Fates and Traitors (12 page)

He darted off, and with an apologetic, imploring look for their mother, Asia swiftly followed.

“John, Asia,” Mary Ann whispered sharply, drawing disapproving stares from those seated nearby. When her children neither halted nor replied, she muffled a sigh and went after them, murmuring apologies to the spectators whose view she obstructed in passing.

She walked quickly, but John Wilkes and Asia easily outpaced her, and the sounds of the ongoing performance faded behind her as she hastened after them through a stand of trees. It broke open upon a shady hollow, where she discovered John Wilkes sprawled out upon the soft, thick grass, gazing up at the sky through the branches high overhead. “Sis,” he exclaimed when Asia reached him, and as she caught her breath, he took her hand and tugged playfully, pulling her to a seat beside him. “I have a curious tale to share.”

A strange note in his voice compelled Mary Ann to halt rather than join her children in the clearing. Instead she concealed herself in the shadows of the trees, straining her ears to listen.

“Tell me all,” she heard Asia demand, with mock seriousness. “Leave out no detail.”

Grinning, John Wilkes leaned his head back against her knees and dug into his pocket for a folded piece of paper. “A band of gypsies has been prowling hereabouts, and one of them told me my fortune.”

“What did she say?” Asia teased, trying in vain to snatch the paper from his grasp. “That you'll find your heart's desire? That fame and fortune will be yours? Or perhaps she gave you the answers to your history exam?”

“Nothing so good as that.” Still grinning, John Wilkes unfolded the paper. “I wrote it down, but there was no need, because it was so bad I won't soon forget it.”

“What do you mean?”

He shrugged, nonchalant, or making a good pretense of it. “She studied my palm and saw only ill fortune.” Glancing at the paper, he cleared his throat and spoke in the voice of an old crone. “‘Ah, you've a bad hand; the lines all crisscross. It's full enough of sorrow. Full of trouble. Trouble in plenty, everywhere I look. You'll break hearts; they'll be nothing to you. You'll die young, and leave many to mourn you, many to love you too, but you'll be rich, generous, and free with your money. You're born under an unlucky star. You've got in your hand a thundering crowd of enemies—not one friend—you'll make a bad end, and have plenty to love you afterwards. You'll have a fast life—short, but a grand one. No, young sir, I've never seen a worse hand, and I wish I hadn't seen it, but every word I've told is true by the signs. You'd best turn a missionary or a priest and try to escape it.'”

“Why, that's nonsense, Wilkes,” Asia protested, shuddering. “The proof is in her own words. You have many friends, and no enemies except for those silly boys back home, and they can't count for much.”

“I guess that's so,” John Wilkes admitted, slowly refolding the paper. “I asked her, if it's in the stars or in my hand, how could I escape my fate, even if I did join the clergy?”

“You can't mean you'd really do
that
, all because of one old woman's wild ramblings.”

“Of course not. Me, a minister?” John shook his head. “Afterward I said to her, ‘Do you expect me to pay you for this evil dose?' Well, she did. She took my money all right, and said she was glad she wasn't a younger woman, or she'd follow me through the world for my handsome face.”

He laughed merrily, but Asia could barely manage a smile.

Deeply troubled, Mary Ann silently withdrew and returned to her seat in the audience, where she sat through the remaining recitations, brooding over the gypsy's dark tidings and her own vision of John Wilkes's future that she had glimpsed in the fire when he was but a babe in her arms.

She imagined the Fates contemplating the tapestry of her son's
destiny—Clotho spinning the thread of his life from distaff to spindle, Lachesis measuring its length, Atropos dispassionately cutting it, determining the manner and hour of his death. “Be kind,” she implored in a whisper, though she knew the mythical Fates were creatures of imagination and superstition, impervious to her pleas.

She pushed the unsettling image aside, and another swiftly took its place—Junius, declaiming from the stage in the role of Julius Caesar. “‘Men at some time are masters of their fates,'” she murmured, remembering. “‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.'”

Whether Shakespeare had intended to encourage or to warn, she could not say.

•   •   •

A
t long last, Adelaide's required period of residency was completed. She promptly sued Junius for divorce, whipping up a new frenzy in the press. Junius did not contest her suit, and before long the matter was settled, and the decades-long sham of a marriage was over.

Soon thereafter, Junius asked Mary Ann to marry him.

She was startled by how intensely his proposal pleased her, and yet, despite her certainty that he loved her dearly, something held her back. “After thirty years, you would ask me to submit to—what did you call it back in London? The iron yoke of marriage?”

He took her hands. “We will submit to it together, for the children's sake.”

