Assassin (8 page)

His hair was not wild, as I had always seen it, but neatly combed and parted. His hands were crossed, and he held a bouquet of small purple flowers. I looked down at him and wondered how death could slip into a person and take away the breath. I was ready to step away when I saw the handkerchief. Folded neatly into the breast pocket of his suit jacket was the handkerchief I had made for him. My hand went to my mouth to keep me from crying out loud, but I was glad, deeply glad, I had made the handkerchief.

The rest of that winter was hard for me. Not long after Willie’s funeral, Tad did recover, but Mrs. Lincoln, they said, spent most of her days in bed. No parties or dinners were held at the White House, and there was no need for any sewing to be done. Mrs. Keckley spent her days trying to comfort Mrs. Lincoln. I had not supposed I would miss my sewing lessons so much, but I did.

I wrote letters to Steven, and when the winter wind was not sharp, I would walk about Washington City, my head down, thinking of all I had lost, my mother, father,
Steven, and now my new friend Willie. Sometimes I would walk down Pennsylvania Avenue to see the White House in hopes of seeing the president. Poor, dear man, he had loved his son so much. Had my father ever loved me that way? I would stand, staring up at the window where I imagined Mr. Lincoln might sit, and I would pretend that he was my father. It was all right, I told myself, to pretend. After all, I did not even know where my own father was.

HIS STORY

I cannot understand Lucy. She is like no other woman I have ever known. Always I have been able to lead women to think as I think. Yet here is a woman who loves me, I know she does. Still she will not agree with me about the Union or about the evils of Abraham Lincoln.

“You could not say he is heartless had you attended his son’s funeral,” she told me at dinner one evening. “The sorrow in that man’s face.” She closed her eyes for a moment and shook her head slightly.

I reached across the table to take her hand. “Do not waste your sympathy, my darling,” I said. “I’ve no doubt the man appeared sorry. I’ve never said he was a fool, but let me assure you his heart is too hard to be touched by the death of a mere child.”

“No,” she protested, her voice strong. “I know Robert Lincoln. He was shaken by his brother’s death, and told me that his father would never be the same.”

I saw a way out of the discussion. Any talk of Lincoln in real human terms distressed me. “You know Robert Lincoln?” We had never talked of young Lincoln, and I had never told her that it was seeing her with the man that had first sparked my interest in her. The idea would have made her angry. I adopted a teasing tone. “How well do you know the president’s son?”

Lucy smiled. “He was my escort on several occasions, nothing more.”

“Ah,” I said, remembering how young Lincoln looked at her, “I’d wager there was something more on his part.”

Lucy shrugged. “Perhaps for a time, but I could never be interested in him. He looks more like his mother than his father.”

I laughed. “Don’t tell me you would ever have been seen in public with him if he looked like his father!”

Lucy raised her eyebrows. “Looks, Wilkes, are not everything, and yes, had I seen anything of the father in Robert Lincoln, you might have had a harder time winning my affection.”

How could I disagree? Had I not thought Lucy plain that first night? Now I found her wildly attractive, more pleasing than all the other women in my life. “Marry me, Lucy,” I said. “Marry me now, no matter what your father thinks.”

“I cannot marry you now, Wilkes, and my father is only one reason.” She slipped a ring from her finger and put it on my smallest finger. “Wear this ring to remind you of me. I have not told you yet, but Father has been appointed the ambassador to Spain. We leave in the spring. I will stay there one year, and if during all that time you have been faithful only to me, I will return and marry you no matter what my father says.”

I was too overcome to speak. I lifted my hand, kissed the ring. Next I lifted her hand and pressed it to my lips. We were engaged! Of course we were not able to make the fact public knowledge, but I knew, and my heart almost burst with joy.

My personal happiness, though, could not outweigh my distress over what was happening to the South and over Lincoln’s reelection. No president in my lifetime had been elected to a second term. “He will make himself king now,” I told Asia. My sister would listen to my concerns, even though she did not believe in the Southern cause.

We were in her home in Philadelphia, where I had gone to star in a play. Asia had made a small supper for me, and her husband playing out of town gave us a chance to talk. “I feel I should do something,” I told her. “I really do.”

