Fiddlehead

Thirteen

Grant very much wished his wife was there, but he’d sent her away the night before.

At the time it’d been little more than a drunken dismissal, for all he’d insisted otherwise—to her, and to himself. Now he was torn because he wished fervently to have her present, yet he was glad that she was gone. She must be safer in Baltimore with her family. He took comfort from the thought, or tried to, at any rate.

The White House was cold again. The afternoon was growing late. That called for a drink, but he didn’t make one. He wondered how Abe’s telegrams had gone off. Had they been received? Answered? No one sent him any word, or if anyone had, the Secret Service agents must’ve intercepted it.

Or maybe he was becoming paranoid.

He stood in the yellow oval and watched the window behind the desk. The curtains were open, and beyond them a tree shook and scraped its limbs across the glass. A storm had rolled up, all bluster and blow but no ice.

Left unattended, the fire had burned low. The fractured, watery light of the coals did nothing to warm the place.

Julia was gone to her mother’s. He’d sent here there, without even thinking.

Only that wasn’t true, was it? Some instinct must have provoked it. Some leftover warning that muttered deep within his brain … some trigger from his youth on the battlefield, when he knew that a fight was coming even though the skies were calm and the taps were silent, and his fellow soldiers lounged in their tents, wearing their warmest wools and playing cards to temper the relentless boredom.

Ever since his evening with Abe, he’d felt it creeping along his bones.

And now he waited.

Not for long, he didn’t think. No, the wearying tension had ratcheted tighter overnight, and all through the day, as the District churned onward without him. But this time, he’d withdrawn at his own behest, not as part of some gentling ploy by Fowler or another advisor to get him out of the way.

Today he wanted to be out of the way. He wanted a retreat, and needed one. He’d been too close to the situation, even as he’d been so unceremoniously cut out of it. Present, but not accounted for. Muzzled and leashed like an old dog who could watch, but not run.

No, he told himself. Like an old lion.

The carpet pattern beneath his feet called to mind crests, seals, and caves. It was meaningless. Julia would’ve said it was only a design, and he was silly. She would’ve been right, but he saw it all the same, and a Biblical phrase swept through his sober, unhappy mind.

A den of roaring lions, seeking whom they may devour.

They would not devour him.

In his right hand he held a loaded Remington, the sturdy 1858 he’d picked up in the war. In his left he held a second cylinder, all its chambers loaded and capped. He had six more stuffed into his pockets, ready to go.

He stood very still and listened, because yes, it was coming.

Or anyway, someone was coming.

Footsteps in the hall, faster than a servant would run if decorum ruled the day. He clenched the gun, and slipped the last cylinder into his pocket to join the rest. Instinct told him the runner would knock, because the runner was not sneaking up on him. An assassin would move more quietly, if with no less urgency.

No. This was a message. A friendly one, if not a good one.

A series of swift raps upon the office door.

He answered: “It’s open.”

And the door crept inward, letting in a long sliver of yellow light from the gas lamps in the hall. Were they lit already? It wasn’t that dark, was it? Well, the sun would be down in another two hours, and the halls of the White House were dark enough even when the days weren’t dreary.

His visitor was a young woman. She was familiar, but it took him a moment to place her. He finally recalled her as a member of the housekeeping staff, but couldn’t think of her name.

“Mr. President,” she gasped, her breath lost somewhere down on the first floor, on another wing. Had she run the whole way? He thought so, from her rumpled dress and loosened bonnet. “It’s Andrews.”

He was honestly taken aback. Of all the subjects he’d expected to hear breathlessly broached, the old man was not among them.

“Andrews? What of him? He’s gone home to his wife by now. Or maybe not; have you checked the kitchen?”

She swallowed hard, shook her head, and only just then noticed the gun. She mustered a “Sir? It’s not that,” but didn’t ask if everything was all right. She knew otherwise, every bit as well as Grant did.

“Then what is it?” he prompted her.

“Sir, it’s a terrible thing—him and Helen both, sir. Murdered!”

He nearly dropped the gun on the floor. Only years of training prevented it. It was that training, rather than any conscious instructions he could muster, that guided him as he slipped the gun into his right pocket. “I’m sorry, you’ll have to … what do you mean, murdered?”

