The Open Doorway: A novel of time travel, the American Civil war, and the Lincoln Assassination.: Based on true events around the life and death of Lewis Thornton Powell. by Madeleine Mitchell

Author:Madeleine Mitchell [Mitchell, Madeleine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-07-23T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

Washington February 1865.

WASHINGTON was a sprawling development centred around the main thoroughfare of the four mile long Pennsylvania Avenue that linked the White House to the Capitol Building, and was nothing like the size of the bustling city Leigh had left in 2015.

Upon arrival by train to the Baltimore and Ohio railway station at the foot of Capitol Hill, she’d seen firsthand this city’s magnificence and squalor. Where, from her world, its outskirts had been streets and streets of pristine tarmac, shining concrete and glass buildings, there were now just tracts of undrained marsh, gullies, woodland and crops of shanties and lone ramshackle dwellings.

Tall slim red brick houses rubbed shoulders with poorly built squat homes constructed from deal plank, and from L Street northwards there was nothing but fields and countryside. To the south lay the rancid stinking City Canal bisecting the notorious red light district of Ohio Street and the area known as Murder Bay.

Despite this seedy underbelly, the city possessed some outstanding architecture; from the Corcoran Art Gallery and awesome colonnaded Treasury building to the only landmark Leigh recognised - the beautiful and imposing Capitol building at the end of Pennsylvania Avenue.

The streets centred round this Avenue were all granite kerbstones, brick pavements and dirt roads that seemed crammed with as many types of horse drawn vehicle Leigh had ever seen. Geese waddled in flocks up and down the sidewalk and even cattle occasionally wandered to and fro getting in the way of the horse drawn transport and adding pancakes of dung to all the other animal faeces littering the ground. It would be another twelve years until Washington’s main one hundred and sixty foot wide thoroughfare would finally be laid with asphalt. Saplings and trees lined the length of this arterial road, and it was illuminated at night with gas lamps.

Pennsylvania Avenue seemed to hold the whole city together like some dark and dusty spinal cord. Due to the war, the Government had a high demand for labour, and people flocked there in search of work so that every hotel, public house and oyster bar was filled to capacity.

Leigh stood at the corner of 6th Street and Pennsylvania, outside the National Hotel in which she’d hired a suite on the first floor. She’d just come out of the telegraph office on the same corner, after sending a message to Maggie assuring her she was well and missing them all. Lewis had been right. She was indeed a wealthy woman. But it was a wealth that brought her little satisfaction, and after ten dull days of her own company Leigh finally decided that something had to change.

The morning was cold but bright. Thankfully, it hadn't rained for a few days and the wide dirt expanse of the Avenue was relatively dry. It was a nightmare negotiating the ever present piles of horse dung and rubbish and she couldn’t quite get used to the swine rooting in the gutters.

Leigh picked up her skirts and pressed forwards while the going was relatively clear.

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