The Murder of Willie Lincoln Read online

  “Such as yourself, you mean.”

  Hay suddenly remembered one of her answers. When he had asked whether Old Aunt Mary had administered medicine to Willie or Tad, this dark lady had replied that that dark lady would never hurt a cockroach. She had assumed—yes, assumed—that his inquiry about giving medicine was about doing harm. He should have noticed it at the time.

  Hay said, “You knew Elizabeth Keckly—Hobbs—as a child, yes?”

  “Oh yes. Very well. We spent part of every day together. Almost like sisters, you might say.”

  “Almost?”

  “Almost.”

  Then it dawned on Hay—what kind of idiot was he? “You owned her. Your own flesh and blood.”

  “Oh my Lord, no. Mister Calvert owned her—the old Mister Calvert. I merely had the use of her. Seems I still do. Old habits do not change, Mister Hay, even when circumstances are new.” Mrs. Surratt pulled at her restraints. “We were right to be worried about you.”

  “‘We’? You and your son?”

  “You may believe that if you like.”

  Hay said, “There are others?”

  “Others—for what?”

  Hay’s punches kept smiting air.

  “You will tell us everything when your life is at stake,” Hay said, for lack of a stronger argument. “Why not tell me now?”

  “There is nothing to tell you. I have no cause for shame, Mister Hay. I am a patriot.”

  “You are under arrest for murder—you understand that?”

  “I am a soldier for the South.”

  “So, you admit that you poisoned Willie Lincoln.”

  “I admit that I am a soldier for the South. Anything more, you will have to prove in court. Unless Mister Traitor Lincoln no longer believes in the courts.”

  That was the name on the second envelope. To Hay, more proof of her guilt. Yet judicially useless.

  “I hope you enjoy this splendor,” Hay said. “You may be enjoying it for a while. You are aware, are you not, that in wartime, the law is whatever the president says it is.” That would never pass muster in front of a judge, but Hay hoped it might cow a laywoman. “He can have you held indefinitely.”

  “He would not dare to.” A smile flitted across her face. “I have no fear of your president.”

  “And why is that, if I may ask?” Hay had not meant to be polite.

  “He would not. He simply would not. Ask him why.”

  * * *

  Others.

  In the hack on the way to the county jail, Hay considered the possibility of other conspirators. The rain had resumed, and the wheels of Hay’s carriage along the Avenue splattered mud on a goose in the gutter.

  Mrs. Keckly? Maybe she had learned of Mary Surratt’s intentions earlier than she admitted. But could a mother whose son had died in battle conspire against another mother’s son? Orphaned Nicolay’s answer: maybe.

  Or Thomas Stackpole. That his illicit trip to the enemy capital had been a matter of commerce, not betrayal—or so Pinkerton was convinced—did not prove he was innocent of murder. Always on the scene, facing Hay’s office, able to slip a message into Hay’s satchel whenever he liked. His father had left Calvert’s plantation soon after James Webster arrived. Had they competed for the favors of Agnes Hobbs? For whatever the reason, there was no love lost between James Webster’s illicit daughter and Henry Stackpole’s son.

  Or—and Hay shuddered at the thought, as much as he despised her—the Hell-cat. Possibly, just possibly, she was daft enough to murder her son, but surely she was too disorganized, too unreliable—too daft—to take part in a plot.

  Before Hay raised any of this with the president, if he ever did, there was someone else he needed to question.

  Superintendent Wood had told him where Mrs. Surratt’s son was being held. (If the new superintendent had kept the information from her, maybe he was an honest man.) The county jail, on Fourth street near G, was known as the Blue Jug, for the paint that was a memory on its decaying walls. A defiled place, for common criminals. John Surratt Jr. was a common criminal, then.

  Not too common, Hay hoped. Having just one man trying to kill him was more than enough. He felt a flutter of anticipation, like he was entering the ring. But this time, he had an advantage: His adversary could not punch back.

  The stink of urine, stale and sharp, gut-punched him at the door. A runt of a guard with a bushy blond beard glanced up from his hard-backed chair, glaring at the day’s latest bother.

  “John Surratt Junior,” Hay announced. The guard turned away, showing no sign of having heard. “John Su—”

  “Ah hoid ya,” the guard snapped. “Wait a Lord’s minute, will ya?”

