The Murder of Willie Lincoln Read online

  Hay took a chair by the bedside, and Tad looked at him with dark, watery eyes. The boy’s curiosity was strong, but no equal to illness or sleep.

  “Taddie, my—” Hay stopped himself. “Tad, I need to ask you a question about some medicines you took. Do you remember Doctor Stone giving you medicine?”

  A wary nod.

  “Gray pills—did he give you some to swallow?” Hay felt a stirring at his back. “Or blue pills?”

  Tad stared back at Hay like a porcelain cat.

  “Tad!” Hay said. “Doctor Stone did give you gray pills, every day, did he not? And watch you swallow them down.” He wondered if the eight-year-old was a little too young to take pills.

  Tad nodded once. His wide eyes never left Hay’s.

  Lincoln said, “But did you eat ’em down, Taddie, like a good boy?”

  “Yes, Papa-day, yes. Me and Willie, too. Oh, I miss Willie, Papa-day. I miss Willie, miss, miss, miss Wil…”

  Tad was trembling and caved in to tears. Lincoln wrapped his oversized hands around the boy’s oversized head and tucked him into his chest. Primitive noises burbled out from … Hay found it hard to tell from which of them. Together, they rocked in a chair that had four straight legs.

  Lincoln looked up and mouthed to Hay, “Any more questions?”

  Hay raised an index finger.

  With a seesawing of his hands, Lincoln roused Tad from his dozing. “Taddie, Taddie, are you awake?”

  The boy raised his head and offered a beatific smile, which Hay hated to squelch.

  As gently as he could, Hay said, “Tad, did anyone else besides Doctor Stone give you pills, gray or blue?”

  Tad seemed not to have heard him, and Hay was about to repeat the question when the boy’s eyes filled with tears and he nodded, then stopped, then nodded again. His head began to bob at an accelerating pace, until he seemed to be losing control. Lincoln’s pressed his palms against Tad’s cheeks, and the boy calmed.

  “Who was he, Tad?” the president whispered.

  “A lady,” Tad said, more clearly than before.

  In unison, Lincoln and Hay said, “A lady?”

  “A lady, Papa-day, a dark lady.”

  “Yib?” said Lincoln. That was Tad’s nickname for Mrs. Keckly.

  Tad shook his head fiercely.

  “Young or old?” said Lincoln, cross-examining the witness.

  “A dark lady,” Tad said stubbornly, then he started to cry, and this time he would not be consoled.

  * * *

  Hay borrowed a brown stallion from the Soldiers’ Home superintendent, with a promise to return it as soon as he could (although he was careful not to specify when). Lacking a carriage roof, nothing to shield him but his greatcoat, his felt hat, and the cable-stitch scarf Kate Chase claimed to have knitted, he was grateful for the sunshine. The trip back seemed shorter, as it usually did and, this time, it actually was: The stallion loped downhill more swiftly than a barouche could carry four adults and a boy to higher ground.

  A dark lady, Hay thought. A dark lady who was not Mrs. Keckly. Assuming, of course, that Tad was telling the truth. The boy lived in a world of his own. Quite possibly he was telling the truth, or what he thought was the truth, but the truthfulness was confined to that world and no one else’s. The only person who knew the difference for certain was Willie. Nobody else, not even the father, whose love for Tad showed a desperation that frightened Hay. When Willie died, no one’s loss was greater than Tad’s.

  Who, then, was the dark lady who had—Hay would assume, yes, that Tad was telling the truth—given Tad, and presumably Willie, the gray pills? The dark lady was not John Watt or Thomas Stackpole or Silly Billy Spaulding, that much was evident. He might also assume it was not Mrs. Keckly. Tad had said so. But that meant taking it as fact that Tad was a credible witness.

  One of the nurses, perhaps. Hay wondered how many of them, besides Mrs. Keckly, had dark skin. He had seen none of their names (none he recognized, anyway) on both of Old Edward’s lists. Or even on one of them, best he could recall. Suddenly he realized why. They worked for eight or twelve hours at a stretch; they had neither arrived nor departed in the time spans Hay had specified, and Old Edward might have been unaware of their presence upstairs. By now, too many days had lapsed to count on asking him again.

