Crazy Bett
Prologue
Richmond, Virginia
Thursday, September 25, 1902
By the watery light of a gray dawn, an aged man crept from his rooming house on North 4th near the banks of Shockoe Creek at the city’s northern edge.
The morning had arisen out of sorts, with gunpowder gray clouds, bilious winds, and temperamental rain. A damp fog hugged the surface of the James River at the city’s southern edge. Bargemen and dockworkers, ambushed by the chill, loitered around fire barrels and drank steaming mugs of bitter coffee, while the hazy outlines of barges and steamers bobbed in the river.
To the west, the damp clung to the walls surrounding the cemetery, which never loitered in its task of storing the city’s memories—and perhaps performed it better on gray mornings.
After bidding a stammering good morning to his landlady—a beefy, red-faced Irishwoman with a distracting wen on her nose who ran her establishment with martial precision—the old man directed his steps south, turned right at Hospital Street, and shambled toward the cemetery gates. Through most of his life, his occupation had driven him from his solitary bed at an hour that most of Richmond society would have found appalling, so while his excursion this morning was out of the ordinary, the early hour seemed familiar, comfortable.
A shroud of silence surrounded him, though at odd moments he could just hear the rolling phrases of a mourning warbler, with its chirry chirry chirry choory chorry—as if it sensed the nature of the aged man’s mission and through its cadences shared it. A horse drawing a baker’s wagon added a clop-clop clop-clop. A faint smile of approval cracked the man’s otherwise impassive face.
Thin wisps of gray hair escaped from around the edges of his bowler, and his spectacles were cloudy with damp. He was slim, and in his prime he would have been tall and vigorous, with massive, strong hands and fingers that told the tale of a life spent in trade. But with the passing years, he had become frail and stooped, and he leaned heavily on a burled walking stick. The gnarled fingers of his other hand clung like a memory to a small bouquet of blue bellflowers, the only color the morning mist would admit.
His eyes were focused in the middle distance, his immediate surroundings lost in the fog of the past, hearing in the caverns of his memory the rustle of drums, the call of bugles, the clatter of horse hooves, the slapping of guidons in the wind, the grumble of cannon fire, but mostly the gravelly voice of an eccentric woman he had lost to the turmoil of events from decades long past.
The wall broke, and he entered the cemetery. He shuffled past the graves of judges, senators, congressmen, captains of industry, and their families who had made up the beau monde of Richmond society. Many had been his customers, but they now survived only in the memories of the descendants who tended their graves.
He scanned the rows of graves, pausing from time to time to get his bearings in the semi-darkness. He caught the sound again: chirry chirry chirry choory chorry.
As the old man turned the key to the door of his room, a woman had begun making her way north from her small row house near the corner of 2nd Street and Canal, overlooking the river. She crossed the tracks of the Richmond Fredericksburg & Potomac Railroad and continued on North 2nd until she reached Hospital Street and the cemetery. She spotted the aged man, who emerged from the mist like a specter from a now-remembered past, and shuffled over to him, poking the ferrule of the umbrella she carried into the gravel path to steady herself. They nodded at each other and smiled wanly in mute greeting, then with unspoken accord began to search for the grave. The woman, herself old and on the verge of frailty but with intelligent, probing eyes and a round, still handsome face, found the family plot and gently led the man in its direction.
The grave was modest, although in her girlhood the woman interred in it had been the daughter of one of Richmond’s leading families. It occupied a space too narrow and cramped—her casket had been buried vertically—to reflect the role she had played in the events of the past that preoccupied the old man. He solemnly placed the bouquet of bellflowers on the grass in front of the memorial stone, kissed the tips of his fingers and touched the stone, then stepped reverently back. Chirry chirry chirry choory chorry.
The woman had died two years before to the day, full of years and, after a life of turmoil and strife, taken to her rest surrounded by a shrinking circle of admirers, although headstrong people in Richmond—and they were many—still thought of her as an insane old spinster who had betrayed her people and the Cause for which tens of thousands of the South’s sons had nobly died.
They stood silently and regarded the stone, and the bronze plaque that had been affixed just two months before and that cemetery officials feared, with good reason as it later turned out, would be defaced by those who reviled her, and who would still have been outraged that the Negro woman standing there could even read it.
Elizabeth Van Lew
1818–1900
She risked everything that is dear to man—friends
fortune—comfort—health—life itself—all for the
one absorbing desire of her heart—that slavery
might be abolished and the Union preserved. This boulder
from the Capitol Hill in Boston is a tribute
from Massachusetts friends
The man and woman knew her by the name cast into the plaque, which already had acquired the soft patina of age. The man had wanted to call her Lizzie, perhaps something dearer, though it was never to be. To the woman, she was always “ma’am” or “Miz Van Lew”— not at the insistence of the dead woman but from social convention and, more importantly, their desire to avert suspicion.
To everyone else in the city, forty years later, she was still known as Crazy Bett.
Part I
Escape
Chapter 1
White Sulphur Springs, Virginia
July 1843
The occasional creak of a rattan chair interrupted the distant chatter of cicadas as two women lounged on the resort spa’s veranda—one with practiced languor, the other slicing the sodden evening air with a rolled-up newspaper in a vain effort to hold the mosquitoes at bay.
Anna refused to allow the mosquitoes to trouble the maiden tranquility she’d cultivated over her twenty-three years. So instead they troubled her sister Elizabeth, two years her senior, who’d often been heard in previous days to declare that she was engaged in a continual and bloody warfare she hoped would end in the creatures’ extermination. If the blotched outer sheet of the Philadelphia Dollar Newspaper was any indication, Lizzie had won some battles.
Lizzie, her thin lips pinched in restless boredom, sat in profile to Anna, whose appraising eyes were drawn to her sister’s sandy brown ringlets and the caterpillar eyebrows that crawled across a sloped forehead. Anna, with her high cheekbones, delicate features, and soft blond hair that kissed bare shoulders, affectionately regarded her sister as a frump. In this, justice failed her, for Lizzie, with her sylphlike figure, rapier blue eyes, and refined manner, had won the notice of an eligible bachelor or two in the marriage market, though on closer inspection the goods had been found brittle and somewhat beyond their date.
