Chapter Two

Jacob woke the following morning exhausted. But this was nothing new. He hadn’t slept well in two years. At least he’d awoken screaming only four times. Four was nowhere close to his record.

Unlike most of his fellow Army surgeons, he’d refused a position rehabilitating soldiers at one of Washington’s Army hospitals. He’d had enough of gangrene and amputated limbs. He’d even chucked his bone saw into the same fire he burned his uniform in. After a breakfast of stale biscuits leftover from the journey home from Virginia, he headed to his clinic a few blocks away. The boardinghouse next to his clinic used to be a respectable establishment favored by Congressmen, but it seemed that at some point during the war it had been put to other purposes. A jagged sign reading “Crooked Hat Saloon” hung over the door, and Jacob guessed the bedrooms on the second floor were where the owner’s real money was made. In the absence of adequate law enforcement, sex and liquor were the only two businesses still thriving in Washington.

Make that three businesses. He’d forgotten burglary.

But he remembered it as soon as he caught sight of his clinic. It was a small, one-story building with an anteroom where he kept his desk and greeted patients. A tiny kitchen sat off the back of the anteroom. An exam/operating room adjoined the anteroom and contained his medicine cabinets. He’d always liked the unassuming nature of the little building, but that unassuming nature clearly hadn’t been enough for it to get through the war’s desperation unnoticed. The front door’s bottom hinge was gone, and the door swung crazily from the upper hinge. He’d boarded up the windows before he’d left, but he’d foolishly assumed the rim lock would secure the door. He drew his knife and stepped around the swinging door into his anteroom.

A quick look around revealed the anteroom was relatively untouched. His medical school diploma still hung on the wall above his desk. The desk’s drawers were pulled out, their papers strewn on the floor, but that was it. His medical texts sat undisturbed under a thick layer of dust on the bookshelves. He expected he knew what whoever had broken in was looking for.

Sure enough, when he crossed into his examination room, the glass doors on his medicine cabinets had been smashed. Broken glass crunched under his feet as he checked to see what was left. He’d given most of his medicines to an older colleague who stayed in the city and taken the covetable items—his morphine, laudanum, and chloroform—with him. Whoever broke in didn’t find more than a few old bottles of iodine. They probably smashed the glass in frustration. He sheathed his knife.

“Look at this mess,” the Minié ball said. “Just give up. It’s not worth it.”

Jacob looked around and felt inclined to agree, but all told he’d probably gotten off easy. And he needed to reopen his practice if he wanted to bring Lyddie home. His had a respectable savings account thanks to modest inheritance from his father and his own frugality, but it wouldn’t last forever. He placed a small portrait of Hannah on his desk and pried the shutters off the windows. The air outside stank of urine and stale beer from the saloon next door, but he needed the light. He spent the rest of the morning sweeping up the broken glass in his exam room and dusting and sweeping the rest of the clinic. Over a lunch of more of the cold, stale biscuits he ate for breakfast, he wrote a list of medicines and supplies to order, including new glass for his cabinets. He paused in his work only long enough to jot “No Surgery” on a piece of paper and tack it to the clinic door.

After lunch, he walked to the post office on F street to collect his mail. The post office was only about a mile and a half away on the other side of the Executive Mansion. He paused for a moment in front of the presidential home and whispered a prayer for the late President Lincoln. When he finished, he added a short one for the new President Johnson as well. The man was going to need it.

When he reached the east side of the mansion, he regretted walking rather than hailing a carriage. He’d forgotten about the shantytown that now abutted the president’s home. The carriage driver yesterday had told him the locals called it “Murder Bay.”

“Sprung up when all them freedmen came into the city after President Lincoln issued that damned Emancipation Proclamation,” the man grumbled. “Police don’t even bother tryin’ to arrest murderers there. Too many scoundrels and not enough officers. Ain’t gonna get no better now we got all these soldiers comin’ home an’ lookin’ for work that ain’t there.”

Jacob quickened his pace, but the feculence from the old city canal that ran behind the Executive Mansion and the shantytown slapped him the face. He pulled his shirt collar over his nose, but the lightweight fabric rendered no aid. The canal had been too shallow for boats, and when the war broke out, the government shifted the money meant for its improvement to the military. The great canal that was supposed to connect Washington to the West now served as an open sewer. Jacob despaired at how much the waterway had deteriorated in only four years.

“Damn miracle everyone hasn’t already shit themselves to death,” he grumbled. The canal was one flush away from sparking an epidemic of cholera, or worse, dysentery. Jacob had lost more soldiers to dysentery than anything else, even battle wounds.

He glanced behind him at the looming figure of the Executive Mansion and then back at Murder Bay. Two young colored boys, neither of them older than ten, fought in the mud over half an apple core.

