What’s past is prologue.
—W. Shakespeare, The Tempest
April 15th, 1865
i
Edwin is in Boston, where he and Sleeper have been talking of purchasing a third theater. The previous evening, he’d played Sir Edward Mortimer in The Iron Chest. “Where is my honor now?” he’d asked the sold-out house. The city is exuberant, the men in the streets ecstatic to learn they aren’t going to die on some battlefield, after all. Edwin is in love and General Grant’s great task is ended. Edwin feels as happy as he’s ever been since Mary’s death.
When he makes his way home, word is already spreading, the mood turning from joy to disbelief to anguish. But Edwin is tired and will hear nothing until a servant wakes him the following morning.
Edwin’s first thought is not a thought, more like a blow to the head, a sense of falling, the crashing of the sea in his ears. His second thought is that he believes it. He wishes he didn’t. He wishes he could say that this is utterly impossible.
He weeps for his president, bleeding in the lap of Laura Keene. His own life going forward is suddenly unimaginable. He moves from room to room, chair to chair, but there is no escape from this.
Before the morning is over, a message arrives from Henry Jarrett, the manager of the Boston Theatre, to say that he prays what everyone is saying about Wilkes will yet prove untrue. Still, he thinks it best and right to cancel all further performances. Of course it’s best and right. What’s best and right is that Edwin never set foot on a stage again. The rest is silence.
* * *
—
Asia learns what has happened from the newspaper. She opens it and the first things she sees are the paper’s black borders and a sketch of her brother’s face. Sleeper, rushing to her side, tries through her incoherent cries to understand what’s wrong. He can’t. Asia is screaming.
Soon enough she’s in control again, all ice and iron. Yet the hysteria returns and returns, never triumphant, never vanquished. She wishes she were dead.
At the first opportunity, she goes alone to retrieve John’s packet. One letter she burns. One name she feels she must protect. She does this in the cold fireplace, blowing the ashes apart, so no scrap remains to be read. The other letters she takes to Sleeper, who’d never known they were in the house. During her continual breakdowns, he’s been solicitous. The appearance of the letters makes him angry.
A US marshal arrives, forbidding them to go outside. Asia thinks they’re being imprisoned, which they are, but also protected. An angry crowd is gathered in the street. In an excess of innocence, Sleeper gives the letters to the marshal, including the one addressed to Mother. He stresses that only his wife had known of their existence. The house is searched, even the nursery with its crying children, in case John is hiding in a wardrobe or under a bed.
A guard is placed at every door.
* * *
—
June is on tour in Cincinnati. He gives the desk clerk a cheerful wave as he sets off for a morning walk. “So you haven’t heard,” the desk clerk says and then wishes he could bite the words back. He doesn’t want to be the one to tell.
June turns around. “What do you mean by that?”
One of the housekeepers comes into the lobby on the run. “Upstairs,” she says, seizing him by the arm. “Quick. Quick!” A mob of some five hundred people is right behind her. They’ve stripped the lampposts of June’s playbills and come to hang him. June is still on the stairs when he hears them cramming into the lobby, shouting his name. If this were California, he’d be swinging from a lamppost before day’s end.
But the clerk manages to convince them that June left in the night. June spends the day hidden in a stuffy attic room, saved by the hotel staff, every one of whom holds his life in their hands, not one of whom gives him away.
* * *
—
Joe is on the Moses Taylor, headed for Panama. After Australia, he’d worked in San Francisco, in a job June got for him at Wells Fargo & Company. He’s been away three years. The authorities find it suspicious that he chose the date of April 13th to start home.
On arriving in Panama City, he hears of the president’s death and the murderer Booth, but many men are named Booth; he thinks little of it. At the next stop, Aspinwall, he hears the name John Wilkes. By then he’s had more time to think. By the time he hears, he feels he already knew.
From the transcript of his later interrogation:
Q: Have you ever been insane, Mr. Booth?
A: Yes, sir.
Q: For how long a time?
A: For several months. I was insane in Panama.
Q: On your return?
A: Yes, sir. That news made me insane.
* * *
—
Mother and Rosalie are in New York. For more than a week, bells have been ringing, horns blowing in the giddy city, and the celebratory noise is only now starting to subside. The war is over. All the boys are home or coming home. Mother says that Ann Hall will be united with her lost children at last. All of them free now! If only Joe Hall had lived to see it. She says that all any mother wants is to be with her children. They make plans for a visit to Tudor Hall.
The doorbell rings and the Aldriches are on the doorstep. Thomas Aldrich is an editor and writer, a man of sincerity and compassion. Rosalie has never liked his wife, an opinion shared by Mark Twain, who called her a dithering blatherskite and worse. “Lord, I loathe that woman,” Mark Twain says.
The Aldriches are friends of Edwin’s. “Edwin’s in Boston,” Rosalie tells them. She’s surprised they wouldn’t know that.
Mrs. Aldrich seizes Rosalie’s hands so tightly that her rings dig into Rosalie’s flesh. “We’re here for your poor mother,” she says. Through the open door, Rosalie hears the newsboy calling. “The President’s Death! The President Foully Murdered! The President’s Death!”
A moment of shock. “The president is dead?” she asks.
“Oh my dear,” Mrs. Aldrich says, still clutching her hands though Rosalie has tried to extricate them.
At least John will be happy, Rosalie thinks. She’ll remember always how that was her first thought just before she heard the newsboy call, “John Wilkes Booth arrested.”
She looks at Mrs. Aldrich, who has taken the time this morning before coming to the house to pin her best hat onto her head, powder her cheeks, and arrange the curls about her face. “Oh my dear,” Mrs. Aldrich says.