Free Rebels of Babylon by Owen Parry, Ralph Peters Page B

hotel.
    Why did Miss Susan Peabody, late of Albany, New York, matter so much in the midst of a great rebellion? Only because her father was a wealthy man, and wealth bought power. I had been sent—ordered—to New Orleans as a personal favor to a rich fellow whose daughter got herself drowned in the Mississippi. It was a matter for a common policeman, not for a major in our Union Army. But the power of democracy does not rest unencumbered upon the ballot.
    I did not like the business one least bit.
    I had resolved to resign my commission and return to our dear Pottsville. I had not only had enough of war, but had seen more than enough of the crime war breeds. I wanted no more to do with corruption and murder, whether on a campaign or down an alley. I had almost reached the age of thirty-five, at which a man had better settle down.
    There was much else, as well. My darling was with child and soon to be delivered of her burden. For all I knew, at my remove from home, a second son or a daughter might already have been born to us—God grant the best of health to mother and child.
    And then there was our new fortune, to be frank. My darling and I had come up rich in the wake of a death in the family. And wealth wants attention. It will not mind itself. There was a fuss at the colliery over our coal lands. Even though Mr. Matthew Cawber himself gave matters his attention, he had far more to tend to than mining anthracite. Philadelphia claimed his first allegiance. I worried that my wife would be overwhelmed with the cares of business. Nor would she give up her dressmaking shop, but kept at that work, as well.
    I had tried to refuse the journey to New Orleans. You will think me hard, but in the midst of so much death I cared little for Miss Peabody, who was unknown to me. I wanted only to live my life, surrounded by those I loved, and to be loved in return. To go to work and to chapel, all steady and sound. I felt that I had given our Union enough.
    Mr. Seward went to work. Before he was done, Mr. Lincoln himself had ordered me South, with a smile that covered steel. He would not accept my resignation, but flattered me. Promising that, once the matter of Miss Peabody was settled, I might resign, if I still wished to do so.
    What did I know of Miss Peabody even now? Little more than Mr. Champlain did. Yes, she was plain. On that, all were agreed. Except, perhaps, her father, with whom I had an interview in Washington. He told me that his daughter had been an abolitionist since childhood. She had insisted, against his advice, on removing herself to New Orleans in the wake of its occupation. She meant to improve the condition of the negro, an intention her father thought giddy.
    “She was always a good girl,” he told me. “But headstrong, Major Jones. With all sorts of addled notions about the nigger. For which, I suppose, we have Mrs. Stowe to thank.”
    I made the voyage down on a Navy ship. The crew watched for blockade runners and I moped. I suspected that Miss Peabody’s abolitionist sentiments, once publicly displayed, had provoked some local no-good. And nothing more to it. Grumbling at the great waste of my time, I had already determined that her murder was so simple an affair a lieutenant could have unraveled it.
    My assumption did not survive my first day in New Orleans. I went to the boardinghouse that had sheltered Miss Peabody. It was a dour establishment, without the enticing kitchen smells or even the cleanliness of Frau Schutzengel’s house. Once her sympathies had become known, no genteel boardinghouse could accept Miss Peabody. And, of course, a woman traveling alone cannot seek a hotel.
    The matron of the house was a native of Newcastle-on-Tyne and no Confederate. As soon as I pronounced Miss Peabody’s name, she exploded my notions.
    “I shouldn’t wonder if the niggers done ’er in,” Mrs. Crawley told me. “I shouldn’t wonder at all. I never in my life met a ladynor even a gentleman what hated them