The Judges of the Secret Court Page 7

  On the opposite side of the street the soldier, sent to find a house, could get no answer at 451. But at number 453 the door opened, and a man with a candle stood there motioning. Lincoln had found someone to take his body in. Leale headed there.

  He got inside, though the crowd pressed in after him. The man with the candle moved ahead of the doctors. To the left was a parlour. To the right a stairway led upstairs, but in all the next eight hours, it did not occur to anyone to go upstairs. It was dark up there.

  Behind the parlour was another sitting room, but under the stairs was a small bedroom. Someone pulled the bed out from the wall. It was a poverty stricken room. It contained a bureau, three straight backed chairs, a washstand and a stove. On one wall was Rosa Bonheur’s The Horse Fair, with its Hellenistic horses like some equine Laocoön. The other engravings were by Herring.

  Mr. Lincoln’s body would not fit the bed. He was an even larger man than Payne. He had to be laid upon it diagonally, with his feet over the edge. An extra pillow was found to support his head.

  Leale had the house cleared. Mrs. Lincoln, Laura Keene, and Clara Harris took up their vigil in the front parlour. Mrs. Lincoln was coming out of shock, which was unfortunate, since it meant just one more thing to be dealt with. Leale held a conference with the other doctors. The man with the candle went through the house, lighting the gaseliers. His name was Petersen. He was a tailor.

  Mrs. Lincoln stood in the doorway of the sickroom. Leale got her out of there. He did not bother to look at her face. He was too busy. Lincoln might just as well have disappeared. He was certainly no longer in that body. But the body was going to die, and therefore Lincoln would not be back. The death watch had begun.

  What on earth was the crowd out there shouting about? Such grief seemed obscene. An hour ago they had hated him.

  Leale did what had to be done. He sent for Robert Lincoln, two more physicians, and Lincoln’s pastor, Dr. Phineas D. Gurley. Then he settled down to watch the body. The brain might be hopelessly damaged, but that face the brain had shaped was still intact. It was a sad face, everyone knew that, and an ugly face, but the approach of death made something evident in it that few had ever noticed, something youthful, ageless, and despite itself, commanding. It was something worse than a face born to rule, something far worse. It was a face doomed to responsibility, and therefore sad because of what it knew. As he lay dying, under the dry shimmering jet of the gaselier, the tact drained out of it, and one could see, what usually that tact concealed, the awful marks of knowledge. While Leale watched, the dark shadows under the eyes became darker. But the face itself became luminous.

  The war was over, but the nightmare had become real. And perhaps, if that body was still aware of anything, it felt only the luxury of a final muscular relief. Slowly the muscles slackened along the length of that ramshackle, amiable, but worn out body. As they did, the face, slack on the chest, became dominant, until they were all uncomfortably aware of its expression. For the faces of the dying show us something, always, we would feel easier not to have to see. They show us something about ourselves and the human condition that we would rather not know.

  VIII

  As yet Wilkes was ignorant of what had happened.

  Two more days, and there would be a chromolithograph for sale in the Washington shops. It was called the Assassin’s Vision. Since the Potomac lay in the background, Booth had already crossed into Maryland. His horse was a prancer. Unwounded and elegant, he sat astride his horse, as unconcerned as a Lipizzan trainer. He was passing some trees. The branches and boles of the trees formed a standing figure of Lincoln, his arms folded, a pitying look on his face. The print was probably German work. Germans were good at that kind of thing. Better at it, anyhow, than Atzerodt had been as the hero of a liberal assassination plot. In the branches little heads of Lincoln hung like the homunculi of some sylvan witch. The picture was also available as a lantern slide.

  But it was not two days later, and Booth had no such vision. His vision was of something else.

  He was wounded. It was something he had not counted on and it maddened him. He had never been violated in any way. He had always, even as a child, had a horror of such things.

  He no longer remembered the shooting. What he remembered was slashing at Major Rathbone. And he remembered standing at the front of the box.

