The Judges of the Secret Court

by David Stacton

  She could not understand that. They had loved him so. Had he no thought for his family? Surely he had loved them in return. She knew he loved her. Looking at Clarke, she tried to hold on to that certainty.

  XVII

  No, he had not thought of his family. He seldom did. He had a mother and a brother who played Hamlet, that was true, and even a useful sister Asia, who coddled him, but he was determined to be the only Booth. He was himself alone. And so he did not even now think of them. He was more worried about his present situation. He was helpless in the hands of incompetents, he did not feel well, and he did not know what to do next.

  He lay under that accursed hangman’s tree of a pine, the biggest one, and wanted very much to shriek. He had had a bad night. It was Monday, if one knew what day it was in a wood, and still that man Jones did not return. He saw it must be dawn, which was not a sight he was often up to watch. Late rising was half his occupation, its hallmark, and its privilege. Not that there was much to see. There was a sluggish ground mist which streamed upward, changed colour, and drowned him in a shallow sea of sickly yellow fog. Herold was still asleep. The two horses were tied to trees. Off somewhere he heard a bugle sounding reveille. That meant soldiers in the neighbourhood. He roused Herold and sent him to quieten the horses.

  No one came. Herold went into the underbrush with his carbine. Booth felt irremediably lost. It was hard to remember who one was, without an audience to play to. Never having been ill before, he had not realized what a tyrannical and terrible thing one’s own body could be. He felt it would eat him up, if once he was so unwary as to lose consciousness. On the ground before him was the nibbled wreck of a small pine cone. He concentrated on that.

  When he looked up, Jones was standing in front of him. Jones did not ask how he felt. He merely handed over a blanket, a bottle of whisky, a packet of food, and the newspapers. There was no telling how long he had been standing there.

  Hungry though he was for food, Booth was hungrier to know what the world thought of him. He opened up the National Intelligencer.

  “There’s a lot of soldiers around today,” Jones said. Booth scarcely heard him. The paper was two days old, and full of nothing but Lincoln, page after black leaded page of it. From the Intelligencer he turned to the New York papers, but found them no better. They did not even mention his name.

  What had Matthews done with that letter? It should have filled two full columns at least, for it had been a long letter which explained everything. It was one of the best letters he had ever written. Had that coward Matthews thrown it away, or had the damned Government deliberately suppressed it? Since it gave a true account of the matter, and the papers seemed to regard Lincoln as a martyr, which he certainly wasn’t, perhaps the Government had.

  He turned back to the Intelligencer again, and finally found his name in a short item. The account was uncertain, as though nobody knew who he was. In another despatch, Stanton was said to have said that John Wilkes Booth had played some part in the crime, but his name was not even in the bold type usually reserved for proper names. His trunk had been found at the National Hotel, and Stanton referred to O’Laughlin: General Augur offered ten thousand dollars for O’Laughlin’s apprehension. Booth glanced at Jones. But Jones was helping Herold prepare the food.

  Everything seemed to have gone wrong. A knife had been found on F. Street. It certainly was not his. A riderless horse had been captured. That must be Payne’s. A small headline informed him that the route pursued by the criminals had been discovered, that one of them was Booth, and the other was supposed to be John Surratt. The authorities seemed to believe that it was Surratt, not he, who had engineered this thing. That was absurd. He stared at the papers with disbelief. He had staked everything on this one appeal to fame. And now his name was scarcely mentioned.

  “Can’t you get me some Southern papers?” he asked. He had always got a better press in the South. In the South they understood him.

  Jones merely stared at him. Booth was weak enough to weep. Was there to be no eulogy?

  “I want Southern papers,” he said, and almost spilled his mug of coffee.

  Jones felt sorry for the poor devil already. He did not want to see him cry. He couldn’t figure Booth out at all. What did the man expect?

  Behind them they heard a man’s voice in the woods, and the sound of horses. A detachment of cavalry jogged by, so close that the flash of metal accoutrements could be seen through the trees. Then they were gone, but they would not be gone for long. Jones had jumped for the muzzle of his horse. Now he let go of it.