  Still, Hay’s first step was clear: to question Mrs. Keckly. He had seen her gliding in and out of Tad’s bedroom and Mrs. Lincoln’s. She was everywhere, hardly noticed, like the wainscoting. She had made herself invaluable to the running of the place, scheduling the boys’ round-the-clock nurses, making herself indispensable to the Hell-cat (and therefore to the president) in matters far beyond gowns. She also seemed to be a heroine of sorts to the Negro servants, or so Hay had gathered, owing to the impressive distance she had traveled in her life. Born a slave somewhere down in Virginia, she had used the artistry in her fingertips to amass the $1,200 to purchase her freedom.

  As Hay continued south along the extension of Seventh street, the distance between the houses decreased. As he crossed Boundary street, back into the city, he felt his stomach constrict.

  Mrs. Keckly lived and worked on Twelfth street, just north of K, in the Negro section of town. Here, the trees were sparse and the sidewalks nonexistent. He was looking for 388 and found it painted in crimson above the door of a four-story row house with elaborate brickwork and cornices carved over the windows. Hay pulled on the frog-shaped doorknocker and let it fall. Inside, an echo died away. A dressmaker probably saw clients only by appointment; for the grandes dames, she went to them.

  Hay rapped again on the door and, this time, the eye-level ovals of opaque glass filled with a swirl of shadow. Light footsteps approached, and the door opened.

  Elizabeth Keckly stood in the doorway. Her charcoal lace gown had an unapologetic bodice. Even on the stone slab of the doorstep, she stood a few inches shorter than Hay—but statuesque, her back erect, her hair tightly braided. Her skin, the color of prewar coffee with cream, gave off a glow. On her unlined face, the polite but inscrutable expression suggested that nothing could trouble her, nothing in the universe, on either side of death. Certainly not a bantam such as John Hay.

  “May I come in?” said Hay, more tentatively than he would have liked.

  Her moment of hesitation showed who was in charge. Then, without a word, she stepped aside. Willing to relent, but out of choice, not obligation. Here, she was the mistress of the premises, and wished it known.

  “Thank you,” he said, to show his breeding—actually, to mask his lack of it.

  As Hay followed her into the front parlor, Hay realized with a shock that not since boyhood had he entered a Negro’s home. Twice, he had accompanied his father to a deathbed and waited in the doorway of a shack. And once, in Springfield, he had taken Uncle Milt’s cook to her home, toting a sling of apples and pears, but declined her invitation for supper. Slaves were unknown in Illinois, except for the fugitives rushing through, and the few frightened freedmen had kept to themselves (as the white folks did). In Providence, the freedmen were too fancy for most of the college men; some of them had Negro butlers of their own.

  Mrs. Keckly’s home was neither fancy nor poor. If not for the photographs of colored men and women in the hallway, Hay might have mistaken it for a white person’s home. Her parlor was as overfurnished and damask draped as any attorney’s. Mrs. Keckly guided Hay into a wine-colored armchair with prickly upholstery. She remained standing.

  “I am terribly busy, Mister Hay. I have a gown that must be ready this afternoon—it is for a senator’s wife—and another one by morning. These are clients who would not countenance a delay. If you would permit me a moment or two to instruct my assistants, I would be grateful.” With a swish of her crinolines, and without waiting for a response, she swept out of the room.

  On the round table at the center of the parlor, the morning’s National Republican was folded to page 3. An item was circled in blunt pencil:

  Slave-Catc
hing in Washington

  The following is the reply of Mr. Keese in relation to one of his supposed slave-catching operations. Mr. Keese declares our statement that his victim was a defenceless woman to be “an unmitigated falsehood,” and challenges our Reporter to prove his assertions. We have always relied with confidence upon the statements of our City Reporter, and have no reason to doubt his veracity in this case. We understand him to accept the challenge and he will doubtless on Monday prove more than Mr. Keese will desire to see.

  Then came the slave-catcher Keese’s letter of vituperation, reminding the Republican’s readers that the Fugitive Slave Act was still the law of the land. Hay wondered if Mrs. Keckly had a personal interest.

  Hay pulled out his pocket watch—when would she return? He was examining the top shelf in the bookcase—The Last of the Mohicans, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a volume of Keats, two of Hawthorne—when he felt, rather than heard, a presence at his back. He spun around guiltily and found Mrs. Keckly in the doorway, delivering a level stare, as if he had violated a confidence, which possibly he had.

  “How, then, may I help you?” she said.

