Fates and Traitors (42 page)

“Not this afternoon. I have pleurisy in my side, and a drink won't help it any.” Then John reconsidered. He had worked up quite a thirst, and he did not know when he might see his friends again after that night. “Maybe I'll take a glass of ale,” he said, dismounting. It was a simple matter to find a boy who agreed to hold the mare for the promise of a penny afterward, and so John slung his arms around the other men's shoulders and went off with them to the Greenback Saloon next door.

One drink did not quench John's thirst, so he had another, then parted from his friends with assurances that he would see them backstage later that night. With a rising sense of urgency, he paid the urchin, mounted the mare, and hurried off to Grover's Theatre.

He had reason to believe manager Charles Hess would not be entirely happy to see him. On Thursday, after he had returned from his unsuccessful trip to Baltimore to speak with O'Laughlen but before the capital had been lit up for the illumination, he had burst into the manager's office, agitated and near despair, interrupting a script reading to
urge Hess to invite Lincoln and his Cabinet secretaries to attend the commemoration of the fall of Fort Sumter the following evening. Though Hess had been displeased by the intrusion, he had acknowledged that he had intended to invite the president, his wife, and whatever companions they chose to attend the performance as honored guests. Although Hess had assured John that he would not forget to inquire, John had lingered until he had seen Hess dispatch a messenger to the Executive Mansion with the invitation in hand—but John had departed before a reply came rather than risk raising suspicions. He had to be sure the Lincolns planned to go to Ford's Theatre and not Grover's, or all would be lost.

Hess greeted him warily, still annoyed from the disruption the previous day. “Mrs. Lincoln declined the invitation on behalf of herself and the president,” he replied to John's question, “but Master Tad Lincoln will attend, with an escort.”

“Not his father, though. You're certain.”

“Quite certain.” Hess gestured ruefully toward the
Evening Star
spread open on his desk. “The Lincolns and the Grants will be at Ford's—and that bodes well for Miss Keene, so for her sake I won't begrudge Ford the ticket sales.”

John smiled. “I'm sure you'll have a full house as well.”

“I'm counting on it,” Hess said. “I spent a fortune on these theatricals.”

John wished him good luck and departed, but just as he prepared to mount his horse, the sound of hundreds of pairs of worn boots pounding in rhythm caught his attention. He turned to discover columns of captured Confederate troops marching down Pennsylvania Avenue. Transfixed by their haunted eyes, resisting the sudden urge to salute, he watched as the gaunt, haggard figures in tattered uniforms of butternut and gray approached, more than four hundred by his rough calculation. To his astonishment, the citizens they passed did not mock them, but instead offered them sympathetic glances or pretended not to notice them rather than add to their disgrace. A few men clad in Union blue even called out encouraging remarks, assuring the broken, weary men that the war would soon be over and they would return to their mothers, sisters, wives, and sweethearts awaiting them back home.

John felt a surge of indignation—perhaps that was not what those
gallant men wanted, even in their exhaustion; perhaps they wanted to escape so that they could fight another day—but the sentiment was quickly replaced by a rush of horror and fury when he realized that the Confederate prisoners were being guarded by colored soldiers. It was, it had to be, a deliberate insult, a mocking reminder of what lay in store for the Southern gentility now that the natural order had been overturned.

And then even fury was usurped by a stronger emotion—the shock of recognition when his gaze lit upon a familiar face. These twenty-two score men were from General Richard Ewell's corps, he overheard a man in the crowd say, captured on the retreat to Appomattox at Sailor's Creek, and among them were the Richmond Grays. He spotted John Pitt, who had given him a cap to complete his makeshift uniform as they rode the train to Charles Town to defend Harpers Ferry from an attack by John Brown's abolitionist partisans. Near him marched their former captain, Wyatt Elliot, now attired in the uniform of a lieutenant colonel. As the bedraggled columns passed, John's gaze fell upon one familiar face after another, soldiers he had called comrades during his brief stint with the Richmond Grays, others he had known as civilians in Richmond, brave defenders of Virginia who had abandoned shops and farms and businesses to take up arms beneath the Confederate banner.

