Madam Wilton’s was just as Batchelor remembered; the brass shingle burning by the ornate door, the strains of a violin playing a saraband somewhere within its portals. It still had, despite the sudden arrival of the Washington Metropolitan Police not so long ago, the air of a finishing school for young ladies.
This time, Batchelor had gone alone. There was no need for Julep to be on hand, although increasingly, both Batchelor and Grand had come to believe that the woman was on hand constantly, one of the many shadows that filled the Washington night. The lights flickered in the hallway, reflecting myriad points in the sparkle of the chandeliers, and he reached the door of Room Nineteen. It opened to his knock and he was in.
This time there was no elegant gentleman sitting at a table, no pistol muzzle levelled at his head. The room was empty. Batchelor whirled this way and that. At times like these, he half wished that he was as au fait with guns as Grand, but this was not the time to be ruing a misspent youth. The door had closed behind him with a click that made the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. Now there was no sound but the ticking of the clock. Four minutes past eleven. Perhaps Major Tice had a different definition of the word sharp.
There was an envelope on the mantelpiece. And it had Batchelor’s name on it. He tore it open and read the letter’s contents. ‘Contraband shacks,’ it read. ‘You have fifteen minutes.’
Batchelor’s brain reeled. Where the Hell were the Contraband shacks? Matthew Grand had never taken him on his promised tour of this great city and Batchelor was literally lost. He hurtled down the stairs, colliding with a couple of Congressmen on their way up, and was out into the street.
There was a cab waiting a hundred yards away, the horse dozing in the traces, and Batchelor ran for it.
‘Do you know where the Contraband shacks are?’ he called up to the cabbie.
‘Sure thing, mister,’ the cabbie said, readying his whip. ‘But are you sure you want to go there?’
‘Positive,’ said Batchelor, and got in. He didn’t take much notice of his surroundings, intent as he was on the time. Every other minute he checked his hunter. Was the cab going backwards?
They hurtled up a gentle rise and Batchelor became aware that the broad boulevards and bright lights had gone. Wooden hovels lay scattered at rakish angles and washing hung limply from rope lines strung across alleyways. He scattered a flock of chickens as he got down and felt his boots squelch in the mud.
‘I guess you know your business, mister,’ the cabbie was looking around him nervously, ‘but if it’s a black girl you’re after, you’d have done better back in the Division.’
‘Thank you,’ said Batchelor. ‘What do I owe you?’
‘That’s taken care of,’ the cabbie said, and was only too keen to lash his horse back down the slope.
What now? Batchelor was standing in the middle of a shantytown, the ramshackle roofs of the buildings black against the purple of the night sky. There was no moon. And the stars were far, far away. He heard them before he saw them. Two men, then three, creeping towards him out of an alley. Another crossed by a picket fence to his right and two more to his left. To a man, they were black, with hard, scrawny faces and worn clothes, patched hand-me-downs that many people had worn before. A couple of them carried sticks.
‘What you doin’ here, cracker?’ one of them asked. ‘We don’t get many white callers.’
‘I’ve come to meet someone,’ Batchelor said. He was aware that they had surrounded him now and that the circle was closing in.
‘Oh, yeah?’ another asked. ‘Who’s that?’
‘That’s my business.’ Batchelor knew as soon as he said it that he might not live to regret that remark.
‘Yours and Major Tice’s,’ a third voice boomed. Another man, rather older than the others, with greying hair and kindly eyes, walked forward from the circle’s rim. He held a note in his hand and he passed it to Batchelor. ‘The Washington Monument,’ he read. ‘Which way’s that?’ he asked aloud. ‘The Washington Monument?’
‘Washington Monument?’ the first man stroked his chin. ‘You heard o’ that, Blue?’
‘No, I ain’t, Scip. And you know I’m Washington born and bred.’
‘Me neither,’ another man piped up. ‘But these crackers keep on building, don’t they? T’ain’t safe for decent black folks to walk the streets.’
Batchelor heard the stifled sniggers, but the joke was very definitely on him and he didn’t appreciate it. ‘I have money,’ he said, rather wishing now that he was still in that London alley with the Irish roughs.
