The Lincoln Conspiracy (3 page)

Temple rode the horse full chisel down 15th, past a line of new three-story row houses, and he weighed veering off onto Pennsylvania Avenue. But he stayed on 15th, gathering more speed and distance from the men chasing him. He dashed down to B where it met the Tiber Creek, a finger of water that was an open sewer, just like the Potomac. The Potomac, a long, brown snake that people dumped their piss and garbage into—and then they drank from it. Even the new pipes in the President’s House had Potomac water in them. Fiona thought water from the Potomac had killed the Lincolns’ little boy and everyone else in Washington who got the fever; she was happy to have found a boardinghouse with its own well water. The Potomac stank when summer arrived, and it got up into your head like the humidity. Things were right in Washington only in the spring and fall. Summers were the inferno and winter never got proper. Half snows, white dustings, always the promise of blizzards but nothing more.

Galloping east on B, he was close to completing the circle that had begun that morning at the B&O: the Smithsonian was out to
his right, surrounded by parkland across the Tiber, and the Capitol had come into view again, straight in front of him. But he didn’t plan on going that far. The Center Market would be busy today.

As he passed 9th Street on B, Temple looked back over his shoulder. The gents, three of them, were a couple of blocks behind him. Glassworks, butchers, embalmers, tanners, and dry grocers sold their wares nearby along Pennsylvania, but the stalls surrounding the market were given over to food—heaps of food that farmers and others carted into Washington to feed the troops and the locals. Wagons were piled high with the stuff, and the Tiber stench that wafted over the market didn’t stop vendors, cooks, grocers, boardinghouse owners, soldiers, and everyone else who lived in the District from crowding the weathered wooden stalls to buy yams, milk, apples, chickens, lettuce, bread, corn, pigs, and beer. The market, a yawning, single-story timber horseshoe, had its back to Pennsylvania and gaped open toward the Tiber, embracing the haze and the odors and the chaos. Temple swung his horse hard into the market’s main square and jumped a pair of heavy wagons that had closed in front of him. As he and the horse landed, he spotted David Dillon next to his vegetable stall, sorting heads of browning, wilting lettuce.

“Dilly, this is for you,” Temple shouted, sliding the leather satchel from his shoulder.

“What’s it?” Dillon queried, his voice laced with an Irish brogue Temple had lost years ago.

“It’s important. I need a favor. Bring this to Nail in Swampdoodle. I don’t have any time.”

“What’s it?”

“Please. I’m being chased, and I have no time. Don’t look inside.”

“You’re bloody and dirty.”

“We’ve both seen worse.”

“Well, indeed we have, Temple, indeed we have,” Dillon said as he wrapped his hands around the satchel and stuffed it down into his cart, between heads of lettuce and bunches of carrots.

“Get them to Nail in Swampdoodle,” Temple said. “I’ll be in your debt.”

Temple spun his horse around as three black stallions leapt the wagons and charged into the square, carrying the gents. His right leg was numbing, but he managed to kick his left heel into his horse’s side hard enough to send both of them streaking toward the back of the square, well away from Dillon. Temple was weary now, and the reins grew heavy in his hands. A bullet grazed his left shoulder almost as soon as he heard the shot from the gun that delivered it; a rivulet of blood ran down his arm toward his wrist, dripping from his cuff like thick, warm cider. And he was quite trapped. The wooden flanks of the market surrounded him, and the gents were blocking the only way he could escape on horseback. He slipped down from the saddle as he reached one of the market’s back corners and began looking for an exit beyond one of the food stalls, an exit that might take him onto Pennsylvania.

The gents, still on their horses, trotted up to him slowly. They had no need to rush now.

“Gentlemen,” Temple said, leaning on his cane, his back bowed.

“The papers,” one of the gents responded as the other two dismounted.

“Papers?”

Temple was too weak to get his cane off the ground. One of the gents pulled his gun from his belt and held it by the barrel—like a hammer, Temple thought. This is how death arrives. This is how death moves. The gent rushed toward Temple. A rifle shot snapped through the air, and the top of the gent’s head fragmented, blood and small pieces of bone erupting in a crimson halo around his skull.

Five men—some of the same ones who had been in the scuffle back at the B&O—were striding in a phalanx across the square, all of them armed with rifles. They fired rounds jointly this time, and the two gents still astride their horses dropped from their saddles before they could turn their mounts around.

