The Lincoln Conspiracy (28 page)

Temple slumped back unconscious, a fine tendril of blood spiraling down from his scalp.

“Take him to the Old Capitol Prison,” Stanton said.

A
FEW HOURS
earlier, Nail was napping in his warehouse, fresh ink stains on his hands and forearms and fresh sheets of cogniacs drying and gently flapping on the wall above him, when a series of rifle shots awoke him. It must be the Grand Review, he thought before rolling back on his side. But a scattered round of subsequent shots were not at all like the measured rounds of a military volley, which would have charged off in sequence: pause, fire, pause, fire. No, not like that at all. This was a gunfight. A battle.

The noise he heard next was new and strange. It sounded like a series of metal hammers pounding away at a wall and creating little explosions each time they landed. He heard screams of the sort he had never heard in Swampdoodle before. He heard fear.

Nail pulled one of his shotguns from beneath his cot and grabbed a pistol lying on a nearby table. They were both always loaded, but he checked again to make sure. Before he got to the front door of the warehouse, it was flung open in front of him. One of his men, bloodied across the front of his shirt, was staring at him wild-eyed. He was stuttering, unable to speak, and pointing with a forefinger back over his shoulder.

“What is it?” Nail shouted.

But the man couldn’t get a word out. Nail slapped him hard across the cheek, and the man corralled himself.

“There’s a good one hundred of them, and they came right over the bridges with guns. They killed the women and the dogs at the entrance to Swampdoodle, and they rolled over any of the children who got in their way. And then they just mowed the men down, Nail, with a horrible thing. Three of them. Horrible and large.”

“Three men?”

“No, three guns. They spin and they spit bullets and they’re a terror.”

By the time Nail emerged from the warehouse, a wide semicircle of his men, forty to fifty strong, had formed in front of the warehouse, armed with clubs, guns, and knives. The noon sun was high over their heads when the first of the three wagons appeared—huge wooden arks, each pulled by two horses and arriving in single file. Drivers sat atop the wagons, and behind each of the drivers knelt three sharpshooters. They began picking off Nail’s men, one by one, to protect the drivers until all three wagons had passed across the rickety, splintered bridges and into the expanse before the warehouse.

Behind the wagons marched five-score men, all wearing the long black frock coats common to Lafayette Baker’s men. As the group moved in, the drivers wheeled the wagons around so that their blank backsides faced the warehouse and the horses now faced Baker’s own men, an oddity that caused some of Nail’s people to look back at him, puzzled. He shrugged, unable to provide an answer.

As the wagons settled, Baker shouted out to Nail from behind one of the wagons. “Give us what we came for and this needn’t be bloodier than it already has been.”

“If it had been a rainy day, you never would have gotten those wagons across our swampland,” Nail shouted back from the steps of the warehouse.

“It’s not a rainy day,” Baker replied.

Nail lifted his pistol and shot one of the wagon drivers through the back of his head. Before he could lower his arm, a sniper’s bullet tore through his shoulder and his gun fell from his hand. The sniper took the reins of the wagon from the dead driver as Baker shouted out again.

“Last chance, fingerlickers. Drop your arms and give us what we came for.”

“Answer him, men!” Nail shouted.

A round of fire erupted from the semicircle, and splinters of wood blasted from the sides of the wagons. Two of the marksmen fell from the wagons, and some of Baker’s men behind the wagons dropped.
Nail’s men roared, raised their clubs, and began to charge across the thirty yards separating them from Baker’s private army.

Tall, thick doors swung open on springs in the back of the wagons, and from each of them three long, chubby, gleaming steel guns emerged. Each bore six barrels that rotated around a central shaft, spun by a man turning a large wood and metal crank while another fed rounds into a hopper above the contraption. Each of the three guns began firing six hundred rounds a minute—sounding just like a series of metal hammers pounding explosively at a wall, Nail thought—and they shredded his men like paper dolls in front of his eyes. Bone fragments and chunks of flesh showered the field, shrouded in eruptions of blood and laces of red mist. Those who weren’t killed were left writhing and screaming on the ground, pieces of jaw and cheek missing, limbs chewed into strands, fist-sized crevices where eyes had been, parts of heads sheared off. When the guns stopped, Nail stood alone on the steps, everyone else around him dead.

