Lincoln's Assassin Read online

  The small bed lamp offered just enough light as I stuffed a favorite pipe with a brandied blend, then took the envelope from my waistcoat, broke its ancient seal and cried to read my name in that absent, but familiar script. It was dated January 1876.

  Your son and daughter are now ten years old. Your daughter is so beautiful. She has your eyes, your lashes, your funny little ears.

  How many times have I begun to write, search for perfect words, only to start again, yet never post a single message.

  I write this to you, wherever you are, that if you can not read my thoughts from there, perhaps my placing words on paper will make it easier.

  Surely you will have learned of our children. Twins, as you always desired. They are fine, strong, beautiful, and possessed of the same wild genius as their father.

  But how was I to know, or how could I have ever truly guessed?

  I had to rethink everything. The scene had changed. What had happened, and what was my imagination alone? Who had then urged that fatal shot? I had been busily engaged in answering this as if the solution was then at hand. My fingers held what I could not feel, what a callous mind could not believe too readily. I read on.

  Perhaps, too, you have learned of your brother’s and my relationship. It is not love. And it could never be a tenth part of what we were, you and I. But it had helped. Oh, he is to marry soon again, and ’though I was hurt at the first, I know it could not be any other way.

  As for me, my family has disowned us all. My father sends money, but reminds that my family can never be his, so long as I am not married and he remains in elected office. I will not marry to win his approval, ’though I will respect his position. The children and I fare well and our needs are ever satisfied, but there is, of necessity, a great void in our lives. It is—

  Perhaps we will move away west. I really do not know.

  I thought to find it difficult to write at all, and now I find it difficult not to tell all. Better to stop now.

  You have my love, you are my love.

  Yours, ever,

  Ella

  Beneath these pages were those of another, older letter. It was dated April 15, 1865.

  Oh, John,

  How foolish you have been! To think that you must indeed give so much, and so dangerously—so recklessly. More the fool because you could not believe my vow.

  You. You are important. None, nothing above.

  I will find that man for me, if that is truly what you want. But how might I ever kiss him without seeing some part of you. Why should I?

  Still, I will obediently try,

  Your pet,

  Ella

  ***

  Time. Place.

  “I entered through the library and passed your room on the way to the study. I saw the portrait over your bed.”

  “You saw nothing! Any intimation of romantic involvements will be flatly denied.”

  “But she is mine!”

  “Was! What Miss Nash does with her life at present has nothing whatsoever to do with Mr. J. B. Wilkes, or J. Wilkes Booth, or any other man fitting the description of the assassin of our Union’s leader. He was killed at Garrett’s Farm.”

  “You knew! You knew I still lived.”

  “Suspected. Sensed. My God! We were brothers. Were!

  “I loved you, and I have cursed myself a thousand times for seeing Camilla, whatever the event. She came to me for comfort, for strength. For love, from the one link she had with the man who owned her heart.”

  “And now she warms your bed! How will the columns read now about your betrothal?”

  “On whose authority? A dead man’s? Or that of a hunted killer?

  “Oh, Johnnie, it wasn’t that easy. It wasn’t sudden or clumsy at all. It was slow, gradual. We both knew it was wrong, yet there was something—Oh! I can’t tell you we did it for you, but strangely—”

  “Enough!”

  “With my poor Mary dead over two years—”

  “Stop!”

  What could I think? What could I expect or hope? Oh dear God, am I so damnable to be cursed like this?

  “How did you get in? What are you doing here anyway?”

  “I need your help. Henry let me in. Gave me a very fine supper, too.”

  “Must he always be your nigger?”

  ***

  “I need to ask a favor of you—brother,” I said, with special emphasis on the last word. “It is important. Very important.”

  “What will you ask of me now that might help in any way to right what has already gone wrong?”

  “It is a simple task—”

  “Ask, then!”

  “St. John’s. I need the roster.”

  “St. John’s? Which St. John’s? Why?”

  “Number three. In Washington City. My reasons are my own, yet I need it. And you are the only person I could trust to bring it to me. Think not, if I could retrieve it on my own I would involve you at all. It is the roll from December of 1863 that interests me.”

  “During the war? Those records were destroyed.”

  “This is not Chancellorsville or Shiloh. There were no raiding parties into the capital.”

  “By the members themselves. No one knew how the conflict might affect the standing of the membership when it was over. It is the Order’s habit to raze the structure in complete disrepair, rather than leave it standing and risk hazardous collapse. It was the same after our revolution. The names of many brothers—I presume there is a particular name you seek—are forever lost.”

  “Still, as a brother, you could access them if they were still to exist.”

  “Yes,” he paused. “I travel to Washington Monday next. Will that serve your purpose?” “No. It has to be now.”

  “The trains have stopped running, Johnnie. It is nearly one in the morning. You expect me to leave now by horse?”

  “The trains run again at sunrise. I have purchased your ticket,” I said, handing him the return fare I had bought that afternoon.

  “Were you so sure I would or could do this for you? Why should I?”

  “Because, after all else, we are brothers.”

  “And then?”

  “I will be here again tomorrow night. Waiting for you.”

