Fates and Traitors (5 page)

Junius Brutus Booth was handsome and fascinating, and Mary Ann could not resist being drawn to him—and curiously, though she had lived such a small, circumscribed life in comparison, he seemed equally enthralled by her.

One cool November morning as she peddled flowers near Covent Garden, her heart was light with anticipation despite the heavy fog that dampened her wool shawl and set her thick, black hair curling wildly. Her heart leapt when she saw him approaching, her smile broadening in reflection of his.

“Let me see,” he said, studying the contents of her basket, his eyes teasing and merry as he pretended to be more interested in her flowers than in her. “I had hoped to find a single perfect English rose.” He looked up, caught her eye, and feigned surprise. “And so I have.”

“Mr. Booth,” she scolded lightly. “You flatter me and insult my flowers. I have many perfect blossoms here, as anyone can see.”

Before he could reply, the manager of the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane emerged from the fog. “Why, Booth,” he exclaimed, clapping him on the back. “Buying more flowers for the missus? No wife has ever been showered in so many bouquets. Aren't you afraid you'll drown her and the boy in petals and pollen?”

Mary Ann felt the blood drain from her face.

Mr. Booth threw her one stricken glance before replying to his friend, but whether his response was witty or dull, confident or stammering, she could not have said. Her ears rang with the man's revelation, and she was insensible to any other sound.

Mr. Booth was married. He had a wife and a son.

As she absorbed the revelation, he hastily finished his conversation and sent the theatre manager on his way. “Miss Holmes—” he began, but she shook her head fiercely to silence him. She tried to speak, and when she could not find the words, she strode away, instinctively turning toward Bow Street and her father's flower shop. She did not look back.

She expected Mr. Booth to have enough shame never to address her again, but to her astonishment, when she set out with her flower basket the next morning, having slept little and wept much, she discovered him pacing on the street a mere two doors down from her father's shop. “Are you mad?” she demanded before he could speak. “Why would you come here?” She did not wait for an answer but strode off to the market, jostling her basket, heedless of the damage to the bright, fragrant blossoms.

Mr. Booth hurried after her. “I wish to explain myself.”

She whirled about to confront him. “Don't you dare plead innocence. Don't deny that you showed me attention beyond mere friendship, that you led me to believe you care more deeply for me.”

“Why would I deny it? Of course I care for you. I love you!”

The words she had once longed to hear burned like bitterest gall. “You have a wife and a child.”

“Yes, and yet I love you.”

He seized her hand to press it to his lips, but she tore it from his grasp, overturning her basket. Instinctively they both stooped to pick up the spilled bouquets, but Mary Ann quickly rose, snatched the flowers from his arms, and dumped them roughly into the basket. “I'm sure you said the same to your wife when you kissed her goodbye this morning.”

“Adelaide may be my wife, but you are my beloved, my soul's companion.” When she laughed in scorn, he said, “Marriage has nothing to do with love, true and earnest love. It's an iron yoke that crushes all
who submit to it. I won't defile what I feel for you by asking you to submit to lifelong enslavement. She has my name—”

“And your child.”

“And my child,” he conceded, “but you have my heart. If you'll take it.”

“Fine words from a husband who seeks a mistress,” she retorted. “If marriage would defile me, what would adultery do?”

She turned and stormed away, but she had not gone far when he called after her, “Tell me you despise me. Tell me you don't love me in return. Tell me this, and I'll never trouble you again.”

Slowly she halted, knowing that whatever she did next would alter everything that could be, and everything that would. She tried to form the sharp rebuke that would banish him forever, but the words faded from her lips, unspoken.

She gathered up her skirts, tightened her grasp on the basket, and hurried away. But she could not speak the lie that she did not love him.

