The Lincoln Conspiracy (36 page)

“Well then, Sister Grace, are you certain that you’re prepared for a visit to the Old Arsenal? It may be one of the most unforgiving hellholes you will ever see.”

“I trust that the good Lord will watch over me.”

“Of course you do, dear. Of course you do.”

She was rather fine-looking, Wood thought. She had beautiful, translucent blue eyes and full lips. Why, if he weren’t a guardian of the law he might just take her right here on his desk. Yep, take her on his desk and teach her the meaning of salvation.

Wood yanked two pieces of paper from his desk drawer and dipped the nib of his quill into the umbrella-shaped ink well by his right hand. He dated both sheets and noted that their bearers had his authorization to visit the Old Arsenal that afternoon to interview Mary Surratt. He dipped his quill again, signed both sheets, and then waved his hand over them to help the ink dry.

“You are both lucky that I am in a magnanimous mood today,” Wood said. “I don’t think I shall permit any visits with the conspirators after this. I think I have already given them more liberties than they deserve.”

“I have come to understand that you have them in hoods, with their heads completely covered except for a small opening for their mouths,” the nun replied. “Surely there is little more you could do to strip away their dignity than that.”

Wood’s hand stopped moving over the sheets of paper, and Father
Walter turned in his seat to look directly at the nun. Wood laid the quill down on the desk and folded his hands together in front of himself. His eyes rose and locked on the nun’s.

“In fact, there is quite a bit more I can do to disrupt their sense of themselves, and I feel absolutely no remorse or moral confusion about any of it,” Wood said. “These people killed President Lincoln. They are murderers. They don’t deserve dignity.”

Sister Grace looked away from Wood and let escape a breath she had been holding in her chest. She turned back to him, avoiding his eyes.

“I understand your position. Forgive my insolence, Mr. Wood,” the nun said, bowing her head and blessing herself with a brief sweep of her hand across her face and shoulders.

Wood resumed fanning the pages in front of him and then slid the two sheets of paper across his desk to Father Walter. Clearing his throat, he called in the guard standing watch outside his door.

“Show both of these people downstairs to the courtyard and have them escorted to the Old Arsenal as soon as a military transport can be arranged. They have my authorization to visit the penitentiary and are carrying permissions from me to that effect.”

The nun and the priest took the sheets of paper and began to leave Wood’s office. He stopped them as they reached the door.

“Father Walter.”

“Yes?”

The priest turned around.

“You left your rosary on my desk, Father.”

The priest stepped forward and took the rosary, rolling it into his hand and sliding it into the sleeve of his cassock.

“God bless,” Wood said as the tired old priest and the little harpy he’d dragged in with him finally departed. “Yes, that’s right. God bless. God bless and go rot.”

A
BOUT AN HOUR
after leaving Wood’s office in the Old Capitol, Father Walter was in the back of a carriage with Sister Grace, accompanied
by a cavalry officer on horseback who rode along behind them as they made their way to the Old Arsenal. Surrounded by soldiers, the priest had said little to the nun outside the Old Capitol; alone with her in the carriage, he struggled to contain himself.

“How did you take it upon yourself to decide that the time was right and proper for you to be a critic of Mr. Wood’s treatment of the prisoners?” he asked her. “Particularly when we were already going to be beholden to him for the documents he provided certifying our eligibility to enter the Old Arsenal?”

“I apologize, Father. It was insubordinate and rash of me—I just found the man’s certitude to be impossible to countenance. There was also something so horrifying about his comportment. And to think that the war secretary puts such stock in a man like that.”

“Your behavior put us both in danger.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Remember, please, you are playing a role, Mrs. McFadden. That means that you aren’t entitled to be yourself.”

“I don’t know that I’ve been myself at all for the past weeks.”

