Each word fell like a hammer upon a chisel, etching themselves into her mind. Yet with more force than normal words, with finality. “Culpers?”
Granddad prodded her onward. “The Culper Ring started in the Revolution. My mother was a spy in British-held New York, passing information through a collection of friends until it reached General Washington.”
“Great-Grandmama Winter—a spy?” Impossible. Her portrait made her look like such a normal woman.
“When I took over during the next war with the British—”
“You?” The world tipped. Her laugh did nothing to right it. “Granddad, you are not a spy.”
“Here we are.” Walker set down the lantern and put his shoulder to a break in the timbers. “It will open only a foot, but it’s enough to get a glimpse. It’s a Knights’ castle, no question.”
A castle, one of their secret lairs? Here, between her home and her carriage house? It could not be. And to prove it could not be, she grabbed the lantern, thrust it through the opening, and stuck her head in after it.
The walls were papered with charts and maps, lines drawn over them helter-skelter. Some of the North, with stars upon the major cities, some of the South, stretching all the way to Texas. One of the entire hemisphere, with a circle drawn around Havana as a center. Papers pinned with what looked like gibberish upon them. And there, nearly out of the dim circle of light, one of Lincoln’s election posters. But with “King” scrawled above his name, and a cruel-looking X drawn through his face in an ink more red-brown than lampblack, something nearly the color of…
“Oh, God in heaven.” Blood, it was blood. She stumbled back and would have dropped the light had Walker not rescued it. Would have fallen had her grandfather not caught her.
He held her fast. “That had better be a genuine beseeching of the Almighty, Mari, because we need to fall to our knees before Him. They are going to harm the president if we don’t stop them. And we’ve done all we can from the outside.”
“Not Dev. Please, not Dev.”
Walker eased the opening shut and watched her closely in the golden light. “He’s the captain of this castle, Yetta. He took over after Lucien died.”
No. She squeezed shut her eyes, but that did nothing to blur the implications. If Granddad spoke rightly, then both of them had lied to her. Had told her she was the most important thing in the world but had undermined all her family stood for. Had made a fool of her. Had they been using her, her family’s connections?
If it were true… “What is it you want from me?”
Granddad gave her a squeeze. “Allan Pinkerton is sending in a man. He has been in communication with Dev and ought to be arriving in town any day. You cannot let either of them know you realize what they are about, but you have to protect him where you can, Mari. Make sure he has the opportunities he needs to find information.”
“His name’s Slade Osborne. A New Yorker by birth, but more recently of Chicago. He’s part of Pinkerton’s Intelligence Service.” Walker reached out and took her hand in his. Audacious, yes. Inappropriate too. And oh, how it reminded her of happier days. “Can you do this, Yetta?”
She saw again that red-brown slash upon the yellowed poster. Shivered at the hatred that must have inspired the defacing. Had the same hand that so recently cupped her cheek marked the president’s image for destruction? Had the lips that had kissed her sworn treason?
She didn’t know. And the not-knowing made her knees want to buckle. For the first time in too many years, she turned her mind to prayer.
Oh, God, if it’s true…What have I done?
Two
Slade Osborne planted his feet on the wooden platform at Camden Station and waited for the locomotive’s steam to clear. In the bleak January sunshine, Baltimore looked as he had come to expect—gray, dreary, frayed. A city on the edge of chaos. Hence the many Union uniforms milling about with dour-faced soldiers inside them.
He scanned the buildings, the muddy streets. Even never having seen Devereaux Hughes, he would know him. He would be well dressed, have a charming smile, and eyes as hard as the rails that paved his way to fortune. He’d no doubt send that skitter of warning up Slade’s spine. The self-same one that had made him spin around a second before his brother meant to put a sledge to his skull.
His jaw clenched, he hooked a finger in his waistcoat pocket and stepped away from the stream of pedestrians. His train car was being hitched to horses for the trip through the city to President Street Station, but he wouldn’t be joining his fellow passengers.