Fates and Traitors (54 page)

Standing at her bedside, Clarke gave her a faint, misshapen smile. “I won't require a lifetime,” he said, his voice oddly pitched. “It can all be managed quickly and soon.”

“What—” Suddenly uneasy, Asia propped herself up with a pillow. “What is it you do require, then?”

“I would like you to consent to a divorce.”

She stared at him. “You can't mean that.”

“I do. Your own brother urged me to sever ties with anyone with the name of Booth.”

“He meant business ties, not matrimonial,” she said sharply, “and I doubt he would have been so generous if he had known what you intended for me. In any case, my name is Clarke now.”

“Divorcing you would be my only salvation.”

“Clarke, I am soon to be delivered of your fourth child!”

“I'm aware of my obligations. I'll continue to provide for you and the children.”

“No,” she declared. “I will not consent to a divorce. You are speaking from emotion, not reason, and I won't endure it. You will not put me aside.”

He watched her bleakly as her tears began to fall. “You condemn me to ruin if you refuse.”

“I condemn myself to ruin if I consent.”

He frowned, inhaled deeply, and shook his head. “I'll sleep in my study.” He turned to go, but before he left the room he said to her over his shoulder, “This discussion is not finished.”

“It is,” she insisted. “It most certainly is.”

But he had already shut the door behind him. She seemed to hear an echo of Wilkes's voice in the reverberations, a warning whisper that she was no more than a professional stepping-stone to Clarke, that her name was her dowry. Now Clarke reviled the very name upon which he had built his entire career, all his fame, his worldly success.

Shaking uncontrollably, she wrapped her arms around the child in her womb and rocked gently back and forth. She would never consent. She would not allow him in a moment of despair to doom her and the children to a miserable existence of poverty and shame.

It was her name he despised, not her. She had to believe that.

“‘My name, dear saint, is hateful to myself,'” she murmured to the empty room, “‘because it is an enemy to thee.'”

But the name of Booth was not hateful to her. Her brother had tarnished it, but it had been a good, proud, even revered name before Wilkes's strange fits of passion consumed him. It would be a grave sin if she allowed the world to forget her father's greatness because of her brother's crime.

Years before—a lifetime ago—she and Wilkes had resolved to write their father's biography, a token of the profound love and reverence with which they had regarded him in life, and had hoped to honor him in death. More recently, before Dottie was born, Asia had taken up the manuscript again, and after much tedious research, she had nearly completed it when the demands of motherhood had forced her to set it aside.

She knew then, as the sound of her husband's footsteps receded down the hallway, that she must complete the great work of writing the story of her revered father's life. In those dark days when so many tongues were free to calumniate her family, a faithful history of the renowned tragedian Junius Brutus Booth would confute the aspersions of unscrupulous men.

Asia would redeem the name of Booth in the eyes of the world, and in so doing, she would banish any thought her husband might have of
divorcing her. She was innocent of any crime, and Clarke could not sentence her and the children to ignominy and destitution so that he could emerge from the shadow of Wilkes's crime unencumbered.

Clarke had evidently mistaken her for Edwin. She would never allow him to cut her loose to save himself.

•   •   •

T
he courtroom was established in a large hall on the second floor of the Arsenal Penitentiary, and when Mary was led inside with the seven men known to the world as her co-conspirators, she was struck by the smell of raw pine and fresh paint. The walls had been recently painted to impress the dignitaries of the government and the military who would attend at least a portion of the hearings, and new furniture had been swiftly constructed to accommodate the twelve members of the tribunal, the eight defendants, and the multitude of lawyers, clerks, stenographers, newspapermen, and spectators who were expected to fill the room for the duration of the trial.

