The Crescent Spy (9 page)

“And you’re worried they’ll give it to someone else while I’m gone?”

“Dr. Mingus isn’t one of us. He’s holding your position as a favor for a friend, who
is
our man.” Franklin shook his head. “And I’m still worried that you’d be recognized. Then there would be questions, especially if you’d affected an accent and false name.”

“Then maybe—” she began.

He lifted a hand to hush her and glanced down the hallway outside her room.

Voices sounded, one of the crew talking to a man with an English accent. Franklin tucked away his silver case and looked briefly like he was going to turn and leave. After a moment, though, he relaxed.

“All right, they’re gone,” he said. “Go on.”

She continued. “Then maybe I don’t affect anything. Maybe I arrive in New Orleans and accept whatever attention comes my way. This isn’t so far off my original plan.”

He looked intrigued. “Explain.”

She told him about her initial thoughts after Barnhart had dismissed her from the
Clarion.
Even while fuming as Franklin and Mr. Pinkerton led her on that humiliating march past the brothels on Rum Row, she’d been thinking about the New York press. She would buy a ticket to Manhattan and use every tool at her disposal to secure a position: her writing ability, foremost, but also her determination, her ambition, and even her feminine charm if necessary. Why not? If something as ridiculous as her sex meant that people discounted the skill of her pen, then she was damned if she’d turn down what advantages being a woman offered.

So why not, she now suggested, march into the offices of the
New Orleans Daily Crescent
or the
Picayune
and try the same thing? Secure a position with pure swagger.

“Not
pure
swagger,” she corrected. “I can write better, faster, than anyone they’ve got on staff.”

“Oh, you were in the habit of reading the
Crescent
up north?” Franklin asked with a smile.

She thrust out her chin. “I don’t have to. The best papers in the country are in New York, and they
still
publish ninety percent rubbish.”

He laughed, and she could see the tension easing from his features. “It might work.”

“Of course it will work,” she said. “If I’m as notorious as Miss—”

She almost said Díaz, then remembered that Franklin didn’t know that Josephine had met Francesca before. Admitting that would open her to all sorts of uncomfortable questions that she had no desire to discuss with anyone, let alone a near stranger with whom she intended to remain professional and cordial.

“Excuse me,
Mrs.
Hancock. If I’m as notorious and popular as she claimed, then any secessionist paper would be delighted to have me, woman or no. And not writing gossip about snooty creole society, either. I’ll be able to come and go as I please, interviewing generals, writing to boost Southern morale.”

“You won’t be popular for long. If we succeed, you’ll be the most reviled woman south of the Mason–Dixon. And if we don’t, if New Orleans stays in rebel hands . . .”

“Say it. I won’t flinch.”

“Very well. If New Orleans stays rebel, and it’s found you played the heroine while really reporting to the enemy . . .” Franklin shook his head. “As you said, woman or no . . . you’ll be hung as a traitor and spy.”

T
he Mississippi River delta spread deep into the Gulf of Mexico, and though the US Navy had blockaded the main channels, there was no way to stop up the dozens of minor estuaries and channels that emerged from the swamp. To get up the river, the shallow-draft smuggling boat hired a bayou fisherman to pilot them through.

They followed the man through meandering channels among the mudflats, the waterways surrounded by thick grass and the bony knees of cypress. Turtles sunned on logs, and egret and heron lifted heavily into the air as they approached. The pilot was careful to lead them around sandbars and “sawyers”—uprooted trees that had lodged in the water and swayed back and forth to hook unsuspecting boats.

In spite of the expert navigation, they found themselves up a blocked channel turned into an oxbow lake. It was barely wide enough for the blockade-runner to turn around, but when they tried to turn around they hit a bar. The engine strained, the side-wheel churning in the mud as it tried to free them.

And there they remained, as afternoon turned to night. The weather was sweltering and miserable, and clouds of mosquitoes beset them. Lamps illuminated the eyes of enormous alligators gliding by the side of the boat. Josephine retreated to her room to write by lamplight, until the swarming bugs forced her to turn out the light and pull her blanket over her head.

