Fates and Traitors (19 page)

She could only hope and pray that Wilkes would have a change of heart.

Her own heart changed—grew, blossomed—as she settled into the comfortable home Clarke had rented at 430 Franklin Street, about a mile south of the Arch Street Theatre. In those early weeks of their fledgling marriage, he proved to be more attentive and loving than she had imagined, generous with compliments and affection, often leaving books and other small gifts for her to find as she went about her day.

She was grateful to discover that she had every reason to anticipate a long and happy marriage with a kind man who loved and adored her.

•   •   •

I
n August, Wilkes returned to the Marshall Theatre in Richmond, Joseph enrolled in medical school, and Mother, Rosalie, and Edwin moved into the Clarke residence in Philadelphia, although Edwin was often traveling on tour. It would have been more romantic, perhaps, if the newlyweds had the house to themselves, but Asia was thankful her
mother and sister were near. Although her petticoats and skirts still concealed her secret from strangers, she was already with child.

As summer turned to autumn, Asia contentedly prepared the nursery and the layette, sewing gowns, knitting soft booties and caps, and piecing small quilts in abundance, for she expected her baby to arrive in midwinter. “Give the babe that old Job's Tears quilt you made for me at Tudor Hall,” Wilkes joked in a letter from Richmond. “Cut it down to size, make three or four cradle quilts from it, I don't mind. I never could bear that sorrowful canopy. It always made me fear I'd see old Job at the foot of my bed, naked and bent, with long white locks, and beard hanging to his knees, and shedding tears as big as the quilt's patches.”

“What a thing to say about a quilt made with a sister's love,” Asia added indignantly after she finished reading the letter aloud to her mother and sister, but she smiled, for she knew Wilkes looked forward with great delight to the arrival of his little niece or nephew.

The family's anticipation of a precious new addition brought a welcome note of happiness to a season of increasing discord throughout the land, for the rising enmity between slave state and free was reflected in their own household. Joseph and Rosalie were indifferent to politics, but Edwin, Mother, Clarke, and Asia staunchly advocated the liberty and freedom of the North, as Asia was certain her father and grandfather would have done. Wilkes alone took the part of the South, especially his beloved adopted home of Virginia, where he had always been treated with kindness and respect by theatergoers, far more so than in the North. It was only natural that he should return the affection the South had offered him in such abundance, Asia supposed, but sometimes she suspected Wilkes exaggerated his ardor to vex Edwin.

Then, in November, an astonishing turn of events forced her to reconsider. The militant abolitionist John Brown, who had been convicted and sentenced to die for his failed attempt to instigate a slave uprising in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, was awaiting execution in a Charles Town prison. As the date approached, rumors flew about that abolitionist partisans were plotting an assault on the village, intending either to break Mr. Brown out of prison or to storm the scaffold and rescue him from the hangman's noose. President Buchanan had ordered four infantry companies under the command of Colonel Robert
E. Lee to Charles Town to meet the threat, but Virginia governor Henry Wise, fearing that this would not suffice, called out the state militias to reinforce the federal troops.

Asia, her mother, and Clarke, avid newspaper readers all, followed the story in the press with alarmed fascination. Only later did they learn that Wilkes had been caught up in the tumultuous events.

Wilkes's letter home spun a thrilling tale, rendered only slightly less harrowing by the knowledge that he had written it after he had already returned safely to Richmond. On the evening of November 19, he was preparing for his bit part in the comedy
The Toodles
when the alarm began to peal in the bell tower on Capitol Square. When Wilkes rushed outside, he discovered that a special train had just pulled into the station at Broad and Seventh, directly across the street from the Marshall Theatre, halting only long enough for the city's militia companies to climb aboard before speeding them off to the defense of Virginia. As he watched the celebrated Richmond Grays, the Richmond Blues, the Howitzer Company, the Virginia Riflemen, the Old Guards, and the Young Guards scramble onto the train, smartly attired in splendid uniforms, impressively outfitted with knapsacks, bedrolls, and muskets, Wilkes was seized by the irresistible compulsion to join them.

