The Murder of Willie Lincoln Page 18

  Through the turtle soup, the shad, the lamb, the asparagus, the terrapin, the french kisses—Hay lost count of the courses—a constant, vexing presence was Kate Chase’s merriment. Hay took it personally, for he was morally certain that was how it was meant. Why did he let himself be tortured so?

  “And yes, my dear Mister Hay, the quality of the Madeira has been frightful of late”—Hay politely allowed the jowl-drooping dowager to his right to prattle on—“and we can only pray that this terrible war will be finished by spring, however it might…”

  It was over the dessert of charlotte russe that Kate Chase trilled his name, with her patented admixture of deference and mockery. “Oh, Mister Hay, you can imagine my dear father’s joy when he learned of your opposition to his reasonable request.”

  “Regarding?” said Hay, although he could guess. A newspaperman in Ohio who was a political ally of the treasury secretary’s had decided he had the talents to serve as the minister plenipotentiary to Czar Alexander II. Hay was surprised that Miss Chase was so unmindful of the capital’s customs as to bring up a matter of business—of office seeking, no less—over dinner. Too much Madeira, perhaps. Or the latest evidence that the Chases, father and daughter, operated in the absence of shame.

  “Oh, Mister Hay, I do believe that you are aware already. Unless the thwarting of qualified applicants has become a matter of daily routine.”

  “Oh, that is my hope for the day when I awake each and every morning. For every position, we have a luxuriance of qualified applicants. This is a fertile country in that regard.”

  “You do have a way with words, Mister Hay. If perhaps you would indulge me, then—I understand you are a poet. In your soul, I mean.” She moved one of the vases aside.

  “My soul is a complicated place, Miss Chase. Someday, perhaps, you will be so good as to explain it to me.”

  “If I had the time, I might enjoy that. But more immediately, I was hoping you would write a poem for us here.”

  “Now?”

  “You say you are unable?”

  “Never. Any subject in particular?”

  “Oh yes,” she said. “Me.”

  Hay saw this could come to no good. Every escape looked like cowardice, and any attempt to … well, every line, every word, was a peril. He would need to navigate between the Scylla and Charybdis of flattery and malice. Hay was prone to say he liked a challenge more frequently than he actually did.

  “Easy subject,” Hay said, dismayed at the silence around the table. “Allow me the honor of trying. A young woman known well for her chestnut hair. No, A young woman renowned for her chestnut hair.”

  Kate Chase leaned toward him, her long lashes fluttering; her crinkled smile sent spasms through Hay.

  “Spent her days … mooning over her papa’s fate.”

  That brought a scowl from Kate Chase, but the rest of the table perked up.

  “Only at night … nighttime … No, night … Only at night when the stars looked oh so fair.”

  Cliché had reared its ugly head, and the rhythm was a-kilter, but Hay saw no choice but to soldier on. He considered the rhymes for fate, then took on a performer’s voice, to project to Seward’s end of the table. (At Brown he had auditioned for the part of Iago but lost out to an Episcopal minister’s son.) “And … if I may…”

  Hay glanced at Seward, who smiled like a proud father.

  A young woman renowned for her chestnut hair

  Spent her days … contriving her papa’s fate.

  At the end of the table, a thump of delight.

  Only if blocked by vases—yes, yes—moved here or there,

  Could—no, would. Would she resist letting a man kiss … fair Kate.

  The deep blush on Kate Chase’s cheeks was Hay’s prize—her embarrassment at the flattery she could hardly renounce, tied to a poke at her deserving, Iago-ish father.

  “A second verse!” the Prussian ambassador cried out. Silverware clattered.

  Hay said, “I shall retire after one round, my dear sir, and declare myself grateful I am still on my feet.” He half stood and bowed.

