Fiddlehead

Seven

“What do you mean, they won’t let me on the floor?” Gideon came very close to shouting. Only the near proximity of Abraham Lincoln’s face prevented him, and even so, this measure of restraint took a great deal of self-control.

“Not at this time,” he replied carefully. “Sessions are closed this week, and they aren’t admitting any new testimony until Wednesday. But Wednesday,” he emphasized, “you’re first on the list. Eight o’clock in the morning, you can say whatever you like. It’s a good thing, I think. This way, we have time to plan. Time to decide and prepare.”

Gideon crossed his arms and leaned up against the cold, hard wall of the Capitol building.

For twenty-four hours he’d been ready to storm Congress with facts, figures, and numbers. He was ready to present proof of what had befallen him, his machine, and his family; he was prepared to offer evidence about the coming plague that would end the nation more surely than the war could ever do. He’d swallowed all the outrage he could swallow, and he needed to unload it—and he’d been counting on doing so here and now.

“I don’t want more time to plan. I already know what to say.”

“Yes, but I think you and I can work together, with regards to how you might say it. Gideon,” Lincoln said more gently. “You have a mind without equal, but a tongue that costs you listeners. To be honest, I’m relieved that you won’t go up on the podium today.”

“Sir, I can’t agree. The sooner we get the message out, the sooner the world will know, and…” He moved away from the wall now, leaning over the man in the mechanized chair. Not for menace, but for emphasis. “Nothing else will help us. If we make the information public, we take away the power of those who wish to conceal it.”

“You and I agree on the fundamental principles; we only disagree in the execution. We won’t get a second chance to introduce the world to the goings-on that your machine has brought to light. The presentation is almost as important as the message itself, and so is the presenter; if we alienate those we wish to sway, we will accomplish little, or nothing.”

“Mr. Lincoln, if the facts aren’t enough to sway them, then we’re worse than doomed—we’re surrounded by fools who don’t want to be saved.” He jammed his hands into his pockets, turned around, and walked away, trusting that Lincoln would know better than to call him back.

Gideon left the premises to the tune of Lincoln’s chair puttering in the opposite direction, down a different marbled corridor, rolling deeper into the bowels of a building Gideon viewed with deep-seated loathing. This wasn’t a place to be heard. It was a place for men of power to meet and conspire.

His long, old-fashioned coat dusted the back of his thighs as he barreled outside, into the blinding light that seared the city every time it snowed.

A thin crust of powder and ice coated every building, tree, and walkway with a sharp, chilly sheen. Not much had fallen, but everything that fell froze, and now the world was slick as well as frigid. Gideon didn’t mind. If it was going to be this cold, the city might as well have something pretty to show for it.

Out on the street, horses stamped and shot clouds of steam from their nostrils. Women drew their coats tighter and walked more quickly, prancing from step to step in fancy shoes; and the old men at the newsstands clapped their hands together, teeth biting hard on hand-rolled cigarettes and the stems of pipes.

Gideon adjusted his scarf and worked his hands open and closed, open and closed. His fingerless gloves were warm knitted wool, made for him by Polly as a Christmas present the year before. The gesture had touched him more than he’d admitted, and he made a point to wear them not only because he liked them, but because he wanted her to know that they were appreciated.

He buttoned his coat up to his neck and drew the scarf up over his face. It wasn’t quite cold enough to warrant such measures, at least so far as the locals were concerned. But he wasn’t a local, not in any original sense, and though he appreciated the freeze for its change of pace, he wasn’t so accustomed to the weather as someone who’d lived with it for a lifetime.

Much as he hated to consider it, and his innate impatience bristled at the prospect … he suspected that Lincoln was right.

He found it virtually impossible to pretend to the niceties that served as social lubricant for the masses. He did not like all the runaround and flowery difficulty that accompanied even the simplest transactions. Why couldn’t everyone just say what they meant? Why did they need to couch everything so cautiously? The truth should always be enough, regardless of its delivery.

He stamped his feet while he walked, as the chill worked its way through the soles of his shoes. His socks were thick and warm, but they were damp with mud and melted ice, and now he carried the slush of the streets along for the ride.

He considered catching a cab, but to where? Back to the Lincolns’ home, where he lurked in unhappy hiding? How could he rest under the ostensible guard of Nelson Wellers, a man who looked too fragile to wind a watch? He needed to stretch his legs. He needed to stretch his brain.

Abraham Lincoln was not wrong. But at the moment, he wasn’t interested in the president’s help. It wasn’t that he didn’t value the assistance and patronage; far from it. But there was some gap, some disconnect between them that occasionally could not be traversed. It might’ve been as simple as money, except that Lincoln had grown up poor as well … though not enslaved. It could’ve been as complicated as power, but were those two things different? Money and power? Gideon thought so, but he would have been the first to admit that the line between the two was thinner than D.C.’s icy air, and the overlap between them could not be overstated.

