The Secrets of Mary Bowser (49 page)

I fairly galloped up to Queen Varina’s dressing room to snatch the crystal vial from her bureau, then dashed back down to the library, where she lay collapsed on the meridienne. I held the aromatic spirits of ammonia beneath her nose until she blinked at me and then at her husband, unsure why we were huddled over her.

“What is it? What’s happened?” she asked.

“I gave you some news that was too much for you to bear in your delicate condition, I’m afraid,” Davis said. He ordered me to pour some claret, then held the glass of burgundy liquid for his wife to sip. The alcohol brought a flush to her cheeks, as she demanded to hear the news again.

He coughed out his hesitation before telling her, “Ulric Dahlgren is no more.”

She frowned. “I remember when Commodore Dahlgren brought his family to visit us in Washington. That little fair-haired child in his black velvet suit, fussing at his Vandyke collar. Why, he couldn’t have been much older then than our Joe is now.”

“That little boy had grown to a man of twenty years and more, and traded his Vandyke collar for a Federal uniform. Colonel Ulric Dahlgren he is, or was. Our men routed him as he was trying to attack Richmond. They have shot him dead.”

Queen Varina went pale again, but then she shook her jowls and swallowed hard. “If he was our enemy, I suppose I am glad he was killed.” She fixed her gaze on her husband’s good eye. “Did you come rushing home just to tell me a Yankee colonel was dead?”

Davis gestured for me to have the vial of smelling salts ready, in case what he had to say sent her into another faint. “When they searched the body, they found his orders. Fitzhugh Lee brought a copy to me not half an hour ago. It will be in the news-sheets by morning—Dahlgren and his men were to enter Richmond, free the Federal prisoners, and set fire to the city. But first, they were to kill me, and all my cabinet.”

“Assassination? Jefferson, are even Yankees capable of so despicable a thing? Are we safe yet?”

Davis laid his long fingers across her mouth, though whether to soothe her or just to silence her I couldn’t tell. “Dahlgren’s men are all arrested, except for a handful who fled back to their camp. I suppose his death will give the Federals pause before they try such a thing again. But my dear, we must not forget that this is war. Whatever friends we had on the Union side, they are lost to us forever. Lincoln has taught them dishonor and deception, and we cannot trust even those we hold closest to our own bosom.”

With that, he signaled for his devoted servant to pour another glass of claret.

A surprise snow came the first Saturday in April, melting away to raise Richmond’s creeks all the higher. Which meant I had to walk west all the way to Second Street on Sunday, just to find a passable route up to Shockoe Cemetery.

Oakwood Cemetery and Hollywood Cemetery, the newer burying grounds where Confederate soldiers were interred, would be full of mourners of a Sunday. But Shockoe Cemetery was deserted, no one taking time to visit the grave of a grandfather when there was a brother or son laid freshly to rest across town. I picked my way among the sodden burial plots, until I found the marker for Old Master Van Lew’s lying place. Nearly two decades’ worth of weather hadn’t marred the words etched into the stone.
JOHN VAN LEW. BORN MARCH 4, 1790. DIED SEPTEMBER 13, 1845. MADE PERFECT THROUGH SUFFERING.

I’d seen enough suffering in war-time Richmond to know a wealthy man lying in a featherbed on the second story of his mansion didn’t hardly compare, even if he was stricken with lung disease. As for perfection, I hadn’t met a person yet I’d mistake for perfect, and certainly no Van Lew.

Particularly not the one who asked me to meet her here this morning.

“I hardly know where else I can find a moment’s privacy these days,” Bet said when she arrived. She’d left off her buckskins and calico bonnet in favor of a mourning dress, the costume worn by so many Richmond ladies. “Every time I turn, I find a detective at my elbow.” She leaned close before continuing, as though the very graves might harbor some unwanted auditor. “I have learned where they’ve left Colonel Dahlgren’s body.”

When the news-sheets published the report of Dahlgren’s orders, the Confederates condemned him so, words weren’t enough. They chopped the little finger off his corpse and stole his artificial leg. Buried him in a shallow grave, then dug him up and put him on display, before interring the moldering remains in some ignominious locale.

