The Lincoln Conspiracy (2 page)

Ah, well. Temple was grateful for his cane at times.

He swept his cane from the ground and blocked the rod; a few quick turns of his wrist and he spun the rod out of the gent’s hands. Still crouched, he whipped his cane across the gent’s knees and, as the man crumbled, Temple gave him a solid whack across the side of his head. He looked up at the group of men, who had parted and put down their knives and knuckles to consider him. The gent with the gun turned toward him and raised his pistol. He looked delighted, his eyes dancing beneath a high, sloping forehead. That one enjoys it, Temple thought. He enjoys killing.

“Corporal,” Temple shouted over his shoulder to the soldier. “I’m a Metropolitan Police detective. Charge that man.”

Good boy: He did as he was told. He raised his rifle, bayonet shining at the end of it, and shouted at the gent with the gun, telling him to disarm. The gent smiled, pointed his gun, and fired. One shot. The boy’s eyes widened in surprise and then he dropped like a sack, the black brim of his little blue cap crumpling behind his head. Temple drew a knife off his ankle and readied it, but now the men—as startled as everyone else in the station by the sound of a gunshot—scrambled, separated, and ran. Temple was alone with Stump, who, like the boy nearby, was limp and lifeless. And it would seem that everyone here today wanted the package more than they wanted poor Stump.

Temple loosened the package from the brown leather belt securing it to Stump’s torso and wondered: Take it in or open it now? Fiona says my sin is impatience. Temple tore open the package. There was a black leather diary and a smaller red leather journal that was also a date book for the previous year. The larger of the two was written in the small, careful script of a woman; the other, on long, narrow pages filled with exclamation points and long lines of discourse, was written by a man. Temple scanned the pages: “Mr. Lincoln” and “railroads” and “New York” appeared several times in the woman’s writings; “Lincoln” and “traitor” and “Lord War” in the man’s script. The man’s pages also contained another word, forcing Temple up on his cane: “assassination.”

His leg hurt. He jammed the pages into the tops of his boots—one set for each boot, everything in order—then hurried toward the B&O’s entrance to find a horse. Fiona said that theft was a sin, too, but on a morning already heavy with sin it didn’t rank with murder.

Temple had to press past throngs of people twirling toward the front of the station and away from the gunshots. He could hear a baby crying to his right, a man shouting for his wife to his left. A porter had come to a full stop and was sitting on two trunks he had been dragging toward the trains. He perched on the edge, surveying the calamity around him, and then pulled his hat down over his eyes,
content to wait out the pandemonium. Temple hobbled around the porter and exited the station.

Temple was large and lanky and needed large horses. Weren’t many of those, ’cept for the mounts that the Army of the Potomac had. Rain was still coming down, but lighter now. First bit of luck today: a beautiful chestnut stallion, unflinching in the rain and tied to a post. Easy to spot. All of the horses that had been here earlier, and the crowd of soldiers, too, were gone. Remember that. Just this one, in the rain, waiting for him.

Temple untied the horse and it didn’t buck. He stuck his left foot in the stirrup, jammed his cane between his right hand and the pommel, and hoisted himself up, stretching his gimp leg behind himself as he swung it over the saddle. Beside the pommel, burned into the leather, were two large initials: L.B.

“You should have stayed inside until the rain stopped,” warned a voice to Temple’s right. “We wouldn’t want what you took off Stump to soak up the bad weather, would we?”

The gent who’d shot the young soldier was standing there, pointing a LeMat at Temple. Military revolver, but not a Colt. LeMats were dicey. Buckshot from the bottom barrel. The gent raised his gun toward Temple’s head, eyes gleaming (He likes it, Temple thought again, he likes killing), and pulled the trigger. The hammer fell, but no shot. The horse reared.

“Powder’s moist,” Temple said. “The rain. You have to mind the rain, friend. Damp
pistolas
mightn’t fire.”

“Bastard, get off my horse and let me have the damn package.”

The gent thrust his hand into the saddle and yanked a riding crop from it, then whipped Temple’s right thigh. The crop tore through his pants, blood came streaming through the tear, and a flash of pain seared his thigh.

The gent brought the crop down again, but Temple jammed his cane into the middle of the man’s forehead, and he stumbled back, dazed. Like billiards, Temple thought. Temple slapped the horse’s
neck with his left hand and the stallion skittered sideways. He slapped it again, very hard, and the horse bucked wildly into the gent, throwing him to the ground. Temple gathered the reins and galloped off, up New Jersey.