  “Hear, hear!” Seward shouted before inviting the women to take their coffee in the front parlor. The men adjourned to the drawing room, where they sipped brandy, puffed on segars, admired the crackling fire, and talked of the war. Of General Pope’s sweep down the Mississippi River toward the Confederate heartland, of the two Union gunboats that silenced a Confederate field battery in Tennessee, of Jefferson Davis’s proclamation of martial law, of interpretations of General McClellan’s behavior—here, voices were raised—as that of a prudent man or a coward. On the last, Seward was silent, as was Hay. Not a word about the Harpers Ferry pontoons, Hay was relieved to note. In Washington City, some secrets stayed secret (although if this one escaped, Hay reckoned, no harm done).

  After a second brandy and before a second Havana—Seward’s taste in both vices was impeccable—Hay rose from the cracked leather armchair to take his leave. Four or five guests lingered, but Seward signaled him to stay. Eleven o’clock had passed before only Hay remained.

  Seward put down his glass and picked up his segar, which had gone out. He pushed his Cyrano nose into a handkerchief and showed no inhibition, which Hay took as a compliment. “Hay, what is the use of growing old?” he said, staring into the fire. “You learn something of men and things, but never until too late to use it.”

  “Well, teach it to me, Governor, and I shall be glad to put it to use.”

  “I would be glad to, my boy—I bet you would. And let me say, I have also learned something of women, Hay, and one thing I have learned is that that young woman is not the right young woman for you.”

  “Miss Chase?” Hay was surprised at his relief to hear this. “Why do you say that?”

  “I do understand the attraction—I am not too old for that.” A twinkle in Seward’s eyes. “But she is not a kind person. Kindness is something that every man needs from a wife. You especially, my dear boy. And patience. Our Miss Chase is cruel when it is necessary—even women can be forgiven for that—but also when it is unnecessary. The only man she will ever make happy is her shit-ass of a father. Indeed, she is her father, in a … comelier package. Let the good governor of Rhode Island achieve his fondest wish.”

  “It seems he will whether I let him or not.”

  “Then be grateful, my boy.”

  Seward was probably right, but surely the secretary of state had not taken him aside to offer romantic counsel. “What else have you learned, Governor, that might be put to good use?”

  “I am curious at the moment about what you have learned. How is your investigation coming?”

  “What investiga—”

  “There are two?”

  Now, Hay understood the summons. Seward’s relationship with Lincoln was more than professional or political; it was personal. The rivals for the Republican presidential nomination in ’sixty had truly become friends—Seward’s doing, mostly. He had courted Willie and Tad with a gift of kittens and prevailed on the president to come along for carriage rides in the late afternoon and conversed with him for hours in comfortable chairs about war and politics and life. Whenever Lincoln wrestled with a decision of state, Seward saw dangers and opportunities that others overlooked, and he was unafraid to say so. Maybe he could help Hay.

  Hay said, “What did he tell you?”

  “The basics.” Seward poured Hay a fresh snifter of brandy and seated himself near the fire, oblique to his guest. “Now, you tell me.”

  Relieved to have Seward to confide in, Hay unburdened himself—the pair of messages in his satchel, the implication of the successful embalming, the arsenic in the embalming fluid, the toxic presence of mercury, Dr. Stone’s heroic intentions, the accusations of disloyalty in Potter’s files, John Watt’s attempt at extortion, Tad’s dark lady—“If there was one, and with Tad, you never know. Someone did poison Willie—that seems clear—and maybe tried to poison Tad. Only because Tad is a … blackguard
in miniature did he survive. That is my working theory, anyway. Until this morning, I was thinking it was a secesh conspiracy at work. John Watt, Stackpole, the painter Spaulding, who has gone south, by coincidence or not—those blackguards. But now I am not so sure. This dark lady—if it was not Missus Keckly, who could it be?”

  Seward stared into the fire, nursing his snifter in his delicately formed hand. Light flickered over the hand-tooled bindings of books that stretched from floor to ceiling. A room of dark wood and leather, in which confidences seemed easy and right.

  “You have ruled out Missus Keckly?” said Seward.

  “Tad has.”

