On Secret Service Page 4

  “Donal’s a fine man, Papa, and I do intend to marry him, but I don’t have to moon over him, do I?”

  “Isn’t that customary when one’s in love?”

  Margaret turned her face to the passing city lights, not answering. Rather than rushing eagerly, she had slipped and slid into her engagement to Donal. Donal’s forebears had owned the firm of McKee, Withers, cotton brokers, for over a hundred years. The firm began in London but Donal ran it from its American headquarters in lower Manhattan. Donal’s mother was a belle, a Mercer of the Georgia Mercers; thus his father had chosen to live in the States most of his life. Donal preferred it too, though he kept his British citizenship. He said it facilitated travel and enabled him to get around certain annoying import and export laws. When Margaret wondered about these, Donal smiled and suggested she not trouble her head about men’s affairs.

  Margaret was distressed whenever she consciously faced up to her feelings about her fiancé. Lack of feelings, rather. That lack generated guilt, something missing from her righteous annoyance over a possible war. If war came, many in Rose Greenhow’s circle predicted that it wouldn’t last more than ninety days because of public indignation. Margaret took no comfort.

  Music drifted to them; a popular melody played on a mouth organ. Miller said, “What a topsy-turvy world we live in. Dan Emmett wrote ‘Dixie’ for his minstrels, the Lincoln Republicans marched to it last fall, and now it seems to be the Southern anthem. Passing strange.”

  In ten minutes they reached the imposing red-brick town house north of the city center. Lamplight glowed in the fan-shaped window above the lacquered front door. Simms reined the horse by the hitch post.

  Calhoun Miller took off his beaver top hat and left the carriage on the street side. He spoke to Simms as Margaret stepped down on the curb side. The town-house door opened. A spill of light revealed her brother and an unfamiliar visitor: an appallingly shabby plug-ugly wearing a green tweed cap. A small parcel wrapped in brown paper passed from the visitor to Cicero. The shape, a right triangle, suggested a revolver with a long barrel.

  The plug-ugly ran down the steps and sped away without looking at Margaret. Calhoun Miller patted the horse’s muzzle as he stepped around to the curb. “Feed him, wipe him down, and that’s all for the evening, Simms.”

  “Yes, sir, thank you, sir.” Simms shook the reins and the horse started its plod around the block to the rear carriage house. Margaret was unsettled by the visitor. Why would the plug-ugly slip her brother a weapon, if that’s what it was?

  Cicero waited for them in the entry hall. He was twenty-nine, a frail, bookish man already bald except for a fringe of rust-colored hair. An accident with a pet pony when he was four had permanently crippled his left leg. He wore a special shoe with a two-inch sole. He listed on that side when he walked.

  Miller tossed his outer coat onto a bench and strode into the parlor where an unseen hearth blazed. Margaret paused dutifully to kiss Cicero’s pale cheek. She did her best to love her brother, but he was neither warm nor affectionate. She felt a certain guilt about his childhood accident, although she hadn’t been born when it happened. Their father was the one who’d mishandled the pony.

  “Have a pleasant supper?” Cicero asked.

  “Yes, I’m sorry you couldn’t come along.”

  He shrugged and hobbled after her. “Business.”

  “With that person who was just here? Surely he isn’t a client.”

  “No, just a friend.”

  “Since when do you cultivate friends who look like bare-knuckle prizefighters?”

  “He’s a member of an organization I’ve joined.”

  “A lodge? You’re not the sort, Cicero.”

  “It isn’t a lodge, it’s a patriotic society. I can’t tell you more. Even the name is secret.” He craned toward her in a way that reminded her of a turtle shooting its head from its shell. “No more questions, please.” It was said lightly, but she heard the warning.

  Cicero was much more of a political fire-eater than their father. In public he dared to refer to General Winfield Scott, the noble old Virginian who led the Army, as “that free-state pimp.” Cicero blithely said that Abe the Ape might not live to be inaugurated “if we are fortunate.” Margaret hated such talk. She hated the epidemic of secession fever sweeping Baltimore and infecting her own household. She couldn’t wait to return to the small, safe universe of Rose Greenhow’s salon.