  “You’ll have to get rid of your horses,” he said. “Otherwise they’ll give you away.”

  Booth did not want to agree to that. Once the horses were gone he would be cut off from escape, and he didn’t altogether trust Jones; but he was too weak to argue, and Herold was so scared he’d do anything Jones told him to do.

  The two men led the horses away, and Booth went back to the papers. Now the sun was up, the ground steamed with damp.

  Everything had gone wrong. Seward was still alive. The steel collar supporting his fractured jaw had saved him. There was no mention of Johnson at all, except the statement that it was suspected he had been marked out as one of the victims. Worst of all, there was no mention of him. So many people had wanted Lincoln dead. He alone had had the courage to kill him. Why then these eulogies of Lincoln, and none of him?

  Far off, deep in the swamp, he heard the echo of two shots. The horses were gone. He was now dependent upon others for his escape. And from the way his own conspirators had behaved, right down to Lewis Payne, for Lewis had bungled the job and run away, he did not put much faith in others.

  His letter had gone astray, and where were the other conspirators? Weak though he was, he would have to explain the whole matter again. He took out his notebook and opened to a blank page. The notebook was a diary for 1864, but he had no other paper. At the top of the blank page he saw he had once written Te amo. He could not for the life of him remember to whom that referred. He smoothed out the paper and wrote in the date. “April 12th, 13th, 14th, Friday the Ides.” What Ides meant he was not sure, but he remembered the phrase from Julius Caesar. He also remembered that Brutus had died for his act. Because he was used to coming out after the death scene to take his bow, and he always did a good death scene, he had forgotten that, but now it struck him forcibly. Brutus is, however, the hero of the play. And so he should be, despite that cringing fool, Matthews.

  The papers said he had been a cut-throat coward. That made him angry. “I struck boldly and not as the papers say,” he wrote. “I walked with firm step through a thousand of his friends, was stopped, but pushed on.” What if he had shot Lincoln in the back? What point would there have been in asking him to turn around? “Our country owed all her troubles to him, and God simply made me the instrument of His punishment,” he went on. And then a little politics: “The country is not what it was. This forced Union is not what I have loved. I care not what becomes of me. I have no desire to outlive my country.”

  On the other hand, he had no real desire to die, either.

  Jones and Herold loomed up in front of him and said that with so many troops on the move, Booth would have to stay where he was for another day or two.

  Booth whimpered. It was too much. He did not see why he should have to suffer so. He sat there and went on writing as long as he could. It was necessary to explain about that letter to the National Intelligencer. Writing calmed him, but even so, he could not bear the thought of lying here like an animal another night, when others far worse than he lay in comfortable houses.

  XVIII

  They were not to lie in them long.

  Monday, Edwin came back from Boston to New York. He had been questioned over and over again, but then released. Life might have no mercy, but he did have a few powerful friends. They saw to it that he was left at liberty, despite Stanton. It was not a liberty he much enjoyed, for overnight the whole world had become his pr
ison. He could not bear to be seen. He would never act again. He dreaded even to descend from the train.

  Tompkins, his host in Boston, had come with him. Edwin would almost rather have been alone. It had never occurred to him that anyone might find him lovable. Therefore, even when he needed it most, he shrank from help. Help was something he found it easier to give than to receive.

  He was pale and tired. Life had bleached him out. For a mercy there did not seem to be any reporters about, but there was a plain clothes detective not far behind him, for though he was not to be arrested, he was to be watched. He looked around shyly. When he saw his old friend Tom Aldrich there, he smiled so hard he almost cried.

  “Tom,” he said. “You shouldn’t have come.” He was concerned. Tom Aldrich was a journalist who needed his job, and who could tell what might happen to anyone who spoke to a Booth these days?