The men in the phalanx continued Temple’s way, never breaking
their line. His cuff hung from his wrist like a wet rag, and he wiped it against the top of his pants. A fresh stream of blood reddened his fingers again. His head drooping, his breath short, Temple watched a few tufts of green grass rise toward him from a swirl of dirt, dust, and food scraps as he collapsed.

“M
ost of them died from flux and diarrhea,” said Springer. “They ate poorly. And the water killed many of them. On both sides. It wasn’t bullets. Bullets did their work, mind you. But don’t you think it shocked some of them to discover that their insides were rotting slowly, or a leg was putrid and the rot was crawling to other parts of their bodies, and that none of that seemed similar in the least to the glory they envisioned of dying in battle?”

“Don’t you think it shocked them?” Springer asked again. “Mrs. McFadden?”

Fiona laid the lancet and small saw in a shallow porcelain tub of water on the stand by the table where the officer’s corpse lay. A wide shaft of light slanted in through a window above her, bathing the tub in a frost that turned the rubied water a cloudy pink.

“Did we have to cut out that much of his leg this morning, Dr. Springer?”

“Mrs. McFadden?”

“Did we have to cut out that much of his leg? What were we trying to accomplish?”

“We tried to stop the rot. We always have to cut to stop the rot.”

“Yes, everyone cuts.”

Fiona gazed past Springer, into the airy galleries beyond him on the Patent Office’s second floor. Samurai armor and swords, one of Ben Franklin’s printing presses, presidential gifts from foreign dignitaries, and neatly tied rolls of state documents filled glass cases lining the museum’s walls. Most of the space in the cases was given over to row upon row of unusual and largely stillborn mechanical contraptions
that had won federal patents, including a model of a riverboat with inflatable devices on its hull so that it could better navigate the Mississippi’s shallows. Lincoln had designed and patented the contraption when he was still a congressman. Only several months before, cots and other makeshift hospital beds had crowded the gallery’s central space. Even then, many of the cots sat white and empty, floating parallel to the marble floor like a field of tumbled gravestones. Fiona, along with Springer and the other surgeons, had moved to smaller side rooms when the government renovated the gallery for Lincoln’s second inaugural ball, a month before he was shot.

Though death had clung to its walls, Fiona knew that Springer felt the Patent Office to be the grandest of spaces, and in moments when they had little to say to each other, he took pleasure in reminding her of his affection for the building. She turned to find him pleased that she was contemplating the office’s collections.

“President Lincoln thought our patent system a singular achievement, Mrs. McFadden, and—”

“I wish I could say the same of our medical system,” Fiona said, cutting him off.

“As I was saying, we are in a building that celebrates invention. And you have an inventive, independent mind. I commend you.”

“We are in a building that has been a hospital for the past four years. Very little of what we have done here has been inventive.”

“May I remind you that I am a doctor and that you are here to assist me?”

“Of course you may, Dr. Springer, though, as I’m sure you know, I am a graduate of Syracuse Medical College.”

“You are not a doctor.”

“I have studied medicine,” Fiona replied, her cheeks flushing. “I have studied medicine with men who claim to be doctors. And I have studied with a woman who actually is a very fine doctor.”

“Ah, Mrs. Walker.”

“Yes.”

“She wears trousers.”

“Mary Edwards Walker is a dedicated doctor.”

“Mrs. Barton and Mrs. Dix would agree with you,” said Springer, the corners of his mouth turning up into a broad grin. “But the thing remains: Mrs. Walker wears trousers!”

“As I do at times, Doctor. A dress and a corset make it impossible to work.”

“I’ve offended you,” Springer said, his eyes still twinkling.

“Please, sir, make your rounds in a corset for a day. You’ll understand.”

“What I don’t understand is your aversion to amputation.”

“I fail to see what it accomplishes. We probe the wounds with dirty fingers, and we operate with pus and blood on our gowns. We scrape the bone and tissue away and pack the abscess with soiled cotton. It’s all so … septic.”

“A minié ball tears flesh like a reaper. If we don’t cut, the rot sets in.”

“We don’t try anything else, Doctor. How do we know?”