In simple fact, they did not always understand each other. And while Lincoln was a great speaker, a great writer, a great orator, even … he wasn’t the man whose audience Gideon craved right then.

And just like that, he knew where he wanted to go.

He hailed a cab after all, climbed inside, and gave directions to a townhome on the other side of the Capitol.

On the way, he stared out the window and watched the city churn, slipping across the ice and pushing through the weather to run the daily errands that would only become more difficult as winter established itself in earnest. He was glad that it wasn’t any worse, not yet. Not while he needed to come and go, and while the carriages pulled by horses, or driven by diesel engines, had to chain up their wheels and trudge through the streets like everyone else.

The carriage took him all the way over the Anacostia River, through some wooded, then swampy acreage, and up to a house called Cedar Hill. It left him at a curb that had been swept clean of ice and snow. Up a spate of stacked stone stairs he climbed, stopping at a door painted a tasteful shade of red. He gave the brass knocker a couple of good gongs and shifted his weight from foot to foot while he waited for an answer.

It arrived momentarily, when the door was opened by a teenage colored girl in the plain domestic outfit of a maid. “Can I help you?” she asked.

She was new. “I’m here to see Mr. Douglass.”

“Do you have an appointment?”

“Tell him Dr. Bardsley is here to see him, and if he leaves me standing on the stoop for too much longer, I’m likely to be shot.”

The girl’s eyes widened in alarm. “Shot?”

“Stabbed. Poisoned. The possibilities are endless. This having been established, I need a word with your employer.”

But she was stubborn, and perhaps not completely stupid. “I’m sorry if that’s true, about someone wanting to shoot you, but you’ll have to wait here. I’ll try to ask quickly. I’d rather nobody shot you on the stoop,” she confessed, and she closed the door.

It’d been an overstatement on Gideon’s part, or so he’d assumed when he said it. But now, in the silence between asking admission and receiving it, he second-guessed himself. They’d come for him at the Jefferson building, hadn’t they? Why wouldn’t they follow him, hunt him to someplace less conspicuous than the Capitol, or the home of a beloved former president?

He eyed the passing pedestrians, wondering who was safe, and who might be watching him … closing in on him. It wasn’t like him to be paranoid, but then again, it wasn’t like him to have murderers on his trail. Not specialized murderers, anyway. Bloodhounds were a generic lot entirely, and he could scarcely bring himself to count them.

In another half-minute, the door opened again. The girl said, “You can come inside. Mr. Douglass will be with you shortly. Let me take your coat, and—”

“No,” he said. “I’ll keep the coat.”

“As you like.” She nodded. “But come this way, and I’ll make you a cup of tea.”

“I’d rather have coffee.”

“I’ll … I’ll see what I can find.”

The parlor was a warm, intelligent place, lined with shelves covered in books, most of which were well loved and well read. A fire burned in the hearth, and two pairs of shoes were drying before it, propped up with their soles facing the flames. Gideon pulled up a chair and aimed himself toward the heat.

From the columned entryway to the home’s main wing, a voice asked, “So what’s this about you getting shot, or stabbed, or poisoned?”

Gideon rose from the chair. “Anything’s possible.”

“But is it likely?” asked Frederick Douglass, a handsome, graying negro in his early sixties. His shirtsleeves were rolled up, and his waistcoat held a small notebook with a pencil strapped against it. He wore a nice pair of house slippers, and a set of reading spectacles pushed up over his forehead.

The men shook hands, and retreated to the warmest seats in the room. Gideon again cocked his feet toward the fire and finally answered, “It’s hard to say. They started with guns and dynamite, and neither one worked out for them. I can only assume they’ll move on to something more subtle next. Knives or potions.”

“They could always go the opposite way, and reach for larger guns.”

“Maybe,” Gideon agreed. “But I suspect that I’ve been targeted by someone more cautious and cunning. Brute force isn’t her style, unless she’s playing political games.”

“And that’s not what you’re caught up in? A political game?”

Now that someone else said it aloud, it was silly to insist otherwise. “All right, then it’s a political game. There’s always the chance that I’m wrong, so let’s call it a hunch and hope for the best.”

Douglass said, “I’d like to think that the ‘best’ would imply that you were destined for a long, happy life, with no interference from dynamite or politics. What’s going on, Gideon? What can I do for you? It’s been … oh, six months since I saw you last. Should I assume you’ve had your nose buried in that Fiddlehead project all this time?”

“Yes. And the Fiddlehead is why they want me dead.”