He sprinted to the train and asked two of the Richmond Grays for permission to board. When they refused, citing orders that no one was allowed on the train but men in uniform, Wilkes employed his boundless charm to persuade them to sell him enough pieces of their own costumes to allow him to pass. By the time the train reached its destination, he had befriended enough soldiers and had spent enough coin to acquire a nearly complete uniform—snug gray trousers and shirt, white sashes crossed over his chest, a greatcoat adorned with a shoulder cape, a gray hat cocked at a debonair tilt and secured with a chin strap.

In Charles Town, Wilkes served as a scout and a guard, and he was present on that bright, cold, blustery morning of December 2 when Mr. Brown was escorted from the prison to the scaffold, seated atop his own dark-walnut coffin in the bed of a wagon pulled by two white horses. “I felt a throb of anguish as he climbed to the gallows, his old eyes straining their anxious sight for the multitude he vainly had thought would rise to rescue him,” Wilkes wrote. “He was a brave old man. His heart must have broken when he felt himself deserted.”

Although Wilkes vehemently disagreed with Mr. Brown's cause, the convicted man had faced death so bravely that he had earned Wilkes's respect. “This experience has changed me utterly,” he confided to Asia, and when she beheld the carte de visite he had enclosed of himself attired in the uniform of the Richmond Grays, she remembered how ardently as a boy he had wished to be a soldier, a longing that—incongruously, she thought—had been inflamed rather than extinguished by his grueling experience as a cadet at St. Timothy's Hall.

But he was not officially a soldier, and after the train carried the militia to Richmond late in the afternoon of December 4, their duties fulfilled, Wilkes had every intention of returning to civilian life and resuming his chosen profession. But the managers of the Marshall Theatre resisted. Wilkes had vanished without warning less than an hour before curtain. He had been absent two weeks, obliging the rest of the company to scramble to cover his roles. His sudden, inexplicable disappearance was unsettlingly reminiscent of his father's erratic behavior, but Junius Brutus Booth's genius had compensated for his faults. John Wilkes Booth was not so richly blessed, and thus he was fired.

His term of unemployment was so brief, Wilkes reported cheerfully, that he had not enough time to write home about it. When the Richmond Grays learned that he had been sacked, a large contingent of the First Virginia Regiment marched upon the Marshall and demanded that the managers reinstate him. Cowering before the wrath of the soldiers, reluctant to offend the sons of the city's elite who formed its ranks, the managers promptly restored Wilkes to the company.

Then and thereafter, Asia enjoyed Wilkes's stories of his military adventure, but Edwin rebuked him for breaking his contract with the Marshall and jeopardizing his career all for a “mad lark” that proved entirely unnecessary, for neither rescue attempt nor attack on Charles Town had ever come. “The Richmond Grays are no better than a band of privileged boys playing at war,” Edwin groused via the post from Louisville. In a stinging flurry of letters, he rebuked Wilkes for deserting the company and for squandering the opportunities Edwin managed to secure for him despite his growing reputation as an arrogant, indolent minor player.

Asia knew that Wilkes chafed beneath Edwin's rule, even as he marveled at his brother's talent and benefitted from his success. The vast
difference in their rank was as evident at home as it was in the theatre world, for whenever Wilkes visited the Clarke residence, he could not avoid seeing the grand portrait of Edwin their mother had hung upon the drawing-room wall, or taking note of the laurel wreath she had arranged around the frame, or glancing at the scrapbook on the marble table nearby, in which she had carefully preserved the laudatory letters Edwin received from the leading members of society in the great cities where he had performed—New York, Boston, Washington City, New Orleans, and Philadelphia. It seemed to Asia, as it surely did to Wilkes, that he now shared the title of favorite son with Edwin, if he had not lost it entirely.

But although Edwin was astonishingly gifted, he was far from perfect. He was prone to deep descents into melancholy, and he suffered from what he called the family curse—an overwhelming compulsion to drink. Asia could not fathom how Edwin had ever been tempted to indulge after seeing what liquor had done to their father, but after weeks, sometimes even months, of sobriety, he would suddenly disappear on a drinking binge several days in duration. His manager kept Edwin sober when he could and tended the trembling, hungover actor when he failed. In time the manager was replaced by a devoted new friend, the theatre critic Adam Badeau, who became Edwin's traveling companion, acting coach, literature tutor, and guide to the customs and manners of the elite circles of society to which Badeau had been born. Badeau succeeded better in the role of caretaker than the manager he had displaced, but even he was surpassed by another—a lovely, charming young actress named Mary Devlin.

