The Crescent Spy Read Free

hide them. Mrs. Lamont watched her carefully.
    “You keep your mouth shut, child. Let me speak to them.”
    When they drew near the bridge, one of the men in plain clothes approached the carriage. He wore a bowler hat and a jacket buttoned in spite of the heat. Thick black whiskers blanketed his face. After casting a dismissive glance at John, he fixed the two women with a sharp, penetrating gaze and asked Mrs. Lamont her name and business in the city. His accent held a soft Scottish burr.
    She told him the same story that she’d given earlier, then added that Josephine was her niece.
    “And why is your niece in this state of undress?”
    Mrs. Lamont tugged the edge of her own dress higher onto Josephine’s lap. “The indignities of war, sir,” she said in a cold voice. “Now be a gentleman and let us past.”
    He shrugged, and they were soon passing onto the Long Bridge. Light slanted in through the slats in the wooden trusses that held up the roadbed.
    “Old men make wars,” Mrs. Lamont said suddenly, as if something had been bothering her. “Yet it’s the boys who suffer and die.”
    Josephine thought of the Confederate soldier pinned beneath the cart. Probably still alive, still suffering. She said nothing as the horses continued in the sluggish procession across the bridge. At last they reached the other side. For the first time in hours, the knot in Josephine’s stomach began to unravel.
    “Thank you for helping me,” she said. “I’m not a spy. I can see that you’re wondering. The papers, and all. They’re not for the government, and not for the secessionists.”
    Mrs. Lamont patted her hand. “There is no need to explain to me, dear. This is a time of divided loyalties. Your secrets are your own.”

I t was early afternoon the next day before Josephine roused herself and made her way back to the offices of the Morning Clarion. She was exhausted from the heat, the flight after the battle, and the work at the paper that had kept her busy late into the night. But she soon found something that lifted her spirits and energy more than the cup of coffee she’d hastily gulped before leaving the boarding house.
    A boy was selling copies of the Clarion at the head of Marble Alley. She was so pleased to see the result of her hard work that she handed him a silver half dime and told the astonished boy to keep the change.
    For a long moment she stared at the headline with a satisfied glow. The city seemed to fade into the background. The marching feet, the whinny of horses, the screech of pump handles, the martial trumpet to the north, the bang of hammers building a new barracks a mile to the east—all faded to a dull buzz as she read the headline over and over.
     
    BITTER DEFEAT !
    REBS ROUT UNION TROOPS, VOW TO SEIZE WASHINGTON
     
    That was all true, and yet vowing to seize Washington and accomplishing it were two different things. But the reality—“hungry, battered rebels milling in disorder, unable to move toward the city”—would hardly sell newspapers.
    The newspaper offices lay up Ninth Street, which was clogged with soldiers and wagons. Men on horse—some soldiers, some not—rode this way and that. A vast tent encampment spread below the Capitol Building and was packed to overflowing, so chaotic and disorganized it may as well have been a prisoner-of-war camp.
    The Capitol Building itself frowned over all of this. It had lost its cap before the war, supposedly to doff a new, iron dome that would more majestically represent American power. But for now it looked merely decapitated, a visible reminder of the sad condition of the United States themselves.
    She turned up Ninth and toward the offices of the Morning Clarion , which lay beyond Ford’s Theatre. A group of men loitered in the street outside the newspaper offices. They had a slouchy, sharp-eyed appearance, and she’d have thought them the kind of disreputable merchants recently filling the city to make their fortunes on bloated