Baker stepped out between two of the wagons. The bandage covering the wrist that Temple had broken was as white as snow in the sunlight. In his good hand he was dragging two of Swampdoodle’s boys by the scruff of their necks.

“My guns are a wonder, aren’t they?” he shouted to Nail. “Developed for our army by Richard Gatling and ready to go into service sometime next year. A killing machine, as you can see.”

Nail hopped down the steps, choking back dust and bile, and raced toward the wagons, hoisting his shotgun with the only good arm he had left.

“Take him down,” Baker commanded.

Three shots rang out from the marksmen; one separated Nail’s left hand from his shotgun while the others spun into each of his legs and forced him to crumple. He flopped forward onto his chest and face.

When Baker reached Nail, he kicked him in the side and rolled him over on his back, then turned Nail’s head toward him with his
boot. Baker let go of both boys—neither was more than five years old—and the pair stood there shivering with fear. He pulled his LeMat from his belt and pounded the butt against the head of one of the boys, toppling the child across Nail’s torso.

“I’ll kill both of these tots unless you tell me where the diary is.”

Nail spat onto Baker’s boot, and Baker shot him through the shoulder.

“Tell me. I have plenty of men here and they’ll search the place once you’re dead. Tell me.”

Nail began laughing.

“It wasn’t here more than a night, and we’ve moved it. You’ll never find it, and whatever you do to me won’t matter, you silly, buggering arsehole, because my friend Temple is smarter than all of you.”

“Your friend Temple isn’t likely to last the day, either.”

Nail spat at him again. Baker put his Colt to Nail’s head and blew his brains out the back of his skull in a moist pile of bone splinters and flesh that turned the ground crimson.

Baker brushed droplets of blood off the front of his coat and stuffed the LeMat back into his belt. He dragged the first boy off Nail’s body and stood him next to the other; the pair looked away from him, quivering.

Baker reached down and patted one of them on the cheek.

“I’m not the kind who would kill either of you boys. You’re both going to grow up in a country that has a little more order to it. Run along.”

He watched the pair stumble away from Nail’s body and then break into a slow, winding trot as they headed back into the shacks of Swampdoodle.

“Move out across this shithole now,” he shouted to his men.

“We’re hunting for a diary.”

S
winging her arms until they felt like they would loop back upon themselves, Fiona tossed the only piece of leather luggage she had ever owned from the back of Mrs. Lincoln’s train shortly before the locomotive rumbled into Defiance, Ohio.

Buckles on the bag’s sides flickered in the sunlight as it tumbled end over end into a mound of grass alongside the tracks, ten feet away from Fiona, then twenty, then thirty, as the train, exhaling clouds of steam from its underbelly and barking three shrill blasts from its stack, slowed to a stop. Fiona made a short leap from the last step on the back of the train, clutching her medical bag under her right arm and extending her left to catch her balance as she landed.

Her luggage—scuffed and shrouded in gravel powder—rested reliably, indeed loyally, she thought, beside a blackened steel rail. The train had made the same brief, odd pause in Defiance as it had in every other station along its route so far. It took on no passengers and had no need to stop anywhere at all given the unusual and celebrated trio still riding inside it, yet at each station its engineer paused only long enough, it seemed, for local onlookers to marvel at industrial progress paying a noisy and unexpected visit.

Mrs. Lincoln’s train departed Defiance within minutes. As Fiona bent down to retrieve her luggage, she cocked her head sideways to contemplate the train’s caboose growing ever smaller in the distance. She was certain Robert Lincoln would be the first to notice that she was missing from the train. He would notice long before Mrs. Lincoln, who had barely emerged from the delirium she had so unfortunately
entered after pitching her diary at her son. And she believed that Robert Lincoln would notice her absence even before Lizzy Keckly, who had been monitoring Mrs. Lincoln by her bedside with unwavering and steadfast attention.

Fiona had wanted to give Lizzy a proper and grateful farewell, but Temple had told her not to pass beyond Defiance and by no means to continue on to Chicago because, sure as the day was long, there would be men waiting for her there. They would be men, Temple surmised, in league with Robert Lincoln and without sympathy for his mother. They would want the diary and they would want Fiona, and they would do whatever was necessary to extract any information they needed from her.

