The Secrets of Mary Bowser (47 page)

I was full ready to remind her I knew my multiplication, maybe she recalled teaching it to me herself, when a fearsome thudding sounded above our heads. “What’s that?” I asked.

“Only Frances Burney.” Bet wasn’t ready to leave off her litany. “We can hardly smuggle our own apothecary into the prison hospitals, now can we? So there’s nothing for me to do but watch them dying—”

“Your carriage horse is in the house?” It had taken me a moment to realize that’s who Frances Burney was.

“The Confederates will confiscate any horse they can find. They’ve come two or three times to search for her. Never thought to look in Father’s library, the fools,” she said, though I didn’t suppose anyone keeping a horse in the house should be calling somebody else a fool.

It had been thirteen years to the day since the Van Lews first sat down to dine with negroes. Neither Bet nor her mother marked the anniversary as we pulled our chairs up before the table a half hour later. Just as they didn’t mention how meager the fare, just partridge stew and potatoes, we had this Christmas. Didn’t even acknowledge the occasional nickering and stomping from the library. The mother was grieving over her son John, who’d fled North to avoid another round of the Virginia draft, and the daughter was too occupied with her prisoners.

Though I was ready to rush back across Shockoe Creek right after the meal, Bet insisted there was some matter she needed to discuss with me. I half expected to find a shoat and some laying hens as she led me into the drawing room. But the space was bare of livestock. Bare, too, of nearly all its furnishings, sold off to support her beneficence to the prisoners.

“You must find out what’s to become of them,” she said, as if she read my thoughts about the captured Federals. “There are rumors that they are to be moved from here, taken down to Georgia. If it is true, we must find a way to prevent it.”

I could no more interrogate Jeff Davis on a particular point of policy than she could hold twenty thousand Federals safe from their Confederate captors. But she was as much a mule as Frances Burney was a mare. Having no husbandry to talk sense into so obstinate a beast, I only nodded, glad at least to have my own empty rooms to repair to. I took my leave of the desolate Van Lew mansion, making my way home beneath a yule sky so overcast, it offered no star that might guide a wise, nor even just a weary, traveler.

A brutal cold spell quieted most of the military campaigns, so come January 1864 about all I discovered of interest in Davis’s office was a letter from Zebulon Vance, complaining over how frequent women’s mobbing was growing down in North Carolina.

Richmond’s Bread Riot had sparked months of similar uprisings throughout the South, and I was mighty pleased that what I’d instigated was at last bursting to full fruition. Vance hadn’t been much for secession back in ’61, though once he became governor of North Carolina he proved to be as States’ Rights as they come. When Confederate cavalry units rode roughshod through his state, seizing supplies from civilian farms, he even threatened to set the state militia on them. “It will be writ upon the grave of the Confederacy, ‘Died of a Principle,’ ” Jeff Davis muttered whenever Vance and the other governors flouted his presidential authority in the name of States’ Rights. Now Lincoln had announced that he’d recognize the return of any state in which one-tenth of the citizens pledged their allegiance to the Union and forswore slavery. Which had Vance writing Davis to declare North Carolinians so discontented with the war, peace negotiations might be his only recourse.

I clung to Vance’s words like they were warming stones as I made my way along the crowded and cold-hard streets that frosty evening. If North Carolina took Lincoln’s terms, robbing the Confederacy of its greatest source of soldiers and its most plentiful ports for blockade running, surely the war would—

Someone pushed hard up against me, knocking the thought from my head and my feet from the icy ground. A hand reached out and grabbed me as I fell. A white man’s hand. It gripped me hard, remaining fast on my wrist even after I stood steady again.

“Clumsy in these new shoes, I am.” The man was tall and burly, his voice low. “Sorry to knock down a servant to the Davises like that. You are the gal from the president’s house, aren’t you?”

“Yes sir, a maid.”

He winked and kept his hold on me. “Plenty of interesting goings on over there, with the military officers and the government officials and all. I wager you could keep a fellow up all night, with stories of what you hear.”

I didn’t dare glance about to see if any passersby heard him. “Don’t know nothing ’bout all that, sir. I just do like Mistress say, cleaning and what.”

“No need to play shy with me. Wouldn’t a fine gal like you want to tell what she’s seen to some nice people who’d help her go North and be free?”

