say nothing. But I remained uneasy and several times I caught him watching me, as if he had read my thoughts and suddenly knew what I suspected.

There was one incident worth noting in the tavern that night. It almost seems superfluous but its importance came to bear much later. We were sitting with a small group of new acquaintances near the bar when a large, boisterous man named Jedro Fink joined our group. He was clearly a Yankee hater, already well fortified with ale, and the more he drank, the more he seemed to take offense at whatever I said. It was my accent: no one could ever mistake me for anything but a Northerner. Once in the general babble, the phrase “Yankee dogs” floated over my head, and when I looked, his bleary eyes were fixed on mine.

Richard had also consumed a vast amount of ale but his eyes were clear. I gave him an apologetic look and began seeking an out. At the first lull in the conversation I said, “I think I’ll retire, gentlemen,” but our Yankee hater said, “What’s your hurry, mate, are we not good enough for Yanks to drink with?”

I felt two sharp stabs, anger and fear. I had never been in any kind of fight, and what frightened me most was not the prospect of being hurt but the spectacle of being beaten in front of the crowd. Still, I could not let this pass. I said, “That’s an offensive thing to say, sir,” and I steeled myself for whatever might come. But in the same moment Richard said, “I think I’ll join you, Charlie. It is getting late.”