With great effort, she refrained from noting that the yoke lay lighter upon his shoulders than hers. She had given him a peaceful home, adoring children, the work of her hands, her beauty, her life. He had given her love and passion and fidelity, but also innumerable hours of worry and immeasurable anxiety. For his sake she had broken with her parents, betrayed her faith, ruined her good name—and yet without Junius, her world would have been constrained to a few city blocks of London, circumscribed by her home, her church, the flower shop, the Covent Garden market. She might never have known what it was like to be truly, completely, ardently loved, to live the sort of passion other people only read about in Byron's poetry. Her darling children would not have existed, and she could not imagine life without them. Nor could she imagine living without Junius—but it seemed impossible
that they could continue on as they had done, now that no impediment stood between them and lawful marriage. The public had a long memory for scandal, and with each passing year, the burden of the choices she and Junius had made would grow heavier upon their children's shoulders, more bewildering, more unfair.

And so Mary Ann accepted Junius's proposal.

They married on the tenth day of May 1851, John Wilkes's thirteenth birthday. “At last we are respectable,” Mary Ann told her husband wryly as they walked home from the courthouse, her gloved hand on his arm. Earlier that morning he had declared that she was as beautiful as on the day they first met, and she had laughed, well aware that love altered his perception. Though hard toil and care had kept her from growing stout, she had lost her girlish grace and her once glossy black hair had faded. Worry and contemplation had marked her brow with a pair of indelible lines, with finer ones etched in the corners of her eyes and mouth. For his part Junius had grown a trifle stockier, and drink and dissipation had marred his noble face with fine red veins and bags beneath his eyes, but his gaze was as piercing and expressive as before, and she found him no less handsome. If anything, she found him more beautiful and loved him all the more for knowing his faults and how valiantly he fought to overcome them.

Later that evening, John Wilkes found her alone in the garden, lost in thought, her gaze fixed on the wedding band Junius had slipped onto her finger only a few hours before. His arms were rigid by his sides, his hands balled into fists, his jaw set, his eyes flaring with anger and triumph.

“Now I am a Booth,” he said emphatically, but she was his mother, and she heard the lingering question in his voice.

“Yes, darling boy, you are,” she said, holding out her arms to him, drawing him into her embrace. “You are John Wilkes Booth, and let no one deny it.”

Time shall unfold what plighted cunning hides,

Who covers faults at last with shame derides.

—William Shakespeare,
King Lear
, Act 1, Scene 1

A
lthough her parents had insisted that nothing would change after they were legally wed, it seemed to Asia that a heavy burden had been lifted from her mother's shoulders, and Father became exultant, even triumphant. Declaring that the Booth family had entered a joyous new era, he resolved to build them a beautiful new residence in the Gothic style on The Farm, and he immediately hired James Johnson Gifford, the architect of the Holliday Street Theatre, to supervise the construction. Asia and her siblings marveled at the artist's renderings of the elegant two-story, eight-room cottage in the shape of a cross, which boasted a massive central chimney, a broad front portico, steeply pitched gables, and diamond-pane windows.

“That's the room I want for myself,” Wilkes announced one afternoon as he and Asia spread out the plans on the dining-room floor and studied them while Mother and Rosalie set the table for supper. He pointed to a bedchamber on the second floor, and with his arm
extended, the cuff of his sleeve shifted to reveal fine black markings like spindly veins on the back of his left hand.

“Wilkes, what did you do?” Asia whispered, seizing his hand. Halfheartedly he tried to pull away, but she held fast, muffling a gasp when she discovered the initials JWB surrounded by a wreath of stars crudely pricked into his fine, smooth skin with India ink. “Wilkes, a tattoo? What were you thinking?”

Wilkes extricated himself from her grasp just as Mother glanced questioningly their way. In unison the brother and sister lowered their gazes to the plans, but as soon as Mother resumed her work, Wilkes whispered, “I'm a true son of Junius Brutus Booth, and I want everyone to know it. I'm no bastard. I'm as good as anyone. That's what I was thinking.”

Often thereafter, Asia spotted him rubbing his right thumb absently over his homemade tattoo, as if reassuring himself that the initials were indeed his by right.

Whenever Mother murmured about the rising construction expenses, Father quieted her with kisses and declared, “My dear wife must have a home befitting our great love.” That never failed to bring a soft brightness to her eyes and roses to her cheeks, and she confided to Asia that she would be glad to move up from the old log cabin that had come with the property, for the family had outgrown it long ago. Father invited Joe and Ann Hall, their faithful longtime employees, to make the cabin their home, a gift that was gratefully accepted.

