Fiona and Kate Warne arrived in the District by train in the early evening. Warne told Fiona to remain on board and then walked the length of the platform in the B&O and looked into the station’s main concourse to see if there was anyone waiting for them. Robert Lincoln would have had ample time to telegraph that Fiona had left the Lincolns’ Pullman car well before Chicago, but the B&O appeared to hold no surprises. Two teenage Union soldiers were guarding the doors separating the platform from the depot’s concourse, and passengers and baggage handlers were milling about—nothing and no one out of place. Twice, as she returned to the train, Warne spun around to see if she could catch someone observing her. Not a soul.
When Warne returned to the train, Fiona was gone. A peach-hued piece of paper rested on the seat that Fiona had occupied: “Thank you for escorting me.”
Warne stepped off the train and scanned the platform again, but Mrs. McFadden was not to be seen. Most likely she had gotten down onto the tracks at the rear of the train and followed the rails out the station’s side and onto D Street. Smart girl, Warne thought to herself. Smart girl.
There was no need to chase Mrs. McFadden. The handoff had been made, and Warne had fulfilled Mr. Pinkerton’s orders. She went back on the train to collect her luggage.
AUGUSTUS HAD PLACED on a table the decoded entries he had transcribed from the telegrams inside the Booth diary, then slid a candle between the two columns of paper to better read them in the fading light. For two days, since Alexander had sent word of Nail’s murder and Temple’s imprisonment, Augustus had slept and eaten little. He didn’t know if Fiona was safe, and he wasn’t sure what he should do with the diary if he remained its primary guardian—if, in the end, Temple and Fiona were unable to come back for it.
Alexander had disappeared in search of Fiona, and Pint had all but evaporated. Temple had said not to respond to any messages from Pint but wouldn’t say why.
Augustus pressed his thumb into the cover of the diary, and a shallow depression appeared for a moment before the red leather sprang back up and the dimple vanished. He peered inside again at Booth’s writing, at sentences drawn in tight, neat lines and occasionally extravagant loops, the script tethered by incredulity and rage.
After being hunted like a dog through swamps, woods, and last night being chased by gunboats till I was forced to return wet, cold, and starving, with every man’s hand against me, I am here in despair. And why? For doing what Brutus was honored for. What made Tell a hero? And yet I, for striking down a greater tyrant than they ever knew, am looked upon as a common cutthroat. My action was purer than either of theirs. One hoped to be great himself. The other had not only his country’s but his own wrongs to avenge. I hoped for no gain. I knew no private wrong. I struck for my country and that alone. A country that groaned beneath this tyranny, and prayed for this end, and yet now behold the cold hands they extend to me. God cannot pardon me if I have done wrong. Yet I cannot see my wrong, except in serving a degenerate people. The little, the very little, I left behind to clear my name, the Government will not allow to be printed.
It was a slender thing, this assassin’s journal, full of meanderings and self-regard, and now so much revolved around it. Augustus held it up as if it were an artifact, trying to appraise its value. Sojourner had returned the diary to him the morning of Nail’s murder, and Augustus wasn’t sure he wanted to be near its scribblings and bile anymore. There were parts of the diary he couldn’t escape, and some of its sentences repeated themselves in his mind, pursuing him around the District.
The little, the very little, I left behind to clear my name, the Government will not allow to be printed. After leaving the National Hotel on the second day of the Grand Review, Augustus had avoided Pennsylvania and its crowds. Temple had asked him to meet at the canal entrance near Godey’s Kiln at five o’clock that afternoon, but Temple had never appeared.
Augustus sent the diary back into the alleys with Sojourner that evening and then called out the damn journal again when he heard about what had happened to Nail and Temple. He could have done many other things that night; Augustus knew it wouldn’t be safe for him to return to his house, and perhaps it would never be safe to go there again. He thought that it might be best to leave the District. Surely if the war secretary had caught Temple, then the war secretary would catch Fiona and himself.
But the Booth diary also exerted a pull of its own and had become more than a puzzle. It was the basis for an accounting, a reckoning, and he aimed, like his friends, to see that the diary’s own peculiar paths were identified and followed.
“If you’re ever fearful of being followed, change houses frequently,” Temple had told him when they moved runaways through the Underground Railroad. “The more trails there are behind you, the harder you are to find.”