Anna’s voice swam through the humid air. “Now where do you suppose that John Newton could have gone?” John Newton was their younger brother.
Lizzie sighed deeply as she withdrew her blunt nose from the newspaper, converted it—the newspaper, not her nose—into a truncheon, and thwapped a mosquito. She knew full well that John Newton was elsewhere carrying on a flirtation with Miss Adelaide Royster, who simpered about the Springs in a riot of flounces and Southern belle gauziness, the ornament that currently dangled from the family tree of the Virginia Roysters. Either that or superintending one of the family’s slaves in the brushing of his vast wardrobe, as though the spa were a caravansary and he a traveling young nabob, there to display his finery for the daughters of Virginia’s first families, and perhaps for their wealthy sires as well.
She’d put aside the old book by the ingenious little Frenchman that, she vowed, was keeping her from madness long enough to meet Miss Royster herself at one of the spa’s unending round of balls the evening before. As John Newton excused himself to fetch the ladies punch, Lizzie’s intense blue eyes bored into the amber vacancy of Miss Royster’s as she said:
“Miss Royster, I’d be interested in your opinion of Mr. Tyler and the effect you believe he will have on the slavery issue.” William Henry Harrison had had the ill grace to die after only a month in the White House, bequeathing high office to John Tyler before the latter had leisure to brush the inaugural mud off the vice-presidential boots.
Miss Royster turned to Lizzie with a blank face. “Mr. Tyler?”
“Mr. John Tyler? The nation’s president? The Virginian?”
“Why Miss Van Lew, I’m sure I don’t know. I leave these matters to my dear father, who knows more about them than I could ever hope to.”
“But surely you have an opinion! Tyler is a states’ rights man. We shall never end the evils of slavery with a man such as he in office. Slave power is arrogant, is jealous and intrusive, is cruel, is despotic, not only over the slave but over the community, the state. Don’t you agree?”
Miss Royster’s downy expression turned bristly. “Why, I’m sure, Miss Van Lew, my father treats our slaves with great kindness and shows a great deal of forbearance for their ignorance.”
“But—”
“We must pity the dark-skinned races, Miss Van Lew, and look to their welfare, for otherwise they shall continue to exist in the most primitive manner without benefit of Christianity and civilization . . . and without this delicious punch.” Miss Royster expelled an audible sigh of relief when John Newton reappeared bearing punch and an invitation to dance, rescuing her from his impertinent sister. Lizzie sputtered—and vowed never to exchange another word with that insipid creature.
Lizzie’s store of patience—meager under the best of circumstances—was exhausted, and Miss Adelaide Royster did little to restock it. The family had come to the Springs at the urging of old John Van Lew’s doctor, who, void of any particular knowledge about what to do, had prescribed taking the waters to restore the ailing patriarch to health. Both Anna and young John Newton saw the excursion as a vacation, a time for balls, soirees, teas, flirting, dancing—pursuits Lizzie regarded as so much taradiddle.
While Anna Paulina was the beauty of the family, leaving convoys of heartstruck beaux in her wake wherever she dipped her oars into society waters, and while John Newton, with his dark good looks and a smile that revealed a row of impossibly white teeth, would in time succeed to their father’s thriving hardware business—“fine pens and pocket Cutlery, Scissors, Razors, Bowie, Dirk and other Knives, Knives and Forks with Ivory, Stag, Buffalo and Bone Handles, ALSO Anvils, Vices, Files, &c. of the very best manufacture”—Lizzie was her father’s secret favorite. She it was whom old John had turned over to the Philadelphia Quakers for a college education, confident that his money would be well spent. One of Lizzie’s school chums—in fact, her only school chum, one whose home was a station on the Underground Railroad—had sent her the Dollar Newspaper, knowing she’d be interested in the prize-winning story by a coming author it contained.
Father and daughter often ambled through the gardens at their Church Hill home in Richmond of an evening, discussing the books they’d read. Sometimes they were accompanied by Lizzie’s mother, Eliza, whose eagerness to put forward opinions met with John’s approval, though it would have been regarded as a dreadful peculiarity among her distaff neighbors. They compassed Gibbons’ Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, de Toqueville’s Democracy in America, Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome and Scott’s The Lay of the Last Minstrel, the speeches of Whig hero Henry Clay, the essays of Mr. Emerson, and the poetry of Mr. Bryant. The curriculum even included lighter literature, such as Esquemeling’s rousing Bucaniers of America: Or, a True Account of the Most Remarkable Assaults Committed of late Years upon the Coasts of the West Indies, which John had acquired in leather, two volumes, quarto, for the family’s extensive library in Richmond.
The one issue they avoided was slavery. Her father, with most of his business associates and the family’s Church Hill neighbors, was a Whig—and a slave owner. The Whigs, though, squabbled. Those of a mind with old John had grumbled and growled about the efforts of Northerners, greasy with manufacture and sullied with commercial Bills of Exchange, to bully the Southern planter class, though the targets of their grumbling and growling were just as often fellow Whigs who sympathized, sometimes grudgingly so, with the abolitionists and were coming around to the belief that slavery was a very peculiar institution whose peculiarities made it no longer tenable.
And, they didn’t discuss the book by the ingenious little Frenchman, sent to her too by the Underground Railroad chum in Philadelphia, which Lizzie consulted faithfully in writing letters she sent by return post.
“Lizzie, I do declare, what is your mind wandering on about now? Put that silly newspaper away. And when are you going to go change? You know we’re invited to Mrs. Beauregard’s at-home this evening”—Mrs. Beauregard was the wife of Captain Pierre Gustave T. Beauregard, who some years later would rise to the rank of general and exercise his generalship in the Richmond environs—“and you’re going to want to look your best, which you’ll never do if you appear in that trumpery gown you’re wearing, which should long ago have been sent to the rag man or given to one of the slaves.” Lizzie continued to study her newspaper, marking passages with a fragment of a pencil.
