The Murder of Willie Lincoln Page 26
The mansion at the hilltop resembled a French château—its proliferating gables, its widow’s walk, the majestic elms and oaks. The old colored butler greeted Hay by name. Word had arrived faster than a railroad. By telegraph, must be—but Hay had seen no wires. By horseback, then. Charles Calvert was taking no chances. Hay wondered why.
He was ushered past an elegant staircase with a bust of the Greek goddess Hygeia (Hay had been awake that morning at Brown) on the newel post and into the southern wing. The butler suggested he wait in the library for Mr. Webster, the overseer, and Hay allowed as how he might.
Entering the room was like crossing into a virginal country. The French wallpaper covering all four walls told the story of a hunt—the red-clad hunters on their mounts chasing the dogs through woods and across arched bridges and dappled glades. The alcove shelves of well-thumbed books—on history, astronomy, veterinary medicine, and (most of all) agronomy—revealed this as a learned man’s refuge. Hay was thumbing through a copy of On the Origin of Species—this notion that man descended from the apes struck him as a cosmic joke—when a tall, lanky man in a patched-up coat stalked through the doorway.
“Webster,” he snarled. “What d’ya want?”
His robust presence belied his age, which must have been sixty or more. His swept-back white mane sharpened his beardless, falcon-nosed face, and his dark eyes kept Hay in their sights. A man you would want on your side in a fight. Not that Hay meant to start one.
“I know who you are,” Webster said, as he sat and left Hay’s extended hand unshaken.
“Mister Calvert gave me a letter of—” Hay reached inside his coat.
Webster raised his hand, palm forward. “Yes, I know.”
“This is about Eva, the slave who—”
“Yes, I know.”
Hay swallowed his exasperation and said, “Can you tell me when she first … escaped?”
“The twenty-first of December. She ran away that night. My job is to keep track of our staff”—Webster tapped the gray-bound ledger that rested under his forearm—“and our property.”
Hay saw no advantage in revealing that the slave ledger was in his possession. “Would you know why she escaped?” he said. “And why she came back?”
“Why do any of them leave? Freedom looks so simple from a distance.” The overseer’s tenor sounded peevish, as if someone were pinching his throat. “They think it will be easy to make it on their own, and they learn to their regret that it is not. And so they give up. This Eva was not the first to come back to Riversdale. Here, they are cared for. They have a home.”
Mrs. Keckly was a counterexample, but Hay saw no reason to argue the point. “Do you know—did you know—Eva?”
“An empty-headed girl, stupider than most.” His lips curled as he spoke. “A troublemaker, like her mama.”
“I would like to talk with Sally.”
“Impossible.”
Hay reached inside his coat and this time unfolded the letter. He insisted that Webster read it and acknowledge its contents. It obliged the overseer of the estate to make available to Hay anyone on the premises and to fulfill any request for nonfinancial and nonproprietary records. Hay had escaped having to add reasonable—Charles B. Calvert was a farmer, not a lawyer.
“You recognize the signature, yes?” said Hay.
Webster bristled. “Anything else, then?”
“Yes,” Hay replied. “Elizabeth Keckly. You know her?”
The overseer’s face drained of color—or had Hay imagined it? “She lived here a while,” Webster said. “Then she left.”
“Was sold, you mean.”
A grunt.
“Was she born here?”
“No.”
“You are sure of this?”
“I am a liar, now?” Webster’s forehead creased, from either concentration or brutality.
Hay said, “You were working here then?”
“And living here.”
“As the overseer?”
“Not quite yet.”
“How well did you know her?”
“She was a pickaninny. What was there to know?” Webster rose from his seat. “Anything else?”
“Not for the moment, sir.”
* * *
Albert, for that was the butler’s name, arrived as soon as he was summoned. He led Hay into a landau and took the reins.
The gravel road passed an orchard of dwarf pear trees and a field of withered hay. All was silent but for the cawing in the elms.
