The Secrets of Mary Bowser (37 page)

The ostentatious furnishings on the main floor told me as much about the Davises as the set piece of domestic relations I’d witnessed among the cellars. Every inch of every wall in those rooms was papered, the flocking swirled in garish greens or crimsons. The wall colors clashed with the elaborate patterns of the carpets, which warred in turn with the gaudy upholstery, the ornate brocatelle curtains, and the gilt edging on the mirrors, paintings, and gasoliers.

I found the housekeeper kneeling over a bucket of vinegary liquid, washing the bottom panes of the parlor window. “You the new one, I suppose,” she said with a Deep South accent. She was a dark string bean of a woman, bones nearly poking through her ebony skin. “You can stop staring. Like to burn off what little flesh I got on me, the way you looking.”

She squeezed out the rag and draped it over the edge of the bucket, then stood and looked me hard in the eye. “She keep the food locked up and everything weighed out to the ounce. Be glad you live out, take your own meals stead a eating her scrap.” She leaned over and pinched my upper arm. “Still, she like to work even that much fat off you.”

“My name is Mary, though she say she gonna call me Molly. What’s yours?”

“I outlasted all the rest a her servants ten times over, that’s enough for you to know. Ain’t about to learn your name till you been here a month or more. She run through your kind too quick for me to bother.” She clucked her tongue. “Unless she take a fool’s liking to you, like that shanty Irish nursemaid Catherine, laziest thing I ever seed and them chiljen running raggedy through the house. Or snobby little Betsy, carry on like she royalty herself just cause she dump Queen Varina’s chamber pot.”

Queen Varina
—Richmonders were handy with that appellation, some using it with pride at the First Lady’s regal bearing, others with complaints of how snobbish she was. I didn’t have to guess which way the emaciated housekeeper meant it.

She nodded toward a girl gawky with adolescence who was cleaning the mantel dressing. “Sophronia, show this one how I like things done. Don’t look as though she know too much, standing there hanging on to a soiled apron like it were a ten-dollar note.” The housekeeper picked up her bucket and left the room.

“Don’t . . . mind . . . Hortense.” Sophronia’s words came out in tiny gulps, like bubbles of air struggling to the surface of a pond. “Plain hates Catherine and Betsy. ’Cause she can’t boss ’em. But she boss me and you. Plenty.”

For the next hour, Sophronia and I cleaned our way through the center parlor and the drawing room, laboring in silence except for her occasional hiccups of instruction about how Hortense insisted a particular chore be done. It had been more than a decade since I’d been set to such grueling work. The intervening years had imbued me with more determination than bodily strength, though the former kept me careful to hide the lack of the latter, even from this Sophronia.

But mine wasn’t the only false front amid the swash and swagger of the Gray House. When I laid the dusting rag along the library mantel, I discovered the seeming marble was nothing but painted cast iron. As I wiped the fakery clean, a hacking started up in the adjoining entryway.

“You’re not going out in this weather, are you, Jefferson?” Varina Davis chirped like a mother robin trying to ward off whatever might upset her nest.

“I must get to the Treasury Building. I’ve meetings all”—a deep voice I took for Jefferson Davis’s twisted into a cough—“day long.”

“The president needs to take care of his health, for the sake of the Confederacy. And the president’s wife needs to take care of him.”

“I must go. The news of the Virginia has everyone hopeful. I must be ready, before that damn Joe Johnston rushes in and takes the credit for himself.”

I thought of the Virginia Guard, the Virginia Infantry, the Virginia Howitzers, and at least a dozen similarly titled military companies that had paraded through Richmond since the war began. Which one did Jeff Davis mean? And what were the Confederates hoping it would do?

“Sophronia,” Hortense cut into my rumination like a jagged-toothed rip-saw, “didn’t I tell you to show that gal how I want things done? She like to smash them Chinee doodads the way she carrying on.”

I looked down and righted one of the large Chinese vases flanking the fireplace, which my skirt had snagged when I turned to hear the exchange between the Davises. “I was just–”

“Ain’t talking to you. Daydreaming and backtalking, another one ain’t gonna last, look like.” Hortense turned back to Sophronia. “Get upstairs and do his office, quick. Who know how long we got before Queen Varina drag him back here, convinced he about to keel over just from a bit a cough and spit.”