He had made it clear: leave the train in Defiance.

Fiona knew a train would be bound east from Defiance only thirty minutes to an hour after the Lincoln cars pushed through, and so she would be on her way back to Washington before Robert was any the wiser. Should he want to raise an alarm, his best bet would be to get off at the next station, Auburn Junction, to telegraph his handlers in Chicago and Washington—if in fact there was a telegraph in Auburn Junction. If he managed to do that, then all would still be well, because Fiona would be changing trains one more time on her return to the District, in Wheeling, from which she could then travel to Cumberland. In Cumberland, Alexander would meet her with horses and they would eventually slip back into the District at night. Temple had mapped all of this out with her before they ever went to the B&O to board Mrs. Lincoln’s train, and now, standing with her luggage in her hand, her medical bag under her arm, and a light veil of perspiration on her forehead, Fiona was ready to turn back toward home.

The station was a humble and empty clapboard assemblage, nearly as passive and commodious as a warehouse. Only two people were in sight, and neither of them paid mind to Fiona, just as they had not even furrowed a brow when her luggage arced out from the back of the imperious mass of iron, smoke, and speed that was
changing and absorbing the good people of Defiance despite their best efforts to preserve—in their town, their churches, their homes—what they had always preserved.

A faro dealer peeled out cards onto an empty table in front of him, waiting and preparing for a small group of optimists who would inevitably gather around him later in the day so that he could empty their pockets. As Fiona mounted the platform, he eyed her curiously but made no effort to bring her into his game. A young, chestnut-haired woman with a lovely cerulean petticoat peeking out from beneath her skirt sat on a bench minding her knitting and saying nothing as her hands bobbed in and out of her skein, the edges of a blanket forming around her needles. Just two people and utter silence, save for a breeze winding among the leaves at the top of a nearby row of buckeyes and inciting them to applaud gently. Or perhaps the buckeyes were snickering? Fiona thought on that possibility but chose to ignore its implications and strode with purpose to an indoor waiting room on the side of the station.

When the door swung outward from the waiting room, well before Fiona had gotten near enough to open it herself, she knew she was caught. She knew it because she knew the navy sleeve on the arm opening the door belonged to a Union soldier; she knew it because that same soldier was visibly pleased with himself and smiled at her with the satisfaction of someone who had been waiting patiently—hours and hours—to fulfill his duty and had, as a reward for his patience, just fulfilled it; she knew it again when two other soldiers crowded out from behind him through the doorway, making room for a short, mustachioed man fingering the top of his sword and wearing a uniform embroidered with gold braid at the shoulders that conveyed his rank over the three men in front of him; and she knew it with certainty when he smiled at her with the same satisfaction that had brightened the face of the first soldier, the one who had opened the door.

“Mrs. McFadden?” the officer purred.

“I am,” she said, having decided in the milliseconds available to
her that lying was pointless. There were several horses—six if her count was right—tethered to a rail in the yard beyond the waiting room, but they offered no hope of escape.

“Mr. Stanton, at Mr. Baker’s behest, dispatched men to every station along this line, and it does appear that we are the lucky ones to have encountered you, ma’am. The war secretary is a forward-thinking man.”

“I have heard as much of him. Are we to wait here together?”

“Yes, and we shall escort you on the train to Washington—after we have a moment to examine your luggage, ma’am.”

“Examine for what, pray tell?” Fiona asked.

“For a leather-bound diary penned in Mrs. Lincoln’s hand. Mr. Stanton would much like to have it.”

“Your name, sir?”

“Major Bufus Ragland.”

He reached for Fiona’s luggage, but she stepped back. He reached again, but she swung the bag away from him, so he stepped forward and smacked her across the cheek with the back of his hand. The blow staggered her and drew a welt out on her cheek. She dropped her luggage but held her medical bag close. The pair of travelers who had been sitting at the side of the station now stood up to stare, but neither spoke up. A woman traveling alone had questionable morals, and if four members of the Union army also found something amiss with her, then it was not up to anyone in Defiance to interfere.