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she also had a photographic memory. She returned to Richmond just before the Civil War began, to marry a free black man and resume working in the Van Lew household.
    “Early in the war Elizabeth Van Lew, who was already considered eccentric because of her anti-slavery and anti-secession views, became positively unpopular with her neighbors by taking food, medicine and other items to the Union officers being held in Richmond’s notorious Libby Prison. She would have been even more unpopular had they known that she was helping some of those prisoners escape, and providing safe houses. She also got information from them about Confederate dispositions and smuggled it out of Richmond to the Union high command via her household staff of freed slaves, written in a code she had devised and hidden in things like shoe soles and hollow eggs.”
    Aiken looked perplexed. “Wasn’t she sort of bringing suspicion on herself by openly being a Union sympathizer? I would have thought she would have wrapped a Confederate flag around herself and sung ‘Dixie’ at the top of her lungs.”
    “That would have been suspicious in itself, since her views were already well known. Instead, she turned her reputation for eccentricity to her advantage. She made sure she wasn’t taken seriously by talking and humming to herself and generally acting demented at every opportunity, so much so that she came to be known as ‘Crazy Bet.’”
    “Hiding in plain sight,” said Mondrago approvingly. “Still, surely the Confederates must have suspected that something was going on.” The naiveté of earlier eras in matters of counterintelligence was a never-ending source of wonder to him. He had declared himself unsurprised when Dabney had told them that Antietam (or Sharpsburg, as the Confederates called it), one of the most decisive battles of the war, had been lost because secret orders had been found in a field along with the cigars they had been used to wrap.
    “Oh, yes. Her home was searched repeatedly. But they never found anything incriminating. She kept all her materials, including a detailed journal of her activities, buried in a hole in her backyard.”
    “A hole in her backyard,” Mondrago repeated with a dazed headshake.
    “Eventually Elizabeth Van Lew was running a spy ring that included clerks in Confederate government departments and a high-ranking officer at Libby Prison. And her lines of communication with General Grant had become so routine that she was sending him a daily copy of the Richmond newspaper! But her greatest coup was inserting her former slave Mary Bowser into the ‘Confederate White House.’ Through a friend, she had Bowser brought in as an illiterate, somewhat dim-witted servant named Ellen Bond—”
    (“Another alias!” Aiken groaned.)
    “—to help Jefferson Davis’ wife Varina with social functions. Soon she was taken on full-time. You must understand that servants were effectively invisible, and were assumed to be unable to read and write, or to understand anything beyond simple commands. So there was no attempt to prevent her from reading the state papers lying around Davis’ office, and listening in on meetings and conversations.”
    Mondrago gave an even more incredulous headshake-and-sigh.
    “With her phenomenal memory, Bowser was able to retain information verbatim, and being educated could write it down. She then passed it on to another of Elizabeth Van Lew’s spies, a baker named Thomas McNiven who made regular deliveries to the Davis household. Eventually, it became obvious that there was a huge leak in the Confederate White House, and McNiven was caught. It was only then that Bowser began to come under suspicion. She was aware that her position had become precarious, and after unsuccessfully attempting to burn the Confederate White House down she fled in January, 1865.”
    “The month after we’re due to arrive,” Jason nodded. “Where did she go after that, Dr. Dabney?”
    “I cannot say.