The Sixth Conspirator Page 7

  Early on the final morning, Sharpe assembled everyone in the half-empty hotel lobby and handed out their last assignments.

  Keach had one more banker to interview. Maggie Lawton was to arrange their railroad travel next day to Portland, Maine, where a transatlantic steamer would set out on February 24 for Liverpool. And after breakfast, Oakes and Sharpe were to take a hired carriage to the Convent of the Sainted Mother some dozen miles west of Montreal.

  “That would be about Sarah Slater,” Maggie Lawton said.

  The hotel cat had inevitably found Sharpe as soon as they had arrived. Now it scampered across the carpet and wrapped itself like a vine around his trouser leg. The former chief of U.S. Grant’s much-feared Bureau of Military Information bent down and scooped it up, then cradled it in his arms, belly side up, and scratched. “Sarah Slater,” he agreed.

  “Why not send her?” Keach jerked his head in Maggie’s direction. “If I know nuns they might not even speak to a man.”

  “Quint speaks good French.”

  “She speaks French.” Keach put on his interrogator’s frowning face. “I’ve heard her.”

  “I thought I had mentioned,” Sharpe said. He put down the cat and peered out the lobby window. It was not yet seven in the morning, but the dark streets were already crowded with shadowy commercial wagons and, under the street lamps, puffing men stacking crates. “I thought I had mentioned,” he said casually, “Quint is the only person we have who knows what Sarah Slater looks like. We have photographs for everyone else, but not her. You remember Stanton’s notes; she always wore a black veil in the North. But by good luck Quint actually grew up in the same town in Connecticut. He saw her a number of times before the war.”

  “My, my,” Maggie said. “What other tidbit did you just happen to forget to mention, General Secret, sir?”

  Sharpe made his face blank as a plate.

  “Guilford, Connecticut,” Keach said. “That’s where he grew up.” Keach had long made it a point to know all he could about Oakes’s background.

  Maggie Lawton flipped through her dog-eared folder of papers. “She was only a low-level courier, between Richmond and here. I never quite saw why she was on the list.”

  “She made half a dozen trips with Booth to New York,” Sharpe said. “She stayed at Missus Surratt’s boarding house once. We know she came here after Richmond and she stayed at the convent for one summer. After that, Stanton’s people lost track. I thought the Sisters at the convent might know something.”

  “She traveled with Booth,” Maggie Lawton said.

  “In the same room probably.” Keach snorted.

  “She speaks fluent French,” Sharpe said, as if that settled any question about Sarah Slater’s morals.

  Oakes had opened his own folder and was studiously decoding Sharpe’s miniscule handwriting. He didn’t look up.

  “She also traveled with a big steamer trunk and another smaller one.” Maggie Lawton snapped the folder shut. “I wonder why so much baggage for somebody running away?”

  “I had the same question,” Keach said.

  “Seward thought she might have carried off some of Booth’s letters, records,” Sharpe said briskly. “Now we need to move on. They’re laying the breakfast out.”

  Maggie studied Oakes with her sharp, disconcertingly intelligent eyes. “Did you know her well?”

  The ability to lie in a forthright and honest manner was the hallmark of a good lawyer, Stanton had said. Oakes shook his head with a rueful expression.

  “Talkative Captain Oakes,” she said, and after a moment added, “What did she look like?”

  But Oakes pretended not to hear and turned away toward the dining room, where white-coated waiters had just flung open the folding doors.

  PART TWO

  “ON MY FIRST SAIL ACROSS THE ATLANTIC,” Chester said, “I saved the whole ship.”

  Thomas Morris Chester was the blackest man Oakes had ever seen, and one of the tallest. Maggie Lawton was grinning up at him like a child about to open a Christmas present. “How did you do that?”

  “I shot the cook!” Chester roared, and he laughed and patted a startled Liverpudlian on the shoulder as they walked past. Chester looked back at the Englishman and roared again, “I shot the cook!”