Augustus found a series of havens, first in a backroom at Myrtilla Miner’s Colored Girls’ School, then at the Wayland Seminary, and finally at Alfred Lee’s home on H Street. Alfred was one of the richest black men in the District, and the rumor was that in addition to his feed business he had almost $19,000 worth of real estate. Alfred had been a generous sponsor of the Underground Railroad and owned enough property that Augustus felt he could secrete himself within the network of Lee’s buildings and not be found. Sojourner and Alfred were the only people who knew where he was, and Alfred once had claimed that he feared Sojourner’s wrath more than the law.
“As it should be,” Sojourner said when she heard this, amused. “Alfred’s in his right mind.”
Augustus had set to work in a bedroom at the back of the house, so no one could look in from the street and discern that someone inside was toiling away over a series of unintelligible diary entries and telegrams that had upended the District’s sense of order. The Colt rested lengthwise across the top of the table, within easy reach. He looked again at the twin columns of transcribed messages he had placed on the table below the gun. On the left side were several Booth had already decoded or that he and Temple had worked through earlier:
March 4, 1865
From: Patriot
To: Avenger
There is a room for you at National. I am for Elmira and Montreal. Horses to Richmond when you have Tyrant.
April 5, 1865
From: Patriot
To: Avenger
Maestro sends funds. Goliath and others will join you. Wise Man and Drinker should be taken with Tyrant.
April 11, 1865
From: Patriot
To: Avenger
You will be allowed to pass at Navy Yard Bridge. Refuge at Tavern.
April 14, 1865
From: Patriot
To: Avenger
It is Ford’s. Praetorians send a Parker to guard Tyrant. He will abandon the door or let you pass.
On the right side of the table, in the second column, were several new messages that Augustus had also transcribed:
January 26, 1865
From: Patriot
To: Avenger
I have been at Tavern with mother. She has concerns about our group and our goals but knows nothing of our cause. There is support here from others, including the doctor. Maestro believes that USG might be best target.
February 2, 1865
From: Patriot
To: Avenger
Is murder our course? I am not troubled by this. Maestro says we must kill the head of the snake for our cause to survive. Is murder our course, then?
February 9, 1865
From: Patriot
To: Avenger
I am heartened by your response and honored that you are part of our cause. When Tyrant is gone, you will be remembered as a brave and honorable servant of a just campaign. Maestro asks for an audience with you in New York after your triumph.
February 14, 1865
From: Patriot
To: Avenger
The war is now against us. This makes your duty more paramount. We have recruited a Rebel soldier for you. You will know him as Goliath.
February 23, 1865
From: Patriot
To: Avenger
Maestro had Conductor intercede with the Bully. Tyrant is not safe and he will not survive us.
Augustus hadn’t encountered “Conductor” or “Bully” elsewhere in the telegrams or in the diary. He flipped ahead in the journal to the page that he and Temple had used to unlock the Vigenère table:
Patriot has told Maestro that I am no traitor, I am sure. Patriot says that Maestro owns Lord War. Davey, George, and Lewis are all heroes also, even if they too share the mark of Cain. Those that find this, those that chase me, know the cipher, and the cipher is true. I do not care that I am made a villain among those who honor the Tyrant. He wanted nigger citizenship and I ran him through.
Augustus rubbed his eyes and stood up, reuniting the telegrams into one stack and stuffing them back inside the diary. He wrapped the diary in its brown paper bundle, walked down the hallway, and placed the package between the wall and a large oak bookcase in his bedroom.
The little, the very little, I left behind to clear my name, the Government will not allow to be printed. He used his candle to light a cranberry-colored oil lamp in the hallway outside his bedroom and then snuffed the wick of the taper between his thumb and forefinger. He was watching a faint gray tendril of smoke rise off the wick when he heard a horse trot up in the street outside Alfred Lee’s home. He turned back to the oil lamp and wound down the wick until the yellow light disappeared from its tubular glass chimney, plunging the hallway into darkness.
The Colt was on the table in the room at the end of the hallway and Augustus moved toward it, sliding his hand along the wall to guide himself forward. He bumped into a chair, sending it sliding along the narrow floor with a brief wooden croak that echoed against the ceiling and walls around him. He froze, waiting, but heard nothing more from outside. He stepped forward again, dodging the chair and reaching the end of the hallway, his hands out in front of him and his fingers splayed as he swung his arms back and forth in the space across from his chest, blindly and frantically searching for the table.