Asia got up from her chair and came to stand beside mine. She put her arm around my shoulders and leaned her head down to rest on mine. “Don’t fret so, Wilkes. I worry about you. Sometimes you seem to worry almost to the
point of breaking. ‘Let us be happy.’ Remember that is what you told me once. You have such a fire, my sweet boy. Don’t let this war burn you out.”

I tried to heed my sister’s words. I even agreed to perform with my brothers. My mother was pleased. At last she had the chance to see her three actor sons on the stage together. June came in from California, and it was arranged that he, Edwin, and I should appear together in New York in a benefit performance to raise money for a wonderful bronze statue of William Shakespeare to be placed in Central Park.

I did not like the idea. Edwin actually supported Lincoln, admitted out loud that he voted for the man, and wanted to hear nothing of my love for the South. We were sitting in the living room of his New York home. I jumped to my feet. “You’ve turned your back on our home. You’ve betrayed Maryland,” I accused him.

“Maryland did not secede,” he answered calmly.

The ease of his manner infuriated me! Could he not see that the matter we discussed was important, was everything? “We should have seceded, by thunder! Look how Lincoln treats us, guarding our borders with suspicion and taking away our writ of habeas corpus, locking people up at will!”

He yawned! Yes, I tell you, he yawned. “How can a man as intelligent as you, Wilkes, not see that the Union must be preserved?” He picked up a book as if to show
me the discussion was at an end. “Your beloved South cannot stand. You may as well get used to the idea.”

I walked out of his house then, and I decided that I would not go back except to see Mother, who is often there caring for Edwin’s motherless daughter. I hate being at odds with Edwin. Nothing else has ever divided us. People suppose that there is professional jealousy between us, both of us prominent actors. Ah, yes, there is talk. . . . Who is the greatest Booth? Which brother is the country’s leading actor? We pay them no heed. We are brothers. When I followed Edwin to the stage, he found true delight in my success in what is, after all, the family business.

Well, why should the Booth boys be any different from the countless other brothers this war has divided? It is, indeed, “A War of Brothers.” June and Joseph support Lincoln too. My brothers’ desertion of me prompted my selection of the quote I had printed on show cards and playbills. It is a quote from Richard in
Richard III
: “I have no brother, I am no brother . . . I AM MYSELF ALONE.”

June is kinder to me on the subject. He was away from the family for so many years managing theaters and doing some acting out west. “This is all a family quarrel, a big family quarrel, I’ll admit, but a family fuss still. It will pass, just as your hard feelings toward Edwin will pass.”

Had it not been for June, acting as peacemaker, Edwin and I would never have been able to perform together.
The play was Shakespeare’s
Julius Caesar
, one of the few pieces with three strong leads for men. Edwin was Brutus, June played Cassius, and I was Marc Antony.

It was late November and bitter cold in New York. Lincoln had been reelected, and my spirits were low. The play was held at the Winter Garden, a lovely old Broadway playhouse named for one in Paris. Mother sat in a box just above the stage, and she was radiant in a black dress with a white collar. On her face was a look of complete happiness. Dear Mother! I loved my mother, hated to grieve her.

The house was packed. The Booth boys raised $3,500 for the statue! There was a party at Edwin’s after the play, everyone laughing and dancing. I pretended to smile, but the air seemed stale to me. I had to loosen my collar in order to breathe freely.

Then I heard Edwin. He was talking, surrounded by people, but Edwin’s voice, of course, carries. I heard every word. I stood slightly away from the crowd, leaning against a doorframe. Edwin spoke of being at a dinner party with Abraham Lincoln, spoke of it with pride! The party was at the home of William H. Seward, secretary of state, a man I hate almost as much as I hate Lincoln.

Edwin told how Mr. Seward and Mr. Lincoln had gone several times to see him in plays at the National Theatre in Washington City, and Edwin felt honored. “What an exhilarating experience! Sitting at the same dinner table with Abraham Lincoln! Seward’s daughter was wild to have
my autograph, but I tell you it felt strange for me to be the one signing autographs in the presence of such greatness!”