There they were, his once-proud friends and acquaintances, reduced to marching in a shameful parade through the enemy capital.

“Booth,” someone called to him, but not from within the columns of vanquished men steadily disappearing around the corner. Turning his head, he glimpsed John Mathews, an actor with the Ford's Theatre stock company, working his way toward him through the crowd of gawkers that had gathered to watch the prisoners pass. They had once been quite good friends, but when John had approached him about joining the plot against Lincoln, Mathews had recoiled in horror and had firmly refused, earning John's enmity. John was briefly tempted to pretend he had not seen him and ride swiftly away, but as that might be the last time they ever spoke, he lingered.

“Did you see the rebels pass?” Mathews asked as he halted before him. “Poor fellows. That was a veritable funeral procession.”

Sympathy was the last sentiment John had expected to hear pass his
erstwhile friend's lips, and something in his chest wrenched. “I no longer have a country,” he lamented, sick at heart, steadying himself on the mare's strong flank. “This is the end of constitutional liberty in America.”

“Booth, what are you saying?” Concerned, Mathews drew closer, studying him. “You're as pale as a ghost. How much have you had to drink today?”

Not nearly enough, John thought. “I'm all right.”

“You don't look all right. What's wrong?”

“It's nothing, but”—John inhaled deeply—“would you do me a favor?”

“Why, certainly, Johnny. What is it?”

“I may leave town tonight, and I have a letter here which I desire to be published in the
National Intelligencer
.” John reached into his breast pocket and withdrew the apologia he had written only a few hours before. It was a hasty sketch compared to the lengthier document he had entrusted to Asia, although she did not know the nature of the document he had asked her to lock up in her safe. Still, hastily composed or not, he meant every word, and he would have the world know it. “Please attend to it for me, unless I see you before ten o'clock tomorrow. In that case I'll see to it myself.”

“All right, Johnny.” Mathews tucked the letter into the pocket of his frock coat. “If it will help you.”

John thanked him and mounted the mare, who, perhaps sensing her rider's feelings, seemed impatient to be off. The grim parade had moved on, and carriages and riders were beginning to pass freely again. “Goodbye, Mathews.”

Mathews nodded, but his gaze had fixed on something moving along the avenue behind John. “There goes the great man,” he said, shaking his head. “They won't be happy to hear about this at Ford's.”

“Hear about what?”

Mathews gestured, and John turned the mare and spied a two-seated top-carriage heavily laden with trunks and carpetbags moving by, so overfull that a Union officer sat up beside the driver instead of inside with the other passengers. “That's General Grant, and from the look of things, he's leaving town. John and Harry were expecting him in the State Box with President Lincoln tonight.”

John stared after the carriage as it receded down the avenue
toward the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad station. “You're certain that was Grant?”

“Of course. Doesn't everyone know him by sight?”

Without a word of farewell, John turned the mare, walked her into the clear, and kicked her into a gallop. He easily caught up to the carriage and peered into it as he passed, immediately recognizing Mrs. Grant and her young son from the Willard earlier that day, but not the other lady seated across from them. He rode twenty yards ahead, wheeled the mare about, and returned at the same swift pace, passing closely on General Grant's side and studying him so intensely that it appeared to him that the so-called Hero of Appomattox instinctively drew back.

Breathing heavily, exultant, John slowed the mare to a walk as the carriage continued on its way to the train station. He felt a thrill of triumph to have made the great general flinch, for it was unmistakably Grant, and he was unmistakably leaving Washington. John was not sure whether he ought to feel relieved or disappointed. He was sorry that he would not have the chance to kill Grant as well as Lincoln, but Grant was an experienced military man, and probably carried a sidearm. Grant's absence no doubt improved John's chances of success a thousandfold.

Grant was leaving town. John knew where Lincoln would be that night, for Hess and Mathews had confirmed it. Seward was confined to bed, recovering from life-threatening injuries he had received in a terrible carriage accident nine days before. That left Johnson. Atzerodt was supposed to be keeping abreast of the vice president's whereabouts, but with the hour steadily approaching, John could not leave anything to chance. He rode to Johnson's hotel, the Kirkwood House at Twelfth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, paid a boy to hold the mare, and entered the lobby. Glancing about, he did not see Atzerodt, but he dared hope that meant the German had either hidden himself remarkably well or that Johnson was out and Atzerodt was stealthily following him through the city.

