Asia had loved to write from the time she was old enough to hold a pencil, and a thrill of anticipation raced through her as she contemplated the professor’s suggestion. “Let us honor Father by writing his biography,” she implored, kneeling beside her mother’s chair and taking her hand. “Father’s personal papers document the events of a great man’s life. Let us—Wilkes and I—intertwine them with family reminiscences and show the world the man we all knew and loved so dearly.”
With Wilkes’s help, she overcame her mother’s reluctance and obtained her blessing to retrieve Father’s trunks from the cellar of their Baltimore residence the next time they collected the rent. They could not bear to wait until the end of the month, so the next morning, Asia and Wilkes set out for the city, bundled up warmly to stave off the cold, chatting excitedly about their project and the potential profits it might bestow upon a household that badly needed them.
Asia was delighted with her brother’s enthusiasm, not only because she would be glad for his companionship and assistance as she labored over the manuscript but also because the project would be a productive outlet for his restless energy. Politics had become his favorite diversion, but Asia worried about the company he kept, and about his new, unsettling habit of making offhand remarks in defense of slavery. Stranger still, he seemed utterly indifferent to how his words shocked his mother and siblings and offended Joe and Ann Hall, whom he very well knew had suffered terribly under slavery. Asia suspected that Wilkes had acquired these disturbing new ideas from the same young men, a few years older than he, who had invited Wilkes to join the local chapter of the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner, or as it was more colloquially known, the Know-Nothing Party. The fledgling political group was enjoying astonishing success in Maryland and most of the North, sending hundreds of new representatives to Congress and winning the governor’s chair in eight states. The Know-Nothings vowed to control the wild, unprecedented flood of Irish immigration threatening the jobs and voting power of the native-born, and they pledged to end regional conflicts between the slave states and territories and the free, especially the horrific, bloody violence erupting in Kansas and Nebraska.
In November, Wilkes had been chosen as a steward when congressional candidate Henry Winter Davis had visited Bel Air for a campaign rally. Wilkes had worn the party badge and had carried a banner, and Mother had sewn him a splendid costume for the event, a wine-red coat trimmed in velvet, a fawn-colored vest, and gray trousers. Asia heartily endorsed the party’s opposition to unchecked immigration and to the expansion of slavery into new territories, but their hostility to Catholics displeased her. Although she remained an Episcopalian like her parents, she had discovered beauty, peace, and comfort in the Catholic faith as a student at the Carmelite Convent school on Aisquith Street in Baltimore. She hoped that the Know-Nothings would renounce their prejudice before they infected Wilkes with it.
Their father’s biography was the perfect undertaking to divert Wilkes’s attention from politics. At 62 North Exeter Street, Asia and Wilkes chatted with their tenants and warmed themselves by the fire in the familiar green-and-gold parlor before loading their father’s trunks of memorabilia into the wagon and heading back to Tudor Hall. The sun had broken through the clouds, and though the stiff wind blew no warmer, the bleak midwinter seemed suddenly bright with promise.
In the days that followed, every morning after breakfast and chores Asia and Wilkes convened in the parlor and delved into their father’s trunks. They discovered a treasure trove of information about his life in the theatre—countless old letters, journals, books, playbills, and posters from 1817 through 1852, from his London debut through his many successful decades in America. They discovered the particulars of theatre engagements arranged nearly half a century before, and detailed accounts of his bitter rivalry with the celebrated thespian Edmund Kean. His correspondence—which he had left in perfect order, dated, indexed, sorted into proper categories, and bound with ribbons—was by turns fascinating, startling, and illuminating. As they studied his journals and read his letters aloud, the cadence of his speech inspirited their voices, so vivid and familiar that it was almost as if the words had resurrected the man. Memories of the grimmer aspects of his life fell away as they immersed themselves in a rising tide of love and admiration and pride for the great thespian and his achievements.
One afternoon as Asia read aloud a letter written to her father by the philosopher William Godwin, she glanced up to discover her mother standing frozen in the doorway, her face pale and stricken, her eyes brimming with tears.
