Fates and Traitors (53 page)

He held her tightly, kissing her brow and promising her over and over again that she would be all right, that she was not alone, that she was loved, that she would always be loved.

•   •   •

I
n the evenings, as a reward for good behavior, the female inmates were permitted to socialize in a large room on the second floor. Mary had made one good friend among the prisoners, Nora's cellmate, a woman in her mid-thirties named Virginia Lomax. Handsome and self-possessed, Virginia was an alleged Confederate spy who had been arrested as a suspect in the assassination conspiracy, although privately she had confided to Mary that she had not been involved, but only wished she had been.

For Anna's sake, Mary never missed a social hour, and the last Sunday evening in April found her near the window chatting quietly with Virginia while Anna played a memory game with Nora and several other younger ladies in the center of the room. Pale and peaked, Anna was smiling wanly at something Nora had said and was just about to take her turn in the game when suddenly they heard racing footsteps and several soldiers burst into the room.

Instinctively, the women recoiled from the door, some seizing the hand of a friend, others uttering quick shrieks of alarm before fear silenced them. “Mrs. Mary Surratt,” the officer in front bellowed. “Step forward.”

Steeling herself, emboldened by Virginia's reassuring touch on her shoulder, Mary emerged from the crowd. “I am Mrs. Surratt.”

“Gather your personal effects and put on your cloak and bonnet,” he ordered. “You're being transferred to the Arsenal Penitentiary immediately.”

A chorus of gasps went up from the room. Mary's heart thudded,
but she slammed her mask of serenity in place and nodded to the officer. Turning, she embraced a horror-stricken Virginia, kissed her cheek, and murmured, “Please look after Anna.”

As Virginia mutely nodded, Mary heard quick, light footsteps, and suddenly Anna's arms were around her. “No,” Anna cried, clinging to her with all her strength. “Don't go! Don't leave me here alone!”

“Anna, my darling,” she said, low and steady, glancing over her daughter's head to the stern-faced guards quickly approaching, “you're going to have to be very brave.”

“Mama, oh, Mama!”

The guards seized Anna and demanded that she release her grasp, but Anna refused, sobbing hysterically, tightening her embrace until Mary almost could not draw breath. Before long the guards wrenched Anna away, and while two of them held the frantic girl by the arms and shoulders, thrashing and wailing, another propelled Mary to her cell, where she collected her shawl, bonnet, and Bible, then followed him back down the hall past the room where she heard her daughter desperately weeping. A few of the inmates emerged to bid her farewell in passing, tears in their eyes, sympathy in their touch. “Pray for me,” she asked each woman, hugging her Bible to her chest. “Pray for me.”

The guard who rode with Mary in the carriage closed the windows and drew the curtains to deny her a glimpse of the world outside, but she could imagine the route, and she dreaded every turn of the wheels that brought her closer to her foreboding destination. The Arsenal Penitentiary lay about two miles south of the Capitol on the northern tip of the Greenleaf Peninsula, the Washington Channel of the Potomac River on its western side, the Anacostia River curving along the south and east. Numbly, she cooperated mechanically as she was processed and escorted to a private cell on the third floor, Number 200. “You're among friends,” the guard told her nastily as he unlocked the door, shoved it open, and waved her into the small, dark, cramped room.

“Who?” Mary asked, bewildered. The cell reeked of urine and terror.

“Seven of your fellow conspirators are locked up here too, all those who yet live and have been captured.” He jerked his head in the direction they had come. “Payne and Atzerodt are down the hall, Herold's
on the third floor.” Grinning, he gestured above and behind himself, the direction so vague he could have meant anywhere in the building. “Arnold, O'Laughlen, Mudd, and Spangler are here too, but you won't see them, nor will you speak to them.”

As the door clanged shut and the key turned in the lock, Mary sank down heavily upon the musty bed, tears springing to her eyes—of despair and loneliness, yes, but also of overwhelming relief. They did not have Junior—at least, they did not have him at the Arsenal.

