“I must go to Spain with my family. It has been decided, and I would never be able to convince my parents to let me stay behind.” Nor did she wish to, for although it would be unkind to tell John so, she was thrilled to be setting off on a grand adventure. Although she would miss him terribly, she trusted that she would see him again upon her return. How foolish she had been to think that he might be happy for her.
His shoulders slumped, but his gaze remained fixed on hers. “So it may be years before I see you again.”
“Not so long as that, I hope,” she said, but his dispirited glower silenced her. Until that moment, it had not occurred to her that he might not wait for her.
She could bear no more. Abruptly she stood, but John too rose and took her hands. “Will you still dance with me at the inaugural ball tomorrow night?”
“Of course. John, I won’t be leaving the country for weeks, and my feelings for you are unchanged.”
“And yet everything else has changed.”
He raised her hands to his lips, disconsolate, and she found herself powerless to contradict him. Resigned, she glanced about, wishing she could find the words to comfort him, and her gaze fell upon an envelope on the dresser, a pen, and ink. Gently she withdrew her hands from his grasp, and as the words of John Greenleaf Whittier came to mind, she wrote,
For of all sad words from tongue or pen
The saddest are these—it might have been.
March 5th, 1865
In John’s room.
Tears in her eyes, she set down the pen and handed the envelope to John, who read them, let out a soft moan of anguish, seized the pen, and added a few lines above hers. Wild-eyed, he thrust the envelope at her, and she read the verse in silence.
Now in this hour that we part,
I will ask to be forgotten never.
But in thy pure and guileless heart,
Consider me thy friend, dear, ever.
J. Wilkes Booth.
“This is not the hour that we part,” she protested. “We’ll enjoy many hours together before my family sets sail. And I will return, John, but until then we can write, and perhaps you can visit us in Madrid.”
“It won’t be the same.”
“No, but it will have to do.” She rested her hand on his shoulder. “Dearest John, this is not farewell. This is not an ending. We’ve not yet performed our final act together.”
Unexpectedly, he allowed a small smile. “The very thought of you, the senator’s—no, the minister to Spain’s daughter, treading the boards—”
Lucy laughed weakly. “Oh, my poor dear mother. She would never recover from it.”
Behind her, Parker cleared his throat.
“My parents are waiting.” Lucy kissed John on the cheek, swift and chaste. “I’ll see you soon.”
“Take this,” he said, handing her the envelope.
“Don’t you want it?”
“I’d rather you kept it. Take it to Spain and read it over whenever you miss me.”
“Very well.” She took the envelope and pressed it to her heart. “You may be sure I’ll read it over every day.”
John nodded and opened the door, but he spoke not a word as Lucy and Parker left the room and he closed the door behind them.
• • •
John was not mistaken—everything had changed.
On the night of Monday, March 6, Lucy was among the Washington elite who attended the Inauguration Ball at the Patent Office, and she arrived to find it beautifully transformed for the occasion. The marble hall appropriated for dancing was about two hundred and eighty feet long and about a quarter that in width, with blue-and-white marble floors, an elaborately frescoed ceiling, and walls tastefully appointed with emblems, banners, and devices among which the Stars and Stripes and flags of various army corps were prominently featured. At the north end of the room, sofas and chairs furnished in blue and gold were arranged on a dais for the comfort of the president and his family. A fine brass band occupied a gallery at the east end, ready to provide music for the promenade, while in the center on the south side, a string ensemble would furnish music for the dance.
Although Lucy had arrived with her parents and Lizzie, John was understood to be her escort, and he met her upon her arrival and claimed the first dance. The music was excellent, the gentlemen handsome and gallant, the ladies dazzling in their finery, and John was perfectly charming and attentive. Lucy had not forgotten the scandal at the New Year’s dance at the National Hotel, however, and she made sure to dance with other gentlemen and to encourage John to dance with other ladies. She danced a quadrille with John Hay, who spent most of the evening attending to their mutual friend Kate Chase Sprague, whose delicate condition obliged her to sit out the dancing. Lucy also enjoyed a lancers with Robert Lincoln, who looked dashing in the splendid dress uniform of an army captain.
