The Judges of the Secret Court

by David Stacton

  People like that can be dangerous, for though they are bad at planning, who can tell what they are apt to do on the spur of the moment? They do not know themselves. They are dandies. For them life is immediate. They have no time for thought. And yet they think they think.

  Washington City was a quagmire of brawling, drunken mud; pigs wandered across Pennsylvania Avenue, the Capitol still lacked parts of its facing, and those buildings which were not shanties lacked all elegance. There was no pink marble in those days, and no cherry trees. There were only veterans back from the wars, a good many of them cripples, ex-spies, copperheads, and above them, a heavy, leaden sky pendulous with undropped rain.

  Booth turned into Ford’s Theatre, stepping jauntily, like a fox back to its burrow after the night’s successful hunt. In the world he was always bothered by the lack of some perpetual proscenium. But in the theatre he felt snug. The world was an alien place, but in the theatre he knew where things were. He knew what to do. He felt at home. Therefore, whatever he did, it would have to be done there. He began to feel better.

  The sun had come out a little. He went into the manager’s office, picked up his mail, letters from ladies to judge by the handwriting, and said hello to Henry Clay Ford. Ford was a boomer. He talked too loud. He told Wilkes that the President and General and Mrs. Grant were coming to the theatre tonight. They might even bring General Robert E. Lee.

  That was raillery. Booth was annoyed, but paid no attention. Of course they would not bring Lee. But also he was taken by surprise.

  He went outside, sat alone under an archway, and read his mail. As the handwriting had told him, it consisted of billets doux. He paid little attention to them. Instead he stared at the opposite house, number 453, which belonged to one Petersen, a tailor. It was a plain brick house, with nothing to catch his eye. Its front door was shut. And yet it did catch his eye. He had to look at something, for he had an awful feeling in his stomach, as though something had kicked him.

  He had known for some time now what he had to do, but he also knew he was incapable of decision. Events would have to make the decision for him. And now they had.

  He was very aware of himself just then. From an ache in the stomach, the awareness of what he had to do had turned into gooseflesh all over him. He felt both bigger and smaller than he was.

  What actor can act without a costume? He looked down at his shiny and immaculate boots, which caught so well the arc of his calves, but never caught the mud of this world, for he had that art of dandies never to spot his clothes or splash himself. He looked at his riding breeches, and at his hands holding their letters. He could see everything of himself except the one thing he wished to have remembered, which was his face. He blinked.

  These were his daily and comedy clothes. For high tragedy one must dress differently, for half the secret of playing any part, and half the strength of the performance, lies in one’s costume, though in our day the cothurnus of tragedy has somehow altered to a pair of spurs. A pair with efficient rowels. He had always liked spurs. He would sit twirling the rowels with his thumb, before putting them on.

  He got up and went into the theatre.

  It was as empty as the Cumaean Sybil’s cave, and as over-decorated, except for the far end, where the stage, that is, the tripod, was. He stood at the rear for a while, to watch. There were no armchairs, only cane backs, as in a European church.

  The play was Our American Cousin, which was what Laura Keene always played, and played very badly, too. She was billed as an international comédienne. Perhaps she was, but she could not act. His brother Edwin had had trouble with her. He had had trouble with her himself. She always liked someone to blame for her own miserable performance. This time she should have it.

  Under the weak stage light, Laura Keene looked older, more drawn and haggard than ever. She was kept by a gambler, a man called Lutz, and passed her own daughters off as her nieces, but he had always thought her a scrawny horror. He shrugged his shoulders. Some men liked older women best. But at the same time he grinned. He knew his Laura. She would make capital of what was about to happen if she could, sincerely, of course, for as though to make up for her lack of ability, she was always sincere, but ravenously too. He had never been able to stand her. He rather hoped they flung her in jail.

