“Why was it awkward?” Sally asked.
Maria mentally weighed the truth against the potential cost. But she’d gotten this far by being straightforward, so she stayed the course. She kept her voice as soft as possible, while still making herself heard. “Because Abraham Lincoln is the man who hired me. It was a real shock, let me tell you.”
Sally’s eyes went wide. “No doubt!”
“But this is what I believe, Captain: Lincoln is working to end the war; he’s struggling to protect this innocent scientist, whose family was kidnapped—though the Pinks are working on that, and I’m told that the missing people have been recovered. The former president is investing a great deal of his personal fortune in a peaceful future, and he’s leveraging every ounce of his remaining reputation to bring this war to a halt. He believes in the machine and the man who built it, but his resources are limited. He no longer commands the federal army, so now he can only buy agents like myself—unless he wants to rely on the Secret Service, which he apparently doesn’t.”
“But he asked for you?”
“To no one’s greater surprise than my own.”
Sally put her elbows down on the desktop and frowned thoughtfully. “Now that I’ve had a moment to consider it, I’m not sure I’m surprised at all. You’re perfect for his purposes, just like you’re perfect for mine.”
Genuinely confused, she asked, “How so?”
“Southern in sympathy, from sheer habit if nothing else, but carrying the clout and the badge of a Northern authority. I think Lincoln gambled on you, hoping that you still care enough about the South to help him defeat it, just in time to save it. And save the rest of the world, too.”
“That’s a grim thing to say. Particularly grim coming from you, Captain. How much of your own fortune have you lost to prolonging the war—cycling these boys back out to the front?”
“All of it, and then some. At present, the hospital operates on research grants and foreign investment funds, mostly doctors and universities overseas who want to know the secret of our survival rate. I have nothing left of my own, and when the war ends, I do not know what will become of me. But the war does need to end. And you know as well as I do that the CSA is a sinking ship. The only question left is how far it will fall, and how many can be saved before it’s lost altogether.”
They sat in silence, neither of them happy, yet somehow relieved to have that frightening sentiment out in the open.
Eventually, Maria spoke—still quite softly, in case anyone listened on the other side of the door. “What can we do?”
Sally stood up. “For starters, you can come with me. Keys to the kingdom, remember?”
“Hard to forget an offer like that. So you’ve made up your mind?”
“I’m running out of time—and if Lincoln will gamble on you, then I will, too.”
Maria rose to her feet, uncertain but strangely hopeful. She had no idea what these “keys” might be, but this was progress—and she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was on the cusp of something big. She only hoped she’d prove worthy of the captain’s trust. And the former president’s. And the U.S. Marshal’s. And the head Pinkerton’s.
The captain opened the door, and yes, her brother-in-law was beside it. Whether or not he’d been listening was anybody’s guess, but it didn’t matter. Sally told him, “Everything’s fine, Adam, but follow along and watch our backs, if you don’t mind. I’m taking Miss Boyd downstairs, so I can show her Mercy.”
“Show me…? What?” Maria asked, but Sally didn’t answer that question, not yet.
She said instead, “We’re going to the basement, dear. And if you think the main floors smell miserably ripe, then I apologize in advance for the state of our laundry room. It’s an appalling place, something out of Dante’s stories, or so it seems at times. Come, this way. We’ll go down the back stairway, the one the old judge’s servants used.”
“As you like,” Maria answered, her hopefulness wilting into uncertainty.
She followed in the captain’s wake. Farther behind came Adam, who pretended he simply had business in this general direction, in case anyone was watching. Down the back corridor they proceeded, all in a line; they descended stairs past nurses in fluttering aprons, they stepped aside for colored women carrying sacks of grain and bales of laundry, and they ducked quickly past a pair of men who were moving a bed from ward to ward, and at the end of the hall they rounded a corner.
Sally opened another door and a wave of steam gusted forth, shocking both for how pleasant the sudden warmth was, and for how bad it smelled—even there, in a land of terrible smells.
Maria winced. Sally said, “I would’ve grabbed you a vial of perfume, if I’d thought about it. Most of us become accustomed to the air here, eventually. You can always tell the newer workers, men and women both, because they’re the ones still carrying such things.”
“No, it’s fine. I can take it,” she insisted, even as she wished she’d taken a smaller breakfast so there’d be less to throw up later.