Catching his breath, he smoothed back his hair, assumed an affable smile, and approached the front desk, but this clerk was not so easily charmed as the fellow at the Willard, for he refused to confirm whether Johnson was in or out, or even whether he had taken a room
there at all, though it was common knowledge. He only reluctantly granted John's request for a blank card and a pencil, and then he stood nearby looking decidedly put out while John dashed off a few quick lines. “Don't wish to disturb you,” he wrote. “Are you at home? J. Wilkes Booth.” He waited until the clerk placed the card in Johnson's box before bowing sardonically and quitting the hotel.

John had not eaten since his late breakfast with Mrs. Bean, and the whiskey and ale were not sitting well in his empty stomach, so he rode back to Ford's Theatre and stabled the mare in the place Maddox had found for him in Baptist Alley, about sixty yards from the back door of the theatre. It was really a modified shed that Spangler had fixed up to store a buggy, but John rented it from a widow lady for five dollars a month and he let theatre friends use it in exchange for keeping an eye on it in his absence.

It was a short walk to the National Hotel, and as John made his way south down Sixth Street, he thought of Lucy and his pace quickened. He wished he had thought to invite her to dine with him that evening, but the day had been so strange and swiftly changing, his thoughts so full of the impending mission, that he had hardly thought of her since morning.

He did not glimpse Lucy or any of her family as he entered the hotel, but other guests were mingling in the lobby and the parlor, and several couples and families were heading down the hallway to the dining room. Hurrying upstairs, he unlocked his room, filled the basin with cool water from the pitcher the maid had left, and swiftly washed and dressed, his heart racing with hope and anticipation. The moment he had crossed the threshold of the hotel where he and Lucy had passed so many pleasant hours together, he had been seized by an urgent hope and apprehension, an intense desire to see her that must be satisfied.

He did not know whether he would ever see Lucy again after that night. He had dallied with other women, but Lucy—lovely, sweet, unspoiled, warmhearted Lucy—was the only one he truly loved. It pained him to imagine the life he might have enjoyed had not the Fates decreed otherwise—the adoration of an affectionate wife, the counsel of her distinguished father, ingress into the highest levels of society, the prosperity and respect that would follow. In recent days he had
considered following Lucy to Spain, but in the immediate aftermath of his mission, he knew he would be needed in the South, to rally the demoralized people, to inspirit them with confidence and hope. After Confederate independence was established, he might be able to spare the time to go abroad, but he could not be sure Lucy would welcome him. She would not approve of what he must do that night—he had no doubt she would consider his actions abhorrent—but perhaps, in time, when she saw from afar what good had come of his brave deed, her heart would soften and she would love him again. Only time would tell, but that night he wished to leave her with one last, fond, affectionate memory of him, so in the years to come she would never doubt that he had loved her.

Impeccably groomed and dressed in a plain dark suit, John checked his pockets for the derringer and the knife and the other things he typically carried on his person. Once satisfied that all was in order, he descended to the lobby, looked around in vain for the Hales, and strolled down the corridor to the dining room, hoping to discover the family just sitting down, and with one extra chair at their table. Passing the parlor, he glanced inside and was delighted to see Lucy seated with her parents, her sister, and a lady he did not know. His heart warmed to see his sweetheart smiling at some jest her sister had made, her dark hair shining in the lamplight, her blue eyes bright with intelligence and humor. Her elegant black silk gown made a pleasing contrast with the red velvet of her chair—and she must have felt his gaze upon her, for at that moment she glanced up, saw him lingering in the doorway, and smiled radiantly.

Her family followed her line of sight, and it pained him to see their expressions turned guarded, even indignant, in Mrs. Hale's case. Nevertheless, he fixed his smile in place, crossed the room, bowed politely, and was introduced to their companion, a Mrs. Temple, no one that he knew or needed to know. He lingered so long that Mr. Hale was obliged to invite him to dine with them, an obligation Lucy encouraged with numerous pointed looks. John graciously accepted.