The Ironclad Alibi Read online

  Harry and Caesar Augustus walked back to the Exchange, taking a circuitous route that led down by the river. In marked contrast to his demeanor upon their arrival in Richmond, the black man mostly stayed silent, despite several attempts at conversation on Harry’s part.

  “Do you trust her?” Harry asked finally—and bluntly.

  “Who?”

  “Miss Van Lew.”

  “Only just met her.”

  Harry could see the lights of the Exchange ahead. The other buildings along the street were dark.

  “I suppose what I’m asking is, do you trust her judgment?”

  “Well, now, Marse Harry. Most of the time I don’t trust yours. And I know you.”

  “This is not helpful.”

  They stopped. Caesar Augustus looked over his shoulder, then at Harry, then to the hotel, which was now looming up the sloping street. To the west, the increasing clatter of a carriage could be heard.

  “I think I done all I can to help you today, Marse Harry. I’ll be back in the morning to help you more.”

  The coach appeared, pulling to a stop in front of the hotel. It was military, with a small cavalry escort.

  “You have your own quarters?” he asked.

  The black man nodded. Both watched as an officer descended from the conveyance. Harry gathered he was of high rank, as he had several aides.

  “Where?”

  “With a friend.”

  Harry hesitated. “Caesar Augustus, we don’t need more trouble.”

  “Sure don’t. Got a whole city brim full of it all around us.” He paused, then grinned. “Goodnight, Marse Harry. I’ll be back at first light.”

  The weight of the hour was becoming heavy. Harry yawned. “Goodnight then.”

  The loiterers and layabouts in front of the hotel happily did not include the menacing Nestor Maccubbin at this hour. Neither was he to be found inside, though there were a few in the crowded lobby Harry took to be police agents. Ignoring them, he went to the bar, ordered an Old Overholtz, finished it quickly, then returned to the lobby, starting for the stairs.

  “Mr. Raines! Harrison Raines!”

  Harry froze, half expecting someone bearing manacles, or a drawn revolver. He feared his mission was concluded. All his missions.

  He turned slowly, to find the hotel manager hurrying toward him in a state of high excitement. He had something in his hand, which Harry hoped was not a weapon. “This came for you, sir,” said the manager, handing Harry an envelope. “Not an hour ago.”

  “Thank you.”

  The man stood there. Harry ignored him, breaking the seal and removing the letter within.

  After reading it twice—holding it close, as he’d neglected to put on his spectacles—he looked to see that the manager hadn’t budged an inch.

  “It’s an invitation—to dinner,” Harry said. The man simply stared. “Tomorrow night.”

  “Think of that,” the other said. “The day after his inauguration. You must be somebody special.”

  Harry slid the envelope and invitation into the breast pocket of his coat, hard by his .44 caliber Derringer pocket pistol. “He’s an old family friend,” Harry said, turning back toward the stairs.

  “So I see, Mr. Raines. Are your accommodations comfortable?”

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  “I think you will find them quite comfortable tonight, sir. Quite comfortable indeed.”

  The scent of perfume came to him the instant he opened the door to his suite of rooms. He thought at first the aroma must have lingered from Arabella’s visit that afternoon.

  But that seemed doubtful in the extreme.

  Instead of turning on the gaslight in the sitting room, he went to the door of the bedroom, which was open. Taking his Derringer from his coat pocket, he paused, then put it back again. He had enough difficulties without adding accidental gunshots.

  He had to get this annoying woman from this place at once—from his rooms and from the hotel. Harry sensed the worst possible scandal and the wreckage of his mission and plans, the whole imminent disaster waiting right there for him. Palmer Mills was the sort of man who would make the worst of any situation.

  Why was Arabella so obsessed with him? They had parted, in no way amicably, years before. He’d not had a word from her since—until …

  Stepping quietly into the bedroom, he went to the gas valve and struck a match, turning the light to its brightest and blinking in consequence.

