The Judges of the Secret Court (14 page)

Sleeper had nothing to say. Others might go to church, but in the Clarke house in Philadelphia no one went there. They had not the stomach, the house had already been ransacked by the police, and Asia was under house arrest. That the Booths should consider it their house always infuriated Sleeper, who owned it, and he was no more sedate now. If that fool Wilkes had not been let in here, against his express orders, by Asia, they would not all be in this trouble.

Asia, who was five months pregnant, sat in a chair placed for some reason in the middle of the parlour, and, watching her husband, wondered how long she had detested him. She had married, it was true, in order to get away from home, but in those days Sleeper had been different. For one thing he had been called Sleepy; for another, he had not been so relentlessly businesslike. Edwin was right: he had tried to claw his way up by means of her. But she was a woman, not a ladder. Sometimes Sleeper forgot that.

Unfortunately he was a ridiculous man. He might not be very bright, though he schemed enough for two men, but he had that rare thing, a physical comic genius. Do what he would, pose as a man of affairs, and as a matter of fact, he was a good one, rant and rave, or upbraid her, that appearance of his always defeated his best domestic effects. He could relax an audience simply by looking at it and saying “whoops”. But time had hardened him. It seemed impossible to believe that he had once gone out of his way to amuse her. On stage his best part was the title role in something called
Toodles
. It was years since he had played Toodles at home. She had to confess that she had shrunk from the vulgarity of it, when he had. But now she shrank from his rage.

For years he had hated all the Booths, and in particular, Edwin, who was everything Sleeper could not be. He loathed Mary Ann. Now Mary Ann was here, and they were going to open the packet Wilkes had left with Asia.

The packet contained two letters. One had been written to Mary Ann the previous November. Clarke read it by himself. It was a piece of fiddlefaddle, as one might expect, but at least it exonerated the family, if one could believe it. Clarke looked around at Asia and Mary Ann, and believed nothing.

The second letter was the more recent, the longer, and addressed, To Whom It May Concern. It was even worse than the first one. It had not even been sealed. It was nonsensical, dangerous taradiddle. He read it aloud, and went right on reading it, even after Mary Ann had fainted. The letter was a justification, if so one could call it, of the crime.

Asia did not faint. She was not the sort of woman who did. She revived Mary Ann and helped her upstairs. Then she came back and demanded to read the letter for herself. Clarke would not allow her to. He read it aloud. He wanted to make her squirm.

She did not squirm. But she remembered. Of course Wilkes had been some kind of Southern courier. Unknown to Clarke, many people had come to this house on his errands. She pretended not to see them. She also remembered something else. She had often heard Wilkes say that there was a fine chance for immortality, for anyone who might shoot the President, and she knew about Wilkes' thirst for fame. She had always thought that nothing but guff. And yet, as she listened to Clarke's awful voice drone on she knew that, yes, Wilkes had actually done this thing.

She could not understand that. They had loved him so. Had he no thought for his family? Surely he had loved them in return. She knew he loved her. Looking at Clarke, she tried to hold on to that certainty.

No, he had not thought of his family. He seldom did. He had a mother and a brother who played
Hamlet
, that was true, and even a useful sister Asia, who coddled him, but he was determined to be the only Booth. He was himself alone. And so he did not even now think of them. He was more worried about his present situation. He was helpless in the hands of incompetents, he did not feel well, and he did not know what to do next.

He lay under that accursed hangman's tree of a pine, the biggest one, and wanted very much to shriek. He had had a bad night. It was Monday, if one knew what day it was in a wood, and still that man Jones did not return. He saw it must be dawn, which was not a sight he was often up to watch. Late rising was half his occupation, its hallmark, and its privilege. Not that there was much to see. There was a sluggish ground mist which streamed upward, changed colour, and drowned him in a shallow sea of sickly yellow fog. Herold was still asleep. The two horses were tied to trees. Off somewhere he heard a bugle sounding reveille. That meant soldiers in the neighbourhood. He roused Herold and sent him to quieten the horses.

