The Crescent Spy (8 page)

“Will you look at that, Josie?” Claire said, handing it over to Josephine, while she hid the money in a compartment beneath her dressing desk. “That fine gentleman is as good as his word. We never should have doubted him.” She hummed and sang to herself as she got ready for the show.

Later that night, when the riverboat was sitting outside the levee near Jackson Square, and the saloon was in full, raucous swing below, Josephine turned up the lamp and stared at the photo, remembering everything about that day in Frenchville and enjoying it as if she were eating the fried dough and iced cream all over again.

As for the Colonel himself, he did not show up after two weeks. Rather, it was two
years
later that he appeared. She had long since given up on him as a scoundrel, as her mother insisted.

But when he did finally arrive, he was carrying a treasure that would change Josephine’s life forever.

I
t took several days to sail down around the tip of Florida and into the harbor at Havana. The city was a sweltering tropical port of low-slung Spanish colonial buildings, with the massive fortress of La Cabaña rising on the eastern side of the harbor. When
The Flying Siam
eased into port, her hold, which had presumably been searched in Brooklyn for contraband, nevertheless disgorged all manner of Northern manufactures that disappeared into the swarm of goods and humanity on the docks, wharfs, and warehouses. Ships of every nation and flag jostled side by side in the harbor, and the waterfront swarmed with Confederate agents and profit-seeking blockade-runners.

Franklin told Josephine they would be three days in Havana waiting for a fast steamer to run the blockade, and he wanted to test her observation skills. After booking separate rooms in the sprawling, dilapidated Royal Sevilla, they went out posing as a blockade-runner and his wife.

On the docks, British and French merchants were bidding up the price of smuggled bales of cotton, and in turn there were Confederates everywhere, buying and loading cargoes of guns, percussion caps, rum, salt, coffee, tea, and even hoopskirts and corset stays. From all the gold changing hands, it seemed that Havana was booming.

Franklin tested Josephine after this excursion and seemed satisfied with both her memory and her powers of observation. Their relationship had been cordial rather than warm after that first night leaving Brooklyn, but once they’d started referring to each other by given names, it proved impossible to resume their earlier distance. He seemed a clever, honorable man, but she did not deceive herself that they’d formed a true friendship.

And if she were honest with herself, Josephine wasn’t sure if she was capable of any such relationship. As a child, her friendships had been liberal and frequent but always shallow. Having free rein of first
Crescent Queen
, and later
Cairo Red
, she would meet other children for short, intense friendships that ended at the next bend of the river, the next port of call.

Franklin’s idea was to come into New Orleans as strangers, and so they boarded the blockade-runner separately. It was a fast, low steamer that carried fifteen passengers and a hold stuffed with six small rifled cannons and whatever else the captain could squeeze in around the main cargo: boots, percussion caps, casks of wine, boxes of square nails, and several barrels of gunpowder. They left at night in case Union warships were patrolling offshore, and cut straight for the Gulf Coast.

When dawn came the next morning, the engines seemed to be straining against the choppy waves, and when Josephine joined the passengers on deck, she found them all watching a column of smoke to their rear at the very edge of what one could see without a spyglass.

“Yankees,” a woman told Josephine. “Captain thinks it’s a steam frigate. Thirty guns—one volley would blow us to kingdom come. But don’t worry, we’re not in danger.”

“How can you be sure?” Josephine asked, keeping her eye on the column of smoke.

“Trust me. I’ve done this run three times. We’re built for speed—we’ll outrun them.”

The side-wheel kept churning, and Josephine knew from the high-pitched whine that it was going flat out, the men below shoveling coal into the boiler as fast as they could. The longer they ran, the more they risked overpressuring the boiler. After her experiences on the river, that prospect filled her with a special kind of terror.

The woman was wrong. Over the next hour, a small figure gradually took shape beneath that column of smoke, and it became obvious that the blockade-runner would be overtaken by the blockade enforcer. Josephine risked looking for Franklin, and she spotted the Pinkerton agent near the stern, his hands around the spray-soaked rail, nervously twisting at the wood as he watched the ship approach. That made her more worried than ever.

