The Lincoln Conspiracy (32 page)

“The sun, too, shines into cesspools and is not polluted,” Temple said.

“All you need to do is tell me where the Booth diary is. Speak up and I will get you out of here.”

“We have two ears and one tongue so that we would listen more and talk less,” Temple replied.

“You are going to stay in this cell barking platitudes at me—platitudes from a failed and homeless philosopher—while your wife and friends remain at risk?”

“I have nothing to ask of you, Mr. Stanton, but that you would remove to the other side, that you may not, by intercepting the sunshine, take from me what you cannot give.”

Stanton shook his head and removed his spectacles. Temple thought it again: this was a weary man, bent by the weight of having prosecuted a bloody and uprooting war.

“You must understand that I thought President Lincoln to be a miraculous and extraordinary man,” Stanton said. “I did not hold him in high regard when I first encountered him as a lawyer in Ohio, and I certainly did not hold him in high regard even when he invited
me into his administration. Perhaps none of us did. But I came to love, admire, and respect him as the greatest man I have ever met. I would have made any sacrifice to protect him.”

Temple stared at the floor.

“I will give you until tomorrow evening to make up your mind. Mr. McFadden, we will kill all of you if we have to, but we will have that diary.”

As he departed, Stanton ordered the guards to leave Temple unbound, find two extra men to escort him to and from the latrine in the prison yard, and then bring him food, water, and a pitcher and towel to clean himself.

Temple interrupted Stanton’s departure with the same question he had asked of Wood.

“Who is Maestro?”

Stanton looked at Temple and shook his head, sighing as he left the cell.

T
HAT EVENING
, W
OOD
ordered his prison guards to move Temple, as well as Mrs. Surratt and Dr. Mudd, from the Old Capitol Prison to the Old Arsenal Penitentiary.

The Old Arsenal was a massive brick fortress several times larger than the Old Capitol and was home to none of the spycraft and intelligence gathering that had made its sister institution so noteworthy. Instead, the Old Arsenal, closed for years and reopened only recently at the war secretary’s command, was dedicated solely and enthusiastically to a single mission: incarcerating the assassination conspirators and diminishing them as they awaited trial.

Dominating the tip of Greenleaf Point, where the Potomac and Anacostia rivers flowed together, the Old Arsenal featured heavily guarded, twenty-foot rampart walls that enclosed a sprawling, open yard baked by the sun. Inside the courtyard, a large brick building housed workrooms and dining rooms. The entire northern side of the penitentiary was a three-story brick slab lined with cells for prisoners, flanked on one end by the warden’s residence and a chapel and
at the other end by the deputy warden’s quarters. Two squat, white wooden guard towers, topped by domed roofs and rounded like gazebos, loomed over the southeastern and southwestern corners of the entire structure and were manned by two lookouts and two marksmen from the military’s rifle corps. The military was ordered to run the Old Arsenal with an eye toward Secesh sympathizers attempting to free the conspirators. Stanton mandated that Jack Hartranft, a Union general whom President Johnson had appointed to run the penitentiary, should keep the Old Arsenal in a state of lockdown—no one in, no one out, unless they had written orders from the war secretary or William Wood.

The Old Capitol guards herded Temple, Mrs. Surratt, and Dr. Mudd into the back of an enclosed wagon around midnight. It was the first time Temple had seen either of them. Two guards hoisted Mrs. Surratt into the wagon, and she sat down on a narrow bench lining one of its walls. Her dark hair was parted in the middle and swept into a tight bun, and her wrists, like Temple’s, were bound by a pair of handcuffs fitted with six inches of chain. A rosary dangled from her hands and she kneaded its beads between her thumbs and fingers, her lips moving in silent prayer from the time she was stuffed inside the back of the wagon until they reached the Old Arsenal.

Guards placed Temple aboard next, and then they lifted Dr. Mudd into the back of the wagon. Almost bald and with a heavy moustache and goatee, Dr. Mudd looked just as listless and tired as Mrs. Surratt. His handcuffs, however, were unusual—a pair of Lilly irons that were several inches thicker around the wrists than the pairs binding Mrs. Surratt and Temple. Rather than being connected by a chain, Dr. Mudd’s handcuffs were linked by a pair of flat, almost planar, iron slats that fitted over each other and then were locked together with a custom deadbolt. Temple had seen Dr. Mudd’s handcuffs only in photographs that Alexander Gardner had taken of the prisoner camps; Union soldiers used them to hold Secesh and other prisoners of war. It was impossible for the doctor to move his hands, and he rested them in his lap.

“Mrs. Surratt, I would like to introduce myself,” Temple said. “I am a detective with the Metropolitan Police Department and I would like to help you.”

She kept on praying, her lips expanding into occasional O’s and then flattening into efficient, thin lines as she continued murmuring into the night. Temple introduced himself again, but she ignored him.

He also tried to start a conversation with Dr. Mudd, whose eyebrows were arching and curling in a fashion so rapid and odd that Temple could only conclude that the doctor was panic-stricken.

“Doctor, might we have a word, I—”

“Why are we here?” he snapped back.

“Well, that’s exactly one of the things I would like to know, Dr. Mudd. Why are we in this prison?”

“Why are we here?” the doctor said again, not heeding him.

“I believe we are because we stand accused.”

“I know we are accused, you fool. I want to know why we’re here, in this wagon at this hour. If you can’t tell me, then please do not accost me any further.”

The rest of the ride from the Old Capitol to the Old Arsenal was made in silence. But when they reached the Old Arsenal and were pulled down off the back of the wagon, Mrs. Surratt burst into a long, low cry, one that stretched into the night like a mother mourning for a child. Stumbling away from the wagon, she pointed at six men lined up near the prison’s gates, and she began shrieking and sobbing even louder.