I pulled hard out of his grasp. “Don’t know nothing worth telling, sir, and my home here in Richmond. Don’t make me go North. I’s scared of them Yankees.”

He stepped so close, his chestnut whiskers nearly brushed my brow. “Can you read, gal?”

Though I shook my head furiously, he shoved a folded page into my hand. “My name’s Acreman. I have a room at Carlton House. It’s written on that paper, my name and the hotel’s. You forget, have someone read it to you. Come see me there. Money and a nice trip North, just waiting for you.”

He turned, disappearing into the crowd. I hurried off, barely able to hold from running as I crossed the street. Once I was home, I slammed the door fast, my hands trembling so as I set the latch that I dropped the man’s note. Out fell a hundred dollars in Federal greenbacks.

Union currency had become a rare sight indeed in Richmond. But I wasn’t certain whether this Acreman was a Northerner, or just pretending to be.

His accent didn’t sound familiar, one way or the other. But he made sure I noticed his shoes were new, even the most accomplished blockade runners weren’t bringing leather like that into the Confederacy. There was something else, though, that didn’t sit right. He bumped against me on Marshall Street, just past Ninth, a good four blocks from the Davis residence. With the shortages at the municipal gasworks, Richmond’s streetlamps barely threw off any light, and I was well wrapped against the cold. How could he recognize me as a servant from the Gray House?

Much as I’d quavered and quaked the summer before over Aunt Piss’s eagerness to find a spy, I’d taken comfort for the last six months, believing he never thought to suspect me. Neither did Jeff Davis nor Burton Harrison, though I passed all three as I slaved in the Gray House. What made this stranger take notice of what they ignored? Was he their enemy, or their ally? Whatever the cause, his colliding into me was no accident.

After that, I kept one eye over my shoulder as I navigated the city’s dim streets. When I arrived unannounced at McNiven’s sixteen days later, I was especially wary. Any negro caught dallying about Richmond after sunset was still subject to jail and whipping. And whatever deviltry McNiven was up to—pretending to be a slave runner or a tobacco smuggler or what—I didn’t care to put myself where any associates who called upon him might see me. But I didn’t know what greater risk there’d be, if I didn’t speak to him about what I’d learned that day.

“Has Vance come to acting after all that talk?” McNiven asked as soon as I was inside.

I shook my head. “It’s Georgia, not North Carolina, that we need to worry about. Sixteen and a half acres, some place called Andersonville, to be built into a massive prison. They’ll send the Federals they’re holding in Richmond there, as soon as it’s ready.” I detailed the plans I’d found on Davis’s desk, then recounted how Bet had carried on at Christmas, threatening to obstruct the relocation of the prisoners. Expecting me to join in whatever folly she set herself upon.

“ ’Tis no folly to fear that half-starved men canna survive a five-hundred-mile journey.”

I didn’t have much patience for McNiven taking her side. “The way she carries on about the ill treatment the prisoners get here, why try to keep them in Richmond?”

“Two and a half years Bet has looked after the Federals. If they go, what is left for her to care on?”

“So we should let her try who knows what disruption, never mind how she might raise General Winder’s suspicion?”

McNiven marked my agitation enough to promise, “I will send Butler a caution against acting anyway rash.”

I suppose I should have held myself triumphant for persuading him to forward my counsel to the Union general. But I was no less apprehensive when I arrived at the Gray House the next morning. And I wasn’t the only one in a state by then.

“So you here after all,” Hortense said when she saw me.

“Where else would I be? Mistress have a fit, dusting and polishing ain’t done like always.”

“She ain’t gonna notice today. Her little Betsy run off North. Some sap-head Yankee gived that dicty nigger two thousand dollars to tell what she seed around here. What she gonna see ’sides herself putting on airs?” Hortense rolled her eyes at the fool ways of Yankees and Betsy both. “Queen Varina howling a fright, like no other darky can dress her hair. You go on up tend her, Sophronia can mind the dusting.”

I would rather have dusted the whole of the Sahara than face Queen Varina. Growing heavy with a new pregnancy, she howled even more histrionic than usual over the loss of her personal maid. “What won’t the Yankees stoop to, to humiliate the president’s family? The sacred bond between master and servant means nothing to them.” She fumed her agitation as I combed out her hair. “And that Betsy, after all I have done for her! Why, she ran off wearing one of my own gowns!”