The rain began to let up, and the sun broke through in a yellow, boiling burst.

T
emple leaned forward on the horse, aiming to get as far away from the station as he could as fast as possible. The gent who’d taken the crop to his leg stood nearly as tall as Temple, but he was broader, and so his horse was used to carrying a heavier man. It galloped easily, took commands. Mud flying and the horse snorting and a veil of humidity rising as the sun began to suck the rain from the ground. Impossible to breathe. As Temple hurtled forward, he cataloged places where he could take the pages crammed into his boots, his back still moist from the rain and sweat twisting tight around his collar, his leg still burning from the lash.

Temple pondered two of his best friends, Augustus and Pint, whom he had intended to meet at the B&O to complete their transaction, and he wanted to get to Fiona. She’d be fine for a bit, he reassured himself, and it wouldn’t be wise to seek her out until he had stashed the pages. Augustus and Pint might have seen him at the B&O, and they would probably try to look for him around Foggy Bottom. He could ride there first and—

Temple yanked back on the reins, pressing his feet into the stirrups and arching his back. Several of the gents from the station, mounted, were facing him amid a boodle of people on New Jersey. As Temple’s horse reared up, the group of them looked his way. Nothing ever registered on the gents’ faces, Temple thought. Taut as rails. They recognized his horse, recognized him, and charged dead at him, drawing their guns. There were probably LeMats on the entire lot of them, too, and that’s a tale. Outnumbered here. Time to dash.

Temple kicked his heels into the sides of his horse and bolted onto E Street, galloping between City Hall and the still burnt-out husk of the Infirmary as a bullet winged past his head. He raced up toward Seventh, plumes of dirty water erupting from the mud and blanketing his boots. Gardner might know what to do with the diaries, and his studio was around the block. But Alexander Gardner toyed with cameras, not guns, and Temple couldn’t arrive there trailing horses and
pistolas
. Couldn’t do that to Gardner. Scots had their peculiar irritations and angers, and he made it a habit never to provoke Gardner’s.

The sun bore down, and Temple’s hair, hanging black and damp around his ears, stuck to the sides of his head like slabs of paste.

He’d need to lose the gents, lose the horse, lose himself, lose the pages, and then get to Fiona. Once the gents from the B&O found out who he was, they might look for Fiona, too. Had to get to her first. Gardner was for later.

Another bullet whizzed past him, just below his ribs. And his leg burned. Enough, then. Temple pressed the horse onto 7th and sped past the Post Office and turned the corner onto F so that he could ride past the Patent Office, where the government still kept a hospital. Where Fiona worked. Please, Fiona, look away from your soldiers and look out one of those windows. Look away from your soldiers because I’m down here, and I’m in a race and I’m coming back to get you.

Temple glanced up, hoping for a glimmer of her framed in a window above him. A bolt of light bounced off some of the glass and flashed in the corner of his eye, but nothing more. He galloped straight on, bolting down F Street. St. Patrick’s Church sprouted up
ahead of him on the right, a handsome little mound of bricks and a steeple, on the same side of the street as the Patent Office. St. Pat’s, feisty and blank, with Irish yearning dripping from every inch of it; Hoban, the Irish architect who’d designed the President’s House, modeling the mansion after a grandee’s pile in Dublin, had also planned St. Patrick’s. They worked in cabals, his old Irish brethren. Father Walter, lord and master of St. Pat’s, standing firm beside his parishioner, the Surratt woman, who’d housed the murderers. Remember that, too. Father Walter will have his thoughts.

A decision presented itself. The biggest building in Washington, massive in granite, spread like an ancient Greek shrine across 15th Street, directly in front of Temple and corking up the end of F beyond St. Pat’s: the Treasury. Like the Washington Monument—like the District itself, in fact—the Treasury building was incomplete, a notion in search of a home. But at least the Treasury functioned, and it dominated the President’s House, which sat on the ruddy parkland behind it.

“Money turns the wheel in America, not votes,” Fiona would say whenever they strolled near the Treasury.

Dozens of thick, thirty-six-foot-high pillars ribboned the building’s exterior. Impregnable. Lincoln had converted the basement into a fortress as a last resort should the Confederates invade the city. His refuge, his last stand. Now Andy Johnson governed from the Treasury, deferring to Mrs. Lincoln until she was ready to leave the President’s House. The Treasury and the streets around it were sure
to be crawling with Union boys. Temple liked that fact, liked that the presence of soldiers, stoked with bayonets and rifles, might convince his pursuers to leave off. It gave him options.

