The Judges of the Secret Court

by David Stacton

  He opened his eyes. He was rational again.

  Relieved, Herold went off for a walk in the woods. Booth had given him a bad scare.

  No, thought Booth, he could not go to Washington. He saw that. But neither could he allow the world to say what it would of him. He must right that misconception. Opening the diary, he began to scribble. The endless work of self-justification went on. “Friday, the 21st,” he wrote. He must explain that he had been punished too much. “After being hunted like a dog through swamps and woods, and last night being chased by gunboats until I was forced to return, wet, cold, and starving, with every man’s hand against me, I am here in despair. And for why? For doing what Brutus was honoured for—what made William Tell a Hero. My act was purer than either of theirs. I am abandoned with the Curse of Cain upon me.”

  Despite his bitterness and the awful pain, he felt a little like Byron, sitting under that tree. He had always wanted to perform Cain. Herold was no Dorsey, of course, but he was better than nothing. Dorsey, to Byron, had been no Patroclus either. But Cain was an excellent part. “And for this brave boy Herold, here with me, who often prays (yes, before and since) with a true and sincere heart, was it a crime for him?” he wrote. “I do not wish to shed a drop of blood, but I must fight the course. ’Tis all that’s left to me.”

  He did not like that last phrase. It sounded too true. Herold he saw was back and watching him. He shut the diary.

  It was perhaps a relief to both of them when Jones appeared with a candle, led them down to the shore, and showed them where to row. He recommended Machadoc Creek. A Mrs. Quesenberry lived there, and would help them. He then explained to them the movements of the tides and how to compensate for the current. He even drew a map for them. Whether they understood what he was saying or not, he could not tell and did not dare to ask.

  Herold did not understand, but he was eager to get going, lest Booth demand to go back to Washington again. He got into the boat.

  Booth was himself again. He appreciated the dramatics of the scene and was grateful to Jones. He gave the man 18 dollars for the boat.

  Jones did not want to take the money. He had not protected them for pay. But he was a poor man, and a boat was a boat. Gruffly he told them to watch out for the monitor which was still on the river. Then he left them.

  There was a flash of lightning down the sky, which only made the dark seem the darker. The river was very wide. Herold rowed silently and then stopped.

  They both heard voices. They both saw the shape on the water downstream. They had almost hit the gunboat.

  Herold let the skiff drift. The returning tide caught it and swept it up to safety again, but away from where they were supposed to be going.

  They were lost, and the sky was beginning to lighten. They would have to make for shore. Once the skiff was pulled up in the weeds, Booth took out Jones’s map and his own compass. The needle pointed the wrong way. All the estuaries of the Virginia shore ran west to east. The needle showed them north. They were still in Maryland. They would never get away.

  XXV

  He sent Herold off to reconnoitre, while he lay in the boat and stared at the clouded sky. There were still a few hours of darkness ahead. Like hope, the dawn had been false.

  Herold came back to say that they were in Maryland all right, at the mouth of Nanjemoy Creek, wherever that was, Herold recognized the place because he had gone poaching there. A Colonel Hughes lived up the creek. Colonel Hughes was all right.

  Booth was starving. That didn’t bother Herold any. He said he’d go ask Hughes for food. Booth told him not to say any more than he had to, but with Davy that was usually too much. The boy suffered from a helpless compulsion to gabble while he ate. It was his way of making friends. Not having shot anybody himself, Herold still didn’t quite see where their danger lay.

  He was back in an hour, happy, healthy, and well fed. Booth might be driven half mad by this existence, but Herold liked it. To him this desperate flight, except for its cause, was a vacation. He throve on it. Booth’s cheeks had fallen in, his skin was grey, and his eyes stared out of deep shadow. Herold had never looked better. He had had a good breakfast and had brought back food for Booth, a bottle of whisky, and the newspapers. Colonel Hughes had told him that if they caught the tide after midnight, it would carry them right to Machadoc Creek. He’d had a nice long talk with Colonel Hughes. He’d told him everything.