G
ENERAL
H
ARTRANFT AND
a pair of soldiers escorted Father Walter and Fiona into the Old Arsenal’s main cellblock, a yawning, three-story warehouse of dense masonry that was empty except for four tiers of narrow, seven-foot-high cells that spanned one of its walls. Iron walkways, accessed by stairwells on either end, ran the length of the three upper tiers. Each cell had an iron door topped with a lattice of metal that allowed a modicum of light and air to creep inside. Although the cellblock could hold eighty prisoners, its only occupants were the eight conspirators about to be tried for assassinating the president and a man the penitentiary’s stewards knew to be a disgraced police detective and honeyfuggler with a pronounced limp who had conspired against the government in a separate and unctuous affair.

“We have another cellblock here that can hold sixty-four women, Sister Grace, but we elected to keep Mrs. Surratt with the men because
there is ample room at the inn,” said Hartranft. “But I refused to put her in one of those hoods the men are forced to wear, and she is also free from leg irons and handcuffs. Perhaps those are small concessions, but we are trying to respect her womanhood.”

“Father Walter and I are eager to meet with her, General, and your considerations for our parishioner will not be forgotten.”

“One of my men will escort both of you to her cell, then. My understanding is that you have an hour to visit with Mrs. Surratt. I will return and see you out when your time has expired.”

“General, if any of the other prisoners wish to visit with us as well, are we free to minister to them?” Father Walter asked.

“Indeed you are, Father, but you will still only have an hour here.”

Fiona fell into line behind Father Walter as the guards brought them upstairs to the second tier of cells. The first cell they passed was empty; a rat scurried past their feet as they drew near the second.

“The bitch ain’t in this one, folks,” said a voice from inside the cell. “You just keep movin’ along now.”

“Who is held in here?” Father Walter asked one of the guards.

“It’s Lewis Powell, and I don’t think he cares a jot for whatever generosity you’re bringing here today, Father. He’s the one who sliced open the secretary of state’s face, and he’s the damnedest one among them.”

“Damned for all time and proud of it. Damned for being a cutter,” Powell said, his thick frame filling the metal screen at the top of his cell door as he pressed into it. His mouth was visible through a single opening at the bottom of the white canvas hood enveloping his head. “Mmm-hmmm, I say, mmm-hmmm. I can almost smell it. I know we have a fine specimen of femininity in our midst today.”

As they continued moving along, Powell pushed up against the weight of the shackles on his wrists, curled his fingers through the screen on the door, and stuck his tongue through one of the gaps as he licked the bars.

“Get the sister inside my cell to save my mortal soul,” he said, cackling. “Get her in here and I will make her mine.”

The next cell was empty, in keeping with Hartranft’s orders that the prisoners had to have gaps between their cells to prevent them from communicating with one another. The guard stopped at the fourth cell and raised a key to the door.

“She’s in here,” he said.

The door offered a low, heavy grunt as it swung back on its hinges, and the block of light that fell into the cell illuminated the legs and feet of its occupant, who was seated on a wooden plank that also served as her bed.

Mary Surratt didn’t speak or stand up as Father Walter and Fiona entered the cell.

“May we visit alone with Mrs. Surratt, please?” the priest asked the guard. “Her spiritual needs are a private matter.”

“I’ll need to lock you in with her, then, Father.”

The guard slammed the door shut again, leaving the cramped cell almost completely dark save for the patchwork that came through the top of the door and drew a faint checkerboard on the far wall. There wasn’t enough room in the cell for the three of them to move, and neither the priest nor the nun could see Mrs. Surratt’s face. But they could hear the soft whimpering spilling out of her in breathy arcs.

“Mary, I’ve brought someone special to see you today.”

“I am going to die in here, Father Walter. I swear, all that I can be certain of anymore is that I am to die in here.”

“Your family and I are working night and day to compel President Johnson to consider the charges against you and to free you. I am putting my faith in the Lord that you shall soon be free of your tormentors.”

“My family can’t do a thing to help me, not a thing,” Mary said. “And the one who might be able to come to my aid—my own son, my Johnny, my flesh and blood—has abandoned me.”

“I think Sister Grace here might be able to lighten your burden. I have brought her with me so that you may have a woman to confide in.”

Mary began whimpering again, rocking back and forth on the
plank until it squeaked in protest. Her whimpers gave way to a soft cry, and when the priest stepped over and put his hand on her shoulder, she took his other hand and kissed the back of it.