Augustus heard the footsteps, distinct and with a series of creaks, as they mounted the wooden staircase at the front door. There were at least two people on the stoop, he guessed, and he began to wave his right hand wildly until he grasped the edge of the table. Then he slid his hand along the top and found the Colt. He considered cocking back the hammer but feared the sound would give him away. So he stood by the table and waited.
There were short raps on the front door, and he stepped forward into the sitting room to try to peer into the foyer. Two long vertical windows crisscrossed with slender muntins were at the front of the sitting room, but he was too far back in the house to see anything through the windows other than several blank town houses framed by a purple sky.
There were two more raps at the door. He pulled back the Colt’s hammer with the palm of his left hand, and it locked into place with a loud snap.
“Don’t you dare,” he heard through the door. “Don’t you dare cock a gun at me, Augustus.”
He exhaled and pushed the hammer forward.
When he opened the door, he found Sojourner staring up at him in irritation and nearly dancing a jig. Standing next to her was Fiona.
FIONA’S CHEEKS WERE BRUISED, her hair mussed into a brown tumbleweed. Augustus had never seen her so out of sorts and thought she looked almost like one of the ragamuffins who frequented the Center Market. Then her eyes, resolute and blue, flashed back at him. He reached out to her, sweeping her into his arms.
“Lordy, stop that and stop that now!” Sojourner demanded in a voice several registers above a whisper but still several more below a yell. “Anybody, just anybody, look out their window round here and see a black man embracin’ a white woman? I don’t need to tell you the consequences if word of that begins to get around the District, my children. Inside!”
When they were in the house and a candle was lit, Augustus led them to the back room again to avoid being seen from the street.
“Nail is dead and Temple is in a cell at the Old Capitol Prison,” Augustus said right away, mustering as much level-headed courage as he could to share the news with Fiona.
She sat down and stared off at a wall for several minutes, occasionally nodding in response to her own unspoken questions. She then asked Augustus for more details about how Nail had died and how Temple had been taken.
“Temple told me what to expect on that train, and he kept me from staying on it all the way to Chicago,” she said, breaking a long silence. “We’re going to have to get him out of that prison.”
Augustus lurched back in his chair.
“It’s the Old Capitol,” he said, shaking his head and reconsidering Fiona’s eyes to see if he could spot any demons there that might have shaped the notions spilling out of her mouth. “They take people in there and keep them for as long as they want. No one just gets people out of there.”
“We are going to help him escape,” Fiona said.
She fumbled for her bag, took a brush from it, and began pulling the bristles through her hair in long, determined sweeps. Augustus brought bread, jam, and water from the kitchen and put it on the table.
“Poor Mr. Flaherty,” Fiona said to no one in particular. “He was a good man.”
“He was that Irish man from Swampdoodle, the blue ink cascading all over his hands?” Sojourner asked.
“He was.”
“Wild one, that man.”
They ate, and Fiona shared her interactions with Mrs. Lincoln and her sons on the train.
“Did you know that Mrs. Lincoln spent two thousand dollars on her gown for the president’s first inauguration ball?” she asked them.
“Southern senators made much of that, actually,” Augustus said. “In the Congress and in newspapers, Mrs. Lincoln’s debts were fodder for many a conversation. People knew.”
“Well, I didn’t know,” Fiona said. “Two thousand dollars. That was four years of Temple’s pay in New York.”
“The senators from the South had a different benchmark,” Augustus said. “They pointed out that Mrs. Lincoln’s two-thousand-dollar gown was the same price as two able-bodied slaves.”
“Mercy,” Sojourner said.
When Fiona told them about her encounter with the soldiers in Defiance, both Augustus and Sojourner shook their heads in disbelief. Sojourner reached over and stroked one side of Fiona’s face, cooing softly as she traced the outlines of the welt still faintly visible on her cheek.
Fiona told them of the cigar smoke and the knives and the strychnine, her voice straining against the recollection. Augustus and Sojourner were mute, listening to her tale and absorbing what had occurred in Defiance. Sojourner looked at the ceiling and pursed her lips, rocking back and forth in her chair.