A pounding on the door woke her early the next morning, groggy, her face damp as if she had wept in her sleep. Hastily she tried to clean her face with the edge of the bedsheet, tried to finger-comb her hair and braid it without the benefit of brush or looking glass, and smoothed the plain muslin dress she had been issued at the Carroll Annex. She was fed a scant breakfast alone in her cell, and afterward, guards took her to a small room where a stone-faced colonel informed her that she had been accused of conspiring to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln. He read aloud a statement that made her dizzy and sick as it informed her that she and a man called Dr. Mudd had been indicted for sheltering the conspirators and helping to plan the killing. President Johnson had decreed that the eight accused individuals would be tried not in a civilian court but before a military commission.

“I don't understand,” Mary said shakily. “I don't understand what this means.”

“You murdered President Lincoln,” said the officer, while the guards looked on impassively. “You were involved in the attempted assassination of Secretary Seward, and you intended to assassinate other officers of the federal government at Washington City in wartime. That makes you subject to the jurisdiction of and lawfully triable before a military commission.”

“But I wasn't,” Mary protested. “I didn't. I never intended a murder.”

His eyebrows rose as he leaned toward her. “Then what did you intend, Mrs. Surratt?”

Suddenly she remembered Junior, and she pressed her lips together and shook her head, blinking away her tears. She would give them nothing, she resolved, silently vehement. They had her, but they would not get her boy.

•   •   •

A
prisoner in her own home, Asia mourned her beloved brother alone, unwilling to burden her young children with her grief. They would not remember their uncle Wilkes, which would perhaps prove to be a mercy in the years to come. She resolved to shield them as long as she could from the knowledge of how and why he had died, and she dreaded the day the truth would come out—in a jeering taunt from a bully at school, in a headline on the anniversary of Mr. Lincoln's death.

It was a torment to be denied Wilkes's remains so they might give him a proper funeral. Of all the family only Edwin and their mother were in a position to appeal to the government, and their mother had been too distraught to address them, and Edwin had firmly resolved not to. He seemed to think that whatever ignominious disposal Wilkes received was better than he deserved.

If Edwin should have a sudden change of heart, it would come too late. No one in the government had informed the family what had become of Wilkes's remains, so they relied upon the newspapers for information, but they presented two contradictory stories. The first, drawing upon the observations of witnesses gathered along the riverbank near the
Montauk
, stated that a large covered object resembling a coffin had been transferred from the ironclad to a steam tug, which had then headed down the Potomac. Soon thereafter the crowd watching from the shore had observed a large rowboat cast off from the tug and meander out into deeper waters, where the mysterious object had been dumped into the river. “Last night, the 27th of April, a small row boat received the carcass of the murderer,” reported the
New York World
, among many others. “Two men were in it; they carried the body out into the darkness, and out of that darkness, it will never return. In the darkness, like his great crime, may it remain forever, impalpable, invisible, nondescript, condemned to that worse than damnation, annihilation.”

Most of the papers Asia saw ran that story, but a scant few told another tale: “The navy-yard in Washington was yesterday closed against visitors, by order of the Department,” a minority report began. “The body of Booth was quietly conveyed, last evening, to an ignominious burial place. The head and heart were removed prior to its burial.”

Asia wept when she read the last—it was unnecessary to desecrate Wilkes's corpse, despite the severity of his crime—but she could not say
whether one interment was preferable to the other, only that it would be better for his loved ones to know. The uncertainty was agonizing, infuriating, and Asia worried for her mother, knowing how she had found comfort through the years visiting the graves of her other lost children. In its righteous rage, the vindictive government would needlessly deny an innocent, grieving mother that small measure of comfort.

As the weeks passed, whenever she read about the trial of the eight conspirators—and it was covered in meticulous detail in the papers, every day—Asia could almost be grateful that Wilkes had perished rather than be subjected to the fresh horror of that public spectacle. Her mother pleaded with her not to follow the grim saga for the sake of her health, but Asia knew several of the defendants, those boyhood friends who had been pulled into the plot out of love and loyalty to Wilkes, and it was better to know what they suffered than to wonder and to imagine much worse. To her immeasurable relief, June and Clarke had not been implicated in the conspiracy, but her anger and indignation rose day by day when they were neither charged with a crime nor released. How much longer would her brother and husband languish in prison before the authorities realized they were innocent and let them go? Were they being held out of spite, as scapegoats for Wilkes, who was beyond the reach of their justice?