Truth was, I nearly shared her surprise. The way Betsy always doted on her mistress, I never supposed she’d plot to go North. Knowing the seemingly obsequious Betsy had put on as false a face as I did about the Gray House nearly made me smile—until I thought how the revelation of her play-acting threatened to expose my own.

As I secured Queen Varina’s recalcitrant locks with a tortoise-shell comb, her eyes met mine in the dressing table mirror. “Has anyone said anything to you about leaving us, Molly?”

In the two years I’d slaved for her, Queen Varina never once called me by my right name. She never seemed to give a thought to who I was or what I did outside the Gray House, and I didn’t much care to have her musing on it now. But lying outright to her might bring who knew what risk to me, if she began nosing around, asking who’d seen strangers talking to her servants.

“Oh Mistress, a horrible man with a funny way a talking say something to me once. He grab me in the street and don’t let go. Ask me to meet him in his hotel. Mistress, you know I’s a good girl, never do no such thing. He say he take me North, but I won’ts never leave my husband for nothing, or run off from my marse. I breaks away fast and runs home.”

I dropped my eyes, all desperation and deference. “Ma’am, you ain’t gonna say nothing to nobody, is you? My marse, he be right furious if he hear. I’s a good girl, ma’am, never run off from no one.”

Queen Varina nodded, glad enough for evidence of the evil of Northerners and the loyalty of her negroes. “To think of those un-Christian Yankees, trying to corrupt a gal like you. Forget that man ever spoke to you, and if any of his like come around again, you tell me right away and I will see that they are punished.” She turned her head this way and that, admiring her half-dressed hair in the looking glass. “Hurry up, now. You still need to press out my orange pekin, for my luncheon with Mrs. Chesnut.”

That afternoon, Sophronia sidled up to me in the second-floor waiting room. “Us go, too?”

The way she grinned, she seemed to think we might follow Betsy’s tracks right then and there. “Go how?” I asked. “Sleep where? Eat what? Just cause Betsy ain’t here, don’t mean she any better off where she is.”

Sophronia’s smile withered to a frown. She turned away, running her flannel dusting-cloth across the maple window bench. I saw her glancing furtively out the glass, worrying herself over what lay beyond the Gray House yard.

I hated to snatch the hope from her. But I couldn’t have Sophronia giving Queen Varina more reason to be suspicious of her servants. I told myself she’d borne slavery long enough, she’d survive it until the war was over and then have freedom aplenty.

I spent the first part of the tenth February cleaning up after Queen Varina’s morning sickness, and the second part serving her and Jeff Davis dinner. The woman was glutton enough not to realize she wasn’t going to keep down but half of what she ate. She might have waved me over to bring her second helpings, even thirds, if a flustered private hadn’t arrived with an urgent message for her husband.

“Sir, I—I was sent to tell you—sir.” The young herald’s eyes darted about the dining room, as though the sideboard or the chandelier might remind him of what he had to say.

Jeff Davis was as anxious as I was to hear the news choking this military messenger. “Out with it, young man,” he said. “Can’t you see Mrs. Davis is waiting to finish her dinner?”

The soldier turned to Queen Varina, his face flushed as ruby as the French decanter that stood half-empty at the table. “I’m sorry to interrupt, ma’am.”

“You should be sorry. The president is harassed morning, noon, and night with the work of the Confederacy. Why, if George Washington were alive, do you suppose he—”

“My dear, let the boy speak,” her husband said. “Private, tell me what’s brought you. That’s an order.”

“It’s the men in Libby prison, sir. The Yankees. Some of them . . . they seem to have escaped, sir.”

Davis choked over the news. “Seem to have escaped? Have they, or haven’t they?”

“We’ve had a devil of a time counting and recounting them, took all morning. And it seems a little more than a hundred are gone, sir.”

Jeff Davis drew his thin lips tight, his cheekbones jutting sharp as he pondered the escaped Federals scrambling toward the Peninsula, hoping to join up with Butler’s troops. “I trust General Winder has set his men to looking for them?”

The messenger nodded. “Yes, sir. Found a few already, right on Dock Street. Drunk as could be at Nottingham’s saloon. Sergeant says it’s like a Yankee, can’t make it four blocks without getting soused.”