The Murder of Willie Lincoln Read online

  Blood. Mud. Blood. Mud. An incantation to thwart the pain. A clog at the back of his throat made him gag, and he hacked loose a chunk of … Hay preferred not to look. An odor rushed in, meaning his nostrils had cleared—a misfortune. Sharper than sewage. Something rotten, something dead—freshly dead.

  This is how you catch typhoid fever, it occurred to Hay, by burying your face in the malevolent mire. Maybe this was how Willie had—if he had.

  Desperate to escape, Hay pushed both hands against the ground, until the mud gave way. A sinkhole! Hay suppressed an urge to panic, squeezing his eyes shut, slowing his breathing to regain control. Hay had learned this in the ring, whenever he felt overwhelmed, to calm himself despite getting punched, preserving enough wind to counterpunch (except when he forgot, which was most of the time). Despite the throb in his forehead and the creak in his back, Hay pushed himself to all fours. He caught his breath and, groaning, raised himself to his knees. He reached out to steady himself but remembered the brambles and pulled his arms back. He focused his gaze across the canal, at a rock promontory that, in the glaze of his vision, loomed like a cross.

  As he moved, the mud sucked at his boots; each footstep was freed with a slurp. On the ground, just ahead, a carcass, the size of a child. He gasped: No! Hay made himself look again. In actual fact, no. Four legs. On its side—a hog? No, a dog. Was a dog, stripped of its skin, the flesh a mottled green. In motion, all of it—maggots, writhing. A cold sweat swept over Hay. He restrained the impulse to run, but not an instant longer would he stay. He plotted a route through the mud, between a shrub and a bog, bypassing the mass of tissue that was no longer alive.

  The dangers in Washington City lay in every direction. The city itself was sandwiched between Confederate Virginia and slave-holding Maryland. For a week in April of ’sixty-one, the capital had been cut off from the nation it led—the mails blocked, the railroad bridges burned, the telegraph wires severed. Reports last May that a rebel regiment planned to capture the Executive Mansion and kidnap the Lincolns had prompted troops to camp in the East-room. When the threat eased, the troops left, and now bivouacked in President’s Park. This hardly justified the want of protection at the mansion itself, but every time Hay or Nicolay raised the matter with the Ancient, the response was a groan. As late as September, Hay had seen Confederate campfires just across the Potomac and heard the musket shots—after the Union army had seized the northern rim of Virginia and built a ring of forts to keep the enemy at bay. Rebel troops were still camped in Manassas, a long day’s march away, having secured it the previous summer in the rout at Bull Run. Once Hay reached the Potomac, one of the eleven states in rebellion would come into sight.

  The path narrowed. The elbows of his coat caught on prickles, and his boots slid in the frosty mud. His shoulder ached, but he ignored it. It was somewhere near here, by the tutor’s telling, that the rock had landed from on high. Rubbish littered the canal bank—a wagon wheel, a mashed-down hat, the soaked sleeve of a sweater. Rocks of every size and description, scabrous and crusted with moss, slick and gray, streaked with gold and a purplish beige, the dullest of browns. How could he identify a rock that had dropped from the sky eighteen days earlier? And if he did, what then? A rock was a rock. How could it be traced to its thrower? Even Vidocq would be stumped.

  But whence, in fact, had this projectile come? Not from the sky, certainly. From across the canal? Alexander Williamson had looked and seen nobody there. Hay wondered about the tutor’s eyesight; he wore no spectacles, although he seemed like a man who should. Across the canal, a few cows foraged on the barren bank. No humans in sight.

  Hay turned away from the canal to examine the knoll of jagged rocks that climbed to the base of the fence.

  The fence.

  It was a high wooden wall that, in some forgotten time, had been coated in whitewash. A rock might have been thrown over the top, or from the top, or from the hillside. A rock or something, the tutor had said. He had seen something drop, possibly a brick or a shard of iron. It hardly mattered what. What mattered was the intent of the person who threw it. Assuming, of course, the projectile could be traced to the thrower. And assuming Hay could find it.