  “I have a few questions I need to ask, if I could, please. At the president’s request.”

  “The president asked that you … question me?” Mrs. Keckly looked down her almost-aquiline nose at Hay as she lowered herself into the overstuffed divan. “The subject, Mister Hay?”

  “He asked that I look into…” Hay started with the least threatening, though least promising, piece of the puzzle. “I had occasion to look through the investigatory files for the House Select Committee on the Loyalty of Government Clerks—you know the committee I mean?”

  “Everyone in this city does.”

  “And in particular, the file for Thomas Stackpole. In which I found a note from you, declining to testify to his character.” Mrs. Keckly’s head jerked up, but Hay could read nothing in her expression. “May I ask why?” he said.

  “Why what?”

  “Why you … declined. And why they asked you in the first place.”

  “And may I ask why you are asking?”

  “Because I am trying to … understand Mister Stackpole and his … loyalties, shall we say?”

  “I know nothing about that. Which is why I declined to say anything at all.”

  “Why did they ask you?”

  “That, you would need to ask them. I can hardly enlighten you as to the committee’s reasons.”

  Plural.

  “But they thought that you could,” he said. And probably would.

  “They are not infallible, Mister Hay. None of us is.”

  “I am relieved to hear that,” Hay said with a smile he hoped was charming.

  He studied her strong, sad face, the determined eyes; the corners of her mouth drooped low. Her beauty was in force of character, in her surprisingly delicate features that told of resolution and an inner calm.

  “Let me ask you something else, then,” Hay said. “I understand you arranged for the nurses for Willie and Tad.”

  “Until to-day.” She seemed resentful at Tad’s departure.

  “At Missus Lincoln’s direction, I imagine?”

  “And the president’s.”

  Lincoln had not mentioned that—no reason to. “Let me ask you this, then. Willie and Tad were in separate bedrooms most of the time they were ill. Did you arrange for a nurse for each of them or a single nurse for both?”

  “For each of them, when I could. But it is hard to find experienced nurses. The war hospitals need them just as much. More.”

  “So there were times when one of the boys was left alone.”

  “I did the best I could, Mister Hay, and if you believe it was not good enough, then I beg you to—”

  “Oh no, Missus Keckly, nothing like that. I do not blame you in the slightest. It is the facts of the situation I am trying to ascertain. I hold no one at fault.”

  Except for murder, Hay thought.

  “Then why do you ask?” she said. The set of her jaw suggested a patience that could outwait Hay until Jefferson Davis became a Yankee.

  “I wish I could explain further, but I cannot. I assure you, however, that I do need to ask.”

  She sat stony-faced.

  “I have another question, please,” he said—“a request, really. I would like to have a list of the nurses you engaged. Could you draw one up for me? Would you, please?”

  Mrs. Keckly seemed tongue-tied for a moment and said, with a tremor in her voice, “Did one of them do something wrong?”

  “I should hope not. But I would like a list.”

  “Now?”

  “Not all of them. But the ones you can remember. Starting with yourself, yes?” Hay withdrew the calfskin notebook from his pocket.

  “Yes, of course. And Missus Lincoln, at times. And the president, when he could. Mary Jane Welles.” That was the navy secretary’s wife. “And Old Aunt Mary. And one or two others, perhaps—I would have to think.”

  “Which of them”—Hay did not know how to say this—“which of the boys’ nurses are…” He rejected darkies. “Negroes?”

  Mrs. Keckly stiffened. “Besides myself, you mean?” she said.

  “Yes, besides yourself.”

  “Old Aunt Mary. Mary Dines.”

  Hay pictured the gray-haired, squared-jawed woman—old was accurate—shambling in and out of the mansion’s bedchambers, dragging a pail.

  “Any others?”

  A hesitation. “No.”

  “No one?”

  A steely gaze was her reply.

  * * *

  Other than his mustachioed landlady in Providence, Old Aunt Mary was probably the gentlest old woman Hay had ever met. The furthest thing from a murderer, Hay thought as he spurred the stallion back to the Executive Mansion. Murderess. Hay knew her only in passing, but he prided himself on his ability to penetrate façades. The notion was ludicrous. And if Mrs. Keckly was as pure as Lincoln believed, and if—if—no other nurse had a darker hue, then Hay was chasing a dark lady in some other guise. Who either worked in the Executive Mansion or had visited it.

