Free The Spy on the Tennessee Walker by Linda Lee Peterson

Greenhow will enjoy each other’s company.”
    â€œAnd my plan in pursuing this visit? Besides the milk of human kindness that flows in my veins? Truly, what is it you think I can gain from this visit?”
    â€œYou are such a well-read young woman, Victoria. I am sure you know the play by Mr. Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The School for Scandal ?”
    â€œâ€˜A school for scandal!/tell me I beseech you,/Needs there a School this modish art to teach you?’”
    Eli shook his head. “Ah, Victoria, you manage to amazeand irk me, all at the same time.”
    â€œFirst performed,” I continued, “in 1777 at the Drury Lane Theatre, a place I long to visit one day.”
    â€œIt will be my pleasure to take you there when we have the leisure to make future plans. But today, I entreat you to visit Mrs. Greenhow. We are pursuing a school of an entirely different kind. And I think you may be precisely the person to help lead this endeavor.”
    It is foolish to ask a question when one already knows the answer, but I could not resist. “A school not of scandal, but of spies. Is that it, Eli?”

CHAPTER 13 CHAPTER 13
    VICTORIA’S JOURNAL, 1862 VICTORIA’S JOURNAL, 1862
    RICHMOND, VIRGINIA
    In the end, of course, I agreed to Eli’s plan. He is a man of great persuasive powers, and not all of them involve manipulation, blackmail, and horse-trading. Literally, horse-trading, because I know that Eli engaged in elaborate wheeling and dealing to keep my beloved horse, Courage, in my care. After I had agreed to hospital work, rather than my itinerant nurse-on-horseback rides from battlefield to battlefield, there was no compelling reason that I still needed Courage for my own. Horses were dearer than gold, as conscription on both sides gathered and consumed both soldiers and their mounts.
    Somehow, Eli managed to negotiate an exception for Courage, and I was deeply grateful. It wasn’t just that I thought of Courage as my partner in my work or that we’d been together since I was a girl; somehow he was also my getaway plan. Since I learned to walk, I have abhorred feeling trapped. My poor parents! They were always calling for me. “Victoria, where are you?” I would wander off the farm and into the woods, and it is likely a miracle I survived toadulthood. But there are so many restrictions on the way we women can live our lives: what we can say, where we can walk, how we should dress, how we do or do not have access to money we earn. I am cursed with an intemperate tongue and a short temper, and knowing that I can saddle Courage, ride as well as any man, and be off, just like that, often kept me from straying more visibly, more spectacularly away from societal norms. Or at least it did for a while.
    And now Eli had woven another spider web to entrap me, and knowing full well that I would probably live to regret it, I agreed to meet with Mrs. Greenhow. Was she a spy? Oh, yes. And a highly skilled one. Her tongue was as silver and sophisticated as mine was hasty and sharp. She was a woman of elegance, refinement, and, most of all, a sly sense of fun. Life was a social whirl at Mrs. Greenhow’s. Despite the shortage of food and drink in the shops, good food and wine somehow miraculously appeared out of nowhere at her home, until it was converted to a temporary prison. Conversations danced around her parlor, pirouetting from local news to speculation to whispered contraband subjects. There was much laughter during a visit with Mrs. Greenhow, I had heard, and I believe she was an accomplished flirt and a highly successful extractor of information. The stories declare that by the end of an evening, Mrs. Greenhow went to bed with an ever-growing cache of information, and she was prepared to share it immediately with her most-favored Confederate officers.
    Not for Rose Greenhow was the quick temper of Belle Boyd, who famously shot a Union soldier when she thought he insulted