Anna glanced at her sister and added languidly, “And you’re going to want to do something with that frightful hair of yours, or you’re going to drive that eminently suitable Mr. Randolph right back to Atlanta and the waiting arms of another woman. And Lizzie, do try to keep your opinions to yourself this evening. Mr. Randolph, I’m sure, does not want to listen to you chattering on about states’ rights and the slaves and nullification and I don’t know what maggot you get into your head. These are not fit topics for a refined Southern lady, as you’ve heard me say many times before.”
Another sigh escaped Lizzie, though another mosquito was less fortunate. Yes, she’d heard it all before. And if young Mr. Randolph, with his whelplike grin and flyswatter ears, had no interest in the maggots that bored ever deeper into her head with each passing year, then she had no interest in young Mr. Randolph.
“Go, shoo,” said Anna, and Lizzie took flight.
As was customary, Lizzie’s toilet occupied her for only a few minutes, and she left her room to join her mother in preparation for the evening’s fête. As was equally customary, Anna’s toilet required more care. After she was convinced that she’d made herself presentable, curiosity overcame her, and she stole into Lizzie’s room.
She spotted Lizzie’s newspaper and muttered, “Now what could that girl possibly find so fascinating in this wearisome thing?” She shook out the pages and allowed her eyes to roam over the columns of close type until she came to the passages Lizzie had marked.
“53‡‡†305))6* . . .”
“What is this fiddledeedee?”
“These characters, as any one might readily guess, form a cipher. . . .”
“Cipher . . .?”
“Circumstances, and a certain bias of mind, have led me to take interest in such riddles.”
“Riddles indeed! The only riddle is Lizzie and her crochets!”
“. . . indeed in all cases of secret writing . . .”
Anna found the top of the story’s first column, where the epigraph read, “What ho! This fellow is dancing mad.” The story, titled “The Gold Bug,” was written by a fellow, himself clearly dancing mad, named Poe.
The next day, a mailbag containing the following letter was loaded onto a Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad train bound for Fredericksburg, Virginia. The letter was written in a scratchy, angular scrawl that often defeated the best efforts of Lizzie’s correspondents to decipher it, though in a day or two the recipient of this letter would willingly persevere.
July 12th, 1843
Midnight
My dearest Cousin Charles—
I’ve just returned with Anna, John Newton, and Mama from one of the well-attended “musical evenings” hosted by one Mrs. Marie Laure Villeré Beauregard—if you can credit such a name!—which consisted of a French singer with an unctuous voice and equally unctuous hair. My ears continue to throb!
And I continue to endure this dreadful place! Why the doctors insist on sending the infirm to places such as this rather than allowing them to convalesce in the comfort of their own homes is beyond my feeble comprehension. Father bears up, though, and perhaps the waters are doing him some good, for he walks every day and has even suggested that he might be persuaded to take part in a game of lawn croquet—
Lizzie here had paused over her pen and reflected that while her mother’s fretfulness and unremitting attentions to her father chafed him at times, she saw the look of fondness in his eyes and thanked God she’d been given parents whose marriage was a model for what a marriage should be. She habitually despaired of ever forging such a bond with a man, though she occasionally envisioned a less blank futurity where foolish dreams lived. She resumed her pen.
Before I prattle on further, let me thank you for the book of Shakespeare’s sonnets, which I read every evening before I retire. Imagine my astonishment when I turned the leaf to Sonnet 29 and discovered that you had underscored the lines—
Yet in these thought myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate.
Why Charles, I do believe that you procured this book for another lady with a pert turned-up nose and rosy cheeks, marked the passage while pining for her, then forgot yourself and sent it to me instead! You must be more careful lest one day you screw up your courage, hurl yourself at the feet of a lady, and address her by the wrong name!
Lizzie here paused to mutter maledictions against the rival of her fancies.
Speaking of other ladies—I do believe that were you here, you would be much enamored with an exotic Spanish lady who walks about in her lace and sequined dress and high mantilla. She makes such a sight, with her folding fan, her reddened lips, and ebony hair and eyes. John Newton, foolish boy, aspired to a flirtation with her—and even attempted to cultivate a full beard when he discovered that she was a full ten years older than he, tho’ he shaved it off in despair when he learned that she is married to a mysterious Turk—who is rumored to have made his fortune in the coffee trade, augmenting that fortune with money he should have been paying to the customs agents he was unable to find amidst the rocks on isolated coastal beaches in the middle of the night.
And then there is one Mr. Graves, who, if you can credit it, is suspected of having committed a murder! At every party and ball, the subject arises in whispered conversations when he enters a room, and the contending stories are testimony to people’s willingness to believe anything. One holds that he murdered his wife for her fortune. But the most interesting tale is that Mr. Graves had crept into the arms and affections of the wife of a judge in Georgia and was observed, his britches all of a heap on the floor, at the lady’s mansion by a window washer on a ladder—
Lizzie blushed. Then chortled.
—who then attempted to blackmail Mr. Graves and paid the price for his avarice. But this is all scuttlebutt, and I’m sure none of it is true.
And speaking of scuttlebutt, what is the tale that has come to my ears on the gossamer wings of Rumor—with the assistance of the United States postal system? I am very sorry to hear that a young gentleman, one whom I esteem highly, very highly, was loudly intoxicated in Fredericksburg the fourth of July and remained so all day and disgraced himself at the dinner and ball—but I am at a loss who to think it is—will you not tell me? It think it must be some mistake. It could not have been you. Could it?
