The Lincoln Conspiracy (15 page)

During the fifth week out from Liverpool, she became ill. During the sixth week out, she died.

After that, Temple could never remember any of his conversations with her, though there were many occasions later in his life when he would sit by himself and try, unsuccessfully, to recall and recapture even a few words.

For several days Dr. McFadden barely spoke to him, often burying himself in a blanket in their cabin. As the weather calmed, Temple spent hours on the deck, working with his cane and his fists as the boys hired by the doctor trained him. Initially they were patient and turned all of the lessons into games. As Temple improved, they made it harder.

He was better with his cane than with his fists because the boys were both taller than he, so he fended them off by holding his cane in front of himself with two hands, waggling it back and forth and looping it in arcs and jabs. He also began to learn how to support most of his weight on his left leg when he couldn’t lean on his cane.
The German boy had found a length of wood in a small supply shed amidships and replaced his épée with it; whenever he and Temple dueled, it was accompanied by repeated cracks of wood upon wood.

When they practiced with fists, Temple was still too young and too small to gain an advantage on the fighter from steerage. If he landed a blow, the older boy would smack him back quickly, raising a small pink welt on his cheek. As he had with his fencing tutor, however, Temple stayed the course, learning to balance his weight on one leg as he protected his face with his hands and made quick jabs at the older boy’s body.

During the ninth week out the storms came again, and Temple took to his bunk. One morning he found the doctor sitting on a stool, sobbing. Temple approached him and put his hand on the doctor’s.

“I could call you Father now,” Temple said.

Dr. McFadden wiped his sleeve across his face and pulled Temple into his arms. It was warm there. Temple wobbled back to his bunk, his stomach churning again as waves pounded the ship, and he became aware of other voices and sounds. One, familiar and clear, wasn’t from the
Washington
. It came from beyond the ship and beyond Temple’s dream.

“We cannot keep these. It is a violation.”

He knew this voice. Fiona.

“They are not ours. They are hers.”

Fiona rarely raised her voice, but now she was almost shouting. Temple slid up into a sitting position in the bed and listened more closely as his head cleared. Fiona was arguing with Augustus, who barely protested. Temple climbed out of bed, put his bloodstained shirt back on, and tucked it into the waist of his pants. He was hungry and thirsty.

When he walked into the parlor, he found Augustus and Fiona seated at a candlelit table, with the diaries open in front of them. There was a generous spread of food on the table, and a shirt was hanging off the back of one of the chairs. Augustus stared silently at
a wall while Fiona looked up at Temple in anger, her face visibly flushed even in the candlelight.

“She is the president’s widow, Temple McFadden, and you have no right to her particulars.”

“Fiona.”

“No right. They are her private thoughts.”

Temple reached out and held her hands in his.

“Do you know who wrote the other journal that we have?”

“I do.”

“We have the diary of an assassin and the diary of the president’s wife and—”

“The president’s widow,” Fiona said, interrupting him.

“Yes. The president’s widow. To whom might we return her diary?”

“Mrs. Lincoln.”

Temple began laughing but stopped when he glanced at Augustus, who was still silent. When he looked back at Fiona, her arms were across her chest.

“Temple, these are Mrs. Lincoln’s thoughts. She has been deprived of enough already.”

“We’ll be killed trying to return this to her.”

“And why?”

Temple sat down. “Fiona, I have a hole in my shoulder. We have strangers following us. You understand why.”

“I understand we have something they want. I understand that,” she said. “But I don’t understand why there is murder or death associated with any of this. That I don’t. Do you?”

“Some things have become clearer to me, and some things are a mystery still. I intend to use part of tomorrow to clarify things. But whoever wanted these writings spirited from the Capitol—and whoever else was of the opposite persuasion and wanted to prevent Mr. Tigani’s departure—all of them were willing to kill to achieve their goals.”

“Your Mr. Pinkerton?”

“Perhaps. Or others.”

“Well, then, read Mrs. Lincoln’s papers and return them to her,” Fiona said. “But you can’t keep them.”

“How would you get them to her?” Temple asked.

“Lizzy Keckly. She and Augustus are acquainted.”

Now Temple understood why Augustus was so silent. Elizabeth Keckly, a former slave, was Mrs. Lincoln’s modiste, and Fiona intended to reach the widow through her. Temple sat down and looked up at the shadows from the candles as they swam across the ceiling. Augustus was looking at him, still silent.

“You’ll be putting yourself at risk,” Temple said.

“I am capable,” Fiona replied.

The three of them gazed at the candles and at one another without saying a word.

Temple surveyed the table as he pulled a loaf of bread toward him: there was a wedge of cheese, a bowl of peaches, pickles on a bed of lettuce, molasses, a bottle of walnut catsup, a portion of pigeon, a pitcher of water, a pitcher of switchel, and three delicacies that Augustus had gone to great expense to have for them—a tin of deviled ham and two Havana cigars. Temple avoided the bottle of nectar whiskey sitting on the corner of the table but indulged heartily in all of the food.