“Well, child, we live in a complicated time,” she said to Fiona. “The good Lord works through all of us in mysterious ways. I suppose that if God hadn’t wanted you to use that poison in that very moment, he wouldn’t have given you a sharp mind to learn about such things in the first place. And them soldiers were devils, no doubt.”
Augustus patted Fiona’s hand, nodding in agreement with Sojourner.
“The endless resourcefulness of Mr. and Mrs. McFadden,” he said. “But why was there a Pinkerton in, of all places, Defiance, Ohio?”
“A female Pinkerton, mind you,” Fiona said.
“Women are gettin’ in all the trades,” Sojourner said. “Just a matter of time, just a matter of time.”
“It would appear that despite the fact that my husband convinced him to leave the District, Mr. Pinkerton has a separate agenda.”
“The diary?” Augustus asked.
“Yes, but his agent did me no harm when I told her I didn’t have it; indeed, she escorted me through their network and onto a train back to Washington. They want more than just the diary, I assume.”
“And you found me through Sojourner when you got back to the District?”
“Temple told me that this would be the way to reorient when I returned. He said it wouldn’t be wise to return to our boardinghouse and that if I couldn’t go to Alexander’s, I should find our dear Sojourner. So I did.”
Sojourner stood up, took the brush off the table and began pulling it through Fiona’s hair herself.
“Why didn’t you go to Alexander’s?” Augustus asked.
“Because poor Alexander is somewhere on the railroad looking for me. I was supposed to meet him in Cumberland, but then I had my adventure in Defiance. I wasn’t sure where he would be, so I looked for Sojourner.”
Sojourner yawned, put the brush down, and told them she was wandering off to bed. Augustus and Fiona ate some more, and then he pulled out the Booth diary from behind the bookcase. They spent an hour looking at the telegrams Augustus had transcribed, sharing thoughts about what they might reveal.
Augustus also told Fiona of his visit to the National Hotel during the Grand Review and his conversation with Booth’s betrothed, Lucy Hale.
“She said that John Surratt, the son of the boardinghouse owner, was a close confidant of Booth’s—and yet the government and the police have largely ignored him.”
Fiona turned the discussion back to the Old Capitol Prison.
“Temple is not the only person they have there, Augustus.”
“Of course he’s not.”
“Two of the conspirators are there, those accused of plotting the president’s assassination.”
“Mary Surratt and Samuel Mudd.”
“Yes, and Mrs. Surratt’s priest visits her there regularly, according to the papers.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The priest, Jacob Walter, has a Catholic church here in the District on F Street—St. Patrick’s. He also runs an orphanage there,” Fiona said, smiling faintly at the memory of how that particular geography discomfited her husband. “Temple hates orphanages and would have avoided F Street for that very reason—except that the Patent Office is on the same block.”
“Where you work.”
“Where I work!” she said. “My poor, brave husband was reduced to a sack of nervous bones whenever he came to fetch me at the Patent Office’s makeshift hospital, because there was an orphanage nearby.”
“Fiona, I’m lost in this, I’m afraid.”
“Temple was trapped in an orphanage in Dublin as a child and was bullied there. He fell from a window, and the fall split his leg.”
“He never shared that with me. Hence his trepidation concerning F Street.”
“Yes, he has been uncomfortable on F Street. And on the day that all of this began, when he was being chased from the B&O with the diaries, he was forced to ride down F Street. Temple told me later that he nearly tossed away the diaries and let his pursuers have them because he found himself riding right past that frightening orphanage!”
They both began laughing at this in a full, rounded way, like neither of them had laughed in days.
“I still don’t understand what use we can make of this now, Fiona,” Augustus said.
“Temple said he remembered as he passed the orphanage during the chase that Father Walter was Mrs. Surratt’s priest. Temple knows Father Walter. When Temple first came here from New York, Archbishop Hughes gave him a letter of introduction to the priest.”
“And?”
“And as I said, the newspapers report that Father Walter is allowed to visit Mrs. Surratt at the Old Capitol Prison.”
“It is still a formidable pile, that prison,” Augustus said, nodding.
“It is,” Fiona acknowledged. “But as you said, the McFaddens are resourceful.”
