Read Online The Crescent Spy by Michael Wallace - Free Book Online

same thing to him right now that she had done to the rebel general. She decided to test him.
    She took the cigarette from his fingers and brought it to her lips. “Do you know what I asked General Beauregard when I gave him the pies?” She changed her voice to mimic the Chesapeake accent she had affected with Beauregard. “ ‘How do you intend to whip the Yanks, General? They seem powerful determined. ’ ” She handed back the cigarette. “That’s all it took. He laid out his entire order of battle.”
    “I’m glad you’re on our side, and not the enemy’s, Miss Breaux.”
    “There are women in Washington who are spying on you at this moment. If you think our generals and congressmen are more tight-lipped than theirs, you are deceiving yourself.” Josephine leaned in confidentially. “May I call you by your given name, Franklin? Or is it Frank?”
    “Please do. And Franklin is fine. There were a million and one Franks where I grew up.”
    “I am pleased to meet you properly, Franklin.” She held out a gloved hand, which he took. “I prefer Josephine to Miss Breaux . . . if you feel comfortable, of course. But not Jo or Josie, or anything like that. They make me sound like a child.”
    “We wouldn’t want to remind anyone that you are only twenty years old.”
    She forced a laugh and hoped it sounded bright and cheery and not defensive. “That is true.”
    “Where is your mother? And this man you call the Colonel—where is he?”
    The questions caught her off guard. She had been thinking how easily she had broken the stiff exterior Franklin had carried in Washington and wondering whether she could simply ask him how they meant to use her spying in the Confederacy. Only now he had turned the tables.
    “That is . . . indelicate.”
    “It’s not puerile curiosity. I have several possibilities of how to bring you into New Orleans, and I want to be sure we won’t stumble into any of your relations.”
    “Neither the Colonel nor my mother will be in New Orleans, I promise. If I do see relations, there will be no problem. I wouldn’t recognize them, and they wouldn’t recognize me.”
    A knot of pain formed in Josephine’s belly. She wouldn’t see her mother, because her mother was dead. The Colonel wasn’t, so far as she knew, but he may as well be.
    “I am glad to hear it,” Franklin said, “but I would still like to hear the details. Whenever you are comfortable, of course.”
    But Josephine had soured on the conversation, and she was now more keen to return to her quarters than to stay and gnaw at old wounds. She feigned a yawn.
    “Perhaps another time, Mr. Gray,” she said, dropping the informality so recently established. “I am tired, and I have a book I am reading that will occupy my mind until bedtime. Good evening to you.”

    T he book was a slim volume discussing Vom Kriege — On War —by the Prussian General Clausewitz. Josephine had purchased it from an elderly Jewish bookseller in Central Park for a dime, marked down from fifteen cents after she’d greeted him with a Yiddish phrase she’d learned from a traveler on the Mississippi. A West Point officer had once told her about the book, claiming that it was the best discussion of war theory, and she’d been excited to find it. Unfortunately, it wasn’t On War itself but a treatise discussing certain points of the book. The chapter about what Clausewitz called “the fog of war” was fascinating, but frustratingly incomplete, and the British naval officer who’d penned the treatise wrote with such leaden prose that she had to set it aside.
    Josephine turned down the oil lamp and lay on her cot in the darkness, her porthole window opened to air out the stateroom. The smell of the ocean was different than the river, but the gentle motion and the sound of the calm water gliding along the hull only dragged her deeper into her memories. She turned up the lamp again, changed into her long nightgown, brushed out her hair, and