She rose in the morning to find fishermen in flatboats and canoes surrounding the stuck blockade-runner. Josephine felt almost sorry for the side-wheel captain, a small, nervous creole who spoke a patois French with the lean, hungry-looking men of the delta. First, he’d dumped much of his cargo to outrun the navy steamer, and now he was handing over what must remain of his anticipated profits to the men working to unload the goods and lighten the ship.

It took a full day just to unload the cannons, one after another, onto smaller smuggler boats that appeared from around the bend: flatboats with huge paddles attached to the rear and roof. Next went the rest of the supplies, and the passengers themselves off-loaded into fisherman skiffs to be taken into the swamp. Josephine found herself alone with a hollow-faced, balding man who watched her with a sharp expression as he rowed her up one of the main channels to God knew where. As they traveled, he stopped to check lines tied to the branches of cypress trees. From one of these, he hauled in a large catfish, which he tossed, flopping at Josephine’s feet, where it lay gulping for air.

The fisherman soon pulled up to a one-room swamp house on stilts, surrounded by towering cypress that dripped with Spanish moss. He held his boat steady while she climbed out. Her feet squished and filled with muddy water as she picked her way through the cypress knees that thrust from the muck. She hadn’t reached the relatively dry ground by the house before the fisherman was paddling away without explanation. He came back a couple of hours later with another woman from the ship. She was a rough-looking sort, like a Kentuckian’s wife. The two women sat awkwardly on the porch until the man returned yet again, this time with Francesca Díaz, or Mrs. Hancock, as she styled herself now. The woman used her parasol as a cane as she came off the boat wincing. She appeared to have twisted her ankle or suffered some other injury and seemed none too pleased as she took in their surroundings and then hobbled over to the fisherman’s shack.

The Cajun fed them beans and crawdads for supper. By now it was dark, and after supper the three women lay on one side of the room, while their host lay down on the other side. He was asleep at once, snoring.

Francesca edged over to Josephine. “I know you’re concerned, but I won’t let that swamp man touch us. I have a pepperbox pistol. You know what that is?”

“Like a riverboat gambler carries for when he’s caught with marked cards.”

“Exactly. You’re the youngest and prettiest—he’ll go for you first. If you wake up to find that ruffian handling you, give a cry and I’ll put a ball in him.”

“Thank you.” Josephine didn’t know what else to say. The swamp man had seemed a rough sort, all right, but the only thing he seemed keen about getting his hands on was the ship owner’s silver.

Francesca patted her hand in the dark. “Good. Now don’t you worry.”

“I was never worried. Anyone touches me and he’ll regret it.”

“You don’t say.”

The Kentucky wife groaned and muttered an unladylike oath. “Will you two shut your traps? I’m trying to sleep.”

“Sorry,” Josephine said. “We’ll be quiet.”

Josephine was glad to be quiet. There had been something in Francesca’s tone that sounded like she’d been winding up to ask more personal questions.

Sleep seemed out of the question. The snoring, the mosquitoes, the hard wood floor, the heat, the smell of sweaty bodies—it was all too much. Add to that the cacophony of animal voices: frogs, buzzing insects, little lizards chirping on the walls around them. Nevertheless, she drifted off a couple of hours later, and woke at dawn when some swamp bird flew overhead with a cry like a strangled cat’s.

I
t had taken five days to cross six hundred miles of open ocean from Havana to the mouth of the delta, but it was a full four days more before they were out of the swamps and steaming north on the river again. Josephine paid special attention to the two forts that guarded a defensible bend in the river. She glanced across the deck of the ship to see Franklin watching keenly.

Francesca came up beside her. “You have your eye on that one. He certainly seems an eligible young bachelor.” There was an implied question in the statement.

Josephine looked away, as if bashful. She hadn’t spoken to the Pinkerton agent since the mishap in the bayou. “Now you sound like my mother.”

“And where does your mother live? Here in New Orleans?”

Josephine glanced back, suddenly sure Francesca was toying with her, that she had figured out who she was—knew perfectly well that Claire de Layerre had died on the Mississippi and this was her daughter.

“My family lives in South Carolina,” Josephine said. She chose her words carefully, knowing that she’d be stuck with whatever lie she concocted. “My brother is a volunteer with the First South Carolina Rifles, and my father is a colonel in the militia. Defensive coastal work only, they say. He’s not a young man anymore.”

