Fates and Traitors (6 page)

On the second day of the New Year, her heart leapt when she spotted Junius watching her from across the Covent Garden square. She nodded to him, then lifted her chin to signal that their time apart had come to an end. It took him five minutes to make his careful, peripatetic way to her side, and as he offered a perfunctory nod and studied the contents of her basket, she said, “I have not yet decided. I only wanted to thank you for the wonderful gift.”

He smiled briefly, bending to smell a rose, newly cut, nurtured
tenderly from bud to blossom in her father's greenhouse. “You said as much in your letter.”

“My letter could not express all I wished to say.” She was mindful of her clumsy way with words, her lack of even a small fraction of the genius possessed by Junius, by Byron. “When I read Byron's poetry, when I see you on the stage, I feel—as if I am awake for the first time, and I live in despair of falling asleep again.”

“I will tell Lord Byron you said so.” He straightened, his smile turning ironic. “Without offering your name, of course, for propriety's sake.”

“You're acquainted with Lord Byron?”

“Certainly. He's on the board of directors of Drury Lane. He counts himself among my admirers.” Junius spoke without so much as a hint of a boast. “Not long ago, as a token of his esteem, he sent me his portrait, a watercolor miniature on a small oval of ivory.”

“Oh, my,” Mary Ann gasped. “I should love to see it.”

“I should love to show you.” His smile faded. “I embark on my tour in a fortnight. Tell me I won't travel alone. Tell me you believe in free love, and that there is no greater sin than suppressing one's passions, that there is no greater good than to pursue truth and beauty and love. This is what I believe; this is what Lord Byron believes. What do you believe?”

“I believe—” Mary Ann's voice faltered. “I believe I cannot so easily steal another woman's husband.”

“No, Mary Ann,” he said earnestly, shaking his head. “Don't adhere to that old, moribund doctrine that laws are holier than love. I'm not Adelaide's to steal. Possession is not love. If I belong to anyone, it's to you.”

“One more week,” she implored, “and I'll give you my answer.”

She needed only half the time she had requested to make up her mind. She and Junius served the greatest cause of all—true love. She deeply regretted hurting anyone, but she believed—she had to believe—that the grief and outrage her parents and Junius's wife and son would suffer would be the birth pangs of a glorious new creation.

On a cold, windy evening in the middle of January, Mary Ann quietly packed her trunk, wrapping the precious volumes of Byron in dresses and petticoats for protection, concealing her purse with her modest savings in the back, taking cloaks and shawls and stockings suitable for both fair weather and cold. Then she descended the stairs to
kiss her mother and father good night, fighting back tears when they told her they loved her and would see her in the morning. She knew that it would break their hearts to find her bedchamber empty the next day, but she prayed that God would forgive her and comfort them.

As she stood before them, struggling to speak, to disguise her torment, her mother rested her knitting on her lap, her brow furrowing in concern. “Mary Ann, my dear child.” Her black hair was plaited in a long braid, with only a faint trace of silver threaded through the glossy mass. She had been a great beauty in her youth and could have had any man of the borough she had wanted, and she had married Mary Ann's father for his kindness and piety. “Is everything all right?”

“Of course,” she lied, forcing a smile. “I'm merely tired.”

“Sleep is the best cure for that,” her father said, setting aside his Bible and regarding her fondly. “Remember to say your prayers.”

She promised him she would and hurried upstairs before they glimpsed the tears in her eyes.

Alone in her bedchamber, she doused the lamp and lay beneath the coverlet fully clothed, listening to the faint sounds of her parents retiring for the night, starting at every banging shutter and creaking windowpane. Shortly after midnight, Junius's signal came; the scratching of a long branch against her window. She threw back the covers, lighted the lantern, straightened her dress, smoothed her hair—and, lastly, fastened her lovely new brooch to the throat of her dress. The exquisite piece of jewelry was a gift from Junius; when she had pledged him her love, he had taken Byron's miniature on ivory to a jeweler, who backed it in gold and set it for a brooch, a beautiful, unique ornament in lieu of a wedding ring.

