The Murder of Willie Lincoln Read online

  In the open stretches of power maligned,

  The line popped into Hay’s mind—what the hell did it mean? Still, he rather liked it. So, keep going.

  Stands a headless temple at a cannonball’s range.

  He had lost the rhythm—that, he could fix—but now he needed a rhyme for maligned. Mind? Hind? (Ha!) Find? Fined? Blind? Oh yes …

  What if the enemy, forsworn—forsworn?—and confined

  Should shoot its embers into …

  Aargh. So, what rhymed with range? Mange? Oh, change.

  What if the enemy, unshorn and confined

  Should he end the verse with a question? Too late now …

  Shot his way into the White House, terribly strange?

  Awful, awful. His calfskin notebook remained where it was.

  A shout at his back reclaimed his attention. A soldier lounging on the porch called on the civilian intruders to present themselves. Hay climbed the worn wooden steps, Robert a half step behind. The pillars, he saw, were made not of marble but of wood (or was it plaster?) that was painted to look like marble, in ochre and off-white.

  “And who are you, boy?” Liquor on the soldier’s breath was evident three feet away.

  “I am John Hay, President Lincoln’s assist—”

  “And you?”—over Hay’s shoulder.

  Robert drew himself up and said, “I am the president’s son.”

  “Dern’t take me fer stupid, boy. His son is bumpin’ up daisies.”

  Robert leapt at the soldier, and Hay bounded between them.

  “Bob, Bob.” Hay pushed him back. “Be smart.”

  The sentry drew his revolver and pointed it at Hay’s head. Hay ignored it, pleased that he could.

  “And strong,” Hay told Robert.

  “I am,” Robert said, leaning forward.

  “Stronger.”

  Robert relaxed.

  The front door swung open at Hay’s touch. The Negro butler in livery looked out of place in the center hallway, as colonels and lieutenants and adjutants scurried past.

  “Yessuh, may I help ya?” The butler’s close-cropped gray hair brightened his mahogany skin. He belonged to a distant time, before this hillside had ever seen war.

  “We are here to see James Parks,” Hay said. “Mister James Parks.”

  “And who may I…?”

  “I am John Hay, an assistant to President Lincoln. And this is Robert Lincoln, the president’s son.”

  The butler’s lack of reaction was disappointing, although Hay supposed that important personages were as common in the Lees’ home as Southern drawls.

  The butler ushered them into the parlor on the right. A jumble of furniture and crates filled the high-ceilinged room; the Oriental rug was rutted and worn. The walls, a robin’s-egg blue, showed gaping rectangles where paintings had hung. The red velvet divan by the front wall was piled high with papers. The only places to sit were the pair of corner seats, upholstered a ghastly green, which faced the marble fireplace. Robert plunked himself down. Hay remained standing.

  Robert said, “Why would he tell us anything?”

  “Sometimes, people just like to be asked. I think he has every reason to help us.”

  “Why would he want to do that? And what do you suspect Missus Keckly of?”

  “An interesting question.” The rich baritone made Hay jump. It came from the back wall, which was not a wall at all but a series of archways into the next room.

  The African was a small man without a hair on his taut brown skull. His ears protruded and one eyelid drooped, which lent him a remote and cockeyed look—fittingly ethereal for an oracle, Hay thought. Yet he stood with perfect balance, his weight distributed on the corners of his feet, his legs and hips and torso in alignment. No one could knock this man down.

  The African’s gaze fastened on Robert, whose face was cast toward the floor. “Mastuh Lincoln, ’tis an honor to have you in this house again. Your father, I pray, is well.”

  “As well as can be expected.” Robert did not meet his eyes.

  “My sorrow, in my heart.” The African’s fist swung to his breast. “And for the one who gave you birth. And for yourself.”

  Robert’s head sank into his palms.

  “And tell me, then, what brings you here on this beautiful morning that God created?” The African directed this to Hay, recognizing who was in charge. Understanding the distribution of power was part of his duties.

  “Elizabeth Keckly,” Hay said. “You know her, yes?”

  “Of course. She was a favorite of the madam’s. And why”—the African nodded toward Robert—“do you ask?”