“Ah, a colonel. I knew you had the look of a cultured young lady. I’ll only be a night and a day in New Orleans, but I’d be honored if you’d join me for supper. Where are you staying?”

“The Paris Hotel. In the Quarter. Do you know it?”

“That’s where I’m staying! They have a fine restaurant. You really must.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Hancock,” Josephine said with a sinking feeling. “That would be lovely.”

O
nce in New Orleans, the two women collected their belongings and took a hansom cab up the muddy streets, past the Cabildo onto Chartres Street, to the fading elegance of the Paris Hotel, where its four stories rose over the French Quarter.

Franklin had telegraphed from New York to reserve Josephine a room, but the hotel claimed they had no room under Mrs. Hancock. What’s more, all available rooms had been taken by a group of gentlemen militia called down from plantations upstream, who had been marching back and forth between Jackson and Lafayette Squares for the past two days.

Francesca argued with the man at the desk, alternately blaming the hotel and her husband’s slipshod memory. The whole situation seemed contrived, and Josephine started to worry that the next step would be for the older woman to turn with affected embarrassment and ask if she could share a bed.
Oh, and confound it all, I seem to have lost my money. I promise I’ll repay you.
It was a card the Colonel might have played against Josephine’s mother.

The hotel manager arrived. He didn’t seem overly pleased at the two women in their dirty clothes and hair, bedraggled after their crossing and their misadventure in the swamp. Francesca kept pleading.

“Do you know who this is? This is Josephine Breaux. From the papers! Heroine of our great cause.”

Josephine cringed. The manager’s eyes widened. The obvious rejoinder was that the so-called heroine had a room already, but the man now checked the books with greater motivation. Almost at once he discovered that a guest had left early, supposedly annoyed by the hard-drinking, gambling planter militia. There was a room, after all. And to Josephine’s surprise, it turned out that Francesca had the money to pay for it. She’d begun to worry that her mother’s old friend would attach herself to Josephine, barnacle-like, attempting to extract money.

The two rooms were on opposite sides of the hotel, thankfully. Josephine paid the extra money to have a bath drawn up and sent her soiled clothes off for cleaning. She dressed in an evening gown with a hoopskirt. She was fighting exhaustion (the bed seemed comfortable, and the sheets clean) and might have skipped dinner if not for her earlier promise. She found Francesca already downstairs at a table beneath the hiss and warm glow of a gas lamp. She’d also cleaned up. With her rouge and powder fresh and her hair in place, she retained much of the charm of her singing and dancing days. Francesca reminded Josephine of her mother, and the young woman felt a pang of loss.

Francesca pressed for more personal information as they ate. Her behavior straddled the line between the quick, easy intimacy typical of riverboat denizens, and suspicious prying. Josephine refined the story about her supposed family in South Carolina, while trying not to embellish details to the extent she would struggle to remember them were she to encounter Mrs. Hancock again. Hopefully, this was their last encounter.

It turned out that Francesca’s riverboat wasn’t leaving the city for several days. If Josephine didn’t know the city, she could accompany Mrs. Hancock in seeing some of the fine houses and gardens of uptown New Orleans, maybe even visit Congo Square if she weren’t too afraid of blacks. Unfortunately, Josephine said, she had determined to stop in at the
Crescent
her first moment in New Orleans. She was anxious to turn her energy to the war effort. That started a new round of questioning, this time about spy work in Washington. This time Josephine played coy. She’d love to discuss details, she said, but loose lips could endanger the cause.

At last, she was able to escape to her rooms. She was supposed to be the newspaper reporter turned spy, in Confederate territory to glean information about troops and river defenses, yet so far she had given up more than she’d gained. Fabricated information, admittedly. Instead, she should have been pumping her mother’s old friend for anything useful. The woman must know all sorts of things: the state of fortifications up and down the river, the effectiveness of the blockade, the morale and attitude of the people who lived and worked between St. Louis and the mouth of the river. Instead, Josephine had come away with nothing.

From now on, she vowed, she would be in charge of such encounters, and not reactive. But not with Francesca Díaz Hancock. It didn’t matter how tired she felt, Josephine was determined to leave the hotel the next morning before the other woman awoke.