“No, no, ma’am. It’s an unusual name, that’s all. I’ve never heard it before.”
“Well, now you have. And if we’re finished with the subject, I’d like to invite you to pull up a seat.” She sat back down, her skirts and those tiny silver bells conspiring to make music. She crossed her legs beneath the desk, unleashing a new round of rustling, and the rubbing together of fabrics and thighs.
Ruthie pulled up one of the striped chairs and offered it to Cly, who sat gingerly upon it. Then she drew up the second one and positioned it beside Hazel’s, so that the captain could not escape the feeling he was about to be interrogated, quizzed, or possibly sentenced.
He didn’t recognize either of these women. They hadn’t been with Josephine back in the old days, which stood to reason, given that neither of them appeared to be older than her mid-twenties. A decade before, they would’ve been young for such a life, by Josephine’s business standards.
Cly shifted in his seat, attempting to get comfortable without damaging the furniture, which looked delicate on the surface but bore his weight without creaking. “I suppose Josephine told you, she called me here about a job.”
Hazel said, “How much did she tell you about it?”
“Almost nothing. She wants me to fly something from the lake to the Gulf.”
“Did she say what she wanted you to fly?”
“No.”
“And did you think it was strange?” she asked, reaching into a drawer and withdrawing a collection of papers without taking her eyes off the captain.
“I did,” he admitted. “But I needed to make a big supply run for my town anyway. And say what you will about Texians—I’m sure they’re none too popular in this house—but they know their way around a machine shop. And I need one, because I’m having some work done on my own bird.”
Ruthie and Hazel considered this response and exchanged the kind of gaze that old friends can sometimes share—squeezing a whole conversation into an instant’s worth of facial tics, blinks, and small frowns. When the moment had passed, Ruthie rose from her seat and went to shut the door. Then she returned to her position beside Hazel, and the pair of them turned their full and absolute attention upon Cly, who could scarcely recall having felt so uncomfortable in his life.
“I get the feeling this is trickier than I thought. Stranger than I thought.”
Hazel said, “Miss Early told us you weren’t stupid, and so far, so good. Yes, what we have to tell you—what we have to ask you—is tricky and strange, and I want you to understand how much danger you could put us in, simply with one wrong word.”
“Danger? For you?”
“For us,” Ruthie said. “For the Garden Court. For Josephine.”
Hazel folded her hands on the desk and said, “Dangerous for you, too, once we tell you everything. So first I must ask, and I expect you to answer me truthfully: Have you now, or have you ever, owed any loyalty to the Republic of Texas or to the Confederate States of America?”
Easily, he responded, “No. Nor the Union, either, if you want to get precise about it. I was born on the Oregon Trail, somewhere east of Portland. I’ve been a merchant by trade most of my life, and it’s been worth my time to keep from making enemies.”
Ruthie snorted, and Hazel said, “A merchant? Josephine said you were a pirate.”
“Same thing, in a way. I’ve run plenty of goods that weren’t good for anyone. But I’m trying to leave that life behind me now. That’s one reason I’m here in the city, getting my bird refitted up in Metairie.”
Hazel asked, “Why would you leave pirating? The only money anybody has anymore comes from working while the law isn’t looking. We know that better than anyone, don’t we, Ruthie?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“Ladies,” he said, opening his hands as if to entreat them. “Josephine and me, we have birthdays only a week apart—and I want to settle down while I’ve still got the life in me to enjoy retirement. But whatever Josie wants, I’m prepared to help her out—even if it’s something that we don’t want the law looking at, since that’s what you’re implying. I told her I’d fly for her, and I will. But you have to tell me what’s really going on, and what Texas and the Rebs have to do with it. Is this a military thing? You want me to sneak something out past the forts?”
“Yes,” Hazel said bluntly. “That’s precisely what we want. We have a craft out at Lake Pontchartrain, and we need to bring it out to the Gulf of Mexico—into it, past the edge of the delta and then some—and deliver it to Admiral Herman Partridge aboard the Union airship carrier Valiant.”
“An airship carrier? I’ve heard of those, but never seen one. Fairly new to the war, ain’t they?”
“Fairly new. Very big ships,” Hazel said in a rush. “But if you chose to accept Josephine’s mission, you won’t be flying an airship.”