Shouldn’t the navy have been warned of their passage so they could slip by unmolested? What if the Union ship overtook them? Would they fire their cannons and sink the blockade-runner, or just board it?

The first thing to go were the heavy boxes of nails, then the gunpowder, and finally two of the cannons, heaved up to the deck by the crew and pushed over the edge. The low-lying schooner-rigged side-wheel lifted higher in the water, but still the navy frigate stayed within view. The captain and his first mate discussed in agitated tones whether to dump the remaining cannons or to throw over the passenger baggage as well. It was clear that any- and everything would go except for coal for the boilers and the passengers and crew themselves.

Then a man at the stern with a spyglass gave a shout and declared that the frigate was falling behind. Cheers rang across the deck.

“Well,” the woman said to Josephine. “That was a narrow shave, as my husband would say.”

“Which one is he?” Josephine asked, looking among the passengers.

“Oh, no. He’s in Memphis. I’m traveling alone—my husband did business up north before the war and earned some enemies in Louisiana. So I’m his business agent this time around.”

Josephine had been standing next to the woman for a good hour, hour and a half, but her attention had fixed on that smokestack and the approaching (now receding) Union warship. Now she turned and sized the other woman up for the first time.

And had a moment of shock as she turned and met the woman’s smile. The woman was older now, her red hair color seemingly dyed, as if to cover a graying head, and her corset and stay couldn’t conceal a waistline that had expanded since her riverboat days. But it was Francesca Díaz, one of the women who had sung and danced with Josephine’s mother. Josephine hadn’t seen the woman since they left
Crescent Queen
for
Cairo Red.
If Claire had ever met her old friend again after that, she’d never mentioned it to her daughter.

Francesca was smiling, looking at her, and Josephine’s shock turned to relief as she realized that the woman didn’t recognize her in turn. But that might change if Josephine stood gaping.

“My name is Miss Breaux.” Josephine figured her last name was safe, having been picked up during her final stay in New Orleans. She didn’t know her mother’s true surname—certainly not de Layerre—and hadn’t wanted to take on the unsavory stage name.

Josephine held out her bare hand. Unlike Francesca, she had not put on gloves before coming out to the deck. Francesca shifted her parasol—now catching as much sea spray as sunshine—and returned a dainty shake.

“I am Mrs. Hancock. You shouldn’t get the wrong idea—my husband is a great patriot and believer in the Southern cause. But this war makes friends of strangers and strangers of friends. There is trouble in New Orleans and the bayou. That’s why I went to Havana instead of him.”

“Oh, I thought maybe you had family in Cuba.”

Francesca laughed. “Oh, no. My family is pure French. From Provence.” She gestured at the parasol. “That’s why I must be careful about taking the sun. I don’t want to turn as brown as a Marseillaise fisherman.”

That wasn’t what she’d claimed when she went by Francesca Díaz. She’d claimed to be from Spain, and with much the same reasoning about why she avoided the sun. Perhaps a Spanish origin was better for a dancer, with its connotations of
gitanos
and flamenco, but French was better for snaring a rich husband.

Now Josephine took a closer look at the woman, and with an adult eye, jaded and suspicious, as she’d learned during her newspaper writing. There was something dark and exotic about the woman’s appearance. She easily could have passed for one of the hacienda owners of Cuba, or had she been in Washington, the Persian ambassador’s wife. And now Josephine had another suspicion that had appeared with Francesca’s shifting story.

Perhaps Francesca was an old-fashioned New Orleans creole, that mix of French, Spanish, and African. French coureur de bois and mulattoes coming together to give birth to quadroons, octoroons, and all the other mixed colored people with their own culture and customs. It was one thing to be a free person of mixed race in New Orleans but another thing to go upriver to Mississippi, Missouri, or Illinois and by her very existence inspire prejudice, violence, and even blackmail.

It was obvious now that they had outrun the Union frigate, albeit at a cost of two cannons and what must have been hundreds of dollars of other vital supplies. The warship had vanished, and all they could see now was the long stream of black smoke slowly dissipating in the brilliant blue sky over the Gulf of Mexico.

“And what brought you to Havana, Miss Breaux?” Francesca asked.

