The Judges of the Secret Court Read online

  He found out soon enough. The news was everywhere. Wilkes had shot Lincoln.

  That overwhelmed him. That was the madness of the family, showing at last. But it did not surprise him. Not, at any rate, now that it had happened. In an insane family, it is only the sane one who worries about his sanity. “You look like Hamlet,” his father had said in California. “Why do you not do it for your benefit?” But Hamlet was a role to no one’s benefit. It had too much melancholy in it. Now Wilkes had put them on a larger stage, and they would all die in Act Five. For no one gains from Hamlet, no one at all, except Fortinbras. That normal creature, that only member of the audience upon the stage, is moved, unmoved, and yet survives it all, to his own benefit. That devil Wilkes, in Wilkes’ case, was no devil, but only a poor devil. If we are trained to do so, how easily we rant on; but that would not save the family.

  Edwin stayed in his room. Yet he could not stay in his room. He would have to take some action. His mother, that simple hearted creature, alone in New York with his idiot sister Rosalie, would need his help. And so would Junius and his sister Asia, with her husband, Sleeper Clarke, who would be furious now. At least his own daughter was safe with Asia.

  “If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all.” Those lines summed up his life. They were his favourite lines. He had spoken them much more than a hundred times. He thought of them often. And yet he was not ready.

  There was a note from the manager of the theatre, not so much to ask, as to point out to him, that it would be better if he did not appear that night. Edwin sat down and answered it. He wrote from the heart, for he had a heart, and he had always admired Lincoln. He would co-operate in every way. And he agreed. It would be better if he never acted again. How could he? He had tried to rise above his family, but his inheritance had once more pulled him down. Madness was all. An actor is limited. He has no right to make the world his stage, for then he reminds us of what we do not want to know, that we are merely players.

  “I am oppressed,” he wrote Jarrett, the manager who had decided to close the theatre, “by a private woe not to be expressed in words.” And neither was it. He could only stare. Even Edwina’s name would be besmirched by this thing Wilkes had done. It was all very well to say not so, but he knew how the world went.

  In Cincinnati, Junius Brutus Booth had yet to find out.

  In that family it was Junius Brutus who was the businessman. His nerves were as thick and as sensible as his legs. The eldest, he saw himself as the uncle of them all. He was also the sanest. But he did not know what had happened. He came downstairs after breakfast and told the desk clerk he was going for a walk. The clerk winced and told him there was a mob out in the streets, waiting to tear him to pieces.

  Junius did not understand and looked bewildered. He knew about mobs, of course, and what they could do, for he had been a charter member of the Vigilantes in California. But that had been a small mob, acting only because there was no other justice to call upon. Here life was orderly and settled, as it was supposed to be. What had a mob to do with him?

  The clerk told him.

  Junius could hear the mob now. It was a sound he had never heard before, for in California he had been at the head of it. It was his first and only glimpse of what lies underneath the surface of life, and from what lies that surface is accreted. The clerk told him to take refuge in his room upstairs, and he went at once.

  But he could hear them down there, and for the first time in his life he was afraid. He was afraid of what life was. Unlike Edwin, he was not a thinking man. He was merely clever. He had never before glimpsed the reality of the theatrical pretence.

  It made him unwilling ever to enact tragedy again. The sound downstairs was inhuman. He could almost hear that mob knot a greasy rope. It did not even care that he was the wrong man. It merely wanted someone to play with.

  Finally the hotel staff managed to smuggle him away.

  For their mother, in New York, it was perhaps worst of all.

  Mary Ann had felt lost for years. Without her husband, and uprooted from Maryland, she no more than existed in New York. A country girl snatched up from London flower selling, she had been whisked here, by a man who could not even marry her, and buried on a farm in Maryland. In forty years she had not yet caught her breath. She at least had the children. Their father’s death had been almost a relief; illegitimate they might be, but now at least there would be grandchildren to play with.