“Inventive, Mrs. McFadden, always inventive. As I said, good that you are toiling here, surrounded by the promise of innovation. You are averse to pus, but some pus is laudable. It means the wound is curing.”

“Then why do they die? Why did this one die? Pus seeped from his leg four days ago, then stopped; the poor man went into a fever, and now he’s dead.”

Fiona turned away from the table. Springer’s favorite cures were lined along a shelf on the wall—carbolic acid, bichloride of mercury, quinine, sodium hypochlorite, Dover’s powder—next to bottles of anesthetics such as chloroform, morphine, and laudanum that Springer dispensed generously whenever he felt compelled to slice into soldiers’ limbs.

“The war is over,” Fiona said softly, still facing the wall. “The only ones we treat now are the occasionals, the ones that Secesh
snipers and other holdouts fire on. We could do better than this. They deserve to get home alive now that the war is done.”

“You and your fellow Sanitary Commission members shouldn’t be overly fond of your own prescriptions on hygiene, Mrs. McFadden. It got General Hammond into trouble, didn’t it?”

“I believe that Secretary Stanton got General Hammond into trouble. The secretary seems to share your views on medical practices in our military.”

“I’ll let the secretary of war know your displeasure. I’m sure he’ll find it of utmost importance.”

Fiona wheeled around. “Dr. Springer—”

She stopped. They weren’t alone any longer. A Union soldier was standing in the doorway.

“There is a man downstairs to see Mrs. McFadden,” the soldier said.

“Do you know him?” Fiona asked.

“No, ma’am. He is well dressed and says he is a friend. His name is Augustus Spriggs. He said it is urgent.”

“Please, show him up.”

“Ma’am?”

“Show him up.”

“He’s contraband, ma’am.”

“He most certainly is not.”

Springer went to the window and gazed down.

“He’s a nigger, certainly,” said Springer. “In a bowler. A nigger in a bowler, and your lady doctors in pants. Mrs. McFadden, you are inventive. And you choose inventive associates, no doubt.”

“I’ll be leaving for the day,” said Fiona, picking up her bag and removing her smock. “I found our conversation today enlightening, Dr. Springer. Thank you for indulging me.”

“My pleasure, Mrs. McFadden.”

Fiona accompanied the soldier downstairs and pushed through the Patent Office’s doors onto F Street. Augustus was pacing; despite
the heat, his bowler was in place and his collar was crisp. Fiona waited for the soldier to go back inside before uttering a word.

“What’s wrong, Augustus?”

A coachman sitting atop a carriage across the street was staring at them. His jacket was torn and dusty. Augustus leaned in toward Fiona, his hands trembling.

“If Pint and I had caught up to Temple at the train station, we might have protected him.”

“Augustus, is Temple alive?”

“He’s alive, but he’s been shot. He’s at Pint’s in Foggy Bottom. We’re to go there at once.”

Fiona stared blankly at Augustus, absorbing what he had told her.

“Where was he shot? Who shot him?”

“In the Center Market. We don’t know yet who shot him. We should go.”

“Who’s tending to him?”

“Pint is with him.”

“But who is tending to his wounds?”

“He told us to wait for you.”

“Where are the wounds?”

“I don’t know. He’s lost blood.”

“Augustus, wait here a moment.”

“Fiona, we should go.”

But Fiona had already dashed back into the Patent Office. Augustus watched the door swing closed behind her, thinking of how many times Temple had told him that he prized Fiona’s spirit in much the same way that he prized Augustus’s education (“Tell me about Homer again, Augustus. We’re in a time of war. You have to steer me right, you and Fiona”). Still, the longer it took Fiona, the more exposed all of them were. Whenever he came to the Patent Office before, he had always waited for Fiona with Temple, never alone. They were a threesome, and Augustus took comfort in that, in
their dinners, in their small group of friends, in his books and students, in prayer, in his tiny patch of order in a place tilting mad.

Now there was disorder, the kind that Temple liked to plunge into when he became restless (“Off to figure it all out, Augustus. See you when I see you”). Disorder only made Augustus anxious, and anxiety, whenever it arose, tugged at him and made him hungry for the dens and calmer, dreamier places.

He shook off the thought and glanced at the coachman, whose eyes were still fixed on him and the door of the Patent Office. He held the reins firmly with his left hand. His right was slipped inside his jacket, where, Augustus suspected, a gun sat ready.