Still, the gents insisted on chasing after him in their bundle, all of them waving guns and screaming. Several pigs roamed 15th Street, and dogs scurried about near puddles. The air smelled. There were dozens of soldiers around here, and confusion was always an ally. As soon as he hit 15th, Temple spun his horse around near a group of six soldiers.

“Gentlemen, that group just held up the B&O,” Temple yelled. “I’m a Metropolitan Police detective, and I think they’re Secesh.”

“And what the hell is a Metropolitan Police detective?” one of the soldiers shouted back, looking up at Temple and squinting.

A bullet tore into the breast of Temple’s horse, and the animal’s forelegs buckled. Temple rolled off and away from the horse as it crumpled, staking the ground with his cane and dragging his bad leg along behind him as mud caked his side. The soldier who had just been yelling back at Temple looked down at him before he fell to the ground, too, a bullet splitting open his head. White puffs of dust burst in the air behind Temple’s head and just below his feet; eruptions from rifle shots sinking into the flour sacks that the army had piled along the Treasury’s foundations as added fortification against a Confederate invasion that never came.

A gray, rolling ball of smoke—a small storm cloud of it—had also formed in front of the gents and their horses as they neared 15th off F Street. All slow motion again, like the train station. The gents were simply shooting at the soldiers to clear their way, shooting so much so quickly that their posse was shrouded and smoldering, and they didn’t care. They were shooting up Union boys in the middle of Washington, the sun bearing down to expose them, and they didn’t care. They knew no one would take them in. Another pair of soldiers appeared to drop, but Temple couldn’t be sure because a slight panic began to envelop him. One of the men was shouting, his voice ricocheting
amid the shots and rising above the rest of the frenzy inside the gunpowder cloud.

“We work for Mr. Baker,” the gent screamed, “and that man’s a spy.”

Temple absorbed the thought as he stood up, slightly dizzy.

“Lads, if I’m the spy, why are they killing you, then?” Temple shouted back.

Another bullet zipped past Temple, thigh high, before burrowing into the mud.

He wondered why they hadn’t killed him yet and in the same moment knew it was because he still had the pages. They would want to know that before they killed him. They would want to find the pages—or learn if they had gone missing—before they killed him.

More than a dozen soldiers formed ranks and raised their rifles, beginning a slow trot as they moved toward the group of gents. This will slow them down, Temple thought. Slow them down, and then I’ll find my trace away from here.

Temple, sweating, his chest heaving, spotted a thin, wiry gent break from the pack and swing his horse toward him. No gun out on this one. Just the crescent of a long, thin cavalry sword. He slipped to the left side of his saddle and charged toward Temple, intending to pin him with the blade. The gent was handy, comfortable on the horse and confident with his sword. As the gent bore down, Temple spun on his good leg, tendrils of mud dripping off his jacket and pants. No target left for the sword, but the gent’s arm was stretched firm and rigid as the horse galloped past. Temple whipped his cane upward into the gent’s wrist, breaking the bone. The gent screamed and dropped his sword and the reins as he grabbed his wrist; the horse, eyes bulging in fear, turned and then came to an abrupt stop, pitching the gent off the saddle and over its shoulder into the mud.

A leather satchel lay on the ground next to the unconscious swordsman, and Temple plucked it up and spilled out its contents: a
small
pistola
, ammunition, glasses, leather gloves, a penknife with an image of a locomotive etched into the blade. Temple slung the empty satchel over his shoulder and dragged himself to the horse—yet another large, meaty one—and mounted it. Second stolen horse of the day. Temple was worn and sore. His muscles ached and his leg throbbed. He braced his cane next to the pommel and then patted his boots. High and sturdy, Fiona’s boots had protected the pages from the mud and the rain and the puddles. He grabbed the diaries from inside his boots and stuffed them into the satchel, then looked back from atop the horse at the swarm of soldiers and gents behind him. Another one of the gents was dead on the ground and still more soldiers were down. Two of the gents were watching Temple from inside the melee, struggling to push through the pack of soldiers so that they could finish their work, finish Temple. They would start to regroup shortly, but now Temple knew where he was taking them. Piggies go to market.