  The woman on the bed, murmured, stirred, then rolled over to look at him, her long, dark hair spread out upon the pillow. She smiled, and extended her arm in invitation. “Hello, Harry.”

  “Louise.”

  Chapter 4

  “Why do you look so stricken, Harry? Are you not glad to see me?”

  Louise smiled, as prettily as when he’d last seen her perform in Much Ado About Nothing.

  “Of course I am, but I would prefer a more seemly circumstance,” he said.

  She sat up, revealingly. “You? Embarrassed?”

  He flushed, but it was not from embarrassment. “Let us say, distressed,” he said.

  Strands of her long, wild dark hair had fallen over her right eye. She tossed them back with a shake of her head, then leaned back slightly, invitingly.

  “I do not know why you should be, Harry. You will recall that the last time we looked upon one another, it was in this very room, and I was in this very bed.”

  And in almost the very same position.

  “I haven’t forgotten, Louise. But, do believe me, the circumstance now is quite changed.”

  She put hand to brow and looked away, as though toward an audience. “‘Take, O take those lips away, that so sweetly were foresworn,’” she recited, “‘And those eyes, the break of day, Light that do mislead the morn; But my kisses bring again, bring again; Seals of love, but seal’d in vain, seal’d in vain.’”

  “What play is that from?”

  “Measure for Measure, you clod. Was your mind elsewhere all those nights you’ve spent in the theater?”

  “When you’re on stage, Louise, I’m always much distracted.”

  He sank into the room’s only chair. He’d put his flask in a coat pocket and now retrieved it for a welcome draught. The whiskey cheered him, but was no help as far as Louise was concerned. Her presence was dizzying.

  “You say the circumstance has changed, do you mean you are no longer a Yankee spy?” she said, with mock theatrical anger. “That you no longer need to go around seducing innocent young Southern girls for the evil purposes of the despotic federal government?” she asked. Her smile became a wicked grin.

  “Louise, you are a lady of surpassing beauty and many admirable talents, but ‘innocent’ is perhaps something of an exaggeration.”

  There was a sudden commotion outside on the street below—shouts, a horse whinnying, and the improbable sound of a baby crying. Then came the unmistakable unison thumps of soldiers in formation, marching away. Harry held back from rushing to the window. These days, odd noises in the street could mean absolutely anything, and little of it good. People were being dragged off to prison here in Richmond just as rudely as they were in the North. It would do no good to add his staring face to this tragic tableau, whatever it might be about.

  “Harry, I asked if you were still a Yankee spy?”

  He smiled, though not so wonderfully as had she. “I was never that, Louise.”

  “Oh? I have seen you with that dastard, Allen Pinkerton, have I not?”

  “I have friends in the federal government is all. As did you—when you resided in the federal city. Caitlin Howard asked me to look after you, and so I did. It was necessary to make use of those friends. You might be dead now—certainly still in jail—if I hadn’t.”

  “I’ll grant you that is true. And I am grateful.” She lay back upon the pillow. “But do you think the likes of Nestor Maccubbin and the Richmond Municipal Police would believe your long, many, and frequent associations with the Yankee Se
cret Service were just to help little old me?”

  “I don’t think that gentleman would believe anything I had to say.”

  “He’s a disagreeable fellow, and I think would judge you a traitor, Harry, needing only the slightest crumb of proof to fetch the rope. I am grateful to you and won’t betray you, but this makes you far more obliged to me than I to you.”

  “It’s an honor and a pleasure to be obliged to you, Louise,” he said, lying.

  “Then tell me under who’s auspices you return to Richmond.”

  “Auspices?”

  “Why in hell are you here, in this increasingly desperate city?”

  “I’m here under my own auspices, Louise. I’m homesick is all. And sick of the war. Life has been hard for me in Washington lately, as it has been for many Southerners. I’ve been accused of several crimes. The authorities do not trust me. Here, at least, I am among friends. Including you, I hope.”

