The Judges of the Secret Court

by David Stacton

  Payne said he had never seen her before either.

  He only did that to save her. When he had stayed here as Wood, she had been kind to him. He had only come here because he had hoped Cap might be somewhere about.

  They made him sit on a bench in the hall. He hauled out his oath of loyalty to the Union and showed them that. That was how they knew he was Payne. Even Mrs. Surratt had not known that. He had no will to resist. He knew the jig was up. But neither did he want to get Mrs. Surratt in trouble. When the soldiers told him to stand up, he shambled out between two of them, the way he guessed they wanted him to. If Cap wasn’t here, it didn’t much matter where he went.

  Mrs. Surratt had gone back to the parlour. The ladies were in there, on their knees, while she led them in prayer. It struck Major Smith that they had not asked, even obliquely, why they were being arrested. That made him thoughtful, but he was gallant enough to give Mrs. Surratt his arm, as they went out to the carriage.

  In the carriage she sat as erect as she knew how and told the girls to do the same. She did not want the neighbours to know they were being hauled off ignominiously to jail. Looking up, she saw her own front door being shut. In the front parlour the lights were still on. That startled her, but she fully expected to be back. It did not occur to her that anything worse was going on than that she was to be grilled again about John’s whereabouts. It was a mercy she did not know them. Otherwise these men might have been able to get them out of her, somehow. As the carriage left the familiar street, and headed she knew not where, she could not help but panic. She did so at that moment when she could not see her own house any more.

  In the house Eliza Hawkins, the old coloured woman, went upstairs to turn off the gaseliers. When she got back to the kitchen Susan Mahoney was having hysterics. Mrs. Hawkins didn’t like Susan, who was an ex-slave belligerent about standing up for her rights. She’d been working here two weeks, and didn’t care two pins about anybody, white or coloured. All she wanted was her wages. That was what she was having hysterics about. She was afraid of being cheated out of what she called her rights. Mrs. Hawkins told her she’d be paid. Mrs. Surratt always paid her bills, if it took her the last cent she had. But that wouldn’t do. Susan wanted the money now.

  Eliza wanted to be shut of the wretched girl. She told her to be off to bed.

  XX

  A night’s sleep made Susan feel no better. This house gave her the creeps, and she wasn’t going to be cheated by no whites, not now the Negroes were free. She wanted to get even. Tuesday morning she got her chance.

  The detectives had come back to search the house. They kept Susan and Eliza in the dining-room, while they did so. She knew now what Mrs. Surratt had been arrested for; and what was going to happen to any darky, now Mr. Lincoln was dead? She wasn’t taken in by Mrs. Surratt either. Eliza might say she was good, but Susan knew she was just picky and stingy, so she could help Mr. Lincoln get shot.

  From time to time a detective came into the room to ask questions. Two pictures of Booth had been found behind the Morning, Noon and Night lithograph. Whose were those?

  “Dose belong Miss Annie,” said Susan. “Miss Annie, she dote on Mr. Booth. She thinks she love that man.”

  Eliza slapped her face.

  The detective got interested. “Tell me some more,” he said.

  “Sho, but not here,” said Susan, and gave Eliza a wounded, down-trodden, cringing look.

  The detectives took her away and she told them more. They offered her 250 dollars for everything she could remember. That was better than waiting round for a lot of lousy little ole wages. Besides, she liked the attention she was getting.

  It wasn’t any trouble at all to say that three men had come to the boarding-house after the assassination just to whisper so she could overhear it, that John Surratt had been at the theatre that night.

  After she’d said that twice, she believed it. There were an awful lot of pretty dresses you could buy for 250 dollars.

  Why couldn’t she have the money now?

  In his town house, Senator Hale was getting ready to corner his daughter. He had never approved of her crush on that man Booth, but he had been wise enough to wait for the thing to collapse by itself. Now he was angry. The assassination was vivid to him. He had had an interview with the President that same Friday. He had never had much use for Lincoln, but the man had appointed him Minister to Spain, which was decent of him, and this wasn’t exactly the time to say what you thought. Now he had discovered, to his horror, that the foolish girl had actually written to Edwin Booth.

