The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln (22 page)

“But you used her!”

“No, Jonathan.” A rare use of his Christian name. “We used you.
You
used her. That is the way of Washington, my boy. You’d better get used to it.”

I

NIGHT
.

Abigail decided to treat herself to a bath. She would have to heat the water in the kitchen and carry it down the hall to the back of the house, but that was a chore she had performed hundreds of times. She turned the knob and water came gushing out, first brown-tinged, then gray. When the water cleared, she put a big kettle under the tap and waited. Her late father had installed the attic tank, which was kept full by a combination of rainwater and regular purchases from the water sellers who drove their wagons through the neighborhood twice a week. The tank was just one way in which the Canner house differed from its neighbors. Her father had considered himself an inventor. They even had a bathing-tub, fashioned by her father from wood and stone and copper. The bathing-room had a stone sink fed by pipes leading to the attic tank. The room also featured what Abigail suspected was the only flush toilet south of the Smithsonian and west of the Navy Yard. Edolphus Canner had improved, he claimed, on the toilets of the rich, which he in his trade as a plumber had helped construct. The one in the Canner bathing-room used the siphoning action of three water pipes, all controlled by a single lever, and the system made a terrible racket, shaking the entire house and frightening the dogs, but no one in Washington City—insisted her father—could claim its like.

When the kettle was full, she hung it in the hearth and, by the light
of the fire, sat down to study. She was still frustrated—well, furious—about being made to wait in Senator Fessenden’s kitchen for three hours and then coming away with nothing, and hoped that reading law would calm her. And so opened her notebook and began to review what she had copied out from Blackstone’s
Commentaries
today on the forms of trespass. If you poisoned a man’s dogs or shot his cattle, wrote Blackstone (in England, it seemed, things were always happening to dogs and cattle, or so one would gather from reading Blackstone), then you were guilty of trespass
vi et armis
, but only if the act was “immediately injurious” and involved force. If, on the other hand, your action involved no force and caused only indirect injury to a man or his property—never a woman in Blackstone and certainly never a woman’s property—then you were guilty only of trespass on the case. She did not yet know what either term meant, because she had been sent off to deliver some papers before she had the opportunity to copy the next page. But already she was wondering what possible difference it made to the man injured whether the injury arose directly or indirectly from the act of another—

A sharp knock at the front door drew her from her legal meditations. She glanced around in surprise, although the door was not visible from the kitchen. A thrill of fear danced through her tired body.

No sane black family opened the door after dark—not these days. Not with the White Camellia and the Ku Klux and the Southern Cross on the rampage. Hundreds of freedmen had been killed over the past two years; some said thousands. The Union troops seemed helpless. Northern newspapers insisted that the night riders were a Southern phenomenon, but Abigail remembered what most Washingtonians had schooled themselves to forget: Maryland was a Southern state, a slaveholding state, kept from joining the rebellion only because Lincoln had sent troops to occupy Annapolis.

Besides, Virginia was right across the river.

The knock came a second time.

Varak, she told herself. The inspector was back for a further interrogation. Her brother, Michael, come to hector her. Or Jonathan, wishing once more to apologize. Perhaps wishing for more: she knew how he looked at her. But if he imagined for an instant that she—

A third knock.

Abigail left the kettle and crept into the parlor, staying beneath the window. She glanced toward the stairs. No movement. A fourth knock.
She reached beneath the sofa until her fingers touched metal. She pulled out the shotgun, and, sitting on the floor, broke it to be sure it was loaded. She scampered into the hallway and crouched beside the door.

She waited.

Another knock.

“Who is it?” she called, voice trembling.

“It’s me, honey,” said a woman’s voice, the tone mildly amused. “Don’t shoot, okay?”

Judith.

II

“I am surprised to see you,” said Abigail, feeling a bit stupid and a bit superior, the way she always did around Judith. Abigail’s tone was frosty. She tended to see the moral world through Nanny Pork’s eyes, and although she had missed her sister, she was unable quite to approve of her.

Judith was amused. “Aren’t you going to ask where I have been keeping myself?”

“I understood that you had moved south.”

“Well, I am back.”

Abigail could not help herself. Every word out of her sister’s mouth left her angrier. “It is the middle of the night. Who comes calling at this hour?”

“We must talk,” said her sister, ignoring Abigail’s remark.

“What can there possibly be for us to talk about?”

“A great deal.” Judith had moved to the stove. “Bathing yourself, I see. You always were a great one for decadence.”

Abigail’s face flared.

“How dare you come here to insult me—”

Again Judith spoke right over her. “Silly girl. I’m not here to insult you. I’m here to help you.”

“I am in no trouble. And if I were, it is not you I would approach for assistance.”

Judith spun toward her. Abigail was surprised to see tears in her older sister’s eyes. “Is that what they taught you at your little Christian college out west? To slap the sinner on the other cheek?”

Abigail felt her face burn. Her mouth moved, but for a few seconds,
no sound emerged. “I am sorry,” she said finally. “I should not have spoken harshly.”

Her older sister’s gaze rejected this confession. “I don’t suppose you will ever change. You’re Nanny Pork all over again, aren’t you? There is no forgiveness in your soul. No love for anything less than perfection.”

“That is untrue!”

“It has been two years since we have laid eyes on each other. In all of that time, did you once try to find me?”

“Did you once write me?”

Judith, about to respond in kind, sighed instead. “It doesn’t matter. I’ll be gone in five minutes, and you’ll never see me again. Your life can go back to whatever it was five minutes before I arrived.” She straightened her shawl. “But first I have something to tell you. It concerns your work.”

