The Judges of the Secret Court

by David Stacton

  All Maryland was being ransacked. He had to get to Virginia. The problem was how to get there. He no longer trusted Herold, for there was nothing to prevent the boy’s running off. The cross roads before him were shadowy and the church behind him empty. He could feel the pressure of that emptiness. But he was weak and tired. He could not remain alert.

  Herold came back, with a darky walking down the road behind him.

  The darky seemed scared, but he was obedient. He had brought ham and bread. That was the way with darkies. They did as they were told until they could get away from you. It was ten miles to Cox’s house. He would lead the way. When they arrived there, Booth told him to wait and faced the house.

  Though the war had made him poor, Colonel Cox lived in a certain style, more style, anyhow, if on less money, than Dr. Mudd aspired to. The house was no plantation, but it was sizable, white with green shutters, and standing safely behind a barrage of picket fence. Herold pounded on the door knocker.

  A light went on upstairs and Cox came down and opened the door. He had pulled on trousers over his nightshirt, and had a pistol at his belt. He knew it was wiser to go armed these days. He led them inside. Booth saw a sofa and lay down on it. Cox had a reputation for loyalty to the Southern cause. And so he told Cox who he was.

  Cox said nothing. For the first time, as he looked about him, in the flickering candlelight of his own house, he saw that the room had too low a ceiling. He was not impressed by these gentlemen. The boy was a pewling afterbirth on legs, a druggist’s clerk, by the look of him, or something like that. Booth was more complicated, but no better. He was that dangerous thing, a would-be gentleman. And besides, a gentleman shoots no one in the back, whatever the provocation. Even more than a Southerner, Cox was a Tory. He had the florid, square, businesslike face of some eighteenth-century provincial governor, but that did not mean that he was insensitive. Whatever else he might have been, Lincoln was at least a rational man. Cox looked at Booth with some contempt.

  None the less, he could not turn him in. He was not an informer. Booth was a matinée idol, so they said. No doubt on the stage he did well enough. Now he was a wounded dog and had the same look in his eyes. It was a look Cox avoided. He was always kind to animals. He had learned enough of humanity, to be so. And besides, he had suffered enough in this war. The best way to suffer no more from this man, who had been born to bring suffering to others, you could see that in his face, was to help him to escape. But that would not be easy.

  “Quarrel,” he said.

  Booth looked puzzled.

  “Stage a quarrel, man. You’re an actor, aren’t you? There are too many ears in this house. I’ll take care of you, but first I have to turn you out. So quarrel.”

  They quarrelled.

  It did Cox good. He had no taste for politics. He thought them a dirty, self-advancing, Irish business. He merely loved his home, his way of life, his State, his adopted son, who lay wounded near Petersburg. What had politics to do with a man who sat on his own land and defended it, not out of principle or economic selfishness, but simply because he loved it?

  Now this woods’ colt, if rumour about the Booth bastardy was true, this silly play actor with the sensibility and the unreality of a Southern belle of seventeen, and none of the guts of the mistress of the house that belle had been educated to turn into, lay here and wanted help; without doubt he had brought new ruin on them all, not to mention upon his own family.

  Cox talked on. He got rid of five years’ worth of baffled sorrow. What he said meant nothing to the man, but at least it made him angry, and Cox was of the opinion that the impotent anger of weak men was exactly what they deserved.

  “Curse as you go out, and curse loud,” finished Cox. “I’ll send you a man to guide you away from here.”

  He opened the front door. As he had expected, Booth had no trouble cursing. If his words lacked the right degree of coarseness, they had the right tone. Cox grinned as he slammed the door.

  Herold and Booth went down the yard. At the gate a man was waiting to pick them up. He said his name was Robey and that he came from Cox. Together the three of them stumbled through the wet countryside and came at last to a knoll covered with pine trees. There Robey left them to wait until Cox could send down someone with a boat to get them away, and perhaps with some food.

  It was Sunday morning.