The black iron bars on the windows stood out starkly against the fresh whitewash, reinforcing the bleak truth that Mary was trapped, at the mercy of men who despised her. She lowered her gaze, reluctant to sear the bars upon her mind's eye, and yet she would rather stare at them directly than wear a stifling hood as did the seven men. Instead of a thick hood she wore a heavy black veil, which she had donned willingly, trusting that it would offer her some protection from the curious stares of the many strangers filling the courtroom. The men wore manacles too, another encumbrance she had been exempted from on account of her sex, and when the guards showed them where to sit in the prisoners' dock, their chairs alternating with seats for the guards, Mary was startled when she was instead escorted to a place at the defense attorneys' table adjacent to the dock. A few weeks before, she would have dared to hope that in additional deference to womanhood, all the charges against her would summarily be dismissed, but the Arsenal had driven all hope and daring out of her. She felt broken down, humbled, fearful, despondent, and only the knowledge that Junior yet eluded capture kept her from breaking down entirely.

The prisoners' dock sat on a raised platform at the western end of the room, while the judge advocate and the military commission sat on both sides of a long table along the northern wall. In the center of the
room facing the commissioners stood the witness stand, and beside that, a smaller table for the court reporter. Three other tables, two for clerks and one for evidence, were arranged nearby, a second long table for the press stood in the southeastern quarter, and chairs for spectators filled all the available space along the walls.

As the court was called to order, Mary resolved to keep her composure, fearful that her uncontrollable trembling and weeping would be interpreted as signs of guilt. Lightheaded from worry and lack of sleep, she found the proceedings confusing and difficult to follow—eight defendants prosecuted simultaneously, multiple lawyers querying and raising objections, witnesses offering testimony relevant to one defendant or several but not others—hours and hours of it, until her head spun. In desperation she resorted to silently reciting the rosary rather than paying close attention to the testimony, which her lawyers had strongly urged her to do.

She was devastated when the prosecution called Louis Weichmann, and when he began hesitantly answering their questions, she took no comfort in his obvious reluctance to label her a conspirator. He asserted that he had ever found her to be a pious, kind, and caring lady whom he regarded with affection. But he went on to say that she and Junior had fallen under the power of Mr. Booth's allure, and that they both had been more involved with the terrible plot than he had realized until it was too late. In condemning detail, he described her numerous meetings with Mr. Booth in the boardinghouse and her frequent trips to and from Surrattsville in the weeks leading up to the assassination, making the prosecutors smile in satisfaction and Mary's heart plummet.

Next John Lloyd took the stand, and he had much to say about Junior, Mr. Herold, Mr. Atzerodt, and the guns and ammunition they had concealed within the Surratt Tavern. The courtroom fell silent with expectation when he told the court he had met Mary on the road between the capital and Surrattsville on April 11, and again at the tavern on the afternoon of Good Friday, and how on the latter visit she had given him a package wrapped in brown paper—field glasses, he had discovered when curiosity compelled him to unwrap it—and had told him to have the hidden items ready, for they would be retrieved that night. He insisted that Mary had never mentioned a plot against the president, nor
had she mentioned who would come to collect the weapons and supplies, but she could tell from the expressions on the commissioners' faces that they did not doubt that she knew who would claim them and why.

The next day Louis Weichmann returned to the stand for cross-examination, but although Mary's lawyer tried to cast suspicion upon him, the testimony only made Mary appear more complicit in the plot. Other witnesses followed, and, sweltering beneath the heavy veil, Mary's thoughts began to drift. She knew that to an outsider, Louis Weichmann and John Lloyd seemed at least as guilty as she, but one of the lawyers had warned her that according to the law, a witness who testified for the prosecution could not be charged in the conspiracy. It was a curious legal code, protecting the men at her expense, for they could admit wrongdoing to implicate her without fear of punishment for themselves.

On and on it went, day after day, one witness after another. Mary steadfastly maintained her innocence, but it seemed that the entire court, from the judges to the clerks and certainly the entire table of reporters, believed her to be guilty. Then the lead attorney for Mary's defense began absenting himself from the court, and she could not shut her ears to the whispers that he had abandoned her because he had become convinced of her guilt.

Every day Mary felt weaker and more broken. Lacking the strength to sit properly, she rested her head on her hand, clutching a handkerchief, blotting perspiration from her brow and sighing. Whenever she made the slow journey from her cell to the courtroom and back, she was obliged to lean heavily upon her guard's arm until, trembling, she was permitted to sink into a chair.