The Minié ball snickered in his pocket.

“Hundreds of thousands of lives lost,” it muttered. “For what? Do you think the freed Negroes feel cheated?”

Jacob sped up some more.

When he reached the post office, the postman surprised him with a small sack of mail. Jacob hadn’t expected much. His family and friends had all known to write to him care of the Army of the Potomac. Back in his clinic, he dug into the bag to discover a small archive of periodicals. He’d received his magazines and newspapers for several months before his subscriptions ran out. But mixed in with old issues of Scientific American and the New York Times was a recent letter from his brother, William. He wrote that he hoped Jacob had returned home safely and that Lyddie was looking forward to seeing him again.

“We’d all love to see you,” William’s letter read. “Come to California, Jacob. Spend some time here on the ranch before returning to your work. You deserve a respite.”

“Older brothers,” Jacob said, shaking his head. “I’m forty-six years old, and he still thinks he can tell me what to do.” The corners of his mouth twitched upward ever so slightly as he dropped the letter back in the mail bag.

He stayed late at the clinic, trying to avoid the emptiness of the large, dusty house. He needed to fix the door anyway. Fortunately, the hinges weren’t broken. He’d need to replace some of the wood of the door frame to get the rim lock to attach properly again, but refastening the hinges was good enough for now. He didn’t have anything worth stealing. Someone banged on the piano in the saloon next door, and he soon wearied of the drunken shouting. Once the door would latch again, he decided to head home. As he turned to check the latch one last time, the skin on the back of his neck crawled.

“Hi, fella,” a sultry voice purred. Jacob started. “Sorry about that.” The woman laid a hand on his shoulder. “Didn’t mean to startle you.” She stepped closer. Her hot breath wafting over his ear reeked of cheap whiskey. “You feeling lonely, fella?”

The timbre of the woman’s voice prickled something in his brain, and he turned around, squinting through the waning light. “Mrs. Thompson?”

She jumped back, her hand snapping away from his shoulder. “Dr. Lewis?” Even in the twilight, Jacob could see color rise on her pale cheeks. “Dr. Lewis, I’m sorry. I didn’t recognize you, I…” She spun on her heel and fled toward the saloon. Jacob sprinted after her, catching her by one arm after only a few yards.

“Alice.” He searched for words, but for a moment could only point at the saloon. “Why are you working here? What happened to Henry?” He flinched, and the Minié ball glowed warm in his pocket. Henry had spoken at length about the need to preserve the Union. He probably closed up his bookshop and joined the Army shortly after Jacob had.

“Henry’s dead,” she said, her voice flat. “Sammy too.”

Jacob’s stomach lurched as he remembered the cheerful, blond little boy with the bright eyes. “What happened to Sammy? He would be what? Six?”

“Seven. Typhoid. Last winter.” Her face stayed blank as she tucked a lank lock of mousy hair behind her ear. She was so emotionless she could have been telling him the time.

Damn that canal.

“Alice, I’m so sorry.” Jacob dug into his pocket and pulled out a gold coin. He pressed it into her hand.

She took it without acknowledgement and tucked it into a bodice that swung so far south it must have been part of the Confederacy. “Where’s Lydia?”

“California with my brother. I’m sending for her tomorrow.”

“Don’t bring her home. Don’t let her see this.” She gestured to the street with a sweep of one hand. Somewhere behind them, a baby cried. He wanted to join it. He’d known the Thompsons since he and Hannah moved to Washington more than twenty years ago. He’d delivered their son. Bile rose in his throat. He forced it back.

“You don’t have to work here,” he said. “Do you need a place to stay?”

“I’m past help. Goodnight, Dr. Lewis.” She disappeared under the shadowy eaves of the saloon.

Jacob looked at the street, once smooth and flat, now covered in six inches of sticky muck, the boarded-up businesses, and in the distance, the noxious fog rising off the canal. The city itself reflected the war’s brutality on its inhabitants. His eyes glazed over as his mind drifted back to the hilly battlefields of Maryland and Pennsylvania and his hand drifted into his pocket and clutched the bullet.

When a crash of shattering glass rang out from the saloon, he dropped flat onto the rotting wooden sidewalk. He threw his arms over his head and lay there trembling until he felt a nudge in his ribs. In one swift motion, he rolled onto his back, ripped his knife from its sheath, and leveled it at the dark shadow looming over him.

“Easy there, mister,” a deep voice drawled. “War’s over.”

He sheathed the knife and apologized. After receiving Jacob’s assurances that he was all right, the man continued his shuffle toward the saloon. Jacob almost followed him. Maybe a drink would settle him down. But he turned and raced for home, one hand on the hilt of his knife the entire way.