  “But as you say, Tad’s word is … not the Gospel according to … Mark, was it?”

  “Do you have some reason to think that she…?” Hay stopped; the words hung there. “Why would a mulatto, any Negress, conspire with secessionists? They should hate one another.”

  “You are assuming there was a conspiracy. And that secessionists were involved.”

  “Yes, Nicolay always says, ‘Never assume.’ I keep assuming.”

  “We wouldn’t need rules to live by if we did not break them from time to time.”

  “Or always.”

  “Even more so, then,” Seward said. “About Missus Keckly, I would be careful about making assumptions. She is a complicated person. A lot is going on underneath.”

  “How on earth do you know this?”

  “I pride myself on an ability to read men—and women, too. You might say that is how I earn my keep. This is what I do.”

  Hay said, “So, what is going on underneath?”

  Seward shifted in his chair. “That, I do not know. But something.”

  Chapter Eleven

  SUNDAY, MARCH 2, 1862

  There was nothing so annoying, in Hay’s mind, as an unselfish act that goes unnoticed. Hay had declined the president’s invitation to church so that Robert might spend time with his father undisturbed; since the inauguration, by Robert’s account, father and son had spent no more than ten minutes alone. Robert had responded to Hay’s generosity by refusing to go. Nor would he tell Hay why. Probably it was the pain he had felt at the toy store after church, plus all the years of pain before that. Hay was exasperated both at Robert and at his own exasperation. It was not his job, he told himself, to fix the rift between father and firstborn. What a sad, sad house!

  Hay wished only to escape into the cold air. He could not bother to descend into the mansion’s basement for bread and currant tea, and so he hastened out the front entrance. The sky was charcoal, heavy with the threat of snow. He pulled his greatcoat tighter around him and felt—heard—a rumble in his belly. He ignored it.

  He crossed the Avenue to Lafayette square. The iron gate, adorned by eagles, was unlocked. The bare branches of the sycamores and tulip trees offered skeletal protection. Straight ahead, Andrew Jackson sat astride his horse rearing high—the “tippy-toe” statue, as Tad called it. Cavalry horses were kept in temporary stables at the rear of the square, and Hay stepped over the evidences and exited through the back gate. Across H street, worshipers surged into the daisy-yellow confines of Saint John’s Church—the church of presidents, it was called, although not of this one. Hay steered clear, turning west. Only then did he remember whose house lay ahead.

  The three-story gray manse with the Corinthian-columned entrance was stately to the point of inertness. This could not be said for the man who answered Hay’s knock. Not a butler but the navy secretary himself. Gideon Welles’s bushy snow-white whiskers looked glued on, like one of Pinkerton’s men in tawdry disguise. The curls that reached his shoulders, along with his ethereal ways, had inspired the newspapermen to dub him “Marie Antoinette.” His unwillingness to venture an opinion no matter what the cabinet was discussing peeved Lincoln. Hay’s opinion was that Welles was a fool.

  “And what do you want?” said Welles. He scrutinized Hay like a beetle under a microscope.

  “Good morning, sir,” Hay replied, wielding courtesy as a shot to the gut. “Is your wife, by any chance, available for a conversation?”

  “We are leaving for church, young man, and I suggest you do the same.”

  “I need only a few minutes,” Hay said, uncertain this was so.

  “What for?”

  Welles’s face was stern, and Hay thought of refusing to say. But that way, he would not get past the door, and he must. A white nurse might tell him of a dark lady, which a colored nurse might not.

  “About the nurses who tended to Willie and Tad—the other nurses,” Hay quickly added.

  A hesitation, then with a Connecticut archness: “I shall see if Missus Welles is indisposed.” Hay expected to be left on the doorstep, but the navy secretary ushered Hay into the parlor.