Their imprudent argument had not gone unnoticed. All day as she sold her flowers, Mary Ann ignored the sidelong glances and curious whispers of the other vendors, fervently hoping that no one would carry tales back to her parents. Mr. Booth must have understood the need for discretion, for in the days that followed, he did not approach her in the market again, not even under the pretense of buying flowers. Instead, a few mornings later, a young boy came upon her, pressed a letter into her hand, and darted off without a word. Having nowhere to dispose of it safely, she slipped the letter into her pocket without breaking the seal. She was certain that the author was watching her, hoping to see her face light up in pleasure as she read his carefully composed lines, but she refused to give him that satisfaction. Yet she lacked the fortitude to throw away the letter unread. Later that evening, by the light of her dark lantern, she read it over and over, her heart warming to his tender apologies.

The next day, the urchin brought another letter as she returned to her father's shop with her empty basket, and the day after that, someone tucked another missive among her flowers while she was accepting coins from a customer. Every day the letters came, written in beautiful script on fine paper or feverishly scribbled on the backs of theatre handbills. Junius wrote of his sorrow that he had offended her, and of
his sincere admiration and respect, and of his enduring hope that she would forgive him. He composed hundreds of lines praising her porcelain skin, ebony hair, ruby lips, and graceful figure. He addressed her as “Mary Ann, my own soul,” and signed himself “Your worshipper, Junius.”

In more introspective moments, he wrote of his childhood in Queen Street, Bloomsbury, as the scion of Jewish silversmiths and lawyers on his father's side and of strict Anglicans on his mother's. When he felt more lighthearted, he amused her with stories of his early years as an actor, of tromping through the provinces with a company of players in search of an engagement, some coin, and a clean bed; of performing
Macbeth
for the Prince of Orange in Brussels shortly before the Battle of Waterloo; of his professional feud with the acclaimed actor Edmund Kean, who had been so jealous of his young rival's popularity that he had hired mobs of ruffians to disrupt his performances. Though Mary Ann never favored Junius with a reply, with every letter she felt herself drawing closer to him.

Then, a few days before Christmas, an urchin brought her a letter that was almost too painful to read, for when she broke the seal his wife's name leapt off the page. “I will confess my history to you,” he had written, “my triumphs, my mistakes. There must be no secrets between us.”

Junius was eighteen, he wrote, when he met Adelaide Delannoy while touring in Brussels. She was one of his landlady's three daughters, and although she was more than four years his senior and not pretty, or so his friends had complained, she was well educated and had impressed him with her cleverness and keen business sense. When Junius and his company of players left Brussels to tour elsewhere on the Continent, Adelaide had followed him, taking upon herself the roles of his assistant, adviser, and closest companion. “You will judge me, and well I may deserve it,” Junius acknowledged. “Upon our return to England in May 1815, we married at St. George's in Bloomsbury. Our daughter was born in October.”

A daughter? Junius and the theatre manager had mentioned only a son. Mary Ann read the passage again, and counted the months, and at once she understood why Junius and Adelaide had been obliged to marry.

The child, Amelia, had died at nine months of age, and grief had driven Junius into fits of melancholy and madness. “Now you know the reason for the mad and bad behavior of those days of years past,” he wrote, “although most of the fantastical tales you might have heard were greatly exaggerated.”

Mary Ann had heard no such tales, young and sheltered as she had been—a lifetime ago, or so it seemed.

Junius's sorrow had been assuaged, he wrote, though never entirely forgotten, by the birth of his son, Richard, in June a year past. Since then Adelaide had devoted herself entirely to the boy, and to her family in Brussels, whom she often visited.

“Whatever passion I felt for her as a lad of eighteen has since faded,” Junius wrote, his regret evident in every dark stroke of the pen. “As has hers for me, or so her nightly indifference proves. For years I believed I would plod through life a proper, dutiful husband, accepting that true love and beauty and the quenching of desire were lost to me forever. But then I discovered you, my darling angel, and having discovered my heart's desire, I must pursue it.”

The next day he came to her in the market. He did not speak, but his eyes burned blue fire as he took her hand and folded it around a small piece of stiff paper. Her heart raced at his touch and she trembled, not trusting herself to speak. Only after he bowed and departed did she open her hand and discover a single ticket for that evening's performance at the Adelphi Theatre in the Strand.

