Fiddlehead (The Clockwork Century 5)

He laughed, and a puff of smoke flowed down his chin. “Secrets ain’t a thing to me, Cleopatra. I collect them like some men collect butterflies, except I don’t put ’em in a case for show. I live on them. They keep me alive. ”

“You must have some good ones. ”

“I do at that. ”

She pushed. “The kind that have kept you away from the District?”

“That kind, yes. ” For a moment he looked irritated, but it quickly passed. “And this kind, too. On the house, all right?” he said to Henry, in a voice dripping with conspiracy. “I understand you’ve got Miss Haymes involved in the situation. ”

Henry’s eyes narrowed. “You understand correctly. ”

“She’s trouble, that one. Worse trouble than this one. ” He cocked his thumb toward Maria, who very nearly took it personally. “Chatting up your Secretary of State in a real friendly way. ”

“She wants a pardon,” Henry said. “That’s what our uncle told me. And she’s offering some new toys from her daddy’s workshops in exchange. ”

Troost snorted, not quite a laugh but definitely a sound of derision. “That’s not why she’s sniffing around the District. It’s just an excuse. ”

“Why, then?” Maria asked. “I thought she was wanted for murder. ”

“Murder, war crimes, what have you. She’s got enough money to shake it off. No, that’s not what she wants. She’s gunning for a Union weapons contract. Give the war another five years, and she’ll have more money than God. ”

“But the war won’t last another five years,” Henry argued. “Everybody knows it—and I thought that was the whole point of letting her come play up north: wrapping up this whole thing all the sooner. ”

“Oh, who knows how long it’ll last,” Troost said, coming to the end of his cigarette. He dropped the last coal to the floor and crushed it with his boot. “All she has to do is give the South something to get good and mad about, something they can take the moral high ground on, since they lost that the day they fired on Sumter. Then she can drag out the war indefinitely. ”

“And how do you think she’s going to do that?” Maria asked. She thought of the hungry dead who never stop chewing, but she said nothing of it.

Troost rose from his seat and slipped his fingers back into his glove. “I don’t know for certain,” he said. A new stab of fear went jolting through Maria’s heart. This was not a man accustomed to uncertainty. “But it will be big, it will be bad, and the whole world will see it. Right now the South is an international object of pity. God help the Union if Europe stops feeling sorry for the CSA, and becomes outraged on its behalf. ”

He turned to go, but Henry stopped him. “Wait. Don’t go like that. What else have you got?”

He leaned down to whisper, just loud enough for Maria to hear him, too. “I’m told they’re calling the project ‘Maynard. ’ So keep your ears open. When you hear the big heads talking about it … that’s when you really need to worry. ”

Twelve

Grant sat alone in the yellow oval, a drink in his hand, but only his second of the afternoon. His second of the late afternoon. And he wouldn’t allow himself another until sundown; that was the bargain he’d made with Julia. Espionage required clarity.

Again he considered if he were even capable of espionage within his own cabinet. Breach of privacy? Absolutely. Breaking and entering? You could make a case for it.

But the maid at the congressional office had a key.

And she had arrived.

Grant heard his elderly but reliable butler Andrews, who had been warned that the girl must be brought to the formal office whenever she appeared, and to lead her up through the back stairs. She’d come through the kitchen, he guessed. Even if the president didn’t mind a more direct approach, the rest of the staff would never have tolerated the impertinence; and it likely wouldn’t have occurred to the girl to wander up to the White House and knock anyway.

This teenage girl being ushered quietly in to see the commander in chief might’ve provoked gossip, if not for the fact that Julia was with him now, seated behind the oversized desk with her sewing and paying the needle and thread just enough attention to keep from sticking herself or ruining the piece.

Grant hadn’t planned to involve Julia. No one would’ve dreamed that he’d bring her into the fray of secrets. But that was the point: should anyone look askance at the arrangement, this was a maid, being brought to interview with his wife.

An utter fabrication, of course. It wouldn’t have withstood even a moment’s scrutiny by anyone the ruse needed to fool. Katharine Haymes, for example, would’ve spotted it in an instant—that this was the girl who worked the halls of the Capitol building, who cleaned Desmond Fowler’s office, who had accidentally interrupted her conversation with the president. Even Fowler himself might have taken a second look. But the president had a suspicion that, in general, girls like Betsey Frye were largely beneath the concern of men and women like Katharine and Desmond.

Girls like Betsey were the foot soldiers of the world, after a fashion. First to go in, last to leave, little respected, largely interchangeable, and virtually invisible … but indispensable if you needed someone with good eyes and ears and a willingness to follow orders. She kept her head down and did her job, unless you required something else of her. She was a lesser Andrews.

Ephraim Andrews himself was a stately, mannered colored man who must’ve been old enough to be Grant’s father, and who’d worked at the White House since he’d been a boy barely big enough to hold a coin. If Andrews couldn’t be trusted, then the whole damn world might as well burn.

It had been Andrews who learned the girl’s name and address, and who had tracked her down that very same evening. He’d delivered the president’s message and made the invitation without any telltale notes to haunt them later; and made the arrangements to see the girl and her mother moved to more comfortable quarters, in payment and gratitude for her service to the nation.

That was how Grant put it, anyway. He didn’t know how, precisely, Andrews had phrased it. He hadn’t been there. Maybe Andrews told her she’d answer to the president or be drawn up on charges; maybe he told her nothing except to appear, or else. Whatever the old man had said, it worked.