The Lincoln Conspiracy (26 page)

Their lack of understanding appeared to send Mrs. Lincoln into a panic, and she plucked a squat brown bottle of laudanum off her bedside table. She poured the drug into a spoon and tipped it into her mouth, waiting for it to take hold before she began speaking again.

“Mr. Scott and my Robert are friends, you see. They are devoted to the rails, and Robert is devoted to creating his own fortune,” she continued. “If it were not for my Tad, I would not want to be with Robert on this train or in Chicago. I will be betrayed. Yes, yes, yes. A house divided. Yes, yes, yes.”

The door to the sleeping car slipped open and Robert Lincoln stepped inside, gazing at the three women huddled around the bed. He sat down on a small bench bolted to the wall between the beds that Fiona and Lizzy slept in, and he stared out the window as if accounting for every tree or small barn they rattled past. He rubbed his fingers against the glass and wiped them on his trousers.

“Even though it’s warming up outside, the window is cool,” he said. “Mother, I wasn’t aware you were keeping a diary or that you had any of Father’s letters.”

Mrs. Lincoln stared down into her bedding.

“Do you know what people in the President’s House called my mother, Mrs. McFadden?” Robert continued. “My father’s secretaries referred to her as ‘Her Satanic Majesty.’ My father’s physician simplified things—he just called her ‘the Devil.’ ”

Mrs. Lincoln threw her diary across the car and it careened off Robert’s head, drawing a faint line of blood near his eye before it fell to the floor. Her eldest son pulled a kerchief from his vest pocket to blot his scratch and bent down to scoop up the journal. He stood up and walked back to the door, turning to Mrs. Lincoln as he opened it.

“I think I shall acquaint myself now with your diary, Mother,” he said, stepping back into the parlor car, where, through the gap in the door, the three women could see Tad on the floor reading a book.

Mrs. Lincoln fell back onto her pillow, pressing her lips together as she stared into the ceiling and began counting the lines and cracks traced in the walnut slats above her bed.

A
ugustus always avoided the District’s lodging houses. He’d step into the street to avoid their entrances, his thoughts pegged to what his father had told him about the hotels: in the years before the war, some were transit points in the slave trade, offering their services to owners and buyers trafficking in healthy, productive, and valuable Negroes. Even being near the hotels could make him light-headed, as fears that had slopped around his imagination as a child—visions of grown men and women stuffed into cellars—awoke and gripped his chest and throat. That quickly, they could rise up and take hold of him.

Remember, his father told him, the President’s House was built by slaves. Even Frederick Douglass was turned away from the mansion until Lincoln ordered him admitted. And the Charles Hotel once had six big holding pens in its basement—dark catacombs lined with iron cages where slaves were shackled in leg irons—that allowed owners to lodge upstairs, comfortable in the knowledge that their property was secure. The owners of the Charles had understood this to be a unique selling point and maintained a small billboard near the front desk to remind lodgers of the hotel’s benefits:
The Proprietor of this hotel has roomy underground cells for confining slaves for safekeeping, and patrons are notified that their slaves will be well cared for. In case of escape, full value of the Negro will be paid by the Proprietor
.

So when Temple had asked him to visit Lucy Hale at the National Hotel on the second day of the Grand Review, Augustus
needed time to accommodate himself to the notion. He’d tried to beg off from the venture, but Temple said he would be preoccupied on Pennsylvania Avenue and Fiona would be on Mrs. Lincoln’s train. Besides, Temple reminded him, John Hale knew Augustus from the abolitionist movement and could arrange a meeting with his daughter. The Hale family had made the National their home, and as circumstance had it, Johnny Booth, inclined toward extravagances that mirrored the arc of his ambition and his sense of his proper place in the world, also kept a room at the National as well. And it was at the National that Lucy met and fell in love with the celebrated actor.

“The senator won’t want this,” Augustus had told Temple.

“Lincoln had just brought Hale back from Spain before he was assassinated,” Temple had said. “The senator is in mourning for the president, and he will be sympathetic to our challenge.”

“We have no reason to accost him so. Senator Hale’s wife has already fled the District for New Hampshire to avoid public shaming.”

