The Judges of the Secret Court (16 page)

Lincoln's funeral was held on Wednesday. Having no precedent for grief, the authorities had had to put it off until then, while they invented a ceremonial. The body had been in the White House all that time. So had Mrs. Lincoln, Robert, and Tad.

That house now had a terrible reputation. Overnight, from being the fairground of an office seekers' carnival, it had become a mausoleum. Johnson stayed away, partly out of consideration towards Mrs. Lincoln, partly because he did not wish to enter that building until he had to. He took the oath to the Constitution in his hotel bedroom, and did nothing all day long but sign papers sent to him by Stanton. There would be time enough to remove Stanton later, when his usefulness was done.

Every night Mrs. Lincoln roamed the now deserted upstairs corridors. Sometimes she caught a glimpse of herself in a console mirror, but apart from that image, the mirrors reflected nothing. She did not think they would ever reflect anything again. From now on she would have to live surrounded only by nothing, and her own image there no longer meant anything to her. She had had her glance at the future. She refused to go downstairs, because the body was down there.

On Wednesday morning, she could hear the company arriving. They had come to take away something that belonged to her. Mr. Lincoln lay in the Green Room. Its mirrors were draped. There was a guard of honour. But it was considered a singular evidence of the poverty of his origin, that no blood relatives could be found outside his own immediate family, and of those Tad was too young, and Mrs. Lincoln too violent, to attend. It was her relatives, however, who were down there. They had not much cared for him living, Mary had married beneath her, but now he was dead nothing could keep them away. Dr. Lyman Beecher Todd, General John B. S. Todd, C. M. Smith, a cousin, and Mr. Ninian Edwards, a man of much better family, would not have wanted to miss this, their last contact with the White House. The Todds were well pleased. Yesterday Mary had somewhat inconveniently been the Chief Magistrate's Lady, and today, as the papers said, she was a widow bearing only an immortal name. That was much more convenient.

At a little after eleven the clergy came in from the reception room and the obsequies began. The clergy were followed by those people who counted, the Governors of New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Iowa, Illinois, Connecticut, Ohio, Maryland, and Wisconsin, all solid men, of whom the Todds approved. They even approved of the funeral. It was very fine. All those people they would never have known in Springfield and Kentucky were there. The Diplomatic Corps was there. And at noon President Johnson arrived.

That made everybody feel better. It brought life into perspective again, for Johnson was a man they could all understand, a wily hardbitten rogue with cold eyes and something evasive in his manner. He was, he had said so often, a common man. They had nothing against that. Politicians were always common men, who did the work that statesmen could not stoop to do. It was the uncommon attributes of Lincoln which had disturbed them. About Lincoln there was always the reserve of a kindly judge who, kind or not, still sits up there, fingering the dossiers of both sides of the case, whether he admits to doing so or not.

Johnson stepped forward to the bier and looked down, at that head from which Willie Wright, in whose bed the President had died, had saved some of the brains on a handkerchief, with the thought of giving them to Robert Lincoln, at the appropriate time. When a corrupt man becomes incorrupt, that merely means he uses the forces of corruption for incorrupt ends. Unlike a man born good, he is hard to dislodge. But as yet nobody had had the chance to find that out.

Johnson stepped back.

The sermon, by Bishop Simpson of the Methodist Church, was short. The oration by the Rev. Gurley, who relished death as much as most of his auditors did, was much too long. Whether they wanted to or not, the Todd family had time to think. And yes, they could see it now. He had been a great man. They would have seen it at that time, if only his family and manners had been better.

They also thought of Mary. She would be more of a problem than ever now. She would be back on their hands again. In all likelihood Lincoln had not left any estate worth mentioning, and surely her pension would not be large.

The room smelled of death. They would be glad to be out of there. For though the age was one in love with the idea of easeful death, and everybody read the threnodies of that brisk, productive, cheerful little body, Lydia Huntley Sigourney, whose river of ink flowed out of Lethe, and who, said Mark Twain, had added a new terror to death, they did not particularly care for the smell. It was sweet in the wrong way, like saccharine.