  Old Edward might know.

  Hay instructed the stable boy to arrange for the stallion’s return to the Soldiers’ Home (Hasheesh would bridle at smelling a rival nearby) and found Old Edward at his post. His white shirt showed a smudge just below the cravat. Hay weighed the embarrassment the doorkeeper would feel against the greater embarrassment he would feel later, and told him. Old Edward was grateful in excess.

  “And what may I do for you, Mister Hay?”

  Hay described the list he wanted, of every Negress employed in the mansion, plus any who were on the premises on Tuesday evening past—“To the extent you can remember.”

  “I can remember,” Old Edward said. “It will be very like the list I gave you already, Mister Hay.”

  “Shorter, I would guess.”

  * * *

  Hay heard the sobs while he was climbing the staircase. He hoped the Hell-cat’s door was open—frightful decibels, should it be shut. It was open; thank goodness for that. Hay was surprised at the sympathy he felt for her. Maybe he was good at heart.

  He crept across the hallway and stood outside the doorway to her bedroom. Her back was to Hay, facing the president, and suddenly she raised her right arm and, without an utterance, slapped him across the cheek. Hay startled, but Lincoln did not react at all, as if he she had swatted a fly on the bedpost. As if it had happened before.

  “We had to move him, Puss.” The president’s reedy voice was whiny and hoarse. “There was no choice. He was not getting well here. And getting nightmares. He will get better up there.”

  “But why…” Sobs punctuated her effort to speak. “Mister … Lincoln, but why … could I”—then in a gush—“not see him first?”

  “Mother, you know why. You were sleeping when we left. And your tears would have upset him. You know that.”

  “It was b-better for hi-i-im not to … s-see his … mo
ther, you mean.” She was trembling, the sobs slipping out.

  “Mother, Mother, Mother.” The president coaxed her toward the far window, his arm girdling her waist. He pulled the curtains aside, and with a solemn gesture, he pointed toward the capital’s southernmost reach.

  “Mother, there is a large white building on the hill yonder,” Lincoln said. He meant the Government Hospital for the Insane. “Try and control your grief, or it will drive you mad, and we may have to send you there.”

  Her sobbing revived.

  Hay felt soiled—this was something he ought never have seen. What had he seen? Were all marriages, he wondered, cauldrons of violence and fear? Had the president grown impervious to anyone else’s pain? (No, that could not be.) Or was the Hell-cat simply beyond salvation?

  * * *

  William Seward was all in gray, and despite that—or because of it—he glittered at the head of the table. His disorderly gray hair, his gray-and-maroon waistcoat, the pallor that seemed wise rather than irresolute—Hay marveled at how lively the Confederate color could look. The grays blended suavely with the mahogany furnishings and the wine-colored walls. The secretary of state’s mansion, along the eastern edge of Lafayette square, stood within a rifle shot of the president’s house. Its elegance suggested a woman’s touch, although owing to her neurasthenia, Frances had shunned the swamp of Washington and stayed in upstate New York. Hay could conclude only that the taste was Seward’s.

  Sophistication was merely one of the qualities Hay admired in the secretary of state. His profanity was another, and his ease with a Havana and a scotch. Also, his unpredictable insights and his fearlessness about ugly truths and his shrewdness in grasping a situation without revealing any thoughts of his own. And his cutting humor, even when it was directed at Hay.

  How else to interpret the placement at this evening’s table except as an instrument for the host’s private amusement at Hay’s expense? Hay was seated between two dowagers and directly across the table—but separated from ease of conversation by an arrangement of tulips and a pair of crystal candlesticks braided with orchids—from Kate Chase. She was a vision in a black frock that revealed more than it concealed. A male admirer sat at each elbow. On her right, Mr. Sprague, the boy governor of Rhode Island, counterpoised by a handsome but stupid congressman from New York whose support Kate’s father would need if (when?) he ran for president again in ’sixty-four. Another of Seward’s pranks, no doubt. So, Hay found himself exchanging labyrinthine sentences with the woman to his left, a tiny woman with a silo of thin white hair, who claimed as her son the loudmouthed senator from Massachusetts currently haranguing Seward about the president’s “folly of constipated emancipation.” Serves Seward right, Hay thought. The secretary of state was making pitifully little effort to suppress a smile.