  The Presidential Box, a double one, yawned black and as yet undecorated to the right of the stage. He calculated the leap. It was not so extensive as that he was accustomed to take in Macbeth, and on stage or off, he always kept in whipcord trim, for the Booths had a tendency to dumpiness that would not look well in the sort of tight trousers his tailor built for him.

  He settled down to time the play. It began at eight. By ten-fifteen the players should have reached that point in the action where the stage is empty, except for poor old Harry Hawk, who has a comic soliloquy to deliver.

  There was much to be done before ten-fifteen. He left the theatre in order to round up his little company. Every actor has one, of course, a little circle of anonymous cronies who shore him up against the neaps of reputation, but his had been chosen for a different purpose. He would begin with Payne. Payne, at least, he could depend on. But first he would go back to the National Hotel to dress.

  When he got to his room, Ella Turner was gone, as he had told her to be. He liked to keep his worlds separate. The women one slept with were not the women one cared to speak to in the daytime, if only because what they had to say was so boring. For daytime use he had his fiancée, Miss Bessie Hale, the daughter of the ex-Senator. Whether they would marry he neither knew nor cared, but the engagement enhanced his aura. It was his dashing clothes that Bessie liked, anyway. Thinking of her, he made that little gesture, his favourite, which was habitual with him, a quick tugging at the handkerchief in his breast pocket, with head modestly downcast, like that of a white cockatoo preening itself. It went so perfectly with the single syllable “m’dear”, which only actors seem able to pronounce. That syllable came out so naturally after some young miss had played the piano or paid a compliment: “M’dear, you have lovely shoulders: you play so well.” “M’dear, you flatter me.” He had been photographed making that gesture. It was his favourite photograph.

  When he thought of Bessie, he saw her always sitting white and cool on a wide veranda, above a croquet lawn, a game which flatters young ladies in wide skirts so beautifully, with the sound of practical laughter so cooing across an afternoon lawn; half green, half lavender. His trunks contained sachets of lavender. It was a smell he preferred.

  Rummaging in his wardrobe, he searched out a costume for this event which was to make him so permanently famous. He had some of his father’s stage clothes in that trunk; some of his own; the uniform he had worn when he went off with the Virginia Rifles to watch the hanging of John Brown, which had made him sick. He did not care for violence. He was upset if he so much as cut his finger on a piece of notepaper. He was careful always to remain inviolate. But he did like uniforms.

  His favourite costume was a riding outfit, half Dangerous Dick, half country squire, and today, as was fitting, it should be black, for is not the avenger always black? Besides, with proper tailoring, and he always insisted on proper tailoring, a riding costume made him seem taller, and shortness was his only physical defect.

  The spurs were important. He spent some time choosing the right pair. Then, looking at himself in the pier glass, he saw that here and there his boots were dull in their sheen. He went downstairs, found a bootblack, and had them perfected.

  It was a gesture he liked, that stance with one foot up on the box, above the shoeshine boy. It had the right magisterial air. His boots polished, he went to Herndon House to tell Payne what to do. He was sure of finding him in. Payne never went out into the streets if he could help it. He was a preacher’s boy from Florida: any town with more than one street not only confused him, but filled him with despair. Booth went upstairs and opened the door.

  The room was almost dark, for the curtains were drawn. Payne
was lying full length on the bed, which was too small for him, smoking a cigar and flicking the ashes into that ashtray he had made by shaving the top off the skull of a Federal soldier. Payne was like that. He seldom drank, but he did smoke, and he was very fond of that skull. It was not a trophy or a symbol exactly, but it was what an old bone was to a dog.

  Payne swung to his feet, saw who it was, and then lay down again.

