The Lincoln Conspiracy Read Online Free

numbing, but he managed to kick his left heel into his horse’s side hard enough to send both of them streaking toward the back of the square, well away from Dillon. Temple was weary now, and the reins grew heavy in his hands. A bullet grazed his left shoulder almost as soon as he heard the shot from the gun that delivered it; a rivulet of blood ran down his arm toward his wrist, dripping from his cuff like thick, warm cider. And he was quite trapped. The wooden flanks of the market surrounded him, and the gents were blocking the only way he could escape on horseback. He slipped down from the saddle as he reached one of the market’s back corners and began looking for an exit beyond one of the food stalls, an exit that might take him onto Pennsylvania.
    The gents, still on their horses, trotted up to him slowly. They had no need to rush now.
    “Gentlemen,” Temple said, leaning on his cane, his back bowed.
    “The papers,” one of the gents responded as the other two dismounted.
    “Papers?”
    Temple was too weak to get his cane off the ground. One of the gents pulled his gun from his belt and held it by the barrel—like a hammer, Temple thought. This is how death arrives. This is how death moves. The gent rushed toward Temple. A rifle shot snapped through the air, and the top of the gent’s head fragmented, blood and small pieces of bone erupting in a crimson halo around his skull.
    Five men—some of the same ones who had been in the scuffle back at the B&O—were striding in a phalanx across the square, all of them armed with rifles. They fired rounds jointly this time, and the two gents still astride their horses dropped from their saddles before they could turn their mounts around.
    The men in the phalanx continued Temple’s way, never breakingtheir line. His cuff hung from his wrist like a wet rag, and he wiped it against the top of his pants. A fresh stream of blood reddened his fingers again. His head drooping, his breath short, Temple watched a few tufts of green grass rise toward him from a swirl of dirt, dust, and food scraps as he collapsed.

CHAPTER THREE
THE CURES
    “M ost of them died from flux and diarrhea,” said Springer. “They ate poorly. And the water killed many of them. On both sides. It wasn’t bullets. Bullets did their work, mind you. But don’t you think it shocked some of them to discover that their insides were rotting slowly, or a leg was putrid and the rot was crawling to other parts of their bodies, and that none of that seemed similar in the least to the glory they envisioned of dying in battle?”
    “Don’t you think it shocked them?” Springer asked again. “Mrs. McFadden?”
    Fiona laid the lancet and small saw in a shallow porcelain tub of water on the stand by the table where the officer’s corpse lay. A wide shaft of light slanted in through a window above her, bathing the tub in a frost that turned the rubied water a cloudy pink.
    “Did we have to cut out that much of his leg this morning, Dr. Springer?”
    “Mrs. McFadden?”
    “Did we have to cut out that much of his leg? What were we trying to accomplish?”
    “We tried to stop the rot. We always have to cut to stop the rot.”
    “Yes, everyone cuts.”
    Fiona gazed past Springer, into the airy galleries beyond him on the Patent Office’s second floor. Samurai armor and swords, one of Ben Franklin’s printing presses, presidential gifts from foreign dignitaries, and neatly tied rolls of state documents filled glass cases lining the museum’s walls. Most of the space in the cases was given over to row upon row of unusual and largely stillborn mechanical contraptionsthat had won federal patents, including a model of a riverboat with inflatable devices on its hull so that it could better navigate the Mississippi’s shallows. Lincoln had designed and patented the contraption when he was still a congressman. Only several months before, cots and other makeshift hospital beds had crowded the gallery’s central