Lincoln in the Basement Chapter Seven

Previously in the book: President and Mrs. Lincoln have been placed in a room in the White House basement by Secretary of War Stanton. Innocent Private Adam Christy is charged with guarding them. Janitor Gabby Zook was caught in the room putting out rat traps so he has to be confined with the Lincoln.

September 1, 1862 was the most fortunate day in the life of Alethia Haliday, or least she thought so as she unpacked her personal items in the large bedroom next to the oval sitting room on the second floor of the president’s home. Only days earlier the plump woman with dark hair and full cheeks had been in the Old Capitol federal military prison, waiting for what superintendent William Woods had called her destiny: death by hanging for espionage.
“Don’t believe it,” Rose Greenhow, her best friend from childhood, advised her in muted tones as they ate dinner in the yard. “Laugh at that skinny little man. Call it a farce, a perfect farce, and eventually he’ll be forced to release you, and then he’ll be revealed to all as the buffoon he is at the core of his being.”
“Why, I couldn’t say that.” Alethia remembered widening her large, expressive brown eyes. “Farce? A buffoon? Rose, you go too far.”
That, of course, was Rose Greenhow’s charm, being brash and audacious, and Alethia, meek and subservient, envied it. She always wanted to be more like Wild Rose, as the young rakes of Bladensburg had called her, when they were girls in the sleepy town at the head of the Anacostia River which flowed south to join the Potomac near Washington. Bladensburg was undistinguished except by a War of 1812 battle win in which the local militia fought and was vanquished by the British army, which then marched on to burn Washington. Since then Bladensburg had slipped into relative obscurity and would have been forgotten altogether, had it not been a minor stop on the Baltimore and Ohio railroad.
“Anybody who is anybody has had a tinkle in Bladensburg,” Rose had quipped many times to the raucous laughter of her beaux and to the embarrassment of her dear, hopeless friend Alethia. “You are much too gentle,” Rose lectured her as they took their Sunday promenade in their teen-aged years.
“But I thought goodness, kindness, and innocence were virtues devoutly sought by men in prospective wives.”
Rose laughed at her friend. “Those qualities are desirable if you wish to be a saint preserved in stained glass in a church and ignored by any young man worth having as your lover, but such qualities possessed by an actual flesh-and-blood girl make her a milksop, and therefore eschewed by paramours of promise.”
“You mean men truly don’t want ladies?”
“Of course, they want ladies—that is, they want women who pretend to be ladies.”
“Pretend?” Alethia shook her head.
“The pretense makes you both appealing and dangerous,” Rose explained.
“I don’t understand.”
“I know you don’t.” Rose sympathetically patted her friend’s shoulder. “You poor creature.”
Perhaps that was why Alethia Haliday was still a virgin and unmarried at age forty-two, while Rose had married and was the mother of several children. In fact, Alethia had resigned herself to a quiet life in Bladensburg earning a modest income selling bread, cakes, and pies from the home inherited from her equally bland parents. Rose had left Bladensburg for an exciting life in the nation’s capital, rarely remembering her old, dreary friend in their backwater Maryland town.
All of this changed in the spring of 1862 when a gallant-looking young man with flowing blond locks appeared in Alethia’s kitchen. He spoke with that odd accent spoken by residents of the Richmond, Virginia, area, which almost sounded like the speech pattern of Boston natives. He informed her that Rose was in a Washington federal prison, on charges of spying for the Confederacy. That Rose was a spy did not surprise Alethia; her flamboyant friend had always had a talent for the devious. That she was a spy for the South also was not a shock, for almost everyone in Bladensburg, including Alethia, was a Democrat with rebel sympathies. What amazed her was that Rose had been caught. Alethia thought her friend would charm herself out of any situation.
“Can you help?” the young man with the golden mane said with pleading, soulful blue eyes.
Alethia felt breathless to have such a handsome man so close, so inviting—even if he were not inviting her in a romantic sense.
“Will you help?”
“Yes,” she said, her heart beating faster.
The young man breathed deeply, and Alethia’s eyes fluttered. He asked her to bake a cake with an escape plan in it and present it to Rose on a trip to the prison. Within days, Alethia sat in a car of the Baltimore and Ohio train with the cake—chocolate with vanilla icing—on her lap. Her cheeks flushed when she pecked her friend on the cheek in the Old Capitol yard and handed her the cake. Perhaps it was her trembling hands that had caused the guard to saunter forward and comment on the freshness of the cake and its sweet aroma. Perhaps it had been her cracking voice when she told him it was chocolate that had caused him to smile suspiciously and reply he could not remember the last time he had had a slice of homemade chocolate cake. Perhaps it was the terror sparkling in her eyes that had prompted him to take out his pocket knife and cut through the middle of the cake, snagging on the packet of escape plans. No matter, for then Alethia had found herself in a room next to her friend, also accused of spying and facing an unknown fate.
Those were the worst days of her life, Alethia told herself as she stood inconspicuously at the window covered with fancy, white cotton lace curtains. She turned her head to glance through the door to the president’s bedroom where a tall, raw-boned man leaned over a suitcase. She caught her breath as she considered whether this tall, sinewy man would ask her to join him in his bed, to make the ruse complete. Alethia remembered Rose’s words: a farce, simply a farce. That was what she was living now.
It had begun one day in July when a short, stout man with a pharaoh-like beard visited Rose in the yard of the Old Capitol. The man turned out to be Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, the latest in a long line of officials who tried to force Rose into revealing how she learned military secrets.
“If I have the information that you say I have,” Rose said to Stanton, “I must have got it from sources that were in the confidence of the government. I don’t intend to say any more. If Mr. Lincoln’s friends will pour into my ear such information, am I to be held responsible for all that?”
Alethia noticed the grave look in Stanton’s eyes when they wandered in her direction, and she sensed a distinct snap in his head as he focused his attention on her.
“And who is this?” Stanton paused, as though to control his low, musical voice. “Is she a member of your spy ring?”

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