“I believe you. Now come along, it’s not much farther.”
“I still don’t understand why … why the laundry room?”
“Because,” Sally said, taking her arm and whispering the rest into her ear. “We hide our secrets where no one will ever wish to look for them.”
The laundry room had overtaken the entire basement, and if there was nothing else to be said for it, the temperature was a welcome change. Great furnaces boiled water nonstop, and enormous tubs collected it, brimming with the foam of industrial soaps and bleaching powders; vats simmered and bubbled with the tart, faint tang of peroxide. The room bustled with strong-armed, stern-faced women both colored and white, women who heaved and dragged sacks of wet laundry along tracks above their heads—drawing it forward and then yanking the cord to open the bags, dumping the contents into carts for sorting and drying. Some of the women wore nurse’s uniforms, some did not. They all wore sturdy boots made for workmen, unless Maria missed her guess; and when she slipped almost badly enough to fall, she understood why.
“The floors are wet. Always,” Sally told her. “Be extra careful past these tubs; yes, that’s right. It’s soapy over here, too. Good morning, Edna,” she added to a tall woman whose arms were blotchy and red up to the elbows. “Everything running smoothly today?”
“Yes, ma’am, though furnace number three is being fussy. Might want to send David along to take a look at it.”
“Yes, I’ll do that. Thank you for the suggestion.”
Edna paused and dragged the back of her wrist across her sweaty brow. “The incoming room is fresh, I hate to tell you. If that’s where you’re headed.”
Without breaking her stride, Sally said over her shoulder, “It won’t be the end of us.”
Maria tried not to worry about how bad it must be, if this hardened laundress felt the need to hand out warnings. She asked, “The incoming room? Is that…?”
“It’s where the dirty laundry dumps down the main chute. It’s sorted according to type. Pillowcases, sheets, blankets. Clothing. Bandages that are good enough to reuse. I don’t like putting the bandages back into circulation—it feels … dirty, somehow, and I can’t abide dirt. I believe in the bottom of my heart that this hospital’s lack of dirt is its saving grace. Literally, perhaps. But we get the wraps as white as we can before we give them back to the doctors and put them back into service. Cotton isn’t the disposable commodity it once was, and we must conserve every scrap.”
She stopped at a basket hanging on a wall beside a set of double doors. She reached into the basket and retrieved a pair of masks—one for her, and one for Maria. Presumably, Adam would wait out this particular leg of the adventure; he lingered back at the end of the corridor, looking out of place and distinctly uncomfortable.
Maria took the mask, a cotton one with straps to tie behind her ears. The mask was scented with lavender oil and a hint of eucalyptus.
Sally said, “We all wear them, down here. Put it on, or you’ll wish you hadn’t.”
Maria gratefully donned the mask, and when Sally opened the double doors enough to let them both inside, she was glad for the distraction of the fragranced cloth across her face. The incoming room truly was hell on earth.
One large metal chute dumped an intermittent tumble of filthy laundry into a terrifying heap, confined by a bin so large it could’ve comfortably held a pair of horses. Each new bundle was announced by the muffled clatter of its descent from the floors above, falling wetly, gruesomely into a heap like a blood-and-vomit-soaked pyramid of human misery.
Maria gagged.
Sally sniffed and cleared her throat. “Only a little farther. Back behind the mountain of things you don’t want to touch.”
Sally was right. Maria didn’t want to touch it. She didn’t want to see it, either. She didn’t want to know it existed at all, and if she could retrace her steps for a minute or two and smudge out the memory with a piece of India rubber, she would’ve given her soul to do so.
Stumbling behind Sally, Maria followed—almost blindly, her eyes watering from the vapors of stomach bile and pus, the old-penny scent of drying blood, the slick yellow stink of feverish sweat, the porklike odor of burned flesh, and a hundred other things too horrible to tease out from the whole. And the laundry fell and fell, bundle after bundle, dropping down the tin chute and sometimes landing with a thump, sometimes with a squish, sometimes with a splash. The laundry mountain grew and shrank, fed and whittled down at a similar tempo as masked women with elbow-length gloves and leather aprons removed it, one nasty armload at a time, for sorting in the bins along the wall. Almost as if it were alive and breathing—but that was a thought so impossibly awful that Maria choked on it, and swallowed it down lest she throw it up.