The Lincoln Conspiracy (37 page)

Fiona got up from the bed and scooped the carte de visite from beneath her foot, slipping it inside her habit.

Father Walter put his hand on Mary’s head, telling her he would try to return the next day, and Fiona patted her on the shoulder, following the priest out of the cell. As the guard turned the key and the bolt slid back into its place, Mary stopped crying and rushed to her side of the door.

“Sister Grace, wait,” she shouted.

“Yes, Mrs. Surratt?”

“You must never, ever have children. They will betray you.”

The guard guffawed.

“She’s losing her mind now, ain’t she?” he said as they neared the stairway. “Thinking nuns are going to have babies.”

“Imagine,” Fiona said softly.

T
HE GUARD STOPPED
at a cell in the middle of the third tier and rapped on the door.

“The priest is back for a visit, McFadden,” he said. “Last chance.”

“I’ll keep watch over my soul myself,” Temple replied through the bars. “On your way. I’ll be fine.”

“But you can’t do it by yourself, Diogenes,” Fiona said.

“What?” the guard asked.

The planks on Temple’s bed creaked as he stood up inside the cell. He cleared his throat and shuffled. He cleared his throat again, trying to find his voice and struggling to keep his excitement at bay.

“It sounds like you don’t just have a priest out there.”

“No, there’s a nun, too,” the guard said.

Temple shuffled closer to the door, pausing for a moment. The chain on his handcuffs clanked and he caught his breath. My angel. My guardian angel.

“Right, perhaps I do need a hand in prayer,” he said. “Show them in.”

“You sit down on your bed until I have this door open.”

Temple shuffled back and the guard turned the key. Fiona entered the cell and Father Walter stepped in behind her, filling the space between her and the guard. Fiona slipped her hand inside her sleeve and withdrew the metal tube Alexander had gotten from Pinkerton and dropped it into the top of Temple’s boot.

Temple held her eyes with his as she straightened up and smoothed her skirts.

“My guests, I have to inform you that your hour has run its course,” Hartranft shouted up from below.

The general had returned, accompanied by two guards. Mary Surratt began wailing at the sound of his voice, her cries echoing into the corners of the ceiling that spread across the top of the cellblock.

“Goddammit, bag her head, too,” Powell screamed from his cell. “Bag her fuckin’ head and shut her up.”

Father Walter came out of Temple’s cell, and Fiona held her husband’s eyes for a moment longer before leaving as well.

“I haven’t had a chance to pray with this one yet,” the priest shouted down to Hartranft.

“One blessing,” the general responded.

Father Walter stepped forward and traced a cross on Temple’s forehead.

“For your sins, the Lord forgives you,” the priest said. “For the challenges that lie ahead, the Lord supports with his strength and wisdom.”

Father Walter backed out of the cell again. As the guard forced the iron door shut, Fiona faced Temple through the narrow opening as it shrank, still holding his eyes with her own. Before the door closed, she brought her hand up over her heart. The chains on Temple’s handcuffs clanked again as he pressed both of his hands against his chest in response.

Hartranft ordered two cavalry officers to escort Father Walter and Sister Grace’s carriage from the Old Arsenal to St. Patrick’s, and they set out from the penitentiary just as the sun began to set.

T
emple lay back on the bed planks and raised his left leg high, shaking it until the metal tube that Fiona had given him dropped onto his stomach. He pressed inward on the hinge in its middle to open it, and a long metal lock pick fell into his lap, along with three tightly rolled sheets of parchment. He slid the papers off his lap and spread his hands apart; there were only three links in the chain holding the cuffs together, and he could barely get the angle and the leverage he needed to jimmy the pick into the lock at the bottom of the left cuff. But he managed to slip it inside, and after fiddling for a moment he was able to pop open the cuff. He slipped it off his wrist and picked the other lock, shaking the cuffs into his lap and rubbing his wrists to let the blood circulate.

They had given him a small map and two notes, one from Allan Pinkerton and another from Fiona. He memorized the map, which displayed the layout of the Old Arsenal, and then read and reread each of the notes. When he was done, he tore up all three documents, stuffing them slowly into his mouth and washing them down his throat with a gulp of dirty water from the basin he used for his hands. He pulled a blanket up to his mouth to muffle his gagging while he swallowed, and when he was done put the pick back into the capsule, dropped it into his boot, and snapped the handcuffs back onto his wrists.

