Fates and Traitors (49 page)

“You're not to blame,” said Asia. “You couldn't have restrained him. Let's hope he comes to his senses before the marshal sees him.”

Her anger smoldered as the evening passed, and she spent the time alternately pacing and resting with her feet up. She watched the door, composing diatribes in her mind she intended to hurl at Clarke the moment he crossed the threshold. How could he have done this? Was he so frightened for himself that he would tie the hangman's noose for Wilkes to prove his loyalty to the Union?

The valet returned an hour later, abashed, to report that he had found Mr. Clarke at Mr. Stockton's office, and Mr. Clarke had ordered him to go home. “Did Mr. Clarke say when he might return?” Asia queried.

“He didn't, ma'am.”

“Was any other gentleman with them?”

“Only Mr. Stockton's secretary, ma'am.”

Then there was still a chance Mr. Stockton would advise Clarke not to take Wilkes's letters to the marshal. She dismissed the valet and resigned herself to an anxious vigil.

The children had long been asleep and even her mother had retired for the night by the time Clarke finally crept in. “What did you do?” Asia demanded, rising awkwardly from her chair, crossing into the foyer and turning up the gaslight.

He jumped at the sound of her voice. “Asia. You should be resting.”

“How could I rest after what you told my mother? I ask again, what did you do?”

He sighed heavily and shrugged out of his coat. “I gave the letters to Stockton. He read them and agreed I should take them to the marshal. You'll be pleased to know that Marshal Millward decreed that it would be improper to publish John's letter to your mother, because despite everything else your brother wrote, his affectionate words for her would create undue and false sympathy for him.”

“Oh, thank God,” said Asia, placing a hand upon her heart, faint with relief. “May I have the letters, please, to return to my mother?”

“I left them with Stockton for safekeeping.”

Asia fixed him with a level glare. “You left them with a newspaper editor for safekeeping?”

“I did, and what of it?”

“A newspaper editor, Clarke!”

“I know what Stockton does for a living. What of it? He heard Millward's order to suppress your mother's letter. He won't disobey.”

“And what of the second letter, the one you called a Confederate screed?”

For a moment Clarke looked taken aback. “I assumed Millward's prohibition applied to both.”

“Why should it? The marshal objected to publishing my mother's letter because he thought it would provoke sympathy for Wilkes. He would have no objection to publishing a letter that would do the opposite.”

Clarke ran a hand over his jaw. “I'll call on Stockton in the morning and take the letters back.”

“You should call on him now.”

“Asia, it's late. I'm sure he's retired for the night and that's what I intend to do myself.”

She pleaded with him at least to send word, but he refused to wake one of the servants to carry a message that he insisted was not urgent. Asia prayed he was right.

In the morning, she resolved to be patient with Clarke, to put him in a good mood so that he would be willing to call on Mr. Stockton immediately after breakfast. And so while he shaved, she sat up in bed and replied cheerfully when he told her about his plans for the day, holding back a rebuke when he mentioned accounts to review and scripts to read but said nothing of visiting his editor friend.

Clarke was nearly finished when the maid brought in Asia's breakfast tray with the newspaper neatly folded next to her plate. She sipped tea, and finding that her appetite had returned, she nibbled at a piece of buttered toast while she unfolded the paper and scanned the front page. The news was almost too horrid to bear. The man accused of assaulting Secretary Seward had been arrested at a Washington boardinghouse, and theatre owner John Ford, a loyal friend of the Booth family since the era of Junius Brutus Booth Senior, had been confined to the Old Capitol Prison, along with his two brothers. Wilkes's childhood friend
Samuel Arnold had been arrested at home and was expected to turn state's evidence against him. Wilkes and several accomplices were believed to be in St. Mary's County, heavily armed and struggling to find a way through the Union pickets across the Potomac. The city councils of Baltimore were offering a ten-thousand-dollar reward for Wilkes's arrest, in part because “The feeling here against Booth is greatly intensified by the fact that he is a Baltimorean and our loyal people are anxious that one who so dishonored the fair name of Baltimore should meet with speedy justice.”