A hush descended on the room as Andan Cly struggled to figure out what on earth these women could possibly mean, and the women teetered on the brink of spilling everything, unsure whether they could trust him. Ruthie cracked first. She blurted to Hazel, “Just tell him! Or ask him, and then we will know whether to shoot him or pay him, eh?”
“Shoot me?” he asked.
Hazel took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and opened them again. “Captain, please understand—we are asking you to participate in smuggling something the likes of which you’ve never smuggled before. And the entirety of the Confederacy and the Republic of Texas will be stacked against you.”
“Must be important.”
“Very,” she told him gravely. “We are not talking about an airship. We are talking about a war machine with the power to enforce the broken naval blockade. A machine that can choke off the ocean supplies, and perhaps the river supplies … and in time, the whole South. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
“You’re telling me you want me to spy for the Union, here inside a Southern city controlled by the South’s number one ally. You’re telling me I’ll be risking my neck to take the case, and you’re risking your own necks to describe it.”
“Sums it up rather nicely,” Hazel agreed. “So what do you say?”
After half a dozen seconds of silence, he told her, “I suppose the war’s got to end one day, one way or another. And all things being equal, I’d rather it gets won by the Federals. I can’t much rally for any government that’ll call a man a piece of property. So if you’re asking if I can keep my mouth shut and do the job, I’m telling you I can.”
“Are you sure?” Ruthie asked, hope in her lovely face, but also fear.
“Yeah, I’m sure. If Josephine thought it was important enough to bring me here, then it must be a job worth doing. But I do want to know, before we come to any formal arrangement: What do you mean, it’s a war machine, but not an airship? I’ve never flown anything but an airship. Is this some special kind of warbird? I’ve seen a few armored crafts, including a big one a buddy of mine stole from a base in Macon … but you’re going to have to be more specific.”
Hazel smiled. It was a worried smile, and it trembled around the edges—but it was a smile that had come to a decision and was prepared to dive on in. “Captain Cly, if it’s specifics you want, it’s specifics you’ll get.” She sorted through the loose papers on Josephine’s desk and selected a few she wanted, then pushed them toward Andan Cly—who scooted his chair closer for a better look. “These are … schematics,” he observed. “For something I’m not sure I understand.”
Ruthie nodded, encouraged by his initial grasp of the matter, if not the depth of his knowledge. “They are old designs. For a machine.”
Hazel picked up a newspaper clipping and turned it around so that it faced the captain right side up. “Horace Lawson Hunley,” he read from the caption beneath a line drawing of a mustachioed man striking a dashing pose.
Hazel said, “Hunley was a Tennessean by birth, but his family brought him to New Orleans as a child, and this is where he did most of his work. He was a marine engineer, and those schematics you’re holding are engineer’s drawings for his first successful machine.”
“If you could call it successful,” Ruthie mumbled.
“It did drown a few people,” Hazel confirmed. “But ultimately, it worked.”
“Worked at what?” he asked.
“It sailed underwater.”
“I beg your pardon?”
Hazel said, “You heard me. The Pioneer was a tube designed to hold men and move them underwater, by the use of these hand-cranks and whatnot, as if they were in the belly of a shark. It was a flawed design, put together with the help of these two men—James McClintock and Baxter Watson.” She pushed forward another clipping with a pair of portraits. “The first sailors drowned, or nearly drowned, when the Pioneer sank in Mobile Bay. The folks who tried to pilot the next version of the craft, the Bayou St. John, didn’t fare too much better.”
Ruthie spelled it out. “They drowned, too.”
“You’d think this Hunley fellow would’ve had a hard time finding crew members after a while.”
“He did, but there are always eager young men who want to be in a history book. Besides, the Confederacy was willing to pay big money to fellows who’d try it out. Imagine it, would you? A boat that sails underwater, loaded up with explosive charges and contact fuses, sneaking up on ships and blowing them to pieces without ever being seen … then slipping away and doing it again.”
Cly stared down at the papers. “I can imagine it.”
“A few years and a few more dollars later, Hunley made himself a new model—which he named for himself. The Hunley did better than his earlier boats, which is to say that it drowned only five men on its first run, and eight on its next—including Hunley himself, who was riding on board. But his old partners, McClintock and Watson, they kept on working, kept on designing. Kept on building,” she added quietly.