Joe remains as he’s always been, argumentative and aggrieved. One day in New Jersey, while Rosalie is answering a knock, a brick is thrown at her head, missing her by inches and denting the doorframe. At the same time, handfuls of smaller stones are thrown by unseen assailants against the windows of the house, spattering against the glass like hail. She staggers, she scuttles inside as fast as she’s able, her back by now so continuously painful that only drink makes life bearable. She calls the servants, locks the doors, and hides like Randall in the basement until Joe’s return. She believes the vengeance of the nation has come for her at last.
But Joe says no. This was all aimed at him and nothing to do with Lincoln. Joe’s in the middle of suing his neighbors. He’s building a twenty-foot fence around his property over the outraged objections of all who live near him. He’s never been popular and he’s not about to start now. It will take more than a brick thrown at his sister to stop him!
Joe was the one who went to Washington to identify John’s body, Edwin having been rejected as too recognizable and June still in prison. John had been sewn inside two horse blankets, a thing no one tells Mother.
It then takes Edwin four years to get the body released from the Old Penitentiary, where it’s been warehoused. President Johnson finally agrees to turn him over on condition that no gravestone ever mark him. None does. Still, everyone knows where he is. He’s buried beside his father in Green Mount Cemetery in Baltimore.
Rosalie succeeds at last in moving Frederick, Mary Ann, and Elizabeth to the same plot. They are mostly together there now—not Henry, buried in England, not Edwin, buried in Boston with Mary, and not June, buried with his third wife in Manchester-by-the-Sea, but all the rest. For once, Joe isn’t the one left out.
* * *
—
Asia left us her books. Rosalie left nothing but a few lines in the stories of her siblings. Edwin left the Players, a club and home for actors in which he lived the last years of his life.
He lasts long enough to see his style of naturalism become unnatural—too mannered, too formal, fossilized.
He dies on June 7th, 1893, at the age of fifty-nine. His funeral is held on June 9th. Joe, his only surviving sibling, is there and three of his nephews, along with his daughter, Edwina, and her husband. Joe Jefferson, Mary Devlin’s old guardian, attends though he’s been ill and looks it. New York’s judges and politicians and clergymen.
Artists and actors. So many actors.
At nine a.m. a huge floral tribute arrives with this banner: From brother actors of England. We all loved him. It wasn’t true in 1861. In 1893, it was. Good night, sweet prince.
The New York Times describes it as the most remarkable funeral ever held in New York City. Hundreds of men and women gather on the sidewalks outside the Players and around Gramercy Park to watch as his coffin is taken into the church, all of them reminiscing about how, on this night or that, they themselves were there to see the legendary Edwin Booth take the stage.
xii
More than a century has passed since they clapped and shouted and cheered him. All of them, every person in every seat in every theater, now dead. One by one, they go, winking out of existence. The enslaved . . . though only ten years old I sold for . . . and the free, the civilians, the soldiers . . . wherever they fired on our boats we burnt everything that would burn . . . the spies, the thieves, the overseers, the auctioneers, the nurses . . . I have forgotten how to feel . . . the clerks and the clergy, the critics, the poets and politicians, the profiteers, the postboys, the lion tamers, the pigeon killers, the mummers, the mourners, the farmers, the famous, the failures, the fortunate, the fallen, Frederick, Mary Ann, Elizabeth, Henry, John, June, Asia, Rosalie, Edwin, Joe. One by one, they go.
* * *
—
Are there ghosts?
How could there not be?
Author’s Note
I began thinking about this book during one of our American spates of horrific mass shootings. Among other things, like other writers before me, I wondered about the families of the shooters—how would such a family deal with their own culpability, all the if-only’s? Would it be possible to rejoin the devastated community? What happens to love when the person you love is a monster? This led me to the family of John Wilkes Booth. I knew he had brothers and sisters. I didn’t know much else.
Immediately, a conundrum. I did not want to write a book about John Wilkes. This is a man who craved attention and has gotten too much of it; I didn’t think he deserved mine. And yet there is no way around the fact that I wouldn’t be writing about his family if he weren’t who he was, if he hadn’t done what he did. The tension over this issue—how to write the book without centering John Wilkes—is something I grappled with on nearly every page.
Researching the Booths was an adventure. I discovered whole communities fascinated by this family, particularly those online at LincolnConspirators.com （formerly BoothieBarn.com） and those in the flesh who maintain the Booths’ old home, Tudor Hall. There was no shortage of material. But separating fact from fiction was often impossible. A number of stories about the Booths have been told and retold, appear in many sources, yet have doubtful provenance. One result of having a brother who ranks with history’s great villains—a lot of mythology.
Donald Trump was elected to the presidency while I was still in the early stages of research. The shock and despair of this waylaid me for more than a year. It seemed pointless to be writing about anything else and it took much longer than it should have for me to realize that I wasn’t writing about anything else. The more I read of Lincoln’s warnings concerning the tyrant and the mob, the more I immersed myself in the years that led to the Civil War, the more brightly lit the road from there to here became.
The Lost Cause may be temporarily mislaid, but it has never been lost. Whenever Black people exercise genuine political power in this country, the assassin appears, the mob rises. This is the history of America and there is no escaping it. Abraham Lincoln told us so.
I was in the midst of my final edits when, during the violent insurrection of January 6th, 2021, I saw the flag of the Confederacy carried through the halls of the Capitol for the very first time. Let it be the last.
Afterword and Acknowledgments
It is only natural, when reading a historical novel, to want to know which parts are true. But the question here is a complicated one. There is an enormous amount of material, both primary and secondary, regarding the Booth family. Some of it is confusing; some of it is contradictory; all of it is fascinating. So there are things here that I am confident are true and things that I know I made up. But there are also things I did not make up, yet am uncertain are true.
Of the characters in this book, Rosalie is the most fictional. She left only a slight mark on the world—one or two letters, and occasional references to her in the books and letters of her siblings, usually referring to her as poor Rose, the invalid sister. It was a great frustration to never be able to settle the question of what exactly her infirmity was. In the end I chose scoliosis, which is referenced in her death certificate. And because, for obvious reasons, Richard III was in my head.
（A parenthetical note on Richard III. Lovers of Shakespeare may be startled when some quotes from the play are not as they should be. But the Richard being performed is the Cibber adaptation, not Shakespeare’s own text. I offer this reminder because I myself so often had trouble remembering it.）