Soon after Robert escorted her from the dance floor, John appeared at her side and claimed her for the waltz, although they had danced the schottische together not long before. “You seemed to enjoy whirling about with Hay and young Lincoln,” he said close to her ear.
“I did, thank you.”
“A little too much, one might say.”
Lucy laughed. “Only if one were being perfectly ridiculous.”
“I say it.”
She had assumed he was only teasing before, but the strain in his voice betrayed him. “Mr. Hay and Captain Lincoln are my friends, nothing more and nothing less.”
“I wonder how many new friends you’ll make among the caballeros of Spain.”
She was painfully conscious of the curious glances his raised voice drew from the couples nearest them. “John, do stop. Jealousy does not become you.”
“If you don’t like my jealousy, don’t provoke it.”
“I’ve done nothing to deserve such censure,” she said tightly. “If you cannot speak to me politely as a gentleman ought, I’ll thank you to say nothing at all.”
He said nothing more for the rest of the waltz, but as soon as the song ended he escorted her from the floor, bowed curtly, and departed. Angry and embarrassed, she found Lizzie and her father in the crowd and joined them in watching her mother take the floor for a quadrille with Chief Justice Chase. John did not attempt to claim another dance with her, nor was she sorry he did not.
The next morning, a bouquet of flowers and a note of apology were delivered to her suite, and although the rest of the family looked askance at the peace offering, her heart softened. John would not have become so jealous and upset if she had not so recently announced that she was going abroad. So she forgave him, but afterward, their brief conversations were polite and tentative, until Lucy began to dread crossing his path at the National.
Thus, soon after the Senate confirmed their father’s appointment, when an invitation came for Lucy and Lizzie to visit family friends in New York City, Lucy was happy to accept, especially after their mother noted that the trip would offer an excellent opportunity to purchase new wardrobes for their journey to Spain. The sisters passed a delightful fortnight in Manhattan, shopping, dining out, attending balls and receptions, and occasionally remembering to study their Spanish. Lucy and John exchanged a few letters while they were apart, and once John even rode the train from Washington to visit her. He stayed at his brother Edwin’s residence in the city, and one evening John escorted her and Lizzie to see his brother portray Hamlet at the Winter Garden, the one hundredth and final performance in an extraordinary, unprecedented series he had begun the previous November. Edwin’s performance was truly magnificent, astonishingly sublime, and the evening had passed so pleasantly that upon the sisters’ return to Washington, Lucy—with Lizzie as chaperone—agreed to accompany John to see Max Maretzek’s Italian opera company perform Bellini’s La Sonnambula at Ford’s Theatre.
But it was no mere performance; it was an enchantment.
&
nbsp; When the chorus sang to Miss Kellogg in the role of Amina, “In Elvezia non v’ha rosa fresca e cara al par d’Amina,” John bent close and murmured his own paraphrased translation—“In Washington there is no flower sweeter, dearer, than Lucy.” When Amina’s betrothed, Elvino, appeared and implored, “Perdona, o mia diletta!” John took her hand, kissed it, and echoed sorrowfully, “Forgive me, my beloved.” As Elvino, Amina, and the chorus joined their voices in the achingly beautiful, soaring phrase, “Prendi: l’anel ti dono che un di receva all ara,” he kissed the ring she had given him and whispered, “Here, receive this ring that the beloved spirit who smiled upon our love wore at the altar.”
John did love her with boundless devotion, Lucy realized. His strange, erratic behavior was not a sign of his unworthiness or a lack of affection but of the other conflict within his heart—his mysterious but essential duty to his country and his love for Virginia and her people. And then, after months of trying to win her parents’ blessing to marry her, instead they intended to take her across the sea. Of course he was mercurial and jealous. How strange indeed it would be if he were not!