  Booth opened the package of food. It contained a blue-pink ham, glistening with age. For five days he had eaten nothing but ham. He was sick to death of it. But he ate. He had to eat. And while he ate, he read the papers. Atzerodt had been arrested. “It was with difficulty that the soldiers could be prevented from lynching him,” he read. He knew what that meant. It meant that Atzerodt would talk, and talk, and talk, until he had talked their lives away. The same page of the paper carried a reward notice. His own price was still 50,000, but Herold was worth 25,000 now and had his name in bigger type. When he pointed that out to Davy, the boy’s face quavered. He looked like a porcupine. When he was scared, the rattle of his quills was almost audible.

  There was also a quotation from the Southern press. It spoke in sorrow, an emotion the South had recently learned to maintain at all times. But it repudiated him. “At the moment he struck down Mr. Lincoln he also struck himself from existence. There can be no more a J. Wilkes Booth in any country. If caught he will be hanged. If he escapes he must dwell in solitude. He has the brand of Cain upon his brow.” That had not the air of an editorial. Rather it seemed the description of something that had already happened, factual because all the world believed it. He believed it himself. “God try and forgive me, and bless my mother,” wrote Booth in his diary, who had not thought of her for days. Then he asked Herold to hand him the whisky.

  Space it out as they would, they could not make it last until midnight. Sometime after dark, Herold asked him if he did not smell something. Booth said he did not, and indeed he did not. He smelled only the slimy marsh smells that had surrounded them now for days. Herold let the matter drop.

  It was the gangrene. Not only had it bubbled up in his leg, but was spreading into his bloodstream. But how were they to know that? Neither of them had ever seen a wounded man before. They went on drinking.

  What was in this wretched Lincoln anyhow, that had made people love him overnight, now he was gone? Booth did not know. He could conceive of a scapegoat, a saint, and a Machiavel, but had not the wit to see them in one body. To him Machiavel was a villain, and not a man who knew that good is only a chestnut we pull from a fire of other men’s lighting. His mind wandered. His costumes were in the South. He had shipped them ahead weeks ago. Why was not he? He longed so much to lie in a bed of warm linen once again.

  At a little after midnight of the 22nd-23rd, Herold shoved off the skiff and they floated down the river, unmolested, towards Machadoc Creek and Mrs. Quesenberry. From that name Booth derived much comfort. It was a motherly, maiden aunt, no nonsense and gruff kindness sort of name. From it he could legitimately expect lemon butter and lavender scented sheets, a foot warmer, and a small snug room with flower sprigged wallpaper. He held himself in against that promise and refused to look at his leg. When they arrived at the shore, he sent Herold off to find the woman.

  While Herold was gone, a straw-footed white wading bird flapped down to peer at him, as he lay at the bottom of the skiff. That startled him, but he had not the strength other than to stare back at it until it went away. When he looked at his once white hands, he saw them mottled with liver spots, like those of an old man. He got out of the skiff, hauled himself ashore, stretched out beneath a tree, and watched the estuary. The tide was moving up over it, sea birds waded in the shallows, and Herold seemed gone a very long time. It was Sunday again, he realized, the 23rd. Who could have thought a week could have been so long? But at least he was in Virginia at last.

  His leg was worse, but he did not notice that, for he lay in the midst of flowering shrubs, whose heavy odo
ur muffled all others. He felt drowsy. He did so long for Mrs. Quesenberry’s cordials, maternal atmosphere, and bed.

  When Herold at last came back, it was to say that Mrs. Quesenberry would have none of them. But her daughter had said that perhaps a farmer called Bryant would help them.

  XXVI

  So he would for a price. He would have done anything for a price.

  Mr. Bryant was a cracker. He had been one all his life, and had a white beard to show for it. His jeans were old, soft, and faded, and fitted him like a second skin. His eyes were on the small side. He had a tight face and a cantankerous manner. Poverty and pellagra had made him an animal. He had an animal’s ambitions, an animal’s cunning, and far less than an animal’s self-respect. For self-respect the baffled farmer’s poor white trash substitute did him just as well: he was touchy.

  The truth would never sway a man like that. What he would want was a bargain. Booth passed himself off as a wounded Confederate soldier trying to avoid the Federal patrol.