Scattered among the accounts of the trial proceedings were sensational, malicious stories of Wilkes, of the entire Booth family, tales spread by false friends as well as distant acquaintances who pretended to intimate knowledge of the Booths they had never had. The old stories of their father's eccentricities were retold, embellished with new exaggerations. One newspaper dredged up an old interview with the late Adelaide Delannoy and presented it to a public that had mostly forgotten her. Asia was astonished to read about herself too, that upon hearing the news of her brother's death, “Mrs. J. S. Clarke had gone mad, and was at present confined at the Asylum at West Philadelphia.” Former neighbors harboring grudges or craving momentary fame turned ordinary childhood mischief into foreboding portents of future evil. The trench Wilkes and Asia had dug at The Farm in search of Indian relics was transformed into an underground cache of arms and ammunition. Silly Halloween pranks became the most egregious theft
and vandalism. Everywhere, it seemed, except in Wilkes's beloved South, the papers teemed with the most preposterous adventures, peculiarities, and ill deeds of the vile Booth family.

If any friends and neighbors sympathized with them, they did so in silence. Few wrote, and none dared come to their door. One exception was Asia's longtime friend Jean Armstrong, ever faithful, who sent many comforting letters from Baltimore, and to her alone Asia poured out her grief, her misery, her loneliness. Then, after so many longtime friends had failed her, Asia received a letter from the actress Effie Germon, who had shared a stage with Wilkes years before. “Although a perfect stranger to you, I take the liberty of offering my sympathy and aid to you in your great sorrow and sickness,” she wrote. “If my mother or myself can be of the slightest use to you in any way in this world we should be only too happy.”

The unexpected kindness caught Asia entirely off guard, and she burst into such heart-wrenching sobs that the children's nurse came running to see who had been murdered or arrested this time. In the midst of her ceaseless, bitter anguish, Miss Germon's letter was a token of rare and unexpected friendliness in a world that despised Asia for her brother's crimes, and it was almost enough to revive her belief in human goodness.

In Washington the trial dragged on, witnesses were called, evidence presented. On May 27, without notice, explanation, or apology, Clarke was suddenly and unexpectedly released from prison, without ever being charged with any crime. Asia was elated when she received his telegram, and she and the servants and even the children prepared a wonderful homecoming for him, but her joy turned to shock when he crossed the threshold, haggard and hollow-eyed, sick and malnourished, aged beyond his years. She saw him straight to bed, and it was some days before he was restored enough to join the family at table or to play with the children. Whenever Asia thought of June, who had been sent to prison before Clarke and languished there still, she thought she would go mad from worry. She did not know how she could bear to live in her native country any longer, how she could possibly raise her children there. What hope had they of finding happiness in a nation where their uncle was the most hated, most notorious citizen in its history?

As soon as Edwin received word that Clarke had been set free, her
brother, selfless in his despair, wrote to his old friend and longtime business partner urging him to dissolve all partnership with him. “My dear friend, you must not be bound in any way to one whose name and fame are irremediably clouded,” he wrote in a subsequent letter, after Clarke flatly rejected the first. “You must sever all connection with me, theatrically and for ever now.”

Asia respected Edwin for generously offering Clarke the chance to renounce their friendship at a time when he had all the world against him and needed every loyal friend he could name. But Clarke adamantly refused to repudiate him, and Asia was certain that she had never loved her husband more than when he wrote to her brother firmly insisting that he never mention it again.

“I am more grateful than words can express,” she told Clarke fervently one evening as they retired for the night, blinking back tears as she settled her cumbersome body into bed. “I'll need a lifetime to express my thanks for your loyalty to my brother.”