Alias Dragonfly (12 page)

“No, Aunt Salome. My father rarely spoke of your troubles,” I answered, knowing his and Mama’s disapproval of his sister and her husband keeping slaves.

The words poured from her. “My husband gave me no children, not a one to warm my heart or mourn my passing. And my slaves scattered like chickens in a lightning storm, though I cared for them as my own. The tobacco plants died before they could be dried, and, I am ashamed to say, my neighbors brought me food so I would not go hungry.”

She wiped away tears, flicked at them like mosquitoes.

“I care for my brother. I do not have to love his beliefs or his cause. I will rent rooms to Yankees or Confederates, as long as they pay, do you understand? But maybe with this recent Yankee defeat, both sides will turn tail and stop. And if that happens, you and your father can go home, in one piece, and I can be relieved of the responsibility of caring for you, feeding you, and oh, God, I don’t know anything else but a farming life. Just like you don’t know anything else, growing up with abolitionists feeding thoughts of freedom like porridge to anyone who will listen. Do you understand the risk in that?”

“Yes, I truly do, Aunt Salome.” I remembered Mr. Amos Jefferson and how my parents had sheltered him. If we lived in the South, what might Mama and Papa have suffered as a result of their good deed?

My aunt was weeping. I felt pity, or at least a whisper of it, for her. Things were so much more complicated than I could ever have imagined.

“I’m sorry for your woes, Aunt Salome,” I said, and I was. “I’m not the enemy, Madeline,” she said wearily, “just a tired old woman. Do you understand? Of course you do.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I answered, patting her hand. I’d not noticed how dry and chafed the flesh of it was, and how she was a bit bent over when she walked. “I’ll manage the clothing, Aunt Salome, perhaps you should rest. And then I’m going out for a bit. Mr. Webster has offered me a stroll, a city tour, I believe he said.”

“That’s nice,” she said, looking past me. “A fine gentleman, he is, and he pays right on time.”

“Aunt Salome?”

“Yes?”

“I’m sorry to have burdened you,” I said, meaning my words; yet knowing, hoping I was about to alter myself in ways I barely understood, but welcomed like a new morning.

“Have you seen Mr. Whitestone about?” she asked. “He’s two days late with his board money.”

I grabbed up a pile of shirts, until they nearly covered my face. “No, I’ve not,” I said. My heart was in my toes at the very mention of his name.

Mr. Webster was waiting for me as I came down the stairs. Even though I couldn’t wait to go, I was seized with a moment of hesitation. He offered me his arm.

“You are safe with me, Miss Bradford. Do you understand? You are safe with me.” He measured each of those words carefully. The cotton planter, the flowery, studied, frivolous manner he had, disappeared in that instant. Even his Southern drawl lessened.

“Tell me more about your abilities, Miss Bradford.”

Whoa, I sure wasn’t going to tell him about my accident, and how hard it had been for Mama and Papa when they thought I was not right in the head.

I studied Mr. Webster. “Your right foot is larger than your left, sir. You lead with it when you walk. When you take up a knife or fork, your left pinky remains in the air, and cannot move with the rest of your fingers. But there are no scars on your hands so the injury must have occurred a long time ago.”

I paused to catch my breath. Mr. Webster was regarding me intently.

“My finger has been this way since birth,” he said softly. “I have to buy two different sizes of shoes. Very good, Miss, very good indeed.”

“You have kind eyes, sir. Yet you narrow them as though to fix your face and harden it. Your expression, your whole being changes at will.”

We had reached the corner of Sixteenth Street. I was so engrossed in our conversation I’d barely heard the clatter of carriages, the voices of men, wide-skirted women and scampering children.

“What else?” he asked.

“I saw you dressed as a clergyman, sir. Who are you, really?”

“You will see, Miss Bradford,” he answered. He spoke with a different accent. Crisp, with no elongated vowels. A changed man stood before me. All gentlemanly courtesy was gone. His face was set, grim, hardened.

“What more did you see at Mrs. Greenhow’s house? You must tell me, now,” Mr. Webster said as soon as we reached the street. “Now! It is important.”

I took a deep breath. Do you know how you decide to trust someone? Do you really know? Even though some uneasiness lingered, I decided to trust him, and I’ve never regretted it.

“Behind her house, in the alley, sir,” I said, “There was . . . an exchange.”

“Of what?” He grasped my arm tightly. I hesitated. “It could be very important,” he said, not letting go of me.

I’d never felt important, or that things I saw meant much at all. I was elated.

“You say Mrs. Greenhow is dangerous?” I asked, remembering what the soldiers said about her.

“Lethal,” he answered. “A good number of Rebels like her sit in the Old Capitol Prison as we speak. Somehow she is in direct communication with Confederates in the field. But it was not known how Mrs. Greenhow was communicating.”

I took a deep breath.

“I know the face and name of her courier, I remember every detail including the name of the man she met in the alley.”

“Can you identify them?”

I was silent. Should I tell him what I’d seen? I was wavering.

“Can you?” he demanded.

I waited.
If Mr. Webster was truly a Pinkerton man
—

“I want to meet him.”