  At the least, he should look. Disgusting, to muck around in this mud. He poked at the brambles with the toe of his boot. Long yellowish stalks looked like hay—hay! Hay sank to his knees, knowing his favorite trousers, of kelly-green corduroy, would never get clean. (What he sacrificed for duty.) He pulled his leather gloves tight around each finger and, with both hands, dug into the earth.

  Here, the mud was hard. Hay felt a twisting of root that seemed unconnected to bushes or trees. A digging tool would help. On a shrub, he saw a branch as thick as a jailer’s forearm; one end was beveled, as if ripped from a tree, although the only tree nearby was a sickly willow. Hay retrieved the branch and used it to jab at the earth by his feet. Willie’s pony, he figured, would have stayed on the path. But why should he dig here instead of five feet ahead or behind? Ridiculous! Vidocq would not be caught dead poking randomly into the ground. Think!

  Hay came up dry.

  He squatted and considered his options. He could prostrate himself before Lincoln, confess his ineptness for the job, suggest he assign it to somebody else—Pinkerton, no doubt—and accept the humiliation. Or he could think of some other way to …

  A few feet ahead on the path, Hay noticed an oval of metal protruding from the path. He sprang to his feet and unearthed what looked like a belt buckle—what was a belt buckle, made of brass. He scraped away enough of the crusted mud to trace the raised letters across the front:

  MVM

  A man’s initials, or … or … Hay had no idea what the letters meant. He slipped the buckle into his overcoat pocket. Maybe the commander of the troops encamped in President’s Park would know if anyone had heaved an object over the fence. It probably meant nothing, just one of those things, mere happenstance.

  Happenstance—there was nothing mere about it. Often, nothing mattered more. On a battlefield, Hay reflected, it made the difference between death and life.

  * * *

  The morning passed too speedily for Hay, given all that he needed to do. He pored over the paperwork for the pile of pardons—Lincoln was sure to grant every one. He drafted letters to the governors of Maryland and Delaware about the president’s proposal for “compensated emancipation”—the phrase was Hay’s, and he rather liked it. To free the slaves in the Union’s slave states by paying their masters to do the right thing. Either ingenious or a smidgen too clever, Hay could not decide which. If it worked, maybe it would work in the South, although the slaveholders there had sneered when Lincoln endorsed the idea as they rushed to rebellion. Hay tore up his first rough as too whiny and the second as naïve, before he achieved a tone of conviction in peddling principle without pain. Then he started on similar letters to the newspaper editors in Maryland. These, he would sign with his own name.

  Hay was drafting a letter of condolence to the governor of Indiana, whose son had met his end at Fort Henry (Hay had learned to simulate Lincoln’s signature) when he was relieved to hear a melodic tenor in the doorway. “Joh-n-ny!”

  “You want something, Nico,” Hay said without looking around.

  “And you are the man for the job.”

  “If you think so, probably not.”

  “To fill in for the Ancient at the reading of the Farewell Address. At the Capitol, a quarter ’til one.”

  Hay swiveled to meet his tormentor and made a face.

  “I promised Stanton I would see him then,” Nicolay said.

  “He can barge in on the president like he usually does.”

  “That is precisely what I am trying to avoid.”

  “Why can’t ol’ Hannibal go?” Hannibal Hamlin was the vice president.

  “Nobody knows where he is. Or cares.”

  To stretch his legs, Hay followed Nicolay out into the waiting room. As he turned back to his office, the specter of letter upon let
ter from simpletons propelled him through the double doors into the central hallway. It was quiet; doors were closed. Hay descended the office stairs to the first floor. As he emerged from the staircase, Dr. Stone was standing outside the green parlor. Hay called to him, and the handsome head snapped back.

  “Do you have a minute, sir?” said Hay.

  “No.”

  “The president’s business, sir.”

  “So is this.” Doc Stone nodded at the door to the green parlor. Hay remembered with a shudder that the embalming was under way. Then Dr. Stone said, “Very well. A minute.”

