The Spymistress (26 page)

“He should tell you himself. I’ll go fetch him.”

Mary Jane slipped into the kitchen and returned holding Wilson’s hand. He nodded politely, his expression solemn and wary.

“Good afternoon, Wilson,” Lizzie said, folding her hands in her lap and regarding him expectantly.

He gave her a brusque nod. “Afternoon, Miss Lizzie.”

He didn’t like her very much, Lizzie knew, and he didn’t entirely trust her. He found her imperious and disliked the way she ordered Mary Jane about—as if Mary Jane were a slave, or so Wilson assumed. What he didn’t understand was that Lizzie bossed Mary Jane around not because she had been born a slave but because she was younger, because Lizzie liked to have her own way, and because she always bossed around younger women if they let her get away with it. Eliza Carrington didn’t like it either, but she complained far less than Mary Jane did.

“I understand you have something to tell me,” Lizzie prompted.

Mary Jane pulled out a chair for her husband and inclined her head ever so slightly to ask him to sit. After a moment’s hesitation, Wilson seated himself, folded his arms on the table, and said, “Do you know the superintendent of the RF&P, Samuel Ruth?”

“No,” she replied, concealing her excitement. The superintendent of the RF&P had enormous influence over the railway line, and thus over General Lee’s supplies. “I have not had the pleasure of making his acquaintance.”

“Well, you should. I think he’d be a friend to you.”

When he said no more, Lizzie turned an inquiring look upon Mary Jane, who explained, “Wilson thinks he’s one of us. A Unionist.”

Lizzie returned her questioning gaze to Wilson. “Why do you suspect that?”

Wilson frowned, his dark eyes grim. “I might be wrong. I don’t want to see him thrown into Castle Godwin on my account. He’s a good man.”

“You’re not wrong,” Mary Jane told him, placing a hand on his arm. “Everything you’ve noticed—he’s been very careful, but the pattern is there.”

“I promise, whatever you tell me, I won’t divulge it to anyone,” said Lizzie. “You have my word.”

Wilson heaved a sigh of resignation and fixed Lizzie with a steely look that told her he still did not think it was wise to confide in her, and she would regret it if she betrayed him. “Mr. Ruth’s been meddling with rebel troop movements for months. Somehow the trains always run much more slowly than they need to when Lee’s brigades are aboard.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes, that’s so, or I wouldn’t say it,” Wilson replied brusquely. “He’s good, I’ll give him that. His schemes are subtle, just small changes here and there to make everything less efficient. His interference has been practically undetectable.”

“Undetectable by everyone but my husband,” said Mary Jane proudly.

“Mr. Ruth takes his sweet time about repairing key bridges,” Wilson said. “He cuts back on the number of workers, and he always has a perfectly logical reason for doing it. He regularly gives private freight shipments priority over military supplies. Why would he do that if he wasn’t on the side of the Union? He’s not a stupid man. He puts on a convincing show of being a fire-breathing rebel, but he’s got to know he’s hindering the entire rebel army.”

“It seems an unlikely collection of coincidences,” Lizzie acknowledged. A man in Mr. Ruth’s position would make an invaluable ally. He could help smuggle information and escaped prisoners out of Richmond, and of course he would know every detail about every shipment of men, arms, and supplies on the RF&P lines. “If you’re certain of his loyalties—”

“I am.”

“Then we must recruit him to our cause.”

Wilson nodded. “I can introduce you if you like. He likes me, and I think he trusts me.”

“No, I think not,” Lizzie mused. “We would make a curious pair if anyone observed us together. You, on the other hand, have every reason to speak with him often, to be seen with him at work every day. You should be the one to approach him.”

Wilson’s mouth twisted in a skeptical grimace. “That way, if I’m wrong about him, he’ll report me to the authorities rather than you.”

“That’s true,” said Lizzie evenly. “That’s not why I’ve suggested that you act as our intermediary, but you’re right. I suppose the question is, how much do you trust your own judgment? You want me to accept your observations, your conclusions, as accurate. Are you willing to rely upon them yourself?”

“I know what I’ve seen,” Wilson retorted. “I can put the pieces together. I know he’s a Unionist.”

“If you’re right, then you shouldn’t have to worry that he’ll report you.”