Each of the men, all of whom were also alleged to be involved in the conspiracy to assassinate the president, wore white canvas hoods that gathered tightly around their necks with small, laced gaps for their mouths and no other openings, even for their eyes. Each wore a pair of Lilly irons on his wrists and across his ankles; the devices securing the men’s legs were also chained to seventy-five-pound iron balls.

Mrs. Surratt collapsed to the ground, still pointing at the men
while she rolled the beads of her rosary in her left hand, her screams tracing the Old Arsenal’s walls and echoing in the courtyard beyond the gates.

“You better shut it now, you dirty bitch, or we’ll shut it for you,” one of the guards shouted.

The guard lifted the butt of his rifle to strike her down, but Temple stepped in between her and the soldier, wrapping up the rifle’s stock in the chains of his handcuffs and then spinning the entire weapon up and out of the guard’s hands.

As the rifle clattered to the ground, it discharged with a burst of fire and a clap, sending a bullet whizzing into a wall thirty yards away. The shot silenced Mrs. Surratt, who kept pointing at the hooded conspirators until she fainted a moment later. Another guard stepped over and slammed his gun into the back of Temple’s head, knocking him out.

W
HEN
T
EMPLE AWOKE
the next morning, he was lying on a lumpy shuck mattress on the floor of a cell. His cane was propped in the corner, but other than that there were no other objects in the room.

A faded sheet of paper hung inside a frame on the wall of his cell. It was inscribed with a list of rules that had been prepared many years before, when the Old Arsenal was a fortress still devoted to reform and when the prisoners were meant to cultivate a set of civic principles that they could take with them into proper society when they were freed:

The list reminded Temple of similar rules at his orphanage in Dublin. All that distinguished this place from the prison of his childhood were bars.

T
HE SAME DAY
, Stanton visited Wood in his office at the Old Capitol to ask why Temple had been transferred to the Old Arsenal along with the conspirators.

Wood rocked back on his chair, considering the question. Together he and Mr. Stanton had navigated all of the difficulties of waging a vast and complex war, as well as the messy, untoward business of supervising the District and rooting out spies and other miscreants. Mars, as Mr. Lincoln had so fondly nicknamed him, had never found need to question Wood’s judgment in such matters before. Even so, the war secretary wanted an explanation of McFadden’s relocation, and Wood was pleased to oblige.

“Those conspirators are going to hang, Mr. Stanton.”

“So we hope they will. They are murderers, each and every one of them.”

“And when they hang, they will hang in the courtyard of the Old Arsenal,” Wood continued. “We will make sure that when that day comes, Mr. McFadden will be seated with a view so he can see each of them swing. That, Mr. Stanton, is sure to loosen his tongue—if, of course, whatever we do in the meantime fails to produce the information we need.”

F
iona and Kate Warne arrived in the District by train in the early evening. Warne told Fiona to remain on board and then walked the length of the platform in the B&O and looked into the station’s main concourse to see if there was anyone waiting for them. Robert Lincoln would have had ample time to telegraph that Fiona had left the Lincolns’ Pullman car well before Chicago, but the B&O appeared to hold no surprises. Two teenage Union soldiers were guarding the doors separating the platform from the depot’s concourse, and passengers and baggage handlers were milling about—nothing and no one out of place. Twice, as she returned to the train, Warne spun around to see if she could catch someone observing her. Not a soul.

When Warne returned to the train, Fiona was gone. A peach-hued piece of paper rested on the seat that Fiona had occupied: “Thank you for escorting me.”

Warne stepped off the train and scanned the platform again, but Mrs. McFadden was not to be seen. Most likely she had gotten down onto the tracks at the rear of the train and followed the rails out the station’s side and onto D Street. Smart girl, Warne thought to herself. Smart girl.

There was no need to chase Mrs. McFadden. The handoff had been made, and Warne had fulfilled Mr. Pinkerton’s orders. She went back on the train to collect her luggage.

A
UGUSTUS HAD PLACED
on a table the decoded entries he had transcribed from the telegrams inside the Booth diary, then slid a
candle between the two columns of paper to better read them in the fading light. For two days, since Alexander had sent word of Nail’s murder and Temple’s imprisonment, Augustus had slept and eaten little. He didn’t know if Fiona was safe, and he wasn’t sure what he should do with the diary if he remained its primary guardian—if, in the end, Temple and Fiona were unable to come back for it.

Alexander had disappeared in search of Fiona, and Pint had all but evaporated. Temple had said not to respond to any messages from Pint but wouldn’t say why.

Augustus pressed his thumb into the cover of the diary, and a shallow depression appeared for a moment before the red leather sprang back up and the dimple vanished. He peered inside again at Booth’s writing, at sentences drawn in tight, neat lines and occasionally extravagant loops, the script tethered by incredulity and rage.

It was a slender thing, this assassin’s journal, full of meanderings and self-regard, and now so much revolved around it. Augustus held
it up as if it were an artifact, trying to appraise its value. Sojourner had returned the diary to him the morning of Nail’s murder, and Augustus wasn’t sure he wanted to be near its scribblings and bile anymore. There were parts of the diary he couldn’t escape, and some of its sentences repeated themselves in his mind, pursuing him around the District.

The little, the very little, I left behind to clear my name, the Government will not allow to be printed
. After leaving the National Hotel on the second day of the Grand Review, Augustus had avoided Pennsylvania and its crowds. Temple had asked him to meet at the canal entrance near Godey’s Kiln at five o’clock that afternoon, but Temple had never appeared.