The Lincoln Conspiracy (33 page)

Augustus sent the diary back into the alleys with Sojourner that evening and then called out the damn journal again when he heard about what had happened to Nail and Temple. He could have done many other things that night; Augustus knew it wouldn’t be safe for him to return to his house, and perhaps it would never be safe to go there again. He thought that it might be best to leave the District. Surely if the war secretary had caught Temple, then the war secretary would catch Fiona and himself.

But the Booth diary also exerted a pull of its own and had become more than a puzzle. It was the basis for an accounting, a reckoning, and he aimed, like his friends, to see that the diary’s own peculiar paths were identified and followed.

“If you’re ever fearful of being followed, change houses frequently,” Temple had told him when they moved runaways through the Underground Railroad. “The more trails there are behind you, the harder you are to find.”

Augustus found a series of havens, first in a backroom at Myrtilla Miner’s Colored Girls’ School, then at the Wayland Seminary, and finally at Alfred Lee’s home on H Street. Alfred was one of the richest black men in the District, and the rumor was that in addition to his feed business he had almost $19,000 worth of real estate. Alfred
had been a generous sponsor of the Underground Railroad and owned enough property that Augustus felt he could secrete himself within the network of Lee’s buildings and not be found. Sojourner and Alfred were the only people who knew where he was, and Alfred once had claimed that he feared Sojourner’s wrath more than the law.

“As it should be,” Sojourner said when she heard this, amused. “Alfred’s in his right mind.”

Augustus had set to work in a bedroom at the back of the house, so no one could look in from the street and discern that someone inside was toiling away over a series of unintelligible diary entries and telegrams that had upended the District’s sense of order. The Colt rested lengthwise across the top of the table, within easy reach. He looked again at the twin columns of transcribed messages he had placed on the table below the gun. On the left side were several Booth had already decoded or that he and Temple had worked through earlier:

On the right side of the table, in the second column, were several new messages that Augustus had also transcribed:

Augustus hadn’t encountered “Conductor” or “Bully” elsewhere in the telegrams or in the diary. He flipped ahead in the journal to the page that he and Temple had used to unlock the Vigenère table:

Augustus rubbed his eyes and stood up, reuniting the telegrams into one stack and stuffing them back inside the diary. He wrapped the diary in its brown paper bundle, walked down the hallway, and placed the package between the wall and a large oak bookcase in his bedroom.

The little, the very little, I left behind to clear my name, the Government will not allow to be printed
. He used his candle to light a cranberry-colored oil lamp in the hallway outside his bedroom and then snuffed the wick of the taper between his thumb and forefinger. He was watching a faint gray tendril of smoke rise off the wick when
he heard a horse trot up in the street outside Alfred Lee’s home. He turned back to the oil lamp and wound down the wick until the yellow light disappeared from its tubular glass chimney, plunging the hallway into darkness.

The Colt was on the table in the room at the end of the hallway and Augustus moved toward it, sliding his hand along the wall to guide himself forward. He bumped into a chair, sending it sliding along the narrow floor with a brief wooden croak that echoed against the ceiling and walls around him. He froze, waiting, but heard nothing more from outside. He stepped forward again, dodging the chair and reaching the end of the hallway, his hands out in front of him and his fingers splayed as he swung his arms back and forth in the space across from his chest, blindly and frantically searching for the table.

Augustus heard the footsteps, distinct and with a series of creaks, as they mounted the wooden staircase at the front door. There were at least two people on the stoop, he guessed, and he began to wave his right hand wildly until he grasped the edge of the table. Then he slid his hand along the top and found the Colt. He considered cocking back the hammer but feared the sound would give him away. So he stood by the table and waited.

There were short raps on the front door, and he stepped forward into the sitting room to try to peer into the foyer. Two long vertical windows crisscrossed with slender muntins were at the front of the sitting room, but he was too far back in the house to see anything through the windows other than several blank town houses framed by a purple sky.

There were two more raps at the door. He pulled back the Colt’s hammer with the palm of his left hand, and it locked into place with a loud snap.

“Don’t you dare,” he heard through the door. “Don’t you dare cock a gun at me, Augustus.”

He exhaled and pushed the hammer forward.

When he opened the door, he found Sojourner staring up at him in irritation and nearly dancing a jig. Standing next to her was Fiona.

F
IONA’S CHEEKS WERE BRUISED
, her hair mussed into a brown tumbleweed. Augustus had never seen her so out of sorts and thought she looked almost like one of the ragamuffins who frequented the Center Market. Then her eyes, resolute and blue, flashed back at him. He reached out to her, sweeping her into his arms.

“Lordy, stop that and stop that now!” Sojourner demanded in a voice several registers above a whisper but still several more below a yell. “Anybody, just anybody, look out their window round here and see a black man embracin’ a white woman? I don’t need to tell you the consequences if word of that begins to get around the District, my children. Inside!”

When they were in the house and a candle was lit, Augustus led them to the back room again to avoid being seen from the street.

“Nail is dead and Temple is in a cell at the Old Capitol Prison,” Augustus said right away, mustering as much level-headed courage as he could to share the news with Fiona.

