The Crescent Spy Read Free Page A

government contracts if she hadn’t had the sudden hunch they were fellow newspaper reporters. Though from what paper and why they were congregating here, she couldn’t tell.
    Had Barnhart finally plunked down some silver to hire more men for the Clarion ? Good, they could use the help. So long as they stayed out of her way.
    Josephine pushed her way through them and came inside to find the staff already hard at work for tomorrow’s edition. Jones was leaning over Finch to watch the man mark up his copy, the cigarette dangling from Jones’s mouth dropping ash on Finch’s shoulder. Finch’s son, a boy of sixteen named Charles, had spread the papers of the competition across a battered desk and was scanning through them, scribbling notes on a pad of lined paper. Wenkle sat atop two stacked crates, his pipe in the corner of his mouth, dictating a telegraph to Miss Lenox. The air was thick with smoke and the oppressive heat of a room with too little ventilation.
    Miss Lenox looked up at Josephine’s approach, her eyes owl-like through thick glasses. She nudged Wenkle, who looked at the newcomer and stopped. The other three spotted Josephine, stopped what they were doing, and all five stared at her for a long moment. Then Wenkle cleared his throat, and they disappeared as one into the back room.
    Josephine was still puzzling out why they’d given her such an odd reception when the door swung open from the back, and she heard the shouts of newsboys, caught a glimpse of mounds of newspapers. Business must be brisk indeed if the boys were returning this late in the morning to refill their carts. Her publisher appeared in the doorway.
    David Barnhart was a slender, smooth-faced man, short enough that when his back was turned, he presented the profile of one of his boys. Angry congressmen would sometimes burst into the offices, take him for a newsboy, and bellow for him to fetch his boss at once. Barnhart would shake his head and say that regrettably the publisher was out, but he would pass along their outrage.
    Before the war, one congressman from South Carolina, a real fire-eater secessionist, had come in waving pistols and demanding a duel. He’d been outraged by insinuations (perfectly true) that he’d fathered several mulatto children by the slaves of his plantation. Barnhart calmly put him off, told him that the man he was looking for had fled to New York to hide from the senator’s wrath. The South Carolinian was now raising regiments in his home state, and had a hand in the shelling of Fort Sumter that had precipitated the outbreak of hostilities.
    Now Barnhart should have been grinning in triumph, but his face was curiously drawn. Newsprint smeared across his cheeks and beneath his eyes, making him look like a petulant raccoon. He clenched a rolled-up newspaper in his blackened fingers. She could only think he was still worried about the threat of General Beauregard’s troops now presumed to be marching on Washington. He’d been fretting about it last night as she finished her story.
    “Don’t worry,” Josephine told him, “the rebs are still at Manassas. A lucky shot or two and Jeff Davis would be panicking in Richmond instead. The other side was so scattered it would take them a week just to muster their forces. By then, Washington will be ready.”
    “Yes, I know. So you said last night. You could scarcely stop talking about it.”
    He sounded so glum, but nothing could penetrate the triumphant feeling in her breast. She smiled and spread the copy of the Clarion she’d bought across the table over the papers Charlie had laid out earlier. Standing proudly on the front page was her eighth lead story in the past month, and her best by far. Every bit of it was true, not a lie or false rumor in the lot.
    Josephine had spoken directly to generals on both sides, had witnessed key moments of the battle. She had correctly assessed the aftermath of the war and was equally confident in her predictions of how the