The next night, Temple would be leaving the Old Arsenal.

P
INKERTON, BEING
P
INKERTON
, had made it his business to find out the rotation of the soldiers at the penitentiary. After eleven-thirty
each night, the cellblock had one guard who replaced the four that patrolled it during the day. So, he wrote in his note to Temple, they would wait until after eleven-thirty the next night, when there wouldn’t be a moon, and Temple would have one hour to follow the instructions that Pinkerton had laid out for the escape. It could only be an hour, Pinkerton emphasized. Sharpshooters in the two towers atop the corners of the penitentiary’s ramparts would be likely to spot them the longer they lingered in the area.

Throughout the next day, Temple wondered where he would actually end up at the end of the night and why Pinkerton had returned. At midday, the guards stirred the prisoners and let them sit outside their cells for half an hour. Temple and Mary Surratt were the only two of the nine without leg irons, and the guards let them walk in the courtyard outside the cellblock. The walls surrounding them had begun to bake in the sun, and the bricks had become almost too hot to touch. Mary stood in the shade by one of the storage rooms, staring at the ground and mumbling. Temple walked over to her to begin a conversation, but the guards waved him off.

When Temple and Mary returned to the cellblock, the seven other conspirators were all back in their cells save for Lewis Powell, who sat above them on the second tier singing quietly. As they climbed the staircase, the guards had Temple wait on the second level while Mary was put back in her cell. Powell didn’t move as they walked by. He was large, with a thick neck and long, muscular arms, and his wrists and ankles were shackled in heavy irons. The laces on his canvas hood hung below his chin, and after Mary passed, he rolled his head to the left and spoke to Temple through the gap in the hood surrounding his mouth.

“Mighty injustice that Lewis Powell is in here, don’t ya think?” he said to Temple in a thick Southern drawl. “I was a war hero, one of Mosby’s Rangers, for chrissake. Nobody minded our killin’ when we was shootin’ Union soldiers. But go and take a piece out of William Seward and they call it murder, conspiracy, and a crime against the state.”

“It is a crime,” Temple said. “You deserve to be here.”

“Aw now, don’t begin lecturing me. Y’all is here, too.”

“So I am.”

“That’s a sockdologer, ain’t it?” Powell said, chuckling.

“Powell?”

“Yeah?”

“How’d you get involved in all of this?”

“Johnny Surratt. We were both in the spy services for Dixie. Dave Parr introduced us in Baltimore, and then Johnny introduced me to Booth.”

“Why isn’t John Surratt here?”

“Well now, that’s a mystery, ain’t it?” Powell said, chuckling again. “His mama’s got rights to be perturbed. All she ever did was feed us at that shithole boardinghouse they owned. And Johnny’s out runnin’ around still. Wooey. But if I’m near that bitch the next time she starts her screamin’, I’m gonna snap her fuckin’ head off clean, got me?”

“Got you,” Temple said as the guard came back and shoved him up the stairwell to the third tier of cells.

Late in the afternoon, Hartranft visited Temple’s cell in person to tell him that William Wood would be at the Old Arsenal the next day or the day after and that they intended to take Temple into the abandoned women’s cellblock for several hours of “persuasion.”

“You should reconsider your obstinacy, Mr. McFadden, and give Wood whatever it is that he’s seeking,” Hartranft advised. “He intends to beat it out of you if you don’t.”

“I’ll take your advice to heart,” said Temple. “I’ll do my best to avoid an unnecessary confrontation.”

T
EMPLE RETRIEVED THE PICK
from his boot as soon as heard the soldiers rotating through guard duty at eleven-thirty and popped the handcuffs off his wrists. He massaged his arms, stretched his back, and then hobbled to the cell door to listen. It took several more minutes for the soldiers to trade places, and then he listened for the lone
guard to begin his routine: a walk along the ground-level cells, then up to the second tier, and then to the cells on his level. After that, the guard would normally climb the stairs to the fourth level and sit there for most of the night because a series of windows ran in a line across the top of the opposing wall and they usually afforded a view of the moon. But tonight the sky was dark, and more than likely the guard would sit things out on the first level.

