The Crescent Spy (34 page)

Dunbar looked up with a dejected expression, but as soon as he met her gaze, he sprang to his feet. “Miss Breaux!” He hastily fastened the top two buttons of his shirt and grabbed for his gray jacket.

“Please don’t trouble yourself,” she said. “Look at me—I’m worse.”

“You’re as beautiful as ever.”

“You’re a bad liar, Major. I’ve been into the river and through two battles. My clothes are torn and my hair is an egret’s nest.” She rubbed her hands together nervously. “Have they been treating you well?”

“Well enough. They separated me from my men and confiscated my pistol and sword, but I have not been abused in any way. How about yourself?”

“I’ve been treated well,” she said. “But I’m not a prisoner.”

“That’s a mercy. Given your reputation, I’d worried that you’d be hard put upon, lady or no.”

He seemed genuinely relieved, and she flinched from her duty. He didn’t understand; he still thought she was a Confederate patriot. It would be an easy task to make him talk. All she had to do was sit next to him on his bed, lay her hand over his, and ask direct questions. He’d tell her everything about the fort and what he’d heard about defenses upriver at Quarantine and New Orleans. She couldn’t do it.

“Well, I suppose I should leave. I wish you the best, Major.”

“Wait! If you’re not a prisoner, does that mean you’re free to come and go?”

“Yes, of course.”

“This is a lucky stroke. That they would leave us alone . . . What a bit of fortune at our darkest hour! I need you to pass a message to General Lovell.”

“Major . . .”

“You won’t be in any danger. If you’re caught, blame me, say I pressed until you couldn’t say no. Farragut is a gentleman. He was born in Tennessee and his wife is from Virginia. He knows we aren’t monsters. He’s only doing his duty, and his duty doesn’t include hanging a young lady caught with compromising military intelligence.” Dunbar reached into the pocket of his jacket and removed a folded piece of paper. “I have critical information about Butler’s troops. I wrote it down this morning, scarcely daring to hope that it would find its way to General Lovell.”

“Major Dunbar, please don’t tell me any more.” She held out her hands as he pushed the note at her. “No, I won’t take it.”

She knew she should take Dunbar’s letter and hand it over to either Franklin or Farragut, but what difference would it make at this late hour? General Butler had fifteen thousand troops downriver, ready to assault the forts if they couldn’t be made to surrender without further violence. And once the forts fell, what then? Lovell might have a few thousand militia in New Orleans, but that included such units of dubious worth as the riverboat gamblers of the Blackleg Cavalry. And as she had so carefully described in her dispatches, the federal fleet could easily puncture the levee and flood the city, rendering helpless any defense.

Her work done, Josephine desperately wanted to avoid this final betrayal.

“Please remember,” she said gently in response to his befuddled frown. “I have experience passing behind enemy lines. I don’t only work for the newspaper, I work for the government. What information I collect, I pass along to my superiors. Think about that for a moment.”

“Like you did in Virginia,” he stumbled on. “At Manassas. If you’d do that for General Beauregard, why can’t you do it for me? All I’m asking is that you carry this information to Lovell. If you can get this to him before the Yankees arrive . . . Can’t you do that for me? Josephine, for the love of God.”

“You still don’t understand,” she said sadly. “I can’t do that for you because I’m not your ally. I never have been. I don’t want you to win.”

His face fell slack. She could see his final, desperate hope draining away. “What?”

“Major, I’m sorry. I work for the other side.”

F
ighting continued on the river as the fleet steamed toward New Orleans. There was a brief skirmish at Quarantine before Farragut sent marines ashore to seize the guns. Then, when they approached the city on the morning of the twenty-fifth, they had to dodge more fire rafts sent downstream in a desperate attempt to drive them off. A few small batteries at the city fired a handful of volleys before they were silenced by the big guns of the fleet.

Josephine and Franklin stood on the deck of
Hartford
as they pulled up to the levee. Rain poured from the sky, as if the city were weeping, but it didn’t cut the fires roaring along the wharfs. A mob was burning and looting the warehouses, tossing flaming bales of cotton into the river. They smashed barrels of rum and molasses and threw them in. Boats of all kinds—barges, launches, tugs, flatboats—burned, either sinking or joining the vast quantity of debris floating down the river. Anything that could potentially aid the Union forces was dumped into the Mississippi.

