The Secrets of Mary Bowser (46 page)

“Am I having some peculiar dream right now, or is all of this really happening and making sense to you?” he asked when I finished.

“You’re crotchety when you wake up, you know that?” I kissed him. “But you best get what rest you can. You’re going to have to figure a way to ride out farther than usual tomorrow, to bring Henry Watson all the way to Fort Monroe.”

Which meant I was going to fret about him even more than ever. As though fretting over Aunt Piss’s investigation, the plight of the rest of the Chambersburg negroes, and now the slaughter in New York wasn’t worry enough.

Wilson and Henry Watson left early Friday morning, while I was gone to my day’s labor. Coming back to our three empty rooms made my heart ache, and after passing the night alone, I was nearly relieved to have the distraction of returning to the Gray House come Saturday.

As soon as the nursemaid Catherine took the four Davis children down to breakfast, Hortense ordered me to make up the nursery. Crossing to the servants’ stair, I caught sight of Aunt Piss pacing nervously in the entry hall.

As I drew back from the doorway, Queen Varina came down the curving center stair. “Secretary Benjamin, what are you doing here at this hour? I’m hardly ready to receive visitors.” Meaning she still wore her morning dress, and she’d barely finished her breakfast cakes and coffee.

“Dear Mrs. Davis, I wouldn’t think of paying a social visit at this hour, even to so charming a hostess.” Agitation tinged his words. “It is rather serious business with your husband that brings me so early.”

Queen Varina nodded with importance. “Let us step into the library, and the president will join us in a moment.”

“That will not be possible. I am afraid this is a most delicate matter, and it demands complete confidentiality. My report must be for President Davis’s ears alone.”

Never one for being excluded, Queen Varina hardened her voice. “Then you ought to go upstairs and see him in his office. Good day, Mr. Benjamin.”

I hung where I was until I heard Aunt Piss’s footsteps on the main stairway, then made my way up the servants’ stair. Once I was sure he’d disappeared into Jeff Davis’s office, I inched into the waiting room.

“I don’t see the need to make a scene,” Aunt Piss was saying.

“It is a point of honor for the accused to be allowed to face the accuser,” Davis answered.

The notion of such a confrontation sent me scurrying toward the nursery. But before I could duck inside, Davis stormed out of his office and called, “You there, come here.”

I turned to him, my heart so full in my mouth I could barely force out a “Yessuh.”

“Go upstairs,” he ordered, “and fetch Burton Harrison.”

I mounted the stairs to the third floor, muscles up and down my legs twitching with fear. Knocking at Harrison’s bedchamber, I repeated the summons.

Then I stole back down to the nursery, wondering if I should try to slip away. Bet could secret me in her mansion until Wilson returned with the pass to her farm. But by then Davis would have gone to McNiven about his wayward slave, and who knows how many intelligence operations would be endangered.

I wouldn’t flee. I couldn’t save myself, if it put everything I’d worked for, everyone I worked with, at risk. I would stay and spin some tale to convince the Confederates that McNiven knew nothing about the espionage.

Standing before the nursery window, I looked south past the Gray House yard to the makeshift military prisons and hospitals that dotted Butchertown. The war had already cost countless lives. The realization curled rope-heavy around my throat, that mine might well be next.

Hearing Harrison pass into Davis’s office, I cupped an ear against the nursery’s communicating door and listened to Davis’s clipped command. “Tell him, Secretary Benjamin.”

“As you know, Mr. Harrison, the security of our military depends on eternal vigilance. To that end, a man with my responsibilities in the government must bear the burden of some rather indelicate matters. It is certainly not something I relish, but for the good of the Confederacy—”

Davis had no patience for Aunt Piss’s pontification. “Dammit Benjamin, out with it.”

“Mr. Harrison, for the past week, you have been under investigation for suspicion of espionage.”

“I?” Harrison’s bewilderment matched my own.

“Certain information reached our enemies that appeared to come directly from this office, so suspicions naturally arose.” Aunt Piss’s usual sycophancy crept back into his voice. “My investigation has cleared you of any wrongdoing, just as the president and I knew it would.” Davis coughed violently, causing Aunt Piss to add, “I apologize for any insult to your honor.”