  “Take all the time in the world,” Hay said, his fists curling into balls.

  At last, the guard pulled his nose out of the doorway and said, “All right, who are you?”

  Hay gave his name and position with the president and got a yawn in return. “Papers?”

  The note signed A. Lincoln was tattered by now and, indeed, could have been written by anyone.

  “Come wit’ me,” the guard said.

  In the dank basement, Hay preferred to breathe through his mouth. The guard left him by the barred cage, which was too small for all of its fifteen or twenty occupants to sleep or even sit at once. They milled around. Hay spotted his assailant at the back, leaning against the wall, staring at the ceiling blackened by decades of smoke. A slight and frightened boy, his goatee more a hint than a fact.

  Hay wanted to beat his face in.

  “Surratt!” Hay called. On his fourth cry, each louder than the one before, the boy-man seemed to stir. He lowered his eyes and, like a dazed dog, struggled to focus on the source of syllables so familiar.

  “Over here,” Hay said.

  To his surprise, the young prisoner complied.

  Surratt’s triangular face looked blank, without a glint of recognition. His planed cheeks were covered with fuzz, and his sandy-brown hair was unkempt and grimy. He was grimy. Everything about him—his skin, his clothes, his slouch. The waistcoat was stained and ripped; his cravat hung from a collar that had come dislodged. Only his eyes had begun to show life, and they fastened on Hay’s, and within moments they blazed into a molten and fiery hatred.

  “You know who I am,” Hay said. “And why I am here.”

  “I … do … not.” The young Surratt had drawn close. His breath smelled of tobacco and last night’s whiskey and too many hours without sleep.

  “There is something I need to know. I can get you out of here”—Hay nodded at the filth and companionship—“if you will help me.” He hoped this was true. More precisely, he hoped that Surratt believed it was true.

  No response—a promising sign.

  Hay had no time or patience to start at the edges and work his way in. “Why were you shooting at me?”

  “Why do you think? I wanted you dead.”

  So, Hay was the target, not Robert.

  The boy-man went on, “You were getting too close. Or she thought so.”

  “Your mother.”

  A nod.

  How untrue. “You and your mother did not act alone,” Hay said. “She told me this. That there were others.”

  Silence.

  “She wants to see you, her darling boy,” Hay said.

  “And will she?”

  “That is up to you.”

  “It is noisy here.”

  Two sinewy white men dressed in raggedy army blues hovered just behind, obviously trying to eavesdrop. Out of boredom, if nothing else.

  “This will have to do,” Hay said.

  Hay fixed his eyes on Surratt’s, with their wild expression. The prisoner’s forearms rested on the vertical iron bars.

  “Your mother has the fanciest accommodations any prison can offer. And here you are, in the filth of…”

  Hay never saw Surratt’s hands move, both at once, reaching through the bars and around Hay’s slender neck. Thumbs pressed into his windpipe, and
Hay could not breathe, much less scream. His face was pulled into the cold hard bar—blood spurted from his nose.

  Yet his hands were free, and with his left fist he started to punch through the bars. Again and again he hit at Surratt’s liver, propelling his leg into each punch, pummeling the abdomen while his right fist struck up at the undefended face. He kept punching, until the grip loosened around his neck. Hay clutched at a forearm and bent it crosswise and pressed it into the bars. When he whipped his right shin through the bars and kicked the boy-man in the groin, John Surratt was man enough to sink toward the rough concrete floor.

  Except that Hay still had hold of a forearm, and he grabbed for the other wrist and pulled it out through the bars and trapped both of them with his chest. He reached his right hand through the bars and grasped the back of Surratt’s neck and yanked. The boy-man’s face slammed into the bars. Hay hissed into his ear: “Who helped?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know,” Surratt whimpered.

  “Tell me, you blackguard, tell me.” Hay pushed the face away and then wrenched it back into the bars. He was dimly aware of other men gawking. Blood gushed from John Surratt’s forehead. Hay was liking this, which disturbed him, though only mildly. As even Vidocq knew, violence worked.

  Hay lifted the prisoner’s shin from the floor and rammed it up into the horizontal bar, then rammed it again.

