Alias Dragonfly Page 8

“Madeline! Get up, they’ll wrinkle!”

  I did not move. “When I fainted and broke your brandy decanter,” I asked, “was there some sort of celebration happening?”

  Aunt Salome’s mouth drew up tight. “Stand up right now. Madeline, you are crushing Mr. Webster’s fresh shirts.” She grasped my wrist.

  “Do you rejoice for the Rebels, Aunt, while my father risks his life for a cause just and true?”

  “Impudence,” she said loudly. “I don’t have to explain a thing to you, dropped on me here like a one-winged hatchling.” She pulled me into an empty room. Aunt Salome closed the door and motioned to the bed. “Sit, Madeline.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She had a look about her I’d never seen before: pained, angry, and intense. “Do you have any idea what it was like on my Maryland farm, after my husband burst his gut and died? Of course you don’t.”

  “No, Aunt Salome. My father rarely spoke of your troubles,” I answered, knowing his and Mama’s disapproval of his sister and her husband keeping slaves.

  The words poured from her. “My husband gave me no children, not a one to warm my heart or mourn my passing. And my slaves scattered like chickens in a lightning storm, though I cared for them as my own. The tobacco plants died before they could be dried, and, I am ashamed to say, my neighbors brought me food so I would not go hungry.”

  She wiped away tears, flicked at them like mosquitoes.

  “I care for my brother. I do not have to love his beliefs or his cause. I will rent rooms to Yankees or Confederates, as long as they pay, do you understand? But maybe with this recent Yankee defeat, both sides will turn tail and stop. And if that happens, you and your father can go home, in one piece, and I can be relieved of the responsibility of caring for you, feeding you, and oh, God, I don’t know anything else but a farming life. Just like you don’t know anything else, growing up with abolitionists feeding thoughts of freedom like porridge to anyone who will listen. Do you understand the risk in that?”

  “Yes, I truly do, Aunt Salome.” I remembered Mr. Amos Jefferson and how my parents had sheltered him. If we lived in the South, what might Mama and Papa have suffered as a result of their good deed?

  My aunt was weeping. I felt pity, or at least a whisper of it, for her. Things were so much more complicated than I could ever have imagined.

  “I’m sorry for your woes, Aunt Salome,” I said, and I was. “I’m not the enemy, Madeline,” she said wearily, “just a tired old woman. Do you understand? Of course you do.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I answered, patting her hand. I’d not noticed how dry and chafed the flesh of it was, and how she was a bit bent over when she walked. “I’ll manage the clothing, Aunt Salome, perhaps you should rest. And then I’m going out for a bit. Mr. Webster has offered me a stroll, a city tour, I believe he said.”

  “That’s nice,” she said, looking past me. “A fine gentleman, he is, and he pays right on time.”

  “Aunt Salome?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m sorry to have burdened you,” I said, meaning my words; yet knowing, hoping I was about to alter myself in ways I barely understood, but welcomed like a new morning.

  “Have you seen Mr. Whitestone about?” she asked. “He’s two days late with his board money.”

  I grabbed up a pile of shirts, until they nearly covered my face. “No, I’ve not,” I said. My heart was in my toes at the very mention of his name.

  Twelve

  Mr. Webster was waiting for me as I came down the stairs. Even though I couldn’t wait to go, I was seized with a moment of hesitation. He offered me his arm.

  “You are safe with me, Miss Bradford. Do you understand? You are safe with me.” He measured each of those words carefully. The cotton planter, the flowery, studied, frivolous manner he had, disappeared in that instant. Even his Southern drawl lessened.

  “Tell me more about your abilities, Miss Bradford.”

  Whoa, I sure wasn’t going to tell him about my accident, and how hard it had been for Mama and Papa when they thought I was not right in the head.

  I studied Mr. Webster. “Your right foot is larger than your left, sir. You lead with it when you walk. When you take up a knife or fork, your left pinky remains in the air, and cannot move with the rest of your fingers. But there are no scars on your hands so the injury must have occurred a long time ago.”

  I paused to catch my breath. Mr. Webster was regarding me intently.