Oh, Charles, I do miss your kind face and the lively conversations we’ve had about our Country and its future, and especially the ill feeling between the Northern States, where I met many ardent opponents of slavery when I went to school there, and the Southern States, which I deeply love but fear have long taken a wrong course they will stubbornly persist in following. And of course dear Virginia, which straddles the two struggling halves of our Nation and seems uncertain which path to take. I hear such enmity spoken, and even talk—faint tho’ it is—of withdrawing from the Union, and I see men’s eyes flared with the red light of hatred. That cannot happen, can it? It would be madness, and I fear that we all shall pay a terrible price for the sin of slavery. I long to hear your thoughts on the matter, and to feel the touch of your hand when we meet again.
Your affectionate Cousin,
Lizzie
P.S. Tell me that you long for the touch of my hand, if you do. But I should be . . . disappointed if you do not. But what am I saying? Why should you?
Lizzie blushed again.
Richmond
Autumn 1843
Lizzie survived the mosquitoes of White Sulphur Springs—or perhaps it should be said that the mosquitoes survived Lizzie—and she recovered the use of her ears after Mrs. Marie Laure Villeré Beauregard’s musical evening. Young Mr. Randolph returned to his home in Atlanta and found happiness in being wedded to the daughter of a prosperous lumber merchant, who took him into the business. Mr. Graves evaded the clutches of the law, and the exotic Spanish lady left for . . . wherever exotic Spanish ladies go when they’re not putting themselves on display at fashionable spas. Lizzie still studied the book by the ingenious little Frenchman, consulting it whenever she corresponded with the Underground Railroad chum in Philadelphia, who reported with satisfaction that traffic was up, news that never failed to kindle Lizzie’s spirits.
Old John Van Lew was less fortunate than the mosquitoes. Although he seemed to have benefited from the waters of the springs, his condition continued to deteriorate, and in September he was gathered to his fathers.
His death was occasion for another letter—one of several that had passed between the two—from Lizzie to Charles, who over the summer months had enjoyed playful evening walks among the roses and magnolias, the dogwoods and flourishing blue bellflowers, of the Church Hill gardens.
October 4th, 1843
Church Hill
My dearest Charles—
Oh, how I longed to have you at my side at dear Papa’s funeral, but I impute no blame for your absence, particularly with the state of the roads through all this dismal rain.
Papa died with calm composure. He had never been a particularly religious man, but in his final days, as the notice in the Richmond Enquirer so kindly said, he “repeatedly conversed of late with his family on his soul’s salvation and eagerly listened to their instructions as they pointed out to him the way of salvation through the blood of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Our friends have been kind and solicitous for our welfare, but our material wants, at least, are well provided for through Papa’s industry and irreproachable character. Mama remains desolate, yet she takes some small comfort in the remembrance of Father’s kindness, and Father’s will has given her weighty matters to occupy her mind.
There shall be no “widow’s third” for Mama. Father generously left nearly his entire fortune to her and gave her absolute control over the whole of it. In this he defied convention, which normally dictates that she would have only the use of the property during her lifetime. To me, Anna, and John Newton he bequeathed $10,000 each—such a fortune! Oh, Charles, I have such plans for that money, but I had especially hoped that it would help to hasten an event which we have discussed—tho’ you should know that Papa bequeathed that money “free and exempt from the control or use of any husband,” in the dusty words of his will. I shall have more to say about this presently.
The only matter that saddens me concerns the slaves. The will bequeathed the slaves to Mama and said that she could do with them as she wished. Would that Papa had not had second thoughts, for I’m certain that Mama would have granted them their freedom immediately. We have always been of one mind about this. But we were distressed to learn that Papa had appended a codicil to his will revoking that provision and giving Mama only the use of the slaves and their increase.
Alas, she cannot free them—nor sell them, not that she ever would. So while they remain our “property”—oh, how I loathe that word, as tho’ these men and women were cattle or fire irons—we shall do what we can to loosen the bonds of their servitude. I’m resolved that one of the girls, Mary Jane, to whom I confess to having an almost sisterly affection, shall be baptized at St. John’s—an event which has been delayed far too long, as Mary Jane is already seven years old. I’m sure our Church Hill neighbors will be shocked and ask us why we are not having her baptized at the First African Baptist Church the free Negroes attend. I believe fervently, tho’, that Our Lord cares not for the brick and mortar where his brothers and sisters gather. Indeed, perhaps this all works out for the best, for as you know, a hateful Virginia law requires a newly freed slave to leave the Commonwealth within one year. We shall find a way to get around Virginia law and Papa’s will to do the only right thing.
Charles—my best Charles—Papa’s death has been an occasion for great sadness, but we were resigned to his passing, for as you know he had not been well for some years. Now that the initial shock has passed, I find my thoughts turning to another matter. After you confessed to me that your fondest wish was to cast your lot in life with me, I felt blessed that Providence had sent me someone with whom I could share great work. For we have a Responsibility to do so, do we not? We have been favored with means and comfort, and we bear an obligation to use those means to improve the lot of others, the poor laborers, the sick, and especially the Negroes whom we’ve reduced to chattel.
But such happiness is not to be thought of now. Oh, Charles, can you wait for your Lizzie—if I do not flatter myself that you still esteem me so? We must allow the turmoil of Papa’s death to pass before we can contemplate an event which I’ve looked forward to with anticipation of happiness.
‘Till then, I remain your most affectionate,
Lizzie
P.S. I wear the silver locket you gave me next to my heart. I hope to pass it to a daughter or granddaughter someday, when we’ve grown old in each other’s company but never old in each other’s esteem.
Lizzie wrote with one hand and fingered the locket with the other. And as midnight shadows conspired on the walls of her room, a dim fear passed through her—that the locket would never so pass.
Chapter 2
Richmond
1848
Golden summers surrendered to copper autumns that passed through Richmond, their warm rains watering the roses and magnolias, the dogwoods and flourishing blue bellflowers, of the Church Hill gardens.
And Lizzie remained a maiden, unlike her sister, who bid highly for the regard of a Philadelphia doctor and won the auction. John Newton, now a reluctant hardware merchant, his leather apron and inked fingers inconsistent with his views of male fashion, would have to wait another six years before finding matrimonial bliss, though the bliss was short-lived as he learned that his young bride was a fire-breathing secessionist.