  “Sic semper tyrannis,” he had said, but he had muffed the line. The sound should have come out rich, full, and memorable. It should have carried conviction. But at the time he had faltered. Why should he sound so uncertain, who possessed, for this one time in his life, such certainty?

  It was because of the audience down there. He had never seen an audience from the side before. He had always faced it head on, from the stage, the way it wishes to see and be seen.

  From the side you could see that the audience was not really interested in the play at all. Most of its members had not even turned their heads when they heard the shot. They sat there in the semi dark, waiting to be amused. They had no concern with real and glorious events. He could not hold them. Nothing could hold them for long. To those who did look toward him, he had been only a little man standing up in a box. That had been a shock.

  It had shaken his nerve. That was why he had caught his spur in the flag, and fallen on his leg. He had been nauseated when he heard the bone in his leg snap. He had wobbled across that stage like a terrified spider shaken out of its lair, or like Richard Crouchback, after his dream, on the way to Bosworth Field. Yet it was not just his leg that had made him cower.

  It was the obliviousness of the audience. He had expected applause or at least attention, since one does not applaud a tragedy until it is over. All he had received was silence. That was what had made him scuttle for his horse. That silence haunted him. Who can act to apathy?

  He wanted Payne. He wanted to smile and smile and have that overgrown puppy dog call him Cap, and prove he was a villain still. He could not do everything himself.

  Of the next hour he remembered nothing, except that his ankle began to swell, and try as he would, he could not prevent it from slapping against the plump flank of his mare.

  The moon was up. There were mackerel in the sky. It was Tam O’Shanter’s ride, for he could not hold the reins, the ankle hurt too much, so he had to hold the mane, with a whole coven of witches behind him, gaining on him through the air. He felt so small and thin and isolated. He had never run for his life before. He could not ride fast enough. It was as though one of those witches had grabbed his horse’s tail and pulled back, with two hideous feet planted against the animal’s rump.

  Yet at the Navy Yard Bridge he had no trouble. He pounded over the water, which was wet with a few lights, and once on the Maryland Shore, breathed easier, for witches cannot cross water. In Maryland he would be safe.

  Payne would be waiting for him here. He slowed down and went up the empty road at a secure jog. Maryland was still partially dead from the previous winter. The trees were skeletal. The bushes rattled. Once he met Payne, everything would be all right. He spurred up Good Hope Hill, heard hoof beats behind him, and not liking the sound, or the sudden fear in his stomach, took cover in a stand of trees. Perhaps this would be Payne.

  It was not Payne. It was Herold. Nudging the mare out to the road, Booth yelled, “Halt”.

  There was no mistaking that whimpering face. But Herold, though not Payne, was better than no one at all. Booth began to feel better. The two men went on to Surrattsville to pick up the binoculars. They found Lloyd, the tenant, dead drunk on the sofa in the parlour. They got him up, and he shuffled off to fetch the glasses, came back, stopped behind the bar, and drew them a quart of whisky.

  Booth was exhilarated. “We have killed the President,” he said, “and Seward.”

  There was no expression in Lloyd’s face. He might not have heard. He thought they were drunk. All he wanted was a dollar for the whisky. When he got it, he went back to the sofa again. That was the way his life went. He sold a
quart and he drank a quart, and he did not care for the quality, and in particular, not for people like Booth, who had money to spend when he did not.

  Who cared about the President or anything else, when Mrs. Surratt squeezed 600 dollars a year rent out of him, for a farm not worth the tending, and the obligation of running a tavern and franking the mail besides? Why the hell should he have to frank mail? When you lost a letter, everyone in the world was down on you.

  The sofa was lumpy. Lloyd had another pull at his bottle and thought things over. There might be more ways than one of not paying Mrs. Surratt her rent, if what Booth had said was true. But on the other hand, he didn’t want to do anything risky.

  He heard the two men gallop off, and grinned.