  4

  January 1861

  When he walked into the Senate gallery on Monday, the twenty-first, he felt like a man lost on a stormy moor with no lantern and no signposts. The U.S. government had educated him, in return asking only that he give service, which he was glad to do. The military life with its order and predictability suited him. Further, there was this unspoken truth: West Point men from the South controlled the Army. Faced with the influence of this cadre, capable officers from the North resigned and looked to civilian life for advancement. Now Southern officers were resigning for a different reason.

  Word of the speech had spread quickly. Lines formed before dawn. By nine o’clock the gallery was nearly full. Varina Davis came in quietly, to a place reserved for her. The notorious socialite Mrs. Greenhow made an ostentatious entrance, obstructing the view of those behind her with the yellow ostrich plumes on her hat. Though asked, she would not remove it.

  He saw a seat in the last row, claimed it, and gave it up five minutes later when there were no more places for women. He stood at the head of the aisle, by the door, a look of brooding concentration on his face. It wasn’t a handsome face in the conventional sense, but an arresting one: carrot-colored hair, pale red brows, gray-green eyes, a large nose. Men under his command never argued when he gave orders. Or if they did, they only did it once.

  Second Lieutenant Frederick Scott Dasher, West Point ’57, wore civilian clothes today. Part of his special duty, which he disliked. A bachelor and a Virginian, he’d grown up on a horse farm near Front Royal, in the Shenandoah. He owned the farm but no longer had family there. His father was gone, a casualty of alcohol. His younger brother had died of scarlet fever at age eight. His older sister, Marie, lived in Tennessee with her husband. His poor mother was cared for by Marie in Knoxville, though she might as well have been on the moon, given her lack of recognition of her surroundings. Fred had always assumed he would find the right young woman, marry, and rebuild the Dasher line. He no longer assumed it. He wondered if anyone in America had a dependable future.

  Time dragged as the Senate disposed of its morning business. Every seat was taken, the aisles and outer stairways clogged with standees. The first of the cotton-state senators rose to speak his farewell. Others followed. The spectators were polite but restless. They’d come to hear the senator from Mississippi, who had left his sickbed for the occasion. When he rose, the huge hall and gallery collectively held its breath.

  Jefferson Davis’s voice was faint from illness. He was a few years past fifty, but stress had added a decade to his wasted, craggy face. A West Point graduate, he had fought in Mexico with Lee, Sam Grant, Tom Jackson, George Pickett. He’d served President Pierce as secretary of war, then represented his state honorably in the Senate. Now, he said, he was going. He felt it was the only course left.

  “Mr. Calhoun, a great man who now reposes with his fathers, advocated the doctrine of nullification as a remedy, but a peaceful one. Secession belongs to a different class of remedies, but it is justified on the basis that the states are sovereign. There was a time when none denied it.” He paused, his tired, feverish eyes on the galleries. His wife, Varina, was like marble, whatever pain she felt suppressed, hidden.

  “I feel no hostility to you, Senators from the North. I am sure there is not one of you, whatever sharp discussion there might have been between us, to whom I cannot now say, in the presence of God, I wish you well. That said, Mr. President and Senators, and having made the announcement which the occasion seemed to require, it only remains for me to bid you a fond fa
rewell.”

  Davis’s colleagues sat silent out of respect, and sorrow. Sobs resounded in the gallery, some of the loudest those of the widow Greenhow. She covered her face and rocked in her seat. Fred Dasher’s chest was tight with tension. He was deeply moved. He charged out the door, too upset to apologize to those he jostled.

  Outside the Capitol the day was foggy, saturated with dampness. Like a man in a maze, he turned this way and that through the disgraceful litter of Corinthian columns, marble slabs, and lumber. Civilian gawkers—tourist families, single women—mingled with slovenly workmen, who seemed to be making only snail’s progress on construction of the Capitol dome. The cast-iron base was complete but wrapped in ugly scaffolding. The statue of Armed Freedom that would surmount the dome lay on its side in the mud.

  Every step spattered mud on Fred’s fawn trousers. His head was clearing after the wrenching speech. If someone as brilliant and important as Davis could stand up to the government’s assault on liberty, so could he.