“Dem crows,” Albert said, twisting around to Hay. “Master Calbert say no shootin’ ’em. He allow no gun shot nowhere on de estate. Yes, suh, dem crows might eat up some of de corn, but dey also eat all dem varmints dat eat up everything else in the fields. We payin’ ’em for der service, ya might say. Ever’ livin’ thing gotta eat.”
“How long have you lived here, Albert?”
“All o’ my life, suh. Next is comin’ my seventy-second year, God willin’.”
“Then perhaps you knew a girl named Elizabeth … Lizzy … Hobbs, she would have been. Now, her name is Keckly.”
“Don’t rightly know that I did, suh.”
“Her mother was Agnes Hobbs. She was sold to a man down in Virginia, must have been thirty-five years ago, maybe more.”
“Yes, suh, that Agnes I do recall. A pretty lady she was, with such an air about her. Of a lady. And, Lordy, she know’d it—she sho’ did.” A cackle. “Proper, she be. Her skin the color of a fawn in spring. Yes, Miss Agnes. Such a smart lady, she was, and determined—tha’ fer sure. With enough sense to take what the good Lord gib her and use it to make her way, if you git my meaning, suh.”
Hay thought he did.
Their destination was ahead on the left. The odd-looking structure resembled a railroad roundhouse, with a roof that rose to a peak, except that the outer wall was not round.
“Master Calbert’s own doin’.” Albert’s chest swelled. “Wit’ eight sides.”
“What on earth for?”
“De cows, dey love it. It calms ’em, habbin’ dem wide walls and all dat space. So’s dey gib mo’ milk. Dat’s science, so Master Calbert say. And dey do.”
So, Charles Calvert was a crank for progress, no matter how silly it looked. Which it did. The roof of the octagonal barn was crowned by a gilt-plated weather vane shaped like a cow. The landau halted at the south gate.
“Through heah, suh,” Albert said, helping Hay climb down.
They walked past a tank that exuded an unmistakable odor of …
“Yes, suh,” Albert said, “de glory of nature. From dose hogs yonder.” Pens were set off to the left. “And de sheep dere.” Albert pointed right.
“Sally works here?”
“Yes, suh. Upstairs.”
In the perimeter yard, dry stalks jutted from the crusty ground. The two-story octagonal barn was painted white—“so’s de cows is happy comin’ in,” Albert chattered. The structure had an unexpected grace, which Hay attributed to its cupola with sides of glass—“for de vent’lation,” his tour guide pointed out. “For a hunnerd and four cows.”
“And for the humans,” Hay joked.
“For de cows,” Albert said.
They passed through the barn-sized entrance, and Hay sniffed the scope of the operation—the substances that entered the cows and those that exited, and the animals themselves. “Not a hunnerd four right now—more like sebenty,” Albert was saying. “But dese are happy cows. And why not?”
Hay might prefer not being tied to a stanchion, even if the feed room was nearby. The stalls were arranged in two concentric octagons, and the entire floor was sloped like a funnel toward the center of the barn—“to allow dem fluids to flow,” Albert explained.
A rickety wooden staircase led to a loft that ringed the open barn. Here, the air smelled of pinewood and the sharp moistness of hay. By the outer wall, beyond a stack of bales, a bent-over Negress was sweeping the floor.
“Sally,” Albert said.
Hay said, “Albert, would you mind…?”
The butler said nothing; nor did he move. Then Hay understood. The overseer had instructed him to listen.
Hay gave his name and came to the point. “I work for President Lincoln,” he said and waited for the welcoming smile. When none appeared, he said gently, “I must ask you about Eva.”
It occurred to Hay that perhaps she did not know yet that her daughter was dead. But her face went rigid, and she started to fall. Albert jumped in, reaching under her arm, and guided her to a seat on a hay bale. Hay chastised himself for not getting there first. He prided himself on being quick in the ring, where nothing was at stake but his manhood.
“What about her?” she said in a thin, aggrieved voice.
“She was here, was she not, the night before last?”
An almost imperceptible nod.
