Chapter 33

In Which Aunt Kitty Worms Out Secrets, and I Prove to Be a Belle of the Ball

Miss Matilda Maddox, you are the wittiest, most fascinating flower to bloom in Baltimore in years.”

Good gravy! If what I was dishing out was considered witty, then these dunderheads must spend all their live-long days under a rock.

Nevertheless, I batted my eyes and waved my dainty black fan at my four companions, trying hard to appear like I was enjoying their company. I shot a look over at Aunt Kitty in her flouncy blue gown, laughing and talking at the center of her own circle of wild-eyed Southern hospitality. I knew we were Mr. Pinkerton’s only detectives at the Barnum Hotel tonight. I’d overheard Aunt Kitty say Hattie Lawton and Detective Webster had already slipped off to the town of Perrymansville not far from here, where they were to pass themselves off as husband and wife and learn what secrets they could.

While the Barnum Hotel was teeming with life, I was enjoying it with a particularly noisy quartet of rabble-rousers. They surrounded me in chairs and on their knees, and as I scanned their young faces, I figured their ages were about sixteen. And they must have taken me for thereabouts, too, though I was only thirteen, give or take.

Beneath the miles and miles of petticoats I was wearing to fill out my shiny green skirt, I shuffled my boots and tried to get comfortable on the stiff sofa. But it was no use, as one of the dim boys pressed in a little closer and crushed my gown under his knee.

I batted my eyes and tried to make sense of their blustery, boastful talk.

“That devil Lincoln is soon to be riding the train through Baltimore,” began the baby-faced rogue who was kneeling on my costume.

“On his way to Washington, yes,” continued the second, shouting over his companion for a chance to sound brave, “but he won’t leave Baltimore alive!”

And not to be outdone, the third and fourth cohorts raised their voices and their fists, vowing, “The abolitionist traitor will never take the oath of office, not if there’s a Son of the South alive to stop him!”

I’d read enough newspapers by now to know about abolitionists, and I did not think the term deserved to go hand in hand with the word traitor. I fanned my face a little faster and resisted the urge to smack these blithering cretins roundly on their hot heads.

I listened keenly to their brave talk, but my attention was distracted by a lively table just a few quick steps away. Seated at their party were two men—both handsome with heads of wavy black hair and well-shaped mustaches—who appeared alarmingly familiar to me.

I knew those faces, but how? And what if they recognized me? Would they call out, “Penelope Potter, we meet again”? Or holler, “Ali, the fortune-teller’s assistant”? Or “Miss Charity Englehart, what a pleasure”? I held my fan steady before my cheeks and peered over it as my four secessionist simpletons continued puffing their chests like a bunch of barnyard roosters.

Suddenly the two mustached men rose from their table and, leaving their dining companions behind, began walking toward our group with great purpose. I couldn’t help but gasp and lower my eyes, shielding my identity beneath the brim of my black bonnet, which Aunt Kitty had be-feathered with practically an entire bird.

“Good to see you again, sirs,” yelped the rebel to my right, now leaping to his feet and grinding my beautiful skirt beneath his manure-encrusted boot. He was vigorously shaking the hands of the two familiar men as if they were old friends, then he began boisterously introducing the members of our party. When he at last came to me, I could feel my heart pounding in my throat for fear that my identity was about to be revealed.

Our entire operation seemed doomed as I rose to my feet.

“Miss Matilda Maddox,” the baby-faced rebel was saying, his cheeks growing splotchy-red from excitement, “I’d like to introduce you to Mr. Edwin Booth and his brother John Wilkes Booth. They are among our most talented theater actors here in Baltimore. If you were to read the newspapers, Miss Matilda, you would know all about them.”

I wanted nothing more than to stomp on his toes with my own heavy boot and call him an illiterate oaf. I’d probably read more newspapers in one week than he’d read in his entire lifetime! But instead I fanned myself and gave a friendly curtsy, nearly overcome with relief that the strangers and I were not acquainted. I merely knew them from the theater posters around town.

“We were just investigating the music we’re hearing,” said one of the Booth brothers, twisting the end of his mustache. “There seems to be dancing in the grand ballroom.”

And before I could say Yankee Doodle, I was swept onto the marble dance floor and forced to divide my time among four of the South’s clumsiest, rock-footed mutineers.

“I believe I have had quite enough of rebels,” I announced a few hours later, once Aunt Kitty and I finally retired to our room upstairs. I threw myself onto the bed and freed my sweaty feet from the brown boots. “When they weren’t talking about stopping Abe Lincoln from becoming president, they were going on and on about the barber at the hotel. They said a Northerner shouldn’t get too close to his shaving blade.

“The way they talked, you’d think the two were linked somehow. Is it possible Mr. Lincoln is due for a shave when he passes through Baltimore?”

Aunt Kitty paced the room trying to make sense of what we picked up from our Southern companions. While she must have been tuckered out from pretending to be Mrs. Barley and insinuating herself into the highest levels of Southern society, she didn’t show it.

“Ferr-ini, Ferr-ani, Ferr-adoni,” she muttered. “I could not catch the pronunciation. I believe that is the barber you heard about, too. The name sounded from Italy or Corsica, I believe.”

“The brutes I was with called him Ferrandini. Do you think he knows how to make that Italian dish we ate in Mississippi?” I hollered, hopping up from the bed in my bare feet and ready to go call on this suspicious barber. “Macaroni a l’Italienne with Fromage. The most wonderful dish I ever tasted!”

Aunt Kitty stopped her pacing and glared at me. I got the hint and hopped back onto the bed, taking a bite out of a bright red apple from the bedside bowl.

“I believe you’ve got it right, Nell. This suspicious barber is someone Mr. Pinkerton needs to visit. We must get a telegraph off as quickly as possible.”

Aunt Kitty’s pen moved furiously across the page as she perched at a desk near the foot of our beds. I quickly escaped my gown and corset and propped my overworked feet on the pillow to air them out. I shifted gingerly on the bed, my back stiff from bearing the weight of all those petticoats—perhaps wearing ten was too many.

“I believe I know when it will happen,” Aunt Kitty said quietly as she dipped her pen into the inkwell. “And we know who is involved. The way things are shaping up, Nell, it’s much more than the railroads that need protecting now.”

I listened to the scratch of the pen’s nib and burned with curiosity. When it will happen? What did Aunt Kitty mean by that? What was she telling Mr. Pinkerton? I could peek at the page, but I knew Aunt Kitty did the same thing as me and Jemma. She wrote her messages to Mr. Pinkerton in code. I stole a quick glance at her paper, the loopy cursive writing as neat and tidy as her hair.

“Nuts to Philadelphia and Harrisburg,” she wrote.

I took another noisy bite of my apple and mulled this over. We were risking our skins in this hornet’s nest for some nuts?

What did that message mean? Jemma could figure it out. If only she were here to read it with me. I pulled out my cigar box and sifted through it until I came across Jemma’s most recent letter, sent at Christmastime.