When the guard reached the second tier, Temple began coughing and gagging loudly enough to be heard through his door. By the time the guard was on the third level, Temple was gagging in full force.

“Dry heaves here, boss,” Temple said to the guard, sputtering as he did so. “I could use a latrine visit.”

“No latrine visits after seven
P.M.
, you know that,” the guard responded.

“Understood, boss, but then I’m going to soil my cell if you leave me here and one of you is going to have to clean that up in the morning.”

That logic appealed to the soldier, and he ordered Temple to step away from the door with his back to him.

“You’re keeping your cuffs on while you spew down at the latrine,” the guard said, placing the torch he was carrying into an iron holder on the wall and slipping his key into the cell door.

When the guard opened the door and entered the cell, Temple spun on him and pounded a fist into his throat and another into his belly. The guard doubled over, gasping for air, and Temple brought a knee up into his jaw, dropping him to the floor. He took the handcuffs off the bed and clipped the guard’s wrists together behind his back; he had already sheared into strips the single sheet they allotted him, and now he used the pieces to draw a tight gag through the soldier’s mouth, tying it in a heavy knot behind his head. He considered taking the guard’s uniform, but the man was a good five inches shorter than Temple, so he dragged him into a corner, picked up his cane, slipped out the cell door, and locked it.

As soon as Temple pocketed the key and grabbed the torch, Mary Surratt began to wail again, a low, wandering cry. None of the other conspirators seemed to be stirring. As long as Mrs. Surratt was the only one making a sound, the guards outside the cellblock wouldn’t raise an alarm; her wailings had now become as routine as the crickets chirping on the riverbanks outside.

He limped down the stairs as quickly as he could and came to a door on the west wall separating the men and women’s cellblocks. The door wasn’t locked, and he passed through into the next cellblock; on the southern wall was another door, locked, that led to the penitentiary’s washhouse. A soldier was seated next to the door snoring, his rifle leaning against the wall next to him. He was a six-footer, so his clothes would be a fit. Temple hobbled up to him and let out a low, flat whistle. The guard shook his head as he awoke and reached to his right for his rifle, but before he could focus on whatever or whoever it was that had roused him, Temple thumped him twice on the side of the head with his cane and put him back to sleep.

The key he had lifted from his cell worked on the washhouse door as well, and Temple went inside and waved the torch around the room just long enough to register everything that was inside it. There were more than a dozen caped, sky-blue Union greatcoats hanging from pegs on the wall. Several small metal washtubs sat on tables around the room’s perimeter, and a round bathtub on a wooden platform dominated the center of the room—just as Pinkerton had said it would in his note. Temple grabbed a burlap bag from one of the tables, then dunked his torch into a washtub to extinguish it before the light became noticeable outside the washhouse’s windows.

He dragged the unconscious guard into the washhouse, stripped off the soldier’s trousers, shirt, coat, and hat, and stuffed them into the bag. The fifth greatcoat to the left of the door was the longest one hanging on the pegs, and Temple counted out each one until he came to it and then he stuffed that into the bag as well.

The next piece of this is where it all rises or falls, doesn’t it, he thought to himself. Well, thinking of you always, Fiona.

Temple reckoned he had about ten steps to the middle of the room but when his right foot banged into the bathtub’s platform, he realized it was only nine. Damn my leg, he thought. He paused a moment to catch his breath before laying his cane down against the platform and feeling underneath the tub for its drainpipe. When he found the pipe, he circled it with his right hand and put his left on the rim of the tub, lifting it up and off the platform until the pipe cleared. Keeping his weight on his left leg, he rolled the tub onto its side on the floor and then turned it upside down. He nearly lost his balance straightening up before he pushed against the platform to see how tightly secured it was to the floor. If the platform was nailed to the floor, he planned on using his cane like a lever to pry it up. But it moved slightly when he pushed its side, and when he pressed his shoulder into it, wincing from the flash of pain where his bullet wound was still healing, the whole platform slid aside. Beneath it, as Pinkerton had said there would be, was a large metal grate sitting above the sewage line that served the entire penitentiary.