One morning in the autumn of 1848, Anna and her mother loitered in the dining room of the Church Hill mansion over the remains of a late breakfast. Both had picked at it with little appetite. Anna poked at her eggs, then threw the fork down, rose from her chair, and took a fitful turn about the room, pausing absently at a window to watch a squirrel shelling a nut. She turned to Eliza, who was staring with reddened eyes at her plate, her hands knotted under her chin.
Both women were dressed in deep black.
“Oh, Mother, how shall Lizzie bear this burden? I don’t know how I shall bear it myself. The poor man. Poor Lizzie! To think they were engaged, and we didn’t even know. How did they keep that a secret all this time? And why?”
“I don’t know, my child, I don’t know. It seems too much for any person to bear.”
“What will she do? She’ll never marry now. Who will have her now that she’s thirty?”
“I don’t think Lizzie has ever wanted to be married just to be married or because others expected it of her.” Eliza pushed aside her plate and pinched the bridge of her nose, shaking her head. “She found in Charles the one man who might have suited a girl with her peculiar temperament.”
“Cholera!” Anna exclaimed for the hundredth time, the word the latest in a fusillade of verbal cannon balls. “Who would have thought that such a vigorous man could have been felled by such a scourge! I still cannot credit it. Cholera strikes at the poor in backward nations, not in such places as Fredericksburg.”
“Oh, my dear, disease knows no place, nor does it consult the victim’s balance with his banker.” Eliza shook her head in bewilderment and fought back a tear.
“Where shall she live? How shall she live?”
“Well of course, dear, she shall remain here with me.”
“Is there enough money for the two of you to live here and keep up the house? You know how Lizzie spends hers on food and clothing for the poor. If you face any financial difficulties, perhaps I could talk to—”
“Thank you, my dear, but we shall be fine. You know that I’ve sold some of the property which your papa acquired, and I’m told by a reputable agent that Henrico is worth at least three thousand dollars.”
The Henrico farm was a plantation north of Richmond that old John Van Lew had purchased years before and that indeed Eliza would sell some years later, though she’d retain a financial interest in it, and it would be worked in part by Van Lew slaves. Old John’s acres had increased as Richmond grew, and already Eliza had sold several of them, some at hefty market prices but others at only a fraction of their value. Lizzie had insisted she sell some of these smaller properties to free Negroes for next to nothing as a way of providing them with respectable homes.
“But you’re paying the slaves—not that you regard them as slaves, else you wouldn’t be paying them, I suppose. You must be feeling the pinch.”
“Yes, we are paying them. And no, we’re not ‘feeling the pinch,’ as you so inelegantly put it.”
Eliza laughed to herself bitterly. John had owned as many as twenty slaves: cooks, gardeners, butlers, maids, stable boys, and the men who worked the Henrico plantation. The question became what to do with them all. Eliza would have freed them, but as Lizzie had known all along, she had no authority legally to do so under the terms of her husband’s will.
So she and Lizzie turned to a dodge that other like-minded families employed. They allowed their slaves to hire themselves out and earn wages, although they kept this bit of information from their respectable slave-owning neighbors. In many cases, two families pooled their wits and hired each other’s slaves to perform the work their own would normally have done. Bondsmen could then earn wages—modest to be sure, but wages nevertheless—away from their former slave quarters, move about the city more or less at will, and take part in the joys and sorrows of the African community.
Such a system, though, had its own pitfalls, especially, added Eliza, “if the mistress is a forgetful old woman such as your mother. I was fined by the court last month—ten dollars, the extortionists demanded!—for allowing Anderson to hire himself out. He had his pass, signed by me, all in good order—except that the pass had expired.”
“But we still haven’t answered the question, what are we going to do with Lizzie?”
“Anna, what an absurd question. No one ‘does’ anything with Lizzie. Lizzie will ‘do’ for herself. Give her time, my dear, give her time.”
Anna went in search of Lizzie.
She’d seen little of Lizzie in private since they’d arrived back home from the funeral in Fredericksburg the day before, and the two had had little opportunity to talk since the delivery of the telegram informing them of Charles’s death. On the train, Lizzie had slept fitfully, or stared out the window. At the services for Charles, she’d maintained a dismal silence. Anna kept her distance out of both respect for Lizzie’s grief and fear that anything she said would have sounded feeble and intrusive. Anna worried about her sister, though, and was determined to crack the carapace of grief encasing her.
Anna lacked her sister’s education and powers of intellect. She rarely gave any but the most passing thought to the great issues that surrounded them. While Lizzie fretted about the state of the nation, Anna fretted about the state of her gown. But she deeply loved her sister and secretly admired her fervency and concern for others less fortunate. She wished she could talk books the way Lizzie could. She would order a pot of sweet tea, curl up in the best chair in the library, her knees tucked up, and resolutely launch herself into a volume she’d heard Lizzie talk about with approval—and it made her head ache. She wished she could engage men in earnest conversation about politics and industry, about the debates in the Commonwealth legislature reported in the newspapers, but when she tried, she always made a muddle of it and found she could not talk sense.
Anna was percipient enough to know that Lizzie’s powers were not hers. Yet while she mocked them, especially to Lizzie, she did so out of a belief that if Lizzie were just a little more like herself, willing to make herself pleasing to men, she would be able to find joy as a wife and mother and make a gracious life for her family rather than for everyone else’s family. Lizzie, not she, could be the mother of eminent physicians, scholars, writers, perhaps a minister or a prosperous attorney, and she saw Lizzie’s failure to marry and bear children as a debit in the account books of the future, to be paid by the next generation.
She climbed the stairs and knocked gently at the door of her sister’s bedroom, but there was no answer. She opened the door and looked inside, but the room was empty. She checked the library and music room and was puzzled that Lizzie was not to be found in either of these favorite haunts. She was about to abandon her search when, as she was descending the staircase, she caught a glimpse of Lizzie through the tall mullioned window that looked out over the James River. Lizzie was in the garden.