“Is something wrong, Mother?” asked Wilkes.
“Surely you don’t intend to include private letters in your book,” she said, her voice strangely hoarse and distant.
“Not all of them, or the biography would run twenty volumes,” said Asia. “But letters of particular historical value and interest, yes.”
“No.” Mother swept into the room, snatched the letter from Asia’s hand, flung open the door of the stove, and threw the paper into the fire. “No, you will not.”
“Mother,” Asia exclaimed, horrified, as her mother seized a bundle of letters from the nearest trunk and fumbled to untie the ribbon. “What are you doing?”
Without a word, Mother opened a letter, ran her gaze over it, and threw it upon the flames. Another letter followed it, and another. Asia and Wilkes begged her to stop, but a morbid grief had possessed her, rendering her insensible to their distress. Nor could they physically restrain her—the trunks and everything in them were her property, and their respect and deference for their mother ran too deep. They were powerless to do anything more than plead with her to stop, stung by loss and bitter indignation each time the flames leapt upward to consume another precious memento.
“Leave us something for remembrance,” Asia begged as another bundle of letters turned to ash.
Mother hesitated, and for a moment Asia’s hopes flared up as greedily as the flames. “Here,” she said, tearing a piece from the bottom of one letter and holding it out. “Tom Flynn’s signature.”
Numbly Asia took it as the rest of the letter was dispatched into the stove. Soon she held Edmund Kean’s autograph too, and Thomas Apthorpe Cooper’s, but the celebrated actors’ signatures were poor compensation for all that her mother was destroying.
Blinking away tears, Asia glimpsed Wilkes nudge a slender book out of sight beneath the divan with his foot. Pretending to search for her handkerchief, Asia furtively tucked the nearest bundle of letters beneath her skirts. Whenever her mother’s gaze was averted, she concealed another priceless relic, while Wilkes, with heavy sighs to cover the sound of rustling paper, shoved stray mementos beneath furniture and behind curtains whenever Mother was not watching.
But despite their best efforts, she destroyed nearly everything, sparing only a few mementos of their parents’ courtship and artifacts from their father’s association with Lord Byron and other men she revered.
That evening, alone in her bedchamber, Asia examined the letters and documents she had concealed within her petticoats and wept to discover how little of value remained. A few days later, in a clandestine meeting in the barn, she and Wilkes shared what they had salvaged from the flames. Asia burst into tears, flung her arms around Wilkes, and kissed his cheek in thankfulness when she discovered that he had saved three of their father’s precious journals, assuring that his voice would not be silenced utterly.
The biography would suffer grievously for the loss of so many irreplaceable personal papers, but Asia was determined to write it nonetheless. Mother had not rescinded her blessing for the project, though she had made the work immeasurably more difficult.
Unbeknownst to their mother, Wilkes devoured their father’s salvaged journals, reading and rereading them, his mouth drawn into that familiar schoolboy frown, his long, graceful fingers turning the pages with careful reverence. Once he beckoned Asia from the parlor where she sat s
ewing with Mother and Rosalie and led her to the kitchen, where they would not be overheard. “Listen to this,” he murmured, retrieving a book from his coat pocket and opening it to a page marked with a strip of parchment. “Father wrote, ‘Mind happily belongs to no age, clime, sex or condition. Instances can be quoted when even from the most despised classes, Genius has developed itself and towered above all the circle of the human race.’”
“Indeed?” Asia peered over her brother’s shoulder and read the list of names that followed, men of humble birth and mixed heritage who had vanquished expectation and convention to ascend to the pinnacle of accomplishment in their chosen fields: Galileo Galilei, Napoleon Bonaparte, Hannibal of Carthage, Christopher Columbus, and Junius Brutus Booth.
“Father believed—and I have become convinced—that fame and glory are marvelous prizes.” Wilkes’s eyes shone with the light of epiphany. “Any man with talent and perseverance may claim them, regardless of his parentage.”
“Fame and glory are earthly prizes,” said Asia. “They carry a high price, and they tarnish. Father’s life is proof enough of that.”