After the oration the coffin was placed on an enormous hearse topped by a gilt eagle. Fifteen feet above them it tottered and swooped, as the catafalque headed up Pennsylvania Avenue towards the Capitol. The muffled beat of the funeral drums, as though someone was in slow motion emptying faggots into a wood bin, kept the pace of the company. The sky was clear, the avenue, as usual, an accordion of dried mud.

A Negro regiment, marching to the procession, met it, reversed order, and so, against all the plans of the War Department, which had prepared so swiftly and with such protocol, led it instead of trailing behind.

One could not really complain, one had no right to do so, but the Todds did not take it kindly that of all these crowds lining the street, most were a rabble, and the rest coloured, peering out over the white spectators like hired hands in the shrubbery of a newly cleared world.

The funeral march, composed by Brevet-Major General J. G. Barnard, in great haste, whoever he was, did well enough. Behind the hearse came the saddled horse of the deceased, in accordance with a ritual older than the Old Testament. There were those who could almost see the President mounted easily upon it, the homely shambles of a man, bending down to say something kind.

Yesterday the papers would have interpreted that friendly voice as the bellowing of an incompetent fiend. But it cannot be denied: death makes a difference.

Behind the Diplomatic Corps marched the Justices of the Supreme Court, slightly fusty, like so many talmudic Jews, blinking in the daylight of some new diaspora.

Had Lincoln been the savage some men had taken him for, though a wily savage, the horse would have been shot to follow him, rather than trailing empty after the catafalque. Now it preceded the Judges, with its white, liquid eyes.

There were picnickers on the lawn of the Capitol. Hastily they bolted their cold beef sandwiches, rolled up their napkins, and got to their feet. Lincoln's coffin was carried past them into the Rotunda of the Capitol, where Dr. Gurley delivered a few more words. It is appointed, he said, unto men once to die.

And so it was. But that was no reason to explain why P. T. Barnum had offered him 1,500 dollars for Abraham Lincoln's hat.

Gurley finished and the mourners departed. They had contrived an impressive ceremony, after all, out of bits and pieces of a hundred rituals as old as the Europe from which they derived. At last, at nightfall, the body of the President was left alone there, under the burning gas lights at the spring of the dome, with a few guards the blades of whose drawn weapons glinted in a muscularly retracted shimmer, under the hissing lights above. The crowds would be admitted tomorrow, to that greater than Rome's Capitol, as the journalist, Mr. Shea, called it, and who was to know if he was wrong?

Booth still lay in the woods. The one thing he wanted now was escape and some release from this endless pain. Yet it was not safe to move. More troops had arrived at Port Tobacco on the night of the 18th, and were fanning out over the peninsula, between the creeks. There were fourteen hundred cavalry alone, not to count Pinkerton men and hired detectives. It was the detectives Booth feared most. Jones had been offered a bribe by one of them, at Port Tobacco, which was where they were holed up. He had refused it. He promised to get them away tonight, in a small boat. But money was money, and the reward was up to 100,000 dollars now, dead or alive. Who was to tell what Jones might do? Booth loved money enough, not to rate it too low against the claims of honour. Jones was only a dirt farmer, anyway.

While he waited the long day out, he looked at the papers, for he did not dare to look any longer at his leg, which was distended, pustulous, and of an unwholesome colour. He had the Southern papers now, but the world in which they were printed seemed farther off than ever. The South had repudiated him. No doubt they did so only out of a fear of reprisals. That must be the explanation. When they got there, they would understand. It would be a matter of Cox again, cursing him only to help him. It must be that.

For the Northern papers were no better. Mrs. Surratt had been arrested, Payne had been arrested, O'Laughlin and Arnold had been arrested. That left only Atzerodt to account for.

On one of the back pages, in a short item, he read that Ella Turner had attempted suicide at her sister's brothel on Ohio Street. She had been found with a chloroformed rag over her face and his picture under her pillow. Nellie's house was behind the White House. The police had hauled all the girls in.