Wilson glowered at her, and by his side, Mary Jane sat perfectly still, almost seeming to hold her breath.

“All right,” he eventually said. “I’ll do it. I can’t ask you to take a risk I’m unwilling to take myself.”

Lizzie felt a rush of elation. “Thank you, Wilson,” she said. “I don’t know what else to say except thank you.”

“I know what else. Promise you’ll look after Mary Jane if I’m whipped to death or sold into slavery for helping you.”

“Wilson,” Mary Jane protested. “Don’t say such things. That won’t happen.”

He regarded her levelly until she had to look away. They all knew it could happen, and likely would, if he was caught.

Within days, Mr. Ruth confirmed Wilson’s suspicions, and although he was disconcerted to learn that he had been found out, he accepted Wilson’s offer to assist him in his clandestine efforts. In turn he agreed to collaborate with Lizzie.

And so the reach of her intelligence network grew, an invisible railroad with lines extending throughout the Confederate capital and the surrounding countryside and herself at the central hub.

. . .

“Miss Lizzie.”

Someone was shaking her awake, and through the fog of half sleep, Lizzie thought she heard the soft rumble of men’s voices somewhere below.

She bolted upright in bed, heart pounding. For more than a year she had dreaded a knock on the door in the middle of the night, and now it had come.

“Miss Lizzie,” Judy whispered again, urgent. “Mr. Van Lew’s come with the children. He needs you.”

“John?” Lizzie threw back the covers and slipped into the dressing gown Judy offered her. “What time is it?”

“Not quite ten o’clock. I put them in the parlor.”

“What’s wrong?” Something dreadful must have happened for John to bring the girls out at that hour.

“Your brother didn’t say, but Eliza’s sick and Annie’s crying, and there’s two men I don’t know with them.”

Lizzie’s heart pounded as she hurried from the room. “And Mary?”

“I don’t know,” Judy said, racing to keep up with her. “She’s not here.”

Bewildered, alarmed, Lizzie raced down the stairs and into the parlor, where she found Eliza dozing listlessly on the sofa and John holding a sobbing Annie, walking her back and forth and patting her back in an attempt to soothe away her tears. Two men stood by the window, holding their hats and conversing in hushed, serious tones, and after a second look she recognized them as friends of John’s, lawyers who shared a practice on Main Street, if she was not mistaken.

Mindful of her state of undress, she nevertheless flew to Eliza’s side, stroking Annie’s head in passing. “What is going on?” she asked John, touching the back of her hand to Eliza’s burning forehead and flushed cheeks. “Where’s Mary?”

“She’s at home, under Hannah’s watchful eye.” John’s voice was like stone, and his evident anger filled Lizzie with relief—she had feared he would tell her that Mary was dead. “I returned home from a late meeting to discover that she had forsaken her children to go out for a night of dreadful sin.”

“What?” Lizzie exclaimed. “She left the children alone? But where was Hannah? What—what sort of sin do you mean? Where did you find her?”

“Never mind that now,” John snapped, and the two men exchanged quick, embarrassed glances. “I’d like to leave the girls here with you and Mother, if you don’t mind.”

“Of course not. They’re always welcome. You know I love them as if they were my own.”

“Better than that, I think, judging by their own mother’s neglect.” John’s mouth was hard, bitter line, and his eyes sparked with fury. “I’ll return in the morning with their things, and with Hannah.”

As he turned to go, Lizzie caught him by the arm. “John.” She glanced over her shoulder at the two men, who were putting on their hats, and she lowered her voice. “Is it the laudanum? Whiskey?”

“Both, and more,” he replied in a whisper, his voice trembling with outrage. He kissed her swiftly on the cheek and departed, his friends following after, nodding to her in polite apology as they passed.

With Judy’s help, Lizzie soon had the girls tucked into bed, Eliza with a cool, damp cloth on her brow. Lizzie remained at her bedside through the night, dozing now and then, until Mother came in shortly after dawn to relieve her. “You should have woken me last night,” she scolded in an undertone as she sent Lizzie off to her own bed, but mercifully, she saved her questions for later.