  Didn’t she know that any connection with the Booth family could ruin him, that Edwin was being watched, and that even though he had been defeated in the last campaign, once his tour of duty in Madrid was over with, he planned to run for re-election in New Hampshire?

  He was red with rage.

  But as it turned out he didn’t have to say anything to Bessie. She had written Edwin on impulse, nothing more; she had had two days to think things over; and she would never be so foolish as to act on impulse again.

  She had had her romance, which is to say, her scare, and perhaps she was as glad now to have it terminated as he was. The softer sides of her tightened up at once. She looked older. He had expected a fight, and instead she had become worldly in five minutes, if perhaps a little lost.

  Looking at her, he saw that he had worried needlessly. No matter how bad a crush she might have had on Johnny, she came of good sound stock. She would have found some way to break off the engagement, even if this thing had not happened. It made him proud of her. It made him sigh with relief. It was balm in Gilead to discover that the thing you love is after all well worth the loving, and he did love his daughter. She was so like himself.

  She agreed with him that the sooner they both left for Madrid, the better. He told her to pack at once.

  He was so pleased. Now everything would be all right. She would do what she had been educated to do; she would always be charming, and with luck, even a good hostess; and she would make a good marriage. From being a silly girl, she had turned overnight into the sort of woman he admired, a woman like her mother, someone who could be trusted to put up apple butter and cranberry jelly at the country place and handle her own stocks and bonds, who understood the mystique of never spending money foolishly, dressed simply but well, and if she had children, no matter how much she might dote on them, could be counted on to put whatever money he might have to leave her into a self-renewing trust; a woman who would teach those same children not only their catechism, but that other catechism whose first sentence is a stern directive that whatever we may do in this life, we must never touch our capital.

  Good may come out of evil, after all. He had always believed so. And by the time they returned from Madrid, all this scandal would be hushed over and forgotten. By then nobody would remember Lincoln, let alone a man called Booth.

  XXI

  Lincoln’s funeral was held on Wednesday. Having no precedent for grief, the authorities had had to put it off until then, while they invented a ceremonial. The body had been in the White House all that time. So had Mrs. Lincoln, Robert, and Tad.

  That house now had a terrible reputation. Overnight, from being the fairground of an office seekers’ carnival, it had become a mausoleum. Johnson stayed away, partly out of consideration towards Mrs. Lincoln, partly because he did not wish to enter that building until he had to. He took the oath to the Constitution in his hotel bedroom, and did nothing all day long but sign papers sent to him by Stanton. There would be time enough to remove Stanton later, when his usefulness was done.

  Every night Mrs. Lincoln roamed the now deserted upstairs corridors. Sometimes she caught a glimpse of herself in a console mirror, but apart from that image, the mirrors reflected nothing. She did not think they would ever reflect anything again. From now on she would have to live surrounded only by nothing, and her own image there no longer meant anything to her. She had had her glance at the future. She refus
ed to go downstairs, because the body was down there.

  On Wednesday morning, she could hear the company arriving. They had come to take away something that belonged to her. Mr. Lincoln lay in the Green Room. Its mirrors were draped. There was a guard of honour. But it was considered a singular evidence of the poverty of his origin, that no blood relatives could be found outside his own immediate family, and of those Tad was too young, and Mrs. Lincoln too violent, to attend. It was her relatives, however, who were down there. They had not much cared for him living, Mary had married beneath her, but now he was dead nothing could keep them away. Dr. Lyman Beecher Todd, General John B. S. Todd, C. M. Smith, a cousin, and Mr. Ninian Edwards, a man of much better family, would not have wanted to miss this, their last contact with the White House. The Todds were well pleased. Yesterday Mary had somewhat inconveniently been the Chief Magistrate’s Lady, and today, as the papers said, she was a widow bearing only an immortal name. That was much more convenient.