“As I have nothing to hide, I take no offense at the investigation,” Harrison said. “Who is the true culprit?”

My heart pounded so heavy, I barely made out Davis’s answer. “Secretary Benjamin seems unable to find him. Do you know of anyone else who is privy to my correspondence?”

“No one, sir. Neither friend nor foe could reach this floor of the house unobserved.”

“Then the turncoat must be in the War Department. Benjamin, I trust your investigations will take you there henceforth.”

“I already have a trap in place to expose the scoundrel,” Aunt Piss replied.

Just don’t expect to spring that trap any time soon, I thought. As my hammering fear subsided, I turned to make up the Davis children’s room.

It was so late I was nearly abed when McNiven came knocking. “The Confederates’ suspicion is raised upon us,” he told me.

“Their suspicion may be raised, but not upon us.” I related Aunt Piss’s accusation of Burton Harrison, and Davis’s insistence that the espionage was in the War Department. “They’ll look there a long while and never find us.”

He frowned, his mouth disappearing in the downturned curve of his mustache. “The intelligence maun pass out o’ Richmond somehow, and that is how Benjamin now looks to uncover it. ’Tis the reason I sended for Wilson these two days past.”

“Wilson needed to bring Henry Watson to Fort Monroe.”

“The Watsons were only a part to the whole, or I might hae brung Henry out myself today. There was a trap to be waiting for any what rode along Osborne Turnpike yesterday. I had to get Wilson to Fort Monroe afore then.”

In all my worry for myself, I hadn’t ever thought my husband might be in danger from Aunt Piss. I might have saved his life if I’d realized it—or cost him his life because I didn’t.

“But he’s safe now?”

“Ay. ’Tis you I worry over. Crowded as Richmond be, a vacant storefront right on Broad Street surely will be attracting notice, so I hae arranged with Robert Ballandine from Leigh Street to let the shop. One colored barber or another will not make a difference to them what come for a hair-cutting or a shave.”

Wilson’s shop was more than his livelihood, it was his pride and his joy. There weren’t too many businesses Richmond negroes managed to keep for themselves. I couldn’t imagine my husband consenting to have another man take up his barbering tools, even for a few days, and I told McNiven so.

“ ’Twill be more than a few days afore Wilson is returned from Fort Monroe. None ken the countryside so well as he, from moving baggage these many years. Better than a company of scouts to the Union command, he is.”

He was still more than that to me. But it didn’t matter what we were to each other. Didn’t matter that we hadn’t even said a proper farewell before he’d gone.

My husband wasn’t coming home, not any time soon.

Loneliness stung me so hard, I could barely pay much mind as McNiven instructed me on how to secret my daily reports in our alley, where they would henceforth be collected.

The next evening, the massive rosewood table in the Gray House dining room was crowded with military officers and government officials, along with their wives. Food shortages had grown so severe in Richmond that even those who cursed Jeff Davis behind his back, blaming him for the bad fortunes of the Confederacy, didn’t refuse an invitation to dine in his home.

The talk was mostly of Vicksburg and Gettysburg, the two-week-old Confederate defeats. But while I served the guests a sad little spice cake made with sorghum syrup in lieu of sugar, the raven-haired Mrs. Chesnut steered the dessert conversation to a new topic. “What about this business in our own South Carolina? I find it most shocking.”

Her sallow-faced husband didn’t bother lifting his eyes from the plate I placed before him. “Our forces at Fort Wagner repelled the Union attack. No shock to that.”

“But that regiment from Massachusetts,” Queen Varina said. “Who would have thought the Federals could stoop to such a thing?”

Colonel Chesnut snorted. “Doesn’t surprise me in the least. This Shaw fellow, his father is the worst kind of Yankee. An abolitionist and a Unitarian. Just the type to send his son on a fool’s errand like that.”

Any time the Davises and their guests cursed abolitionists, I paid careful attention.

“From what I’ve heard of the attack,” observed a scrawny chief from the postal bureau, “the 54th acquitted itself quite bravely.”