She crept down the stairs and opened the door to her beloved Junius. He kissed her before following her inside and up to her bedchamber to retrieve her trunk, which he carried downstairs and outside to the waiting carriage. Her heart thumped at every creak of the floorboards; her ears strained for the sound of her parents sitting up in bed, lighting a candle, her mother sobbing, her father following in pursuit.

The house was silent. She heard a baby cry next door, a dog bark several blocks away, but her parents slumbered peacefully on.

When Junius settled her into the carriage, she gasped, suddenly remembering something precious left behind—Junius's letters, nearly
one hundred of them hidden at the bottom of her wardrobe, sorted according to the week and bound with ribbon left over from tying bouquets. “I've forgotten something.”

“What is it?” Junius caressed her cheek tenderly. “Wait here. I'll fetch it for you.”

“No, it's too great a risk.” If her parents woke and caught her in mid-flight, her resolve would crumble. “Let's go.”

He nodded, and a moment later, the carriage swiftly carried her away from the only home she had ever known.

Let Junius's words remain behind as a testament to true love. Perhaps after her parents read them, they would understand.

They traveled first to Deal on the southeastern coast of England, giddily celebrating their escape by taking a room at a seaside inn and arranging for supper to be sent up to them, bread and potatoes roasted with leeks and rosemary. Junius cherished all living things, he told her, and he refused to eat the flesh of any beast, fish, or fowl. “Man was not intended to make Earth a slaughterhouse of innocent animals,” he said, making her deeply regret suggesting the pheasant.

He had signed the register “J. B. Booth and wife,” which sent a frisson of anticipation through her even as a pang of remorse reminded her that it was not and never could be true. It did not matter, she told herself later as they prepared for bed, as he tenderly undressed her, as her skin warmed beneath his touch. She had him. She had his love. She did not need his name or a paper from the church to confirm either.

The next morning, she woke warm and dreamily sated in a tangle of bedcovers to find herself alone. “Junius?” she called, sitting up and drawing the coverlet around herself.

“I'm here.”

He sat at a table near the window, pen in hand. Sleet pelted the window and outside the sky was leaden gray, but Junius's face was radiant as he looked up from his writing to admire her.

“Come back to bed,” she said, smiling. “We won't be able to sail today.”

“I will, as soon as I finish this letter.”

Her contentment vanished. “To Adelaide?” He nodded and returned his attention to the page. “What will you tell her?”

“That I hope she's enjoying her visit to Brussels and that her family is in good health. I'll ask her to kiss the boy for me, and I'll send her five pounds.”

“You'll say nothing more? Nothing of our elopement?”

“Good God, no. With any luck, she'll never know.”

Mary Ann stared at him for a long moment, then lay back upon her pillow and gazed up at the ceiling, unsettled. But by the time Junius came back to bed, she had summoned up the courage to tell him they must return to London. Before she could speak, his kisses silenced her, and soon thereafter his caresses reminded her that she could never go back, nor did she want to.

The next morning dawned clear and calm, and they sailed for France. For a fortnight Junius performed in Boulogne-sur-Mer and Calais, but the reviews were not so glowing that he was tempted to linger. Instead Junius decided that he should tour the West Indies.

Their ship crossed the Channel and stopped at Dover, where, wary of discovery, they went ashore only long enough to stretch their legs and to purchase a little piebald pony they named Peacock. Their ship next stopped at Madeira, an island about three hundred and fifty miles off the coast of Morocco, so enchantingly beautiful that they decided to extend their visit several weeks. But Junius had to earn a living, and as their blissful holiday came to an end, they pondered whether to continue on to the West Indies or to choose some other destination.

They had not yet settled the question when Mary Ann discovered that she was with child.

She feared Junius would be angry or disappointed, for a child would change everything, but to her relief, Junius was delighted. He became even more tender and solicitous toward her, albeit increasingly worried about their amorphous plans. When he wrote to several trusted friends seeking their advice, it was the philosopher William Godwin who urged them to sail for America.

“He warns me that the only way to avoid the scourge of public disapproval is to leave the country,” Junius said.

“We've already left our country,” Mary Ann reminded him. “Must we go all the way to America?”

“Overseas we can start anew.” Junius knelt at her feet and clasped
her hands. “In America, no one will know that you aren't my wife—and even if the secret did come out, Americans are individualists, tolerant and free-thinking. They wouldn't care.”

