Recovery was easier said than done. The physical injuries were bad enough: broken ribs, broken hands, a galaxy of scrapes and bruises everywhere the doctors looked. My attempt at sacrificing my life to take Mortenson’s was noble, I told myself, but I should have been more thorough in the execution. This way, I was only half dead. Some days, it felt like more than half.
Even as the bruises faded and my bones began to slowly knit themselves back together under the skin, I lacked the spirit to move forward, a reason to get up and tackle each day. My first and last thought every day was how much I missed Tim, how large a hole he’d left in the world. Mortenson was dead, yes, but it changed nothing. Greenhow had slipped beyond my grasp; she had run the blockade to England and published a book about her adventures, raising money for her cause. I supposed I could write a book too, but there were so many things I never wanted anyone to know, I hardly saw how there would be anything left to write about.
Once I had the use of my hands again and the worst of the fog had cleared from my brain, I read many books while I lay in the hospital recovering. Hers was not one of them.
I’d hoped for a visit from Hattie or DeForest, but they were both on assignment. The war still raged on, though I could not see it from my bed. From time to time, I got a letter from one or the other. I could only tell which by the handwriting. Both sent highly creative letters—fake love letters sometimes, or a chatty missive as if from a gossipy aunt, all in code to keep things secret. One of Hattie’s letters, full of atrocious doggerel written as if from a half-literate soldier to his unfaithful shopgirl, made me laugh so hard, I reinjured a rib. Those days were the best days. Unfortunately, the light always seemed to slip too quickly from the sky, my tiny window fading to blackness, abandoning me to the interminable nights.
I thought a lot about Tim, and I wondered what would have happened had he lived. Would we have burned bright or burned out? If I told him I would never bear children, nor would I ever walk away from my position as an operative willingly, would he still have wanted to marry me? I had no way of knowing the answers. There was no world where those things had happened, only the world where they hadn’t. And I had to remind myself, every day, that I needed to be grateful I’d had his love as long as I had, even as short a time as it was.
Once I was able to walk again and to think without my head feeling like it was caving in on itself, I came to a decision. I would be a detective again, but this time, for myself. I would find my parents and make sure they could never hurt me. How I would guarantee that I didn’t know. Life generally held no such guarantees. But I had shrunk my whole life from confronting them, and now that I was lost and alone, perhaps the best thing I could do with my Pinkerton training was to hunt down where I’d come from and the people who made me who I was.
They were easier than I thought to find. They were buried, side by side, in Charleston. The sun fought its way through the gnarled oaks to cast a dappled shadow over them.
There would be no reckoning, no confrontation. I had been cheated of it. The wounds Mortenson gave me in our final battle had mostly healed, but the wounds my parents had given me would be with me for life.
I moved back to Chicago. The city had settled a little in my absence and felt not quite so wild. The raising was complete, and the sewers worked well. The stink off the river seemed diminished. I selected a new boardinghouse and a new identity. Hattie had finished her assignments on the front and was based in Chicago again—a good sign both for the war and the agency. She offered to room together, and I was sorely tempted to have a friend so close by. But I had been on my own so long, I worried I wouldn’t be suited for a closer living situation, so I told Hattie we would visit frequently, and she agreed.
I was glad for my privacy in October. Strangely, I didn’t even remember how the shocking news reached me. Did I come across it in a newspaper? Overhear it in a shop? I only knew that my reaction to it was not at all what I would have expected.
Rose Greenhow was dead.
I wanted to be glad of it; I wanted to shriek in joy. Instead, I sat on my bed and examined the wallpaper, faded ever so slightly near the window, as the sun set outside and the room fell dark. My enemy’s passing, which I’d once prayed and wished for, brought me no happiness. It only meant another motherless child, Little Rose, as I was now motherless. There was nothing to celebrate in that.
She’d almost made it home. On her way back from England, Greenhow’s ship had sunk just off the coast of the Carolinas, blasted by a Union defender. It was not a direct hit, and from the story I heard, the ship sunk slowly. Nearly everyone else survived the sinking. She leapt into the water and might have made it to shore, but she was weighed down by gold bars sewn into the hem and sleeves of her dress. Against my will, I often pictured her as I fell asleep, the lace of her collar rising up around her face like seaweed as the hoarded gold dragged the rest of her down, down, down.
Chasing money was a fool’s pursuit. Some women might leave a family as their legacy, but others had an effect in completely different ways. I paused, thinking about what her life had left and what my life might leave. I thought of Pinkerton’s offer. I thought of what Tim would have suggested, had he been sitting there next to me. I thought of the line from Lincoln’s inaugural speech—the better angels of our nature.
After that, it was only waiting.
Chapter Thirty
The End and the Beginning
When the day came, I misunderstood it at first.
It was only a few days short of the fourth anniversary of Fort Sumter, and when I first heard a boom from outside my window, I thought perhaps I’d missed a few days and that it was a salute being fired in commemoration. But no, it was the ninth of April, not the twelfth, and the boom was followed by other sounds, more difficult to identify.