No one came. Herold went into the underbrush with his carbine. Booth felt irremediably lost. It was hard to remember who one was, without an audience to play to. Never having been ill before, he had not realized what a tyrannical and terrible thing one's own body could be. He felt it would eat him up, if once he was so unwary as to lose consciousness. On the ground before him was the nibbled wreck of a small pine cone. He concentrated on that.

When he looked up, Jones was standing in front of him. Jones did not ask how he felt. He merely handed over a blanket, a bottle of whisky, a packet of food, and the newspapers. There was no telling how long he had been standing there.

Hungry though he was for food, Booth was hungrier to know what the world thought of him. He opened up the
National Intelligencer
.

“There's a lot of soldiers around today,” Jones said. Booth scarcely heard him. The paper was two days old, and full of nothing but Lincoln, page after black leaded page of it. From the
Intelligencer
he turned to the New York papers, but found them no better. They did not even mention his name.

What had Matthews done with that letter? It should have filled two full columns at least, for it had been a long letter which explained everything. It was one of the best letters he had ever written. Had that coward Matthews thrown it away, or had the damned Government deliberately suppressed it? Since it gave a true account of the matter, and the papers seemed to regard Lincoln as a martyr, which he certainly wasn't, perhaps the Government had.

He turned back to the
Intelligencer
again, and finally found his name in a short item. The account was uncertain, as though nobody knew who he was. In another despatch, Stanton was said to have said that John Wilkes Booth had played some part in the crime, but his name was not even in the bold type usually reserved for proper names. His trunk had been found at the National Hotel, and Stanton referred to O'Laughlin: General Augur offered ten thousand dollars for O'Laughlin's apprehension. Booth glanced at Jones. But Jones was helping Herold prepare the food.

Everything seemed to have gone wrong. A knife had been found on F. Street. It certainly was not his. A riderless horse had been captured. That must be Payne's. A small headline informed him that the route pursued by the criminals had been discovered, that one of them was Booth, and the other was supposed to be John Surratt. The authorities seemed to believe that it was Surratt, not he, who had engineered this thing. That was absurd. He stared at the papers with disbelief. He had staked everything on this one appeal to fame. And now his name was scarcely mentioned.

“Can't you get me some Southern papers?” he asked. He had always got a better press in the South. In the South they understood him.

Jones merely stared at him. Booth was weak enough to weep. Was there to be no eulogy?

“I want Southern papers,” he said, and almost spilled his mug of coffee.

Jones felt sorry for the poor devil already. He did not want to see him cry. He couldn't figure Booth out at all. What did the man expect?

Behind them they heard a man's voice in the woods, and the sound of horses. A detachment of cavalry jogged by, so close that the flash of metal accoutrements could be seen through the trees. Then they were gone, but they would not be gone for long. Jones had jumped for the muzzle of his horse. Now he let go of it.

“You'll have to get rid of your horses,” he said. “Otherwise they'll give you away.”

Booth did not want to agree to that. Once the horses were gone he would be cut off from escape, and he didn't altogether trust Jones; but he was too weak to argue, and Herold was so scared he'd do anything Jones told him to do.

The two men led the horses away, and Booth went back to the papers. Now the sun was up, the ground steamed with damp.

Everything had gone wrong. Seward was still alive. The steel collar supporting his fractured jaw had saved him. There was no mention of Johnson at all, except the statement that it was suspected he had been marked out as one of the victims. Worst of all, there was no mention of him. So many people had wanted Lincoln dead. He alone had had the courage to kill him. Why then these eulogies of Lincoln, and none of him?

Far off, deep in the swamp, he heard the echo of two shots. The horses were gone. He was now dependent upon others for his escape. And from the way his own conspirators had behaved, right down to Lewis Payne, for Lewis had bungled the job and run away, he did not put much faith in others.