  “You came prowling ’round the theater after me. What do you want?”

  “Just to see you again—now I’m back in town.”

  “I do not know if I believe you.”

  “You can believe me. I wanted to see you.”

  “See me.” She spread her arms wide, and then laughed, as loudly as though on the stage. The hotel was full, and she would be heard.

  “Well, here I am for you to see, but with your eyesight, you’d best come closer.”

  Allen Pinkerton had picked the wrongest possible man in the U.S. Secret Service for this mission.

  He rose, but came no nearer the bed.

  Louise snuggled into the covers. “Turn out the lamp and come ‘see’ me in proper fashion, Harry.”

  “Louise …”

  “It’s a cold and miserable night, sir. You don’t want to spend it in a chair.”

  He had to admit that he did not.

  She did not leave his room until after sunrise—an indiscretion flagrant enough to have caused her to be run out of town or fired from the theater before the war. Now, it was as though she’d been issued a license to behave as she wished.

  He lay in bed, thinking upon how much help or hindrance she might be to the accomplishment of his task. Before long, he was simply, dreamily, happily thinking of her.

  Finally, he stirred himself to face the day, prodded to do so mostly by his annoyance over Caesar Augustus’s tardiness. His continuing absences were poor service to the Union cause.

  Unless he’d gotten himself into trouble—of which there was more than fair chance in this city.

  Harry breakfasted, then went out onto the hotel’s gallery, finding an empty chair and settling himself into it, glad of the warm, sunshiny day.

  Years before, when barely fifteen, Harry had accompanied his father on a trip to Mississippi, where the elder Raines was acquiring a part interest in a cotton plantation.

  Harry’s memories of that adventurous journey were most vividly of smoky, cinder-spewing railroad trains, magnificent white steamboats, and the great, broad rivers of the West that dwarfed the Potomac and the James. He remembered as well the vast plantation they’d gone to see, an endless expanse of steamy green fields with an army of slaves moving through them like so many insects. The backs of those poor folk had looked so bent and broken with their ceaseless labor one wondered if they might ever straighten again. Yet on they had moved, filling the long, canvas sacks they dragged behind them through the long, hot day, receiving not a penny for their effort.

  Complementing that recollection was one of the main street of Natchez, still something of a wild frontier town back then, but for the foppish finery of the city’s young men of “society.” These proud fellows were arrogant in their idleness, lazing and loitering about the sidewalks and verandas, each bearing his walking stick as though it were a badge of high office. But for recurring visits to the taverns, they passed the entirety of their days in this manner, swatting flies and yawning. Work was fit only for beasts and Negroes. Exalting their indolence as proof of their aristocracy, they were the most useless human beings Harry had ever encountered.

  But now, at ease in a chair on the gallery of the Exchange here in Richmond, Harry emulated them in every regard, complete to the affectation of a walking stick, and a very genuine series of yawns.

  Like their own George Washington, who was in the saddle working his Mount Vernon farms from morn to dusk even into the illness that killed him, Virginians were a more industrious people than those of the deeper South. Harry’s father and brother had been just as busy about their place along the shore of the James.

  But there were still slackers enough to be found here in the Confederate capital, despite the war and the government’s impassioned call to arms for every able bodied man.

  By joining these laggards, Harry hoped to make a self-defining statement. He’d been considered something of a wastrel himself upon first coming of age. When not gambling or racing horses, he was at the theater or reading books or strolling along the river with a pretty girl, if one would have him. Never had he taken a hand in the business affairs of the family plantation—though of course a far more compelling reason than laziness accounted for that.

  But indolent is what he now wished to appear, and thus provide the curious with an explanation for aimless-seeming wanderings about the town. He wanted people to believe he had tired of having to support himself in the North and now wished only to live again off the Raines family fortune. Lies were often more readily accepted if they gave people a reason to think ill of a person.