  Bryant accepted the explanation. “It’ll cost ya,” he said. “Your brother here said you could pay. Otherwise I wouldn’t have bothered none.”

  Booth had trouble holding in his temper.

  As usual with his sort of man, the hope of some advantage made Bryant tight-fingered and sullen.

  Booth took out some greenbacks. “I can’t walk. I need a conveyance. A carriage of some kind, and a horse.”

  Bryant spat. They didn’t look like Confederate soldiers to him. They were in worse trouble than that. If that were so, he could get more for even less than he would normally have offered. He asked them where they wanted to go and how much they’d pay to get there. The beat-up one said he wanted a doctor to dress his foot. The nearest doctor was Doc Stewart. Stewart probably wouldn’t lift a finger to help, but that wasn’t any of Bryant’s business. His only job was to get Booth there.

  Booth said Stewart would do and told Bryant to hitch up his horses.

  Bryant had been waiting for that. He didn’t have any carriage, he said. Just horses. Booth almost sobbed when he heard him. Bryant decided he could hope to get ten dollars in gold, waited until Booth paid it over, and then said the two men would have to walk up to his place by themselves. He didn’t have the time to bring any horses down to meet them. He walked away ahead of them, chinking his gold. Ten dollars wouldn’t go far. Maybe he could get more out of them.

  The more desperate of the two men seemed to have trouble hobbling up the dirt lane. Bryant grinned and led the way to his shack, a tumbledown shanty whose housekeeper was a slovenly Negress. Booth sat down on a ricketty chair and closed his eyes. Herold asked for something to eat. Bryant said that would cost them, and sold them some soggy biscuits and three cold slices of bacon for a dollar. Herold ate them. Herold wasn’t choosy about what he ate. But Booth was in a hurry to move on.

  Bryant was enjoying himself. Out of sheer cussedness, he said they couldn’t have the horses until the day’s chores were done, which wouldn’t be until evening. Having gotten his money in advance, he wasn’t in any hurry to go out of his way to earn it. But he did allow as how Booth could lay down on the bed for free, if he wanted. Then he went out.

  The bed was filthy, but the rest did Booth good. He wasn’t too worried about Bryant’s turning him in. He knew the type. It was too cunning to plan for anything but immediate advantage. Ten or twenty dollars was the limit of Bryant’s experience; 25,000 or 50,000 wouldn’t mean anything to him at all.

  Nor was he wrong. By late afternoon Bryant was back with his spavined horse, Herold boosted Booth up to the saddle, and by the time darkness fell they had reached Dr. Stewart’s house.

  It was a good while since Booth had seen a real house, and Dr. Stewart lived well. The building was two stories high, with a wide porch along the front of it, and faced ten acres of lawns and pasture, backed by trees. The glow of lamps at the windows was heartbreakingly cheerful. He would present himself as a Confederate soldier and, if Dr. Stewart seemed sympathetic, would tell him the truth later. A little forlorn on his horse, he sent Bryant inside to fetch the doctor.

  Stewart came out and asked him what he wanted and who he was. His voice was curt. Booth said he wanted help. Looking down, he saw he would not get it. There was something hostile about Dr. Stewart.

  “I’m a physician, not a surgeon. I doubt whether I can be of much assistance,” said Stewart, though his voice betrayed no doubt of any kind. “But come into the house, if you wish. I suppose you want something to eat. Every soldier who comes by here seems hungry. I can’t feed them all.”

  Too much call upon his good will had drained off Stewart’s southern sympathies. He had been arrested several times during the war, and now the war was over, he did not propose to be arrested again. People think that because a man is a doctor, they may ask anything of him.

  Booth would have turned away. But before he could do so, Herold had him out of the saddle and on to his crutches. Herold was hungry. They went into the house.

  The sight of that large and comfortable parlour made Booth blink. A woman, obviously the doctor’s wife, sat with his elaborately dressed daughters. The girls were weedy, but the mother had plump, complacent arms decked out with gold bracelets. He would have said something courtly, in his customary, half-forgotten style, had not one of the daughters raised her hand to her mouth and gasped.