  At this point they were just crossing Standish Street, in the nearly geographic center of Liverpool. It had taken sixteen blustery days to cross the Atlantic—four more than usual—and another two days for Maggie Lawton and Keach, first-time European travelers, to adjust to the hundreds of little differences in architecture, food, and clothes that made this a foreign city. Sharpe had been patient and then, of course, impatient.

  “Now,” Chester announced, “take that big white building.” As they reached the opposite curb, he pointed to the great colonnaded bulk of St. George’s Concert and Courthouse, which was far and away the most imposing building in Liverpool, visible even from their ship as they had steamed up the Merseyside estuary.

  “Now,” Chester repeated, “you could pick up a rock and throw it from that old rich white man’s temple and hit the most miserable slums in Europe—worse than anything in Africa—and that’s where I’m going to take you. Hang on to your money!”

  He wheeled on the sidewalk, slipped Maggie’s arm inside his, and gave another of his great booming laughs.

  Oakes trailed a few feet behind them, shivering in the wind and marveling at the ease with which Chester moved through the crowded streets, the crowded white streets, where pale English faces turned and swayed like blanched sunflowers toward him as he passed. It had been that way all day. He had met them at their hotel at ten a.m., and while Sharpe and Keach went off on their rounds of visits to banks and consuls, Thomas Chester Morris had taken them in hand and more or less swept them away for a personal whirlwind tour of the city. Theme: John Surratt on the run.

  They had just left the oratoire of the Church of the Holy Cross, where two years earlier yet another Catholic priest, one Charles Jolivet, had taken Surratt in and given him shelter, fully aware that Surratt was wanted worldwide for the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. But in heavily Catholic, violently pro-Southern Liverpool, that was almost a recommendation. From the start of the war, Liverpool, as the main English port of entrance for all Southern cotton, had lent its moral support to the Confederacy, and often more than just its moral support. A “charity” auction in St. George’s Hall raised a hundred thousand dollars for Jeff Davis’s armies. At least three new armored warships for the South had been built right there on the Mersey docks—illegal under British neutrality laws, but an open secret in Liverpool—and launched against the Union. Before the trip, Oakes understood abstractly that Liverpool depended for its jobs and shipping on “King Cotton,” but he had been completely unprepared for the snarling insults, the turned backs, the muttered curses that greeted all four of them when they started to ask their questions.

  “Now when,” Maggie Lawton said almost girlishly, “were you in Africa?”

  Another great rippling laugh, a flash of white teeth in a black, cold-puckered face. “Bless your innocence, child. I lived five years in Liberia. I was born in Philadelphia, but that was no place for”—he drew out the word to mock it—“a Nee-gro. I’ve been to Africa, France, Germany—now I live in England. If you’re black enough you can be anywhere in the world, because you’re invisible, like a ghost.”

  Oakes thought that was the most untruthful thing he had heard yet. It was impossible to imagine the six-foot five-inch tall, enormously forceful Chester invisible. Energy somehow baked off of him. It was sometimes as if, Sharpe had said, waxing Shakespearean, Falstaff had somehow metamorphosed into Othello.

  “I even saw our slowpoke little puppy Captain Oakes back there,” Chester said over his shoulder, “in Richmond, when Lincoln came strolling in.”

  They stood about two hundred yards north of St. Geor
ge’s Hall now, and just as Chester had said, the handsome red brick offices and shops had disappeared. They were now entering a kind of urban wilderness of tiny three-story wooden hovels and amazingly narrow, arthritically twisted alleys.

  “You saw me?”

  “I came back from Liberia in late 1863, right after Gettysburg, and the editor of the Philadelphia Courier—a good abolitionist—hired me on as a newspaper reporter. I can read and write like a white man—dat I’se can. I went with Grant’s headquarters right through Virginia in ’64. When Jeff Davis took his French leave of that fine city, I wrote the story for my paper and for the New-York Times. Captain Oakes has a distinctive look, a handsome look.”

  “He was younger then,” Maggie Lawton said sardonically.