  They had a long ride before them. It was seventeen miles to the nearest doctor. That would be Dr. Mudd, whom Booth neither liked nor trusted. Few people did. But the pain in his leg was terrible. He had to have help.

  IX

  Mr. Lincoln was dying, and there was nothing to be said about that. He was a great man, and greatness is an enigma. It is also amoral, and we cannot have that. Nobody likes to have his little game seen through. And yet it could not be denied. A fire was going out. So few of them had ever realized until now that it had warmed them.

  Laura Keene sat on the horsehair sofa in the front parlour on 10th Street, while the gaseliers hissed, with Mrs. Lincoln and Clara Harris. The room was close, and Mr. Petersen, who owned the house, could not be a successful tailor, for the wallpaper was faded and the furniture was massively out of date. It made her wonder, because the room was so old fashioned, if all this had not happened a long time ago, instead of having to be sat through now.

  It was a long time since Laura Keene had lived in the present. On stage she played women younger than herself, and her life had made her older. Somewhere along the way she had got lost, but though frightened, she had always wanted to be a real person again, for she supposed she must have been one once. On stage she was a terror, after all, she had a living to earn, two daughters to bring up, and a position to keep, but offstage she was not unkind. Clara Harris seemed a sweet enough little thing. She should be sent home to bed. But if real life was what Mrs. Lincoln was going through, and if real life made you that futile, that terrified, and that silly, then perhaps it was better to be on the stage.

  There were crowds outside the house, but the crowds were quieter now. The house was not. Lincoln would die. What then was the use of Mrs. Lincoln’s hysterics? They accomplished nothing. The inevitable was something one watched with quiet eyes, from a safe corner.

  That was why Laura Keene was here. Lincoln had been shot in a theatre, and on Good Friday, at that. The pious can raise a rabble faster than a sensible man, and there would be hard days for actors ahead. In that case the best thing to do was to take shelter as close to the eye of the storm as possible. Besides, she could not have fled if she had wanted to. Something held her here.

  She was neither a clever nor a political woman. British by birth, she had always found America a little unreal. But this room was real to her. Lincoln was real to her. Say what the world would, yes, he was coarse and provincial, but he had had some kind of human warmth about him. He was lying, she supposed, motionless on a bed, and yet she thought of him as sitting in a chair, a little benign, a little gawky, but very like a father. One felt hostile to him for that very reason, even though one loved him. He was a father. He had gone ahead. He knew what came next.

  One could not love Stanton, and Stanton was in the next room. That man had seized the government. He had marched in an hour ago, at a little past eleven. She had not seen him, but she had heard him, and she had smelled the passage of that violet pomaded beard and seen his bespectacled face, as he glanced in the door of the parlour.

  Now he was holding interviews, and all through the slow passage of that night, the people he had sent for slipped heavy footed but on tiptoe down the corridor. He was less Secretary of War than Grand Inquisitor, and yet there was nothing grand about him. He had sent out, she heard, to arrest everyone at the theatre, including herself. And he was quite merciless. He suffered neither from pity nor from doubt. He believed in nothing but efficiency. But he was also afraid.

  The person who knew that was Gideon Welles, from the Navy Department.

  They had met in the shambles at Seward’s house. Seward was not informative. He could only complain and haul himself upon his bed again. He was a man given to indignation, but he was also an astute politician. No matter how the wind blew, he contrived that it should carry him back into office. Now the unknown smiler with the knife had descended upon him. And yet he would survive. He lay there and grumbled under his sedative.

  Stanton was something worse than a politician. He was a fanatic. His trouble, thought Welles, was that he had no chin beneath his beard. Therefore he was that perfect security officer, the coward turned absolute. He had imprisoned tens of thousands to keep his own position, first behind the world’s back, and then, as his own power had increased, to its face. Lincoln had been astute enough to be able to control him. Welles did not know who could control him now. He was one of the new men. There was nothing to be done with him. Welles suggested they should go to the house on 10th Street. He said he had commandeered a carriage.