  They went straight to the 19th Street house. It was empty, except for Rosalie. Mary Ann was in Philadelphia with Asia. He had tried to make this house a home for Mary Ann, who certainly deserved one, but now the rooms seemed futile. He went right to his own bedroom. Poor Mary Ann, she was his mother, but perhaps for that very reason he never knew what to say to her. Now no one would know what to say to her. Johnny was the only one who was able to please her, the only one she cared two pins about. For the first time, for he doted on his own daughter, he saw that willynilly, to be a parent is inevitably to expose oneself to loss.

  He had forgotten. There was a portrait of John Wilkes on the wall beside his bed. He stared at it, while Tom Aldrich came in, glanced at it, and then tactfully looked away. In that instant Edwin knew he would never take it down. Whatever he had done, Wilkes was a member of the family. But neither could he bring himself to look at it any more.

  The men settled down for the night. Through the shutters they could see the plain clothes man waiting down in the street. Booth did not dare to leave the house. As his father had once said bitterly, when someone he did not even know had greeted him on the street, “Everybody knows Tom Fool.” The difference between fame and notoriety is seldom certain. Suddenly Tom Fool was exactly what Edwin had become. The wretched history of his family had finally tripped him up, as it was to do to how many others?

  That was what Stanton wanted to know. How many others were there? Stanton had worked around the clock. Edwin might get away from him, but now he proposed to arrest everyone in sight. It was his usual method, for he had come to believe that all the world was guilty of something. It was merely necessary to discover of what, and that could be proven better in the Old Capitol Prison than in court. The writ of habeas corpus was still suspended. That gave him a free hand. He was in no hurry, but he was inexorable. He began with such of the conspirators as he could catch.

  The first to be hauled in was Sam Arnold. He was easy enough to find. He was asleep in the back room of the store at Fort Monroe where he worked. Arnold was not surprised. He had read in the newspapers that the jealous and temporizing letter he had written Booth from Baltimore had been found when the police seized Wilkes’ trunk at the National Hotel. What was the letter about? Nothing but that Booth had come to Baltimore and taken Mike O’Laughlin out to dinner instead of him. “How inconsiderate you have been,” he had written.

  How inconsiderate he had been. A kidnapping during a war was one thing. Murder after the war was over was another. Arnold had told Booth that. He had fallen in with the man only for the profit of knowing him, since Booth was involved in wartime smuggling. There was money in that. They ran quinine. Murder was another matter entirely.

  Arnold did not have the look of a criminal. At twenty-eight he was a pleasant young man. And neither was he a criminal. When the arresting officers handed him a letter from his father, advising him to co-operate and to talk, he talked.

  It was Booth the charmer, not Booth the assassin who had held his attention. He was not implicated in the assassination in any way. Why should he not talk?

  With Mike O’Laughlin the matter was more serious. He had a deeper awareness of that vague Southern dream of the gentleman, and Booth had been kinder to him. He was small and delicate, but he had a firmer mind than Arnold. He knew what his own arrest was apt to lead to.

  He had taken refuge at a boarding house, and so dodged arrest for two days. There seemed no point in trying to dodge it any longer. Those sent to arrest him seemed impressed by the fact that he apparently understood why he was being arrested and asked no questions. His only wish was to protect his family. He had been in Washington City that fatal night, and Arnold had not. He would undergo whatever he had to undergo alone.

  Those were the only conspirators Stanton could gather in that day. Atzerodt, Payne, and Booth himself were still at liberty, as was Surratt, whom he wanted most of all. But if he could not have the son, the mother was available. Major Smith was despatched for Mrs. Surratt.

  XIX

  Out of some sad last minute whim, Mrs. Surratt had decided to play the piano, which she had not touched in weeks. She felt nervous, for she still had no news of John. She could not keep down some sense of dread. She raised the piano lid, stretched her fingers, and searched out a chord. The chord sounded sour, for the piano had got out of tune. Annie was dressed to go out to a party, and was waiting to be called for. Honora sat on the sofa. The other boarder, Olivia Jenkins, was equally quiet. But all four women had a lot to think about.

