A large man with a large beard greeted me at the door, and though I hadn’t met him before, I knew Mr. Lamon immediately by description. If Pinkerton was a barrel, Lamon was a cask: larger, wider, and rounder in the middle. He was a good friend of Lincoln’s, acting as his bodyguard on this journey, whether or not Lincoln wished it so.
Lamon ushered me into the outer chamber of Lincoln’s room, which was small but well appointed. I knew Lincoln had been traveling a great deal, and it was our good fortune that he could be intercepted in New York, where a train would bring me right to his doorstep.
When the man himself entered, he looked almost the same; a shock, considering how things had changed since we’d last spoken. The entire world had been rocked on its axis; it seemed incredible that anything could remain as it had been only a few months before. And he, once a local solicitor, now about to be the president—all the more shocking that he, alone among those I knew, would seem like his younger self. He had grown a well-tended beard in the meantime, so his cheeks looked less gaunt, but his eyes, his most memorable feature, still burned with the same intelligence I remembered.
The suite at the Astor contained only us three. I thought to ask Lamon to leave, but as soon as I looked in his direction, Lincoln said, “Anything you can say to me should be said in the presence of Hill here. He is a key advisor.”
I nodded at Lamon, and he returned the motion.
Then I said to him, “Do you believe the Baltimore plot is real, Mr. Lamon?”
“I do not want to believe it,” he said, shrugging and nestling himself deeper into his chair. “But we are here to listen to your evidence. And so perhaps you will make both of us believe.”
It was not what I wanted to hear but no worse than I expected. “And you do understand just how much is at stake here?”
Lincoln said, “My life.”
“Respectfully, sir, it’s far more than that.”
Lamon said, “The future of the nation. Yes, Mr. Pinkerton told us that already.”
“Can you be so cavalier?”
“Mrs. Warne,” said Lamon, sounding impatient. “Day in and day out, everyone speaks in this rhetoric. Everything is the most or the worst or the highest or the best. Even our friend Lincoln here speaks only in high-flown language.”
Lincoln shrugged a bit ruefully. His silence neither confirmed nor denied the charge.
I addressed the silent man. “Sir, you have to understand. We’re deadly serious about this.”
“I know you are, Mrs. Warne. But you have to understand me. I keep my promises. I need to be in Harrisburg, and I need to be in Baltimore, just as I said I would.”
“You made another promise. A bigger promise. You said you would be the president of the United States of America. A free country, of free men. Don’t you want to keep that promise?”
He sat back, hands on his knees, too big for his chair. “And you’re going to say I can’t keep it if I’m dead.”
“Yes. But I believe we can compromise,” I said. Consulting the copy of his itinerary Lamon had provided, I pointed to a line of text. “I can get you to Harrisburg day after tomorrow for the noon event as scheduled.”
“Good.”
“Then we leave immediately afterward.”
“No.”
“Damn it, Lincoln.”
“Damn it, Warne,” he replied in the same tone without a moment’s hesitation.
“What do you want?”
He leaned closer, unfolding and refolding his long, spidery legs. He pointed to a line below where my finger still rested. “I have three speeches and a dinner planned in Harrisburg. I’m going to attend all of them.”
“So a dinner is worth dying for.”
He said grimly, “I’m not going to die.”
“We are absolutely certain that there are men in Baltimore who wish you ill.”
“Of course there are men in Baltimore who wish me ill!” He said it as if confirming that the world was round, and for the first time, I believed he did truly understand the danger he was in. There were those who loved him and those who hated him, and he knew it. “But are they really organized enough to do something about it?”
I said, “When you dismount from one train in Baltimore, you take a carriage to the other. Calvert Street to Camden Street. It’s a mile between. In the space between the train and the carriage, their plan is to surround you. There will be so many of them, you won’t be able to escape. They will swarm you and thrust themselves upon you. They drew lots from a jar to see who would have the honor of murdering you. The lucky man was to be the one with a red mark on his paper.”
“And so one of them—if your intelligence is to be believed—will stab me, but we don’t know which one? It’s whoever drew this red mark?”
“On the contrary,” I said. “They all drew red marks. They will all try to stab you.”
There was a moment of silence while he let the impact settle on him. Then, making light, he said, “Doesn’t that seem excessive?”
“The makers of the plot want to be absolutely sure of your death. The men who will execute the plot stand ready to die in the attempt. Moderation is not their strong suit.”
From my pocket, I drew a square of paper. Tim Bellamy had gotten it into our hands, against all odds, in secret. I unfolded it and lay it down on the table in front of us. In the middle was a dark red blot of ink, as rusty and thick as blood.
At last, Lincoln said, “All right. Tell me how we will get through Baltimore.”
I said, “You’ll leave your dinner in Harrisburg early…” And I told him the rest of the plan, step by step, all we had carefully crafted to save him.
He listened all the way through. At the end, he nodded his assent.
“See you in Philadelphia,” I said.
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