“I don’t understand. What does my work—”

“For once in your life, Abby, don’t say anything. Please. Just listen.” Judith had moved quite close. She smelled of orange blossoms, and a hint of rosemary, and Abigail could not help wondering which of her sister’s men had gifted her with scented water. “What I am going to say will sound unpleasant. But you have to hear it.” She waited, but this time her younger sister did not interrupt. “The man you were working with—the white man—the lawyer—”

“Jonathan?”

Again her older sister was amused. “No, darling. Not your precious Jonathan. The lawyer. The one who died. McShane. I knew the woman who died with him.”

“I am not surprised,” said Abigail, before she could catch herself. Judith’s eyes flashed. Abigail regretted her words at once, but knew that no apology would suffice. Judith was right. She was just like Nanny Pork, firing off her ammunition before checking to see whether the approaching stranger was friend or foe. “I did not mean that,” she began.

Judith waved her to silence. “Never mind. Just listen. I knew Rebecca. She was a … a friend.”

Catching the pain in her sister’s tone, Abigail struggled for the proper response. “I am sorry about your friend,” she said.

“Thank you.” She wiped her eyes. “Rebecca was a decent woman, Abigail. She wasn’t like me. She was more like … like you.” A hard swallow. “She was not a prostitute.”

“But the Provost General said—”

“The military will say whatever General Lafayette Baker commands them to say. I am telling you the truth. Rebecca was not a prostitute. Nor did she give herself to men.”

Abigail had joined her at the stove and began heating the smaller kettle, to make tea. “Then why was she meeting Mr. McShane outside a brothel?”

Judith took two cups from the shelf. “I don’t know. I do know that she had met him before.”

“Then perhaps the two of them—”

“No, Abby. I told you. Rebecca wasn’t like that. She had regular work. She was employed as a domestic. She worked in one of the great houses. And, besides.” Hesitating. Weighing a final truth. “Besides. Rebecca was helping Mr. Lincoln. That was why she was meeting Mr. McShane.” She held up a hand. “I do not know the details. But I had the impression, from things that she said, that she was giving Mr. McShane information.”

“What sort of information?”

“Again, I am not sure. She said there was something Mr. McShane needed, and she was helping him to find it. I do not know what he was looking for, but, whatever it was, Rebecca thought it important.” The hard jaw trembled. “And whatever it was, she died for it.” Judith was on her feet. “I must go.”

“You have not had your tea.”

“I dare not tarry. Please do not tell Nanny I was here.”

Abigail felt an unaccountable panic. “Let me wake her.”

“No.”

“You could come back home. The two of you could reconcile—”

“Not possible.”

“What if—”

Judith laid a hand on her younger sister’s shoulder. “Remember when we were little? When Mother would read to us from Shakespeare?”

“Of course.”

“Then you’ll remember
Twelfth Night:
‘My stars shine darkly over me; the malignancy of my fate might, perhaps, distemper yours …’ ” She leaned over, kissed Abigail on the cheek. “It’s best that I bear my evils alone.” And then, as if in afterthought, she delved in the folds of her shawl. Abigail tensed, but her sister pulled out only an envelope.

“What is this?”

“Rebecca asked me to hold on to it. If anything happened to her, I was to deliver it to Mr. McShane.” Her voice trembled. “She said he would know what to do with it. She did not anticipate that they might die together, and—well—”

Tears rolling down her long cheeks, Judith thrust the envelope into her sister’s hands. A last clumsy hug, and she was gone into the night. Abigail stood in the window, watching her sister’s trap until it vanished.

Back in the kitchen, she opened the envelope. Inside was a single piece of paper, which she spread on the kitchen counter. There were no words, but only a string of numbers:

Abigail frowned and puzzled, but could connect the peculiar note with nothing in her experience. Though she was no expert, the numbers looked to her like a code. In this city of conspiracies and fears, of plots and unknown sources, the President’s lawyer had been receiving coded messages from a colored woman; and now both were dead.

And everything everybody thought they knew about the murder was wrong.

I

“
SO WHAT?
”

Abigail stared at Rufus Dennard, unable to believe that he had offered so cavalier a response to her sister’s information. She was standing in his office. Dennard himself was seated, his bulk overflowing the chair. The brass fittings gleamed against the polished dark wood. A partners desk was designed so that two could sit, facing each other. But nobody would take the chair opposite without being invited, and Abigail had not been invited.

“What I am saying,” she resumed, picking her words carefully, in case her first attempt had been unclear, “is that if the woman who died with Mr. McShane was not a prostitute, what happened might after all be connected to the trial.”

“It isn’t,” Dennard snapped.

“But what if—”

He leaned toward her, steepling his hands. “Listen to me, Miss Canner. I took you into my employ because Dr. Finney speaks well of you. He told me that you possess one of the finest brains he has ever encountered. Maybe so. We’ll find out whether the evaluation is true. So far, you’re just fine.” His eyes steamed at her, and the praise that should have made her heart sing struck her like a cudgel. “Nevertheless, there is such a thing as being too intelligent for one’s own good. Your mind is leading you into flights of imagination. This conspiracy business is just the thing McShane would have liked, because he had that devious
sort of mind. I like to keep my eye on the work—nothing but the work. McShane is dead, and I’m sorry about that. He was an exemplary partner and a dear friend. But his murder is a matter for the city police. Our task is to defend Mr. Lincoln. We face the most important trial in the history of this nation. God willing, these United States shall never again see its like. That trial shall demand every bit of our energy. If we get involved in spinning the sort of wild theories that fascinated McShane, that will make our job harder rather than easier. Do I make myself clear?”