Edwin and Mary had first met in Richmond in 1856, when Mary played Juliet to Edwin's Romeo at the Marshall Theatre. Edwin had been immediately captivated by her exquisite, dark-haired beauty, her lively and intelligent mind, and her ineffable, warmhearted charm, but she was only sixteen, and the ten years that separated them included a sordid history of heavy drinking and—or so Asia suspected from bits of conversation between her brothers she chanced to overhear—shocking promiscuity on Edwin's part. “I have lost my heart,” he had written home to Mother shortly after they met. “It has found a resting place.” His love for Mary was so true that he believed he could never deserve her, and as soon as his term at the Marshall ended, he broke off all
contact with her. But two years later they met again in Boston, again in the roles of Romeo and Juliet. Mary was eighteen, Edwin was successful and sober, and his determination to protect her from himself melted away beneath the warmth of her affection. In time, Edwin asked her to become his wife.

In February 1860, Asia was safely delivered of a beautiful baby girl, whom a besotted, overjoyed Clarke insisted upon naming after her mother. Asia contributed the middle names of Anne Dorothy, and they soon took to calling her Dottie. Although their little daughter was blessedly healthy and strong, Asia and Clarke agreed that they should not hazard the trip to New York City to attend Edwin's wedding in July. Soon thereafter, when Edwin and Mary invited Mother, Rosalie, and Joseph to live with them in Manhattan, Clarke confessed to Asia that he was glad to see them go. The rising discord between the Booth brothers had strained the household, with Clarke invariably taking the part of his best friend and Asia loyally defending her favorite brother.

“Maybe distance will help John Wilkes master his jealousy,” Clarke said on the first night they and little Dottie had the house all to themselves.

“Perhaps,” Asia retorted spiritedly, “if Edwin did not insist that they divide the country's theatres between them, keeping the more lucrative North for himself while restricting Wilkes to the South, Wilkes would not feel slighted and constrained.”

“Oh, come now. Wilkes has often said that he wants to be first and foremost a Southern actor, beloved of the Southern people.” Clarke scowled and shook his head. “And it's plain to see that if secession comes, as many in the South vow it will, he'll cast his lot with rebellion and slavery.”

“Wilkes loves his country,” Asia protested. “Yes, he's sympathetic to the plight of the Southern people, far more so than you or I, but he's no firebrand secessionist.”

But Asia found little evidence to prove her brother's loyalty in the months that followed, when Wilkes declared that the election of Abraham Lincoln as president augured doom for the United States, or when he raised a New Year Eve's toast to South Carolina for courageously seceding from the Union, or when he similarly celebrated each state that followed into rebellion. In April 1861, he sent Asia a rapturous letter
after Mr. Lincoln's attempt to send a ship to resupply the Union troops held under siege at Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor ended in failure when South Carolina militia repelled the steamer and Union Major Anderson was forced to surrender. As she read her brother's letter, Asia, heartsick and afraid, could no longer ignore what had been evident to her husband all along: Wilkes was in wartime what he had been in his youth, an ardent lover of the South and her customs, a staunch defender of Southern principles. Though his native state of Maryland remained in the Union, in his heart Wilkes was as zealous a Confederate as any gentleman of the plantation aristocracy.

As the war erupted and spread, Wilkes continued to ply his trade, crossing borders to tour both in the Union and the Confederacy. He made no secret of his Southern sympathies, only reluctantly conceding to Asia's pleas not to express his passionate, unpopular opinions in public. He could not refrain from praising the Confederacy within the family, however, which only widened the gulf of enmity that separated him from Edwin, who refused to listen to Wilkes's heated denunciations of President Lincoln and Northern policies, and from Clarke, who flatly told Wilkes he was a fool, and that he had cast his lot with criminal rebels who would inevitably be crushed beneath the might of Northern righteousness.