  Back at the house, Cox stretched, yawned, spat in the fire, and found that he was still quivering with indignation. He cooled down and sent for his foster brother, Thomas Jones. Jones eked out these thin war years by poaching. Jones would be able to get them off, and would keep his mouth shut about doing so. The two men always owed each other a favour or two, so there was nothing to worry about there.

  Because he believed what other men merely said they believed, Cox had managed to get through this world with an easy conscience. He went back upstairs to bed.

  XV

  Booth was furious. He did not care to be snubbed by the gentry. Cox was as bad, in his way, as Bessie Hale’s father had been in his.

  The copse of pines stood above the open fields, backed by a wood down to the unseen shore, and standing about a mile from the Cox place. Booth considered himself a gentleman. Whatever a gentleman did, he slept in a bed. He had never slept out of doors before, and the night was vile. The pine wood was no help for anything but cover. The trees were scraggly, with exaggerated needles so yellow and laden with moisture, that the slightest touch of wind discharged a volley of stale rain on to the faces of those below. Nor were pine needles comfortable to sleep on, either. He could not endure his situation for a moment.

  Yet he was to endure it for five days.

  When he woke the world was an oven of leaden grey as damp as the ground beneath his body. His hands and joints were stiff with moisture, and he had a fever. He shivered and huddled deeper in his blanket. No man should have to be exposed in this way.

  Afraid he had been deserted, he shouted for Herold. At last the boy appeared, looking as though he were going to cry. Booth had no patience with that, and sent him to look after the horses. When Herold came back it was to say that Booth’s rocker had tugged its rope loose and escaped. Booth said what he thought of that, saw by the boy’s face he would have to go carefully, otherwise the bloated booby would run away, and sent him to fetch back the mare. That used up all his remaining strength. He had not the will to think. After a while he heard someone whistle.

  He thought at first it was troops come to take him alive. He did not mean to be taken alive. He sat up, against the bole of a tree, and took out his revolver. On his lip a little spirit gum glistened, where he had had the beard fastened on. He should never have thrown it away.

  Peering anxiously, he recognized Herold and another, older man, approaching. The older man was leading Booth’s escaped mare. The stranger had a long, gaunt face with a dreary moustache, but his eyes, like those of Cox, were bright.

  “Mr. Jones has a boat,” said Herold. “He can get us across the river.”

  Booth began to rail against Cox. Thomas Jones paid no attention. He had heard all that before, from other men, and he knew more about his foster brother than Booth did. He had only wanted to see the man before making up his mind. Saving them was a futile gesture. The war was lost. But now, from the look of Booth, he saw that the man would have to be got out of the way, if Cox and he were to save their own necks. A promise to Cox was a promise.

  Besides, he felt sorry for the poor devil. Booth was still handsome, but he already had the marks of decay on him. Jones had seen him act once. He was a good, noisy, vigorous actor, more animal than anything else, but a speaking animal. He certainly had a good voice. But the vigour was beginning to go out of him. Being a fugitive didn’t suit him; and somebody had to help him, since clearly he didn’t know how to help himself.

  Booth shrank away. The one thing he did not want was pity. He felt small lying there, before this faded denim man with the watchful face.

  The niggers woul
d be worst, Jones saw that. Every nigger in the country was weeping and wailing for Lincoln, as well he might. Booth would have to stay where he was, until it was safe to get him out, but he saw no point in telling the man that. He looked close enough to the end of his rope as it was. Jones gave them the food he had brought and said he would be back when he could, tomorrow maybe. Booth seemed to want only two things, brandy and the newspapers. Brandy was more than Jones could manage, this was corn likker country, but he said he’d see about the papers. He went away.

  Booth fell asleep, and when he woke, saw Herold polishing up the guns, as though nothing had happened, and this were only a hunting expedition.

  “Davy,” he said. “Do you know the manners of good society?”

  Davy just stared at him. No, he did not. He went on polishing the gun.

  Before him Booth saw an enormous decanter of cut glass. He knew it was not there, but he had to have it.