  “And if I have an appointment in the morning, John?”

  “I am sorry to interrupt it,” I smiled simply. “How often can you serve the pleasures of the dead?”

  ***

  I followed my brother at some distance as he left the station and just before we would have turned down Columbus, appeared to him from out of the shadows.

  “This way,” I beckoned, pointing across the park.

  “I should say I am glad you did not risk my reputation again by going a second night in a row to the club," spoke Edwin in his usual, affected manner. "But I am afraid," he continued, "it was for your safety and not my own you have waylaid me.”

  “In any event, the result is the same.”

  “Perhaps,” he nodded, deep in thought.

  We continued on toward the rocky crests that border the lake in the center park.

  “Most peculiar,” said Edwin, as we arrived.

  The split moonlight filtered hauntingly through the trees. A low fog clung to the black shrubbery with tangling fingers of ambush. Edwin handed me a folded document on which he had copied a list of names.

  “Peculiar and most fortunate, brother. How would you remember the name of his lodge after so many years?”

  “Whose?” I answered almost protectively.

  “Why, Surratt’s. I suppose that is the name you wanted. And, it is there.”

  My eyes fumbled past my brother’s fingers as he pointed out the name. It was not the one I expected to find.

  Strophe

  I

  I’ve only myself to blame. Oh, I conceived it, sure enough. Was long-convinced of its method and course before ever being approached. But I compromised the very nature of my choice. I took their money. Denigrated my every action. Obligate
d my very soul.

  It was arranged. Accomplices at every turn. The coordinated fusillade—a military term, not mine. The letters to the press—all mine. The calling card for the vice-president—yes, mine again. An elaborate imbroglio to simply affect—what?

  Why then could they not let me live? Trust me to kill for them, but not to keep my word or faith? Their words are hollow, their oaths sworn upon faithless hearts. Poor Wilkes! Poor blessed Corbett who too would also do their bidding for an Iscarion wage.

  II

  Cara,

  I wonder if you will recognize this poor script. Have you waited for it, wished it into your hands before this moment?

  I am, of necessity, far away. My heart, however, is yours. I—

  III

  Today I decide no longer to try and tell my story with the aid of invention and imagination. What better romance is there than truth? Who would believe our love and my story otherwise, if at all?

  Events are going too fast. I cannot keep up with them, or if they are meant to race, keep wishing there were something I could do to direct them. Something whole and sure, quick and healing. Instead I find myself, my thoughts, bullied about by these phantom occurrences, these causeless results, formless uniforms hung in the shadows of a backstage closet, playing their parts while I appear unrehearsed in the speechless nightmare, unaware of the role chosen for me. For I have read the names of thirty-two young actors whose final curtain has been wrung by a greater stage manager before which you or I have ever played. And I know now that here shall be the thirty-third.

  IV

  Today I am a hermit. Today I am so lonely that I would spill or speak to any Tom or Jack or Richard. I would tell them, any or all, that I am not Jack Harvey. That there is no—no, nor never has been any—John Lee Harvey. I would tell them that and any else they would care or be so kind to heed, for I weary. Weary of creating a past for an uncertain present and a less certain future. Weary of the lies.

  Oh, I have known the opportunity and advantage of a lie, the well-placed fiction and reception of a lie. Have even enjoyed the occasional thrill of a lie complete. But even the schoolboy tires of the game. And so do I.

  Still, I am a beggar. My hair short but uneven, my face bare but stubbled, as it were streaked with grime from an actor’s trunk, my one eye patched, my clothes ungainly in their fit and style and condition.

  I am not the dandy they would expect to see, paid to see, think long dead. Or do they?

  ***

  I had long promised my mother I would not fight, nor join the ranks of either army, a promise not so very difficult for me to make, as I did dearly love my home, my South. She knew which side it would have been for me and might have feared the extended division such alignment would have caused within our family, as much as she feared the omen that had been forever in her mind, but you will hear of that.

  Because I wore no uniform it did not mean I could not serve. It was that my service could be different from those others who flew the banner of our South on their caps as well as in their hearts. My profession alone had disposed me to hide that heart from my fellow man, even if I never could from the eyes of a woman. But I was not a soldier. My expulsion from West Point had made that clear. My jail room parlay with John Brown too. Still, I thought, there is work that can be done.

  In April and May of 1862, I had been playing in St. Louis at Ben DeBar’s Theater. Part of the schedule was that I should star with the noted T. L. Conner in a revival of our roles as Phidias and Raphael in Selby’s The Marble Heart; or The Sculptor’s Dream. I had played the two parts—a feat not so easily managed—since my engagement at the beginning of the previous year at the Metropolitan Theater in Rochester, New York, and several times since. It was as Raphael I would first play for the Union president—at John T. Ford’s in November 1863. The whole of the first act spent staring at him with every opportunity, and found the perfect line in the second act to wag an accusing finger at him, as to assure we would play together again.

  I welcomed not only a chance to develop the single role, but to work with Conner, a stout fellow with an appetite and excuse for just about everything. After our final curtain Saturday night—and we took several—we two went out for a whisky and beer by way of celebrating our successful run.