“How now,” Asia murmured to herself, disgusted. “Rebellious Baltimore is suddenly rife with Unionists.”

There was some good news amid the bad. “Clarke,” she said, raising her voice, “General Sherman has captured Raleigh. General Johnston has surrendered.”

“Well, thank God for that,” he called from the washbasin, drying his clean-shaven face with a towel. “It was only a matter of time.”

Nodding, she finished her breakfast and turned the page, glancing at the headlines, unable to bear the lengthy descriptions of Mr. Lincoln's funeral and the arrangements to carry his remains to Springfield by a special railcar, skimming past financial news and announcements of club meetings and amusements and—

And then her glance fell upon her brother's name again and she went as cold as death.

“Letter of John Wilkes Booth,” the first bold headline on the fourth page screamed. “Proof that He Meditated His Crime Months Ago. Confesses that He Was Engaged in a Plot to Capture and Carry Off the President. His Excuses for the Contemplated Act. His Participation in the Execution of John Brown. A SECESSION RHAPSODY.”

It was not the letter Wilkes had written to Mother, but the second, more condemning document, transformed into a column and a half of rambling, vitriolic apologia for all the world to see.

“Clarke!” she shrilled, scrambling backward until her shoulders pressed against the headboard, staring in terror at the paper as if it were a venomous insect. “Clarke!”

In a moment he was at her side. “What is it? Is something wrong with the baby?”

Unable to speak, she gestured frantically to the paper. He bent over
it, and as he read, his face went slack with confusion, then red with fury. “That bastard.” Suddenly he lunged and with one swipe of his arm sent the newspaper flying off the bed and onto the floor. Cursing under his breath, he threw on his clothes and strode from the room. She called him back, but he did not reply.

When Asia had composed herself, she rose, washed, and dressed, and went downstairs to confirm that Clarke had quit the house—to see Mr. Stockton, she assumed, although what good that would do now, she could not say. She hoped Clarke would not kill him.

She sought out her mother, and when she found her in the parlor staring into space, tears in her eyes, seeming scarcely aware of baby Adrienne on her lap or little Dottie and Edwin playing at her feet, she knew her mother had seen the newspaper too.

Overcome with shock and trepidation, Asia, Rosalie, and their mother said little to one another while they waited for Clarke to return home, afraid to go to the windows, dreading a pounding on the door. When a knock did come, Asia boldly answered it herself, only to discover June on the doorstep, haggard, red-eyed, unshaven, his luggage set haphazardly at his feet as if he had dropped it. “Can it be true?” he asked hoarsely. “Has John killed the president?”

“Come inside and see Mother,” Asia said, taking his arm and guiding him across the threshold. Mother and Rosalie had come to the foyer, summoned by the sound of his voice, and with Adrienne on her grandmother's hip and the other children toddling alongside, they embraced one another, their tears falling freely, their fears easing even though nothing about their dire circumstances had changed except that they were together.

Clarke's arrival interrupted the reunion, and though he greeted his brother-in-law courteously, his gaze was wary. “At such a time, yet another Booth taking refuge in my house might stir up talk,” he said, managing a smile, though no one believed he spoke in jest.

“I'm no fugitive,” said June. “I'm willing to report my whereabouts to any authority you choose.”

“As it happens, I'm acquainted with a United States marshal.”

June gestured sharply to the door. “Lead on, then.”

“June, no,” their mother protested, clutching his arm. “You've only just arrived.”

June kissed her cheek. “I'm sure it won't take long.”

Clarke helped him bring in his luggage, and then the two men set out. Asia instructed the staff to prepare a room for her brother and sent word to the cook to set an extra place for lunch, but their preparations were still under way when Clarke and June returned. “Marshal Millward was out,” Clarke explained. “We'll call again tomorrow.”

But early the next morning, a knock sounded upon the front door while the family was at breakfast. It was the marshal, accompanied by a large complement of officers. He asked to meet June, and as Clarke introduced them, the other officers strode past them into the house.

They searched every room, leaving no door unopened, no closet unexamined. Asia overheard some of the officers talking, and she was astonished and yet not to discover that they were searching for Wilkes, that they had expected to find him taking his ease there, attended by his devoted sister in a comfortable mansion in the North while legions of soldiers and detectives frantically searched for him in the South. The unexpected presence of his mother and eldest sister only strengthened their certainty.