“On that ominous note…” Douglass raised a finger to indicate that the maid had returned with coffee for Gideon, and tea for her employer. He told her to leave the tray behind, so that they could serve themselves at their leisure. When she was gone he selected two cubes of sugar, and took up the question he’d left dangling before her arrival. “Now, why don’t you tell me who ‘they’ are. The mysterious ‘they,’ who you’ve used a feminine pronoun to describe—so I am terribly curious, if you don’t mind me saying so.”

Over the next half hour, Gideon told him everything, starting with Abraham Lincoln and the Confederate spy Belle Boyd working for the Pinkertons, and moving right along to the Fiddlehead’s conclusions, Katharine Haymes, and the tenuous connection between her company’s war crimes and the walking plague. It felt good to lay it out on the table, even if the table wasn’t his own, and didn’t belong to his usual benefactor. If anything, being forced to tell it all from start to finish, to someone who hadn’t heard it yet and wasn’t familiar with all the details, gave his brain room to sort through the particulars and see the connections better himself.

When he’d exhausted the subject from several angles, he held his still-full, now-cooled cup of coffee untouched in his right hand as he waited for a response.

“I must say,” Douglass began slowly, “it sounds like a very fine mess.”

“It’s not the first time people have wanted to kill me,” Gideon noted. “I refuse to be cowed.”

But Douglass was less firm on the matter. “Perhaps you should be cowed by it, a little if not a lot. And I’m not perfectly confident that they’d prefer you dead. It’d be smarter to discredit you. If I were you, I’d be more worried about that.”

Taken aback, Gideon set his coffee down too hard. It rattled, and all the small spoons quivered on the silver tray. “You think I should back down? Hide? Run back to Lincoln with my tail between my legs, until he gives me permission to speak?”

“No one can make that decision for you, but there’s good reason to consider a more cautious stance than the one you’re taking right now. When you left Tennessee, you risked no one but yourself and your family. If everything you’ve said about your machine and its calculations is true, then you’re gambling much more these days when you put yourself at risk. Upon your message could rest the fate of two nations, millions of people—including yourself and your family, a fact I wish to underscore. Let it not be said that I fruitlessly urged you on a path toward altruism.”

“I give the world the fruits of my labor. That’s worth something, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but you don’t do so from a sense of duty. You do it because you prefer an audience, and because the more people respect your results, the more grant money you acquire in order to produce more results. You will change the world, Gideon Bardsley. Whether you give a damn about it or not.”

“I’m trying to save it. They won’t let me save it.”

“They, they, they. Another ‘they’ for you to blame.” Douglass shook his head. “You’re so single-minded at times. Think broader. Think in another direction. That’s your forte, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but I don’t know what I’m thinking toward, not anymore. And what does it matter right now? No one will deign to hear me until Wednesday.”

“Deign to hear you, yes—you say that like it’s the easiest thing on earth to waltz into Congress and make people listen. Lincoln pulled strings and called favors to put you on that podium next week, so it’s a pity you begrudge him the delay. He’s working for you, not against you. But since he can’t help you the way you want, right this moment,” Douglass continued, “you beat your head against the wall because you think your only path is blocked. But it isn’t. Lincoln’s right about taking time to craft your message, but he’s wrong that you’ll have to wait until Wednesday to have it heard.”

Gideon’s unhappy fugue flickered, but he did not straighten up from his position in the chair. “How so?”

Frederick Douglass sighed. “Son, Congress isn’t the only stage in the nation. It’s not even the largest, not by a far cry. You don’t have to start there, and you don’t have to stop there, either. You need the audience, as much as you want it. You need to shine a brilliant light into the shadows, and teach people that things are being hidden. The governors are buying things and paying for them with blood, without the knowledge—if not yet against the will—of the governed.”

“Ah.” He understood. “You think I should go to the papers.”

“Not just ours, but up and down the coast—to Baltimore and Philadelphia, Chicago, New York, and Boston. For that matter…” he pulled out his notebook and began jotting things down. “If you have that Southern woman in your camp—infernal Cleopatra though she may be—she might be useful. Once we’ve written up your findings and made your case in a straightforward, compelling fashion, she might be able to place the editorial in the Richmond papers, or Atlanta. You never know, she might have contacts in Houston. The Texians are a tricky lot, but they don’t like being exterminated any more than anyone else. You might find a more willing audience there than you’d expect.”

It was a lot to consider, but Gideon considered it. “You’re right. I should bring the message to the people who would be most affected by it. I thought I should appeal to the authorities, but the authorities are very likely causing the problems in the first place.”

Douglass smiled like a proud tutor whose student has finally seen the light.

“Which is why you can’t ignore them altogether. If you want to be heard, you can make yourself heard in the halls of government, it’s true—and you’ll have to take your case there eventually. But that case will be all the stronger when the masses stand behind it. Change happens two ways: from top to bottom, and the reverse. If one avenue is cut off, you must try the other.”