MAY GOD BE WITH YOU AND YOUR COUNTRY IN YOUR HOUR OF SORROW. YOU ARE IN MY PRAYERS. The printed signature read, A. LINCOLN.
Another came from Clarksdale, Mississippi:
REQUEST YOUR KIND PERMISSION TO RESCIND MY RESIGNATION FROM CONFEDERATE STATES CAVALRY SO I CAN LEAD AGAINST THE MURDERERS WHO WOULD SET AT NAUGHT OUR REPUBLIC AND ITS INSTITUTIONS—N. B. FORREST.
“How shall I respond to this one from Forrest, sir?” asked Charles Marshall, who had resumed his wartime post as Lee’s aide. By his tone, he wanted nothing to do with the Patriot leader.
But Lee said, “Answer, ‘Your country is ever grateful for your service, Lieutenant General Forrest.’ He and I may fail to see eye-to-eye on a great many issues, but hypocrisy has never been numbered among his vices. And against the men of America Will Break, I fear we may need the most able military talent available to us. Do you deny Forrest’s native gifts along those lines?” Marshall shook his head, but his mouth was set in a narrow line of disapproval as he wrote down Lee’s reply and took it to the telegraph office.
That afternoon, Lee endured his wife’s funeral service. Bishop Johns, one arm in a sling from the wound he himself had taken up on the platform, spoke of how all-wise Providence had Summoned Mary from the world of men, of how her spirit yet lived and would continue to inspire everyone who had known her thanks to the courage with which she had faced adversity, of her unshaken confidence in God as her hope and strength, which all would do well to emulate.
Lee believed with his whole being every word the Right Reverend Johns spoke, yet the oration brought less comfort than it should have, serving instead to tear off the scab which had begun to grow over his grief. He wept, unashamed, as a hearse drawn by six black horses took his wife’s coffin to the Richmond, Fredericksburg and Potomac Railroad depot to start its final journey to Arlington. He knew she would never have forgiven him for interring her anywhere else.
A lieutenant came up to him as he was leaving St. Paul’s, Church. “I beg your pardon, sir, for disturbing you at such a time, but your orders were to be informed the moment we succeeded in entering that sealed chamber. We have just done so.”
“Thank you, young man. Yes, I shall go there at once. Have you a carriage?”
“Yes, sir. If you will follow me—” The lieutenant drove Lee east on Broad to Ninth, and then down the western side of Capitol Square to the building that had sheltered America Will Break. When he swung right onto Franklin, Lee pointed and exclaimed. The lieutenant chuckled. “We took a leaf from your book, sir. Since that damned door—I beg your pardon again—defeated our every frontal assault, we decided to outflank it.”
A ladder leaned against the side of the building. Several masons in grimy overalls stood at the base of the wall. One still held a mallet and chisel. Crowbars and pry bars, along with chunks of stone and broken brick, lay on the sidewalk. They’d broken a hole in the wall big enough for a man to crawl though.
“Has anyone gone in yet?” Lee asked. When the lieutenant shook his head, Lee descended from the carriage and hurried toward the ladder.
The lieutenant sprang down, too, and got in front of him. With the self-conscious voice junior officers use when dressing down their superiors, he said, “With your permission, sir, I shall precede you, in case the Rivington men”—men was not the word he used—”have placed a torpedo or some other infernal device in there.”
Lee considered that, reluctantly nodded. His courage was not at issue here, and his duty to his country was. “Very well, Lieutenant; carry on.”
The young soldier swarmed up the ladder, disappeared into the inky hole. Lee waited with barely contained worry and impatience until he stuck his head out again. “Seems safe enough, sir, though I tripped over a chair and damn near broke my fool neck. Can you bring a lantern up with you? It’s still almighty dark inside.”
A soldier darted into the War Department across the street, came out with a lantern which he handed to Lee. He and a couple of the masons steadied the ladder while Lee ascended. Lee was simultaneously grateful and offended: they hadn’t offered the spry young lieutenant any such assistance. How decrepit did they think he was?
At the top of the climb, the lieutenant took the lantern from him, then helped him through the hole. He held the flickering light on high while Lee got to his feet. Its faint yellow beams and the gray light that came through the hole in the outer wall told Lee at once that America Will Break truly did not belong to 1868, or any year close to it.
“Metal,” he muttered. “Everything metal.” The desks, the cabinets, the bookcases against the walls, the swivel chairs, all were painted metal, like the impenetrable door that had so long defeated everything the Confederacy threw at it. On this side, he noticed, that door was set well into the wall. Its inner surface was not painted at all, only polished, and cast back at Lee the light the lantern shed upon it.
Above one of the cabinets, a low one, hung a poster blazoned with the emblem of America Will Break. Above the insignia stood the AWE initials Lee had first seen on Andries Rhoodie’s coffee mug in camp above Orange Court House. He wondered where Rhoodie was. The big man had not died on March 4, nor had he been at his house when soldiers came that evening, armed with a warrant and with AK-47s set on full automatic. That worried Lee—this side of Bedford Forrest, Rhoodie was as dangerous a man as he could think of.
Below the three bent spikes in their circle stood a pair of unfamiliar words: AFRIKANER WEERSTANDSBEWEGING, and below them, in smaller letters, AFRIKANER RESISTANCE MOVEMENT. Lee cocked his head. He wondered what an Afrikaner was—not an African, certainly, not by the way the Rivington men treated Negroes—and whether the name betokened resistance against Afrikaners, whatever they were, or by them.
He deliberately turned away from the poster, refusing to let inessentials sidetrack him” He walked over to the polished metal door, set his hand on the knob. The lieutenant dashed up and tried to turn it for him. This time, he refused to yield his place. The men on the other side of that door had done everything but fire a Napoleon at it—and they’d contemplated that, desisting only for fear of damaging the room the door guarded. Were it hooked to a torpedo, they surely would have set off the explosive charge.
He worked the knob. It did not turn smoothly—the Confederates had managed that much, at any rate, in their efforts to force it—but it turned. The door was heavy. Lee had to exert his full strength to pull it back, and the massive hinges squealed in protest as he did so, but it opened. A couple of officers standing on the other side stared at him, then grinned and began to clap.
Their applause was joined by another noise, a low, throaty rumble, that began as soon as the door swung wide. They stopped clapping. The rumble went on. Looking about for its source, Lee decided after a few seconds that it was somehow coming from within the thickened wall. It sounded mechanical, though not really like a steam engine. He wondered why anyone would want to conceal something mechanical inside a wall.
Behind him, in the hidden chamber, the lieutenant cried out. He whirled, wondering what trap the youngster had sprung. He saw no trap, only the lieutenant’s startled face. He saw that very clearly, for several long, thin tubes mounted on the ceiling—he’d not noticed them before; who notices ceilings?—had suddenly started shedding a fine, white light that illuminated the room as well as hazy sunshine might have. “What on earth—?” the lieutenant said. Lee did not know what on earth, either, though after a moment’s reflection he supposed he should not have been surprised the Rivington men enjoyed better lamps even than gaslight. But understanding all their tricks was another inessential now. The shining tubes let him read the titles of the volumes that packed these secret bookshelves. As soon as he saw the Picture History of the Civil War was one of them, the shelves drew him like a lodestone.