Cherie Priest - Fiddlehead

“Correct,” he said discreetly. “Near there, at any rate.”

“Within the wall?”

“Just outside it, I should think.”

They kept the conversation chatty and open, lest anyone overhear and think they were whispering about something interesting. “Perhaps we should pay them a visit before we leave town,” she suggested.

He spread a big pat of butter across the nearest biscuit. “That might be fun. In fact, I’m here on a mission from their favorite uncle because I need a word with their porter. I have paperwork they’ll require, and expenses for the road.”

“How kind of their uncle,” she murmured around a sip of coffee, assuming they spoke of Lincoln.

“He’s a kind man indeed.” Henry let his gaze slip around the room, checking to see if anyone might be listening. No one showed any undue interest, but there were still several people within hearing range: two serving girls, another pair of customers, and the old woman who took orders at the counter.

Maria saw what Henry was doing, and came to the same conclusion. It wasn’t safe to speak openly, not quite yet. So they chatted idly about nothing in particular until the room had cleared, leaving only the counter woman, who was engrossed in the daily paper on the other side of the shop.

Finally, Henry leaned in, the gesture charmingly, deliberately calibrated to look like flirtation. “The hospital,” he prompted. “What happened there?”

It was Maria’s rather well-informed opinion that Henry did “flirtatious” very nicely. She leaned forward to meet his intimately styled invitation, and replied in a similar tone. “The captain was most accommodating. She gave me a gift on my way out the door, but someone else wanted it. Badly. A firefight broke out in the surgical ward. I escaped.”

In precisely the same purr he would’ve used to seduce her, he asked, “With an ambulance? I heard that one went missing, and turned up downtown.”

She performed a girlish giggle, letting the ruse run wild. “It was faster than my feet, and I didn’t see any horses handy. I made do.”

“Were you followed?”

“Two men. Neither one worth describing. Lost them on an electric streetcar.”

He set down his fork and reached one hand across the table to take her fingertips and kiss them. “Is there any chance anyone knew you were headed for the trains?”

“I couldn’t say, though I did my best to remain ordinary and unremarkable. And I don’t think anyone saw me buy my ticket or get on board. Speaking of which … how did you know I’d be in Tennessee?”

“I didn’t,” he admitted, releasing her fingers and retrieving his fork. “But based on some … increased media attention, our uncle recommended that I come here and help our incoming visitors with their packing and their papers.”

Maria gathered the gist and nodded. “I see.”

“And I thought you’d turn up here next, considering what I heard about the hospital.” He lowered his voice. “You’d need a way out, and you wouldn’t be ready to come home yet. They’d be expecting that, and watching the northbound trains.”

“Excellent detective work, Mr.… Henry. If you ever tire of the marshals, you should try your luck with the Pinks.”

“Thank you, ma’am, but I’m happy with the badge I wear already.” He winked at her, and the front door opened, admitting three hungry soldiers into the warm little space.

The rest of their breakfast was spent in more idle chatter, and when they were finished Henry proposed they find a more private venue. “Under normal circumstances I’d never suggest such a thing, but I think you ought to join me in my hotel room over at the Saint George,” he told her. She did not think it was her imagination that he said it with blushing cheeks.

She smiled at him, and when he held out his arm at an angle, she took it. She wasn’t so much older that it looked strange—or she didn’t think so, at any rate—and if he thought she’d be embarrassed by the suggestion or even the company, he had another thing coming. He was a polite, intelligent young man, strong and good-looking in an understated, easygoing kind of way, even with the glasses. His nervousness around her might’ve been due to his age—mid-twenties, she would’ve guessed—or her own notoriety, but either way it added to his charm. And anyway, sneaking up to an attractive lad’s hotel room in the middle of the day? Bah. She’d been accused of worse things. This didn’t even break the top ten.

His room was a clean but empty space, much like any inexpensive hotel room around the world. It was spacious and comfortably private, though it overlooked Broad Street, where the traffic was heavy and sometimes wild. Horses balked at motor vehicles and military men barked orders back and forth across the way; big engines moved big machines up and down the too-narrow thoroughfare, clipping the curbs, scraping stones, and frightening the city’s dog population into a frenzy of howled complaints.

“It’s not too … quiet,” Henry apologized. “But it’s tidy, and I can sleep through almost anything. Real close to the train station, too. So there’s that.”

“It’s almost as big as my apartment in Chicago,” she assured him, with only a slight degree of understatement. “And there’s no need to make excuses for the background noise. The more the better, I say. Let it drown out any stray words that might drift through the walls. But, do you mind … could I bother you to turn up the heat? I’m a cold-natured thing, I’m afraid, and the window isn’t keeping enough November outside.”

He went to the radiator and adjusted its controls, sending pressurized, boiling water squealing through the pipes. “That’s another nice thing about this place,” he said, recoiling from the heater’s valve and waving his hand at it. “Not as much smoke as a fireplace. I hear we’ll have electric warmers in every home one of these days, and won’t that be nice? And maybe they won’t be so uncomfortable to set.”

“Thank you, Henry. I appreciate it. I hope your hand isn’t burned…?”

“Just a smidge of pink, ma’am. If that’s the worst I do to myself today, I’ll be in real good shape. Now, at the risk of seeming ungallant, I believe we should sort out our information,” he said stiffly.

She smiled, hoping he understood she was smiling for him, not at him. “At the risk of seeming unladylike, I’ll take the bed. These papers will require some spreading out, and the desk in the corner won’t do the job.”

Henry drew a chair up to the bed and Maria sat on its edge, emptying the satchel of Captain Sally’s notes and organizing them as best she could. Sometimes the dates were fuzzy or imprecise, and the nurse’s grasp of numbers wasn’t too much keener than her grasp of letters. Still, Maria marveled at the tenacious dedication of a near-illiterate woman writing so much, at such depth and length.

“There must be a whole novel’s worth of material here!” Henry exclaimed.

“It’s difficult to read at times, not merely for the content, but for the presentation,” she said gently. And then she walked him through the letters, hitting the high points and marking some of the more interesting bits with a pencil.

It took two hours, and even then, Maria felt like the summing up had been too shallow.

Henry stood over the bed, festooned with its brittle sheets of damning paper, and put his hands on his hips. “We should send a telegram back to the Lincoln house and let everybody know what you found in Richmond … but we couldn’t send off enough taps in a week of Sundays. Not even if we cut it down tighter than an obituary.”

“No, not even then. Here’s what I recommend: We’ll write out the most important parts, digested down from this … this serialized journal. Then we’ll express the important parts up to the Lincolns, and mail the original journals separately. But not to the Lincolns,” she added suddenly.