“Who?”

“Mr. Allan Pinkerton.”

Mr. Webster stopped short. He looked me straight in the eye. “I dare say. Why?”

“I heard he helped to save President Lincoln from assassination in Baltimore when he came to Washington City to be inaugurated. I heard it on the train coming here, and it was in the papers. He, all his people, must be very brave.”

Mr. Webster was silent for a long time. As we walked, the city streets teemed with carriages, milk wagons with bottles teetering and toppling into the mud and debris splattered on cobblestones. I lifted my skirts as a barrel rolled at me, its split sides pouring liquid, something that smelled like liquor. The fumes clogged my nostrils, and my blood raced with the din and stench of it all.

I was growing a bit dizzy, and stumbled. Mr. Webster caught my arm. He pulled me to a lamppost and wiped my face with his handkerchief.

“What place have you come to, little Miss, with a mind like a photographer’s camera? What good fortune came my way that I found you? And what perils might you endure in my keep?”

I was speechless. No one had ever spoken to me this way. Here was a man, nearly a stranger, who valued what I was telling him, respected what I was saying and seeing and remembering.
There goes the ‘village peculiar,’
they would say back in Portsmouth.
Maybe, just maybe, now, I was shedding that old skin for another.

I decided then and there to ask Mr. Webster what I wanted. I took the chance.

“Please, sir, my father is risking his life for what he believes. Might I not help as well in some small way?”

Mr. Webster led me to a nearby bench. He motioned for me to sit.

“Mr. Pinkerton was working as the head of a detective agency in Chicago when Samuel Felton, the president of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, asked him to investigate a plot against Abraham Lincoln. He came to Washington City and then sent operatives to Maryland, to unmask the conspiracy.”

“And they did, right?”

“Yes,” said Mr. Webster. “But there are many, many others who would like to see President Lincoln dead, the Union destroyed and this city given over to the enemy. Rebels who sneak like sewer rats.”

“I want to help, sir. I know I can.”

His gaze was so grave, so very grave.

“You are not ready, Miss.”

My heart sank. “Good day, sir.” I turned back to the house, walking fast.

He didn’t let me get far, but grasped my shoulder.

“You really must see a perfect representation of a great Apache warrior at the Smithsonian Picture Gallery, Miss Bradford. Have you been there?” He didn’t wait for an answer but turned me away from the house. “The Apache’s fierceness reaches from the canvas, and the colors are, well, astonishing,” he said, stopping me in my tracks, not by a firm hand on my arm again, but by his eyes, grey and hard as marbles. “Come with me, Miss Bradford. It will be a worthy excursion for us both, mark my words.”

He was moving me along the street now, past a makeshift hospital, where a group of bandaged, pale soldiers lay on a shaded veranda, through the bustle and snap of bright-faced strollers, pausing now and again to sigh with pity at a battered soldier being borne on a litter, or peering at a line of haggard Confederate prisoners dragging along between two guards holding bayonets at their backs. As we passed a beggar man, Mr. Webster patted him three times on the arm and dropped five pennies in his wooden bucket. The man bowed, grabbed up his things, and walked quickly away.

Mr. Webster cast a sharp glance behind us, and back to me again.

“The beggar we passed just now, sir,” I said, “he had the smooth, white hands of a gentleman who’d not labored, ever. He had fifteen pennies in his bucket, not counting your five.”

“I dare say,” he said, shaking his head with amazement, “I do dare say.”

“And sometimes, if I concentrate hard, I can hear bits of conversations that others cannot,” I added.

“Impressive,” Mr. Webster said. “And enchanting.”

I bristled at the word “enchanting.” If he only knew how my strangeness used to pain me. Finally, would it, would I, be good for something?

We passed through a daisy-filled meadow. Boys and men were hollering, and laughing, shooting at cloth targets mounted on posts.

“Watch your way,” Webster said. “This area is a shooting range. They do miss the mark now and again.” I ducked away in a flash as one bullet sailed over my head.

“Very good,” he said. “Quick as a penny-whistle.”

In the middle of the carpet of flowers was a rust-colored castle. “That’s the Smithsonian Museum,” Mr. Webster said. “A marvel, eh?”

It was a bit vulgar, like huge, overdone, decorated cake, with carved spires, arched doorways, and a huge, turreted column that looked ready to pierce the clouds.

Inside, Mr. Webster whisked me past rows of white marble busts—heads of kings, Roman gods, and emperors all in neat arrangement—straight to the picture gallery, a grand hall with mahogany carvings and paintings as far as the eye could see: oils and watercolors, dazzling, costumed men and their wives, looking the lesser in their schoolmarm’s lace. Beyond were soaring landscapes of the Western frontier: unforgiving, scorched plains crawling with buffalo, and Indian portraits all about, some in fancy white man’s clothing, others in blazing war paint.

I’d never been any place like this place where all time was stopped, cool-aired and very still, except for some heavy- skirted women and their gentlemen escorts moving like chess pieces along the rows, now and again pausing to stop before a painting, exclaiming, criticizing, admiring in murmurs as though they were in a church. The war is invisible here, I thought.