She rose from the table and then cupped her elbow in her palm, bringing her hand up to her face and hunching over. In a moment she was standing upright again, her composure intact.
“I miss him in a way that consumes me, Augustus.”
Augustus stood up to comfort her, but she waved him away, saying good night instead and finding her way to one of the bedrooms.
“I’ll sleep on the sofa in the sitting room, and I’ll have the Colt on the floor beneath me,” Augustus said to her as she walked down the hallway.
“Thank you, Augustus,” she replied, stopping and turning back to him. “You are our dear, dear friend.”
Later, lying on her side in bed and running her fingers across her face to measure the swell of her welts, she longed for Temple even more than she had earlier while imagining him in a cell at the Old Capitol; she longed for him so intensely that the tug in her bosom drew deep, like something overflowing on the end of a rope at the bottom of a well. She began crying as she pulled the sheet up to her chin, and eventually she fell asleep.
“WE’VE BEEN HERE a very long time, seventy years, founded to look after the spiritual needs of the lads building the Capitol and the President’s House, yet you and your husband have never once visited us nor joined us to celebrate a mass.”
Father Walter, sitting on the edge of an old oak desk in an office wedged between the vestry and a storage room behind St. Patrick’s sacristy, gazed at Fiona from beneath a pair of bushy gray eyebrows. His black cassock draped in folds to the top of his feet and a heavy silver crucifix hung from his neck and spread across his chest, as much a part of the priest’s own architecture, Fiona thought, as it was a symbol of his devotion.
That morning she had washed her hair for the first time in more than a week and changed into fresh clothes Sojourner had retrieved for her from a trunk that Lafayette Baker’s men had torn through but not soiled near Nail’s shattered, smoldering warehouse in Swampdoodle. Then she made her way from H Street and down 10th to St. Patrick’s, pausing briefly to look down the block to Ford’s Theatre before she entered the empty church.
Father Walter had large, ruddy hands, and he clasped hers between them in a gesture she would have found overly familiar from anyone other than him. A Bible he had been reading when she knocked on his door was spread facedown on the desk, its brown leather binding worn and cracked. He followed her eyes to the Good Book.
“Colossians, chapter three, verse thirteen,” Father Walter said. “I was reacquainting myself with it before you arrived.” He pulled the Bible across the desk and into his lap, turned it over, and began reading the passage to Fiona. “ ‘Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another—’ ”
Fiona interrupted him and completed the rest of the passage: “ ‘Forgive as the Lord forgave you.’ ”
“You have read your Scriptures,” Father Walter said, putting the Bible back down on the desk.
“Matthew, chapter eighteen, verses twenty-one and twenty-two,” she replied. “ ‘Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, “Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother when he sins against me? Up to seven times?” ’ ”
“ ‘Jesus answered, “I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times,” ’ ” Father Walter responded, completing the passage. “Tell me, Mrs. McFadden, your husband came to the District well recommended by Archbishop Hughes, and yet he is a stranger to our parish. Is he as conversant in Scripture as you?”
“My husband fills his head with poems, I’m afraid. He admires poets and has an affinity for Walt Whitman’s verse.”
“Walt Whitman is a heathen.”
“Father, I have seen Mr. Whitman at work in the hospitals ministering to the wounded, sick, and dying. Whatever his beliefs may be, I think he does the Lord’s work.”
“I understand he is an atheist.”
“The war that all of us just endured made many men and women question their faith, Father.”
“And yet you do not.”
“I question the injustices that surround us, but I am a woman of faith.”
“So we all must be in times like this,” Father Walter said. “Forgive my bluster over Mr. Whitman.”
“You are much concerned, it would appear, with forgiveness, Father.”
The priest looked down at his Bible again and rested his hand atop it.
“I think that the true Christian is a forgiving Christian,” he said, pulling the Bible back into his lap. “This has been a time of turmoil and blood and cruelty. Forgiveness is not the first path some of our brothers and sisters will choose to follow. I fear mightily for the well-being of one of the most devout members of St. Patrick’s.”
“Yes, Mary Surratt.”
“She is why I’m here,” Fiona said.
“I assumed as much, although I would have been more pleased to encounter you here in search of your Maker.”
Father Walter drew the Bible closer to his body, enveloping it inside his arms and the folds of his cassock and reciting yet another passage. “ ‘Do not judge, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven.’ ”
“Luke, chapter six, verse thirty-seven,” Fiona replied.
