The Freak Who Became A Spy
by Jane Singer
When Maddie Bradford, the teenage spy in Alias Dragonfly by Jane Singer fell out of a tree when she was five years old and hit her head on a rock, her spells, as she called them, started. Today, we’d label what happened to her a traumatic brain injury that left her body whole, but her brain forever altered. But Maddie was born in 1846, long before diagnostics might illuminate why this sad youngster twisted and thrashed without warning and seemed to gaze into thin air, seeing, hearing, what? And then suddenly right herself, her tumble of curls covering the tears on her cheeks. At least they didn’t put her away.
She could be anywhere when the spells came. At home, at school, or in her town of Portsmouth, New Hampshire where she was a freak, “the village peculiar,” as the goodly folks of Portsmouth whispered. Too bad she could hear them. She could hear … everything. The sad howls of a wolf who’d lost its mate to a hunter’s snare deep in the woods, the distant sobs of her Mama at the grave of her sister, and the during those times when she saw flashing lights, shapes, even the minute details of faces of everyone around her—the exact numbers of specks on a strawberry—what she didn’t know as a scared child with scared parents who had no idea how to help her, was that her “runaway” brain would forever change her life.
And she did run away: from school where the kids laughed and pointed, from home into the woods where her Papa had taught her how to use a gun, but never to kill an animal, unless her life was at stake.
Her growing years were a muddle of sadness when her sister Nancy died at only five, and shortly after, her Mama died of the same wasting illness. And then war came. The Civil War. Her Papa enlisted when Mr. Lincoln sent out the call for volunteers. Maddie begged to go with him. Why couldn’t she be a soldier, a girl in a boy’s disguise?
Not ever, her Papa said and took her for safekeeping to Washington, D.C. before he left for the front and parked in her Aunt’s boardinghouse.
That’s when her life began again.
That’s when her oddities, her talents, meant something to Mr. Alan Pinkerton’s secret service force. That’s when the “village peculiar” became a spy. That’s when she shed old skin and donned her alias, Dragonfly.
See what happened. See the Civil War through the eyes of a fifteen-year old girl, a savant, some might call her. See what you think and tell me.
I write about that war, about unknown men, women and teens living in a time of terror. That is my mission, my calling.
Visit Maddie and me at Janesinger.com, meet spies of all stripes, and look for the sequel Alias Sparrow Hawk in the near future where you will meet a fiercer, harder, toughened-by-war Maddie.
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And if you like nonfiction, check out my latest, The War Criminal’s Son: The Civil War Saga of William A. Winder, a good man with a bad name synonymous with brutality in an already brutal war. As the first-born son of Confederate General John H. Winder of Libby, Belle Isle, and Andersonville Prison infamy, William A. turned his back on the entire Confederate Winder clan—father, uncles, half-brothers, cousins, aunts and grandmother—to stand with the Union. For this loyalty, and that is a theme that recurs in much of my work, William A. was under suspicion throughout the entire war. So the Civil War still haunts and simmers for me. And the themes then as now of discord and division resonate again and again our own troubled time.
Alias Dragonfly is on sale for $0.99 from February 1st through February 15th. Find it on Amazon, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Google, and Apple.