From upriver floated a huge, flaming object that she couldn’t identify at first, so much smoke was roiling from it into the sky. She supposed it was another fire raft. But as it drew nearer, she saw that it was the burning hulk of a massive ironclad vessel.

“
Mississippi
,” Franklin said. “I suppose they never did finish her.”

A note of melancholy had entered his voice. Franklin had worked for months at the yards building the two boats that had been meant to change the course of the war. He must have been curious to know how
Louisiana
and
Mississippi
would fare had they been completed and properly armed. But perhaps it was more, a sense of betrayal to those he’d worked beside, not unlike how Josephine felt about Solomon Fein and Major Dunbar.

By early afternoon, most of Farragut’s fleet lay anchored in the river
facing New Orleans. Word came that Lovell had fled New Orleans
with the militia, and there would be no opposition. With this
news,
Farragut sent a small company of men ashore under flag of truce.

Cleaned up and ready to report on the capture of the city, Josephine went ashore with them, together with Franklin. A mob was gathering, some of them singing Confederate hymns or waving rebel battle flags, while others jeered and hurled bottles and other rubbish at the men in blue. For a moment it seemed as though there would be violence, but then the band on one of the ships struck up “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The crowd fell silent. A few handkerchiefs came out. The song was an anthem for all Americans, the North and South alike.

Josephine was scanning the crowd with a newspaper reporter’s eye when her gaze fell on a woman with wet, dripping hair and streaked makeup. The woman stared back with a morose expression. That expression was unlike the anger and sorrow in most of the crowd, deeper somehow, more intense.

A jolt of recognition. The woman was Francesca Díaz.

Josephine hadn’t recognized her at first glance because of the haggard expression, the reddish hair made dull and sodden by the rain, with an inch of gray showing at the roots. And the utter defeat in Francesca’s expression. It was as if she were battered down, had personally suffered great ruin.

You did it. You ruined her.

It was an accusation born of the self-pitying note Francesca had sent in February, the one that had left Josephine baffled. And it was hardly fair. Francesca had threatened her with exposure and destruction, not the other way around.

Francesca leaned against a cane. Not the elegant, ivory-topped cane from that day in Congo Square, when she’d walked in the company of the Colonel, but a hickory walking stick, scuffed and splitting at the end. Not an affectation, then, but to help support her weight, the more elegant stick apparently having been sold in response to her reduced situation. That limp Josephine had first spotted at the Cajun fisherman’s shack must be a real and permanent injury, not a twisted ankle, not gout.

And suddenly Josephine understood. Francesca had taken lame during her dancing days, fallen, perhaps, broken a bone. Reduced in her ability to earn a living, she had fastened herself to her old friend’s partner, had perhaps married him during one of the riverboat gambler’s flush periods, when it seemed that he might provide for her in return for what remained of her youth and beauty.

Had Francesca’s attempts to blackmail Josephine been a similar act of desperation? Had there been no real malice behind it?

Josephine shook her head to clear it, confused and unsettled. The Colonel, Josephine, even the whole confounded war: Did she understand any of it?

The moment the federal band stopped playing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the tumult started up again, and when Josephine looked back, she had lost Francesca in the crowd.
In spite of the pouring rain, people kept rushing in to join the mob. By the time two Union soldiers set off under flag of truce, they were surrounded by cursing, spitting civilians, some of them waving pistols in their faces. They disappeared into the crowd, and Josephine couldn’t see how they’d reach the mayor’s office alive. And then the fleet would shell the city in revenge.

But shortly the men returned to the flag officer with a short note from the mayor, which was later shown to Josephine.

Come and take the city; we are powerless.

As to the hoisting of any flag than the flag of our own adoption and allegiance, let me say to you, sir, that the man lives not in our midst whose hand and heart would not be palsied at the mere thought of such an act.

The implication was obvious. Take the city if you think you can. Raise the Stars and Stripes. Come in with a few marines, risk the mob.

The Confederates still hoped to hold the city, hoped that a counterattack would come downriver or across Lake Pontchartrain. And with General Butler’s bluecoats still bottled up below the forts, there was a real question as to how the occupation could be managed.