  Robert King Stone was a tall, brisk man with muscular shoulders. He looked forty, if that, hardly old enough (in Hay’s opinion) to justify either his arrogance or the position that justified his arrogance as the acknowledged dean of the city’s medical community. The unblemished face was of classic Greek proportions, with a sculpted nose, almost feminine cheeks, a jutting chin, and a mane of black hair that swept back from the formidable forehead. The well-starched frock coat took no pains to conceal the gold-and-silver brocaded waistcoat, an instrument for a physician known most for his skill at the bedside. Dr. Stone carried himself as if nothing could harm him, which tempted Hay to try.

  The doctor planted his feet, drew a watch from his vest pocket, flipped it open, examined it, then put it back in its place and said, “Well?”

  “The morning that Willie got sick, the fourth of February, a Tuesday, he fell off his pony along the canal. You examined him when he returned to the mansion, did you not?”

  “I would need to check my records as to the date. But yes, I did.”

  “And he was uninjured?”

  “And what is your interest in this, Mister Hay?”

  Hay had been girding for this question and had not yet devised a satisfying answer. “The president asked me … he asked me … to examine all the possibilities. Of what happened. To Willie.”

  “We know what happened to Willie.”

  “What, then?”

  “Typhoid fever. Which has killed more Union soldiers than the Confederates have. Or possibly another form of bilious fever. A classic case, to the degree there is one.”

  “The morning of February fourth?”

  “That morning, he was fine. Nothing but a scrape on his cheek.”

  “That afternoon, as I understand it, he developed a chill and a fever. Might he have caught it that morning by the canal? Falling off his pony, into the mud. And let me tell you, that mud is—”

  “Of course not. It takes a week or more after exposure to typhoid fever for the symptoms to manifest. Eight days, typically.”

  “So he could not have caught the fever by the canal.”

  “Of course he could have. You understand, Mister Hay, that the Executive Mansion is located in the single unhealthiest spot in the entire sixty-eight square miles of the District of Columbia. The air that drifts in from the canal, from the river, is nothing short of poison. Or he might have caught it from the water piped into the mansion. No telling how many soldiers upriver, on both sides of what passes for a border, use the Potomac as a latrine.”

  One of President Buchanan’s parting gifts, besides the unstanched slide into civil war, was the system of pipes to deliver the Potomac’s water to every bedroom in the president’s house, including Hay’s. The boys had been told not to drink the water from their washstands, but who could say how punctiliously they obeyed?

  “So any of us might have caught it, you mean.”

  “And still could.”

  To Hay’s ear, Dr. Stone sounded pleased. “But it was typhoid fever?”

  “That is my best professional judgment.” Doc Stone’s eyes narrowed. “You have reason to doubt it, Mister Hay?”

  Hay suppressed his annoyance—he could topple this tall and broad-shouldered notable with a single punch. “Which of his symptoms suggested it was typhoid fever, if I might ask?”

  “At the beginning, the fever and chills. The delirium. The rose-colored spots. The intestinal, shall we say, distress.” Dr. Stone spoke in a rush. “And the high fever, which came and went.”

  “Is that usual? For the fever to come and go?”

  “Not unusual. You said a minute, Mister Hay. It has been more than that already. So, if you will excuse me, I am needed inside.”

  Without waiting for a reply, Dr. Stone reached for the doorknob and entered the green parlor. Peeved at being dismissed, Hay followed him in.

  The first thing Hay noticed was the smell of chemicals, sharp and clean—acidic. His eyes watered, and he pressed them shut. He waited for the sting to pass before easing them open.

  Through a blurry gaze, everything in the room was either drab green or stark white. The divans and armchairs had been pushed to the walls, flush against the jungle-green striped wallpaper and the gold-fringed tapestries purchased with appropriations meant for gas lamps on Capitol Hill and a culvert under the Avenue—yea, another triumph for the Hell-cat.

  At the center of the room, a table was draped in a white sheet, except for the two bare feet that pointed toward Hay.

  Hay stumbled backward and reached behind him for the door. A hand at his left shoulder stopped him. Hay spun around.

  “You can stay, suh,” whispered a short, pudgy man, and Hay knew that he must. Although not why.

