“Please, dear Lord. It’s not true. Don’t let it be true.”
Will’s last letter from Camp Sumter is kept with his others safe inside the pages of my scrapbook. So many times I’d knelt before the hearth or grate, intending to destroy it. To torch its physical reminder. Turn it to ash. At the last minute, I never could. It was Will’s final clutch of contact with me before I’d lost him altogether. Or so I’d thought.
Steeling myself, I unfold it. Then I smooth out Quinn’s note to Uncle Henry and place it next to Will’s prison confession.
The blocks of paragraph, the cutting strokes of his uppercase letters, the back slant of his lower loops. My finger traces these same words as my lips repeat them, hearing their fierce braggadocio. I’d never found Will’s identity in that final letter. His words had never imprinted as the young man I could claim as my own. So I clung to the assertion that he’d changed from the war. How could he not have been changed?
I’d read that letter with my own pain surging through me. I’d read that confession with hardly a thought to the writer. For it hadn’t struck me, not once, that it wasn’t the same man at all.
Right-handed, Quinn’s letters had been elegant as a woman’s. In readapting to his left hand, his style has taken on some of his brother’s traits. The narrow loops, that blown-back slant. Some of Will, but much of Quinn remains on the page.
With shaking hands, I tuck both letters into my skirt pocket and hurry from my bedroom. Wheeling around the staircase and gripping the banister for balance, I see Madame in her cloak at the mirror, making fastidious adjustments to her hat as she prepares to leave.
“Madame,” I whisper. But new doubts strangle my breath.
Here it is, laid out in front of me. The sense of what I ought to have seen all along. And yet, staring into the horror of the moment, I’m numb. I need to force myself to action, but I am paralyzed by what that means for me.
A monster. He is a monster.
A cry escapes my lips. Startled, Madame looks up and catches my eye in the mirror’s reflection. “Why, Mademoiselle Jennie, what is it? What has happened?”
I want to hide, but instead I run, hurtling down the stairs to grasp hold of the dressmaker’s wrists, my eyes beseeching her. “Take me away from here, Madame. Please, I must go at once!”
27.
In the mirror, the right hand becomes the left. In everything I saw, I now find its reflection. A young man looks into the mirror and another looks through. In replacing one brother with the other, the lock of the mystery comes unclasped. Now I smooth out the chain of the narrative, link by link.
A spy is foremost a code breaker.
Two brothers went to war. The older was a natural soldier, an optimist, and an athlete. Adored by everyone, invincible in his confidence. The younger brother was reserved, an acid wit with a taste for gambling and fine clothes. He stood in disdain of the elder’s good and trusting nature while secretly craving all that his big brother had. Sometimes to the point where he pretended he had those things, too.
Away from home the younger brother befriended a soldier, another rogue like himself, who became a happy substitute when his blood brother loomed too disapproving or expected too much. Together, Quinn Pritchett and Nate Dearborn played cards, rolled dice, drank whiskey, and invented stories of their sweethearts back home Franny Paddle and Jennie Lovell. The fact that Franny didn’t exist, or that I was engaged to Will, didn’t matter to these brothers-in-arms. The battlefield was not reality.
The friends honed their talent for gambling and then, inured by the monstrous horrors of the Wilderness, for grave robbing what use has a dead man for a watch or a ring or a pair of thick boots… Thieving from corpses of fallen soldiers meant a wealth of treasures to barter, and others must have known of their cache. Rounded up with their company and forced into Camp Sumter, they would be naturally attracted to a gang of thieves, and the thieves to them. Charles Curtis, the leader of such a gang, knew how to put these young men’s talents to good use for a time. We picked the adventure knowing there’d be no end but a bloody one…This was my true self.
I can’t complete the entire shape of this chain. It is not laid out flat in front of my eyes. What was Will’s role in all this? Why did he end up a thief and Raider? What specific crime had he committed that he was delivered to the gallows at Camp Sumter? Why couldn’t he have escaped with Quinn?
Madame had asked nothing of me when I’d asked her to take me away and given her Geist’s address. I suppose the fear in my eyes had been enough. She’d simply tossed my cloak over my shoulders and hurried me out the front door to her coach. We hadn’t spoken a word on the trip into Boston, though I’m sure her questions burned in her head.
My own mind is surprisingly lucid. I think of Viviette’s baleful gaze on me all over again. I’d been mistaken. Viviette hadn’t called me the demon; she had warned me of the demon. And Quinn’s second visit had confirmed her suspicions.
“I’ll wait for you.” Madame finally breaks her silence as the carriage turns down the modest rectilinear block to stop in front of Geist’s townhouse.
“No need. Mr. Geist will bring me home in his carriage,” I dissuade her. “Truly, I’ll be fine.”
Madame looks doubtful, but my feet are brisk as I disembark. I wave her driver on. “Thank you, Madame.”
Through the carriage window she watches me, but doesn’t protest as the driver snaps the reins. Once she is departed and I’ve tripped up the steps to Geist’s door, I’m faced with a dread sensation. Inside, darkness. Nobody is home.
With a sinking heart, I rap the brass knocker.
“You won’t find him.”
I whip around. The next-door housekeeper lists over the rail, as bloated as a bee. Tipsy I’d wager, and she has stepped outside for a few bracing moments of winter twilight before ducking back into her kitchen prison.
“Where did he go?”
She raises her hand with her slurred proclamation. “He did the right thing by her. With a ring on her finger, she can hold her head up.”
I’m confused. “Who?”
“Him and her. The master and his maid. Run off together.”
“You mean Mr. Geist and Viviette were…married?”
“Yes, Miss, in city hall, the day ’fore yesterday.”
There’s no way to hide my incredulity. “Where are they now?”
“On holiday. Took a train all the way up to Nova Scotia. Where no doubt they’ll be up to their usual dev’lish monkeyshines. Developing those ghosty pitchers and plund’ring the souls of the dead.” She genuflects.
My bewilderment must show on my face, for the housekeeper guffaws. “No, no, no. There’s no romance there, Miss, lest you count the love of money. Everyone knows it was that Wallis boy brought on Viv’s condition. But Mister Geist can’t ’ford to lose her. Not in his line of work.”
“Do you know when they’ll return?”
“Not till next month’s end.” She blinks drowsily through the dusk. “Who are you, anyhow?”
“Mr. Geist’s niece,” I improvise. “And I suppose that it’s very lucky I was given a spare house key.” I pretend to rummage for it in my purse. The housekeeper tires of watching me. “Chance of rain,” she says, a parting warning before she scowls at the gloaming sky and plods back inside.
I wait until I’m sure she’s gone. My hand reaches up to disengage a hairpin. Then I crouch and fit the pin, jiggering it. A spy can open whatever is locked. I only dare let myself exhale when I feel it click.
Part of me is exalting. A spirit in turmoil wants to expose a truth, Geist had said, or make a confession. But Will hadn’t wanted to make a confession. No, his unfinished business had to do with exposing his brother’s betrayal.