Father Walter suggested that they visit the garden outside his office, where a trio of bees buzzed around a large wisteria arbor and several rosebushes. A magnolia tree, a black locust, a host of marigolds and lilacs, and clusters of purple hydrangeas were showing their buds or blossoming around a long wooden bench that spanned part of the garden’s perimeter. Father Walter sat down and offered Fiona details about each of the flowers and trees before them: the wisteria vine’s tendency to grow rapidly and out of control unless cut back frequently; the mix of soil and space around St. Patrick’s stunting the black locust to thirty-five feet instead of the one hundred feet it could reach in the countryside; the magnolia tree’s shabby appearance in the spring, with a gnarled trunk and limbs and brown, pockmarked leaves, soon to be transformed by an eruption of brilliant pink blossoms. He had planted the garden himself years earlier, he said, and nurturing it offered a respite from his concerns about Mrs. Surratt—and from his worry that forgiveness would elude her.
“I do not believe her to be guilty of playing any role in the conspiracy to murder President Lincoln,” Father Walter said. “And I am not sure in my soul whether the men running our government and hunting these assassins have read or have taken to heart Colossians and Matthew. Mary Surratt deserves forgiveness, and I shall be vocal in asserting that on her behalf at the President’s House and in whatever courtroom in which they try her.”
Fiona paused a moment, considering her words, and then asked a question she had been wanting to pose since arriving.
“The press describes her boardinghouse on H Street as the haven for the conspirators—they all convened there, including Booth, and she presided over that house, did she not?” she asked. “And did she not provide the assassins with firing irons?”
“What else does the press say about her?”
“They describe her as a large woman, of the Amazonian style, with masculine hands and a swarthy complexion.”
For the first time that morning Father Walter laughed, a staccato burst that rolled out from him with an abandon he rarely displayed in public.
“And you say that I have unfairly categorized the poet Whitman! Yes, you should meet with her and decide for yourself whether the newspapers are to be believed. I’ve told the authorities that Mary is innocent, and I’ve told them that if they hang her, that act will weigh heavily upon them for eternity.”
He tilted his head back into the sunlight and closed his eyes, his fingers wrapped around a cross hanging from his neck. The priest sighed and opened his eyes again, pivoting away from his struggle to reconcile Mary Surratt’s plight with his belief in the righteousness of the good Lord.
“Why do you desire a meeting with Mary?” Father Walter asked. “You must share this with me if I am to do anything on your behalf.”
“We have a number of things, documents, that involve communications about the president’s assassination. My husband has pursued this and is now in the same prison as Mrs. Surratt. I have spent time with Mrs. Lincoln, traveled with her, and have shared her intimacies. I would like to convey Mrs. Lincoln’s thoughts to Mrs. Surratt. And I most desperately want to see my husband.”
“The Old Capitol is a hard, bitter place, and if your husband has alienated our government to the same degree that Mrs. Surratt has, then I consider his incarceration an equal abomination,” the priest said. “You must know you are on a perilous course. So, tell me: what do you fear?”
“Oh my, I fear many things. I fear aging, and death, and the loss of my husband. I fear a life without children of my own.”
“I can say that I do not fear aging or death, but I fear evil in the world,” the priest said. “I fear the injustices of mankind.”
“I have come here to try to right an injustice.”
“You can save Mrs. Surratt?”
“No, I don’t believe I can.”
A flock of red-winged blackbirds landed in a spiraling flutter atop the magnolia tree, shaking their wings and bouncing from branch to branch.
“Mrs. Surratt used to sit with me in this garden and tell me about a dream she often had,” the priest said. “She would dream that one of the roses in the garden had grown thick and mighty as an oak, its stem swelling and swirling for hundreds of thousands of feet, climbing and climbing and climbing, until it reached to heaven. She would climb the stem of that rose, pulling herself up and around its thorns, cutting her arms and hands and legs all along the way, and praying to the good Lord to give her the strength she needed to complete her journey. At the end of her dream she always reached an enormous burst of silky red petals at the top of the stem. And then she would find her way to bliss.”
The blackbirds stirred and flew up from the magnolia, trading places in tight little loops as they glided over one another on their way toward the Potomac.