The Lincoln Conspiracy (18 page)

Before Fiona took the driver’s hand to climb into the Lincolns’ barouche, she studied Mrs. Lincoln for a moment, taking stock of a woman bereft and shrouded by the fog, floating upon a sea of miseries and losses.

Fiona nodded to Lizzy and stepped up into the carriage.

T
emple had lingered in Foggy Bottom long enough to see if he was being followed. Satisfied he wasn’t, he made his way downtown and was standing beneath a lamppost across from Alexander’s studio on 7th Street, taking in the huge lettering the photographer had festooned across the building—lettering large enough to be legible even as the evening grew dark.

“Gardner’s Gallery” was spelled out in foot-high letters across the top of the building, with three columns of advertisements bordering the windows right below: “Cartes de Visite, Stenographs, Album Cards; Imperial Photographs—Plain, Colored, Retouched; Ambrotypes, Hallotypes, Ivory Types.” Alexander was not shy in his promotions. On the D Street side of the studio, he had attached a large billboard to the edge of the roof: “Photographs.” Below that sign, another advertisement was painted on the wall: “Views of the War.”

Yellow light was spilling out from the middle window of the studio’s second floor. Gardner had returned.

Temple knocked on the door, but there was no answer. He pounded on it again, as loud as he could, and then backed into the street and stared up. Moments later, Gardner poked his head out the window, about to burst into a rage until he saw Temple below him, grinning.

“Why so damn noisy?” Gardner yelled.

“Why so damn hard to find?”

“Lang may yer lum reek!” Gardner shouted back in Scottish slang, as he did on the infrequent occasions when he was relaxed enough to be a wit.

Gardner had spread several lanterns around the room, but he was anxious about them. There were enough chemicals in his studio to ignite the building should any one of the lanterns tip over. For that reason, he rarely worked at night.

“Stop eyeing the lanterns and talk with me,” Temple said.

Temple was sitting with his bad leg propped up on a small table. He had spent most of the day on his feet and his leg was throbbing. Before arriving at Gardner’s he had contemplated going to his boardinghouse to gather fresh clothes for Fiona and himself—it was only several blocks away, at 15th and F—but he assumed that Pinkerton would be watching his home. Perhaps Baker, too, if he had already discovered Temple’s identity. Maybe they were watching Gardner’s studio. But he had circled the area twice before hovering across the street and observing the neighborhood and its inhabitants for several minutes. Anyhow, he needed to have this conversation.

Gardner pulled a cheroot out of a bag and lifted one of the lanterns to his face so that he could light it. His beard pressed against the lantern as the end of the cheroot glowed red, and Gardner drew deeply on it.

“You’re afeared of fire and now you have one progressing in your very own mouth,” Temple said. “Sitting here, in your own studio, you’re surrounded by flames.”

“The cheroots relax me. General Sickles gave me a dozen last week because he is still pleased with photographs I took of him.”

“Everyone is usually pleased with your photographs.”

“Sickles was especially pleased. I made his in New York shortly after his trial for killing Francis Scott Key’s son here in Lafayette Park. He claimed that he was temporarily insane, and he had a strong, crafty lawyer who turned the judge in his favor.”

“The lawyer was who?”

“Edwin Stanton. It was just a few years before he became war secretary.”

“I am finding Mr. Stanton to be rather ubiquitous,” Temple said. “People say Danny Sickles was a dirty sort.”

“Indeed, even if he did lose half a leg at Gettysburg. When he was with Tammany Hall—workin’ and givin’ it laldy among the corrupts haunting your New York—he represented the city’s delegation to London. In the name of the wee man! He brought an adventuress as his guest to Buckingham Palace and formally introduced her to Queen Victoria!”

Both men laughed hard enough that they rocked back in their seats. When Gardner finally settled down, he drew on the cheroot again and exhaled a thick cloud of gray smoke.

“A fine smoke is a fine smoke, no matter who gives them to you,” Gardner said. “Fiona told you about my words with Pint, I take it?”

“She did.”

“After Fiona left the studio, Pint just sat here ruminating, not sayin’ a word. So I told him to skedaddle. Too much anger inside him, and he drinks too much.”

“He’s been our friend, and we all have a dose of anger inside us.”