  DeBar’s had been for some time known in Union circles as a hotbed of rebels, and I discovered Conner far and away the most vocal of its constituents. As we were sharing stories in the local saloon, a large, drunk, self-styled mountain man pushed me aside. I am afraid I paled somewhat that I felt no choice but to yield. The insensible’s swamper, a rather short but stocky man possessed of a frankly pleasant face, looked to both Conner and me with an invincible smile as he stepped up to the rail.

  It never fails as great beauty will always ally itself with plainness in women, so do large men seem to pair with small. So it was with Payne and Atzerodt. So is it always. The exact reason for these symbiotic partnerships I shall leave to you in every case but this. At Lawrence’s Bar it seemed self-evident. One craved protection, the other demanded guidance.

  “You’ve taken my friend’s place,” insisted Conner with a hand to the shoulder of the interloper and a forced laugh calculated to expose prominent canines.

  “I’ll give it back when the keeper’s drawn beers for me and my mate,” he replied with a glanceless motion over his shoulder to certify he was not alone.

  The overlarge accomplice seemed neither appeased nor amused by Conner’s explanation. While looming and large, aside from having clearly unfurled the majority of his sheets much earlier in that evening’s junket—or pub crawl as it was termed by hardies—he sported above one of his ethyl-eclipsed eyes a scar to parallel my own. Though no stage-duel, I was fairly certain, had been the cause. And on the back of his close-cropped scalp an acquired cowlick testified to a gash by which the direction of his entire face seemed to be determined. Here was a man not only fit for brawling, but also habituated to being blind-sided as an only means of being subdued.

  If this Philistine was not enough we soon had another obstacle, when suddenly we were recognized by one of the play-going locals, who reminded everyone of the company’s reputation. Swore on the bible he had personally heard the two of us wish the whole damned government go to hell. The saloon was momentarily churchlike in its quiet.

  “And, sir, if tha’ is true?” returned Conner. “Is’t wrong for a man t’express his love and devotion for the land of his birth?”

  “It is, sir,” mocked our sermonizing detractor, “when those sentiments run afoul of everything that is decent and pure.”

  “Well said!” grinned Conner as he turned toward me. “Then, I accept your apology,” he added before taking a deeply indifferent draught of his beer.

  To say that I was laughing would not do justice to Conner’s style and wit. In fact, he had borne himself with such mock-heroic charity that everyone in the house roared—even those whose feelings were only an instant before quite obviously contrary to ours.

  This, of course, had the predictable effect on Goliath and his mate. Being the smaller of the two men he opposed, I was the first at whom he swung his fist. But any frequenter of saloons will tell you there are only three men with whom one must not choose to brawl: the man who, though your apparent physical inferior, yet takes issue—he knows something you do not; the man whose features are a repetition of disfigurements resulting from years of the like—he has no more to lose, though constantly seems to try; and the man whose speech and manners are both coarse and combative yet, well into his twenties, has smooth, unsullied features—neither fang nor claw has ever found its mark. This last alone can boast the courage to face an imminent mêlée, while sporting the apparent certainty his nose has never been broken. I was two of these men, and only if my opponent had been all three—which he was not—should he have felt a distinct enough advantage to engage me. Yet engage me he did.

  When the local police arrived, our unionist had long been removed to a corne
r of the hall where his swollen face was sleeping off the indignations his drunken patriotism had suffered. Conner was entertaining an appreciative gallery with wide gestures of laugh-producing story-telling. The only witnesses to the fracas were the few broken stools and one crippled card table.

  No one expected that a simple owning up to events should still result in our arrest, except that our snoring instigator was nephew to the long-embittered and equally anti-secessionist mayor. I, therefore, joined my companion in yet another sentiment against the impositions of the North for the sake of a nominative Union, and with a great flourish we were led away to a disappointed, if ultimately unsympathetic, mixture of laughter and applause.

  ***

  Conner and I were not only charged with disturbing the peace but opposing the national government, and thrown into jail early Sunday morning. Jails of themselves were not altogether new to me, but being on the inside was. They placed us in adjacent cells within a compact maze of tiny passages at the rear of the police station, and Conner continued to amuse a new audience with tales of Southern humor and sensibilities that made us seem the forwarders of some benevolent new order for the advancement of humanity rather than the ignoble faction of separatists we had become. Ordinarily I would have joined in his verbal forays, but something inside me sanctioned I should not. Besides, I was tired—not the less for my drinking and battling. When I closed my eyes for the night it was Conner’s ceaseless and ringing protests singing me smilingly to sleep.

  Seven has ever been thought a lucky number. But seven by seven by seven is no luck at all, I assure you. Until this time, I would not even have recollected the spirit of poor John Brown from that combination. But ever after how could I not? For though my stay was not long—less than a weekend—I felt in those two cold and painful nights what it must be like for every man incarcerated—true or false—begging for sleep to come in the middle of the day, that time should pass more quickly. Or being wakened throughout the night by the swearing curses of some drunken heretic as he tries to make peace with the God he no longer sees to fear.