  At a little after eleven the clergy came in from the reception room and the obsequies began. The clergy were followed by those people who counted, the Governors of New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Iowa, Illinois, Connecticut, Ohio, Maryland, and Wisconsin, all solid men, of whom the Todds approved. They even approved of the funeral. It was very fine. All those people they would never have known in Springfield and Kentucky were there. The Diplomatic Corps was there. And at noon President Johnson arrived.

  That made everybody feel better. It brought life into perspective again, for Johnson was a man they could all understand, a wily hardbitten rogue with cold eyes and something evasive in his manner. He was, he had said so often, a common man. They had nothing against that. Politicians were always common men, who did the work that statesmen could not stoop to do. It was the uncommon attributes of Lincoln which had disturbed them. About Lincoln there was always the reserve of a kindly judge who, kind or not, still sits up there, fingering the dossiers of both sides of the case, whether he admits to doing so or not.

  Johnson stepped forward to the bier and looked down, at that head from which Willie Wright, in whose bed the President had died, had saved some of the brains on a handkerchief, with the thought of giving them to Robert Lincoln, at the appropriate time. When a corrupt man becomes incorrupt, that merely means he uses the forces of corruption for incorrupt ends. Unlike a man born good, he is hard to dislodge. But as yet nobody had had the chance to find that out.

  Johnson stepped back.

  The sermon, by Bishop Simpson of the Methodist Church, was short. The oration by the Rev. Gurley, who relished death as much as most of his auditors did, was much too long. Whether they wanted to or not, the Todd family had time to think. And yes, they could see it now. He had been a great man. They would have seen it at that time, if only his family and manners had been better.

  They also thought of Mary. She would be more of a problem than ever now. She would be back on their hands again. In all likelihood Lincoln had not left any estate worth mentioning, and surely her pension would not be large.

  The room smelled of death. They would be glad to be out of there. For though the age was one in love with the idea of easeful death, and everybody read the threnodies of that brisk, productive, cheerful little body, Lydia Huntley Sigourney, whose river of ink flowed out of Lethe, and who, said Mark Twain, had added a new terror to death, they did not particularly care for the smell. It was sweet in the wrong way, like saccharine.

  After the oration the coffin was placed on an enormous hearse topped by a gilt eagle. Fifteen feet above them it tottered and swooped, as the catafalque headed up Pennsylvania Avenue towards the Capitol. The muffled beat of the funeral drums, as though someone was in slow motion emptying faggots into a wood bin, kept the pace of the company. The sky was clear, the avenue, as usual, an accordion of dried mud.

  A Negro regiment, marching to the procession, met it, reversed order, and so, against all the plans of the War Department, which had prepared so swiftly and with such protocol, led it instead of trailing behind.

  One could not really complain, one had no right to do so, but the Todds did not take it kindly that of all these crowds lining the street, most were a rabble, and the rest coloured, peering out over the white spectators like hired hands in the shrubbery of a newly cleared world.

  The funeral march, composed by Brevet-Major General J. G. Barnard, in great haste, whoever he was, did well enough. Behind the hearse came the saddled horse of the deceased, in accordance with a ritual older than the Old Testament. There were those who could almost see the President mounted easily upon it, the homely shambles of a man, bending down to say something kind.

  Yesterday the papers would have interpreted that friendly voice as the bellowing of an incompetent fiend. But it cannot be denied: death makes a difference.

  Behind the Diplomatic Corps marched the Justices of the Supreme Court, slightly fusty, like so many talmudic Jews, blinking in the daylight of some new diaspora.

  Had Lincoln been the savage some men had taken him for, though a wily savage, the horse would have been shot to follow him, rather than trailing empty after the catafalque. Now it preceded the Judges, with its white, liquid eyes.

  There were picnickers on the lawn of the Capitol. Hastily they bolted their cold beef sandwiches, rolled up their napkins, and got to their feet. Lincoln’s coffin was carried past them into the Rotunda of the Capitol, where Dr. Gurley delivered a few more words. It is appointed, he said, unto men once to die.