  “And I saw him about fifty yards behind the President, worried to death and running back and forth with his pistol out.”

  Oakes nodded. He barely noticed that Chester had brought them through one of the stinking alleys and up to what must have been a tavern, though there was no sign above the door and the windows were too filthy to see through. He had indeed walked behind the President that day in Richmond—it was the same scene Sharpe had reminded him of back in Washington City. He was following with a squad of Marines, feverishly watching the shattered buildings and side streets for stalkers, gunmen, assassins. Up ahead Lincoln, wearing his usual black suit and stovepipe hat, his back to Oakes, was walking hand in hand with his obnoxious little son Tad. Tall and short shadows going down a bombarded street toward a sunset, toward the end of the war. If he had been a photographer, if he had had a camera, it would have been the image of a lifetime. Once or twice he had tried to write about it.

  “Now this,” Chester said, “is what I wanted you to see.”

  Two boys in rags, “street Arabs” as they were called in Liverpool, stared up at him. Chester patted them absently on the head, ducked his own head and led them into the tavern.

  “Dear Savior and figs,” Maggie Lawton murmured. “The Astor Hotel this is not.”

  The tavern with no sign was in fact “The Spotted Horse.” Oakes read the name on a long white plank hanging behind the bar, which consisted of two long greasy planks supported by wooden barrels. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he could see a crude drawing of a horse on the sign, two rickety tiers of glasses and brown bottles, and the single glowering bloodshot eye of the barkeep leaning toward them with both knotted fists on the bar.

  They had been in Liverpool for three days now, but even though the language was in theory English, Oakes understood very little of the rapid, high-pitched local dialect, “Scouse,” which Maggie Lawton said sounded like somebody’s nasal plumbing in the morning.

  “He says,” Chester translated, “get the hell out.” A few streaks of pale sunlight found their way through the front windows. The black man grinned and spun a gold sovereign on the plank, in a little circle of light. “I gentled his exact words a little, for the lady.” Two ancient wraiths in sailor’s gear and a fine alcoholic stupor watched the coin spin.

  “We’re not going to drink anything here,” Oakes said and rubbed his nose against the caustic mixed smell of urine and stale beer and unwashed bodies.

  Behind Chester, the barkeep had stiffened. He watched the coin spin, too, but made no move to reach for a bottle.

  “Cholera,” Chester nodded, “typhus. Runs through these sorry warrens three or four times a year. Kills half the people off, but the next wave pours in from Ireland or wherever and you don’t even know it happened. I wouldn’t drink anything here either. But I wanted you to see what kind of man old Thomas Dudley is.”

  Maggie Lawton was studying the claustrophobic little room with what Oakes recognized as one of Pinkerton’s search routines, High to Low in quadrants, Left to Right, repeat. “You mean Dudley the consul?”

  In a far corner two knobby shadows sat slumped over a table, an emaciated hound sprawled on what seemed to be a dirt floor. A black curtain slid aside and a woman stepped out, rubbing her hands on a cloth.

  “Thomas Haines Dudley, I do mean him.” One of the old sailors tugged at Chester’s elbow. “Give them both a drink,” Chester told the barkeep, who still didn’t move. “One brave man, one brave man.”

  “He came here?”

  “That little New Jersey Quaker used to slip out of his nice paneled office on Water Street and come in these awful back streets and wander around from bar to bar talking to sailors. He was looking for people to sign up, people that would ship out with the rebels and spy for him. So he had to go where the sailors were. Not many people would.”

  Oakes nodded, less surprised than he might have been. Thomas Dudley had been the American consul in Liverpool throughout the war—still was—and according to Sharpe he had recruited more spies, hired more detectives, broken up more Confederate schemes than anybody else in Europe. He was a wan, sickly-looking man in his fifties, still carrying horrible scars on one side of his face from a steamship explosion before the war, and by any measure he should have been wasting away in some rural sanitarium.