Now Bet declared we would retrieve those remains and lay them properly to rest. She spoke with such enthusiasm she might have been telling me we were to unearth a treasure of gold bullion rather than a month-old corpse.

“Why would we unbury and rebury someone who’s long gone?” I asked.

“It is the very least we can do for him.” She swept her hand toward her father’s grave, as though she meant to set the colonel down right in her family plot. “He was a Federal officer. He deserves a decent burial.”

“He was a cold-blooded killer.” The
Richmond
Examiner
was so enthusiastic about proving Dahlgren a scoundrel, they published a diatribe against his treatment of the man who tried to guide the expedition to the city. Now I cited it back to Bet. “How do you think your Colonel Dahlgren was going to find his way into Richmond? Like plenty of whites, North and South, he relied on some negro. But when the rains swelled the James so high that the Federals couldn’t ford across, Dahlgren blamed the scout. As though colored people have the Lord’s own power to make the waters rise and fall. He had that man hanged, stripped the reins off his own horse to do it.” The tale haunted me, knowing Wilson had scouted for the Union army.

Bet flicked her hand, as though she were shooing away a gall wasp. “That cannot be. Why would any Federal officer do such a thing?”

I pursed my lips, thinking of George Patterson and Henry Watson and my own husband serving under who knows what chain of commanders. “Since when does being a Northerner, a Unionist, or even a Federal officer preclude hating negroes? Your Colonel Dahlgren wasn’t even decent enough to have that poor man’s body cut down once he was dead. When the Confederates found it, they were glad enough to leave it swinging from the tree. A reminder to the darkies of how the Yankees mean to treat them.” I bucked my chin up, daring her to respond.

“What you describe is a despicable act, and if it occurred as you say, there is no excuse for it. But there is no excuse for us to behave indecently, either.” She cocked her head, trying to bring her chin up to mine. “The correct thing to do is to give any body, white or colored, a proper burial. That is what we must do for Colonel Dahlgren.”

We must. I wasn’t sure which of those words irked me more—the one that assumed I was indivisible from her, or the one that declared me bound to do whatever she deemed necessary. Though she rebelled against other people’s ideas of show and ought her whole life, Bet was always glad enough to show me what she believed I ought to do.

I strode to the cemetery gate without a word of farewell. Bet could spend her Sunday plotting whatever foolishness she wanted. I’d spend mine at the colored burying yard across the way, tending Mama’s grave.

On the warm Saturday that ended April, Jeff Davis set out for his office in the old Customs House first thing in the morning, sputtering about the need for proximity to his cabinet. Queen Varina bustled after him at mid-day, half moaning and half boasting that her dear president wouldn’t remember to eat a morsel of food unless she delivered it with her own hand. Hortense and Sophronia were scrubbing the first floor, and in the momentary quiet of the second story, I left off my dusting and sweeping to search through Jeff Davis’s correspondence. The Union generals were positioning their forces for a great new confrontation with Bobby Lee, and they needed every detail I could supply about where the Confederate regiments lay in wait.

Just seven weeks earlier, Mr. Lincoln had installed U. S. Grant as head of the Army of the Potomac. Unconditional Surrender, the Confederates called him, for the terms he demanded when he took Fort Donelson, Tennessee, back in February of ’62. They spat the appellation ruefully when he won the siege of Vicksburg in the summer of ’63. By ’64, after three long years of war and so many Federal generals come and gone from the Virginia campaign, it was hard for me to believe Grant could bring victory to the Union side at last. But marking how his appointment agitated the Confederates, I hoped Unconditional Surrender might prove true to his nickname once again.

Atop the pile on Davis’s desk were three drafts of a plodding, ponderous speech he was to make to the Confederate Congress when they reconvened in the coming week. Beneath those lay a copy of a letter General Breckenridge sent General Bragg three days earlier. Underneath that I found another missive, dated the day before, in a crisp hand that by then I recognized as surely as I did my own.

