Lincoln (61 page)

“It is Governor Sprague, isn’t it?” Sanford scowled; the rosy lips pouted.

“Oh, it’s no one, I promise you, but my father and me,” said Kate with, for once, perfect candor. Then General Pope swept through the room; and out into the night, and his destiny.

Hay was now at Kate’s side. He had a fair notion of Sanford’s conversation. The younger set in Washington was much aware of Sanford’s passion for Kate. Some thought she should marry him; and never again worry about money for herself or her father. Others thought that she should settle for Sprague and
his
money, and remain with her father. Hay thought that she would make
him
an admirable consort, even though there was no money at all between them, and he was not certain that he had the knack of making it. “How do you like your new commander, Captain Sanford?” Hay asked Sanford the question but looked at Kate, who was staring, idly, at Garfield.

“General McDowell likes him well enough,” said Sanford, who was still on McDowell’s staff. “But General Frémont won’t serve under an officer he outranks. So Frémont has quit.”

“That’s a bit of luck,” said Hay, aware of his tactlessness; after all, the President had done everything in his power to keep content the absolutely incompetent but highly popular Frémont, who had been the first Republican candidate for president; thus, outranking, in a sense, the second candidate, Lincoln.

“That’s what General McDowell thinks.” Sanford continued to stare at Kate, who looked more than usually lovely and untouchable—but not untouching, for Hay could still feel on the back of his hand the smooth skin of her arm.

“What is the plan?” asked Kate. “Or is that secret?”

“We know very little,” said Sanford, glancing at Hay. “The Army of Virginia will probably join up with the Army of the Potomac and together they’ll occupy Richmond.”

“I’m sure,” said Kate, “that that is
not
what will happen. By design or plain incompetence something else is bound to take place, and the enemy already knows everything.”

D
AVID HEROLD
, enemy of the Union and occasional spy—far too occasional for his taste—made his way through the crowded Center Market. The first cool wind of autumn was in the air; and the first hogs had been slaughtered. The pig-ladies were all of them busy, each at her stall beneath the vast roof of the market which was neither enclosed nor open air. The entire high structure was a fretwork of beams set in brick half-walls. The market was the center not only for the women of Washington, but many of the ladies, too. Everyone came to look at the produce from the surrounding farms as well as every sort of fish—preserved, fresh and alive in tanks. There were barrels of oysters from the Chesapeake, but none from the Rappahannock, now lost forever to the Union capital, thought David, well pleased that the latest Confederate victories had deprived the Yanks of the world’s best oysters.

Chickens dead and alive overflowed Mr. Henderson’s stall, where several Henderson women, bright-eyed and beak-nosed, wrung the necks of living chickens; then plucked and eviscerated the corpses with extraordinary speed and skill, all the while smiling to themselves like cannibals sated. Ladies in crinolines and huge hats stood alongside black women in bandannas. The Center Market made sisters of them all. Where a thousand men and women sold quantities of food, no degree was observed other than that of food-seller to customer. David’s mother had known some of the countryfolk all her life. One old woman from Fairfax had sold fruit not only to David’s mother but to his grandmother and great-grandmother as well. As a result, there were always barrels of apples going bad in the cellar of the Herold house.

“I reckon you’re looking for a stewing chicken, for your mother.” Mr. Henderson began each meeting in the same way; and with the same words. Then he would motion for David to join him in the back of the stall, where he would produce a number of plucked chickens and he would caress them as he and David talked, their voices low—not that any voice lower than a shout could be heard on a bright Monday market morning in September.

“We’ve taken Harper’s Ferry back,” said Mr. Henderson, bright eyes on the crowd of women who had gathered around his wife in order to pinch and poke the superior-to-all-others Henderson fowls.

“They say General Lee’s headed for Philadelphia.” David repeated the
latest rumors. “And only McClellan can stop him, which means there is nothing to stop him.”

“He’s gone from the town?”

David nodded. “Week ago today. I took some medicine over to his house, and almost broke my neck on these telegraph lines he’s got running all along the floors and up the stairs. He was fixing to go, I could tell from what he was saying to these aides who kept coming in and out, and he was blaming Old Abe and the Pope for the fix he’s in.”