“Augustus, his daughter knew Booth, knew his movements and whom he was consorting with. We need to know whom Booth was close to.”

“We’ll have no way to secure a meeting with her,” Augustus had said. “Lucy Hale loved Booth and John Hale considers that a curse.”

“His daughter was secretly engaged to Booth. He’ll find this an embarrassment.”

“And?”

“Gardner can help keep news of the engagement out of the papers for a time.”

Hale was inside the lobby of the National when Augustus arrived, but Augustus waited outside, unable to move through the doors. The senator took Augustus’s hesitation to be that of a Negro uncertain of his welcome in a Pennsylvania Avenue hotel and walked toward him, hand outstretched.

“You can come in, my friend,” Hale said, before addressing the doorman. “Mr. Spriggs is a most well-received visitor.”

The senator pulled Augustus through the doors and across the lobby, still misunderstanding his unease for anything other than a raw loathing of hotels. They ascended the stairs to the second floor, and as they walked down the hallway, Hale nodded glumly at room 228.

“Booth’s,” he said. “The murderer was just doors away from us.”

“Senator Hale, I appreciate your help, but before we sit with Lucy, I have to share with you a troubling revelation.”

The men stopped short of the end of the hallway where the Hales’ two-bedroom suite was located, and Augustus lowered his voice. He told the senator that Temple had learned that among Booth’s belongings were photographs of five women, Miss Hale being one of them; the assassin claimed engagements to each.

Hale absorbed this, shaking his head.

Augustus cleared his throat.

“I would not want to hurt Miss Hale in any fashion,” he whispered.

Hale nodded. “She should know so she understands the measure of that despicable man. She was besotted. She invited Booth to attend the president’s second inauguration with her, as our guest. At our invitation the killer was just feet away from Mr. Lincoln—even then, just steps away.”

“Temple has told me that he can keep much of the information about Miss Hale out of the newspapers, if that’s of any comfort, sir, but it won’t remain unknown for very long.”

“We are Hales and we will manage this on our own. You are after the president’s killers, and I believe my daughter has information to impart.”

Lucy Hale was perched on the edge of a settee in the middle of the suite’s parlor. Her hair lay against her head in two thick braids, a clutch of ringlets dangling near her ears, and she wore a crisp navy blue dress. She was stout and plain, and rumor had it that Booth, who had his choice of the District’s beauties, had targeted Lucy to gain access to her father’s influential circle.

Lucy’s eyes were bloodshot and she knotted a kerchief in her hands as she looked past Augustus and her father, her gaze settling somewhere on the wall beyond them. A neat stack of letters bound together with green velvet ribbon sat nestled in her lap, with a thick lock of brown hair tucked under the bow. Augustus cleared his throat but didn’t say anything. Lucy’s gaze wandered from the wall to Augustus, and she patted the letters in her lap.

“Johnny gave me these,” she said. “These, and his hair.”

She began weeping in heaves, pressing her kerchief to her eyes and rocking back and forth on the edge of the couch as the letters slipped from her lap and spilled onto the floor. Augustus wanted to leave and turned toward the door, but Hale pulled him back by his arm and then walked to his daughter’s side. He retrieved the letters from the floor and placed them by her on the settee, patting her on the shoulder and stroking her hair until she calmed.

“He had large, dark eyes, and he was kind to me, and he could recite Shakespeare better than his illustrious brothers,” she said, looking up at her father, her eyes still glassy.

“He was a murderer, Lucy,” said Hale.

“Do not be a tutor to me, Father!” Lucy screamed. “He was my betrothed and my own.”

Hale pushed away from Lucy and stormed into one of the bedrooms, slamming the door behind him. Augustus sat down on a stool near the settee, staring at the floor until Lucy spoke again. She pulled the letters back into her lap, dropping her kerchief and twirling the lock of hair in her hand.

“I could give you these, Mr. Spriggs, but they aren’t of any value. They are Johnny’s love letters to me. There is nothing here of plots or murder. You aren’t the first to visit me, of course. Mr. Stanton sent a very threatening man, a Mr. Baker, to speak with me weeks ago. He read through all of my letters and didn’t keep a single page.”