The sniggering stopped. ‘We don’t want your money, white boy,’ one man said, his voice thick with anger. ‘You wouldn’t give us the time of day if’n you didn’t want something.’
‘Aw, don’t tease the cracker, Scip. Man’s likely to shit hisself – oops, pardon my manners – soil himself.’
Batchelor stood his full height and crossed to the man, staring him down. ‘I asked you gentlemen a civil question,’ he said. ‘You may guess from my accent that I am a stranger in your city. Now, for the last time, are you going to tell me which way the Monument is?’
The older man looked at the Englishman grimly. Then he pointed with his left hand. ‘That way, mister,’ he said. ‘And you won’t find no cabs around here. You’re gonna have to run for it.’
Batchelor nodded and turned. For a moment, the circle did not break and the sticks seemed to glow white in the men’s hands. Then, they fell back, first one, then two, and there was a clear run down the hill. Batchelor tipped his hat and strode off, not breaking into a run until he felt himself to be out of sight of the shacks. In the distance as he ran, he heard a harmonica open up and the mocking words of the old Civil War song rang in his ears.
‘The Massa run, ha, ha, The darkie stay, ho ho. It must be now the Kingdom’s coming, and the year of Jubilo!’ It was followed by hoots and catcalls and gales of laughter. At least tonight, James Batchelor had momentarily lightened somebody’s life.
He jogged as best he could over uneven ground in the pitch dark, cursing whenever his ankle threatened to turn or brambles ripped at his trousers. He could see the city’s canal lying straight and silver ahead – and he could smell it, too; the open sewer of the capital and the floating graveyard of cats without number. The park, still under construction, that he had seen in the daylight when he and Grand had talked to Luther Baker behind his tree, looked different at night. Sinister shadows extended the bushes and the night airs shifted the fallen leaves, sending them skittering across the pathways like armies of rats.
Here it was, the Monument, three times the height of a man and surrounded by scaffolding. Batchelor’s lungs felt fit to burst and his legs like lead. What was this game of ‘hunt the thimble’ that Tice was playing? He was about to give up and plan exactly what he would say to Julep when he next met her, when he saw the paper fluttering on an arm of the scaffolding. He could barely make it out in the darkness, but a minute or two turning it this way and that revealed its secret. ‘The Long Bridge’.
Batchelor threw his hat against the stonework in his frustration. This was getting ludicrous. Just then, a whistle shattered the moment and Batchelor saw a cab standing at the bottom of the hill. He ran for it.
‘Long Bridge, mister?’
‘You little mind-reader, you!’ Batchelor still retained something of his sense of humour. ‘Don’t tell me, this ride is paid for.’
‘The Hell it is,’ the cabbie said. ‘You want to go to the Long Bridge, mister, it’s gonna cost yuh fifty cents.’
‘Fifty cents?’ Batchelor nearly swallowed his tongue.
‘After midnight, mister,’ the cabbie told him. ‘City regulations. Besides, I got a wife and kids to support.’
‘Hmm,’ Batchelor climbed inside. ‘Haven’t got any relatives in London, have you? Same line of work?’
‘Would that be London, Texas?’ the cabbie asked.
‘Probably,’ Batchelor sighed, settling back and closing his eyes. ‘But for now, get me to the Long Bridge, and make it snappy.’
The sentry’s boots were the only sound on the planks of the Long Bridge that night. He patrolled at the regulation speed, back and forth across the entrance and one hundred paces towards Virginia. Below him, the Potomac glided silver and slick in the starlight. Every now and then he shifted the weight of the rifle on his shoulder and toyed, in these silent hours of the watch, with lighting his pipe.
James Batchelor had not had much to do with sentries in his life. They guarded Buckingham Palace, the Tower and the Bank of England, but this one was standing like Horatius, guarding his sacred city from a determined and dangerous foe. Batchelor waited in the shadows. Stretching far away to his right, the fringes of the Island fronted the river, and beyond that the still swampy ground of the Mall and the fractured column of the Monument he had just left. To his left, the Island continued until the rookeries gave way to open land, lying black and level in the darkness, and the grim walls of the Arsenal beyond that.
