The Judges of the Secret Court (15 page)

The first to be hauled in was Sam Arnold. He was easy enough to find. He was asleep in the back room of the store at Fort Monroe where he worked. Arnold was not surprised. He had read in the newspapers that the jealous and temporizing letter he had written Booth from Baltimore had been found when the police seized Wilkes' trunk at the National Hotel. What was the letter about? Nothing but that Booth had come to Baltimore and taken Mike O'Laughlin out to dinner instead of him. “How inconsiderate you have been,” he had written.

How inconsiderate he had been. A kidnapping during a war was one thing. Murder after the war was over was another. Arnold had told Booth that. He had fallen in with the man only for the profit of knowing him, since Booth was involved in wartime smuggling. There was money in that. They ran quinine. Murder was another matter entirely.

Arnold did not have the look of a criminal. At twenty-eight he was a pleasant young man. And neither was he a criminal. When the arresting officers handed him a letter from his father, advising him to co-operate and to talk, he talked.

It was Booth the charmer, not Booth the assassin who had held his attention. He was not implicated in the assassination in any way. Why should he not talk?

With Mike O'Laughlin the matter was more serious. He had a deeper awareness of that vague Southern dream of the gentleman, and Booth had been kinder to him. He was small and delicate, but he had a firmer mind than Arnold. He knew what his own arrest was apt to lead to.

He had taken refuge at a boarding house, and so dodged arrest for two days. There seemed no point in trying to dodge it any longer. Those sent to arrest him seemed impressed by the fact that he apparently understood why he was being arrested and asked no questions. His only wish was to protect his family. He had been in Washington City that fatal night, and Arnold had not. He would undergo whatever he had to undergo alone.

Those were the only conspirators Stanton could gather in that day. Atzerodt, Payne, and Booth himself were still at liberty, as was Surratt, whom he wanted most of all. But if he could not have the son, the mother was available. Major Smith was despatched for Mrs. Surratt.

Out of some sad last minute whim, Mrs. Surratt had decided to play the piano, which she had not touched in weeks. She felt nervous, for she still had no news of John. She could not keep down some sense of dread. She raised the piano lid, stretched her fingers, and searched out a chord. The chord sounded sour, for the piano had got out of tune. Annie was dressed to go out to a party, and was waiting to be called for. Honora sat on the sofa. The other boarder, Olivia Jenkins, was equally quiet. But all four women had a lot to think about.

The house had been searched Saturday. The police were after John. Mrs. Surratt had told them nothing, but hoped John
had
had the sense to slip away over the Canadian border. Weichmann had left Saturday, and so had her other male roomer, Mr. Holahan. Mrs. Holahan had moved out Sunday, taking her child with her. So many departures were ominous.

The front parlour was not an agreeable room. One wall was decorated with a lugubrious lithograph called
Morning, Noon, and Night
. On another hung the arms of the State of Virginia, with two crossed Confederate Flags beneath it, and the motto written large.
Sic semper tyrannis
was the motto of Virginia, “Thus will it ever be with tyrants.” Mr. Booth had admired it once.

And repeated it on Friday night.

What was to become of them all? Mrs. Surratt looked down at her fingers, and watched them search out the familiar melody, a piece by J. R. Thomas, “Bonnie Eloise, the Belle of the Mohawk Vale”. It had been popular during the war. She had no real awareness of playing and no pleasure in doing so. She noticed only that her hands looked old.

The thing that had disturbed her most that day was something quite trivial. Happening to glance out the parlour windows, at about noon, she had seen a man across the street, his head under a black cloth, taking a photograph of the house with a large box camera on a tripod. As she watched, an arm reached out of the cloth, removed the metal cap, and she found the pupilless great eye of the camera staring at the house like the bore of a cannon.

She went right down the front steps and across the street.

“What is the meaning of this?” she said.

The man said he did not know. He only knew that Mr. Brady, who photographed everyone and had photographed the war besides, had sent him to take a likeness of the house.

“But why?” she had insisted. “How dare you do such a thing without my permission?”