  “Davy, I want brandy,” he said. His throat had gone back on him again. He realized he was whispering. How could he act, if he had bronchitis? Besides, there was no brandy.

  “Davy, have you ever thought of dying?”

  “No,” said Herold, who at the moment thought of little else and was beginning to long to avoid the experience. He did not like the way Booth was looking at him. But then Wilkes’ eyes glazed over, he swallowed hard, and began to carry on a monologue about the nature of good society.

  That was what he wanted the papers for. He wanted to find out what good society had to say of him. Good society, when it is bored, which is most of the time, is only too delighted to have a hero worth the fêting, one who knows the difference between a knife and fork, and has a friend like Payne to help him, though Payne, poor loyal lad, was not instructible and would never appreciate that difference.

  Everything would be all right once Payne came. Where was Payne?

  XVI

  He was in Washington City, cold, miserable, and lost. He could think of nothing to do, except to wait for Cap to come and rescue him. He knew Cap would.

  He had spent his second night in that old tree, down by the Potomac. Now he walked across a dry vacant lot, his coat flapping in the breeze, turned round to watch the river and the Maryland shore, and went off to get something in his stomach. He did not care what the food was, just so he could fill up on it.

  It was Easter Sunday, he supposed, to judge by the church bells, but he felt bedraggled and bored. A meal made him feel no better. He was in a poorer section of town. There were no fine ladies to watch, as they swept into church like great self-willed conservatory flowers. At most, a woman here and there had turned her bonnet or added a papiermâché bunch of berries to it.

  Having nothing else to do, he slipped into the back pew of the nearest church. It was that sort of church, with pitch pine pews and no stove, fundamentally cold, in which the preacher, knowing nothing of it, is chronically given to deploring the world. Payne grinned. His own father had been a hellfire preacher, which was one reason why he had left home. He was used to that kind of oratory.

  “Would that Mr. Lincoln had fallen elsewhere than at the very Gates of Hell,” groaned the preacher, who had a badly shaved Adam’s apple. “We remember with sorrow the place of his death. It was a poor place to die in. The theatre is one of the last places to which a good man should go, the illumined and decorated gateway through which thousands are constantly passing into the embrace of gaiety and folly, intemperance and lewdness, infamy and ruin.”

  That was enough for Payne. He had learned those adjectives at his father’s knee, and they were to him no more than what they were, a meaningless nursery jingle to soothe the fretful and the underprivileged. Still, they did not soothe him.

  For its own reasons, the Government, or Stanton, anyway, agreed with the preacher. They had to arrest someone. That was why the whole cast of the theatre was in jail. But there was nothing to be got out of them. They had to be let go. Stanton turned his attention to the Booth family instead.

  He was a little behindhand. The public had got to them first. The anonymous letters had already begun to come in, delivered by special post, so as to arrive on Sunday. Edwin was the chief recipient. “Bullets are marked for you,” he read, before deciding to read no more. They all got them, from Mary Ann, to poor Junius’s daughter by an earlier marriage, Blanche de Bar Booth.

  Souvenir hunters streamed out of Baltimore to Bel Air, and tore Tudor Hall to pieces. Old clothes, dead leaves, and bits of the upholstery all went down that public maw. The newspapers were splenetic. Mary Ann, in New York, could only hope, as she boarded the train for Philadelphia on Saturday, that Wilkes would not live to be hanged. There was nothing else left for her to hope for. The papers were full of the whole sorry story of their lives. They were illegitimate. Their father had been a bigamist, and their mother, that is to say, herself, Mary Ann, not even so good as a common law wife. Junius’s daughter had been born out of wedlock, while he was still married to his first wife. Edwin was a former drunkard, whose neglect of her had killed his wife.

  He believed that himself, but he did not want to read about it in the newspapers. He held his head in his hands. Even their Jewish blood was dragged up against them, and not least in the Jewish press.