Farragut kept the bulk of the fleet anchored off the levee while he took
Hartford
and several other sloops upriver to destroy batteries and shell a few small fortifications. They returned to New Orleans towing a number of captured vessels. The flag officer told Josephine that he wanted to let the fire-eaters in the city tire of their wrath, but upon their return, they found New Orleans as hostile as ever.

In another obvious attempt to buy time, the mayor sent his private secretary and the chief of police out to
Hartford
to haggle with Farragut, who was clearly losing his patience. He sent another demand for complete surrender.

For two days the mob had maintained an angry, cursing vigil on the levee, and there were dozens of pistols and shotguns in evidence. If fighting should start, Farragut warned that he would open a broadside from
Hartford
and every other ship at his command until the city burned to the ground, and this seemed to keep the hotheads in check.

On April 28, word came that Fort Jackson and Fort St. Philip had surrendered to Porter’s mortar fleet and General Butler’s troops. After Porter resumed shelling, the defenders of Jackson, low on food and fuel, their morale at the muddy bottom of the Mississippi, had mutinied against their officers. Once Jackson surrendered, St. Philip also abandoned the struggle.

And this news took what remained of the fighting spirit from the people of New Orleans. The mob began to melt away, and Farragut felt secure enough to send in a company of 250 marines to seize key buildings until General Butler could arrive with his large occupying force.

On the evening of May 1, Josephine and Franklin stood in Jackson Square, opposite the Cabildo and the cathedral, while the Thirtieth Massachusetts Infantry came down from the levee. Marching with a jaunty step behind the regimental band, which played “Yankee Doodle” with flair and confidence, the troops passed through the square and up the streets of the French Quarter.

Some in the crowd booed, other cheered, and all seemed to settle in for the great change that had swept over the city. New Orleans had fallen.

J
osephine opened the Oriental box on the desk. Inside she put the two photographs, the first with a beautiful woman and an angular, bony girl of eight on the deck of
Crescent Queen
. In the second, she was older and standing with the man who would be her father.

The Colonel. What had become of him? Was he still in the city with Francesca? She wasn’t sure if she wanted to know, but the not knowing was almost worse. Like her mother, who had drowned on the river but had never been recovered. It left the imagination to fester, to postulate scenarios by which a woman who must be dead had somehow survived. Or, in this case, to imagine how an old gambler, unreliable as rainfall on the plains of Nebraska, might have changed his ways. Might have become a father.

No.

She put them away. Then she tucked in her banknotes and what silver she’d managed to get from the worthless greybacks Fein had paid her at the
Crescent
. She put the lacquered box into her carpetbag and snapped the latch shut.

When she came downstairs with her bag and her spare dress draped over one arm, Nellie was standing stiff and cold in the front room. Josephine had kept out two dollars in silver, which she attempted to hand over.

Nellie shook her head.

“I stayed in the room; I ate your food.”

“Treacherously, yes. You did.”

“Please take what I owe you.”

“I won’t take it.”

Nellie Gill’s husband was a prisoner in a Union camp after the fall of Fort Henry. She had few resources. Her larder was nearly empty. What little money she had was in greybacks and Confederate war bonds, both nearly worthless in the city since its fall.

Josephine made for the front door. She left the coins on the entry table as she passed. Nellie made a hiss behind her. As Josephine went down the stairs toward the cab waiting out front, she expected Nellie to open the door and throw the money after her. This she did not do.

Franklin jumped out to grab Josephine’s bag. She held her dress and petticoats on her lap as she climbed up.

“I suppose leaving the city would be for the best,” she told Franklin. “Every time I’m recognized I’m abused. Such invective as would make the Cyprians of Gallatin blush.”

He reached into his jacket pocket and removed a folded telegraph fixed with a military seal. “Ready for your orders?”

“No, not yet. Part of me wants to stay, the other part wants to get as far away as possible. But I have one more thing troubling me before I face that. Do you need to go back to General Butler’s headquarters? I can drop you at the end of Toulouse to catch another cab.”

“I’m too anxious to hear your news,” he said with a smile. “Let’s get on with this other business.”

The driver looked back through the window from his perch up front. “Where to, miss?”

“Do you know the
Crescent
? Good. Take me there.”