Rosalie wipes her hands on an apron cross-stitched with fraying pieties—Her price is far above rubies. She has more flour in her hair now.
Abstract or not, Edwin thinks that Baby Joe shouldn’t be hearing any of this. He thinks that Rosalie has lost her mind. She’s so gullible. She reads too many books. He himself stopped listening about the time Byron was wanting to marry his sister. Where has Rosalie heard such nonsense?
It can only have come from Mother. Mother and Rosalie are prone to quiet, private conversations while they beat the rugs, hang the laundry, churn the butter. He’s always assumed they were deciding what to make for supper. Now it appears they’ve been sharing licentious, depraved gossip instead. Mother! And Rose!
Edwin and Asia have, on occasion, performed the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet and he’s tried to make it as real as he can, but he certainly doesn’t want to marry Asia. He pities the man who does. Nor does he want to discuss free love with Rosalie. Nothing could be more embarrassing. He needs to get back to his costumes.
“?‘Marriage from love, like vinegar from wine,’?” Rosalie is saying now, because apparently this is something Byron used to say. She leaves no pause during which Edwin might extricate himself from the whole horrid conversation.
“Scree, scree,” says Baby Joe, who has his own ways of escaping.
The way Rosalie sees it, pretty much everyone in London was abandoning their wives to run away with their sweethearts around the time that Father met Mother. It seems to have been quite the fad. Sodom and Gomorrah with tea.
She is either accusing Mother and Father or she is defending them. Edwin can’t figure out which. He thinks that she’s angry, although with Rosalie it’s always hard to tell. She speaks quietly, but there is something in the way she is working the dough as if stabbing at it with her spoon. “We’re no better than anyone else,” Rosalie says, “for all Father’s airs. A lot of people will think we’re worse now. Practically everyone will think that.”
It comes to Edwin then what Rosalie is really talking about. Two years ago, Father had taken them all to the circus, where Rosalie met a handsome policeman-turned-lion-tamer from New York named Jacob Driesbach. Driesbach worked without cages, no bars between his cats and an audience full of tender young children. As they watched, he wrestled a full-grown tiger to the ground. He invited several lions to sup with him at a large dining table. The best of manners were observed, each cat in its own chair, no cat commencing to eat until Driesbach, the host, did so. And all the while, he wore a glittering Arabian costume tight around the legs and his muscled arms bare. Naturally, Rosalie was impressed.
Afterwards, Driesbach asked to be introduced to the great actor Junius Booth. But Rosalie seemed to be his real interest. This unexpected and almost implausible turn of events ended in a time of closed doors and muffled sobbing as Father put a quick stop to the whole thing.
He’d said: That Rosalie was needed at home. How did she imagine Mother would manage without her?
That Driesbach was a traveling man and had, undoubtedly, left a trail of broken women behind him. Rosalie would be a fool to think herself so special as to have captured his heart.
That maybe lions were happier untamed.
That Driesbach was a sideshow performer, a creator of mere spectacle, not an artist, not a true player. Circus folk were beneath them. Rosalie should remember that she was better than that. Father would not allow her to so undervalue herself.
Rosalie should remember that she is a Booth. End of discussion.
Rosalie is remembering that now.
“Why are you telling me about Byron?” Edwin asks.
“Who else can I tell?” Rosalie asks him back.
That night, Father remarks that Rosalie’s biscuits have never been so light. Lighter even than Aunty Rogers’. Rosalie’s biscuits are lighter than air.
* * *
—
In 1869, when Harriet Beecher Stowe ignites a conflagration by accusing Lord Byron of incest in the pages of The Atlantic Monthly and a third of their subscribers leave as a result, Rosalie will remind Edwin that she told him so first and he didn’t believe her. No one will believe Stowe either.
* * *
—
The next surprising thing that Edwin hears is that the Mitchells are leaving the farm. Just days after Adelaide Booth’s arrival, with the secret of Father’s marriage now out in the open, the Mitchells are being thrown to the streets. Everyone had always wondered why they’d been allowed to stay, crowding the family out as they did, abusing Mother’s hospitality, offering nothing in return for Father’s support. Now the mystery is solved. Clearly, Uncle Mitchell had secured their place through blackmail.
Edwin has an early memory. He’s a very young boy, returning to the farm in the dark on horseback, seated on the slope of the saddle, his father behind him. Even safe inside the warm circle of his father’s arms, a night terror has been growing, scorching his lungs and whipping his heart. He hears an owl, the wind, the panting and hoofbeats of the horse. The sounds swell in volume. The whole dark sky is in motion.
His father dismounts and swings him down. “There, boy,” Father says. “Your foot is on your native heath.” And the terror lifts and leaves him. The farm is his home and he will never be afraid there.
He feels a longing for it all—the way the water smells, branches scraping like violin bows in the wind, cows calling to be milked, fireflies sparking in the grass. Swimming and riding, climbing into the interlaced trees, singing with the slaves and the freemen in the warm evenings, taking the paths to the swamp with the dogs, ever hopeful for squirrels, panting and racing ahead.
No Mitchells lurking about, spoiling it all.
* * *
—
The Mitchells disappear into the squalor of the Baltimore Ring Factory. Edwin will not think of them again.
But after Edwin’s death, Baby Joe will take, as his second wife, Cora Mitchell, the daughter of one of the Mitchell cousins. The groom will be fifty-four and a doctor, the bride twenty-four and a socialite. The wedding will be a grand affair, with many newspapers taking note of the fact that the groom had two older brothers, the late Junius Booth Jr. and the late great actor Edwin Booth. No other brother will be mentioned.
ix