Alias Dragonfly
Authors: Jane Singer
Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Historical, #United States, #General, #Civil War Period (1850-1877), #Mysteries & Detective Stories
“Don’t love a spy,” warns fifteen-year-old Pinkerton agent
Maddie Bradford
, a lonely, rebellious outsider with a mind on fire and a photographic memory. It is 1861, the Civil War has just started and this motherless teen must move with her soldier-father from New Hampshire to Washington, DC—a city at war, packed cheek by jowl with soldiers, Rebel spies, slave catchers and traitors of all stripes bent on waging a war of destruction against the Union, and President Lincoln himself.
Maddie’s journal, written in secret, of course, begins with her arrival at her aunt’s DC boardinghouse through the first year of the Civil War, a time, as Maddie puts it, full of “dips and dangers,” when she becomes a fearless Union spy. And then there is the mysterious, maddening Jake Whitestone, a young man who awakens something equally dangerous in Maddie: Love in a time of terror.
Civil War historian, author and lecturer Jane Singer brings her unique voice to Alias Dragonfly.
by
Jane Singer
Bell Bridge Books
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, (living or dead,) events or locations is entirely coincidental.
Bell Bridge Books
PO BOX 300921
Memphis, TN 38130
eISBN: 978-1-61194-074-9
ISBN: 978-1-61194-041-1
Bell Bridge Books is an Imprint of BelleBooks, Inc.
Copyright © 2011 by Jane Singer
Printed and bound in the United States of America.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
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Cover design: Debra Dixon
Interior design: Hank Smith
Photo credits:
Girl (manipulated) © Matthew Williams-ellis - Dreamstime.com
Background © Sveva - www.thedigitalmuse.net
Dragonfly pin © Jaguarwoman Designs
:Eda:01:
For my brother James Martin Singer
The nightmare came again, spreading like an ink stain over my brain . . .
I am alone in the alley. Stealthy as a cellar rat, the girl creeps up behind me. I’m too busy fishing her dispatch out of a slops bucket to sense her. It is too late to pull my revolver from my boot. I feel hers in my back.
“Turn around, Yankee.” She whispers. I face her full on. I gasp. We are so alike: wide-set blue eyes—starburst eyes flecked with green, rambling brown curls, and we are both tall, close in age, and young, we are so young. We are wearing wrinkled black frocks that hang loose on our thin frames. Are we in mourning, or in disguise? We might pass for sisters. But I don’t have a sister, not a living one.
She cocks her revolver . . .
I duck low and dart past her down the long, narrow alleyway. A bullet whizzes past my cheek and smashes into the wall as I run toward the street.
She does not take her kill shot.
She wants to capture me if she can, parade me before her handlers—her prize. I hear her panting behind me like a slave-tracking hound after its quarry. She catches me by the ankle. I fly forward and hit the ground. She is leaning over me, trying to pull me up. I rake my fingers down her face. She bleeds.
Kick, like they taught you, fight, I tell myself. I slam the heel of my boot into her kneecap.
Before she buckles, she punches me in the mouth. I am bleeding, too. She is down. Her weapon clatters to the cobblestones. In that instant, I pull my pistol out of my boot.
Behind me, I hear a man, his voice slurred by drink, ask, “Anything broke, sweetheart?”
I hear her snarling, like a wild thing.
“Little witch. Bit me, did you?” He yelps.
I can hear him cursing as he totters away. She is clutching her leg, crawling toward her weapon. I grab it up, and yank her to her feet. I jam my gun into her side.
“Walk,” I tell her. She sways, her teeth clenched, in pain.
“Yankee devil.” She hisses.
I am near my boss’s headquarters. Even in the darkness, with the moon smudged by clouds, I see it. I pull her along, past two Union soldiers who eye us, leering.
“Don’t ever let me catch you out drinking again, Nancy.” I say loudly, holding her against me, supporting her. “If papa saw you like this, he’d beat you blue.”
The soldiers laugh as I drag her along.
Three men guarding Mr. Pinkerton’s door, step aside at the sight of me.
Inside, the girl collapses in a chair, her head down. I tie her hands together, avoiding the blazing hatred in her eyes.
Mr. P. hands me his handkerchief. I wipe at my bloody lip.
He walks to the girl. “This time, lassie, we win.”
She throws back her head. She is laughing.
The room explodes in a flash of blinding white light. I am no longer flesh. I am in pieces—bone, bits of skin and glass.
I am screaming. I cover my mouth to muffle the sound, and fumble for the revolver I keep by my pillow. The smooth wooden stock, the cold metal barrel warms in my hand.
Breathe. Slow, easy. Breathe.
Something tugs me toward wakefulness. It is the easy light of dawn, soft and gray, slowing the thudding of my heart.
I am angry at this nightmare, like it is a living being. Much of it, not all, but much of it is wrong.
Write it down, then, the truth, the way it really happened, how it all began, I tell myself. Take up pen and paper. Write.
You’ve probably guessed by now that I am a spy.
We are slippery sorts, like the eels that slither out of my father’s fishnets back in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. That’s where I was born and lived until we came to Washington City.
You might pass me on the street and not even know it. I could be the one-armed beggar with a half-moon scar on her forehead, the orphan under the gas lamp selling wilted violets, or the young woman in crimson velvet awaiting her escort to one of President Lincoln’s White House balls.
Or maybe I am the lanky serving maid with a mass of springy, light brown curls. I might be the muleskinner’s brat, with blue eyes in a dirty face, my hands stained from tanning animal hides.
Sometimes I am known as “Fiona,” or “Dragonfly.” These are aliases, fake names given to me by Mr. Allan Pinkerton, so my true identity and movements can remain secret.
Between missions, I stay in Washington City, in my aunt’s boardinghouse that is my sometime stopping place, not really my home.
My father is a private with the Second New Hampshire Infantry Regiment. Brave men like him aim to win the fight against the Confederates. If that happens, the Negro slaves might well go free. I’d never seen human beings dragged like cattle to auction until I came to Washington City. Their freedom, and putting our broken country back together, my father says, is worth dying for. I agree with my whole heart. Even about the dying part.
Some call this conflict between the North and the South the Civil War. That’s a bunch of bosh! There is nothing civil about it. After more than a year it still rages, destroying everything in its path.
And here I am smack in the middle of it, a girl of fifteen who never believed she’d fit in anywhere, let alone contribute to a great cause. In spite of the danger, I am bursting proud to do my part. Bursting proud and changed forever.