“
General
Pope, Davie,” said Mr. Henderson. “No need to involve the papists just yet. There being a few good ones, like John Surratt, God rest his valiant soul.” Both David and Mr. Henderson had attended the old man’s funeral the previous month. He had died happy in the knowledge that the Yankees under General Pope had been beaten a second time at Bull Run by Lee and Jackson, who were now invading Maryland on their way to Pennsylvania.

“Well, we’ve helped save Richmond, you and me, by feeding Mr. Pinkerton till he’s like to burst with all sorts of nonsense. Now if General Lee can set up shop in Philadelphia, the war is over and we have won.”

David was pleased; and displeased. He had yet to play a gallant role. He had kept his ears open. He had delivered Thompson’s medicine and, in the process, he had managed to steal copies of orders which he liked to believe were crucial to the war but, actually, he had yet to come across anything like a real secret on the order of the one that Bettie Duvall—now vanished—had ridden all one night to give General Beauregard. But, as Mr. Henderson said, you never know what might prove useful to the government at Richmond. So David gave whatever he came across to Mr. Henderson; and he was rewarded with kind words and, occasionally, money. He now lived, once again, with the widow in the Navy Yard. But he was growing mortally sick of ham. He had visited Sal Austin a number of times, ostensibly to chat with her on a Sunday afternoon but, actually, to try to discover who frequented her parlors and her beds. But Sal was discreet. Fortunately, the girls were not; and he learned that John Hay, a regular customer, was currently enamored—if that was the word—of Azadia, a beautiful, half-Indian girl, who confessed that she quite enjoyed the President’s secretary. “Like going to bed with a schoolboy—or you,” she had added, as they lay side by side on the wide bed, watching the summer light stream through half-closed shutters, listening to church bells. Sunday morning was the only time that he could properly enjoy, at a special rate, Sal’s premises.

When David questioned Azadia—most cunningly, he thought to himself—she had been talkative. Unfortunately, Hay had not been talkative.
But Hay had told her of the President’s outrage at McClellan, who had told Mr. Stanton that Pope could get out of his own scrape at Bull Run; and then let Pope’s army be destroyed. Hay had also said that there would soon be a great change in the war. When David had repeated that to Mr. Henderson, the chicken-man actually cackled. “The change is,” he said at last, “we went and won!”

But Mr. Henderson was not cackling now. “The next few weeks will decide this thing. We have some good people inside the War Department. But we’ve got nobody near Mr. Stanton, who’s sickly as can be I hear …”

“Asthma, opthalmia, chronic bilious fevers.” David could identify each Washington worthy’s every ailment. Only Old Abe seemed immune to everything save constipation; and a single slight attack of the fever after his son died. On the other hand, the President had started losing weight; and he was growing gray. But that, David had concluded, was more the result of a losing war than of anything vital being eaten at inside him. “I’ll do my best,” said David. “Only the Stantons never use Thompson’s. I don’t know why.”

“Find out who their doctor is. Get Thompson to work on him. I want you in and out of the Stanton house.”

“I’ll try.” They parted among the stewing chickens. David then walked to the Surratt house, where he knew he’d find Annie alone.

Annie was on the parlor floor, polishing furniture. She gave a cry, as he entered. “Knock on the door, Davie!” she said. “You scared me half to death. With the streets full of wild soldiers and even wilder niggers …”

“Then lock your door. What’s happening in Surrattsville?”

Annie put down her cloth, and sat in her mother’s rocking chair; she resembled, somewhat, that highly voluptuous woman. “John will take over as postmaster the first of the month. That’ll keep him busy, except when he’s really busy. You know, he rides back and forth all the time to Richmond.”

“I know.” David was bleak. “I don’t get the chance, ever, but he does.”

“Well, he is where he is and you are where you are, which is worth a lot to us. Anyway, he was just now South, all the way to Fortress Monroe, where they were waiting for General Burnside, who was coming up from North Carolina, and the question was
where
was Burnside’s army going to go? If they were to stay in the vicinity, then he and McClellan would attack Richmond. But if they went on up to the Rappahannock, then that meant McClellan would be ordered back to Washington and Richmond would be safe, and Lee would be able to move up north. Well, John overheard two barge captains talking, and they said that they’d been
ordered to take Burnside’s men to the Rappahannock. So John rode, fast as he could to Richmond, with the news.”

“Now he’s back at the post office.”