  The house had been searched Saturday. The police were after John. Mrs. Surratt had told them nothing, but hoped John had had the sense to slip away over the Canadian border. Weichmann had left Saturday, and so had her other male roomer, Mr. Holahan. Mrs. Holahan had moved out Sunday, taking her child with her. So many departures were ominous.

  The front parlour was not an agreeable room. One wall was decorated with a lugubrious lithograph called Morning, Noon, and Night. On another hung the arms of the State of Virginia, with two crossed Confederate Flags beneath it, and the motto written large. Sic semper tyrannis was the motto of Virginia, “Thus will it ever be with tyrants.” Mr. Booth had admired it once.

  And repeated it on Friday night.

  What was to become of them all? Mrs. Surratt looked down at her fingers, and watched them search out the familiar melody, a piece by J. R. Thomas, “Bonnie Eloise, the Belle of the Mohawk Vale”. It had been popular during the war. She had no real awareness of playing and no pleasure in doing so. She noticed only that her hands looked old.

  The thing that had disturbed her most that day was something quite trivial. Happening to glance out the parlour windows, at about noon, she had seen a man across the street, his head under a black cloth, taking a photograph of the house with a large box camera on a tripod. As she watched, an arm reached out of the cloth, removed the metal cap, and she found the pupilless great eye of the camera staring at the house like the bore of a cannon.

  She went right down the front steps and across the street.

  “What is the meaning of this?” she said.

  The man said he did not know. He only knew that Mr. Brady, who photographed everyone and had photographed the war besides, had sent him to take a likeness of the house.

  “But why?” she had insisted. “How dare you do such a thing without my permission?”

  The photographer had given her a pitying look, snapped up his tripod, and walked away. It was a look she remembered now, even though her hands were playing this supposedly agreeable and sentimental music.

  All four women heard the rattle of horses and then footsteps on the stoop, outside. Annie’s escort, no doubt. He was a little late. The doorbell rang, Mrs. Surratt finished her phrase, and got up to answer it.

  From the parlour the others could hear her gasp, as she opened the door. It was not Annie’s escort. It was the military.

  “We have come to arrest you and everyone in the house.”

  They heard that too. Annie glanced at the arms of Virginia on the opposite wall, but there was no time to remove it. Mama came back, sat down, and began t
o pray. The men followed. They did not like the job of arresting women. They were embarrassed. But they had no choice. Mrs. Surratt looked up and sighed. She would not be dragged through the streets like a common criminal. Nor would she have Annie treated so.

  “May we have a carriage?” she asked. She was always a little timid with men, but it was a pitiable enough request. “It’s cold and damp, and I don’t want my daughter and these other ladies …” Her voice trailed off.

  Major Smith was delighted to oblige. He would have done anything to make his task less disagreeable. He sent one of his men out for a carriage and told the ladies to get their hats and coats. Mrs. Surratt rose to do so. Major Smith regretted that his orders were not to let her go through the house alone. A Mr. Samson would go with her.

  She went upstairs, gathered up the coats and bonnets, and went back to the parlour. The women were tying their bonnets when the front doorbell rang again. Two of the soldiers answered it this time.

  Outside they saw a tall man in a grey coat, black pantaloons, rather fine riding boots, and with the torn sleeve of an old shirt on his head. Over his shoulder he carried a pick axe. It was Payne. Seeing them, he turned around to leave. They would not let him leave. They asked him what he wanted. He said he wanted to see Mrs. Surratt. Perhaps he had mistaken the house. They asked him in and shut the door behind him.

  Major Smith called Mrs. Surratt out of the parlour. The man said he had been hired to dig a gutter. Mrs. Surratt swore that he had not. She was short sighted and the hall was dim. But she recognized him, she thought. He was the man Booth had introduced to her as a preacher named Wood, who had stayed in the house a few days, about two months before. She saw no point in identifying him. Booth had caused her enough trouble already.