  But he was still at his desk today, still sending long weekly reports to Seward about Liverpool shipping. When he had welcomed them to his office three days ago, he had coughed until they thought his lungs would burst. Yet, like many Quakers that Oakes had known, Dudley possessed an iron core, impressive and determined and unstoppable. He had instantly reminded Oakes of U. S. Grant.

  “I was here for a little while,” Chester said. He turned slowly and looked hard at the barkeep. After a long moment, the barkeep slid a pair of glasses in front of the sailors.

  “I passed through on one my trips.” Chester turned back to them. “This town was one big nasty nest of Southerners, you know, all of them trying to persuade the British to sell them a ship or build them a ship or lend them a ship, and they kept throwing bricks through Dudley’s windows and writing him threatening notes. Somebody took a shot at him. I was here when three hired rebels of the genteel class broke into his office and grabbed the housekeeper, and little Dudley drove them back down the steps with an axe handle.” He boomed out a laugh and the sprawling dog sat up and barked. “My kind of Quaker!”

  “He was an abolitionist,” Maggie Lawton said.

  “He did everything a white man could do to help the black man,” Chester said. “I just wanted you to see. If somebody in Liverpool, besides that god-forsaken priest, helped Surratt get away, Dudley can find him. He knows this city like a hawk.”

  “There are people on our list,” Oakes said, “who had nothing to do with Surratt.”

  “I saw your list.”

  “Sharpe is talking to bankers, ship owners, sympathizers who might have financed Booth.”

  “Dudley is some kind of tenacious beast,” Chester said. “I wouldn’t want him after me.” He slapped his big palm down with a bang and left the coin on the bar. Then he hitched his shoulders and started toward the door. “But General Sharpe,” he said, “that man scares me.”

  “The mildest-mannered little man,” Maggie said, “that ever cut a throat.”

  The Liverpool docks stretched more than five miles along the tidal estuary of the Mersey River. The city itself lay almost entirely on the eastern side of the river, but the crowded wet docks lined both sides of it, north and south, until the river curved out of sight and disappeared into the green, always-cloudy distance. There was a double-track railroad line from the southern end of the docks to London. Around them, sprung up like weeds, crowded innumerable small export houses, cordwainers’ shops, carpenters’ shops, sail makers, coal merchants, beer shops, sailors’ flops—a frenetic Babel of nations swarmed up and down its muddy, foul-smelling wharves. As for recreation, the disapproving Dudley had told them that there were more than a hundred brothels along the docks alone.

  It was four-fifteen in the afternoon of the following day, a cold, bright blue English afternoon, and the sailors were
milling about the docked ships and clambering up the riggings, while the ladies of the brothels were lounging in their doorways or, in one or two instances, in the front windows of their places of business.

  Sharpe paid no attention to any of it. He emerged from Dudley’s consulate office on Water Street and snapped his watch shut. Then he strode purposefully past the Prince’s pier-head ferry landing, made an abrupt turn east on, as far as Oakes could tell, a completely anonymous street and abruptly right again down an alley called, rather grandly, Rumford Place. He stopped in front of a tidy two-story office building, constructed of the ubiquitous red Liverpool brick, and pushed open the ground-floor door.

  Gordon Hulse’s secretary was expecting them. He ushered them up the stairs to Hulse’s office, which had a certain nautical bareness and tidiness, and behind a fine polished oak desk, Gordon Hulse himself, rising to extend a hand.

  Preliminaries out of way, cigars and port offered and refused, Hulse leaned back in his chair and smiled like an alligator.

  “So I understand from your letter that you—and your associate here—” He looked inquiringly at Oakes, who said nothing. “You’re interested in having Fraser, Trenholm build a merchant steamer, something, you said, over four hundred tons.”

  “I haven’t the least interest in buying a ship, Mister Hulse.” Sharpe slid over the desk one of his official letters of introduction from Seward. “I want to ask you about John Surratt and George Trenholm.”

  The crocodilian smiled vanished. Hulse picked up the letter between thumb and forefinger, as if it were on fire. While he read, Sharpe straightened the model ship on the corner of Hulse’s desk.