  “My finger has been this way since birth,” he said softly. “I have to buy two different sizes of shoes. Very good, Miss, very good indeed.”

  “You have kind eyes, sir. Yet you narrow them as though to fix your face and harden it. Your expression, your whole being changes at will.”

  We had reached the corner of Sixteenth Street. I was so engrossed in our conversation I’d barely heard the clatter of carriages, the voices of men, wide-skirted women and scampering children.

  “What else?” he asked.

  “I saw you dressed as a clergyman, sir. Who are you, really?”

  “You will see, Miss Bradford,” he answered. He spoke with a different accent. Crisp, with no elongated vowels. A changed man stood before me. All gentlemanly courtesy was gone. His face was set, grim, hardened.

  “What more did you see at Mrs. Greenhow’s house? You must tell me, now,” Mr. Webster said as soon as we reached the street. “Now! It is important.”

  I took a deep breath. Do you know how you decide to trust someone? Do you really know? Even though some uneasiness lingered, I decided to trust him, and I’ve never regretted it.

  “Behind her house, in the alley, sir,” I said, “There was . . . an exchange.”

  “Of what?” He grasped my arm tightly. I hesitated. “It could be very important,” he said, not letting go of me.

  I’d never felt important, or that things I saw meant much at all. I was elated.

  “You say Mrs. Greenhow is dangerous?” I asked, remembering what the soldiers said about her.

  “Lethal,” he answered. “A good number of Rebels like her sit in the Old Capitol Prison as we speak. Somehow she is in direct communication with Confederates in the field. But it was not known how Mrs. Greenhow was communicating.”

  I took a deep breath.

  “I know the face and name of her courier, I remember every detail including the name of the man she met in the alley.”

  “Can you identify them?”

  I was silent. Should I tell him what I’d seen? I was wavering.

  “Can you?” he demanded.

  I waited. If Mr. Webster was truly a Pinkerton man —

  “I want to meet him.”

  “Who?”

  “Mr. Allan Pinkerton.”

  Mr. Webster stopped short. He looked me straight in the eye. “I dare say. Why?”

  “I heard he helped to save President Lincoln from assassination in Baltimore when he came to Washington City to be inaugurated. I heard it on the train coming here, and it was in the papers. He, all his people, must be very brave.”

  Mr. Webster was silent for a long time. As we walked, the city streets teemed with carriages, milk wagons with bottles teetering and toppling into the mud and debris splattered on cobblestones. I lifted my skirts as a barrel rolled at me, its split sides pouring liquid, something that smelled like liquor. The fumes clogged my nostrils, and my blood raced with the din and stench of it all.

  I was growing a bit dizzy, and stumbled. Mr. Webster caught my arm. He pulled me to a lamppost and wiped my face with his handkerchief.

  “What place have you come to, little Miss, with a mind like a photographer’s camera? What good fortune came my way that I found you? And what perils might you endure in my keep?”

  I was speechless. No one had ever spoken to me this way. Here was a man, nearly a stranger, who valued what I was telling him, respected what I was saying and seeing and remembering. There goes the ‘village peculiar,’ they would say back in Portsmouth. Maybe, just maybe, now
, I was shedding that old skin for another.

  I decided then and there to ask Mr. Webster what I wanted. I took the chance.

  “Please, sir, my father is risking his life for what he believes. Might I not help as well in some small way?”

  Mr. Webster led me to a nearby bench. He motioned for me to sit.

  “Mr. Pinkerton was working as the head of a detective agency in Chicago when Samuel Felton, the president of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, asked him to investigate a plot against Abraham Lincoln. He came to Washington City and then sent operatives to Maryland, to unmask the conspiracy.”

  “And they did, right?”

  “Yes,” said Mr. Webster. “But there are many, many others who would like to see President Lincoln dead, the Union destroyed and this city given over to the enemy. Rebels who sneak like sewer rats.”

  “I want to help, sir. I know I can.”

  His gaze was so grave, so very grave.

  “You are not ready, Miss.”

  My heart sank. “Good day, sir.” I turned back to the house, walking fast.

  He didn’t let me get far, but grasped my shoulder.