“For the time being. Mother’s busy with the farm. I’m fixing up this place so we can take in lodgers and make some money now Father’s gone.”

During this, David moved so close to Annie that he could smell the lilac water she liked to splash over her clothes, not to mention the lemon oil that she was rubbing into the furniture. When he tried to kiss her, she laughed; struggled; kissed. Then she told him either to leave her alone or help her clean up.

As David left the house, he wondered at the curious laws that governed men and women. Where Azadia was all his whenever he liked, to do what he wanted with, Annie would never be his without marriage, while the ham-lady—well, he was hers. On the other hand, if he were John Hay, everything would be his, including, if what the newspapers said was true, Kate Chase.

But at that moment, no one was John Hay’s nor was he anyone’s. He was in Stanton’s office, seated on a straight chair opposite the long sofa on which lay the Tycoon, feet on one sofa arm, head on the other, with a gray felt hat pulled over the eyes as if he no longer wanted to see anything or anyone, ever again. Stanton sat behind his desk, heavy jaw set, red eyes blinking. General Halleck was at the large map of Maryland. It had been Hay’s unkind observation to Nicolay that Old Brains was just that: brains that had grown too old to be of any use to their owner, much less the country. He had taken over as general-in-chief. He had sent Pope and the Army of Virginia to rendezvous with McClellan and the Army of the Potomac so that, together, they would seize Richmond. Instead, Pope had been defeated at Bull Run; and McClellan recalled to Washington. Halleck had been hopeless in the crisis; and Lincoln had not been much better.

For the first time, Hay had begun to wonder if the Ancient, for all his virtues, had the right temperament for a war leader. Or, put the other way around, the rebels had produced a half-dozen first-rate generals and the Union none, with the possible exception of Grant, who was currently bogged down in the West. Was it possible that the Southern military superiority was due to a more intelligent political system? Certainly, the Northern president either gave his generals too much freedom or too little, while his decision to withdraw McClellan from a position twenty-five miles east of Richmond was not only arbitrary but foolish. With
Richmond no longer threatened, Lee was now free to invade the Union; and that was exactly what he was doing.

Henry W. Halleck turned from the map and stared, lugubriously, at Lincoln. He was a paunchy man, with a gray puffy face in which were set two large, singularly glassy eyes. It was rumored that he was addicted to opium; and smoked pipes of it late into the night. The old brains, however, were contained in an impressively large place, thought Hay, eyes resting on the high domed forehead made even higher as the wiry gray hair receded, doubtless in terror of what lurked beneath that dome, those inexorable brains. “So there the armies rest for the moment. Lee on this side of Antietam Creek and McClellan on the other. Yesterday’s battle has been described by General McClellan as a complete victory. Today he should finish off Lee, and that will be the end of Lee’s invasion. Because an army that has invaded the enemy’s territory and suffers a defeat and is cut off”—the professional note, which had crept into Halleck’s voice, had much the same effect on Hay as a metronome—“invariably is a prelude to an overall surrender, as you may recall when Fabius Cunctator turned back Hannibal.”

“I recall it as if it were yesterday,” said the President, beneath his cap.

“I am suspicious of this ‘complete’ victory,” said Stanton. “One never knows with McClellan.”

“Well, we know that he commands those heights here at Sharpsburg.” Halleck touched the map with a long dirty forefinger. “We know that Lee fell back after yesterday’s fighting. So today will determine whether or not McClellan follows the President’s order and destroys Lee’s army, or whether Lee will withdraw safely to Virginia.”

The President removed his cap. He sat up, swinging his legs to the floor. “I’m well pleased so far. As you know, I never wanted to use McClellan again, but the only other general who was available refused the command.”

“Burnside was slow to attack at Sharpsburg,” said Stanton, glancing at the pile of telegrams from the Army of the Potomac.

“So General McClellan tells us.” Halleck’s dislike of McClellan had an abstract purity. For Halleck, thought Hay, McClellan was an incorrect theorem that ought, simply, to be erased from the blackboard. But Lincoln had been tolerant with the little man; and now he was well pleased with him. “The present danger, as I see it,” said Halleck, “is the nearness of the rebel army to Washington. Stonewall Jackson holds Harper’s Ferry. He is between our army and this city. If Lee were to join with Jackson, they could seize Washington before McClellan got here.”