She sat down and stared off at a wall for several minutes, occasionally nodding in response to her own unspoken questions. She then asked Augustus for more details about how Nail had died and how Temple had been taken.

“Temple told me what to expect on that train, and he kept me from staying on it all the way to Chicago,” she said, breaking a long silence. “We’re going to have to get him out of that prison.”

Augustus lurched back in his chair.

“It’s the Old Capitol,” he said, shaking his head and reconsidering Fiona’s eyes to see if he could spot any demons there that might have shaped the notions spilling out of her mouth. “They take people in there and keep them for as long as they want. No one just gets people out of there.”

“We are going to help him escape,” Fiona said.

She fumbled for her bag, took a brush from it, and began pulling
the bristles through her hair in long, determined sweeps. Augustus brought bread, jam, and water from the kitchen and put it on the table.

“Poor Mr. Flaherty,” Fiona said to no one in particular. “He was a good man.”

“He was that Irish man from Swampdoodle, the blue ink cascading all over his hands?” Sojourner asked.

“He was.”

“Wild one, that man.”

They ate, and Fiona shared her interactions with Mrs. Lincoln and her sons on the train.

“Did you know that Mrs. Lincoln spent two thousand dollars on her gown for the president’s first inauguration ball?” she asked them.

“Southern senators made much of that, actually,” Augustus said. “In the Congress and in newspapers, Mrs. Lincoln’s debts were fodder for many a conversation. People knew.”

“Well, I didn’t know,” Fiona said. “Two thousand dollars. That was four years of Temple’s pay in New York.”

“The senators from the South had a different benchmark,” Augustus said. “They pointed out that Mrs. Lincoln’s two-thousand-dollar gown was the same price as two able-bodied slaves.”

“Mercy,” Sojourner said.

When Fiona told them about her encounter with the soldiers in Defiance, both Augustus and Sojourner shook their heads in disbelief. Sojourner reached over and stroked one side of Fiona’s face, cooing softly as she traced the outlines of the welt still faintly visible on her cheek.

Fiona told them of the cigar smoke and the knives and the strychnine, her voice straining against the recollection. Augustus and Sojourner were mute, listening to her tale and absorbing what had occurred in Defiance. Sojourner looked at the ceiling and pursed her lips, rocking back and forth in her chair.

“Well, child, we live in a complicated time,” she said to Fiona. “The good Lord works through all of us in mysterious ways. I suppose
that if God hadn’t wanted you to use that poison in that very moment, he wouldn’t have given you a sharp mind to learn about such things in the first place. And them soldiers were devils, no doubt.”

Augustus patted Fiona’s hand, nodding in agreement with Sojourner.

“The endless resourcefulness of Mr. and Mrs. McFadden,” he said. “But why was there a Pinkerton in, of all places, Defiance, Ohio?”

“A female Pinkerton, mind you,” Fiona said.

“Women are gettin’ in all the trades,” Sojourner said. “Just a matter of time, just a matter of time.”

“It would appear that despite the fact that my husband convinced him to leave the District, Mr. Pinkerton has a separate agenda.”

“The diary?” Augustus asked.

“Yes, but his agent did me no harm when I told her I didn’t have it; indeed, she escorted me through their network and onto a train back to Washington. They want more than just the diary, I assume.”

“And you found me through Sojourner when you got back to the District?”

“Temple told me that this would be the way to reorient when I returned. He said it wouldn’t be wise to return to our boardinghouse and that if I couldn’t go to Alexander’s, I should find our dear Sojourner. So I did.”

Sojourner stood up, took the brush off the table and began pulling it through Fiona’s hair herself.

“Why didn’t you go to Alexander’s?” Augustus asked.

“Because poor Alexander is somewhere on the railroad looking for me. I was supposed to meet him in Cumberland, but then I had my adventure in Defiance. I wasn’t sure where he would be, so I looked for Sojourner.”

Sojourner yawned, put the brush down, and told them she was wandering off to bed. Augustus and Fiona ate some more, and then he pulled out the Booth diary from behind the bookcase. They spent
an hour looking at the telegrams Augustus had transcribed, sharing thoughts about what they might reveal.

Augustus also told Fiona of his visit to the National Hotel during the Grand Review and his conversation with Booth’s betrothed, Lucy Hale.

“She said that John Surratt, the son of the boardinghouse owner, was a close confidant of Booth’s—and yet the government and the police have largely ignored him.”

Fiona turned the discussion back to the Old Capitol Prison.

“Temple is not the only person they have there, Augustus.”

“Of course he’s not.”

“Two of the conspirators are there, those accused of plotting the president’s assassination.”

“Mary Surratt and Samuel Mudd.”

“Yes, and Mrs. Surratt’s priest visits her there regularly, according to the papers.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The priest, Jacob Walter, has a Catholic church here in the District on F Street—St. Patrick’s. He also runs an orphanage there,” Fiona said, smiling faintly at the memory of how that particular geography discomfited her husband. “Temple hates orphanages and would have avoided F Street for that very reason—except that the Patent Office is on the same block.”