The photographer had given her a pitying look, snapped up his tripod, and walked away. It was a look she remembered now, even though her hands were playing this supposedly agreeable and sentimental music.

All four women heard the rattle of horses and then footsteps on the stoop, outside. Annie's escort, no doubt. He was a little late. The doorbell rang, Mrs. Surratt finished her phrase, and got up to answer it.

From the parlour the others could hear her gasp, as she opened the door. It was not Annie's escort. It was the military.

“We have come to arrest you and everyone in the house.”

They heard that too. Annie glanced at the arms of Virginia on the opposite wall, but there was no time to remove it. Mama came back, sat down, and began to pray. The men followed. They did not like the job of arresting women. They were embarrassed. But they had no choice. Mrs. Surratt looked up and sighed. She would not be dragged through the streets like a common criminal. Nor would she have Annie treated so.

“May we have a carriage?” she asked. She was always a little timid with men, but it was a pitiable enough request. “It's cold and damp, and I don't want my daughter and these other ladies …” Her voice trailed off.

Major Smith was delighted to oblige. He would have done anything to make his task less disagreeable. He sent one of his men out for a carriage and told the ladies to get their hats and coats. Mrs. Surratt rose to do so. Major Smith regretted that his orders were not to let her go through the house alone. A Mr. Samson would go with her.

She went upstairs, gathered up the coats and bonnets, and went back to the parlour. The women were tying their bonnets when the front doorbell rang again. Two of the soldiers answered it this time.

Outside they saw a tall man in a grey coat, black pantaloons, rather fine riding boots, and with the torn sleeve of an old shirt on his head. Over his shoulder he carried a pick axe. It was Payne. Seeing them, he turned around to leave. They would not let him leave. They asked him what he wanted. He said he wanted to see Mrs. Surratt. Perhaps he had mistaken the house. They asked him in and shut the door behind him.

Major Smith called Mrs. Surratt out of the parlour. The man said he had been hired to dig a gutter. Mrs. Surratt swore that he had not. She was short sighted and the hall was dim. But she recognized him, she thought. He was the man Booth had introduced to her as a preacher named Wood, who had stayed in the house a few days, about two months before. She saw no point in identifying him. Booth had caused her enough trouble already.

Payne said he had never seen her before either.

He only did that to save her. When he had stayed here as Wood, she had been kind to him. He had only come here because he had hoped Cap might be somewhere about.

They made him sit on a bench in the hall. He hauled out his oath of loyalty to the Union and showed them that. That was how they knew he was Payne. Even Mrs. Surratt had not known that. He had no will to resist. He knew the jig was up. But neither did he want to get Mrs. Surratt in trouble. When the soldiers told him to stand up, he shambled out between two of them, the way he guessed they wanted him to. If Cap wasn't here, it didn't much matter where he went.

Mrs. Surratt had gone back to the parlour. The ladies were in there, on their knees, while she led them in prayer. It struck Major Smith that they had not asked, even obliquely, why they were being arrested. That made him thoughtful, but he was gallant enough to give Mrs. Surratt his arm, as they went out to the carriage.

In the carriage she sat as erect as she knew how and told the girls to do the same. She did not want the neighbours to know they were being hauled off ignominiously to jail. Looking up, she saw her own front door being shut. In the front parlour the lights were still on. That startled her, but she fully expected to be back. It did not occur to her that anything worse was going on than that she was to be grilled again about John's whereabouts. It was a mercy she did not know them. Otherwise these men might have been able to get them out of her, somehow. As the carriage left the familiar street, and headed she knew not where, she could not help but panic. She did so at that moment when she could not see her own house any more.

In the house Eliza Hawkins, the old coloured woman, went upstairs to turn off the gaseliers. When she got back to the kitchen Susan Mahoney was having hysterics. Mrs. Hawkins didn't like Susan, who was an ex-slave belligerent about standing up for her rights. She'd been working here two weeks, and didn't care two pins about anybody, white or coloured. All she wanted was her wages. That was what she was having hysterics about. She was afraid of being cheated out of what she called her rights. Mrs. Hawkins told her she'd be paid. Mrs. Surratt always paid her bills, if it took her the last cent she had. But that wouldn't do. Susan wanted the money now.