“And that was all?” Augustus asked.

“They ransacked Johnny’s room down the hall and said they found encrypted letters in envelopes bearing New York marks. Mr. Stanton’s man suspected that my letters might conform with an inscrutable code they also found in Johnny’s room. But all they found in his letters to me was love.”

“Booth never discussed with you a fascination or an obsession with President Lincoln?”

“Other than his desire to be at the inauguration, he did not.”

“Well. That is all, then.”

Augustus rose from the stool, bowed to Lucy, and asked her to remember him to her father. When he reached the door of the suite, she stopped him.

“That is not all,” she said. “Johnny did meet frequently with others at the Surratt boardinghouse. And as I told Mr. Baker, one person from that group hasn’t been fully claimed by all of these investigators, police, and soldiers.”

“And who is that person?”

“John Surratt. My Johnny and he were confidants. Where, I might ask, is John Surratt? Why has no one pursued him?”

“Good day,” Augustus said.

“Good day.”

Augustus left the National alone, the bellman and the doorman eyeing him as he passed through the lobby and onto Pennsylvania Avenue. He pulled at his collar to get some air and walked a block before pausing to lean against a building, clawing at his collar again. He could hear the sounds of crowds swelling to join the Grand Review. He felt penned in, ready to visit his dreams. His right hand was shaking and he covered it with his left, then swiped at his nose, which had started to run. He needed to visit his dreams. He needed to find some smoke.

T
HE WAR SECRETARY
demonstrated his well-known pluck in the message he sent through Noah Brooks in response to Temple’s request
for a meeting:
Whoever you may be and whatever “diaries” you may possess, I will not meet with you without further proof of the true value of that which you claim to have
.

Temple responded:
Mars: I will leave a packet in your name at the Willard this evening at half past six
.

Allan Pinkerton was at a table in the Willard’s lobby when Temple arrived. He was drumming his fingers, and his hip shook slightly in response to the frantic pumping of his left foot beneath the table. Pinkerton followed Temple as he made his way across the lobby, his pace hobbled by his bad leg and his cane.

“You look angry with me, Mr. Pinkerton.”

“I am determined to conclude this very messy affair.”

“And how do you propose to do that?”

“You will give me the diaries.”

“I obviously won’t. But you and your men will stop following me and my wife as of this evening.”

“We’ll do no such thing,” Pinkerton roared, bolting up from the table and shoving his chair aside. “I have four of my men outside who will enter at my prompting and resolve this dilemma.”

“My friend Nail and his acquaintances have disbanded your guards, Mr. Pinkerton. At this moment, they’re being … transported. I also have a photograph of you in Alexandria consorting with the most well-known madam in the District. The picture can get into the newspapers and it can get to your wife. So sit down, Mr. Pinkerton, and be civil.”

Allan Pinkerton subdued was like a man tied and gagged, struggling against the emotions binding him and rocking to and fro in search of an escape. Once Pinkerton settled, Temple and he came to terms: Pinkerton would disappear from the District.

“It was my men at the B&O confronting Baker’s stooges, and it was my men who rescued you at the Center Market,” Pinkerton said. “And for this you would have me exiled?”

“You came to my aid because you wanted the diaries. But how did you know I even had the diaries?”

“We tracked you from the B&O right behind Baker’s team when they gave chase.”

“What took you to the train station to begin with, Mr. Pinkerton?”

“Stump Tigani. He worked as a courier for Baker, and my network told me what he had.”

“Which was?”

“The Booth diary and Mrs. Lincoln’s journal. Was I wrong?”

“No, you weren’t. But your men needed to slice open Tigani’s throat to get them?”

“Tigani was a dangerous man. He wouldn’t have parted with the diaries. As you saw at the B&O, Lafayette Baker was there to protect him.”

“Why was Tigani traveling to New York?”

“That is a secret that only Baker and Edwin Stanton can unveil. I loved President Lincoln; I served him and General McClellan during the war—until Stanton removed me in favor of Baker. The diaries will serve as instruments for justice.”

“Justice for whom?”

“That was what I was intending to discover when you interfered with my work, Mr. McFadden. I believe the journals will aid those seeking information about the assassination of the president.”