Headquarters, April 29, 1864

His Excellency Jefferson Davis,

President Confederate States:

Mr. President: I received this morning a report from a scout just from the vicinity of Washington that General Burnside, with 23,000 men, 7,000 of which are negroes, marched through that city on Monday last to Alexandria. This report was forwarded by General Fitz. Lee from Fredericksburg, and I presume the scout to be Stringfellow. If true, I think it shows that Burnside’s destination is the Rappahannock frontier, and that he will have to be met north of the James River. I would therefore recommend that the troops which you design to oppose him, which are south of that river, be drawn toward it. I think there are sufficient troops in North Carolina for the local operations contemplated there without those sent from this army, and request that Hoke’s brigade and the two regiments attached to it be returned to me. I think it better to keep the organization of the corps complete, and, if necessary, to detach a corps than to weaken them and break them up. I have kept Longstreet in reserve for such an emergency and shall be too weak to oppose Meade’s army without Hoke’s and R. D. Johnston’s brigades.

With great respect, your obedient servant,

R. E. Lee,

General.

That was Lee’s way. He played at humbly submitting himself to Davis, all the while telling his commander-in-chief what to do. Whether he was right about Burnside or no, I couldn’t gauge. But his great vexation at having Grant’s men on one side, Burnside’s on another, with Butler’s on yet a third, was some comfort to me, knowing my own husband served among them. I held Lee’s letter before me, arranging all the details in my mind so I could write them out that night.

“What you think you doing?”

Hortense’s question shocked a bolt from my heart to my head, and deep into my belly.

She’d come up behind me, seen the paper in my hand. Seen me squinting at it, too.

“Looking for cat ears.” I turned the page sideways, then upside down. Moving it slowly and tilting my head like I was puzzling over it. “Missy, my first master’s little girl, her name Mildred Ann. When they learnt her reading, she show me how one them letters look like cat ears. She say her name start with that letter, my name, too. Sometime I see writing, I try pick out that cat ear letter ’cause it the only one I know. But I don’t see it nowhere here, do you?” I held the page out to her.

“Don’t got time to be looking for no cat ear or dog tail. Got work enough to do ’fore Queen Varina come home hot full of holler.” She stepped closer. “I don’t know what trouble you up to in here but I know there some. Now you get to cleaning or I gonna—”

A shriek pierced the air. It came from outside, shrill and long. One of the Davis children—but with an edge of panic that distinguished it from their usual yelps of mischief.

“Where that Lazy Irish at?” Hortense strode to the open window and surveyed the backyard.

The nursemaid mustn’t have been too far from her charges, because the next moment she was screaming, “Yiv killed ’im! Sweet Mary Mother o’ Jesus, the boy is dead fir sure!”

Hortense whirled round and ran from the room. As she thumped down the stairs, I slid Lee’s missive back into the stack on the table.

Shoving my hands beneath my apron, I made my quick way outside, where I found my fellow servants huddled around the brick pathway between the basement door and the kitchen. That’s where little Joseph Davis, a child of barely five years, lay—bloody, twisted, and motionless. Fallen from the veranda balustrade twenty feet above, where he’d been playing with his brothers.

It was only later, after Catherine went to the Customs House to fetch the Davises, after Queen Varina arrived screaming and Jeff Davis praying, after the doctor came and confirmed the child would breathe no more, after we set the house in mourning for the stream of visitors who arrived that very evening to express their condolences—only after all of that, did I stop to realize that when I thanked Jesus for distracting Hortense from what she saw of my spying, it was the death of a child I thanked Him for.

I would not have harmed a hair on the boy’s head. But still I carried with me the weighty truth of what slim respite I gained, solely because he was lost.

The Sunday morning church bells had all tolled their last before I noticed the letter lying on the floor just inside my door. Someone must have slipped it in from outside while I slept, like they’d done to Bet only a few weeks before.

Though she pretended not to pay that note any mind, I’d marked the way her face twitched when she showed it to me. On the top was a skull and cross-bones, the words beneath blocked out in the unsure hand of someone without formal schooling:
Dear Miss Van Lough, Old maid. White caps are arownd town. They are coming at nyte. Look out! Your house is going at last. FIRE. Is your house insherd? Put this in the fire and mum’s the word. Yours truly, White Caps. Please give me some of your blood to wryte leters with.

Picking up the unmarked packet that had been left for me, I considered burning it still sealed up, just to keep whatever image of harm it might contain out of my mind. But it was a warm May day, no fire lit, and matches a rare enough commodity I didn’t care to waste one.