“But to be remembered through the ages,” persisted Wilkes. “That is a kind of immortality. Few men enjoy it. Few men dare to aspire to it.”
“Most men have better sense,” retorted Asia irritably.
Inspired by their father and Byron and other tragic, romantic heroes of days gone by, Wilkes built himself fantastic temples of fame, which he described for her often, in the most glowing phrases. No visions or dreams of the future were too extravagant, too great—and yet, even as his obsession with acquiring the immortality of fame troubled Asia, she could not say that he was entirely wrong.
John Wilkes Booth would make his mark upon the world, upon history. Everyone in the family had always known that an extraordinary fate awaited him. Mother’s fireside vision and the gypsy crone’s fortune had foretold it. The only question was how.
• • •
While Wilkes absorbed lessons from their father’s journals and dreamed of fame, Asia brooded over his future. Their father was dead. Their mother was lost in a deep cavern of grief from which she seemed unable to emerge. Their elder brothers were hundreds of miles away. Rosalie was withdrawn and cared little for the world beyond The Farm, and Joseph was yet a boy. There was no one but Asia to guide Wilkes—aside from his legions of friends, who might lead him astray rather than toward the golden future he longed for and deserved.
Asia mulled over the possibilities. At almost seventeen years of age, Wilkes was neither scholar nor farmer, as time and toil had shown. He had once fervently aspired to become a soldier, an ambition sparked at St. Timothy’s and nurtured ever since by heroic tales of martial glory, but Mother had always firmly discouraged any such plans. Before long Asia concluded that the most obvious and immediate answer was for Wilkes to take up the family trade and become an actor. He was handsome, charming, and athletic, and the revered Booth name would grant him access to the most respected circles of the theatre world. By his mother’s decree he had inherited his father’s vast and marvelous collection of splendid costumes, jewelry, makeup, and stage weapons. Edwin was making his fortune and acquiring great acclaim on stages as far away as Honolulu and Sydney, while June enjoyed modest success in California. Why should Wilkes, the most graceful, charismatic, and exuberant of the three brothers, not expect to fare at least as well as they?
“I’ve contemplated following Father onto the stage ever since I portrayed Shylock at the Milton Academy as a schoolboy,” Wilkes confessed when she proposed her plan for his future career. “No, my ambition has an even earlier origin. I’ve longed to prove myself ever since Edwin assigned the best roles in his Tripple Alley Players productions to his friends and stuck me with banging a triangle between acts.”
Since Wilkes had not been able to learn acting from the great tragedian himself as Edwin had, Asia suggested that he embark on a program of theatrical study. With Asia assuming the role of tutor, they pored over their father’s volumes of Shakespeare, memorizing speeches, studying illustrations, and imitating the characters’ poses.
Wilkes was, as he had ever been, a slow and dogged student, struggling to comprehend the texts, perspiring from exertion as he forced the lines into his brain as if he were shoving boulders through a keyhole. Asia admired his persistence even when his slow and tedious pace made her grit her teeth with impatience. He was determined to learn the plays by heart, without a single word omitted or extra syllable appended.
In time he committed to memory the parts of Caesar, Marcus Antonius, and Brutus from Julius Caesar, although Asia wondered if he ever truly understood the play, for he delivered his lines as if Brutus were the hero of the drama. “Brutus is an honorable man,” Wilkes argued whenever she tried to convince him otherwise. “Even Marcus Antonius says so.”
“He is speaking ironically,” said Asia. “He doesn’t really mean it.”
“His words are true regardless,” said Wilkes. “Brutus is the only character in the entire tragedy who puts the good of Rome before himself. He sacrificed his life and his fortune to bring down a tyrant. He was the George Washington of his day.”
“I don’t think so, and neither did Shakespeare.” Asia paged through the script until she came to the proper scene in the second act. “Think of what Artemidorus said when he tried to warn Caesar about the plot against him. ‘If thou read this, O Caesar, thou mayst live. If not, the Fates with traitors do contrive.’ Traitors, Wilkes, not patriots.”