His letter had gone astray, and where were the other conspirators? Weak though he was, he would have to explain the whole matter again. He took out his notebook and opened to a blank page. The notebook was a diary for 1864, but he had no other paper. At the top of the blank page he saw he had once written
Te amo
. He could not for the life of him remember to whom that referred. He smoothed out the paper and wrote in the date. “April 12th, 13th, 14th, Friday the Ides.” What Ides meant he was not sure, but he remembered the phrase from
Julius Caesar
. He also remembered that Brutus had died for his act. Because he was used to coming out after the death scene to take his bow, and he always did a good death scene, he had forgotten that, but now it struck him forcibly. Brutus is, however, the hero of the play. And so he should be, despite that cringing fool, Matthews.

The papers said he had been a cut-throat coward. That made him angry. “I struck boldly and not as the papers say,” he wrote. “I walked with firm step through a thousand of his friends, was stopped, but pushed on.” What if he had shot Lincoln in the back? What point would there have been in asking him to turn around? “Our country owed all her troubles to him, and God simply made me the instrument of His punishment,” he went on. And then a little politics: “The country is not what it was. This forced Union is not what I have loved. I care not what becomes of me. I have no desire to outlive my country.”

On the other hand, he had no real desire to die, either.

Jones and Herold loomed up in front of him and said that with so many troops on the move, Booth would have to stay where he was for another day or two.

Booth whimpered. It was too much. He did not see why he should have to suffer so. He sat there and went on writing as long as he could. It was necessary to explain about that letter to the
National Intelligencer
. Writing calmed him, but even so, he could not bear the thought of lying here like an animal another night, when others far worse than he lay in comfortable houses.

They were not to lie in them long.

Monday, Edwin came back from Boston to New York. He had been questioned over and over again, but then released. Life might have no mercy, but he did have a few powerful friends. They saw to it that he was left at liberty, despite Stanton. It was not a liberty he much enjoyed, for overnight the whole world had become his prison. He could not bear to be seen. He would never act again. He dreaded even to descend from the train.

Tompkins, his host in Boston, had come with him. Edwin would almost rather have been alone. It had never occurred to him that anyone might find him lovable. Therefore, even when he needed it most, he shrank from help. Help was something he found it easier to give than to receive.

He was pale and tired. Life had bleached him out. For a mercy there did not seem to be any reporters about, but there was a plain clothes detective not far behind him, for though he was not to be arrested, he was to be watched. He looked around shyly. When he saw his old friend Tom Aldrich there, he smiled so hard he almost cried.

“Tom,” he said. “You shouldn't have come.” He was concerned. Tom Aldrich was a journalist who needed his job, and who could tell what might happen to anyone who spoke to a Booth these days?

They went straight to the 19th Street house. It was empty, except for Rosalie. Mary Ann was in Philadelphia with Asia. He had tried to make this house a home for Mary Ann, who certainly deserved one, but now the rooms seemed futile. He went right to his own bedroom. Poor Mary Ann, she was his mother, but perhaps for that very reason he never knew what to say to her. Now no one would know what to say to her. Johnny was the only one who was able to please her, the only one she cared two pins about. For the first time, for he doted on his own daughter, he saw that willynilly, to be a parent is inevitably to expose oneself to loss.

He had forgotten. There was a portrait of John Wilkes on the wall beside his bed. He stared at it, while Tom Aldrich came in, glanced at it, and then tactfully looked away. In that instant Edwin knew he would never take it down. Whatever he had done, Wilkes was a member of the family. But neither could he bring himself to look at it any more.

The men settled down for the night. Through the shutters they could see the plain clothes man waiting down in the street. Booth did not dare to leave the house. As his father had once said bitterly, when someone he did not even know had greeted him on the street, “Everybody knows Tom Fool.” The difference between fame and notoriety is seldom certain. Suddenly Tom Fool was exactly what Edwin had become. The wretched history of his family had finally tripped him up, as it was to do to how many others?

That was what Stanton wanted to know. How many others were there? Stanton had worked around the clock. Edwin might get away from him, but now he proposed to arrest everyone in sight. It was his usual method, for he had come to believe that all the world was guilty of something. It was merely necessary to discover of what, and that could be proven better in the Old Capitol Prison than in court. The writ of habeas corpus was still suspended. That gave him a free hand. He was in no hurry, but he was inexorable. He began with such of the conspirators as he could catch.