Lizzie was still asleep when John returned with Hannah and his daughters’ clothing, books, and toys, so it was Mother to whom he confessed the shameful story. The previous evening, when he had come home to find Mary absent, Hannah missing, Eliza ill, and Annie crying, he interrogated Mary’s diffident maid until she reluctantly admitted that Mary had hired Hannah out to a neighbor for the night, and then she had gone out alone, as she apparently always did whenever business detained John late into the evening.

“Mary hired Hannah out to strangers?” asked Lizzie, disbelieving. “John allowed this?”

“Of course not,” said Mother. “He knew nothing of it, although evidently Mary has done it before.”

“Why didn’t Hannah tell him? Why didn’t did she tell us? She must have known we wouldn’t stand for it.”

Mother shook her head helplessly. “She was afraid that Mary would sell her off Down South before we could stop her. She also worried that we would bring her home but leave Eliza and Annie with their mother, helpless, with no one to look after them.”

After John had gotten the story out of Mary’s maid, he fetched Hannah back from the indignant neighbors who had hired her for the night, apologizing profusely for the mistake and smoothing things over by assuring them they owed him nothing for the hours Hannah had worked. He then stormed from one tavern and hotel to the next, searching up and down Main Street, and eventually he found his wife teetering on a stool in the bar of a third-rate hotel accompanied by a gentleman of uncertain origin and questionable morals, her mind addled by laudanum and drink. Mary had screeched and clawed and fought as John wrested her away from the bar and outside, but as he struggled to lead her down the street toward home, his two acquaintances had spotted him through the window of their law office and had come to his aid.

“What will he do?” Lizzie asked, appalled, when her mother had finished.

“He wants to leave the girls with us, for now,” Mother said. “Of course I said that would be fine.”

“Not only fine but necessary. Mary is clearly in no state to care for them.” Lizzie took a deep breath. “Mother, do you think they will...divorce?”

“Oh, Lizzie, I don’t know.” Mother’s voice broke, and she wrung her hands. “John found Mary in the bar of the hotel, not emerging from a rented room or even descending the stairs, so I’m not sure he can have her charged with adultery.”

“But she was with another man.”

“Who doubtless has disappeared into the crowd of strangers Richmond has become, never to be found again. Without his testimony, Mary could claim their meeting was perfectly innocent, which it very well could have been.”

Incredulous, Lizzie said, “A married woman leaves her children home alone at night so she can dose herself with laudanum and meet a strange man for drinks in a hotel bar. You could not fit the word
innocent
into that description with a shoehorn and a crowbar.”

Mother acknowledged the truth of Lizzie’s words with a nod. “Even if John could divorce Mary for adultery, think of the scandal. Think of what it would mean to those poor little girls.”

“I
am
thinking of those poor little girls,” said Lizzie. “They would be better off removed from their mother’s influence.”

“And they shall be, for a while. They will remain here with us until Mary is capable of caring for them herself.”

Lizzie imagined Hannah would have quite a lot to say about Mary’s capabilities. “And John? Will he come home?”

“I believe he intends to stay with Mary. He won’t abandon her, but he will insist that she stop drinking and taking laudanum. If she refuses, or if she cannot...”

When her mother fell silent, Lizzie hesitantly filled in the rest. “The sanitarium?”

Mother’s eyes filled with tears as she nodded. “What else can he do?”

“I don’t know,” Lizzie said. As much as she disliked Mary, she would not have wished this fate on her, nor on anyone. And John—her poor brother, to have been so publicly humiliated, and now, likely to become the subject of ugly gossip.

She longed to help him, to help them both, but in her bewildered uncertainty, all she could think of to do was to resolve to care for their daughters with all the devotion a loving aunt could offer.

Annie and little Eliza were overjoyed to be home, as they had never stopped referring to the Church Hill mansion, and they settled into their familiar rooms so easily it was almost as if they had never moved away. John visited at least every other day, and the girls were showered with so much attention from their grandmother, auntie, and nurse that they did not seem to miss their mother, judging by how infrequently they asked about her. When the girls could not overhear, Lizzie and her mother asked John about Mary, but he said very little other than to assure them that she was on the mend, and that she was meeting regularly with her minister and a nurse, and that as far as he knew, she had not touched a drop of alcohol or laudanum since that dreadful night. “She was terribly sick at first,” John said, “but every day, she seems a little stronger, although she is furious with me.”

“Does she ask about the girls?” Lizzie asked, almost afraid to hear the answer.