Grant heard the prickling pinpoints of hysteria in her voice when she replied, “Oh, Mr. President, I mean murdered with guns and knives! In their home. Helen made it out to the street for help, but then collapsed.” She stepped inside the office and stood there before the door—still backlit, and casting a witchy puddle of shadow on the floor.

It wasn’t hysteria that he felt oozing through the surface of his thoughts, but something colder and more numb. Something familiar.

This is what happens when it begins, when the last domino is pushed. When the hammer has dropped. This is the sound when the fuse is lit.

“Andrews,” he said the man’s name, not really believing it. Not choosing to believe it. Why Andrews? What did he have to do with anything? And how could the White House function without him? The man was an institution. “And Helen, too,” he added, only then realizing that the woman’s name was all he knew about her. He’d seen her a handful of times, coming and going from the kitchen or laundry.

It hadn’t always been like that. He hadn’t always been the kind of man who knew nothing about the people who managed his life and home. Once he’d been a soldier, hadn’t he? A good one. A great one. A serving man of a different sort.

When did it get away from him? Had it been bought with this distancing ease? Too many years riding on the shoulders of others?

“Sir? What should we do?” she asked him.

A pitiful question, yet one he couldn’t answer. Send flowers? Console his family? Summon the authorities? A better suggestion, yes. “Have the appropriate authorities been called?”

Fiercely she nodded. “The police, sir. They’re coming to talk to you, I think. Almost unseemly, one of ’em said, that they’d bother interviewing the president about a nigger, but it was Andrews, sir.” The note of pleading nearly broke his heart. “You’ll speak to them, won’t you? You’ll help them find out what happened?”

“Of course I will, and you mustn’t hold any questions or ill will against the police. When a man’s been murdered—any man—one must always investigate. Especially when he has such ties to … to government. To the president.”

He wished for Julia again, and then unwished for her. He congratulated himself instead on sending her away. Then his warm confidence faded as he wondered: was Maryland far enough?

Still fidgeting and fretting, the girl added, “They say another colored man did it, sir.”

He frowned. “I’m sorry, come again?”

“That scientist. I think you know him. Been living over with the Lincolns, I think.”

“Bardsley…? No, I don’t think so. Not for a moment. They didn’t even know one another, and if they did, there would be no reason … no reason at all for Bardsley to…”

But the story was already arranging itself in his head. No, there was no reason for the scientist to kill an old couple in a small house. But there might be an excellent reason for someone else to raise the question—to cast suspicion, and remove credibility.

Grant had seen the editorial. He’d read it himself, and his skin had crawled. He’d felt it then, too, the coming battle. Gideon Bardsley. The walking plague. Project Maynard. The Fiddlehead. All these things, bubbling together and finding their way into print, into the public. Into the light, for scrutiny.

Readers were talking. Editors were talking. Last he’d heard from Abe, the warning letter was about to run in New York. That’d drum up some real interest, wouldn’t it? A thousand paperboys crying out, screaming the truth on the busiest streets in the world.

Unless.

Unless the truth was coming from a known murderer. Sometimes the answers are so simple.

“And sir? A message. I’m sorry, I almost forgot it.” She came forward, holding a scrap of folded paper in trembling hands. “A lady gave it to me, and said I should give it to you. She said it was important, but I was so … I heard about Andrews, sir, that’s all. I only just now remembered.”

“It’s fine,” he lied. He took it from her hands and read.

Even the smallest actions of great men come with tremendous consequences. Now hold still and be careful not to touch anything else. I can take more from you than your pawns. Baltimore isn’t so far off.

“You can’t threaten me,” he said to the note, or to the woman who must have written it.

The serving girl gave him a puzzled look. “Sir?”

“Not you, dear,” he replied without taking his eyes off the page. “Not you. But I want you to do something for me. I want you to tell the agent outside that I’m retiring for the night. Tell him to stay where he is, and his relief should remain downstairs, too, for I’m not feeling well. Then build me a stack of pillows in my bed, and don’t say a word when I leave through the kitchen.”