At first, he thought he’d imagined it. There was another sound mingling with the sentry’s footsteps; faster, more rhythmic, and it was getting louder. Batchelor strained to look out along the bridge. A solitary figure, no more than a pair of legs with the darkness of Virginia behind them, was walking at a steady pace towards him. The figure wore a long duster coat and a muffler under a broad hat. At his approach, the sentry sprang into action.
‘Who goes?’ he barked, rifle at the attack and bayonet gleaming.
‘Friend of the South,’ the muffled reply came back.
‘What colour of friend?’
‘Gold, soldier,’ the voice said. ‘Pure gold.’
‘Advance, friend.’ The soldier stood to, his rifle back on his shoulder. Batchelor expected cash to change hands, some practical explanation for the mention of gold. But there was none. No gold, no silver, not even a wad of notes. The sentry stood there, as though the traveller were invisible.
‘Are you there, Mr Batchelor?’ he said. ‘Only, I’m a little old for playing games.’
Slowly, as though the ground might give way beneath him, Batchelor stepped out of the shadows. ‘You surprise me, Major Tice,’ he said. ‘I’ve been playing your games all night.’
‘Yes.’ Tice pulled the muffler down from his face. ‘Sorry about that, but a man in my position can’t be too careful. I had to be sure you were alone.’
‘And what position is that, Major?’ Batchelor asked. ‘On top of Mrs Baker, or floating in that river down there?’
‘My, my,’ Tice chuckled. ‘We have been asking questions, haven’t we?’
‘It goes with the job,’ Batchelor said.
‘I’m sure it does,’ Tice smiled. ‘Walk with me, Mr Batchelor.’ He led the way back from where he had come, slowing to let Batchelor keep an easy pace alongside him. ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘how does it feel to be walking into Dixie?’
‘If you mean the South,’ Batchelor said, ‘I’ve been there.’
‘Knoxville, yeah, I know. Pretty place. But there’s a lot more to the South than one town or one state, Mr Batchelor. I’m from the sovereign state of Alabama, myself.’
‘Congratulations.’
Tice stopped walking, looking back along the bridge. ‘You wouldn’t think, looking at this place right now, just how busy it was back in the day.’
‘Really?’
‘Thousands of Contraband streaming to safety, as they thought, from the plantations. Thousands of Yankees streaming to death, going in the opposite direction. Your friend Captain Grand must have ridden over these planks many a time.’
‘Fascinating,’ Batchelor commented.
‘I guess you’re in no mood for a history lesson.’ Tice shrugged and walked on.
‘Did you kill Lafayette Baker?’ Batchelor hadn’t moved and his voice was loud in the middle of the bridge, with only the wind, the seabirds and Tice for company.
Tice walked back to him. ‘Well, you cut right to the chase, don’t you?’ he said. ‘No, I didn’t kill Baker. But I know a man who might have.’
‘You’ll have to explain that.’
‘First off,’ Tice wagged a finger at the Englishman, ‘I don’t have to explain nothing. Not to you. Not to nobody.’ He dropped the finger and the attitude. ‘There again, I’m tired of running, Mr Batchelor. I’m tired of being a marked man and dodging in and out of the shadows. I’ve got Luther Baker on my back and half President Johnson’s Federal government. I’d like there to be somebody I can turn my back on and not get a bullet in it.’
‘I’m an Englishman, Major Tice,’ Batchelor said. ‘I don’t carry a gun.’
‘Fair enough,’ Tice said. ‘What do you want to know?’
‘First,’ Batchelor said, ‘why is Luther Baker after you?’
‘He’s not.’ Tice was walking on. ‘At least, the only reason he’s not is that he thinks I’m dead.’
‘He killed you?’
Tice laughed. ‘In a manner of speaking,’ he said. ‘Out there,’ he pointed back to the Washington side, where the spars and stacks of the gunboats jutted like an iron forest against the pearl of the impending dawn, ‘that’s the scene of the crime. Murdering bastard tried to blow my head off, but I dove into the river instead.’