  “I hoped you’d come, Cap,” he said. That was what he called John Wilkes. His own father was a little man and not worth bothering about, and besides, a father wasn’t what Payne wanted in this world. What he wanted was to be somebody’s pet dog in a regiment. He had probably never heard of Patroclus and Achilles. But that was the limit of his emotional world, and he had taken Booth for his Achilles. He was a soft spoken, warm, obedient, and affectionate dog who could only serve one master. He was also, if told what to do and how to do it, a homicidal maniac, which did not bother Booth. He had never played in The Tempest himself, but his father had once read that play aloud, at home, and he knew perfectly well who was Prospero and what becomes of Caliban. And like Caliban, he did not care, for Caliban is scarcely human. He is only a dog who wants to lick your face and for that reason can be taught to retrieve what birds you shoot down.

  Yet sometimes Payne made him uncomfortable. The boy had strength but no guile. He was proof of what love can do without a brain. And Booth, who could not love in that way, was one of those people whom only loyalty to themselves makes a little uneasy. None the less he could depend on Payne. He told him what to do. He had never even heard of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, though he knew Shelley well enough. But when that heavy, blinking, overgrown child stood up, there was something shuffling and inexorable about his walk which always took Booth aback. The boy had a strangler’s hands.

  Even so, he was not really dangerous. It was just that his world contained only one person at a time, in this case Cap, and so it did not matter what he did to the rest of the world, for the rest of the world did not exist. It was as simple and as confused as that. He was so grateful to have an affectionate voice to tell him what to do, that he would do anything, in order to have the same voice tell him what to do again. As another man would carry his address in his wallet, in case of accidents, Payne carried a carte de visite of Booth.

  Booth told him what to do and thought no more about it. The ethics of what he was doing did not occur to him. Booth had no ethics, only manners. He never had had.

  When he had gone, Payne sighed. He did not particularly want to kill anybody, but if he did, then he would see Cap tomorrow. Therefore he would.

  On his way to Atzerodt, who was out, Booth stopped by to leave a card on Vice-President Johnson, who was also out. Johnson was out because he was feeling ashamed of himself. If he could not hide in his room, he could at least hide in a bar. A shrewd enough politician in his own state, he had found out that his own state was not the same as Washington City. He had made a fool of himself by getting drunk at the Inauguration and giving an ill-timed speech to the effect that he was a self-made man and not ashamed of it. That always went down well at home, but here he had misjudged his audience. Most of those in the government were self-made men themselves, but their autofacture had been directed towards concealment of the fact, not display. They had watched him with uneasy horror and then condemned him. As a result, the President would not even see him. He had made himself the laughing stock of Washington, and though he had many virtues, being hard-bitten enough to act disinterestedly when he chose, or when he thought he should do so, which takes more guts, a sense of humour was not among them. So he was out to the world these days.

  His absence made Booth angry. He had met Johnson once, backstage in Baltimore, and had hoped, on the strength of that, to get a safe conduct to the Maryland Shore out of him. Now he would have to bluff his way across the Navy Yard bridge, instead. Then there was the matter of Atzerodt. Atzerodt should have been in his room above Johnson’s, at the Kirkwood House. But the man was an undependable coward. He was probably out drinking somewhere, knowing very well what he would have to do, once Booth caught up with him.

  But Booth did not catch up with him. The day was dwindling away, and he could find none of his instruments. Herold did not turn up, Arnold was in Baltimore, and O’Laughlin, though in Washington, had refused to help. Finally he managed to collar Atzerodt in the street, before that silly, distasteful, hunched over little man could slither away.

  “I am in trouble,” whined Atzerodt. “I will never be out of it.” Which was quite true, but not what Booth had to tell him. He would have to do something to bring these weaklings into line. So at about four o’clock that afternoon he wrote out a letter to the newspapers, explaining what he was about to do and why, signed it with all their names, and gave it to an actor called Matthews to deliver, since he would have no opportunity to deliver it himself. Then he was ready. He had even remembered to stop by and give Mrs. Surratt a little package to deposit for him at Surrattsville. Field glasses, by the feel of them.

  Mrs. Surratt had hired a carriage for ten dollars, and now jogged across the Potomac, into Maryland, with Louis Weichmann to drive her. Not even the presence of that man could quite spoil her day, though he had been infuriatingly curious about the package. But then he was curious about everything.