As spring turned to summer, the temperature in the stifling courtroom soared and the number of spectators swelled until they spilled out into the aisles and doorways and halls. Mary noticed more women among the crowds; some murmured encouragement and assured her of their prayers, others hissed invective, all peered at her with eager curiosity as if she were an exotic creature in a menagerie. Eventually one of the judges limited the number of curious onlookers allowed into the building, a measure Mary welcomed and considered long overdue.

The prosecutors continued to pound away at her, and at the other
seven defendants, and at Junior in absentia. Her well-meaning but inexperienced attorneys seemed vastly overwhelmed by the sheer volume of evidence the government had assembled, and Mary knew that her reticence did not help them—but as long as it did not harm Junior or Anna, she could endure the accusations, the angry glares, even the ridicule.

Then came a few days of blessed relief when the prosecutors turned their attention to the other defendants. Mary still had to suffer through the long, tedious hours in the sweltering courtroom, but at least she was spared listening to slanderous remarks about her character and outrageous misinterpretations of her actions in the weeks leading up to Mr. Lincoln's assassination.

And then, on May 25, just when Mary thought she could bear it no longer, the prosecution rested its case.

•   •   •

A
fter receiving final instructions from President Johnson and the Department of State, Lucy's father checked out of the National Hotel and escorted his family back to New Hampshire. Lucy found herself overwhelmingly relieved to depart the capital, and she would consider it a blessing if she never returned.

For weeks Lucy, Lizzie, and their mother studied Spanish and packed their trunks for the voyage while their father worked from his study at home and instructed the capable manager he had hired to tend to his affairs in Dover while he was abroad. Gradually, Lucy found her grief and confusion ebbing as she became more involved in the family's preparations, and from time to time she even felt faint curiosity and stirrings of anticipation. Lizzie was her constant companion—affectionate, gentle, understanding, patient—and as the days passed, Lucy began to see the tumultuous events of the previous seven months as her family did. Her love for John, which had once burned so brightly, faded into embers, obscured by bewilderment, pity, and regret.

She hoped someday she could forgive him for what he had done.

On the eve of their departure, the family traveled to Boston, where the next day they boarded the steamer
Africa
and settled into their stateroom. Soon thereafter, the ship set out for Liverpool, from whence it would depart for Madrid.

Standing at the railing, her mother on her right side and Lizzie on
her left, her shawl drawn about her head and shoulders and her skirt whipping in the ocean winds, Lucy gazed at the New England shore as it receded into the mists behind the ship.

When she could see land no more, she inhaled deeply and turned away from the railing. She linked her arms through her mother's and her sister's and strolled off with them down the deck, ready to embrace the new life that awaited her, across the ocean and in all the years to come.

•   •   •

O
n the day the defense of the conspirators began, one of Mary's lawyers announced to the court that the attorneys had agreed to begin with the testimony on her behalf. Mary wondered uneasily if it would have been better to have her case presented last or somewhere in the middle, so that the testimony about her good character would be fresh in the judges' memories when they withdrew to deliberate. But no one had consulted her, and she had no choice but to resign herself to the lawyers' decision.

The first witnesses they presented were priests, called to the stand to testify to her devout Christian character. Inexplicably, her lawyers had chosen priests who hardly knew her, and so they could say very little about her piety and nothing at all about her political beliefs. Next they called Eliza Holohan, who firmly stated that Mary disliked Mr. Atzerodt and he was not welcome in her home, but any good her assertions did was undermined by her acknowledgment that Mr. Booth visited the boardinghouse often, and that if Junior was not home, he would ask for Mary. Nora Fitzpatrick followed Eliza, but if anything, she was even less helpful. She said that she knew nothing about the photograph of Mr. Booth concealed behind the lithograph
Morning, Noon, and Night
, although she had often seen a portrait of Mr. Booth displayed on the mantelpiece of Mary's bedroom.