  The absurdly fanciful accounts of the battles of Manassas and Ball’s Bluff Harry had read in newspapers both North and South had diminished his confidence in any of their reporting, and he considered them now a poor tool indeed for espionage. It amused him to think that the federal government had made it a crime to mail Northern newspapers to the Secessionist state. The information reported therein could only subvert the Southern cause with its wild exaggeration and inaccuracy.

  But he sat reading the Richmond Enquirer now as a means of passing the time until Caesar Augustus’s return, contenting himself with the knowledge that half-truths were preferable to none.

  The very first story he read, however, seemed true enough—and alarming. He’d heard that Richmond had been put under some formal pronouncement of martial law, but hadn’t realized it had gotten as bad as the dictatorship the Union Army was running in Baltimore. Here, too, anyone could be dragged off to prison on the slightest pretext.

  “Yankee Spies,” the headline read.

  “Two Lincoln spies,” the story began, “giving the names of John Scully and Pryce Lewis, were arrested at the Monument Hotel on Friday last, and are now in prison. The proof of their connection with the secret service of the enemy is most positive. They were recognized on the street by a young lady, whose baggage they searched in Baltimore, while she was on her way to the South. Suspecting that they were detective officers sent by the Yankee Government to Richmond, she communicated her suspicions to a young man, who gave information of the presence of the strangers at General Winder’s office. The officers in pay of our Government were immediately put upon the track, and discovered them in a private house. Here the young man was introduced to their presence, much to the discomfort and chagrin of the guilty parties. They became so much confused that they hastened away to the Hotel, leaving their overcoats behind. They were followed and captured by the detectives. Both of them claim to be English subjects, and they are in reality native born Englishmen, and have claimed the protection of that Government. But this will avail them little, since it is clearly shown by evidence not prudent to detail in this place, that they are paid hirelings of the enemy.”

  Harry had been warmed by the sun but now felt quite chilled. He and his fellow Secret Service operative Joseph “Boston” Leahy had done some work in Baltimore, but Harry could not recall a pair of Englishmen assigned as agents there. Of course, his master, Allen Pinkerton, preferred to keep his people as ignorant of each other as possible, lest
a single arrest bring down an entire network.

  He read on. Another story proclaimed: “Arrest of Honorable John Botts and Other Suspected Unionists!”

  Now his flesh began to crawl in earnest. Was this some sort of sweep? Was no one safe—in particular, recently arrived gambling gentlemen from Yankeeland with a local history of antislavery sensibilities?

  “The Honorable John Minor Botts was arrested at his residence on Broad Street near the city limits yesterday at the early hour of six a.m. by a detachment under command of Captain Godwin, assisted by detective Cashmeyer. Mr. Botts was very indignant when, after his house had been surrounded, he found himself called upon by the officers to accompany them to prison. The household of the prisoner appeared very much alarmed at the ‘intrusion,’ and his son became so much excited that he lost all consciousness and fainted. Immediately after his capture, Mr. Botts was carried in a buggy to the private jail of McDaniel’s on Franklin Street, near Sixteenth, where he now remains.”

  Private jails? Of course, federal Detective Lafayette Baker of the Washington provost guard was operating much the same thing in the basement of the U.S. Treasury.

  Harry continued.

  “Frank Stearns, a wealthy distiller of Northern birth, was arrested at about three o’clock a.m. at ‘Tree Hill,’ his country residence on the banks of the James River, some three miles distant from the city. The house of this prisoner has been suspected to be a rendezvous for Lincoln sympathizers during the past one or two months. Its occupant is believed to have been in communication with the enemy and is known to have expressed sympathy for their cause. When captured he remarked, ‘I suppose you take me because I am a Union man.’ The officers replied that that was the reason, and added that they intended to arrest all of the same stripe in the city of Richmond, to which Mr. Stearns responded, ‘Well, you’ll have your hands full.’

  “The distillery owned by the prisoner is located on Fifteenth between Main and Cary Streets. It, together with all its appurtenances, have been seized by order of the Government, and placed under guard.”