  The African crossed the room and stood with his back to the hearth. The low fire danced behind him. The collar on his black coat was frayed, although his shirt was a starchy white. The amusement in his eyes suggested he knew what Hay would say before Hay said it, which he probably did.

  “I wish I were allowed to tell you,” Hay replied.

  The African nodded. “What can I tell you then, sir?”

  Can, not may—a good sign, Hay thought. “About her character, her friendships, her loyalty—her loyalties. Let us begin at the beginning. Where was she born, do you know?”

  “I do. In Dinwiddie Courthouse, sout’ of Richmond. On a plantation owned by Armistead Burwell.” He pronounced the surname as a single slurred syllable. “A mild-mannered man.”

  “You knew him?”

  “Knew of.”

  The African stopped—his mind had gone elsewhere. A secret to deft detection, Hay recognized, was to sense when something had gone unsaid. Better still if you could guess what it was.

  Try a blunderbuss. “Knew of what?”

  “Rumors, not’ing more.”

  This time, he tried silence, hoping to elicit a longer reply. He cringed when Robert said, “Never believe a rumor.”

  “And why is that?” the African said.

  “Because they are lies.” Robert’s tone was grim.

  “Always?”

  Robert flushed. “Almost.”

  Hay said, “What were those rumors, Mister Parks, if you would?”

  A hesitation, then: “What you’d expect. Lizzy’s mother—Agnes, was her name—she was a fine-lookin’ woman, and Mastuh Burwell got his way wit’ her. Lizzy, she several degrees lighter than Agnes. Agnes’s slave husband, the ebony Mister Hobbs, he not Lizzy’s daddy.”

  “Hardly uncommon, as I understand it, for a master to … take up with his prettiest slave.”

  “That is so, sir.”

  Hay suspected the African knew this all too well. “What was he like—Mister Burwell?”

  “Not an evil man, really. Less brutal than most o’ ’em. It hurt him when he had to sell off a husband from a wife. Though he would—business is business, you understand. Is it more o’ an evil or lesser of one, to know the pain he cause and to cause it ne’er’less?”

  The eloquence of the African’s shrug acknowledged the agonies that human greed unleashed so serenely.

  “You knew Agnes,” Hay said.

  The African’s posture softened.

  “That I did. A fine lady—the finest. Wit’ dignity, and a mind of her own. It give her no end of troubles, which she endured with a sufferance to make the Savior proud. All of this she passed on to Lizzy. Everyone hear o’ Lizzy Hobbs, fer her beauty and willpower and … her airs, you might say. How she held her head, as if she was meant for somet’in’ better than the hovel.” Hay thought the African gave off similar airs. “Which, as it happened, she was.”

  “With your help, perhaps?”

  “Not hardly. Only bringing to the madam’s attention”—the sweep of the African’s hand included the mansion and the ghosts of Lees—“what ever’one already knew. That here was a woman of talent, with her fingers and her head.”

  It was astonishing how far Mrs. Keckly had traveled in life. “Her mother passed on not long ago, I understand,” Hay said.

  “Around the time your troubles”—the
African nodded at Robert, who sat curled in the chair—“began.”

  “Losing your mother cannot be easy.” Hay exhaled and added, “And a son.”

  Silence. The African’s face was granite. When he spoke again, his voice sounded flat and distant. “One was in the natural order of things—the other was not. Something changed in her, then. In Lizzy. Both times.”

  Hay waited for him to go on, then exclaimed, “So, you have seen her? Here, I suppose?”

  “It happens. The Long Bridge is not as long as you think, Mister Hay. There are many ways to know things, and many levels of knowing.”

  Hay groaned inwardly; he was stuck at one way, one level, at most. “What changed in her, then?”

  “Exactly what one would expect, Mister Hay.”

  “Which is?” Hay hated to ask dumb questions, but not all of them could be smart.

  “Lizzy learned something,” the African said. “From her mother. At the end.”

  Again, silence. This time, even Robert knew to shut up.

  Their patience paid off. “About Lizzy’s father. That it was not Master Burwell, as everyone had believed. Including Lizzy. Nor was his plantation the only place she lived as a girl. That much I know and no more.”

  “Do you know where this other place was?”

  “Not in Virginia. Beyond that, I know nothing at all.”