Save for an occasional dog barking in the woods, Augustus’s home was quiet. Nearly half an hour passed before anyone spoke.

“May Augustus and I share these Havanas, Fiona?” Temple asked.

“Outside, please.”

“You’re angry with me.”

“All I wish is that we resolve our debate over Mrs. Lincoln.”

Temple pondered this, staring again at the candles. Augustus poured a glass of switchel and slowly drank it.

“I suspect all of us are a mite bit afraid right now,” Temple said.

He stood up and stripped off his bloodied shirt, replacing it with
the fresh shirt hanging on the chair. Then he slid his chair closer to Fiona’s and put his arm around her.

“Fiona, if you return the diary to Mrs. Lincoln, it would be valuable if you did something more than merely hand it over,” he said.

“And that would be?”

“Speak with her. Spend time with her. We can consider opportunities that may allow you to visit with her more than once. You can ask her what her thoughts are. You can ask her why she believes her husband was murdered.”

F
iona left early the next morning, before Temple or Augustus awoke. When Temple arose he found Augustus at the table, bent once more over the diary.

Temple sat beside him, placing the Vigenère table next to the pages with the telegrams. He also tossed a billfold onto the table. It was tan leather with two pouches inside and a strap holding it closed. One pouch contained greenbacks, and the other held several documents.

“Whose is that?” Augustus asked.

“His name is Lafayette Baker. He’s the man I traded blows with in front of the B&O. I borrowed this from him at Mary Ann Hall’s after he popped my stitches.”

Temple took ten dollars from the billfold and dropped it in front of Augustus.

“This should pay for the food last night and some of your other fixings,” Temple said. “Mr. Baker owes us that courtesy, I believe.”

“Do you have a path into this code and these telegrams?” Augustus asked.

“I think we can both try to get a start, and then we shall show some of our work to Pint, as he is the expert in these matters.”

The telegrams were in front of them on the table, one encrypted and three decrypted:

“As you told me when you first showed these to me, the first part of our challenge will be easy, thanks to Booth,” Augustus said. “If we presume that the encrypted message is from Patriot and to Avenger—like the others that Booth decrypted—then we can work backward and learn how it might fit with the Vigenère table.”

“You’ve done some of this already this morning?” Temple asked.

“I have.”

Augustus placed a sheet of paper on the table with two of the decrypted and encrypted words lined above each other in columns:

Augustus pulled the Vigenère table closer to them both and pointed out on the table where the matching letters intersected. The P in
PATRIOT
, from the table’s vertical axis, and the B in
BAKBWTV
, from the middle of the table, traced upward to M on the horizontal axis. He repeated this with each of the letters in each of the words, mating the vertical letters with its partner inside the table and then finding a link to a letter above on the horizontal axis.

When Augustus was done, he had a sheet of paper in front of him with six words on it:

“Now our challenge takes on a different shade,” Temple said. “We no longer have any simple words to pair together from the decrypted and encrypted messages.”

“But we do have some portion of the code,” Augustus said brightly. “We have
MARKOFC
, and we could apply that to the beginning of the first encrypted message we have.”

“To the point!” Temple said, squeezing Augustus’s shoulder. “Do some more of your handiwork.”

Augustus wrote down the first sentence of the encrypted message, with as much of the code beneath it as he could:

With the code in hand, Augustus then reversed his earlier method; he dropped down from
M
on the horizontal axis to mate it with
F
in the middle of the table, and looked across at the vertical axis to see what letter linked to it. That gave him this much:

“I think the single letter
A
after ‘There is’ is likely to be, in fact,
A
,” Temple said. “So it would read ‘There is a …’ Though I am in a conundrum over what the rest of this will say.”

“But we also know more of our code now,” said Augustus. “The
A
in the sentence would match with
A
in the table. So our code is now
MARKOFCA
.”

Temple stared at the code, nodding his head as he studied it.

“Damn.”

Temple picked up Booth’s diary and thumbed quickly through the pages. When he found the page he was looking for, he slapped the diary down on the table.

“Damn.”

“What?” asked Augustus.

“I have it. It’s right here.”

F
IONA WAITED IN
Lafayette Park, across the street from the President’s House, where Augustus had told her that Lizzy Keckly would pass in the morning. Union soldiers were still encamped in the square, and enough people were about on this Saturday morning that Fiona would have to watch sharply not to miss Lizzy. But she had an advantage: there would be few Negro women able to enter or leave the mansion freely, much less one who would be, as Augustus was quick to tell Fiona, one of the best-dressed women on Pennsylvania Avenue.

Lizzy was Mrs. Lincoln’s dressmaker, and the pair sometimes shopped together, with Lizzy often forced to wait outside stores that barred her entry. While Lizzy’s clothes scarcely matched the cost or elegance of those her mistress wore—few women in the District, of any means or background, could match Mrs. Lincoln’s spending, after all—she took pride in the cut and quality of her garments.