“Upstairs,” I said quietly, not caring what the clerk must think. The rules were different on the frontier. Besides, now that I had been found, I doubted I’d be staying much longer.
But the weeks I had been here had made one thing abundantly clear. Whatever my feelings toward Pinkerton, I missed my life as an operative. I missed the feeling of being useful, of puzzling out an answer to a crucial question. I missed mattering. Now that he was back, perhaps that was on offer again, and even before we got to the door of my room, I had to hold myself back from throwing myself on his mercy. But I knew begging him to welcome me back was an insult to both of us. Everything had gone so wrong between us. I wasn’t sure any of our former ease could ever be recovered.
I brought him inside and shut the door. He took off his coat—he was always more comfortable in his shirtsleeves, and the room was warm—and sat down in the chair. I perched on the very edge of the bed, ankles crossed neatly. The memory of the last conversation among him, Tim, and me hung so heavy in the air, I kept running my fingers across the bedspread beside me, hoping against hope to feel the solid warm bulk of Tim there next to me. But he would never be there again.
My melancholy made me abrupt. “Why are you here?”
“I came to give you the news,” he said, twisting his hat in his hand. “I thought you should hear it from me. It won’t be in the papers.”
I knew immediately he spoke of Mrs. Greenhow. Nothing else, not even the daily movements of the war, could interest me. I hadn’t gone near a newspaper since I’d arrived in town. There was nothing I wanted to know. “Hanged, I hope?”
“No.”
“Then what?”
“They sent her back,” he said.
I felt as if the floor of the hotel had fallen away underneath my feet and there was no longer anything solid in the world to stand on. Loss was the first feeling. The second was fury. My blood boiled. I struggled to find words besides profanities to express myself, but there were none. I leapt up. “That’s all? No punishment? Nothing?”
“The exile was the punishment.”
“Sent home? To the country she loves, where she’ll be hailed as a hero? That’s disgusting!”
“Kate.”
“I’ll go stab her in the gut myself,” I said, “and I am not kidding.” There was no room to pace, but I did it anyway, my fury too strong to stay in one place.
“I know you’re not.” He remained in the chair, looking up at me. “But, Warne, the last thing we need is for you to die too.”
“Oh, is that the last thing we need?” I snarled at him, letting the full force of my anger loose at last. “Because I wouldn’t mind it. I’m ready. Let’s just call the game what it is. My life is a failure. The man I love is dead, probably because of me. Or maybe,” I said, suddenly bold, “because of you.”
“Me?”
I put my hands on the arms of his chair and leaned down into his face. “You sent him there. Because he told you we were engaged to be married. You saw we were in love, and you had to stop that. You had to take that away from us.”
“That was not my intent.”
I could not read his expression.
“Regardless of your intent. Or mine. If things had been different, if I hadn’t loved him and you hadn’t hated him…” I pulled away, pacing again.
“I didn’t hate him! He was my best man.”
“And you sent him to his death.”
He was patient in the face of my abuse, especially considering how far he had come. “I sent him where he was most needed, for the sake of the country. I sent Hattie too, you remember? Was that because of you as well?”
My head ached, and I wanted to do something violent. Push him out a window or leap my own self. All this pent-up anger needed somewhere to go, now that it was flowing.
But something in me knew he was right. Tim had been his best agent. Pinkerton was nothing if not a logical, measured, deliberate man. If he had sent Tim to Richmond, he needed someone in Richmond.
He said, “I used to ask you to lie to me, to help you learn. I have never lied to you.”
I leaned my head against the wallpaper, closing my eyes, wishing he hadn’t come, wishing I’d never met him, wishing everything had been different all along. I couldn’t bear the way I felt. I had no choice but to bear it. It was torture.
He went on, his voice more hesitant now, “But I came to tell you something else we discovered. That you need to know.”
“Go on.”
His next words were slow in coming. “It wasn’t just Greenhow. If her word alone were enough, a dozen other people would be dead. Tim had someone else betray him.”
I turned to look at him. I needed to see his face. “Not Hattie?”
“No, someone else. Someone we didn’t foresee.”
“Tell me.”
“Mortenson,” he said.
I’d barely though of Jack Mortenson a handful of times since he was dismissed for his poor behavior back during Hattie’s early years. But as soon as Pinkerton mentioned the name, the image sprung instantly to mind, indelible: pale and awkward, always the odd man out, half ghost. Now, he truly was a sort of ghost, one who haunted us unexpectedly.
I sat on the bed again to steady myself. “But how? How was he there?”
Pinkerton rubbed his hand across his mouth and looked down at the rug. “He’d heard about the intelligence service, what we were doing for the railroads and the country, and he said he wanted to help.”
“Oh no.”
“He said it was all water under the bridge, how things ended. He said he could put aside his anger if I could. And we needed good agents, Warne, needed them badly. So I hired him back. And I sent him to Richmond, told him Tim and Hattie were there. But he was working for the other side.”