“Well, people evolve.”

Temple pulled his leg down from the table and sat upright, leaning toward Gardner.

“Was everything you did in the war for Pinkerton? Every photograph?”

“Hell no!” Gardner shot back, bolting up from his chair. He sucked on the cheroot again and began walking in circles around the studio, pounding his fist against the wall—but coming to a full stop, and being careful not to do any damage, when he got near one of the cameras he had scattered about the room. Stop, start, stop, start, stop, start, until his anger slowly unwound.

Gardner sat down again, dropping the cheroot into a stone bowl to burn out. Temple waited for him to calm because, invariably, he would reveal a bit of himself after a rage, perhaps as a penance of sorts.

In addition to his equipment and his shelves and his cabinets, Gardner kept several oversized albums of his own work in the studio and the book Fiona had so enthusiastically mentioned, his
Photographic
Sketch Book of the Civil War
. He walked to a table and grabbed a large, leather-bound scrapbook and brought it back to his chair, flipping through its pages until he found an article he had cut from
The New York Times
about a display of his Antietam photographs at Mathew Brady’s studio. He read the clip aloud.

“ ‘October twentieth, 1862: These pictures have a terrible distinctness. By the aid of a magnifying glass, the very features of the slain may be distinguished.’ ”

Gardner looked up from the book.

“I think I prize that phrase, ‘a terrible distinctness.’ I chronicled something horrible during the war and I recorded it with clarity, Temple.”

Gardner flipped more pages in the scrapbook, closely examining a few, until he found another clip he was looking for, from
Harper’s New Monthly
.

“This next one isn’t about me. It’s about a photograph that Jim Gibson took during the war at Savage’s Station, of a field hospital scattered with the wounded and the dying. ‘This scene brings the war to those who have not been to it. How patiently and still they lie; these brave men who bleed and are maimed for us. It is a picture that is more eloquent than the sternest speech.’ ”

Gardner looked up again at Temple.

“All of us on the battlefield were witnesses, Temple.”

Gardner laid out the challenges of taking pictures in the field. He needed another photographer or an assistant with him at the same location: one to set the camera up, the other to arrange the glass plates and mix chemicals. Once the chemicals were ready, they were poured onto the plate and allowed to evaporate, and then the plate had to be dunked in a solution, in complete darkness, inside a wagon—“On a battlefield, mind you!”

When the plate was ready, it was fitted in a holder and slotted inside the camera, which had to be moved into the right position and brought into focus. After the plate was exposed, photographers had only minutes to get it back to the wagon to develop it. The plates
were fragile and broke easily, so photographers had to do as much as they could to cushion them during transport—“On a battlefield!” Alexander thundered again.

Gardner told Temple that when Gibson took aerial photographs of the battlefields, he occasionally went up in one of the army’s hot-air balloons. Gibson came back from his first balloon rides aglow, brimming with excitement about what he’d seen and photographed from the sky. But the army only let him up because it wanted surveillance photos that could be used to plan attacks, and when Gibson returned, the military confiscated his plates.

“By the time Jim got around to his third or fourth ride, he knew he wasn’t going to keep a single thing he brought back. But I tell ya—he kept going up.”

“Because that was the trade,” Temple said. “They gave him access to other parts of the war in exchange for occasional reconnaissance.”

“That was the trade.”

“You too?”

“Yes, absolutely. And I’d do it again. I could never have gotten near the real force and terror of it without the army’s help. And the army wasn’t going to let me in without giving it something in exchange. So we swapped, and I gave people pictures that weren’t pageantry—gave them pictures of dead Rebel and Union boys without shoes. And if that forces people to confront calamity, then I’ve served a purpose, and not a devilish one.”

“I can’t argue with that.”

Gardner sat up, shaking his head, and leaned in toward Temple.

“But I also arranged bodies and rifles and swords sometimes to make the settings more appealing, so the photographs would sell. Pint rode me hard on that when he and Fiona were here, and we got to screamin’.”

“We all have our unsavories.”

“You’ve got your cards,” Gardner said.

“I do.”

Gardner slumped back in his chair, burying his chin in his chest
and running his fingers through his beard. Temple lit up a cheroot, letting the sweet edge of it rest against his tongue while he waited again for Gardner to resurface.