“It's dangerous to have your family here,” Clarke said to Asia in a rare moment alone. “They've brought suspicion down upon us.”

“The publication of Wilkes's manifesto brought suspicion down on us,” retorted Asia, incredulous, “and that is your doing.”

“Your mother and sister should return home. Your brother should go with them.”

Her heart plummeting, Asia rested her hands on her belly and took a deep breath. “Please, Clarke. For the love you bear me and our children, for the love you bear Edwin, please don't send my family away.”

“I'm not casting them out,” he retorted, “but for their sake and for ours, it would be better if they returned to New York.”

Asia refused to ask them to leave, so Clarke spoke to them, and to Asia's dismay, they agreed that they would be safer beneath Edwin's roof, where they might share in the protection of his powerful friends.

Her mother and sister immediately began packing their trunks—June had not yet had time to unpack his luggage—but the wary officers ordered them to halt and summoned Marshal Millward. When Asia explained that her family intended to leave for New York on the evening
train, the marshal considered this, then shook his head. “Mrs. Booth and Miss Booth may go, but Junius Booth will remain here, in case we need to question him.”

Asia protested, but when Marshal Millward implied that if she did not relent, no one would be allowed to leave the house, she swallowed her bitter retorts and went to break the troubling news to her family. June accepted his detention stoically, but their mother worried about traveling without an escort until they assured her they would telegraph Edwin to meet her at the station in New York. Nodding acquiescence, she and Rosalie resumed packing while an officer observed them closely to make sure they took no documents or letters with them. Their luggage would be thoroughly examined again before they left for the train station, the marshal informed them. They did not complain, accepting the indignity rather than jeopardize their freedom to travel.

In the meantime, the search of the house continued. The officers questioned everyone in the household except the children. They collected papers, letters, playbills, scripts, maps, and mementos, sealed them in bags, and took them away. They ordered Clarke to open the safe, and they carefully scrutinized every sheet of paper within it.

They found the envelope Wilkes had entrusted to Asia, empty now, but with her name still inscribed upon it. “May I keep that?” Asia asked from the doorway, one hand resting upon her abdomen, the other supporting her lower back. They showed no deference to her distress or to her delicate condition, but tucked the precious relic of her brother into a bag and carried it off.

When the search finished, the officers departed, but armed guards took up positions around the house, entirely surrounding it.

If the assassin John Wilkes Booth sought refuge there, they would have their man.

•   •   •

O
n Saturday morning one week after President Lincoln died, Lucy sat in her family's sitting room looking out the window upon Pennsylvania Avenue, one newspaper lying open on her lap, others stacked on the table at her right hand. She had scarcely left the suite since that terrible night, taking her meals on a tray rather than creating a spectacle in the dining room, swathing herself in a heavy black
veil when she went on her daily walk with her mother and sister. In a city full of mourners, their somber attire attracted little notice, granting Lucy the momentary relief of anonymity.

Earlier that week, the Hales had joined the nearly thirty thousand shocked and grieving citizens who had paid their last respects to President Lincoln as he had lain in state in the East Room of the White House, watched over by an honor guard of a dozen officers, including two generals. Commencing at half past nine o'clock in the morning and lasting well into the evening, the slow, solemn procession had filed past the president's casket, richly ornamented in silver and resting upon a black catafalque beneath a black canopy. The Hales had not attended the small, private funeral service that had taken place the following day, but they had observed the funeral procession that had carried the president's remains to the Capitol, where thousands more had paid their respects as he had lain in state in the rotunda all the next day. On April 21—only one day prior—a nine-car funeral train bedecked with bunting, crepe, and a portrait of Mr. Lincoln on the engine set out from Washington on a seventeen-hundred-mile journey west to Springfield, carrying the remains of the president and his young son Willie, who had died of typhoid fever at the White House more than three years before. The train was scheduled to stop at twelve cities along the circuitous route, and tens of thousands were expected to meet it, to mourn and to bid farewell to their fallen leader.