  He sat down to write to Asia. Asia had treated him badly, but she was his sister, his child Edwina was with her, he hoped in safety, and someone had to advise Asia, who was fanatical about Wilkes and always had been. There was no telling what she might say or do.

  “Think no more of John,” he wrote. “As your brother, he is dead to us now as soon he must be to all the world, but imagine the boy you loved to be in that better part of his spirit in another world.” He had already had a broken-hearted letter from Bessie Hale, Wilkes’ fiancée. That too had shaken him.

  He had not himself loved Wilkes. He had not cared for his patriotic posturing and his incompetence. He had loved him only as the one member of the family who lived in a charmed circle, and so had been able to afford irresponsibility, and yet who was in some way weak.

  Now they knew in what way, but it would not help Asia to tell her that. Poor Asia. She was a great hater. That would make it all the more difficult for her to bear the hatred of the world. At least she was in Philadelphia. But so was Sleeper Clarke. Sleeper Clarke had married her, Edwin had told her so at the time, only to get a leg up in the theatrical world by means of the Booth connection. Since Asia was ashamed of her connection with the stage, he had made little out of it, which had made him irritable to begin with, so goodness only knew what he would have to say to Asia now.

  Sleeper had nothing to say. Others might go to church, but in the Clarke house in Philadelphia no one went there. They had not the stomach, the house had already been ransacked by the police, and Asia was under house arrest. That the Booths should consider it their house always infuriated Sleeper, who owned it, and he was no more sedate now. If that fool Wilkes had not been let in here, against his express orders, by Asia, they would not all be in this trouble.

  Asia, who was five months pregnant, sat in a chair placed for some reason in the middle of the parlour, and, watching her husband, wondered how long she had detested him. She had married, it was true, in order to get away from home, but in those days Sleeper had been different. For one thing he had been called Sleepy; for another, he had not been so relentlessly businesslike. Edwin was right: he had tried to claw his way up by means of her. But she was a woman, not a ladder. Sometimes Sleeper forgot that.

  Unfortunately he was a ridiculous man. He might not be very bright, though he schemed enough for two men, but he had that rare thing, a physical comic genius. Do what he would, pose as a man of affairs, and as a matter of fact, he was a good one, rant and rave, or upbraid her, that appearance of his always defeated his best domestic effects. He could relax an audience simply by looking at it and saying “whoops”. But time had hardened him. It seemed impossible to believe that he had once gone out of his way to amuse her. On stage his best part w
as the title role in something called Toodles. It was years since he had played Toodles at home. She had to confess that she had shrunk from the vulgarity of it, when he had. But now she shrank from his rage.

  For years he had hated all the Booths, and in particular, Edwin, who was everything Sleeper could not be. He loathed Mary Ann. Now Mary Ann was here, and they were going to open the packet Wilkes had left with Asia.

  The packet contained two letters. One had been written to Mary Ann the previous November. Clarke read it by himself. It was a piece of fiddlefaddle, as one might expect, but at least it exonerated the family, if one could believe it. Clarke looked around at Asia and Mary Ann, and believed nothing.

  The second letter was the more recent, the longer, and addressed, To Whom It May Concern. It was even worse than the first one. It had not even been sealed. It was nonsensical, dangerous taradiddle. He read it aloud, and went right on reading it, even after Mary Ann had fainted. The letter was a justification, if so one could call it, of the crime.

  Asia did not faint. She was not the sort of woman who did. She revived Mary Ann and helped her upstairs. Then she came back and demanded to read the letter for herself. Clarke would not allow her to. He read it aloud. He wanted to make her squirm.

  She did not squirm. But she remembered. Of course Wilkes had been some kind of Southern courier. Unknown to Clarke, many people had come to this house on his errands. She pretended not to see them. She also remembered something else. She had often heard Wilkes say that there was a fine chance for immortality, for anyone who might shoot the President, and she knew about Wilkes’ thirst for fame. She had always thought that nothing but guff. And yet, as she listened to Clarke’s awful voice drone on she knew that, yes, Wilkes had actually done this thing.