Josephine smiled. “I lived for a spell up north, but with the outbreak of the war, I had my own . . . troubles. It was time to come home to the South, and I couldn’t do so directly. I sailed out of Brooklyn on the twenty-seventh of July.”

“You have family in New Orleans?”

“They’re scattered,” she said. This much was true. “I hope to get a position with one of the papers. I have some newspaper experience, and I thought I could lend my voice to our struggles. There are a lot of foreigners in town, many English and French, especially, and if persuaded, they might carry our sympathies to their home countries.”

Francesca’s eyes widened. “Wait a moment. Josephine?” Her voice was loud, and several other people looked over.

Josephine’s stomach flipped over. Her eyes flickered to one side, and there she spotted Franklin, his hat pulled low over his brow against the sun. He was staring hard.

“It is, isn’t it?” Francesca pressed. “It’s Josephine Breaux. I don’t believe it.”

Still two days from reaching New Orleans and already she’d been discovered. Franklin would be furious. He’d no doubt telegraph Washington, who would have no choice but to pull her from the city, unless they simply disavowed her and left her to her own devices. She cursed silently. Unless she could quiet this woman down in a hurry, put her off the scent . . .

“I’m afraid you’re mistaken,” she said. “That’s not my name.”

“Oh, please. None of that false modesty.” Francesca’s excitement seemed to be mounting. “You’re a heroine! It’s all they were talking about when I left the city ten days ago. So much ink spilled in the papers. That business at Manassas. And the way those blackguards threw you out of Washington. They were no gentlemen.”

As Francesca prattled on, it gradually dawned on Josephine that the woman didn’t recognize her at all. They hadn’t met for years, since the younger woman was still a waifish girl, and Francesca had apparently not connected that child to the young woman of the same given name standing next to her. But the woman
had
heard of a certain reporter in Washington City, unmasked first as a woman, then as a Confederate spy. It had only been a minor news item in the New York papers but had apparently made big news in New Orleans and the rest of the Southern press. One more thing to crow about in the aftermath of the Confederate victory at Manassas.

Later, when the handful of passengers had departed for their various cabins, a knock came at Josephine’s door. It was Franklin, apparently abandoning his commitment to ignore her until they were safely ensconced in New Orleans. He chewed nervously on his lower lip.

Josephine had been at her cramped desk next to the porthole window, scribbling notes about the outrunning of the steamer frigate to go with several pages she’d written about her time on the clipper and their three-day stopover in Havana.

She rose to her feet. “I am so sorry. That was a terrible blunder. I never should have used the name Breaux. Why didn’t I think?”

She expected him to be angry, but he only shook his head.

“This is my fault as much as yours. We were being watched in Havana, so I didn’t collect or send telegrams. I figured any news could wait until New Orleans.”

“Watched? By whom?”

“That’s not important. The point is that I didn’t check or I might have been warned that you were notorious in Louisiana, and we could have found a more suitable last name.”

“So what now?”

For a long moment Franklin stood silently at the doorway. He took out his cigarette case but only turned it over in his hand without taking one out. Josephine grew nervous, worried that he would tell her it was over, that she’d be sent back north. And it surprised her how committed she’d become to this plan, not only for personal glory, but for duty as well. The feeling had been growing since Brooklyn and had spread as she watched Confederate agents and smugglers working with great purpose and energy in Havana.

“Don’t send me back,” she said. “I can travel upriver to St. Louis or Memphis for a spell. I’ll change my appearance, take on a new name, practice a new accent, and come back under another guise.”

“That’s assuming you can get in and out of New Orleans without the entire city marching you at the head of a parade. What’s more, I’d arranged a position for you at Fort Jackson. They have an infirmary, and the surgeon on site needs an assistant, has asked for a pretty young woman who can raise the cheer of the men as they recover.”

This wasn’t a surprise to her. That evening at the White House, when the president had departed, the two agents had asked her a few questions about her health. They seemed satisfied when she said that she wasn’t squeamish at the sight of blood, and pleased when she told them that she’d suffered yellow fever as a child. That meant she was immune to the epidemics that regularly swept up and down the swampy lands of the lower Mississippi. She’d already guessed that they meant her to work in a charitable hospital, posing as a Confederate Florence Nightingale.