Anna followed her outdoors. Her sister was on her knees, tending to one of the flowerbeds. Lizzie impatiently brushed a stray lock of hair out of her face, then thrust a trowel into the moist earth. She was planting a row of weigela along the border of the bed; in the spring, the plants would produce showy pink flowers.
“Lizzie, dear, should you be doing this now? Let one of the men do it. You should rest.” Anna knelt on the grass next to her, uncharacteristically indifferent to the possibility of soiling her dress.
“Anna, I have done nothing but rest—as though resting will erase everything that has happened. I need to do something. I believe if I tried to sit still, my limbs would refuse their cooperation and I should go mad.”
“You know I’m concerned about you. I believe we should talk about Charles, even if doing so is painful. If we try to bury our memories of him along with his ashes, nothing can come of it but more sorrow. Oh, Lizzie, you must have loved him so! We all suspected as much, but you hardly ever spoke of him.”
Lizzie lowered a cutting into the hole she had just dug and gently scraped the loose soil around it and firmed it. She swiped at her forehead with the back of her hand and reached for another cutting, a silver locket dangling beneath her chin. After a long silence, she said only:
“I think in many ways he reminded me of Father.”
“You can imagine how astonished we were when you told us that you and Charles were engaged to be married. Why did you keep your engagement a secret?”
“We didn’t keep it a secret. We simply didn’t tell anyone.”
“My dear, I confess I fail to see the difference.”
“We weren’t hiding it. Oh, I don’t know, Anna, Papa died and Mama seemed so desolate—and then so overwhelmed with looking after Papa’s affairs. John Newton was rushed headlong into Father’s business, you married, and everything seemed to be at sixes and sevens. It somehow seemed easier to let matters rest as they were. Charles never pushed me, and for that I was grateful. It just seemed easier that way.”
“We just want you to be happy, Lizzie.”
Lizzie looked up at her sister, her expression scalded by pain and loss.
“Happiness? Tell me, please, what happiness is. I begin to think that happiness is the outcome of nothing more than having a bad memory. When you recline your head at night and are sure your husband is safe and hasn’t had a horrible accident in his carriage while off tending to a patient on a rainy night, then speak to me of happiness.”
“Oh, Lizzie, don’t!”
“Or when the child growing in your womb is safely delivered and has ten fingers and ten toes, then speak to me of happiness.” Lizzie turned away and choked back a wrenching sob—the first tears Anna had seen her shed.
“Oh, Anna, forgive me,” she wailed. “I don’t know what I’m saying. All seems so uncertain. Everything changes, nothing lasts. Our country is coming asunder, and I feel powerless to stop it.”
Anna sighed. No matter what was happening on the solid soil of Church Hill, Lizzie was always gazing off into the vaporous distance.
“I know, dear, I know.” She put her arm around her sister, who melted against her shoulder. “Come inside with me. It looks to start raining soon anyhow, and I’m chilled to the bone. Let’s have a nice pot of tea, and you can tell me all about Charles and everything he said and how he proposed and what your plans were, and I can tell you how handsome I thought he was and that I was even a little bit jealous of you. Imagine me! The Virginia belle! Jealous of my dear frumpy sister Lizzie.”
Lizzie managed a weak smile. Anna was often foolish, but she was no fool. She rose to her feet, dropped the trowel in her hand to the ground, and allowed Anna to lead her into the house. Just as they entered, a steady rain began to fall, watering the roses and magnolias, the dogwoods and flourishing blue bellflowers, of the Church Hill gardens and, on the other side of town, the soil that blanketed old John Van Lew.
More years passed, the searing cold and damp of winters resolving into emerald springs, and the weigela blossomed.
Lizzie to all appearances recovered from her loss, yet she went around bolting the doors and latching the windows of her inner mansion to shut out any possibility that felon joy would break and enter. She resisted Anna’s efforts to encourage her to talk about Charles. His name was never mentioned. It was as though he had never existed. Or, as Anna put it, as though a veil had been drawn over the entire affair.
She drifted about the Church Hill grounds and the hallways of the mansion like a restless spirit, doomed for a certain term to walk the night. She tried, with indifferent success, to play the part of doting aunt to Anna’s and John’s children—though the children were a little frightened of her, and she seemed to get on better with a neighbor girl with flashing green eyes—and she helped her mother with her business affairs. And, she worked tirelessly in the gardens—so much so that year upon year they won awards from the city’s Horticultural Society.
She met with abolitionists and played hostess to a famed author who went in for women’s rights. On Lizzie’s invitation, Edgar Allen Poe sobered up enough to recite his verses to a select audience in the Church Hill drawing room. Lizzie clenched when he appeared in with a young woman whom he introduced as Sarah Royster on his arm, though she unclenched when she loosened his tongue with generous applications of brandy during a private conversation about “The Gold Bug” in the library. She attended debates of the Virginia legislature, always sitting, of course, in the separate women’s section of the gallery. She visited the Negro sections of Richmond, bearing money and food for those in need. Few blacks who lived in the area did not know about “Miz Lizzie” and her efforts to improve their lot—borne not of a desire to burnish her own soul, as was the case with some reformers who spoke the cant of abolition but would never have shared a board with a Negro—but out of genuine concern for those she met.
She continued to find ways to help escaped slaves flee to the North—with the aid of the Philadelphia chum, with whom she exchanged notes and letters, all written and read with the further aid of the ingenious Frenchman and his tattered book. She joined a quilting circle, but what the authorities didn’t know and never learned was that into the design of the quilts the ladies sewed patterns, even maps, that told escaped slaves where and when to go. A quilt hanging on a line or porch railing for “airing” and embellished with a straight arrow told the slave which of several predetermined routes to take in escaping from the city, depending on which way the quilt was turned.