Sophronia led me up the narrow servants’ stairs, gurgling out a word or two on each step. “Hate that office. Papers everyplace. Move ’em, he has a fit. Don’t, and she hollers it ain’t clean. Like to burn them all.”

We set to work in the upstairs hall, which with its ornate coat rack and array of straightbacked chairs served as the receiving area for visitors to the president. From there we advanced into a tiny pass-through of a closet that had been commandeered for the secretary’s office. Though the calendar of appointments lying on the drop-front desk piqued my interest, I didn’t dare to more than glance at it with Sophronia crowded so close. She dawdled over the room as long as she could, until finally we stood in one corner, staring through the open door into Jeff Davis’s office.

“Hortense scared to do it herself,” Sophronia said. “That’s why she makes me. Makes us.” A flicker of realization crossed her face, and she pushed me into the room. “Yeah, Molly. Us better get to it.”

Davis’s office seemed nearly stark in comparison to the decor downstairs, with a simple red and brown fleur-de-lis pattern on the beige wall paper, and repeating diamonds of gold and maroon on the carpet. A pair of crossed swords and scattered paintings of military scenes adorned the walls. The walnut and black horsehair furniture sat dark and spare and heavy. An Empire couch, a desk and tufted chair, and a round table with two straightback chairs, all set purposefully around the room. Writing papers were scattered across the desk, and larger pages, probably maps, covered the table.

Sophronia crossed to the far wall. Her face was flat and round as a fry pan, her eyes set wide like the raw yolks of two eggs cracked in to cook. “I better watch you. Make sure you get it right. Go on.”

Like a child forcing himself through his haricots and saving his cake for last, I began dusting the sofa, the paintings, and the large globe and stand, then polishing the wood with our mix of beeswax and turpentine. By the time I finished sweeping the fireplace and cleaning the long, thin tube that connected the desk lamp to the ceiling gasolier, Sophronia had turned her back to me to nod and wave out the window. Watching her pantomime, I guessed she must be carrying on a romance with the groundsman. That was all the opening I needed. Nudging the spittoon that stood sentry beside the desk, I leaked an ooze of brown onto the carpet.

“Hortense have a fit if she see this,” I said, calling Sophronia’s attention to the tobacco juice. “I best run downstairs, fetch a fresh bucket of water to clean it. Is the sink in the cellar?”

“Cellar water too rusty. Got to draw it in the yard. Go myself.” She scurried out of the room, delighted at the prospect of a rendezvous with her groundsman.

I didn’t waste a tick of the mantel clock before I was studying the correspondence scattered on Davis’s desk.

Gosport Naval Yard, Va. February 28,

President Jefferson Davis,

My design for the former Merrimac has been fully executed. The CSS Virginia sits in Norfolk fully clad in iron, awaiting only her coal before she attacks the Union fleet at the mouth of the James. Our naval men look forward to their historic voyage on behalf of the Confederacy.

Very respectfully yours,

Jn L Porter

Sketched on the bottom of the missive was the oddest-looking maritime conveyance I’d ever seen. She had no sails, and most of the hull sat below the squiggly marks meant to show the water-line. Atop the water, the ship rose into a trapezoid, with slits drawn in for gunnery windows.

On the back of the letter, someone had scribbled technical particulars.

L: 270ft

Armored casement: 24in oak and pine clad with 4in iron plate

Prow: 1500lb iron ram

Armament: 3 9in smooth-bore Dahlgrens, 1 6in rifle on each broadside.

Single pivot mted 7in Brooke rifle in stern and bow gun ports.

This
Virginia
was an iron-clad monster of the sea. Surely able to decimate the Federal navy and destroy the Union blockade.

Before I could search through the next letter, a loud crash sounded through the house. I hurried from the office and down the curving center stair toward the commotion.

In the entry hall, two ornate mahogany chairs were toppled onto the brawling Davis sons, a silver dish and a dozen calling cards scattered across the floor. Queen Varina stood above the boys, howling about how the president’s wife must be able to have her nap without the household going to bedlam. Catching sight of me, she snatched an umbrella from the hallstand and cuffed it hard against my ear. “Infernal servants, too busy prancing about to get their work done.”