  The man escorted Hay along the wall to the right, past the side door to the blue parlor. Not quite to the end of the wall, the man halted. So did Hay, to his sorrow.

  On the table, the sheet stopped at the shoulders. The head was propped on a headrest that bulged at the neck. The face looked vaguely like Willie’s, but it was puffier, round and full—too full. A rubber tube jutted out of the nose and snaked to the far side of the table, into a contraption Hay recognized as a pump. A man standing behind it kept pushing on a plunger.

  Hay was trying not to see—or failing that, to believe—what he plainly saw and could not help but believe. Bile rose in his throat, and he swallowed hard, then swallowed again, hoping not to vomit. He noticed Dr. Stone leaning against the opposite wall, glaring at Hay, and swore to deprive him of the pleasure of an urgent departure. He shut his eyes and tensed his shoulders and strained to exert his will—over himself, which was the hardest of all. He looked again at the face that protruded from the sheet, of Willie-but-not-Willie—its waxy pallor, its bloating—and forced himself to feel nothing at all. Hay was good at this when he had to be; he always had been.

  He observed the embalming surgeon at work, as a diorama with parts that moved. Dr. Charles Brown—Hay remembered his name—had licensed a French method of embalming for use in America and had recently moved here from New York to profit from the war. Embalmers had overrun Washington City, as the closest center of civilization to the battlefields of Virginia; their wagons followed the troops, contracting with soldiers or with their loved ones to deliver the fallen back home, chemically preserved.

  Dr. Brown worked with a vacant absorption. He was a slender man, taller even than Lincoln, with side-whiskers as bushy as General Burnside’s. Strong forearms brought the most delicate touch; not a muscle moved without purpose. He pulled the tube out from a nostril at a smooth and steady pace, until the end of it broke free. Then he tilted the head farther back, so that Willie’s mouth fell open, and inserted the tube and threaded it into the throat. At Dr. Brown’s nod, the man at the pump began again to press the plunger. Whoosh-whoosh-whoosh—liquid being forced through a constriction—was the only sound Hay could hear, besides his own heartbeat. The pump did its work for a minute or more, and when it stopped, the silence deafened. Hay realized his breathing needed to resume.

  Hay could not help but stare, trying not to take in what he saw. Dr. Brown pressed his fingertips into Willie’s neck and, with the flick of a knife, made a slice. Using a prong, he pulled an artery out of the morass of muscle and nerves, then threaded two pieces of silk underneath. Another deft cut, and Dr. Brown slipped a rubber tube into the artery and wrapped it in a silk ribbon that h
e drew tight and tied twice in double knots. As he repeated the procedure on the other side of the neck, a trickle of something splashed into a porcelain pan by Willie-but-not-Willie’s head. Dr. Brown pressed his massive hands across the barely recognizable cheeks, which quickened the flow for a few seconds, until it suddenly ceased. This was a boy’s blood, his lifeblood. Willie had no need for it now.

  Then the pump started pumping again, slowly at first, then faster, until it reached a pitiless pace. Audibly, the liquid forced its way in, pushing the blood ahead of it. Soon the trickle into the porcelain pan resumed and then became a torrent. Dr. Brown poured in an acrid-smelling liquid—a disinfectant, Hay thought.

  Suddenly, Hay felt light-headed and desperate to sit. There was an armless upholstered chair at his right, and he gratefully sank into it, then was sorry he had. A burning behind his eyes—from the chemicals, surely—needed release. Oh, he pleaded, anyplace but here. He forced himself to his feet and was relieved to feel a strong arm holding him up. The short, pudgy man—Hay had seen him in the East-room the night that Willie took ill—guided him to the door that led into the blue parlor. There, the air smelled mercifully pure, and the man found him a seat and then left him alone, just as Hay wished.

  Hay hoped he had not embarrassed himself but was surprised at how little he cared. Already, he was regaining control. Slowly he tried to take in what he had observed. It had been shocking, but also soothing somehow, to see the body as an emptied vessel, nothing more—bloodless, in its way. The soul had already fled, yet the wan figure of Willie-but-not-Willie would remain with him, Hay felt certain, for the rest of his days.