Hay said, “Do you know why?”
Sally shook her head.
“Did you see her?”
The Negress’s face betrayed a mix of pain and love that was conquered by a motherly instinct to deceive.
“No,” she said, her voice strong. She looked Hay in the eye, which he took as a sign she was lying.
“Did you know she was here?”
“No.”
Hay glanced over at Albert, whose presence was not conducive to frankness. “I happen to know that she was,” he said, “and that Elizabeth Keckly sent her.” Which was more than he knew.
No denial—no reaction at all.
“Missus Keckly is a friend of yours, is she not?” said Hay. “Or was, from when she lived here as a girl. She told me so.”
“She was,” Sally murmured. Her eyes shone with tears.
“When did you see her last?”
A shrug—eloquent, ageless. “I hear tell of her,” Sally said.
“Through Eva?”
A pause, then a nod.
“Meaning you saw Eva.”
No reply.
Then something struck him. He leaned toward Sally and whispered, out of Albert’s hearing. “You took the slave ledger. You knew where it was. And you handed it to—”
“No, no, no,” she said.
“But how did you know to look for it? Either you saw Eva twice or … you got word from Missus Keckly, through … Well, what does it matter, I suppose? She is bound to have her ways. No doubt you would do anything she asked.”
“She is a good woman. Good to my Eva.”
Until she got her killed, Hay thought. “Yes, and a strong woman, too. And smart.”
“Smarter than most men—most white men.”
“She gets it in part from her papa, I suppose.”
Sally shot Hay a shrewd look; his shot in the dark had found its mark. The slave examined the back of her hand, which was the color of the Mississippi mud. In a light and airy voice, she said, “So people say.”
“Did they say this at the time?”
“People talk.”
“What do they say—did they say?”
Sally stared at the floor.
In a low, even tone, Hay said, “Your daughter died for this information, to deliver it to Missus Keckly. I am trying to find out what it was.”
“Ask Lizzy.”
“I shall. But I am asking you first.” Hay debated telling the truth. “So I’ll know what to ask her.”
Sally swallowed and looked across the barn and seemed to make up her mind. “She was … lent … Miz Agnes was. To Mistuh Calvert…”
“To Mister Calvert.”
A nod. “—and was sent back to Virginnie jest befo’ she give birth. Then Mistuh Calvert—the old Mistuh Calvert, Mastuh George—he takes her back. This time, buys her. And den he sells her again, back to Virginnie. Back and forth she go—they go—like a sheep between two patches o’ clover. ’Cept warn’t no clover.”
“When you say Virginia, you mean Armistead Burwell’s place, in Dinwiddie, yes?”
“Dat’s the name. He’s the one dat lent her and den sold her and den bought her back again.”
“Any idea why?”
At her look of incredulity, Hay felt himself blush. “A fine-lookin’ woman she was,” Sally said. “More than one man might-a thought so. But whichever one had ’er, he must-a been the smartest man in the place—the smartest white man. ’Cause Lizzy so smart—and near to white. Dat was what people say. And people, what dey say, dey’s usually right.”
“If she is that smart, and I do not doubt it, why did she want that ledger, do you suppose?”
“Why do you ask me? Ask her. All I can say, suh, it warn’t the only ledger she ask for.”
“Oh?”
“No, suh. But the other warn’t there. Gone where it oughta ha’ been.”
“An earlier one?” The slave ledger Hay had seen showed nothing earlier for Elizabeth Hobbs than at age seven—back in the ’twenties sometime.
“Not’in’ like that, no, suh. A ledger of another sort. Listin’ the staff what lived here.”
The ledger Hay had seen under the overseer’s forearm.
