They would have swung in the breeze had there been one. Signs hung around their necks, too far off to read. I didn’t need to get any closer. I knew at least one of the signs read TRAITOR.
And I knew who that body belonged to, the second from the left. Even slumped, I recognized the shape of his body, the long legs, the once-quick fingers. I would never get this image out of my head. Riding closer would only give me more images I couldn’t banish.
I rode away then, without any sense of where to go.
I could not let myself feel. There would be time for that later.
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At the first likely-looking hotel, I stabled my horse and asked for a room. I steered clear of the fashionable hotels downtown that I’d once stayed in; I knew I would not be able to stand the hoarse cries of the slaves in Lumpkin’s Jail, not this time.
When the desk clerk asked how long I’d stay, it took all I had not to burst into tears. Collecting myself, I mumbled something about “three days at least” and was handed my keys. I paid with the Confederate scrip I’d secured back in Washington, feeling it might burn my fingers. I lay across the bed fully clothed. I think I slept.
In the morning, my eyes flying open with the sunrise, I considered my options, poor as they were. Even if I went back to Washington right that minute, my position was almost certainly forfeit. By now, Pinkerton would have noticed my absence, my lack of communication. But my fury at him knew no limits. Was he the one who betrayed Tim, acting not as our boss but as a jealous rival? It would have been easy for him to do so. And now a good man was dead, and I still didn’t know what had happened to Hattie. I couldn’t go, and I couldn’t stay.
But I could seek out Hattie, and I needed to. I was too late to save the man I loved, but I could at least find a good woman who deserved to live and find a love of her own. If it hadn’t been for me, she wouldn’t have been a spy in the first place, so I owed it to her.
I didn’t know where to find her, but I had an inkling of where to start. The Southern ladies of Washington had been all abuzz about a Northern lady of Richmond, one Elizabeth Van Lew. She was a Richmond girl but educated in Philadelphia, and her family had freed their slaves twenty years before. So naturally, she was suspected of being a Yankee spy. I went to her, hoping the rumors were true.
Naturally, she was suspicious of me and would neither confirm nor deny any of her spying activities. And I was wild-eyed, not my usual subtle and careful self. She was right to keep me at arms’ length.
Leaning back in a sumptuously padded chair as high and elegant as a throne, she appeared unruffled. She did confirm that the female spy captured a few days before was being held in Castle Thunder but would not support my visits to her. The most she could do, she said, was to recommend that if I needed to get into Castle Thunder, I should invoke the name of Belle Boyd.
“The partisans in the prisons go bonkers for that girl, like everybody else,” she said and excused herself from the room to check on the tea.
This left me alone in the room with Mrs. Van Lew’s butler. He lingered in a spot to the left of my chair, which I thought was odd. Lost in thought, I had an awareness that he was there but brushed it aside to wrack my brain. How far should I push Mrs. Van Lew? Should I risk exposing myself by telling her the truth? The gossips said she was on the Yankee side, but what if the gossips were wrong?
There was a blur of motion, just a small one, coming from the butler’s direction. It happened again. What was he doing?
Without meeting my eyes, he moved his hand in a strange signal, bringing his fingers together and then apart. There was something familiar about it. He repeated the signal, so I knew it was deliberate, but I couldn’t place it.
And then I could. I hadn’t seen it in years, but deep in my mind, there was the image of Allan Pinkerton himself making that motion during my very first week of training. It was the signal Pinkerton agents exchanged to identify themselves to each other.
The butler was a Pinkerton agent.
I repeated his signal, carefully, and raised my eyes to his.
In a deep, husky voice, he said, “You must be the great Kate Warne.”
“Not so great, I don’t think. How did you know?”
“I saw your picture once, in the Chicago office. I trained there, before I was placed here with Mrs. Van Lew, last year.”
“Does she know?”
“No. She does much for the Northern cause, but my position is a secret from her and everyone else, for safety.”
My next question sprang instantly to mind. “Why didn’t you get turned in with Bellamy and Lawton?”
“We never worked together at all. Just the three others.”
“Three?”
“There was a third agent.”
“Who?”
“Never got his name.”
The door rattled, and Elizabeth reentered the room, followed by a young Negress carrying a tea tray. The butler and I pretended we hadn’t been talking. In the end, I never learned anything more about him. But between his information and Mrs. Van Lew’s, my visit had not been in vain.
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