  There was even a little sun, and the weather on the Maryland Shore proved warm. It was as though there had never been a war. She began to unbend. When she unbended, one could see that locked up somewhere in her, under all that defensive gruffness, was something vulnerable and charming, but Louis Weichmann did not see it. Charm was not a quality he sought in life, and vulnerability was something he confused with weakness. He lived like a rat in a wheel, always paddling away at the same treadmill; and his dignity, of which he had none, unless frightened, was that of a rat rearing up on its hind paws to defend itself against danger.

  Whether he was in danger or not, he did not know, but he did know that he had talked too much before his superiors about the Secesh tendencies of Mrs. Surratt and her boarders, and he did not want to be called a liar, any more than he wished to be unmasked as a spy. Yet he had no will to move. He was quite comfortable at Mrs. Surratt’s. She kept a good house. But neither did he want, being weak willed, the responsibility of anyone’s being arrested, guilty or innocent, on his word. Just the same he questioned her. He could not help it. Besides, though he liked her boarding house, he did not like her. He knew perfectly well what she thought of him. It was what he thought of himself.

  For a moment Mrs. Surratt was alarmed, lest he was trying to ferret out something about her son John. Yet John was safe in Canada, she was quite the equal of Mr. Weichmann, thank you, and the country was so beautiful that in a while she forgot all about him, except for the badness of his driving.

  You could tell from the way he held the reins that Mr. Weichmann had not been brought up among people accustomed to owning horses, whereas she had been, in Prince George County, and even at Surrattsville, a few years ago. She saw two mares, white, in a field, and automatically she said, “zit, zit”.

  It was a game they had all played when she was a child. Whenever you saw a white horse, when you were out in the carriage, you said “zit”. Whoever said it first got a point. She could not remember what the point of the game was. Perhaps it had been its own point. But the memory of it made her smile.

  So did the countryside. She did not care for the smell of Washington City, which was a mixture of whisky, dust and stale garbage in open drains. She loved the smell of green spring meadows flocked with flowers. Every winter she forgot it, and every April it was there again, like the memory of a happy childhood or of a happy day. She loved the world when it smelled young. She even loved the young themselves.

  Along the low horizon, against the sky, the first redbud was in bloom.

  It was as well she enjoyed the day, for her errand was fruitless. Her debtor was hiding somewhere and could not be found. But she did stop at Su
rrattsville and leave that irresponsible drunk of a tenant, Lloyd, Mr. Booth’s package. She knew how scornful Weichmann was of Surrattsville. He was full of the scorn of those who own nothing towards those who prize the little that is theirs. True, it was little. It brought in only six hundred a year. But at least it was Surrattsville, it was named for her late husband, and any land one owns is Eden, if one has to visit it from town.

  So she ignored Weichmann. As she drove back through the dusk, she could smell the drowsy odour of the redbud, and it soothed her as she had not been soothed in weeks. To relax so much, made her realize how tense she had been. But with John safe in Canada and the war over, and quite enough boarders at the boarding house, really, perhaps life would be better from now on.

  Jounced, jostled, alone, but content, she sat in the dusk, listening to the horse, and smiled.

  Mr. Lincoln’s afternoon drive had not been so pleasant. He did not sleep easily these days. His nightmares were worse and more frequent, and they left him drained. He had made all the plans of a man who knows perfectly well that he is not going to live to fulfil them. He would take Mother, which is what he called his wife, to Europe with the children, once this second term had run its course. He would set up a law practice in Springfield again. He made plans the way a doctor reassures his patients. He talked of the future with everyone, for he knew he was not well. It was of his own death that he had nightmares.

  The scene was always the same. He came back to the White House which was a disorderly, ill-run, and inhuman building, to find that a death had taken place. And the body in the coffin was always his own. It was when learning that that he always moaned in his sleep.