Mary Ann doubted that assumption very much, but Junius did his best to reassure her, and eventually he overcame her objections with the plain truth that they had no better recourse.

One bright May morning, Mary Ann woke to find Junius much as she had on their first morning together in Deal, at a table by the window writing letters. First he wrote to his father to ask him to call on Mary Ann's parents and inform them that she was going to America to live with Junius, and that she would be safe, loved, and well looked after.

The second letter, which took much longer to compose, was for Adelaide.

English audiences had grown weary of him, Junius wrote, and his recent tour of the Continent had shown him that fickle European theatergoers too had become indifferent. Across the Atlantic, however, grateful Americans starved for culture would turn out in droves to see him, increasing his fame and his fortune. He might be abroad several years, he warned, but with his letter he would enclose enough money for Adelaide and their son to live on for a year, and he would send her fifty pounds per annum thereafter, more if his fortunes soared as he anticipated.

Junius and Mary Ann booked passage on the next ship to America, a small freighter bound for Virginia with a cargo of wine. The
Two Brothers
was not suited to carry passengers, but after Junius quietly explained Mary Ann's delicate condition, the captain gave them his own quarters in exchange for an ample fee paid in gold.

Passing themselves off as husband and wife, they spent the crossing in relative comfort, keeping mostly to themselves. Junius reviewed his repertoire and planned his tour, while Mary Ann aired, mended, and refurbished his costumes, crushed from many weeks stuffed inside his trunk with his greasepaint, scripts, and old playbills. She had always had a deft hand with a needle, but since their arrival in France when she had assumed the role of Junius's wardrobe mistress, she had perfected her skills. Perhaps she could not advise him on matters of business as Adelaide had done, but she was determined that he would have the finest costumes of any tragedian on the American stage.

Forty-four days after they departed Madeira, the
Two Brothers
landed in Norfolk, Virginia, a humble, rustic settlement of about eight thousand residents on the edge of the Great Dismal Swamp. It was as unlike Mary Ann's beloved London as it was possible for a town to be.

“This is only a trading post,” Junius hastened to assure her as the
Two Brothers
approached the wharf and she stoically took in the view of ramshackle buildings, warehouses, and gambling dens along the shore, and the vast, dense wilderness beyond. “We won't remain long.”

Mary Ann forced a smile and took his arm as they disembarked. She needed a moment to adjust to the feeling of solid pavement beneath her shoes, but even as she did, a dreadful sight nearly staggered her. “Junius,” she gasped, tightening her grip on his arm.

Although some unscrupulous Englishmen still engaged in the slave trade at sea, English common law did not recognize slavery. As soon as an enslaved person set foot on English soil and breathed English air, he was free. Mary Ann had known that slavery still flourished in some regions of America, despite the citizens' exaltation of the ideals of liberty and freedom. And yet until that moment she had never seen Africans in chains, clad in rags, thin and hollow-eyed with hunger. The harrowing sight sickened her.

“I see them,” Junius murmured, resting his hand upon hers in a gesture that failed to comfort. “The poor, wretched souls!”

Horrified, Mary Ann could not tear her gaze away. On one bare back she glimpsed interlaced scars, the mark of the lash; on another, welts like intertwined initials burned into the skin.

“Oh, my.” Mary Ann covered her mouth with her hand, feeling faint. “Oh, Junius. Some of them have been branded, like—like livestock.”

“My dear, I'm grieved to say that, to slave owners, these unfortunate men and women are little more than livestock.”

Junius swiftly arranged for a porter to collect their luggage and led her away from the waterfront and its harrowing, heartbreaking sights. They settled in a modest hotel, but thankfully, Junius's prediction that they would not linger in Norfolk proved true. Within a matter of days he had booked a two-week engagement in Richmond, where a grand new theatre, the Marshall, had recently been completed. From the deck of the steamer that carried them up the James River to the state capital,
Mary Ann was much relieved to see grand public buildings and elegant residences rising on the steep hills along the shore. “Civilization at last,” she murmured, patting Peacock's flank as they disembarked. It was not London, with its libraries and cathedrals and bustling public squares, but it was a far cry from the wild frontier.