I left the party then. Found Mother, kissed her quickly, and made for the door, almost unable to breathe. At first I took a hansom cab, but then I got out to walk. The wind was sharp, but I seemed to feel no cold except the cold that came from inside me. I walked along the water, stared out at the dark waves, and searched for answers.

Over the sound of the ocean, I began to recite the speech from the play I had just performed, the words that announced the death of Caesar:

“Liberty! Freedom! Tyranny is dead!
Run hence, proclaim, cry it about the streets.”

I wondered why the words resounded so in my memory. They certainly did not apply to my life. Tyranny was not dead in America, where a tyrant had just been elected for a second term. I began to shake uncontrollably, and yet I was perspiring too. I thought bright orange lights came from the ocean.

Finally my head cleared. I hailed a cab, went to the train station, and caught a train back to Washington City.

HER STORY

The winter of Willie’s death passed. I went back to the White House, working in the kitchen and picking up my lessons. For two years I studied dressmaking with Mrs. Keckley, and for two years I listened and watched for news of the war. How torn I was, a girl who worked in the White House and who admired Mr. Lincoln beyond my weak ability to express, yet whose heart remembered tenderly her old life in Richmond and the long-ago father who now wore the uniform of gray.

I discussed the torment caused by my divided loyalties only with Steven. During those many hours of letter writing, I had discovered that the tongue-tied girl of my childhood could, with a pen in hand, express herself well. And so our letters became the foundation for our always
deepening friendship, one between two young people who knew and understood each other profoundly.

I wrote to Steven about how Union victories in the South had brought former slaves to Washington City by the thousands, carrying with them almost nothing. They were called contrabands because they were considered to be property seized during war.

They lived in camps set up by the government down by the soggy, stinking Washington Canal, entire families huddled beneath a makeshift shanty roof that did not even keep the rain out. They were hungry and often cold and sick. Mrs. Keckley worked long hours speaking in various churches to raise money to help them, and she worked in the camps with other women to teach the children to read and to encourage the adults to plant vegetable gardens.

“Weren’t they better off as slaves?” I asked her once as she told me about the terrible conditions under which the people lived.

We were sitting at a table, sewing, and she leaned toward me. “Oh, no, Bella, never. We have to think of the future, of the next generation. The first steps to freedom may be very hard, but those steps must be made! It is better to starve as a free man than to eat well as a slave.”

On January 1, 1863, the president had signed the Emancipation Proclamation, which said that all slaves in states in rebellion against the Union were officially free. Of course, as Steven pointed out to me, the Confederacy paid no attention and freed no slaves, and the proclamation did
not free the slaves in the border states where some people still owned them.

Before the Emancipation Proclamation, the war had been about secession, not slavery, but the proclamation settled for all time the fate of slavery in America. If the Union won the war, slavery everywhere would end. The proclamation also stated that men of color could now be used in the Union Army and Navy.

Steven and I discussed all of that in our letters. He sent me a tintype of himself in his school uniform. He had grown taller, and there was a serious look in his blue eyes. We had not seen each other in three years, and to help me feel closer to him, I frequently leaned the picture against a pitcher that stood on the table where I wrote letters.

I told Steven of my changing attitude toward Mrs. Lincoln. “Yes, she can be difficult,” I wrote, “but I’ve come to appreciate some things about her, for instance, the way she works in the hospitals caring for the wounded. It has helped her deal with her grief over Willie.”

In the fall of 1863 a letter had come from my aunt in Richmond. This one was addressed to me. “Dear Bella,” it said, “I am sending this letter with a friend of mine who will be traveling North. I do hope it reaches you.” I looked up in the right-hand corner and noticed that the date of the letter was in August. I read on, “Your father was in the Battle of Gettysburg. We know for sure that he was not injured, but he was taken prisoner. We heard from
a man who was with him that most of the prisoners from that battle went to Fort Delaware. There has been no word directly from your father. I imagine that you consider yourself a Northerner now, but still, surely you can find it in your heart to pray for one Southern prisoner.”