‘He missed?’
‘If I was the charitable type, I’d say it was a combination of things. It was dark and he was upset. But the truth of the matter is, he’s a useless shot.’
‘That’s not what Julep says. She says he’s – and I quote – “pretty handy with a gun”.’
Tice laughed. ‘Yeah, well, that’s Julep for you. Loyal as a toast, that girl. All right, I’ll come clean. Luther’s bullet grazed my arm and I figured I wouldn’t get a clear shot myself.’
‘Julep also said that Luther wouldn’t stand a chance against you in the daylight.’
‘Good judge of ability, that girl,’ Tice said. ‘I’ve always maintained that. I just hung around, treading water under the levee until the fuss was over. I saw one of Washington’s finest peering over the side and talking to Julep. I knew she’d steer the law away from us both.’
‘And the body in the river?’ Batchelor asked. ‘The one they fished out weeks later?’
‘Some bum,’ Tice shrugged. ‘You gotta understand, Mr Batchelor, what’s happened over here. Men died in their thousands back in the day – Shiloh, Antietam, Gettysburg. Life’s cheap. I didn’t kill whoever that poor cuss was, but the body became available, so to speak; some shooting in Murder Bay, I understand. He looked nothing like me, but he was white and about my age and build, so I took a chance and threw him in, complete with my best frock coat, I’m chagrined to say. Well, you gotta make a few sacrifices.’
‘So Luther was happy that you were really dead?’
‘Seemed to be,’ Tice nodded. ‘Thought that left the field open for him and Jane.’
‘Open, except for Lafayette.’
‘Of course. Look,’ Tice had stopped again. ‘Contrary to the opinion you’ve probably got of me, I felt pretty bad about that. I’d ridden with the Baker boys and we cleaned up the cesspit that was Washington between us. Didn’t seem right to be sniffing around Laff’s wife. But there it is; these things happen.’
‘They do.’ Batchelor was thinking of Belle Boyd again.
‘’Course, that ain’t as unnatural as Luther. Lafayette was like a brother to that man – Jane was as good as his own sister-in-law, for Christ’s sake. Has to be something in the Bible about that.’
Batchelor was sure of it.
‘As for the other thing – well, it’s all so much water under this here bridge now.’
‘What other thing?’
‘Knoxville,’ Tice said.
‘Knoxville,’ Batchelor echoed.
‘You know I was there?’ Tice checked.
‘There’s a photograph of you, in Mr Schleier’s daguerreotype emporium. You and Nathan Forrest and Lafayette Baker.’
Tice chuckled grimly. ‘Pretty as a picture, ain’t we?’ he said. ‘I didn’t know who Laff Baker was back then. It was the early days of the war and I was biding my time, like a lot of fellas did, seeing which way the wind blew. Baker was calling himself Munson and he was supplying guns to the South.’
‘Except they were useless,’ Batchelor knew the story.
‘Like tits on a bull,’ Tice nodded. ‘No, it was Forrest I was interested in.’
‘Forrest? Why?’
Tice stopped again. They were at the midpoint of the Long Bridge now, the land on both banks just hazy lines of black against the coming dawn. ‘Did you happen to notice, back there, when the sentry challenged me, what I said?’
‘Er …’ Batchelor dredged his memory. It wasn’t long ago, but this night had been strange and timeless; unless he really tried, he could hardly remember his own name. Then he remembered. ‘“Friend of the South”.’
‘What colour of friend?’ Tice was playing the sentry’s role.
‘“Gold”,’ Batchelor answered. ‘“Pure gold”.’
‘Right. And I’m reliably informed that when you visited Tennessee, you spoke with General Forrest?’
‘Not me, exactly. Grand.’
‘All right. Did Forrest say anything about me?’
‘Nothing that we understood,’ Batchelor said. ‘At least, at the time.’
‘What did he say?’
‘Er …’
‘Come on, Mr Batchelor, you’ve impressed me so far. Don’t let me down now.’
‘He said … he said – and according to Grand, it sort of slipped out – that you were a member of the American knights. I didn’t think you Americans had knights, not as in our Orders of Chivalry, anyway.’
