Tired of waiting for me to play along, Taylor gave the answer. “It’s Lincoln.”
Now, he had my attention. “Abraham Lincoln? Our Lincoln? The lawyer?” I knew he’d had some political dealings, but I couldn’t help but think of him as the scarecrow lawyer I’d met, years ago now, in Springfield. Together, we’d brought the embezzling accountant to justice, though I still remembered the hearts I’d broken to do it, including my own.
“The very same.”
“What did he have to go do a fool thing like that for?” I said incredulously.
Bellamy mumbled, “Maybe he wants to be president?”
“It’ll never happen,” said Taylor, shaking his head.
I had to agree, as much as it pained me. The South would never stand for a president openly against slavery, whether or not he was well-spoken and intelligent. He was the wrong man for the job. We needed someone who could appeal to both sides, though I couldn’t be sure that such a man existed. And certainly, I would rather have a man of our cause in the White House, if the alternative was a slaver. Lincoln would never be the kind of compromise that both sides could buy into. But maybe I was fooling myself that compromise was an option for our country. I thought back to Murfreesboro. We were already two countries.
We even spoke different languages. Southerners who agitated for secession were referred to as Secesh, but never south of the Mason-Dixon Line, where the term was considered an insult. A Northerner who felt the same was a copperhead, but only in the North. I had to be fluent in both languages and remember what to speak to whom, at all moments, in all places. I had no illusions about what would happen if I were discovered in the wrong place at the wrong time.
One misstep was all it would take.
Chapter Eighteen
Baltimore
All of Richmond’s finest hotels were located only a few blocks from the slave market. No matter where I stayed, I would pass within feet of the notorious Lumpkin’s Jail, where the howls and cries of those within never fell silent. To keep myself from reacting, I watched the reactions of others, to see if they felt anything. Some did, and some didn’t. I had seen men spit and women weep, as well as the other way around, but most seemed to make an effort not to notice. As I passed the rotten structure with a stationmaster’s teenage daughter in November 1860, she rolled her eyes. It was all I could do not to cuff her and stamp her bonnet strings in the mud.
Instead, we continued our walk to take tea at the Spotswood, the city’s newest hotel and its crown jewel. My room was at the Exchange down the street, a marble palace that was hardly less luxurious, but the Spotswood was more fashionable, and Letty was a creature of fashion.
I was pretending to be a Mrs. Barley, a former resident of the town who had moved away years before, calling on the thinnest of threads to visit with the stationmaster’s family. The mother was busy with her sewing circle, but the teenage Letty proved a most willing gossip, and I hoped the tea would yield some results. My favorite trick with young women was to ask where all the handsome young men could be found: it was a good way to keep tabs on the development and movements of any local militia, and it was a topic upon which they could be counted to expand at length.
The front of the Spotswood was tall and imposing, dwarfing everything nearby with its five stories of brick and a woven ornamentation of iron at the ground level. The tearoom itself had all the modern touches: a golden brocade on the walls, generously padded chairs, teacups of porcelain so thin the light shone through them. It was all graceful curves and elegance.
Letty was nattering away, periodically straightening the front of her fashionable navy-blue Zouave jacket in a way calculated to make sure everyone noticed it. I nodded and encouraged her, periodically stirring sugar into my Darjeeling tea, until a disheveled young man suddenly came charging into the room through the far entrance, shouting at the top of his lungs. I couldn’t make out what he was saying, but whatever it was, a great grumbling noise like thunder began to fill the room.
In the hubbub, my young companion, a wrinkle of confusion on her pretty brow, reached over to the table next to us and politely asked the man there what the news had been.
“They elected that bastard Lincoln,” snarled the man, and now I understood the wave of feeling in the room. It was not excitement but anger. Teacups rattled in their saucers; every once in a while, a profanity soared above the other noises to echo like a gunshot.
Surrounded by fury and disappointment, with a private joy and pride singing in my heart, I had never been so alone. Any one of the people here, told my true identity and loyalties, would tear me apart. The young lady across from me, her eyes wide with surprise at the turn of events, looked innocent enough. But if I told her my high opinion of Lincoln, she would likely have clawed my face with her elegant, long nails hard enough to draw blood.
It was the best possible news and the worst possible news, all at once.
I considered sending a telegram of congratulations to Lincoln, but for two reasons, I refrained. One, I figured my small tidings would be lost in a sea of good wishes. Second and more importantly, no matter how careful we were with identities and codes, there was always a chance my activities would be found out, and I couldn’t take the chance, not with the stakes higher and higher every day. It was hard enough to keep track of all my identities as it was.
I submitted my report to Pinkerton, detailing what Letty had told me, and I left Richmond behind for another Southern city to do it all over again.