A crooked arrow, on the other hand, signaled danger. It told a runaway slave in hiding that it was not safe to proceed. The ladies relied on Lizzie and her ever present companion, Mary Jane, to circulate the necessary instructions through the black community.
Lizzie, never very handy with her needle, one evening announced, “Ladies, if you ever need a crooked arrow, perhaps you should assign to me the task of sewing a straight one!”
On July 29, 1861, just weeks after the first clash of arms in Virginia at the Battle of Bethel Creek, and just days after the Confederates had routed the Federals at the Battle of Bull Run and herded hundreds of captured Federal troops into Richmond’s prisons, the following paragraphs appeared in the pages of the Richmond Enquirer:
Two ladies, a mother and a daughter, living on Church Hill, have lately attracted public notice by their assiduous attentions to the Yankee prisoners confined in this City. Whilst every true woman in this community has been busy making articles of comfort or necessity for our troops—
The writer was correct in his facts. Women throughout the South were lauded in the press and from the hustings as pure ministering angels who spurred their heroic men into battle and daily displayed their devotion to the sick, the weary, and the wounded.
The Church Hill matrons were no different. A deputation approached the Van Lew front door, like a muster of peacocks, to ask Lizzie and her mother about sewing shirts for South Carolina troops who had just arrived in Virginia, apparently shirtless. They were confounded when they met with indignant refusal, though the Van Lew women later regretted their impolitic decision and camouflaged themselves by taking flowers, books, and foodstuffs to the Rebel troops encamped at the Old Fair Grounds in Richmond. They even for a time took in an untidy Confederate captain named George Gibbs and his family as boarders at the mansion.
— Whilst every true woman in this community has been busy making articles of comfort or necessity for our troops, these two women have been expending their opulent means in aiding and giving comfort to the miscreants who have invaded our sacred soil, bent on raping and murder, the desolation of our homes and sacred places, and the ruin and dishonor of our families.
The largest human charity can find ample scope in kindness and attention to our own poor fellows. The Yankee wounded have been put under charge of competent surgeons and provided with good nurses.—
“Which explains why so many are dying!” Lizzie fumed.
—This is more than they have any right to expect, and the course of these two females—
“These two females indeed!” Lizzie exclaimed. “Gracious God in heaven, how these men can patronize!”
—cannot but be regarded as an evidence of sympathy amounting to an endorsation—
Which literate Richmonders all agreed the newspaper’s editor should have amended to the more felicitous “endorsement.”
—of the cause and conduct of these Northern Vandals.
Not to be scooped, the Richmond Dispatch threatened that the women would be “exposed and dealt with as alien enemies to the country.”
A growing number of Richmonders nodded agreement with the Dispatch’s sentence. Lizzie was an enemy of the Confederacy and an alien in her own country, though she was indifferent to the slights of her neighbors and often quoted Psalm 31 to herself: “I was a reproach among all mine enemies, but especially among my neighbours, and a fear to mine acquaintance: they that did see me without fled from me. I am forgotten as a dead man out of mind: I am like a broken vessel.”
Lizzie tried to avert suspicion, but she was watched. Armed sentries were placed around Church Hill, particularly after the escape of a Colonel Abel Streight and seventeen other Union prisoners, who fanned out over the countryside and eventually crossed to the Northern lines. The men eluded capture only because Lizzie persuaded a sympathetic newspaper editor to print an official dispatch from General Benjamin Butler, commander of the Union’s Army of the James. The dispatch, provided by an Associated Press agent and first printed in the New York Times, reported that the men had arrived safely in Washington. On the day the dispatch appeared on the city’s increasingly barren breakfast tables, the men were hiding in Lizzie’s attic and other homes in and around Richmond. The dispatch, written in Lizzie’s scratchy, angular scrawl, was entirely fake.
Over the next year, the population at Confederate prisons in Richmond, prisons with names like Libby, Belle Isle, and Castle Thunder, had swollen like rotting carcasses.
Union loyalists in the city had looked forward to deliverance by General George McClellan. As was his habit, McClellan dithered, once prompting President Abraham Lincoln to ask McClellan in a letter if he, the president, could borrow the general’s army since he, McClellan, wasn’t using it.
Finally, the Union launched the Peninsular Campaign in late May with the Battle of Seven Pines, just an hour north of Richmond. In June, Robert E. Lee crossed the Chickahominy River to meet Union forces at the Battle of Oak Grove, the first of the Seven Days Battles. For days the air around Richmond was acrid with smoke and the stench of spent gunpowder, and cannon fire rumbled in the distance as Richmond’s citizens anxiously went about their business—or rode out to the tops of surrounding hills to witness the battles, to the accompaniment of shrimps and champagne.
Union losses were heavy, and thousands were captured and herded into the prisons, where floggings were more regular than meals. Rations were skimpy, and blankets were skimpier. The men were denied access to the outdoor jakes after nightfall, so the prisons stank of human waste. Hundreds died of disease and hunger. Survivors feared death from boredom.
The Richmond underground, with Lizzie in the vanguard, did what it could to ease the suffering. Its members smuggled in money prisoners could use to bribe the guards for clothing and food. Lizzie secreted coins and banknotes in the bottoms of lunch pails carried by Negroes who worked for her and her mother. These men, posing as workers in and around the prisons, were Lizzie’s eyes and ears. While many of the Confederate guards were driven by bald avarice, many others needed the money, finding the $11 a month paid to privates, $13 to corporals, unequal to the task of feeding their families and often failing to appear in their pockets for months at a time. Some were even secretly sympathetic to the Union cause but had been pressed into military service by the troop-starved Confederacy.
Even youngsters helped. They arrived at the prison gates bearing baked goods that, they said, they hoped to trade for a souvenir button or uniform insignia from a grateful captured soldier. Inside their packages was money, sometimes packets of medicine, and always notes of encouragement. These children left with notes in their shoes with information about Confederate troop movements and fortifications that recently captured men hoped would be of use to Union commanders. The source of much of this information was an agent Lizzie had placed in the prison as a clerk.