“Thank you for your many and varied kindnesses, Father Walter,” she said, sliding off the plank and kneeling in front of him, her face still obscured in the darkness.

She and her priest prayed together for several minutes, and when they were done, Father Walter bent down and whispered into her ear.

“I’ll come back soon,” he said to her as he stood back up and called to the guard, asking for an escort to see if other prisoners sought spiritual counsel. The guard consented to leaving the door to Mrs. Surratt’s cell open so that she and the nun would have more light, but insisted on another guard standing watch at the end of the walkway.

“May I sit next to you?” Fiona asked.

“Father Walter has told me why you are here,” Mary said, sliding down to one end of the plank and into the light, revealing her face to Fiona for the first time.

Mary was sturdy and plain, her brown hair parted in the middle and swept into a simple bun. Her warm gray eyes floated above crescent-shaped pouches darkened by a lack of sleep, and she had the stubby, chafed fingers and thick nails of a woman who had worked with her hands her entire life. She was not a beautiful woman, but she was not of the Amazonian sort, as the papers would have had it. She was, like Mrs. Lincoln, thrown off kilter by the disappointments in her life.

Mary bent toward Fiona and whispered into her ear. “Father Walter said you are a confidante of the president’s widow.”

“An acquaintance, not a confidante.”

“I must tell you that I hated her husband and I have no joy in my heart for the niggers,” Mary said. “But never in the world, even if it was the last word I have ever to utter, was I part of a plot to kill Abraham Lincoln. Never.”

Fiona drew away from her for a moment and then leaned back toward her.

“Your son?”

“What of my son?”

“Has he any complicity in this?”

“He was John Wilkes Booth’s partner in many things, but he never spoke to me of murder.”

“What did he speak of?”

“My son is an enthusiast. He is enamored of many things—except for his mother.”

She balled her hands into fists and dug them into her eyes, her back convulsing as she sobbed. The guard came down the walkway and peered in for several moments before leaving the women alone again.

“To have birthed a son, to have raised him and fed him and dutifully brought him into the embrace of the Church, only to have him abandon me,” she said, trying to bring her voice down as she continued to sob. “I do not know Mrs. Lincoln, but I do know that gossip in the District had it that she, too, shares the curse of an ungrateful and spiteful son. And I am imprisoned here in his stead, I tell you. I barely knew Mr. Booth, but my son consorted with him regularly. Yet he is not to be brought into this manhunt rather than me?”

She drew a carte de visite of a slender, pale young man from inside her blouse and began to tear it in half.

“Wait!” Fiona said. “Is this your son?”

“It is, Sister Grace. He is a demon to me now.”

She threw the image to the floor. Soldiers had begun drilling in the courtyard outside, and the sounds of their boots hitting the ground in unison wafted into the cellblock.

“What were your son’s enthusiasms?” Fiona asked.

Mary pushed the tears off her cheeks.

“He loved Dixie, for certain. And the Church. And Elmira.”

“Elmira?”

“Elmira, New York. There is a Union prison camp there where Confederate soldiers are held. He was there frequently, plotting to free the soldiers. I have told the authorities this. I and many other
sympathizers gave him money to support his activities there. I have told this to Mr. Stanton’s investigators as well.”

“Did he live in Elmira?”

“No, he did not. He stayed in Manhattan whenever he went up there.”

“With whom did he stay?”

“A benefactor. Someone of ample means.”

“Do you recall his name?”

“John never spoke his name to me.”

“How is it that you came to know of a wealthy benefactor, then?”

“On two occasions, deep into his drink, he said his friend in New York could book him free passage on the trains anytime he wanted to go to Elmira. He also said this man was a colossus who was going to change the world.”

“That is all that he ever said about him?”

“He referred to him as Maestro.”

T
HE GUARD AND
Father Walter found Mrs. Surratt on her bed, doubled over and sobbing again, when they returned to the cell. Fiona was next to Mary, rubbing her back.

“Sister Grace, we have little time, I am afraid. Only fifteen minutes or so,” the priest said. “There is a prisoner on the block above us whom I think we need to encourage to pray with us. None of the others here say they have the need.”