Construction on Tudor Hall, as Father had christened the new residence in honor of Henry Tudor, the earl of Richmond and slayer of King Richard III, continued after Wilkes returned to Milton Academy and all through the winter and into the spring. It was not yet complete when June unexpectedly returned to Baltimore.

Mother wept from joy to embrace her eldest child again after three long years, but Asia was so astonished to see her eldest brother that at first she could only stare and wonder. It was unmistakably him—a bit thinner and weathered, and more careful in his speech, but otherwise seeming little changed for his three years in San Francisco. Strikingly handsome at thirty years of age, June had inherited their father's noble features and Roman profile but none of his dramatic genius, or so Asia had overheard her parents lament. He was an excellent athlete, a
powerful boxer, and an impressively skilled swordsman. Those talents had kept him steadily employed as a reliable actor in supporting roles, but it was in management and directing that he excelled.

Mother immediately sent Joseph running to the Holliday Street Theatre to tell Father of his namesake's return. “My boy! My boy,” Father exclaimed as he burst into the house with Edwin and Joseph on his heels, and tears filled his eyes as he embraced June. “It's glorious to see you. Why didn't you send word that you were coming? Have you come home to stay?”

“Why didn't Miss Harriet Mace accompany you?” Asia inquired, for that was surely the most interesting question; no one else would be bold enough to ask about the woman for whom June had abandoned his wife and daughter.

“Asia,” Mother admonished gently.

But June smiled affably, not offended. “I sent you a long letter before I set sail from San Francisco. Didn't you receive it? I don't expect to stay more than a fortnight, and that, dear Asia, is why Harriet remained in San Francisco.”

If only Wilkes were there to make the family circle complete, Asia thought wistfully as they gathered around the supper table and June enthralled them with tales of his adventures in far-off California. In the three years he and Harriet had lived in San Francisco, it had transformed from a frontier settlement of a few hundred haphazard shacks in the mud to a thriving city of fifty thousand residents, the population swelled by gold miners, aspiring prospectors, and a great many entrepreneurs eager to part them from their earnings.

“Unless you've seen it, you can't imagine the wealth pouring into San Francisco,” said June. “Fortunes are plucked from streams every day, or earned by merchants peddling picks and shovels and sieves. I've seen men buy houses with gold nuggets as big as my thumb.”

Except for gold, June told them, above all things Californians craved entertainment. Many of the first public buildings constructed in San Francisco were theatres, but so few truly talented players performed in the West that those who were willing to leave their comfortable situations in the East for the rustic frontier were appreciated all the more. “Prospectors often throw purses of gold on the stage to reward a player that has particularly pleased them,” June said. “After performances,
the cast and crew sweep the stage and divide up the gold dust they gather.”

“Really?” asked Joseph, awestruck.

“Yes, really.” Grinning, June reached across the table to tousle his younger brother's hair, but then he sat back and fixed an expectant gaze upon Father. “The people of San Francisco and Sacramento yearn for entertainment of the highest quality. They would pay generously to see the great tragedian Junius Brutus Booth.”

June explained that he had been hired as the stage manager for the new Jenny Lind Theatre in Portsmouth Square, a magnificent, beautifully appointed playhouse with seating for two thousand. For months, his partners—and every theatergoer who learned who his father was—had begged him to persuade the celebrated thespian to tour California. “You could earn a fortune, Father, more than enough to justify the long journey.”

“The long, very difficult, and very dangerous journey, I think you mean,” said Mother.

“You flatter me, son,” said Father, his expressive brow furrowing, “but lately I've contemplated retirement, not undertaking the most arduous tour of my career.”

“All the more reason to seize this opportunity to reap great profits before you pack away your costumes for good,” said June. “Just think how eagerly audiences will fill the theatres—and how handsomely they'll reward you—if they believe this may be their last chance to see you perform.” He turned to Edwin. “You'll earn a fortune too. You'll have your pick of roles, as many and as varied as you could possibly want.”

“What if I don't want any roles?” Edwin's dark eyes revealed a deep unhappiness, the set of his jaw a mutinous determination. “What if I don't want to go?”

“Yes, Junius, what of that?” said Mother. “Edwin is eighteen. He's served you faithfully for six years. Shouldn't he be permitted to resume his education, if he wishes?”

“If Edwin doesn't want to join the tour, he needn't,” said June. “I'm happy to serve as Father's escort, valet, dresser—whatever he needs.”

“In that case,” said Father, avoiding his wife's eye, “I'd be a fool not to consider it.”