* * *
Hay caught the day’s last train back to Washington City. He had willed it to arrive before the overseer discovered the loss and came in pursuit. Not a theft, exactly. He was not a thief but a borrower—an authorized borrower, in fact. Hay had left Webster a note, using Riversdale’s own cream-colored stationery. He had promised—in writing!—to return the ledger to Congressman Calvert personally, soon as Hay was done with it. All too cowardly, he had to admit, lifting it from the table in the library and concealing it under his coat. Still, he reasoned, the overseer was nowhere to be found (not that Hay had looked) and the B&O, if running on schedule, was soon to pass through. Which it had, and now his eyes drifted shut. Lines flashed into his mind:
Property is theft, he had been told
By a thief who was laden with loot.
Hay fished his calfskin notebook and a pencil from his greatcoat pocket.
He was about to agree when he … hmmm … rhyming with told. Fold. Cold. Hold. Controlled. Or, yes …
He was about to agree when he found himself sold
For … a greenback, an eagle, and … a … hoot.
Hmm, that was close to meaning something. Hay slipped the paper back into his pocket and fingered the ledger under his coat and pulled it out. The swaying of the railroad carriage was not the problem, nor the fading wintery light. Most daunting was the ledger’s faint writing, a tangle of filaments. Lists of names, best Hay could tell, dating back years, decades, generations. How would he make any sense of it, not knowing what he was looking for? Assuming he had filched—well, borrowed—the right ledger.
The railroad car was empty but for a gray-haired couple who had exchanged nary a word. Hay rested his head on the side of the railroad car, and it rattled like a drummer boy’s jaw. He closed his eyes and pictured Sally seated on the hay bale. He chided himself for not asking directly if her daughter might have done ill to Willie. But what good would it have done? She would not have known and, if she had, she would have lied. Or collapsed, just at the thought of it. Why cause pointless pain? There was enough in the world of the other kind.
And what, pray tell, did any of this have to do with Willie’s death? So what if Elizabeth Keckly had been fathered by this slaveholder or that one, or if she had lived at this plantation or that one and had known this doorkeeper or…? But it did matter—Hay believed that in his gut. Mrs. Keckly had hired Eva as a nurse, had she not? And Eva—yes, a dark lady—could easily have administered the poison to Willie and Tad, and maybe Mrs. Keckly had known. She had sen
t Eva back to the plantation, supposedly in search of a ledger that listed the young Elizabeth’s high price, at the cost of Eva’s life. Maybe Mrs. Keckly had wanted Eva dead, because of … Who could say? Her son had been killed, then her mother died, just as Willie fell ill. Nicolay was right; there was no telling the effect. She had something, somethings, to hide—that much seemed clear. And she had been too involved in Willie’s care, and too involved in the household—still—for Hay to silence his suspicions.
Hay opened his eyes and stared out at a soggy, fallow field. Then he closed them again and pondered who was the smartest man on the Calvert estate. That was easy: the proprietor, Charles B. Calvert. He of the octagonal cow barn and the other innovations. Hay sat up. No, he thought—not possible. He was too young to be Mrs. Keckly’s father. Fifteen years older than she was, at most. Well, it was possible. (Hay, at fifteen, had no slave girl at his disposal.) Charles Calvert’s father—that made more sense. Yes, in his elder years. The old man taking an unwilling slave girl for his own—where was the news in that? That would mean that Elizabeth Hobbs Keckly was Charles Calvert’s … half sister. That would explain why he had gone pale when Hay mentioned her name. The two of them, borne of the same father. What was his name? Oh yes, George Calvert. Ah, those were the initials in the slave ledger—G. C.
George! The name Mrs. Keckly had bestowed upon her only child.
* * *
Lincoln stepped out into the waiting room and summoned Hay inside. He looked like hell. Had he slept in days? His cheeks seemed to be slipping from their moorings. No wonder: His son, his sons, his wife, the war, his generals—everything was taking a toll. Melancholia seemed a rational response.
Hay had no capacity—or desire, really—to cheer the man up. He had started to recount what he had learned of Mrs. Keckly’s background when Lincoln broke in.
“I appreciate all of this, John.” Lincoln fumbled around on his desk, absently rolling a rock into a brass-handled bell, causing the lantern to flicker. “But there is no need for you to look into this any further.”