There was a rustle of disapproval from Queen Varina and Mary Chesnut. One of the military men leaned back, peering through his spectacles to address the bureaucrat. “Do not confuse ignorance for bravery. Darkies are simply too dumb to know any better than to run headlong into death. The reports we heard of these troops terrorizing women and children, burning civilian possessions in Darien last month, prove they are all of them brutes.” He paused to suppress a belch, then waved his fork for me to bring another serving of cake. “Our men wiped out nearly half the Massachusetts regiment, once they presumed to meet us on the battlefield. As for Captain Shaw, he got what he deserved, shot down dead among the niggers he and his abolitionist kind adore.”

A sudden crash came from the sideboard. Hortense had dropped the tea service.

Queen Varina shouted a blue streak of oaths, cussing over how hard things were for her with not a decent servant to be had.

Jeff Davis let out a coughing fit, presumably as much to cover his wife’s coarse language as to clear his throat. “We gentlemen had better repair to the parlor,” he said. “All of our talk seems to be upsetting the ladies.”

As the company stood up from the table, Colonel Chesnut said, “You see, we who must live with the niggers know their incompetence. What Lincoln expects will become of them without masters to care for them, I don’t know.” Murmuring agreement, the Davises and their guests made their procession out of the dining room.

I hurried to the sideboard. Hortense’s face had gone gray, her usually fiery features slumped in despondency. “I got a son up in Massertooset, always thanked Jesus he made it that far,” she whispered. “Could be him they’s talking ’bout, killed by Secesh.” All the time I’d been in the Gray House, it was the first she spoke of having any family—and the only sign she gave that she listened as keenly as I did to the Davises’ conversations.

“What all it mean?” Sophronia asked.

“Means white folks don’t care to see no negro with a gun,” I said. “Ain’t much surprise in that.”

I knelt and gathered up the pieces of the tea service, hiding my face from Hortense and Sophronia. I hated myself for cutting them off like that. The news that colored soldiers had fought and died for the Union made me proud and scared and sad all at once, and truly I wanted to talk out the shock of what we’d just heard. But I’d felt the threat of exposure too keenly to risk speaking so in the Gray House.

First the draft riots in New York, then the defeat of the Massachusetts 54th in South Carolina. The Rebels slaughtered our men when they fought, and the Yankees slaughtered us when they didn’t. And the Watsons were proof you couldn’t even keep to yourself without some Confederate hauling you out of your home, your life, into the living hell of slavery. Alone that night and many a one thereafter, I worried over Wilson, knowing how little protection the Union command could give the colored men who served them.

Twenty-two

O
ne night in the summer of ’45, a barn swallow flew inside the Van Lew mansion. It made such a racket, it woke the household. Old Sam chased that bird from room to room, waving a broom to shoo it outside. When I asked Mama why it was flapping and swooping and flying around so, she said, “Lonely for its kind. It knows there are other birds out there, but it can’t figure how to get to them.”

I thought about that bird for the first time in years as I drifted about our three little rooms while the summer of ’63 cooled to autumn, and then autumn chilled to winter. I was lonely for my kind, too. Wilson, of course, but Papa and Mama also. Hattie, even Zinnie Moore.

Queen Varina and her friends had taken to attending starvation parties, singing and dancing all night long as though the death and devastation of war weren’t all around them. It put me in mind of Emperor Nero fiddling while Rome burned. But as the year drew to a close, a part of me understood it, envied it even. Because waking alone, slaving for the Davises, and coming home to those same empty rooms, I felt like a bird who might beat and beat its wings, but would never soar free again.

With Papa passed on and Wilson passed across the Union line, I was dreading Christmas alone. So when Bet insisted on having me to Church Hill for Christmas dinner, I accepted gladly. But as soon as I arrived, I began to doubt my choice. I’d braced myself for the effusive Bet, who’d hug me to her for the holiday, speechifying on the great role we were playing. Instead I discovered a woman as gaunt with worry as any of the hollow-cheeked crowds I saw on the city streets, and longing to share her vexation with me.

“They are holding somewhere between ten and twenty thousand of them,” she said as soon as I came through the servants’ door into the basement. “I cannot get things enough into Libby Prison. And nothing to Belle Isle.” The giant island in the James was where the Confederates kept all the non-commissioned Union prisoners.

“I know, Miss Bet.”

“But you have no idea of the suffering. Dysentery, cholera. Fifty of them dying every day. Do you realize that is fifteen hundred a month?”