  Hay had learned you could never judge a man’s true nature from examining his parlor, but you could always tell what he wanted others to think of him. The nut brown and maroon of the upholstery and the drapes reminded Hay of a New England patrician’s sanctum. A vase of orchids and a Bible sat on the center table’s octagonal marble top; crossed cutlasses were mounted over the doorway. Volumes of Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne lined the walnut bookcase, their bindings uncracked. Only Uncle Tom’s Cabin showed signs of intrusion. On a higher shelf sat the carving of a skull from some primitive land.

  “Mister Hay.” The cultured voice came from the doorway. Hay turned and saw the plain but poised countenance of Mary Jane Welles. “May I be of service?”

  “Thank you, yes.”

  “And please, if you would have a seat. There is no need for you to stand.”

  “Oh, I like to look at books.”

  “Then perhaps you shall write one someday. I understand you have a talent.”

  “Who on earth told you that?”

  “One can spend hours by a boy’s bedside and learn many things. Could I offer you some tea, Mister Hay? I would offer coffee but you might think I was showing off.”

  Hay understood why the Hell-cat had taken to Mary Jane Welles. She wore her empathy on her sleeve, and her friendship with Mrs. Lincoln offered the imprimatur of eastern breeding upon this outlander from the West. And yet she was homely enough—her nose was blunt and bony, and gray curls hung to her neck—to pose no threat.

  “Your husband tells me you are leaving for church. I do not wish to delay you.”

  “God can spare me for a few minutes.”

  “In that case, yes, please, tea would be lovely,” Hay said, slipping into his manners for the Providence salon. He hoped something solid would come with the tea.

  A shake of the bone-china bell summoned a servant. Once the servant was gone, Mrs. Welles waited for Hay to speak. Either from politeness or a defensive crouch.

  “You are a nurse by training?” he said.

  “In Hartford, I was. Not since coming here, until Missus Keckly asked. Anything I could do for Missus Lincoln, I would do gladly.”

  “And for the president, too?”

  “Of course.”

  “I am pleased to hear that, because I need to ask you some questions at his behest.”

  Hay established that she had been a nurse to Willie as well as to Tad. Had Dr. Stone ever asked her to administer medicines?

  “Laudanum, when the pain was strong—that was for Willie. And when he was agitated, a little brandy, on his mother’s lace handkerchief. He would take it no other way.”

  “Nothing more than that?”

  “No, nothing more.”

  “Calomel? Blue-mass pills?”

  “No.” She looked desperate to inquire but, as a cabinet wife, knew not to.

  “What can you tell me, then, about Mary Dines?”

  “Old Aunt Mary? What would you like to know?”

  “Is she trustworthy?”

  “Entirely. Whatever she says she will do, she does. That is my experience. I would trust her with my life.”

  “With your child’s life?”

  “I already have. Last fall, with our Hubert,
when he had typhoid fever. I recommended her to Missus Keckly, when she asked me.”

  “Your son recovered?”

  “Yes, thank the Lord. He was horribly ill, but Old Aunt Mary has a knack for soothing a child. As settled as the earth, she is, and as reliable. A child senses that—Hubert did. Tad did, too.”

  “How was she freed, do you know?”

  “That, you would have to ask her. I do know who owned her. You might have heard of him. A former senator and war secretary by the name of Jefferson Davis.”

  Hay gasped. The Confederate president’s former slave was caring for the Union president’s sons.

  The servant returned with a silver tray, relieving Hay of the need to reply. An ornate teapot and two fluted cups—sacredamn, no food! Mrs. Welles poured, and Hay sipped a beverage that looked and tasted rather like water. New England austereness. Homeopathic tea.

  “Does Missus Keckly know this?” Hay managed. “Or the Lincolns?”

  “Missus Keckly does. That is how she knows Old Aunt Mary. From the Davises.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Missus Keckly made gowns for Varina Davis until the day she and her husband left for Montgomery to take the rebel presidency. Varina begged Missus Keckly to go with them, but it was out of the question. If you had purchased your freedom, would you move to Alabama of your own volition, even with a guarantee you would remain free?”

  “So, that is their connection, through…?”