Eliza wanted to be shut of the wretched girl. She told her to be off to bed.

A night's sleep made Susan feel no better. This house gave her the creeps, and she wasn't going to be cheated by no whites, not now the Negroes were free. She wanted to get even. Tuesday morning she got her chance.

The detectives had come back to search the house. They kept Susan and Eliza in the dining-room, while they did so. She knew now what Mrs. Surratt had been arrested for; and what was going to happen to any darky, now Mr. Lincoln was dead? She wasn't taken in by Mrs. Surratt either. Eliza might say she was good, but Susan knew she was just picky and stingy, so she could help Mr. Lincoln get shot.

From time to time a detective came into the room to ask questions. Two pictures of Booth had been found behind the
Morning, Noon and Night
lithograph. Whose were those?

“Dose belong Miss Annie,” said Susan. “Miss Annie, she dote on Mr. Booth. She thinks she love that man.”

Eliza slapped her face.

The detective got interested. “Tell me some more,” he said.

“Sho, but not here,” said Susan, and gave Eliza a wounded, down-trodden, cringing look.

The detectives took her away and she told them more. They offered her 250 dollars for everything she could remember. That was better than waiting round for a lot of lousy little ole wages. Besides, she liked the attention she was getting.

It wasn't any trouble at all to say that three men had come to the boarding-house after the assassination just to whisper so she could overhear it, that John Surratt had been at the theatre that night.

After she'd said that twice, she believed it. There were an awful lot of pretty dresses you could buy for 250 dollars.

Why couldn't she have the money now?

In his town house, Senator Hale was getting ready to corner his daughter. He had never approved of her crush on that man Booth, but he had been wise enough to wait for the thing to collapse by itself. Now he was angry. The assassination was vivid to him. He had had an interview with the President that same Friday. He had never had much use for Lincoln, but the man had appointed him Minister to Spain, which was decent of him, and this wasn't exactly the time to say what you thought. Now he had discovered, to his horror, that the foolish girl had actually written to Edwin Booth.

Didn't she know that any connection with the Booth family could ruin him, that Edwin was being watched, and that even though he had been defeated in the last campaign, once his tour of duty in Madrid was over with, he planned to run for re-election in New Hampshire?

He was red with rage.

But as it turned out he didn't have to say anything to Bessie. She had written Edwin on impulse, nothing more; she had had two days to think things over; and she would never be so foolish as to act on impulse again.

She had had her romance, which is to say, her scare, and perhaps she was as glad now to have it terminated as he was. The softer sides of her tightened up at once. She looked older. He had expected a fight, and instead she had become worldly in five minutes, if perhaps a little lost.

Looking at her, he saw that he had worried needlessly. No matter how bad a crush she might have had on Johnny, she came of good sound stock. She would have found some way to break off the engagement, even if this thing had not happened. It made him proud of her. It made him sigh with relief. It was balm in Gilead to discover that the thing you love is after all well worth the loving, and he did love his daughter. She was so like himself.

She agreed with him that the sooner they both left for Madrid, the better. He told her to pack at once.

He was so pleased. Now everything would be all right. She would do what she had been educated to do; she would always be charming, and with luck, even a good hostess; and she would make a good marriage. From being a silly girl, she had turned overnight into the sort of woman he admired, a woman like her mother, someone who could be trusted to put up apple butter and cranberry jelly at the country place and handle her own stocks and bonds, who understood the mystique of never spending money foolishly, dressed simply but well, and if she had children, no matter how much she might dote on them, could be counted on to put whatever money he might have to leave her into a self-renewing trust; a woman who would teach those same children not only their catechism, but that other catechism whose first sentence is a stern directive that whatever we may do in this life, we must never touch our capital.

Good may come out of evil, after all. He had always believed so. And by the time they returned from Madrid, all this scandal would be hushed over and forgotten. By then nobody would remember Lincoln, let alone a man called Booth.