  That reminded him. He looked a tramp, so that was what they thought him. Young girls like their soldiers to be officers, and smart with boot polish at that. He was stubbly and filthy, probably wide eyed with fever, and the bandage on his foot must look like a piece of marbleized paper soaking in a gutter. In the expression of their faces he could see that he was something they did not want to remember, the exact image of what civilians hate most in a war, though they cheer loudly enough when the troops go off.

  He did not try to speak. He allowed Stewart to lead him to the study. It was a heavy, red rep room. Stewart glanced at the bandage, poked his fingers in it, and realized that the sooner he washed his hands the better. And yet he couldn’t turn them away, nor would he accept money from a Confederate soldier for so slight a service. At the same time, he most decidedly would not put them up. He did not like the look of them. But he did say he would see that the servants got them something to eat. He led them to the kitchens and left them there.

  Herold saw nothing demeaning in that. The closest he had ever gotten to the gentry was their kitchen offices. The room was warm and the food plentiful. He had no objection to sitting down at the plain plank table, said the doctor was very kind, and began to stuff himself. Opposite him some copper pans and dessert moulds hung on the wall. They gleamed. Dr. Stewart must be well fixed. Why didn’t Booth eat? The food was good.

  Booth didn’t bother to answer. He raged. He felt the humiliation of sitting here all the more deeply, for being so feeble. The one thing he had always insisted upon was entering life by the front door. It was his due. It was a demand he had always bought with his appearance, and not even Bessie Hale’s father would have dared to send him to the kitchens. Now Lincoln had reduced him to this filthy discarded scarecrow whom nobody would have dreamed of asking to sit anywhere else. He felt for the first time some of the terror, but none of the resignation, of the middle-aged character actor, who earns his living by pretending to be less than he is, and so becomes what he is forced to impersonate. He would not be degraded so. He got up and hobbled off in search of Dr. Stewart. The man could at least tell him of some place where he might stay. He had never before realized how much of a man’s position in this world comes from a razor and a good suit of clothes, how little from his character.

  Stewart met him in the front hall, barring entrance to the living room. Booth missed none of that. The nearest place to sleep was a Negro shanty down the road, owned by a freed man called William Lucas. Stewart said he would not ordinarily send a white man to a nigger, he apologized for that, but there was no other nearby house. Booth fetched Herold, got back on Bryant�
��s horse, and rode off into the woods. He had put all the sarcasm he could manage into thanking Stewart for his hospitality, but he had not been able to say enough.

  In the first clearing they came to he drew rein, got out the diary, and scribbled away by the light of a candle stump. He did not realize that all he achieved was a written whine.

  “It is not the substance, but the manner in which kindness is extended, that makes one happy in the acceptance thereof. ‘The sauce to meat is ceremony; meeting were bare without it.’ Be kind enough to accept the enclosed five dollars (though hard to spare) for what we have received,” he wrote. The trouble was he could not afford even five dollars. He rewrote the letter and cut the price to two and a half. That humiliated him still further, for the one way a gentleman has of showing his contempt for scoundrels, is to pay them more than their services are worth. But he could no longer afford to be a gentleman. Two fifty would have to do.

  He signed the note, “A Stranger”, and sent the note back by Bryant. He hoped it would give Stewart a bad moment or two. Instead, it was to save the man’s life. Then he took a swig of whisky and rode on.

  The Lucas shanty was nothing but a clapboard ruin badly chinked. At first, Lucas would not come out when summoned. When he did come out, he was a shivering darky of the kind that makes you want to kick them as soon as they open their mouths. He wouldn’t let them in. He said his wife was ill, and besides, he only had one room. Booth would have to go away.

  What right did a nigger, freed man or not, have to tell a white man what he could or couldn’t do? Booth hit him with one of his crutches. It was the first time he had struck a nigger, but he had had enough. He barged inside and told Lucas to get his wife out of there. Lucas decided he could do that. Herold sniggered. Booth had the bed stripped, because you never knew what bugs a nigger might have, lay down and went to sleep.