  “You really must see a perfect representation of a great Apache warrior at the Smithsonian Picture Gallery, Miss Bradford. Have you been there?” He didn’t wait for an answer but turned me away from the house. “The Apache’s fierceness reaches from the canvas, and the colors are, well, astonishing,” he said, stopping me in my tracks, not by a firm hand on my arm again, but by his eyes, grey and hard as marbles. “Come with me, Miss Bradford. It will be a worthy excursion for us both, mark my words.”

  He was moving me along the street now, past a makeshift hospital, where a group of bandaged, pale soldiers lay on a shaded veranda, through the bustle and snap of bright-faced strollers, pausing now and again to sigh with pity at a battered soldier being borne on a litter, or peering at a line of haggard Confederate prisoners dragging along between two guards holding bayonets at their backs. As we passed a beggar man, Mr. Webster patted him three times on the arm and dropped five pennies in his wooden bucket. The man bowed, grabbed up his things, and walked quickly away.

  Mr. Webster cast a sharp glance behind us, and back to me again.

  “The beggar we passed just now, sir,” I said, “he had the smooth, white hands of a gentleman who’d not labored, ever. He had fifteen pennies in his bucket, not counting your five.”

  “I dare say,” he said, shaking his head with amazement, “I do dare say.”

  “And sometimes, if I concentrate hard, I can hear bits of conversations that others cannot,” I added.

  “Impressive,” Mr. Webster said. “And enchanting.”

  I bristled at the word “enchanting.” If he only knew how my strangeness used to pain me. Finally, would it, would I, be good for something?

  We passed through a daisy-filled meadow. Boys and men were hollering, and laughing, shooting at cloth targets mounted on posts.

  “Watch your way,” Webster said. “This area is a shooting range. They do miss the mark now and again.” I ducked away in a flash as one bullet sailed over my head.

  “Very good,” he said. “Quick as a penny-whistle.”

  In the middle of the carpet of flowers was a rust-colored castle. “That’s the Smithsonian Museum,” Mr. Webster said. “A marvel, eh?”

  It was a bit vulgar, like huge, overdone, decorated cake, with carved spires, arched doorways, and a huge, turreted column that looked ready to pierce the clouds.

  Inside, Mr. Webster whisked me past rows of white marble busts—heads of kings, Roman gods, and emperors all in neat arrangement—straight to the picture gallery, a grand hall with mahogany carvings and paintings as far as the eye could see: oils and watercolors, dazzling, costumed men and their wives, looking the lesser in their schoolmarm’s lace. Beyond were soaring landscapes of the Western frontier: unforgiving, scorched plains crawling with buffalo, and Indian portraits all about, some in fancy white man’s clothing, others in blazing war paint.

  I’d never been any place like this place where all time was stopped, cool-aired and very still, except for some heavy- skirted women and their gentlemen escorts moving like chess pieces along the rows, now and again pausing to stop before a painting, exclaiming, criticizing, admiring in murmurs as though they were in a church. The war is invisible here, I thought.

  Before I could pause to take it all in, Webster swept me to yet another large oil painting to the side of the gallery.

  Across the broad canvas, Indian braves rode in silence, scouting, watching in all directions, for what? Even the horse was vigilant, looking away, perhaps an impending attack? And the colors—

  Within minutes, Webster grabbed my arm and walked me hurriedly through the gallery and out the door. I blinked hard in the sunlight, my mind a jumble of images.

  “Don’t speak, Miss,” he said. “Just remember.”

  We passed through the daisy meadow and left the spires of the fantasy castle behind.

  “What now, Mr. Webster?” I asked, sensing this excursion was a kind of test.

  “I’m taking you back to your aunt, for now. Be patient.”

  Patient? Back to that solitude, the endless chores, for how long? I thought as Mr. Webster bid me farewell at the boardinghouse door.

  Two long days passed without any sign of Mr. Webster, or any word from my father. The papers had the lists of the missing and the dead in Papa’s regiment. His name was not among them. But where was he?

