He descends the stairs, but in body only; his mind is still on his production. He finds Rosalie making biscuits just the way Aunty Rogers taught her. She’s flushed and there’s a dusting of flour in her hair and on her rumpled shirtfront. Baby Joe is at the table cutting the biscuits from the dough with the rim of a water glass.
She asks Edwin to build up the fire in the stove, so he adds sticks and stirs the whole thing until it’s crackling. Edwin and Rosalie have a conversation that, because of Baby Joe’s presence, takes place in abstracts. It dawns on Edwin that while he has been working to avoid all thought of their parents’ treachery, Rosalie has been worrying over it like a dog with a bone.
“How much do you know about Lord Byron?” Rosalie asks him.
Edwin knows how often Mother has said that she ran off with Father because of Byron’s poems. They’ve all only heard this for their whole lives.
He knows that one of Father’s first gifts to Mother was an oval of Byron’s face, his dark curls encircled by a thin golden wreath. A brooch, and Mother treasures it, though she never wears it. Her life has turned out less dressy. The brooch is kept in a cupboard drawer with Mother’s other treasures, including Edwin’s caul. He knows that Byron was poor Henry’s middle name.
“I’ve read some of his poetry,” Edwin says. “I know he and Father used to be friends.”
Rosalie, it turns out, knows a great deal more. She tells Edwin about Byron’s abandoned wife and the sister whom he treated as a wife, and his friend Percy Shelley and his abandoned wife, who killed herself while she was pregnant （unless she was murdered, by whom and for what reason Rosalie couldn’t say）， and also William Godwin, an anarchist who believed women were just as good as men but had one illegitimate stepdaughter who killed herself, and another who’d had an affair and a child with Byron, and also a real daughter who was that same Mary Shelley who wrote Frankenstein after running off with Percy Shelley. Oh, it was all a dreadful tangle and, as far as Rosalie can see, nothing but free love from top to bottom. Free love, she explains to Edwin in a scatter of flour, means that love matters more than marriage. Marriage is a prison in which love cannot be free.
Rosalie wipes her hands on an apron cross-stitched with fraying pieties—Her price is far above rubies. She has more flour in her hair now.
Abstract or not, Edwin thinks that Baby Joe shouldn’t be hearing any of this. He thinks that Rosalie has lost her mind. She’s so gullible. She reads too many books. He himself stopped listening about the time Byron was wanting to marry his sister. Where has Rosalie heard such nonsense?
It can only have come from Mother. Mother and Rosalie are prone to quiet, private conversations while they beat the rugs, hang the laundry, churn the butter. He’s always assumed they were deciding what to make for supper. Now it appears they’ve been sharing licentious, depraved gossip instead. Mother! And Rose!
Edwin and Asia have, on occasion, performed the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet and he’s tried to make it as real as he can, but he certainly doesn’t want to marry Asia. He pities the man who does. Nor does he want to discuss free love with Rosalie. Nothing could be more embarrassing. He needs to get back to his costumes.
“？‘Marriage from love, like vinegar from wine,’？” Rosalie is saying now, because apparently this is something Byron used to say. She leaves no pause during which Edwin might extricate himself from the whole horrid conversation.
“Scree, scree,” says Baby Joe, who has his own ways of escaping.
The way Rosalie sees it, pretty much everyone in London was abandoning their wives to run away with their sweethearts around the time that Father met Mother. It seems to have been quite the fad. Sodom and Gomorrah with tea.
She is either accusing Mother and Father or she is defending them. Edwin can’t figure out which. He thinks that she’s angry, although with Rosalie it’s always hard to tell. She speaks quietly, but there is something in the way she is working the dough as if stabbing at it with her spoon. “We’re no better than anyone else,” Rosalie says, “for all Father’s airs. A lot of people will think we’re worse now. Practically everyone will think that.”
It comes to Edwin then what Rosalie is really talking about. Two years ago, Father had taken them all to the circus, where Rosalie met a handsome policeman-turned-lion-tamer from New York named Jacob Driesbach. Driesbach worked without cages, no bars between his cats and an audience full of tender young children. As they watched, he wrestled a full-grown tiger to the ground. He invited several lions to sup with him at a large dining table. The best of manners were observed, each cat in its own chair, no cat commencing to eat until Driesbach, the host, did so. And all the while, he wore a glittering Arabian costume tight around the legs and his muscled arms bare. Naturally, Rosalie was impressed.
Afterwards, Driesbach asked to be introduced to the great actor Junius Booth. But Rosalie seemed to be his real interest. This unexpected and almost implausible turn of events ended in a time of closed doors and muffled sobbing as Father put a quick stop to the whole thing.
He’d said: That Rosalie was needed at home. How did she imagine Mother would manage without her?
That Driesbach was a traveling man and had, undoubtedly, left a trail of broken women behind him. Rosalie would be a fool to think herself so special as to have captured his heart.
That maybe lions were happier untamed.
That Driesbach was a sideshow performer, a creator of mere spectacle, not an artist, not a true player. Circus folk were beneath them. Rosalie should remember that she was better than that. Father would not allow her to so undervalue herself.
Rosalie should remember that she is a Booth. End of discussion.
Rosalie is remembering that now.
“Why are you telling me about Byron?” Edwin asks.
“Who else can I tell?” Rosalie asks him back.
That night, Father remarks that Rosalie’s biscuits have never been so light. Lighter even than Aunty Rogers’。 Rosalie’s biscuits are lighter than air.
* * *
—
In 1869, when Harriet Beecher Stowe ignites a conflagration by accusing Lord Byron of incest in the pages of The Atlantic Monthly and a third of their subscribers leave as a result, Rosalie will remind Edwin that she told him so first and he didn’t believe her. No one will believe Stowe either.
* * *
—
The next surprising thing that Edwin hears is that the Mitchells are leaving the farm. Just days after Adelaide Booth’s arrival, with the secret of Father’s marriage now out in the open, the Mitchells are being thrown to the streets. Everyone had always wondered why they’d been allowed to stay, crowding the family out as they did, abusing Mother’s hospitality, offering nothing in return for Father’s support. Now the mystery is solved. Clearly, Uncle Mitchell had secured their place through blackmail.
Edwin has an early memory. He’s a very young boy, returning to the farm in the dark on horseback, seated on the slope of the saddle, his father behind him. Even safe inside the warm circle of his father’s arms, a night terror has been growing, scorching his lungs and whipping his heart. He hears an owl, the wind, the panting and hoofbeats of the horse. The sounds swell in volume. The whole dark sky is in motion.