  And so it was. But that was no reason to explain why P. T. Barnum had offered him 1,500 dollars for Abraham Lincoln’s hat.

  Gurley finished and the mourners departed. They had contrived an impressive ceremony, after all, out of bits and pieces of a hundred rituals as old as the Europe from which they derived. At last, at nightfall, the body of the President was left alone there, under the burning gas lights at the spring of the dome, with a few guards the blades of whose drawn weapons glinted in a muscularly retracted shimmer, under the hissing lights above. The crowds would be admitted tomorrow, to that greater than Rome’s Capitol, as the journalist, Mr. Shea, called it, and who was to know if he was wrong?

  XXII

  Booth still lay in the woods. The one thing he wanted now was escape and some release from this endless pain. Yet it was not safe to move. More troops had arrived at Port Tobacco on the night of the 18th, and were fanning out over the peninsula, between the creeks. There were fourteen hundred cavalry alone, not to count Pinkerton men and hired detectives. It was the detectives Booth feared most. Jones had been offered a bribe by one of them, at Port Tobacco, which was where they were holed up. He had refused it. He promised to get them away tonight, in a small boat. But money was money, and the reward was up to 100,000 dollars now, dead or alive. Who was to tell what Jones might do? Booth loved money enough, not to rate it too low against the claims of honour. Jones was only a dirt farmer, anyway.

  While he waited the long day out, he looked at the papers, for he did not dare to look any longer at his leg, which was distended, pustulous, and of an unwholesome colour. He had the Southern papers now, but the world in which they were printed seemed farther off than ever. The South had repudiated him. No doubt they did so only out of a fear of reprisals. That must be the explanation. When they got there, they would understand. It would be a matter of Cox again, cursing him only to help him. It must be that.

  For the Northern papers were no better. Mrs. Surratt had been arrested, Payne had been arrested, O’Laughlin and Arnold had been arrested. That left only Atzerodt to account for.

  On one of the back pages, in a short item, he read that Ella Turner had attempted suicide at her sister’s brothel on Ohio Street. She had been found with a chloroformed rag over her face and his picture under her pillow. Nellie’s house was behind the White House. The police had hauled all the girls in.

  It meant nothing to him. He had almost forgotten Ella. He could scarcely remember her now. It was such ages since he had slept in a bed,
let alone felt any human warmth there. Yet she had been pert enough. He was touched. It was just that he had more important matters to think about. Where was Atzerodt? Why hadn’t he killed Johnson? He sighed. It all seemed somehow abstract now.

  It was not abstract to Atzerodt.

  That miserable troll knew perfectly well what the world had in store for him. The night of the assassination he had not even been able to find a friend to put him up. That showed him what the world was. He had stayed at a glorified flophouse instead, and then, sure he would be caught in any case, had fled to enjoy his last few days of freedom. America had always frightened him. It was too large. It had no corners to hide in. He pawned his revolvers, and with the ten dollars he got for them, went on a spree. For five days he lived life as he had always wanted to live it. He went to Germantown, in Maryland. He ate in taverns and talked to the other guests, like a normal man. He was accepted by them. He called himself Attwood. That was the name he always took on his drinking expeditions, when he impersonated a normal man. It was wonderful. He stayed in the house of a Mr. Richter. He ate meals in the dining-room, and slept upstairs in a room with two other men, instead of the six that slept in the same room at his flophouse. Not since Mrs. Surratt’s, where he had boarded until she had flung him out, had he been treated so well. He got drunk every night. He was terrified.

  When they came to arrest him, which was done before dawn on the morning of the 20th, he was ready to tell them anything and everything, pellmell, just so they would let him go. Who they were he did not know, but clearly they were persons in authority. He told them everything.

  But they did not let him go.

  In Philadelphia the arrest of Sleeper Clarke and Junius Brutus Booth was conducted with more decorum. They were men of property.