And the man next to me, with the ice-blue eyes, so tall and proud? Mr. Timothy Armstrong, my husband.
How strange. How impossible. I had pretended many things before, but I had never pretended to be truly in love, and how funny that this man should be the one I’d be pretending with. But I would have to tackle it the same way I had any other role. Holding the truth and the lie in my mind together was too difficult. Better to believe the lie with my whole self.
“Shall we, my love?” I asked.
In his eyes, there was only the mildest flicker of shock. No one else would have noticed it. He was a good operative, and I could trust him. I had to.
I tucked my hand through his arm, and together, we went in to dinner.
As we sat down at table, I had my first sight of our target.
Mrs. Greenhow was a robust woman, buxom and round-cheeked, but with nothing of the milkmaid about her. Her hair was dark, bound in a low chignon. I’d read the file a dozen times before feeding it to the flames and could call any of it to mind instantly. Born in Maryland in 1813. Resident in the capital on and off since 1830. Widowed in 1854. Longtime friend to South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun. Aunt to Stephen Douglas, the senator who had so memorably debated Lincoln in 1858 and lost the presidency to him two years later. They were not related by blood—he had married her sister’s daughter, Adele, after his first wife’s death—nor did they share much in the way of political leanings. She was well-known as a Southern loyalist, but so far, no one could prove she’d done anything criminal.
We were here for that proof.
? ? ?
After dinner, we rose and gathered in the parlor. I continued to exchange pleasantries with the young man who had been seated on my right, careful not to sound too enthusiastic. He was quite handsome, with a full mustache and neatly trimmed beard, and he gestured with animated hands that drew and kept my attention. However I would have felt about him under other circumstances, I had to pay respect to my alleged husband first and foremost. I half listened, but my eyes and mind were elsewhere, with Mrs. Greenhow.
She held court at the far end of the parlor, next to a beautiful ebony piano crowned with a colorful spray of flowers in a blue-green China vase. Her full-skirted gown was a bright shade of lapis blue and looked so well with the vase of flowers, I wondered if it had been chosen on purpose.
Artfully, she flirted, and I watched how she flirted. Her hands were deployed like soldiers to any front where they were needed: stroking a man’s sleeve to create intimacy, resting on the piano to reinforce her wealth, trailing along the side of her neck to draw attention to her body. She was not a young woman, but she was a beautiful one, no mistake. Her beauty alone was not all she had to offer. She gave off some kind of energy that drew men to her. Her gift, I saw, was attention. There was nothing more intoxicating to these men.
The general next to her bowed his head to listen to her—watching them, I would have bet Union dollars that she spoke in a near whisper, forcing him to bend closer, as a stratagem. I’d used it before. Was I looking at a fellow spy or just a woman who used wiles to get what she wanted? Perhaps I was quick to judge her because I could see how she was well armed with a battery of tools I didn’t have at my own disposal: riches, friends, beauty.
“Don’t stare,” said Tim, leaning in himself, so close I felt his breath on my ear.
“Mrs. Armstrong would,” I muttered softly.
“Has my wife no manners, then?” He said it with a chuckle, but I took his point. I turned away from Mrs. Greenhow and began to survey the rest of the room. She was our person of interest, but there was much else to see, and we needed to understand her world.
It was a lovely room, not too ostentatious, every addition thoughtful. The carpet under dozens of feet was brightly patterned with blue and purple flowers on a yellow ground, and golden damask curtains framed the large, clear windows. Someone had paid a pretty penny for this house, and it was impeccably kept up, despite the war shortages. Perhaps that was how we might ensnare her—some of these silks had to have run the blockade.
Pinkerton had given us but little guidance, but we had talked it over again and again, and there were a number of different plans we could put into action. All we knew was that if she were a spy, she needed to be stopped. The weight of our task rested most heavily on me at night, when I heard Bellamy’s soft breathing on the other side of our quiet room. The intimacy was almost unbearable. But it was part of the work.
So I flirted with Tim Bellamy, as a wife would with her husband if she loved him: a gentle, teasing interplay, filled with warmth and comfort. And under it all, I spied. I kept an eye on the room and swept it with my gaze, until I alit on something new.
A girl, no more than eight years old, dressed as charmingly as a doll. Her skirt was full, and her dress was an exact copy of her mother’s, scaled down for her tiny proportions.
Little Rose.
She was in the file too. Mrs. Greenhow’s other daughters were grown, married, gone to Ohio and beyond. Only Little Rose remained. By all accounts, the mother and daughter were mutually devoted, and perhaps that was true, but in this crowd, she looked abandoned, out of place. I thought of all the times I’d been stowed at the edges of ballrooms and backstage at theaters, places no child belonged, never sure I’d be remembered or retrieved. I told myself when I was a mother, I’d take more care with my child. But I’d never gotten the chance.