“All of it makes me feel like it’s time to start fresh, maybe venture to the Great Plains and acquaint myself with Indian country,” Gardner said.

“We’ll miss you if you go west,” Temple said. “You’d better hurry there if that’s what suits you, because the railroads are aiming to get there first.”

“The locomotives are going to change everything. They’re the future and they’re progress and they’ll make the country smaller, and I think for all of that, for all of their fuming and churning, I loathe them. Which means, I fear, that I’ll end up being duty bound to photograph the trains as well.”

Gardner pressed his cheroot into his mouth and inhaled.

“Thank you for going with Fiona to the cemetery,” Temple said. “It was a helpful diversion.”

“Why is Pinkerton so interested in you?”

“Can’t say.”

“You mean you don’t know?”

“No, I mean I can’t say. There’s another one after me as well.”

“One of Pinkerton’s?”

“No. His name is Lafayette Baker.”

Gardner sucked the air back in through his teeth and shook his head, gazing at Temple with a mixture of pity and fear.

“Ah, you as well,” Temple said.

“Meaning what?”

“It seems so many people know of or are familiar with Mr. Baker except for me.”

“Anyone who was around the war or Edwin Stanton knew of Baker. ’Tisn’t so rare.”

“I wasn’t around the war,” Temple said. “Nor have I ever been around Mr. Stanton.”

Gardner went to a cabinet and pulled down a bottle of whiskey, along with two heavy glass tumblers. He filled them high and gave one to Temple. And then he explained how Baker was likely to be well known very soon, even celebrated, perhaps. Although there wasn’t anything about him in the newspapers yet, not even in the
National Intelligencer
.

“Lafayette Baker led the group that tracked down Booth. People are now all jabberin’ how that lad Corbett shot Booth in the barn in Port Royal—but it was Baker who tracked the assassin, and Baker who rounded up the other boys who conspired with Booth. Baker had always been Stanton’s man, and when Stanton needed someone with leather on his shoes to hunt Booth, he asked Baker. And I’ll tell you this: Pinkerton and Baker aren’t together. They hate each other.”

“Then why are they after me together?”

“I dunno.”

“How do you know Baker led the group that hunted down Booth?”

“Because Stanton and the army ordered me to photograph the murderer’s corpse, and when I went down to the river after they brought the body back, Baker was there telling everyone what to do. It was his show, through and through.”

Temple tipped his drink, finding himself worried again about Fiona and Augustus, regretting that he had drawn them into this peril. For a moment his mouth went dry.

“Alexander, tell me about the night they brought Booth back,” Temple said, putting his drink down.

Gardner told him it hadn’t been night, really, but early in the morning. After Booth was killed in Virginia, they wrapped his body in a horse blanket and tied it to a wooden plank, then loaded it onto a farmer’s wagon. From there they rode to the water and loaded the body onto a steamboat, the
John S. Ide
, which carried the corpse to Alexandria. Then they put Booth’s body on a tugboat and ferried it across the Potomac to the Washington Navy Yard.

“It was around one forty-five in the morning on April twenty-seventh,” Alexander said. “I’ll never forget that date, or the day that Lincoln died.”

“And that’s when you first saw Booth’s body? And first saw Baker?”

“I didn’t arrive at the Navy Yard until just after sunrise, several hours after they brought the body ashore. Soldiers came here to the studio—a full military escort—and pounded on the door even louder than you did earlier, Temple, you rude sod. They woke me up and read the command from Stanton ordering me down to the Potomac to photograph a corpse. I couldn’t have gone any earlier anyway because I wouldn’t have had enough light. I brought Timmy O’Sullivan with me to help with the equipment. I didn’t know until I got to the Navy Yard that it was Booth, and they told me the body had been lying there since about one forty-five in the morning.”

Gardner said that by the time he reached the Navy Yard, they had moved Booth’s body off the tug and onto the deck of one of the ironclads, the
Montauk
. Booth was still fully clothed, and the left leg of the corpse was wrapped in a makeshift splint and bandages. Stanton had ordered an entire parade of specialists to identify the body, and Baker had said that the war secretary wanted to ensure that they had indeed captured and shot Booth and not some imposter.