  He failed to see the strolling whore until she barred his way, cooing at him with her rouged mouth. “Buy my muffin, dearie. Nice warm muffin.”

  Fred Dasher treated women politely, but not this time. He shoved her so hard she stumbled against a block of uncut marble. “Ow! Dirty bastard!” He settled his beaver hat more securely and strode into the miasmic fog lying on the Mall. He could already smell the canal where he was to rendezvous at twelve.

  He walked rapidly over the rough ground, past the towers of the Smithsonian, poking up like strange red fingers, and onward, till he was south of President’s Park, with the unfinished trunk of the monument to George Washington just visible in the distance. Subscriptions had dwindled; people said the monument would never be finished.

  He threw a rock at some pigs rooting in the mud. The area was a disgrace and by night, dangerous. It was marsh and mudflat, with the old municipal canal cutting across. Once the canal had linked the Potomac and the East Branch. Now it was abandoned, clogged with garbage, night soil, the occasional horse or dog carcass rotting away. Though not a delicate person, Fred held a linen handkerchief over his nose and mouth as he approached an iron bridge spanning the canal. On the opposite side, among bare trees, a man in a dark gray, caped overcoat and unmarked forage cap lurked like a footpad. Fred was filled with disgust. Was this fit duty for a professional soldier?

  “Colonel,” he said as he approached the other man. He had been ordered not to salute where he might be observed.

  “Lieutenant,” the colonel said. “What have you discovered?”

  “It’s as you suspected, sir. The National Rifles are practically all secesh.”

  Colonel Charles Stone, West Point ’45, was in charge of the defenses of the District. He was given the responsibility by the bloated egomaniac at the head of the Army, old Fuss and Feathers Scott. Fred Dasher was Stone’s aide, forced to operate as a glorified detective. Until companies of the regular Army could be pulled from Kansas, upstate New York, and two Southern arsenals from which they’d been driven, four militia units including the National Rifles were the city’s only protection. Fred had used the name Frederick Danner, and his credentials as a Virginian, to join and drill with the Rifles.

  “What’s your assessment of the militia commander?” Stone asked.

  “Captain Schaeffer’s hard to read, sir. He’s careful to say nothing partisan or controversial. On the other hand, the men he’s recruited constitute evidence against him. He must have picked every one of them for their secesh sympathies. The unit is well armed. Sabers, revolvers, two mountain howitzers.”

  “Good God.”

  Fred delivered the coup de grâce. “Everything’s straight from the Army arsenal, I confirmed that.”

  “Fine work, Lieutenant. The weapons will be confiscated but we must keep watching. I suggest we meet again—”

  “Sir.”

  “—Friday. We might manage someplace warmer.”

  “Sir, I can’t make arrangements for Friday.”

  “Why not?”

  “Do I have permission to speak candidly?”

  “You do,” Stone said, his tone less comradely than before.

  “I don’t care for this kind of work, sir. Skulking. Telling lies about my identity.”

  “Lieutenant, this city is ringed by enemies who could rise up and attack at any time. Part of my duty is to ferret out weaknesses in our defense force. The work’s necessary, and I have no one else to do it.”

  Fred felt an enormous, buoyant relief even before he spoke the words he’d rehearsed. “It’s nothing personal, Colonel, and I am sorry to abandon you—”

  “Christ in heaven. Not you too.”

  “Yes, sir. I will hand in my resignation from the Army effective today.”

  “Then damn you, sir. God damn you for a traitor.”

  Hurt and angry, Fred didn’t know what to say. He had no animosity toward his commander. They shared a moment of helpless silence in the fog. Finally Stone said, “Where are you going, then?”

  “South,” Fred Dasher said. “Wherever they will have me.”

  5

  January 1861

  “As a young girl I lived for a time at the Old Capitol,” Rose said to her captive, a pop-eyed young man new to the salon. Those nearby listened politely, though most had heard the story many times. Margaret had.