  It had not worked out that way. She did not understand the brood she had reared. They puzzled her as much as their father had done, and she loved them far less. They were so seldom home, and their children they kept away from her. Even Edwin, who meant to be kind, sent his daughter to Philadelphia and not to her. Asia was a witty, caustic stranger, ashamed of her own birth. Junius Brutus evaded her, Edwin, who had been so lively a child, had unaccountably darkened. He was kind to her, of course, but only because he wished to be. She was not taken in by that, even though she was grateful to him for being so. Rosalie was weak minded, though, since she stayed home, she was better than no company at all.

  Somehow life had turned her into a useless old woman. Of them all, only Johnny had ever flattered her enough to remember she had ever been young. So why should she not have indulged Johnny? She had kept him home and let him play the gallant. She found that agreeable. And now he called himself Wilkes, and had done this dreadful thing.

  She was a silly woman. She knew that. She had never aspired to anything else. Why should not a woman be loved and silly? She couldn’t help that, could she? Silliness was all her safety and all her power. Silliness had kept her snug and warm for years, even though she had had to manage everything and yet find the energy to be silly, or at least to pretend to be.

  Of course she had idolized her husband. In her day that had been the proper thing to do. It was certainly not a crime. At the same time she hadn’t exactly been sorry when he had gone. He had been a difficult man to deal with. She had preferred to dote on Johnny. He broke her heart, of course. He refused to grow up, he was a devil with the women. But really, having one’s heart broken was rather nice. It gave her something to do during the day, which was more than any other member of the family had done.

  Besides, he was so dashing. He had such a nice smile. How could he possibly have murdered anyone? In some fight over a woman, perhaps, or on the battlefield, though she had stopped that by forbidding him to enter the army, not wanting to have him hurt any more, she had seen, than he had wanted to go. But how could he expose them to this public thing?

  She knew what her duty was. A mother’s duty in time of trouble is to go to her children’s family. The only family to go to was Asia’s. She shrank from that. Asia was so inhuman. But all the same she made arrangements about the train. She had to do something. Her great hurt she would keep to herself.

  Poor Edwin, she thought for a moment, up there alone in Boston, and then thought no more about him. Johnny often left letters with Asia. Perhaps there would be some explanation waiting there.

  XIII

  John T. Ford, the owner of Ford’s Theatre, was in Richmond, supervising what could be saved from his properties there, when they brought him the news that Booth had shot the President, and where.

  “Impossible,” Ford said. “He’s not in Washington.” For like the rest of the world, when he thought of the name Booth, he thought of Edwin first. Then, with a shock, he remembered that John Wilkes had been in Washington City that night. The man was mad as a hatter, but that would make what he had done none the easier for the rest of them. Ford made plans to go to Washington.

  Booth woke towards noon. He felt deliciously relaxed. Then the pain began again. What had wakened him was the familiar country noises outside the windows and in the fields beyond. It was raining. The familiar sounds gave him a childhood, soothed, and tucked in feeling. Then he remembered where he was.

  He was frightened. He
had to get away. He would not be a hero until he reached the South. As he swam up from sleep, his mind caught at various pieces of rhetorical flotsam. “Truly the hearts of men are full of fear: You cannot reason (almost) with a man that looks not heavily and full of dread.” That was the citizens in Richard III, and not what he wanted. He grabbed at another speech.

  What! do I fear myself? There’s none else by:

  Richard loves Richard; that is, I am I.

  Is there a murderer here? No. Yes, I am:

  Then fly. What! from myself? Great reason why.

  No, that would not do either. He had almost drowned in that sea of words, but now he was awake. He was reduced once more to the status of a man. Therefore it behooved him to escape.

  Before he could turn his head, Mudd was in the room, examining his wound. Mudd was still worried. He had seen something he had no wish to see, and refused to recognize, but it had made him more than ever eager to keep the patient upstairs out of sight, where the servants could not see him. Servants blab, and Negroes have a thousand ways of getting even with their former masters.