“But those are the words of a man loyal to Caesar. You can’t take that on faith. I’m sure King George the Third and all his Tories denounced Washington as a traitor too.”
Vexed, Asia cited other excerpts from the text, but when her brother refused to be persuaded, she wearily suggested they move on to Richard III, where there could be no mistaking the true villain of the piece.
Next they turned to The Merchant of Venice, a remarkable portion of which Wilkes remembered from his school days, but when Asia encouraged him to take on Romeo and Juliet, he shook his head, dubious. “I could never be a nimble skip-about like Romeo. I’m too square and solid.”
“Study Mercutio, then,” Asia proposed, although she profoundly disagreed with her brother’s assessment. Wilkes was limber and graceful, and he seemed to acquire more admirers among the fairer sex with each passing month. She could well imagine ladies filling theatres to watch him portray the tragic hero of a star-crossed romance.
But her enthusiasm for her scheme faltered when she came upon him practicing alone in the forest when he thought himself unobserved, shouting Shakespeare’s masterfully crafted speeches, his phrasing all wrong, his emphases draining all sense and meaning from the lines. Whereas Edwin possessed an instinctive, intuitive grasp of Shakespeare’s language, Wilkes seemed to understand it no better than he had as a schoolboy.
Wilkes required a master teacher to guide him if he ever hoped to become half the thespian their father had been. Asia’s hubris shamed her. She possessed no more than a schoolgirl’s comprehension of Shakespeare and an infrequent observer’s understanding of the stage. How had she ever imagined herself capable of preparing Wilkes to take up their father’s mantle?
Although she hid her increasing dismay, forcing smiles and offering constant encouragement, Wilkes gradually became aware of his deficiencies. “What hope do I have of achieving success on the stage?” he lamented as they abandoned their books one afternoon in early spring to go riding through the pale green, rain-soaked forest. “Buried here, torturing the grain out of the ground for daily bread, what chance have I of ever studying elocution or declamation?”
“We’ll find a way,” she assured him. “Your voice is a beautiful instrument, with perfect music in it. You need only a master teacher to prune, cultivate, subdue, and encourage.”
“Oh, only that?” he retorted, disappointment and embarrassment giving that perfect i
nstrument an edge. Earlier that day, a bundle of letters from Edwin had arrived all the way from the South Pacific, where he had gone on tour with the renowned British actress Laura Keene. He had performed to great acclaim for British colonists in Sydney, Australia, and for King Kamehameha IV in the lovely island village of Honolulu. Theatre critics around the world hailed him in glowing reviews as a worthy successor to the great tragedian Junius Brutus Booth, dismissing June with faint praise and disregarding his other children entirely.
It was not in Wilkes’s nature to endure being overshadowed by any man, even a beloved brother. Mother had been unable to hire a tenant farmer in the spring, and all summer, while Joe Hall and the hired hands attempted to raise crops in their increasingly unproductive fields, Wilkes kept to his studies, redoubling his efforts to master Shakespeare’s soliloquies, the art of costumes and makeup, stage fighting, and dancing.
One afternoon in the middle of August, Asia was gathering mayapples and dewberries in a shady grove when she heard horse hooves upon the road, announcing Wilkes’s return from a brief visit to Baltimore. Wilkes’s smile gladdened her heart as he approached, brought the gleaming black stallion to a halt, and swiftly dismounted. “Well, Mother Bunch, guess what I’ve done,” he crowed. “I made my first appearance on the stage yesterday evening, one night only, but with my name in great capitals on the playbill.”
For a moment Asia could only blink at him. “What do you mean?”
His laughter at her astonishment rang with merriment and pride. “Last night I played Richmond in Richard III at the Charles Street Theatre in Baltimore.”
His jubilant demeanor told her that he had passed the test of his debut, somehow. Relief made her lightheaded. “John Sleeper Clarke’s theatre?”
“Indeed, and as you might have expected, Sleepy asked me to give you his best regards.” Wilkes threw her a mischievous smile and took her hand. “Come. Let’s tell Mother and Rosalie together.”
Fates and Traitors Page 13