Adelaide Booth begins to follow all of them, though mostly Mother, around Baltimore, shouting that Mother is a whore and the children bastard-born. She’ll appear at the market where Mother tries to sell her produce. She’ll appear outside the classroom just as the boys are leaving.
“I’ll fall on your backs like a bomb,” Adelaide cries out, trailing them through the streets, weaving through carriages and pedestrians, her contorted face obscured by her bonnet, her voice loud and spit-filled. The Bully Boys scatter when she appears, reconvene in her absence. They remain Johnny’s staunch supporters, but their fists and fisticuffs are useless against this woman. The nagging sense that he must be grateful to the Bully Boys for their continued friendship is a feeling new to Johnny and very disagreeable.
The more she shouts, the more room she is given on the sidewalks and streets. She moves through Baltimore in a private space created by her own fury. She follows Edwin and Johnny right into the schoolyard. “You brats. You ill-begotten vipers. You aren’t clean enough to step on. I wouldn’t sully my shoes.” The other children stare and Edwin’s not sure if they’re staring at her or at him. He feels the heat coming into his face. “We should come a different way,” Johnny says quietly, and after that they change their route daily. Mother hires a large black man to walk Asia back and forth from school.
Only Father is left unmolested. Mrs. Booth is not so angry that she’ll jeopardize his earnings.
Sometimes she’s accompanied by Father’s real son—a man only a few years older than June, and named for Grandfather. Rosalie tells the others that Richard Booth has actually been traveling with Father for more than a year. How Father can have imagined he would pull this off without Richard ever getting wind of the family in Baltimore remains one of the mysteries that is Father. He was, perhaps, emboldened by twenty-five years of successfully keeping his bigamy a secret from almost everyone.
Edwin rarely looks at Richard straight on for fear Richard will look back, but he knows him as a tall, pale, fragile man, nothing like June, opposite to Father in every way. Can this really be Father’s son? Edwin doubts it.
Richard never speaks, but his presence at his mother’s side suggests his enmity. A half-brother Edwin never knew he had is his mortal enemy. It’s Shakespearean, really.
viii
Most of the time, Edwin manages to ignore the situation. He has other things to think about. He’s been offered a theater!
Only not exactly. Mrs. Robson, the mother of Johnny’s friend Stuart, manages a local hotel, and she’s told Stuart that if he and his little friends clean out the cellar, they can use it as a playhouse. Stuart has even managed to purchase a real set from the Kilmiste Garden resort, a painted backdrop—the plain room of a simple cottage, a fireplace, rough-hewn shelves with bowls and mugs.
Johnny and his friends are full of plans. They’ll charge a penny apiece for the neighborhood children, two pennies for interested adults, and pay an organ grinder out of the proceeds. Their first play will be Richard III, with all the women’s parts removed and the swordplay emphasized. Johnny is terribly excited about the whole thing. He expects to star. He makes the mistake of boasting about this to Edwin . . .
. . . who sees instantly that he needs to take over. Johnny can’t play Richard III. He’s eight years old! Edwin and his friend John Sleeper offer to join the troupe. The offer comes with a contract specifying their share of the purse. As an adult George Stout will remember these thirteen-year-olds as intimidatingly professional. Also fantastically condescending. The older boys steal the set. Johnny and his friends steal it back. It changes hands so many times, it falls to pieces before it can be used.
The older boys don’t join the troupe so much as they take possession of it. Edwin will, of course, be Richard. Sleeper will be Buckingham. Johnny can be Richmond, a very important part, they assure him. The hero.
All of these boys will go on to have careers in the theater. While other children are playing mumblety-peg, ringtaw, and the game of graces in their spare time, those in the Booth orbit have long been putting on plays. To date, these have taken place in the backyard of 62 Exeter. But this new venture is a magnitude greater. The cellar is enormous and free from the vagaries of Baltimore weather.
Edwin just needs costumes. And a horse. There is plenty of room in the cellar for a horse.
He’s happily mulling these things over when Rosalie calls for him to come down to the kitchen. He can tell from her tone that he missed her first call. Rosalie is always so quiet. Really, you have to be expecting her voice in order to hear it.
He descends the stairs, but in body only; his mind is still on his production. He finds Rosalie making biscuits just the way Aunty Rogers taught her. She’s flushed and there’s a dusting of flour in her hair and on her rumpled shirtfront. Baby Joe is at the table cutting the biscuits from the dough with the rim of a water glass.
She asks Edwin to build up the fire in the stove, so he adds sticks and stirs the whole thing until it’s crackling. Edwin and Rosalie have a conversation that, because of Baby Joe’s presence, takes place in abstracts. It dawns on Edwin that while he has been working to avoid all thought of their parents’ treachery, Rosalie has been worrying over it like a dog with a bone.
“How much do you know about Lord Byron?” Rosalie asks him.
Edwin knows how often Mother has said that she ran off with Father because of Byron’s poems. They’ve all only heard this for their whole lives.
He knows that one of Father’s first gifts to Mother was an oval of Byron’s face, his dark curls encircled by a thin golden wreath. A brooch, and Mother treasures it, though she never wears it. Her life has turned out less dressy. The brooch is kept in a cupboard drawer with Mother’s other treasures, including Edwin’s caul. He knows that Byron was poor Henry’s middle name.
“I’ve read some of his poetry,” Edwin says. “I know he and Father used to be friends.”
Rosalie, it turns out, knows a great deal more. She tells Edwin about Byron’s abandoned wife and the sister whom he treated as a wife, and his friend Percy Shelley and his abandoned wife, who killed herself while she was pregnant (unless she was murdered, by whom and for what reason Rosalie couldn’t say), and also William Godwin, an anarchist who believed women were just as good as men but had one illegitimate stepdaughter who killed herself, and another who’d had an affair and a child with Byron, and also a real daughter who was that same Mary Shelley who wrote Frankenstein after running off with Percy Shelley. Oh, it was all a dreadful tangle and, as far as Rosalie can see, nothing but free love from top to bottom. Free love, she explains to Edwin in a scatter of flour, means that love matters more than marriage. Marriage is a prison in which love cannot be free.