  Late in the afternoon of the second day, I was resting after my chores. To keep my mind busy, I kept going over the Indian painting in my mind. I could almost taste the dust, and feel the sweat of the Indian horses, their bodies slick with it. I remembered all I had seen in that remarkable museum. Details and colors skittered in my head.

  The door of my room opened slowly. A hand held out a china doll with pink lips and bright, azure eyes frozen open. Her blonde ringlets were swept up in a rose-colored ribbon. A high-pitched voice came from behind the door.

  “I jumped straight out of the toy-store window, just so I could be yours.” The doll head bobbed, and her eyes closed.

  My heart leapt for joy!

  I knew it was my father, and I was beyond relieved, but I wasn’t going to let on.

  “Okay, Papa, you can come in,” I said.

  My father opened the door wide. I threw myself into his arms, the doll crushed between us.

  “I couldn’t come or write, Maddie. I’m so sorry.”

  “You are safe!” The doll dropped to the floor.

  Now I’ve never had a doll so fine, and didn’t have the heart to tell him that at that moment, I couldn’t have cared less. I picked up the frozen-faced thing.

  “I wish you were a little girl still wrapped in your mama’s arms by the fire,” he said. “I wish this terrible war had never started. I watched men I’d come to love die in front of me.”

  “Oh, Papa.”

  I held him like he was the child and I was the adult. In that moment as I watched my father weep, how could I tell him I was waiting for . . . something? And for the first time in my life, wishing him to leave?

  He drew back, wiping his eyes, and looked at me, at the different me.

  “My regiment will remain here, Maddie, at one of the forts that guard the city. I don’t know how often I can get away, what with rumors of a Rebel invasion, and—”

  “The doll is really pretty, Papa.” I didn’t know what else to say.

  “Maddie, you must promise me never, never to run off again. Salome said you gave her such a fright.”

  “I can’t promise that, Papa,” I said.

  “Maddie! What has happened to you? Where is my good little girl, my darling?”

  “She’s gone, Papa!”

  I went to the window and looked out at the alleyway below. I was trying to think what else to say to my father when I saw two large, white men in overalls hovering at the doorway to the kitchen. One carried a rope, the other a shotgun. Th
ey were slave catchers, I was nearly certain.

  I had to warn Nellie. And if Isaac was about? My God!

  I had to leave right then.

  “Papa! I forgot! I have to finish helping Aunt Salome. She counts on me, she—” I pushed past him. “Leave me alone!”

  I raced through the hall, and down to the kitchen. Nellie was kneading dough, punching it hard.

  “Men! Strangers outside, Nellie!”

  Nellie stopped cold. “Mm hm,” she said, and calmly walked to a wooden enclosure at the corner of the kitchen where the slops buckets were stored. She hefted a full one and dragged it to the door leading to the alley. She opened it and sure enough, the men still lurked there.

  Without a word, Nellie emptied the bucket of waste, and the slime of it flooded the doorway. The men backed away.“Watch your slops, mammy!” one said.

  “I’m dreadful sorry, suh,” Nellie answered, head bowed. She backed away muttering her sorrys until she’d closed the door.

  Without a word, Nellie returned to her task of kneading, only now her punches grew harder as she slammed both fists into the mass of dough. I watched as Nellie rolled the bread makings into a large ball and dropped it into a pan. She poured water over her hands, wiped them off on a towel, and picked up a quilt from under the wooden counter. It was the same one she’d hung in the window to the alley after she’d caught me alone outside. It was of rough, heavy texture with red zigzag stripes embroidered across it. At the bottom were two half-moon shapes.

  Nellie hung the quilt in the window from a large, brass hook.

  “Ain’t nobody in the cellar,” she said to me. “Ain’t gonna be for a time.”

  With that, she touched my face gently.

  I left her there.

  There was no sign of my father. I felt beyond relieved that he was safe, and really, really guilty about the ungrateful way I’d behaved.

  I was so caught up in these thoughts I didn’t see Mr. Webster pacing in the parlor when I walked in.

  He motioned for me to come closer. “Do you know how to use a gun?” he whispered.

  “Oh, yes, sir.” Yes I did, and why was I feeling so excited by his question? Did this mean he trusted me?