  “I don’t know, I tell you!” Surratt shrieked. “’Twas somebody fed him puddin’—that be all I know, I swear to Jesus. She got ’im to help us—she never say who. Willin’ enough, to mix calomel into the puddin’.” The boy-man was gasping for breath. “Willie ate it down, and Tad, the little bugger, spit it out.”

  * * *

  “Dang it to hell. He can go back to sleep when I’m done.”

  Hay regretted swearing at Rebecca Pomroy, but she refused to let him even look in on Tad. He was hoping loud voices might awaken the boy. This hope, unlike most of Hay’s, came to pass.

  “Papa-day, Papa-day!”

  Mrs. Pomroy’s width blocked the source of the yowl. She turned and said, “’Tain’t your daddy, sweet pea.”

  “Taddie, it’s me, John.” Hay tried to look around the nurse’s waist and then over her shoulder.

  “Johnny, Johnny!”

  Hay shot Mrs. Pomroy a look of triumph. With a nod of warning, she stepped aside.

  “Taddie, my boy, you like—”

  “I am not your boy.”

  “No, you are your own boy,” Hay said hastily. Tad sat up and beamed. “You like pudding, yes? What is your favorite kind of pudding? Ginger? Or…”

  “Oh I do, I do. Yes, ginger. Or mowasses. Or…”

  “Taddie, my … Tad, do you remember when you were sick, in your room here, when Willie was sick, do you remember the pudding you ate?”

  Tad’s face curled into a snarl.

  “It tasted bad?” said Hay.

  “Yes, bad. Bad.”

  “Did you eat any of it?”

  Tad’s oversized head bobbed. “Taddie is a good boy.”

  “Why, if it tasted so bad?”

  “Because Wobert ask me so nice, and he look so cross if I say no.”

  * * *

  “What more can this woman do to me,” Lincoln said, “than she has already done?”

  “She could—”

  “If it was my life she took, it would never be so painful.”

  Hay had intended to mention Tad.

  “And something more,” Hay said. He had wrestled with the question of telling the president what he had learned. Hay felt certain that Lincoln already knew, that this was why he had wanted Hay to stop the investigation. There was one way to find out. “Missus Surratt claims you will never press charges against her. Or against her son.”

  A hesitation. “She is correct, John.”

  “Because of what she knows—this is extortion. Because of what you know.”

  “I know nothing at all, John, nothing about anything. The older I get—and only the Lord knows how many years I have left—the more I understand how very little I know. I aspire, should I live long enough, to utter ignorance.”

  “About Bob, sir?”

  Lincoln’s gaze had returned from a place unknown to a sharp intelligent point. “He will not come back here for a while. I am the one at fault here, John. He lacked a father’s love, and so he grew to hate the sons who lacked for nothing. He explained this to me the night he confessed what he had done. He told me. He bragged about it, killing his own…” Lincoln struggled to keep his composure, and he succeeded.

  “He was only doing what Missus Surratt wanted.”

  “But he did it. He wanted it, too. This is my doing, John. My fault. I am the guilty party here. As a father, as a man. It is on my shoulders. In my most important job, to raise my sons to become hardy and capable men, I have failed utterly. And my failure with one son brought the … the…” His shoulders shook, then slumped. “Oh, John, John, John, this is worse, worse—harder—than the war.”

  Hay had never before seen anyone cry horizontal tears.

  Oh, Robert! Hay marveled at his own ineptness, at never seeing the hatreds seething in his young friend’s soul. Directed not so much at his younger brother, or brothers—of this, Hay felt unaccountably certain—but at the father who had never been a father to his eldest, the father who was a man of ambition and too rarely at home. Robert’s shot had found its mark.

  When Lincoln regained his control, he said, “Keeping this between ourselves, John, has nothing to do with Robert. It is for Mother. She could never survive another blow. For her it would mean losing another son—it would kill her. She must never know. Nor Tad. John, my dear, dear John, I would consider it the finest of favors—a blessing, really—if you would never mention this to another living soul. Including Robert. Never.”

  What blue-blasted choice did Hay have? He gave his word. “And you insist,” he said, “on freeing this Mary Surratt, who vows to cause you harm? And her son.”

  “They may repent, John, you shall see. The power of mercy unstrained can touch the hardest heart.”