In the days that followed, Asia often came upon her parents conferring in strained whispers, her father enumerating their many financial concerns, her mother anxiously reminding him of the hardships and dangers of travel. Whether her father wore down her mother or simply overruled her, Asia did not know, but before long Father announced his decision: He would seek fortune and acclaim in California, June would escort him, and Edwin would remain behind to resume his long-neglected education.

In late June, Junius Brutus Booth Senior and Junior departed for New York, stopping along the way at Milton Academy to bid farewell to Wilkes. In their absence, Edwin seemed to brighten by the hour. He and Mother animatedly discussed enrolling him in school in the fall, and perhaps engaging a tutor in the meantime to fill the gaps in his education and spare him embarrassment. Edwin had such a quick, shrewd mind that Asia had no doubt he would soon make up for the years of neglect.

Thus it was a shock to them all a few days later when her father's telegram threw Edwin's fledgling plans into disarray. Immediately upon arriving in New York, Father's courage had fled, replaced by overwhelming loneliness and apprehension. June was loyal and amiable, but Edwin knew their father's quirks and routines, his preferences and fears, and had proven himself adept at anticipating and sorting out problems before the great thespian knew anything was amiss. Father begged Edwin to join him before their steamer left for Panama, or he could not possibly go to California.

Asia felt a pang of sympathy as all hope drained from her brother's expression. “You don't have to go,” she told him as he read the telegram a second time. Mother, her eyes filling with tears, wordlessly nodded.

“If I don't,” he replied dully, “the tour will be canceled.”

“Then let it be canceled,” Asia said.

“We can't afford that. We all know it.”

“Oh, Edwin,” Mother lamented, sinking into a chair. “I had hoped to spare you this.”

“Never mind.” Woodenly, Edwin bent to kiss her forehead. “I'm not my father's favorite, but at least I know he needs me.”

After telegraphing his assent to Father and June, Edwin quickly packed for the journey with help from his mother and sisters. Mother
assembled a wardrobe suitable for the tropical climate—two straw hats to protect him from the intense sun and heavy rains, several linen shirts and trousers, and sturdy boots for the hike over the isthmus. “I've packed a few of your costumes too,” she told him on the morning of his departure, her voice trembling. “You'll surely be asked to perform your usual roles in
Richard III
and
Othello
.”

He thanked her sincerely but without enthusiasm, and Asia grieved to see that the old look of haunted misery had already returned to his eyes.

Edwin reached New York in time to board the steamer and set out for Panama with his father and elder brother. And then there was nothing for those left behind to do but wait, anxious and apprehensive, for word that the men had reached their destination safely. News came sparsely and sporadically, so they learned well after the fact that the travelers had reached the warm azure waters of the Florida Keys, that their ship had put in at Jamaica and Cuba to take on more coal, that the vessel had arrived at the Isthmus of Panama. It seemed to Asia that she and her mother and Rosalie held their breaths during the interminable, anxious days while the men traveled by canoe up the Chagres River, winding through the lush, perilous rain forest to Gorgona, where they would journey on through rocky, mountainous terrain on foot and by pack mule. Even when word came that the travelers had reached Panama City, the family back at home could not breathe a sigh of relief, for cholera was epidemic in the city, and the men were obliged to isolate themselves in a hotel room to avoid contagion until the steamship
California
arrived to transport them a fortnight's journey north up the coast of Mexico and California.

Only after Asia, Mother, and Rosalie learned that the
California
had arrived safely at San Francisco on July 28, and that their loved ones were in good health and high spirits, did the unrelenting tension ease. Two days later, Father opened his tour at the Jenny Lind Theatre in the role of Sir Edward Mortimer in
The Iron Chest
to admiring reviews. After a fortnight in San Francisco, they moved on to the American Theatre in Sacramento, where Father would have a brief engagement before venturing farther inland to towns and settlements closer to the gold fields.

In the meantime, life in Baltimore went on as ever, infinitely less
exciting than Asia imagined the California tour to be. Wilkes came home from school for the summer recess, which was wonderful, but with Tudor Hall still under construction and the old cabin occupied by Joe and Ann Hall and their children, the Booths could not withdraw to the comfort and peaceful solitude of their country estate for the summer. The only scandal worth writing to California about was that Edwin's friend John Clarke Sleeper, who had been studying law at his mother's insistence, had abandoned his books to become an actor, commencing his new career with a regular engagement at the Chestnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia. He wrote Asia an odd, abrupt letter in which he told her he had changed his name to John Clarke, because no actor wanted to be considered a sleeper on the stage, but Asia should continue to call him Clarke, as she had since she was fourteen.