He’s introduced as the star of the season to the rest of the company. He’s not imagining their unfriendliness. Edwin’s kept his hair long so that he can play Hamlet without a wig. “Is that how men wear their hair in America?” a man who might play Falstaff asks and Edwin understands that it’s not a question but a mockery. Someone is quoting Shakespeare—“?‘There’s many a man hath more hair than wit’?”—but he can’t quickly locate the source. He thinks it came from a man who, were casting left to Edwin, would play nothing but ghosts.
He hasn’t been bullied since he was a boy, but oh, how quickly the feelings come back. “?‘They have a plentiful lack of wit,’?” he says, but only to himself.
“It was fine,” Edwin tells Mary that night. His head is in her lap and she’s rubbing his temples. He’s relieved to see her radiant again. His cheek lies next to the slight curve in her belly that is their baby. He sees her hair coiling over her breasts. “But they think me a bumpkin. They told me that in England no one spits on the stage, as if I were about to do that.”
Edwin set such value on wowing London. As the days tick towards his opening, his nerves snap and twang. He can’t sleep without drinking, though drink only works for an hour or two, and then he’s awake again, lying stiffly immobile so as not to wake Mary as well. He’s never seen the dark come so early nor stay so late. He can see that Mary is worrying about him.
With good reason.
The season does not go well. The audiences are appreciative. He finishes each evening stepping forward to acknowledge the sustained applause. He returns to Mary well satisfied. And then morning comes and with it his reviews. The critics are muted in their praise—“good, but not great”—except when they’re savage—“bobbing fiercely hither and thither like a dumpling in a boiling pot.” He tells Mary that only the audience matters, and he tries to believe it, but he’s losing his way onstage. He needs her and her notes. He needs someone outside himself to tell him what he’s done. Mary is too advanced in her pregnancy for this. He has his first understanding of how the baby will usurp her attention.
Other circumstances conspire against him.
The popular Charles Fechter opens opposite him at the Princess Theatre. Edwin takes a week off, hoping the enthusiasm for Fechter will ebb, but it doesn’t. He goes to see Fechter’s Othello and dislikes it. Fechter builds his characters visually from a myriad of physical moments. His Othello shakes hands with everyone who steps onto the stage, like an overly friendly dog. He sits through one whole scene, writing at his desk, waving a feather pen about. Edwin builds his characters through motive and emotion. The constant busyness onstage annoys him. “Bobbing fiercely hither and thither like a dumpling in a boiling pot,” is what Edwin thinks, yet the critics are rapturous. Charles Dickens seems to attend every performance. All London is agog with Fechter’s “new Hamlet,” his “new Othello.”
In early November, the war back home comes to England. The USS San Jacinto intercepts and boards the RMS Trent, removing, without permission, two Confederate envoys from her. This aggressive action inflames the British public. That it doesn’t result in Lincoln’s second war is partly due to the patient efforts and diplomacy of Prince Albert. The rise in anti-American sentiment further sharpens the tongues of Edwin’s critics. He’s out one day for a brisk walk through the streets, when a young man in a shining top hat mutters in passing, “You have a lot to answer for.” The man is houses away before Edwin understands that what he has to answer for is the Trent affair, that, even for people who’ve never seen him onstage, something in the way he dresses or walks marks him instantly as American.
The calendar turns to December with all her chill and dark. One morning Edwin wakes to find the windows coated with frost inside as well as out. “My legs are aching,” Mary tells him and he massages each in turn, trying to stir the blood.
They’ve moved to a villa in Fulham, small, but charming. The air is better, the street quieter, and Mary loves it. She sings in her lovely alto voice as she goes about the house. This is the house in which their child is born, one week old when Prince Albert dies.
At the time of the Trent negotiations, Albert was already very ill. A pall settles over the streets. The theaters are never full, rarely half-full. The baby is small, but hearty. The villa is a little spot of joy inside the great sad city.
The more London fails to love him, the more Edwin loves America. When Mary goes into labor, he tacks an American flag on the wall above her bed. His baby may be born in England, but will enter the world under that flag.
Mary screams throughout the delivery, and Edwin’s terror appears to amuse the doctor. “All perfectly normal,” he tells Edwin. “Seen it a hundred times,” but it doesn’t seem possible to Edwin that the very first act of every single person he sees on the street, the milkman, the beggar, the lord, and the lady, is to produce a searing pain in the one who’ll love them most.
The baby comes and Edwin’s allowed to tiptoe into a room smelling of blood and kiss them both briefly. Then he’s shooed outside so that everyone can clean up. He steps out into the icy garden. His terrors have melted away. He’s a father. He’s a father!
He looks about him to see what’s changed, now that he has a father’s eyes. There is the horizon of chimneys, all streaming with smoke, the thin, bare branches of trees, three rosebushes cut to their ugly stumps, two large crows fluffing their feathers, Mary’s muddy boots, a path of white stones with old bits of snow melting at the edges, a gray scrim of clouds. The world seems very full, not a patch neglected, not a space left blank. It’s incredible really, the work, the detail, God put into His creation. Edwin thought he’d come outside to smoke his pipe. Instead, he cups the cold bowl in his hand and sobs with exhaustion and relief and gratitude and awe.
He spends the dark afternoon writing letters by gaslight, interrupted twice by the baby’s cry, a sound never heard in this world before. To his mother he writes that Mary is safe, but weakened. To his friend Tom Hicks, the painter, Edwin says that he won’t tell him the sex, but if he paints the baby using nothing but red and makes it not a boy, he will just about hit the mark. I am right mad with joy, he writes to everyone.
Mary sees what a terrible mistake she made in wishing for a son. What a narrow escape she’s had! They name the baby Edwina. (Did you ever hear the like?! Asia says, unmoved by mutual motherhood.)
* * *
—
Before Edwin left, he could scarcely be bothered with the war. Safely abroad, he and Mary are desperate for every bit of war news they can find. He has friends on the battlefields. He carries his poor broken country in his heart.