Throughout the turmoil and separation of their months together, her heart had remained constant. Lucy loved John dearly. The end of the war was surely close at hand. His service to his country would be fulfilled. Virginia would be restored to the Union, her people fed and comforted, all that had been destroyed rebuilt. Then, relieved of the great burdens of war, the good man that John was would emerge, and her parents would at last see him as she did. They loved her and wanted her to be happy, and when they finally realized that she would never know true joy unless she was united in marriage to her true love, they would give their blessing.
Enthralled by the music and caught up in her own passion, she sat spellbound as the final curtain fell and thunderous applause filled the theatre. Belatedly Lucy joined in, overjoyed to be seated beside her darling John, to have her uncertainty at last resolved.
When the carriage left them at the National Hotel, Lizzie kindly walked a few paces ahead to allow Lucy and John a precious few moments of intimate conversation.
Lucy spoke first, and she said all that needed to be said between them.
“I will return from Spain in a year,” she told him. By then, she prayed, the war would be over, her parents’ blessing earned and received. “At that time, if you still love me as you do today, I will marry you, John.”
Heedless of the curious eyes upon them, John took her in his arms and kissed her.
CHAPTER FOUR
MARY
1864–1865
Away, and mock the time with fairest show.
False face must hide what the false heart doth know.
—William Shakespeare,
Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 7
Only the most desperate pecuniary circumstances would have compelled Mary to rent out the Surratt Tavern and Inn in Prince George’s County in southern Maryland and move to the Yankee capital, but by the autumn of 1864, she resigned herself to the harsh, bitter truth that she had no other choice.
It seemed that all her life misfortune and cruelty had pursued her from one unhappy home to another. When she was still quite young, she had become unwelcome in her childhood home after abandoning her mother’s Episcopalian faith to convert to Roman Catholicism. As soon as she had come of age, her mother’s smoldering resentment had compelled her to flee into marriage. Though John Surratt had been ten years her elder and had fathered an illegitimate son with another woman, the prospect of future happiness he had dangled before her had been preferable to remaining another night beneath her mother’s roof, so she had seized it, and gratefully.
In the four years that had followed, Mary had borne John three children, but he had despised her Catholic faith so intensely that it had taken many heated arguments and many tears on her part before he had consented to have Isaac, John Junior, and Anna baptized. By then the Church had become her only consolation for a marriage that had turned into a bitter misery. Mary had learned too late that her husband was prone to violent, drunken tirades, but when she had appealed for help, broken and afraid, everyone had looked the other way, ignoring her bruised and swollen face as if they believed it had been more important to spare her from embarrassment than from injury.
Resigned to her fate, strengthened by prayer, Mary had devoted herself to protecting her two young sons and daughter from their father’s violence, sheltering them within the safest, most comfortable home it had been within her power to create. She had been married eleven years when even that was taken from her. In 1851, a disgruntled slave had set fire to their house, and although the family had escaped with their lives, their home had been utterly destroyed. Later, as she, her husband, and the children had raked through the ashes searching for any possessions they could salvage, Mary’s heart had burned with resentment as she imagined Northern abolitionists celebrating the news of her family’s ruin. From the safety of their stone mansions in far-off Boston and New York, those self-righteous Yankees incited colored folk to violence with their pamphlets and their preaching, utterly indifferent to the suffering that innocent Southern women and children would endure as a result.