  Or he knew, Hay thought, and would not tell.

  * * *

  Hay and Robert returned the sentry’s salute and continued down the hill. The sunlight was failing; the sky looked heavy with snow. Below, the Potomac was devoid of life. As they neared the riverbank, the path grew muddy and steep, and Hay worried that Hasheesh might stumble. He thought he noticed a movement in the clump of trees to the left. He looked hard but saw nothing but fir branches shivering in the wind.

  Hay waited at the bottom of the hill for Robert to catch up. Hasheesh found a snack in an overgrown bush.

  “You all right, Bob?”

  “Yes.”

  Too curt. Robert was brooding—in this way, if in no other, his father’s son. The source of Robert’s perpetual sadness, Hay surmised, was more than Willie’s death or Tad’s malady or his mother’s forays into madness. It was because he was his father’s son. Having to watch his younger brothers—and Hay, too—reap the fatherly attentions he had never known.

  Hay pulled back on Hasheesh’s reins, as she kept bucking her head to the field of food. Only under protest did she point her muzzle forward.

  The path swept along the river, which a wall of spruce concealed. Everything seemed still, eerily so. A shout echoed from afar—of a sentry, perhaps, by Long Bridge. Hay thought he saw a white oval flitting through the trees. Not an oval so much as a triangle, pointed toward the earth. A face—yes, it was. Ghostlike. Vaguely familiar.

  A noise exploded from the woods, and Hay’s left shoulder felt a slash of heat. He flopped to his left and, only by the fiercest hold of his calves, kept Hasheesh beneath him. With his right hand he grabbed at the loosened reins as the mare launched into a gallop, toward the bridge. There was hair in his face—his own?—and both of his shoulders went numb. In a voice of command he had never used, Hay shouted at Hasheesh to halt, and for once in her life, the mare obeyed.

  He pressed his fingers of his right glove into his left shoulder. Pain pulsed into his chest. He felt faint and wondered wildly, Damn, where is Robert?

  Then Hay remembered where he had seen that triangular face before, and he swore to himself not to forget it.

  And then he forgot it as the sepia faded to black.

  Chapter Fifteen

  THURSDAY, MARCH 6, 1862

  Opening his eyes seemed so preposterous it was not worth trying. Hay roamed around inside himself. The fog was impenetrable. Nothing he thought made sense; nor did he care. Only gradually did he become aware that he was awake—and alive. His upper left torso throbbed. Drawn and quartered, he hummed to himself. Drawn and quartered … He yielded to self-pity, his lonely pleasure, before willing himself back to sleep.

  He must have succeeded, because when he became sentient again, he felt a warmth across his cheeks. Pressure slipped to both sides of his jaw and started to slide toward his neck. Hay opened his eyes. A face hovered above his—rutted, roughly whiskered, with a beatific smile.

  “Good as new, soon ’nough.” The prairie drawl reverberated with emotion restrained as Lincoln brushed a hair from Hay’s forehead. “The doc says.”

  Hay tried to sit up and say, “Doc Stone?” But it came out as a croak, and he dropped back onto his thin pillow, exhausted. He squirmed, and the undercarriage wobbled—a cot. He was dimly aware of someone thrashing to his left. When he twisted toward the noise, his left shoulder blazed into pain. He squeezed his eyelids shut and longed for oblivion. When he opened them again—seconds later? hours?—the kindly gray eyes were gazing down upon him.

  “Did I ever tell you, John,” Lincoln said, “about the soldier who was wounded at Dranesville?” Jeb Stuart’s rebels had skirmished with McClellan’s troops just before Christmas, in northern Virginia. “A young lady accompanied me to the hospital, and she asks the soldier where he had been shot. ‘At Dranesville,’ says he. ‘But where?’ ‘At Dranesville,’ says he. ‘But how were you wounded?’ A plucky young woman. ‘At Dranesville,’ he says again. So the lady asks me to help, for she feels a deep interest in the poor soldier. She steps aside and I ask him, ‘My good man, where were you wounded?’ ‘At Dranesville,’ he tells me. ‘But where did the minié ball hit you?’ ‘It passed through my testicles, sir.’