It was opening night of a new melodrama in three acts,
Zamoski, or, The Fortress and the Mine
, but Mary Ann saw almost none of the performance. Soon after the curtain rose, Junius slipped into the empty seat on her right, laced his fingers through hers, and when the hero first appeared onstage, he quickly led her away under the cover of the audience's cheers. He took her through a side door and into the backstage labyrinth, past players in various stages of undress, men gargling lemon water as they awaited their cues, ladies peering into looking glasses and carefully applying rouge with rabbit's feet brushes.

Junius pulled her after him into a cramped, windowless dressing room and shut the door behind them. A heartbeat later she was in his arms, his lips warm and hungry upon hers. “I love you,” he breathed in her ear, and when he kissed her again, she sighed and felt herself
melting into his embrace. “I adore you. I worship you.” Again and again his mouth found hers. “Come away with me.”

For the briefest of moments she glowed with joy, imagining herself strolling by his side through some distant European capital, attending the theatre on his arm or applauding him from an ideal spot backstage, spending every night in his arms—but somehow she found the will to push him away. “Where would we go? Your life is here, in London, upon the London stage.” And remaining in London was out of the question. Even if she thought she could endure the scorn of everyone she knew, theatergoers were a fickle lot. Charges of adultery could ruin Junius's career.

“My life is where I make it, and with whom.” He took her gently by the shoulders, his eyes urgent and pleading. “I'm welcome on any stage in the greatest cities of the world. Early in the New Year, my wife plans to take our boy to Brussels to visit her mother. In the meantime I intend to go on tour on the Continent.” He seized her hands and pressed them to his lips. “Come with me. I cannot bear the thought of being apart from you for so many long, lonely months.”

“And what would we do after your tour? Shall I go home to my mother's house, while you return to your wife's?”

“I don't yet know what we'll do, but a way will be made clear for us. Perhaps we'll go to America.”

For a moment Mary Ann felt a thrill of anticipation—but then, with a sudden, sharp pang, she remembered Adelaide and Richard. “Junius, we can't. You're too good a man to abandon your wife and child.”

“I would do anything not to hurt them,” he said, “anything but abandon true love, anything but suffer the torment of a lifetime without you. I won't forsake my responsibilities. I'll provide for them. They'll never go hungry. They'll never know a day of want.”

“They will,” she countered. “Even if every material need is satisfied, they'll still suffer the absence of their husband and father.”

“I travel so much already, I'm sure their suffering will be very slight indeed.”

“I can't believe that's true.” Fighting back tears, she clung to him, resting her cheek against the lapel of his fine wool coat. “I couldn't possibly give you my answer now. I need time alone to think. We should both carefully weigh the consequences.”

“I've never been more certain,” he declared, but he assured her that she could have all the time to reflect that she needed.

If she eloped with him, the repercussions would be vast and far-reaching. Not only would she deprive Adelaide and young Richard of a husband and a father—his presence and affection, if not his income—but she would ruin her own good name and break her parents' hearts. She would be denounced as an adulteress, a whore, and if she bore Junius any children, they would be called bastards. They would be entitled to neither their father's name nor his property. If Junius were to tire of her, to abandon her as he meant to abandon Adelaide—

But no. He never would. His every word, his every glance and gesture, convinced her that she had ignited a fire in his soul as intense and eternal as the one he had kindled in hers. He would never cast her aside.

Junius honored her request for time apart, but he wrote to her more frequently and more passionately than before, sometimes several letters a day, full of tender words about his love, the adventures they would share, the higher obligation they owed to true love than to any other mortal consideration. For Christmas he gave her a beautiful, leather-bound collection of Lord Byron's poems that must have cost a small fortune. It was no simple matter to smuggle the ten volumes up to her bedchamber, but it was worth the risk to keep them nearby rather than leave them with her friend Molly for safekeeping. Byron's provocative verses thrilled her, intoxicated her, and she perceived in each stunning, magnificent line the terrible beauty Junius wielded on the stage. When she dared not risk lighting the lantern she would rise in the middle of the night and read at the window by moonlight, committing entire poems to memory, climbing back into bed and reciting them in whispers until she fell asleep.