  Hay considered pleading the logic of deterrence and invoking the demands of justice. But who was he to judge? It was Lincoln who was the master of mercy and also the mind behind the war, the man who knew when to love and when to fight. What did Hay really know about any of this? He knew enough, at least, to keep his mouth shut. Besides, he knew beyond a doubt that any attempt to change Lincoln’s mind was destined to fail.

  Afterword

  Around 5:00 P.M. on February 20, 1862, at the Executive Mansion, eleven-year-old William Wallace Lincoln died in the Prince of Wales Room, now known as the Lincoln Bedroom. The cause of death was thought to be typhoid fever. In my story, he was poisoned.

  Almost everything else in this novel is true. John Hay and John George Nicolay shared a room upstairs in the Executive Mansion; they referred to the Lincolns as “the Ancient” and “the Hell-cat”; a House committee fingered secessionists throughout the government, in language I’ve borrowed; John Watt tried to blackmail Mrs. Lincoln for $20,000 and settled for $1,500; Lincoln lent $380 to Thomas Stackpole in November 1861; Tad swiped the gardener’s strawberries and got a scolding; Elizabeth Keckly had worked for Mrs. Jefferson Davis (who invited her south) and for Mrs. Robert E. Lee before she made dresses for Mary Lincoln; Allan Pinkerton and his wife were once robbed in Warsaw, Illinois; the symptoms of mercury poisoning mimic those of typhoid fever, except for the spinach-like stool—all of this is true. Willie’s embalming, funeral, and exhumation (which actually happened twice); Hay’s spurned affections for Kate Chase; Mrs. Lincoln’s séance at the Soldiers’ Home (one of several); her slap across her husband’s face; the Marsh and Smithson tests for, respectively, arsenic and mercury; Charles Calvert’s octagonal cow barn; “Bowie Knife” Potter’s nickname and ancestry; the Reverend Gurley’s eulogy; the tussles with General McClellan; the cabinet’s uproar over the Merrimack, with the dialogue drawn from navy secretary Gi
deon Welles’s diary; each day’s weather in Washington City—all fact. Where possible, I have used dialogue or observations taken from diaries, memoirs, and journalistic accounts. John Hay later became a published poet (occasional lines I’ve used were his), although there is no evidence he ever stepped into a boxing ring.

  The biographical facts about Mary Surratt are accurate (her grandfather was the overseer of the Calvert estate; she often used her confirmation name, Eugenia; her brother’s friend became Old Capitol Prison’s superintendent in January 1862) but there is no reason to think she had any kinship to Elizabeth Keckly or any involvement in Willie Lincoln’s death. Three years later, she was hanged as a coconspirator in the president’s murder, for using her H Street house as a meeting place for John Wilkes Booth and the plotters. Her son John Jr. was tried but never convicted for his role in the assassination.

  Every character in this novel is real except for Josiah, Hay’s second in the boxing ring; Albert, the black butler at Riversdale; Sally Socrates, the slave woman there; and Sally’s (offstage) escaped daughter, Eva. I have blended two slaves at Arlington House—James Parks, who lived from 1843 to 1929, and an older man known to Hay as “the African,” born at Mount Vernon before George Washington died there in 1799. I’ve modeled Hay’s professor of pugilism after Terrance Wood, my boxing instructor for the past seven years. The character of Dr. Jamie Hall conflates Dr. James C. Hall, a physician on Pennsylvania avenue in Washington at the time; Dr. Neal Hall, who consulted with Dr. Stone on Willie’s case; and the (presumed) son of Lincoln’s stepsister, Matilda, and her husband, Squire Hall. Little is known about John Watt (who was a Scotsman, not a Kentuckian), Thomas Stackpole, Edward McManus, Cornelia Mitchell, and some other minor characters, so I have invented their backgrounds, physical presence, and personalities. I’ve altered several facts about Elizabeth Keckly’s life: She never lived at the Calvert estate; her mother disclosed on her deathbed (in 1857, not in 1862) that Elizabeth’s real father was Armistead Burwell, their owner in Dinwiddie, Virginia. Otherwise, for the historically prominent characters and their relationships, I’ve hewed to what is known, with two exceptions. Historians generally see Robert Lincoln as a bland and dutiful Victorian, not a neurotic like the mother he otherwise resembled. And I’ve kept John Hay’s irreverence and his closeness to Lincoln and Nicolay, but his writing style (which was ornate and clever beyond compare) and inner life reflect more of my own.