  For the first time, he saw Stanton hesitate. “I am going at once,” he said. “I think it is your duty to go.”

  Stanton drew back. “This is not my carriage,” he said. A Grand Inquisitor may not respect anything else, but he does respect property. So do the new men. Men, women, children, and the emotions count for nothing. It is their right to suffer, for they are guilty and deceitful. But property is real.

  Welles was not of that temperament. He said it was no time to argue about the ownership of a carriage.

  Stanton was forced to agree, but all the same, he leaned out of the carriage window and asked Chief Justice Carter, who had also been at Seward’s, to come with them. That would give the commandeering of the carriage a respectability at law. For the rest, he saw this murder as part of an immense plot. He ordered the declaration of martial law. He set a guard around the other Cabinet members. He ordered everyone at Ford’s Theatre arrested, from stableboy to manager, which is what had made life awkward for Laura Keene in the front parlour.

  He had taken only the briefest of glimpses at Lincoln, and those unwillingly. Unlike the women, he had no affection for deathbed scenes. He did not like to be moved, and the sight of that inert, dying body moved him. He had intrigued against Lincoln for years. Lincoln had been too clement. And now it had come to this.

  Stanton, it was his justification, acted always for the public good, which was an abstraction, and had nothing to do with men or women. Yet that body in there had rattled him. As he had looked down at the President’s face, the mouth had pulled sharply to the left, in a sort of jeer. The doctors said he was beyond conscious thought. But Stanton did not care for the look of that jeer. In fifteen minutes it stopped, and the face smoothed away. But Stanton remembered it. His master had been more astute than his daily kindness would have indicated. It bothered him, that jeer. It seemed a jeer at him, as though this murder were nothing but a reflection upon his own efficiency.

  Now these witnesses said the crime was Booth’s doing. That was impossible. No one man could defeat Stanton. His net was cast too wide. Therefore there must be some vast conspiracy.

  He felt confused, not by the evidence, but by those who gave it. He seldom interviewed people himself. He found them too distracting to the cause of justice and pursuit. Besides, he was worried about his own part in all this. He had conspired against the President, lied to the President, evaded the President, and despised the weakness of the man. And in a funny, patronizing, grudging way he had loved him. For the first time in his life he wanted to cry. He did not do so. He had never had the habit. It was his duty to maintain order and to prosecute the criminal. Without him, the Union would have collapsed years ago. He had not the time for
tears. As soon as he was through with the witnesses, he had them sent to the Old Capitol Prison. It must be a widespread plot. How else could he have been defeated?

  When Andy Johnson arrived at last, to look in on the President, he did not even stop on his way out to ask how things were going. That made Stanton feel a little desperate. Johnson did not like him. He had to prove his efficiency, or be sacked, and what would happen to the country without its Secretary of War? He became more peremptory with his witnesses.

  Johnson had been asked not to come, his well wishers had said the trip might be dangerous, but he had come anyway, walking all the way from Kirkwood House. His reasons were in part mere expediency. He wanted no one to say either that he had cringed indoors or that he had rejoiced at this tragedy. But in fact it was something else that had drawn him here. He could not stay away.

  He stood at the foot of the bed, wondering what the difference between himself and Lincoln was. Robert Lincoln stood at the head of the bed, alternating between that post and the problems of his mother in the parlour. There was nothing much to Robert Lincoln. He had neither his mother’s brilliance nor his father’s brains. He was just a mediocre young man, capable of feeling, no doubt, but not of thought. Johnson recognized him at once as that simple but unpredictable thing, a born constituent.

  The body in the bed was something more.

  What was that difference, anyhow? He could not fathom it. Each was a self-made man. Each came a little from the west of this puzzling, treacherous, and so-called civilized world of Washington City. They had played the same political tricks. They had the same political wisdom, the same wariness. And yet the difference was more than one of mere cleverness. The difference was something they could always recognize in Kentucky, poor white trash that they were, even if folks didn’t do so in Washington.