It meant nothing to him. He had almost forgotten Ella. He could scarcely remember her now. It was such ages since he had slept in a bed, let alone felt any human warmth there. Yet she had been pert enough. He was touched. It was just that he had more important matters to think about. Where was Atzerodt? Why hadn't he killed Johnson? He sighed. It all seemed somehow abstract now.

It was not abstract to Atzerodt.

That miserable troll knew perfectly well what the world had in store for him. The night of the assassination he had not even been able to find a friend to put him up. That showed him what the world was. He had stayed at a glorified flophouse instead, and then, sure he would be caught in any case, had fled to enjoy his last few days of freedom. America had always frightened him. It was too large. It had no corners to hide in. He pawned his revolvers, and with the ten dollars he got for them, went on a spree. For five days he lived life as he had always wanted to live it. He went to Germantown, in Maryland. He ate in taverns and talked to the other guests, like a normal man. He was accepted by them. He called himself Attwood. That was the name he always took on his drinking expeditions, when he impersonated a normal man. It was wonderful. He stayed in the house of a Mr. Richter. He ate meals in the dining-room, and slept upstairs in a room with two other men, instead of the six that slept in the same room at his flophouse. Not since Mrs. Surratt's, where he had boarded until she had flung him out, had he been treated so well. He got drunk every night. He was terrified.

When they came to arrest him, which was done before dawn on the morning of the 20th, he was ready to tell them anything and everything, pellmell, just so they would let him go. Who
they
were he did not know, but clearly they were persons in authority. He told them everything.

But they did not let him go.

In Philadelphia the arrest of Sleeper Clarke and Junius Brutus Booth was conducted with more decorum. They were men of property.

Asia was under house arrest. Her brother Junius had arrived the night before. Edwina was still upstairs, with Junius's own daughter, Marion. Junius was no help. He was too stolid. And he and Clarke got on each other's nerves.

Clarke was bad enough to begin with. He was furious about the house arrest, when Edwin went scot free. He could not denounce Edwin. He denounced his wife instead. It was she who had brought all this upon him. Only she.

She did not bother to answer. Did he expect her to repudiate her whole family, just because he had made the mistake of marrying her? After all, she had made the mistake of marrying him. She did try to keep out of his way. She blushed for shame enough, without having the detective hear what Clarke had to say. Why should she not be loyal to her family, for certainly Sleeper Clarke was not loyal to her.

It was almost a relief when at last the Federal Marshal took Clarke and Junius into custody. She was not pleased with June. He knew how she felt about Wilkes, and yet all he could say was that he wished John had been killed before the assassination, for their family's sake.

Clarke was arrested on the grounds that he could have read Wilkes' letter, since it had been unsealed, and so could have prevented the plot had he chosen. That business was the sort of farce he was so good at. But it was not a good farce. The charge against Junius was even less substantial. He had written John Wilkes about their oil investments in Pennsylvania, and the government suspected that the plot numbers were really a cypher. June knew nothing about such things. A life of concentrated self-interest had left him with a curious innocence about the ways of the rest of the world. He went along to jail almost cheerfully.

Asia was at last left alone with that grief she did not even dare to mention, yet she had no will to weep. Thoughts were her grief, not tears. She saw herself as a Roman matron. Roman matrons do not weep.

The detective took pity on her. He begged her to let his wife take over his duty. Asia was so patently both ill-treated and ill. Would she not prefer a woman in the house? Asia said to thank his wife kindly, she appreciated the offer, but she would rather be watched by ten men who could keep quiet, than by one chattering female. That was true enough. Asia had not only the soul of a man, but a man's hatred of gossip. Do what the world would, she would not be seen humiliated by her own sex. She went upstairs to write to Edwin.

It was true she had been unpleasant to Edwin about his first wife. The woman was an actress, and Asia received no actresses in her home. But of them all, he, apart from herself, was at least loyal to the family, when even Junius was not. On her way to her room she stopped in to look at Edwina, who seemed to be taking her afternoon nap. Edwina, too, had doted on her Nunkee Wilkes. She gazed down at Edwina, and then slipped back into the corridor. It was as Edwin had said. That jolly man Clarke had never loved her at all. And she had tried for so long to believe that he did. Why had Wilkes done this to them all?