‘Hmm,’ Tice nodded. ‘Chance remarks get people hung over here,’ he said. ‘But yes, he’s right. I am a knight. I am a member of the Sacred Order of the Golden Circle, Mr Batchelor. The watchword a few moments ago, to the sentry – pure gold; he’s a member too. We used to have castles all over Maryland.’
‘Castles?’
‘Local branches, I guess you’d call them.’
‘So …’ Batchelor was trying to make sense of it all. ‘You’re a sort of branch of the Ku Klux Klan?’
‘What?’ Tice roared with laughter. ‘That bunch of misfits, dressing up in their momma’s nightclothes? Give me a break, Mr Batchelor.’
‘But, I thought, General Forrest …’
‘Oh, yeah, I know he’s their Grand Panjandrum or whatever they call it, but I knew the man years ago, before they’d started all that nonsense. No, the Golden Circle was set up long before the war. You Limeys had abolished slavery years ago and every day there was some liberal bleeding heart bleating about the treatment of the blacks. Lloyd Garrison, Beecher Stowe – all so much hot air. At least John Brown had convictions – went to his grave to free the blacks. Lincoln, too. No, before the war, the South was under threat. Slavery wasn’t a peculiar institution, Mr Batchelor, it was the natural way of life. The Golden Circle was fixing to do something about that. We wanted to set up a circle of states, all over Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean. There were to be twenty-five of them. That would be like the United States starting over. We reckoned that the Indian territories would probably join us and the North would be outnumbered, forced to rethink their position. It could have worked.’
‘But it didn’t,’ Batchelor felt obliged to point out.
‘Hell, no. That lanky son of a bitch from Illinois got himself elected President and that was it. A house divided against itself – that’s in the Bible too, somewhere.’
‘Mark. Chapter three,’ Batchelor, the ex-Sunday School boy, couldn’t help but add.
‘Whatever. I never had much time for the Bible. After they fired on Fort Sumter, well, that was it. The Golden Circle ended up on the scrapheap. And that,’ he sighed, ‘is where it lies today.’
‘But, if you were with the South,’ Batchelor reasoned, ‘if you were pro-slavery, how on earth did you end up riding with Lafayette Baker?’
Tice had stopped yet again. Now, they were within hailing distance of the southern Potomac shore, the headland of Virginia beginning to twinkle with distant lights as people stirred themselves for another day. ‘Hasn’t it dawned on you yet, Mr Batchelor?’ the major asked. ‘If I’d enlisted with the colours, thrown in my lot with Forrest or Jeb Stuart or Jim Longstreet, what could I have offered? Another rifle among thousands, another poor bastard lying on a battlefield with his guts blown out? No. I realized I could do more good in the North.’
‘You were a spy.’ Batchelor put it into words.
‘I prefer the phrase “espionage agent”,’ Tice said, ‘but, yes. Every step Baker took, I reported to the South. I saw to it that he was fired – the first time, I mean – by Stanton.’
‘And you nearly let John Wilkes Booth go.’
‘I did. I didn’t know the man personally, but I applauded his actions. When Laff Baker was brought back in to head the National Detective Police after Lincoln’s death, I went with him. Figured I could get Booth out of that jam if possible.’
‘But it wasn’t?’
Tice shook his head.
‘I lost a bit of reputation there,’ he said. ‘Growing up in Alabama, I knew swamps like the back of my hand. Twenty miles south of here as the crow flies is Zekiah Swamp, near Bryantown. I could have navigated that in my sleep. Laff was relying on me as his chief of scouts. I pretended I’d loused up to give Booth time to get away. But that didn’t come off and the rest is history.’
‘Baker didn’t have a problem with you before that?’ Batchelor probed. ‘After all, he’d come across you when he was spying in Knoxville.’
‘I guess he figured he had to trust somebody sometime,’ Tice said. ‘And you can trust me, Mr Batchelor, when I tell you that you get awful tired of not having a friend in the world. And now …’
Suddenly, there was a pistol in his hand and it was pointing at Batchelor. For a moment, the Englishman toyed with doing exactly what Tice had done, diving into the river as the bullet went wide. But Tice was a better shot than Luther Baker, and there were no shadowy levees here where a thrashing man could hide.