  Therefore, when Booth demanded a carriage, Mudd temporized. He would do his best, but this was Saturday. Most of the local carriages were reserved for Easter Sunday. It would not be easy to find one.

  Booth saw no signs of recognition in the doctor’s face. Whether that blankness was real or assumed, he had no way of knowing. He paid the man twenty-five dollars. He hoped that would be enough.

  Mudd said he was going into Bryantown. Booth sent Herold with him. Someone had to watch the doctor. Herold could not be trusted, and yet in some measure he was dependable enough. It was the best Booth could do. The two men left, and Booth was left alone. The afternoon wore on.

  In Washington City, Stanton had decreed one last performance of Our American Cousin, to be held behind locked doors. The actors were led out of the Old Capitol Prison, where he had sent them, and into the theatre. They were innocent, all of them, but they had spent a night in prison. That had left them with a guilty look.

  It did not improve matters that the play was a comedy. The stage was still set up for Hawk’s monologue, but the theatre itself was empty, and so brilliantly lit, as to seem even more than hollow. The brilliant lights were for the photographers, whose shrouded boxes stood everywhere, with nothing to be seen except a white hand reaching out from under the cloth, to remove the lens caps.

  Military guards also stood everywhere. Footsteps in the lobby could be heard on the stage. There was no one down in the seats but detectives and military officials. The whole play had to be run through. Stanton was determined to prove some collusion between the actors and what Booth had done. It was difficult to remember lines. As they approached that interrupted scene, they became more and more nervous. The auditorium, without an audience to warm it, was cold. Laura Keene shuddered. They all shuddered.

  At last Hawk’s scene arrived again. Mrs. Mountchessington left the stage. Harry Hawk stood there alone.

  “Well, I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, you sockdologizing, you sockdologizing,” said Harry Hawk, and his voice dried up.

  “Go on,” said the assistant from the War Department, speaking from a seat in the third row.

  “You sockdologizing old mantrap,” said Hawks. And because he could not help it, looked up at the Presidential Box. Nothing about it had been changed. But it was empty and dark. He heard a rustle behind him, Laura Keene, he supposed, in the wings. He paused, his arm extended.

  From the box there was the creak of a rocker. Then somebody appeared at the box rail and jumped.

  Laura Keene screamed.

  The figure scuttled by Hawk, but it was only a young soldier, standing in for Booth. The performance was over.

  Half an hour later they were led back to the Old Capitol Prison. Innocent they might be, and yet somehow their guilt had been proved.

  Booth had shaved off his moustache. Without a moustache he looked callow and naked, which was how he felt. No one could hear him, but he could hear every noise in the house. He could not tell what was happening down there. Mrs. Mudd did not come up again. He paced the room. A coloured man brought him improvised crutches. He tried to hobble about. The room was beginning to get on his nerves. It was too much like a cell. The leaves of a tree barred the windows and sent a pattern of moving boughs across the floor, for the sun had come out weakly for a little while.

  He heard a horse gallop up, and boots stumbling on the stairs. Herold burst into the room. There were Federal troops in the neighbourhood. They would have to get out of there, because Mudd knew who they were, and was going to turn them in.

  He was lying.

  Afraid to go into town with Mudd, he had reined off by the side of the road, at the entrance to Zekiah Swamp, waited for a while, and then made up his story. But Booth did not know that. He believed Herold. Putting on his false beard and his shawl, he took up his crutches and hobbled down the stairs.

  A figure blocked his path. In the dim light of the stairwell it was hard to make out, but from the rustle of stuff he knew it must be Mrs. Mudd. She seemed bewildered.

  He mumbled something to her, went out the front door, and hobbled across the lawn. Herold went ahead, riding one horse and leading the other. It was a long way across the lawn.

  The servants watched them go. They had better memories for their own grievances than for facts, but they would remember Dr. Mudd was not a popular employer.

  He knew that. He had heard all about the assassination by now, and what he did not know, he could guess. He began to sweat. Booth was tattooed with his initials on his left hand. So had been this man. That was what Mudd had tried not to see. Now, as he rode home, he could see nothing else. It was a coincidence, but he knew what a coincidence like that could lead to. There was only one way to defend himself. He would have to turn them in.