  “I call the young lady back, and she asks me, ‘Well, Mister President, have you found how the man was wounded?’ And I say, ‘Yes, at Dranesville.’ And she says, ‘But where was he struck?’ Taking the young lady by both hands, I say, ‘My dear girl, the ball that hit him would have missed you.’”

  Lincoln’s own guffaw overwhelmed the giggle that rocked Hay’s torso and caused extraordinary pain. But for an instant, Hay forgot where he was. Then he thought, Where am I?

  He must have spoken this because Lincoln said, “In the Patent Office, the top floor, the hospital here.” After the waves of wounded soldiers filled the churches, schoolhouses, and public halls, the federal government had opened its own buildings next.

  “What better place to … convalesce,” Lincoln said. “With the telescopes and threshers and sewing machines—these things I love so.” Lincoln was the only president to hold a patent, for a device to lift a boat over shoals. He pointed to the glass-front cabinet at Hay’s feet. “Look at the model of this Gatling gun here. The latest version, with the reloadable steel chambers. Six barrels, two hundred rounds a minute. They use percussion caps, you know. Doctor Gatling personally swore to me—were you in the room?—that his gun would fire so fast, and the carnage would be so dreadful, that this single invention would bring an end to war, all war. I would venture to say he has yet to be proven correct.”

  Hay understood the reason for Lincoln’s prolixity, and he was touched. It was meant as a lullaby, and it worked. The fatherly grasp on his uninjured shoulder was a steadying force.

  The next time Hay awakened, something was blocking the sunlight. His shoulder felt a twinge, nothing worse, and he resisted the temptation to test it. Millimeter by millimeter, he opened his eyes. The vaulted ceiling was high above him; through the skylights the sun struggled to break through the clouds. Everything was a blur.

  “You all right, John?”

  The reedy voice beside his head was familiar. Another way in which Robert resembled his father.

  Hay was overwhelmed with embarrassment at his awful—unforgivable—lapse of judgment. Inviting Robert along might have gotten him killed. The saving grace was that he, Hay, had been hit with the bullet surely meant for the president’s son.

  “Bob, are you all right?”

  “Me? You are the one who got shot.”

  “Why would anyone want to shoot me?”

  “Who wouldn’t?”
said Robert. The glint of a smile. “Whoever it was, was not much of a shot.”

  “Seems to be true, by the weight of the evidence.” Hay clasped his left shoulder with care. “A graze, nothing worse.”

  * * *

  The next time Hay awoke, sunlight was reflecting off the cabinet’s glass panes. He was relieved to be alone—well, not alone. He propped himself on his elbows; to his right and to his left, a double row of cots led to the distant walls.

  When he sat up, his shoulder hurt like hell. Might a bullet or a minié ball have lodged inside? He had not seen a doctor to ask. He started to sag back but steeled himself. If these soldiers could brave their wounds, so could he.

  Except that the moans from nearby cots undercut his premise. “Mama, Mama”—from Hay’s left. A carrot-haired boy, scrawny, no more than sixteen or seventeen. The coarse blanket traced the outline of one leg and not the other, and the stump of his right arm rested on top. Hay could think of nothing to say, and he had learned from painful experience that if he had nothing to say, it was wise to keep his mouth shut.

  In the high-ceilinged gallery, with its graceful windows and marble columns, the cots were out of place. Each was occupied by a bandaged head, a half limb, a tangle of man and bloodstained cloth. Hay could do nothing for these men—these boys. Write a letter home, if his neighbor was—had been—right-handed? He had no business being here, with soldiers who had left parts of themselves on a field of blood. He was taking up a bed from someone who needed it more.

  Yes, Hay thought, that is what he could do.

  This would take planning. He was wearing only his undershirt and ankle-length drawers; his street clothes were probably under the cot. Along with his boots, he hoped. Hay leaned over to look, and everything went gray; he flung his hand to the floor, catching himself just in time. Pugilistic instinct.

  No, he was not ready yet.

  He waited until after the midday meal, brownish liquid with chunks of something—was it vegetable or meat? He had no appetite but ate all of it, knowing he needed the strength. Most of the men, the lucky ones, dropped off to sleep. No one still awake would care what he did, unless Lincoln’s presence had prompted the nurses to keep tabs.