‘You didn’t answer my question,’ Batchelor blurted out, playing desperately for time.
‘Question? I seem to have been answering your questions all night, Mr Batchelor.’ Tice hefted the gun a little, making himself more comfortable.
‘About Baker. Did you kill Lafayette?’
‘I told you, I didn’t do it.’ Tice cocked the Remington with an accomplished thumb.
Batchelor’s squawk was a little less manly than he’d hoped, but he couldn’t tell how much pressure Tice was putting on the trigger. What he needed was to distract him in some way, make him forget that he had murder on his mind. ‘So, you’re not the Mr Cobb who paid Baker visits in Philadelphia?’
Tice’s eyes narrowed. ‘Which one of them told you that?’ he asked. ‘The Irish bitch or the maid?’
‘It hardly matters now,’ Batchelor said, ‘but, for the record, it was the maid – Mrs Hawks.’
‘Yes, although she’s only mad north-northwest, that one. What did she say?’
‘She said you called sometimes, after dinner. She described you, Grand told me, as “middling” in every respect.’
‘That figures,’ Tice murmured.
‘She heard you say to Baker something like, “Our patience is running short. You haven’t much time.” And, as things turned out, he didn’t, did he?’
‘I won’t deny any of that,’ Tice said. ‘Baker claimed he had some papers that would prove very useful to the Golden Circle. Papers that could hang some people and send others to the pen for a long, long time. But, as you said a minute ago, it hardly matters now.’
‘Perhaps not, but you said a minute ago, you knew who killed Baker.’
‘No, I didn’t,’ Tice corrected him. ‘I said I knew who might have.’
‘I don’t think this is the time for splitting hairs, Major Tice.’ Batchelor was rarely so blunt, but there was something about having a gun levelled right between his eyes which made him more outspoken.
‘No, I guess not,’ he said. ‘Stanton.’
Batchelor could have screamed, except that – even now – staring death in the face, he thought that rather un-British. After all he and Grand had been through, all the people they had talked to, all the risks they had taken, he was back here again. Looking down the barrel of a .44 on the Long Bridge across the Potomac, he had come full circle.
Tice clicked back the hammer and held the gun upright before sliding it away with astonishing speed into his belt. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Nothing would be served by killing you, Mr Batchelor. You and your Yankee friend are no threat to me. Besides, I sort of promised Julep.’
‘Julep?’ Batchelor blinked. He was slowly releasing his clenched fists, letting his heart crawl back down from his mouth.
‘She’s taken quite a shine to you. Quite a looker, huh?’
‘You’re fond of her too, aren’t you, Major?’
‘Yeah,’ Tice smiled. ‘Yeah, I am.’
‘Even though she’s black.’
‘Black?’ Tice frowned. ‘Come on, Mr Batchelor. Julep ain’t black. She’s … well … Julep, I guess.’
He turned to finish his walk on the bridge. Then he stopped and half turned. ‘Sure I can’t interest you in joining me for a little sightseeing in Virginia? It’ll be a walk on the wild side.’
‘Thank you, no,’ Batchelor said. ‘What about you? What keeps you in Washington now the war’s over? You can’t hope to revive the plans of the Golden Circle.’
‘No, I guess not.’ Tice was walking away.
‘Julep, then?’ Batchelor called. ‘Will you go back for Julep?’
Tice turned back. ‘For Julep, no. For Jane Pollack – now, that’d be different. Except she thinks I’m dead.’
‘Who?’ Batchelor couldn’t believe what he’d just heard.
‘Jane P … oh, sorry, Jane Baker. Jane was a Belle of the South, Mr Batchelor, for all she married a Goddamned Yankee. When I first knew her she was Jane Pollack. Her maiden name. Mr Batchelor? Mr Batchelor?’
But James Batchelor couldn’t hear him. He was running with the fleeing Contraband, the ghosts of the past, his feet hammering on the planks. He had places to be, people to see. And a killer to confront.