  But when he got back to the farm, both men had fled. And so, since he knew he could expect no sympathy from the North, he decided to say nothing. That was what he usually said about things, anyhow.

  It was his worst error. The game of hounds and hares demands a purse, and the reward posters were already coming from the printers. There was a hundred thousand dollars at stake. That was writ large. The death penalty for those who aided or abetted their escape, in finer print, assured Stanton of a good trial. Some men might choose one reward, and some another.

  But Mudd, who being cautious, preferred not to face any choice in this world, had not seen the reward posters yet. All he knew was that there were two thousand cavalrymen searching the county. He had not realized before, being a man of property, secure in the midst of his own extensive family, that the world we feel so secure in has such thin walls. He found the sound of the cavalry deafening, as it galloped by. Yet a doctor has defences of his own. He took a sleeping draught.

  XIV

  Herold pointed out a wagon track leading into the woods. The trees were slim and the cover far from dense. Booth turned down that way. The crutches bit into his armpits. The rocker mare rocked before him. Herold bent down from his horse.

  Booth did not care for that. It was he who should be mounted, not this wretched underling. The ground was soft and muddy underfoot. His crutches sank into it, and when he pulled them free, he did not care for the sucking sound the effort cost him. Herold tempted him to ride, but he could not ride. It would be torture and he was in enough pain as it was.

  They entered the Zekiah Swamp.

  It was not impressive. Booth was used to better scenery. A swamp in a play has tall blue-grey trees, Spanish moss, will o’ the wisps, willis, and dugout canoes, a mossy bank, and between the speeches and the Bengal lights, a nip of brandy in the Green Room, with someone to talk to. Here there was no one to talk to, except stupid Herold. The air was oppressive. He did not like this place. It had nothing in common with even that phosphorescent grandeur Gustave Doré produced to decorate Chateaubriand’s Bernardin de St. Pierre America. Neither René nor Atala would have las
ted a moment here, nor was there any kindly hermit to take them in. In one moment Booth had puffed all the kindness out of the world, as though he had been blowing an egg. He was left with the shell.

  This swamp was low, muddy, uninviting, and treacherous. Booth looked at it and felt as though he were leaving the world forever. But Herold had cheered up. He felt sure footed. This was where he came when the world became too much for him, to hunt ducks.

  Where was Payne? Herold was too weak even to support him while he hobbled. Payne was his courage. Payne made him feel himself again. He did not trust Herold. Herold was shifty and intractable. Near the open water the mud became viscous. Booth’s crutches stuck fast and so did he. He shouted for Herold.

  Herold was incapable of feeling pity and terror at the same time, and terror filled him up. They were not safe yet. “Either get mounted, or you’ll stay here till the turkey buzzards get you,” he said. Even the horses were mired. Booth was almost hysterical. Herold paid no attention. Hysterical himself, he knew hysteria was only another kind of drunkenness, and could be dealt with in the same way. He boosted Booth up on the rocker mare and then washed his hands in a patch of water, for Booth was covered with slime.

  Irritated, Booth ripped off his crêpe beard and threw it away.

  They had left the stream, neither man knew where. It was dusk already. All colours had faded, except those of the redbud. Frogs began to croak and peep. They rode on. Booth looked at his pocket compass, but could make no sense of it. The night was damp. Tree limbs and low bushes ripped at his exposed and wounded foot. Surely by now it must be Sunday morning?

  Whether it was or not, a church loomed up before them, standing by itself at the intersection of several roads. It was a landmark of some kind, but Herold was lost. He could equate it with nothing. But if they were in the middle of nothing, at least they were safe there until it became something, and Booth could ride no more. He dismounted to wait on the church steps while Herold went off to find out where they were. He had decided to make for the house of a Southern sympathizer named Cox, which must be somewhere round here. Herold disappeared and he was alone.