Mary firmly believed that Northerners ought not to condemn what they did not understand. Slavery had existed since antiquity, and it could not offend God or He would not have established so many rules governing it in the Holy Bible. Mary’s family and John’s had been slave owners going back generations, just like most of their neighbors. Although she heard occasional tales of slaves treated roughly on farms elsewhere, her kinfolk had always been responsible stewards of their property, whether slave, livestock, hammer, or plow. It seemed to Mary that good, decent, God-fearing white citizens were more likely to suffer at the hands of their slaves than the other way around. Reports of arson and murder at the hands of vengeful slaves sped from farm to town all too frequently, sending ripples of fear and anger through entire counties. The Surratts themselves had barely escaped being burned alive, and their family physician had suffered the worst loss imaginable when a fourteen-year-old housemaid had poisoned his three children with arsenic. If the darkies could wreak this much violence on innocent white families while enslaved, what horrors would they inflict if, as the Yankees demanded, they were set free? And what would happen to the economy of the South, which depended upon their labor? The people of the North were determined to destroy the Southern way of life, and Mary—and every true Southerner of her acquaintance—hated them for it.
In the aftermath of the fire, Mary had found a measure of peace and security when she and the children had moved in with a cousin’s family while her husband worked out of state as a contractor for the Orange and Alexandria Railroad. As thankful as she had been for the respite from her husband’s dreadful presence, she had always known it would not last. After two years, her cousin’s family had put them out, and to keep a roof over her children’s heads, Mary had suffered the indignity of moving her little brood into abandoned slaves’ quarters on the land where the ruins of their burned house stood.
In the meantime, John had decided to become a tavern keeper. Over Mary’s objections, he had purchased land at an important crossroads in Prince George’s County, twelve miles south of Washington City, and the construction of a tavern and adjacent inn had swiftly commenced.
“I won’t live at a tavern,” Mary had told him fiercely. “A den of drinking and gambling and sin is no place to raise children.”
For her defiance, she had earned a derisive laugh and a blow across the face that had sent her reeling.
When the building had finally been completed in the summer of 1853, Mary had summoned up her courage, dug in her heels, and declared that John could live there alone if he insisted, but she and the children would not. At first he had tried to remove her by force, because that had always been his most efficacious method of accomplishing anything, but when that had failed, he had sold the farm, sl
ave quarters and all, leaving her no choice but to join him in the crossroads village that soon became known as Surrattsville.
The enterprise had left John deeply in debt, and although the inn and tavern had proven successful and John had been named town postmaster, his constant drinking and gambling kept the family teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. Determined to protect her children from the worst of their father’s excesses, and with charitable assistance from the Church, Mary had managed to send Isaac, John Junior, and little Anna away to school. As the years passed, Mary had quietly assumed her dissipated husband’s duties as postmaster rather than lose his income, and she had been obliged to sell off livestock, slaves, and parcels of good farmland to satisfy creditors and pay his gambling debts.
After John Surratt Sr. finally dropped dead from a sudden apoplexy in August 1862, Mary had barely escaped bankruptcy, but hardship had taught her to be clever and capable, and she had managed to wrestle his estate through probate, consolidating the debt, securing new mortgages, and retaining ownership of her home in Surrattsville as well as a four-story town house they rented out in Washington City. But with the onset of war, burdened with the strain and fear and constant danger of being a Confederate sympathizer in a Union state, running the tavern and farm became too much for her—especially as the Surratt Inn and Tavern had become an important post on Confederate spy and smuggling routes. Anna, now twenty-one, was a great help and support, but nineteen-year-old John Junior, a Confederate courier, was often away on business for the Cause. Her eldest son, Isaac, had joined the Confederate army shortly before his father’s death, and he was somewhere in the Deep South serving with the Thirty-Third Texas Cavalry, unable to assist his mother except in a higher sense, by fighting the Yankees. As much as Mary loathed to admit it, she and Anna could not manage the business on their own.
Marrying again was absolutely out of the question. Though she had been only thirty-nine when John died—and was still quite pretty judging by the compliments to her deep blue eyes, shining brown hair, and pretty, firm, well-shaped mouth that some of the bolder tavern guests tossed her way now and then—Mary was not about to risk losing the little she had left on the slim chance that she might choose a better husband in middle age than she had as a girl of seventeen. While it was true that she had learned a great deal about men in the interim, what she had learned about husbands was that she was better off without one.
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