  “It’s a pity they’ve turned it into a jail, it has such a distinguished history. Congress met in the building after the British burned Washington in 1814. When Congress moved out, it became a fashionable boardinghouse. Mrs. H.V. Hill, the proprietor, was my aunt. Living there was an education for a young woman. I met Henry Clay, and Daniel Webster. I heard Chief Justice Marshall discourse on the law in the Supreme Court’s room in the basement. Great men. Statesmen. Not the weasels infesting the town today. The greatest of them was John C. Calhoun. He loved my aunt’s hospitality. I was privileged to sit at his bedside during his last days. Offer him sips of water or a cool cloth for his head. He had a profound influence on my thinking. Before he died, he predicted a fatal conflict with the North.”

  Rose O’Neal Greenhow was a strikingly attractive woman, with dark eyes like Margaret’s, and a complexion of a deeper olive hue. No one knew her exact age. Somewhere in the forties, Margaret guessed. Her raven-black hair, center parted, showed only a few hints of gray. Her attire was somber: a short jacket of black wool grenadine over a black silk dress, and a rope of pearls on her lush bosom.

  A dozen guests were gathered in the parlor of her manse at No. 398 Sixteenth Street, left to her by her late husband, Dr. Greenhow. It was the last Monday of the month. Rose received on Mondays, Fridays, and Sunday afternoons.

  “Ah, but here’s the person you must meet,” she exclaimed to the pop-eyed visitor. Senator Seward, slender and rather stooped, entered arm in arm with the chairman of the Military Affairs Committee, Henry Wilson of Massachusetts. The plain and corpulent Wilson reminded Margaret of a farmer. He was a frequent guest. Infatuated with Rose, Margaret suspected. He never brought his wife.

  “Governor,” Rose said, sailing over to Seward with her visitor in tow. “Hello, Henry.” The greeting made Wilson grin foolishly. Rose fixed her attention on the senator from New York. “This young man is the nephew of a dear friend of my late husband. Jarvis Tottle, the Honorable William Seward. Everyone calls him governor, Jarvis, in spite of his seat in the Senate.”

  “Pleasure, sir,” Seward said in a voice grown hoarse from too many cigars. His clothes reeked of them.

  Rose linked arms with the young man. “Jarvis is recently out of college in Kentucky. He wants to work in government. I told him you could open doors, perhaps find him a clerkship, since everyone says you’ll head the new cabinet and be the de facto president.” Long ago, Seward had predicted the “irrepressible conflict” between advocates of free and slave labor. Rose despised his Republican politics but welcomed him personally, as she welcomed others of his party for what they could do for her.


  “I must warn you, however. Jarvis is known to sympathize with the South.”

  “There’s a blue cockade on my hat, absolutely,” Jarvis said.

  Seward adjusted the gentleman’s traveling shawl draped over his frock coat. “You’re certainly not alone in Washington. The Star claims we have twenty thousand secesh-minded citizens in the District. A third of our white population. Many work in government. Tell me about yourself, Mr. Tottle.”

  Margaret had been listening. Now she turned away, disappointed that Hanna wasn’t present this evening. She had made many acquaintances since dipping into the waters of Rose’s social pond. Only one, Hanna Siegel, had become a friend.

  Margaret and Hanna were the same age but were in other ways opposites. Hanna was European, fair, narrow-hipped, boyish. She dressed to conceal what little bosom she had. Where Margaret was vividly dark, Hanna was straw blonde, with blue eyes.

  Margaret lived comfortably; Hanna was poor. Hanna’s father was a former officer in the Austrian army. Asked about his reason for emigrating to America, he always replied with vague statements about “opportunity.” He was seeking preferment, a commission or a government job, like young Jarvis Tottle and hundreds of others.

  Hanna was an actress. She ran with a crowd of theatricals who were struggling just as she was; the sort of people Calhoun Miller would dismiss as not respectable. Margaret had a picture of actresses as gregarious to the point of bawdiness, and often brashly ambitious. Hanna was quiet, though quietly determined. In the country less than three years, she retained only an echo of European speech. For eighteen months she’d hired out to the shrewish wife of an elocution teacher. She washed dishes, scrubbed floors, carried slops, and in return the teacher purged her accent.

  They disagreed sharply on slavery. Margaret thought it a regrettable system, but necessary for the South’s survival. The Calhoun Miller view. Hanna wished one of God’s lightning bolts would destroy every white man who practiced it. Hanna wanted to convert her friend. Margaret avoided the subject if she could.