And of course a pretty girl with an ingratiating manner, a well-turned ankle, and perhaps just a whisper of petticoat could gain access to places denied to matrons and spinsters like Lizzie, or to dour ministers trying to heal souls and earnest young doctors trying to heal bodies.
Lizzie wasn’t content to depute this work to others. She became renowned for her custards, which she carried to the prisons in a double boiler dish and which invariably contained information and encouragement for the prisoners. Once, warned that a guard planned a thorough inspection of the dish, she filled the bottom with boiling water, using her shawl to protect her hands as she handed the dish to the guard, who howled in pain as Lizzie feigned apology—and who henceforth allowed all custards to pass unchallenged.
Her brazenness knew no limits. She invited Confederate generals and colonels to tea, taking secret delight in her knowledge that the smuggled tea she placed before them, and that she sequestered in a certain canister for the purpose, had been adulterated by disreputable British merchants, as was a common and unsavory practice among them, with sheep’s dung. As Richmond authorities began to watch her movements, she appeared at the Confederate White House to petition Jefferson Davis for protection.
Negroes working clean-up duty at the military prisons would point her out to the Yankees as their best friend, and their best hope. With a battered bonnet planted at a most unfashionable angle on her head and her hair pursuing its own capricious courses, she paced of a Sunday morning up and down the streets around the prisons, a handkerchief in her hand, her eyes now sunken, muttering and mumbling and singing and holding imaginary conversations, often to the laughter and jeering of the guards, who called her Crazy Bett.
Thus it was that Elizabeth Van Lew—the refined daughter of one of Richmond’s leading families, the inheritrix of a respectable fortune, a resident of one of the most opulent mansions in the city’s most elegant neighborhood, a broken vessel who had found love and lost it, an eloquent opponent of slavery and a passionate supporter of the Union who had followed the political debates of the 1850s with keen interest and cried “My country, oh, my country” when the smoke of battle first rose over the rent nation—thus Elizabeth Van Lew became known as Crazy Bett, the disheveled, ill-dressed woman who hoodwinked her opponents by mumbling to herself like a madwoman as she went about the business of fighting the Confederacy in the only way her skirts would allow.
And who introduced herself thus to two naked men hiding in her attic.
Chapter 3
Richmond
December 1863
“Blast and damnation, Jim, shut up! They’ll hear you rattling about, and if they nab us, they’ll throw us back into that rat hell of a prison.”
The man’s hoarse whisper waded through the dim light. He was peering out a tiny window, alert for signs of movement in the narrow alleyway that stretched left and right. He used the cuff of his jacket to wipe away the fog of his breath on the window, but dampness conspired with years of grime to frustrate his efforts. A dog barked savagely in a nearby yard, and the man and his companion could hear a train rumble its colicky way into Richmond on tracks that lay in the distance along Broad Street.
Probably a troop transport train, the man thought. That’s about all the trains are used for these days. Old Ruth sounds like he’s taking his good old time, bless his sneaky heart.
The man smiled wryly at the thought of Samuel Ruth, by day an apparent Confederate sympathizer but by night an agent of the North. The old Jew did everything he could to dismay Confederate authorities, who’d impressed him and the services of the Richmond Fredericksburg & Potomac Railroad—known to common folk as the “Rich Folks & Pedigrees” line—for military purposes. He could look a Rebel commander straight in the eye, swear he’d deliver troops or supplies on schedule, then find a way to bollix things up by misplacing paperwork or sending out one of Lizzie Van Lew’s men to smash holes in water tanks, slew rails, or pour sand into the pistons of engines. The next morning he’d blame it on the Yanks—with perfect truth, since he was a loyal Unionist.
The second man, the source of the racket fraying the nerves of the first, was scratching with grim resolve at bloody ankles. All the while he grunted, moaned, cursed, and muttered imprecations against a deity that saw fit to create unseen creatures whose sole purpose seemed to be to bedevil humans, though he took some comfort in the fact that the same deity had created fingernails to equal the odds.
“Is that an order, sair?” he whispered. “Because if ‘tis, sair, under normal caircumstances, I’d be maist happy to follow a lawful order. But the caircumstances Providence has placed us in are nae normal. For the fact o’ the matter is, I canna hold still. ‘Tis the goddamn sons-of-whores gallinippers. They’d like to chew me into a pile o’ runny porritch and spit me out. Jesus in heaven, what is this fustian we’re wearin’? I’m just ready to gie these vermin a parole.”
The two men huddled in a dilapidated tool shed, doing all they could to stop themselves from stamping their feet against the cold. To that end they passed back and forth a flask of applejack made from the contents of a barrel of cider one of Lizzie Van Lew’s Negroes had smuggled into the prison, leaving the prison’s carpenters inexplicably short on their requisition of nails. By letting the top freeze over several nights, then tossing aside the ice, the men produced a decoction that bore a passing likeness to liquor. They were outfitted in serviceable gray trousers and jackets, hand sewn out of blankets and smuggled into the prison by black workers.
“I told you, Doc. The clothes came from that society lady. Elizabeth Van Lew—the one the guards call Crazy Bett. You want to give the lice a parole? Go ahead. That just might be amusing. I’m sure Miss Van Lew might be more inclined to take you in if you’re naked. I hear she’s unmarried and not a bad looker—or at least used to be. Just shut up and hold still.” Then, “Wait, shush!”
The first man put up a warning finger and cocked his ear to the window. He was of middle height and handsome in a craggy sort of way, with dusty blond hair and a mustache he’d kept trimmed with a piece of broken glass. He could charm a snake out of its skin—or a lady out of her virtue, though most of the ladies he comported with at Madam Wilton’s Private Residence for Ladies in Washington, one of the noncombat units making up General Hooker’s Division, had little virtue out of which to be charmed, adhering as they did to the belief that the best way to avoid being called a flirt is to yield easily.