As she turned to bark at a befreckled white woman who appeared in the far doorway, I slipped into the library.

Hortense, huddled behind the door, sent no comfort my way. “One a them chiljen like to kill the other, way they fight. Let that Lazy Irish have ’em, we got ’nough to do cleaning up after it all.” Though my ear ached, all she offered was stern command. “Keep to the back stair and keep out of trouble. I got plenty a grief without needing to train a new maid every other day.”

Through the long, labor-filled afternoon that followed, the only way I could distract myself from a nagging tinnitus was by damning Varina Davis and her umbrella. Damning McNiven for expecting me to put up with her. And damning what intelligence I had gathered about the CSS
Virginia,
for making me feel it was my duty to come back to the Gray House the next day and the next, even if I were beaten for the privilege.

Wilson was sweeping the stoop of the shop as I came up Broad Street. Or pretending to, moving the broom back and forth as he squinted to make out my arrival, his face ashen with worry.

He shepherded me through the side gate and inside our door. “You heard?”

“Haven’t heard a thing but ringing.” I slid off my head wrap, exposing my contusion.

“How did that happen?”

“Same way most things happen to slaves. Hot white anger, looking for a place to land.”

I worried over what he would say, seeing my body bruised by Queen Varina. But he curled into me and kissed my ear, the nearness of him soothing the ache. “I suppose you’re safer than if you’d been on Church Hill.”

I pulled back and peered into his eyes. “What do you mean?”

“They’ve been arresting Unionists, all last night and this morning. Richmond is under martial law.”

Something pulled tight in my chest. “What about Bet?”

“I don’t know. A man came into the shop just after dinner, boasting to the other customers about all he’d done. Captain Godwin, he called himself, bragging on how they renamed McDaniel’s negro jail Castle Godwin on account of all the white Unionists he locked up there.” Wilson rattled off what names he could remember of those who’d been arrested.

I recognized some of them, John Botts, Franklin Stearns, Burnham Wardwell. Men I’d waited on at Bet’s table way back during my childhood. “If they have her . . .” I couldn’t bring myself to finish.

Bet had been a part of my life as long as I could remember. Not exactly family, not quite friend. Still, there was a bond between us unlike any I had with anyone else.

Outside our parlor window, the last rays of sunlight were disappearing from the sky. With curfew on, there’d be no news of Bet’s whereabouts unless we had a white person to seek her out, and there was only one to ask. Provided he wasn’t locked up in Castle Godwin.

“Where’s McNiven?”

Wilson shrugged. “I wager no one’s thought to arrest him. He hasn’t given anyone reason to think he’s a Unionist.”

“And given them plenty of reason to think otherwise.”

“Still, there isn’t any suspicion raised on him, or you.” Seeing there was yet more worrying me, he added, “Probably not on Bet, either.”

I nodded. But I sat hunched with apprehension while Wilson cooked supper. Wrong as it was to be wasteful with food grown so dear, still I no more than picked over my meager portion before setting all my intelligence about the
Virginia
down in Bet’s code. Staring at the strange pattern of letters and numbers was like seeing how tangled up everything of mine was with her, as though we were Mr. Barnum’s twins of Siam. My intelligence, her cipher, my hand. One twin of Siam couldn’t dance or ride or even rest without the other doing the same. Without sure word of Bet’s whereabouts, I couldn’t drift to sleep, no matter how late it grew.

A knock sounded on our door near two o’clock in the morning. We found McNiven on the step, his breath warm with alcohol. “Where have you been?” I asked once we got him upstairs to our parlor.

“I passed some hours over to the faro parlor favored by the guests o’ the Spotswood Hotel. Partwise to see what I might hear there, but mostwise waiting for the streets to empty enough that I could come here without any taking notice.” Gambling houses, drinking houses, even houses of ill repute had sprung up all over Richmond, filling the streets with rowdies long after decent people had gone to bed. McNiven’s tippling among them provided him with more details than we’d yet had. “Two spies are among those what are arrested.”

Spies. The word seemed sharp and waspish as he said it. “Who are they?” I asked.