Lincoln's Assassin

by J F Pennington

  ***

  “Ledger?” asked the young churl who suddenly presented himself and his late-night editions in my path.

  “Press?" asked another, one arm curled around a stack of newspapers, the other now poised around his companion.

  “Perhaps the gent prefers the North American?” chimed a third from where he appeared out of the darkness. “It’s the choice of the well-to-do, eh, Captain?” he winked at his friends as he turned to me.

  “I haven’t any money,” I offered, unsteady to their purpose, particularly this third, who carried no papers at all.

  “We can’t very well pick the pocket of a corpse, can we mates?” cackled the leader of the three with a quick movement of his face toward mine.

  Then, with a skip backward toward the darkness and a wave of his arms, he whistled to his two fellows, who followed him away into the night. I wasted no time in leaving off myself, resolved, however, that I must only walk—yet not at too brisk a pace, lest I confess my patent fear.

  All the way back to the station, despite the well-lit avenues and occasional passersby, I expected to see the trio again but thankfully did not. Instead I boarded without further difficulty my next leg on the North Central.

  By the time we arrived in Harrisburg I had nearly forgotten the Philadelphia incident, or relegated it to dreams at the very least. The sky was stormy here with flashes of lightning every several seconds followed dutifully by loud and rumbling strikes of thunder. That is all by way of depicting the scene, not as frightening but certainly foreboding, haunting to the extent that what I now report I cannot swear for truth any more than what I have just told.

  Harrisburg was a short stop, with no time for a viewing of the capital or its grounds, but I found myself again in need of exercise and not the least tired, despite the unreasonable hour. So I determined to walk the length of the train, first in one direction as far as the club car, then in the other all the way to the caboose. This type of coursing was forever discouraged, inviting, in fact, the very sort of incident I had nearly suffered in the City of Brotherly Love, but I was determined that I should not allow my petty imaginings to dissuade the least part of my greater purpose. Feeling already somewhat satisfied with my regimen and fearless resolve, I felt I could perhaps sleep true.

  On my deliberate way back to my seat, I was met between cars by a couple of passengers walking in the opposite direction and forced to stop in that windowless, if drafty part of the train where two cars are coupled together and sided with canvas. The grating rhythm of the rods and the smell of burnt oil confirms your movement when underway—if confirmation was needed. We exchanged cursory nods as the two fellows excused themselves past me. The door behind me closed, yet I distinctly heard the one say to the other, “I was exactly here when the news was learned of the death of Wilkes Booth.”

  It was more than coincidence struck me then. For, unless I am no judge of age at all, neither of these men was more than four and twenty, yet spoke of an event that would have taken place perhaps a year before their birth. But that was that, and nothing more the rest of the day and the next. Nor did I see again my two momentary companions.

  Arriving finally in Chicago, I booked a room under the name of Harvey, continuing what I had already begun. The hotel was just down the street from McVicker’s, where I had played so very many times and almost expected now to see one of my former company members. What would I have said? How now might I have addressed my cousin James, father of Edwin’s late wife?

  Hand had arranged to meet me the following morning, and wired that he had found for me the perfect disguise: two more traveling companions, in his description, "Blacker z’an my backside." They would accompany us to Oklahoma before heading on for hopes of western homesteading.

  I cannot exactly explain what drove me to the theater that night—the same impulse that had caused me to have my picture taken perhaps. Some restless, reckless courage wanting to be recognized, acknowledged. It was not as if The Corsican Brothers was my favorite play, even for as many times as I had, myself, played either or both of the famed Francci twins.

  ***

  Time. Place.

  “What is truth?” she asked with the searching candor of those days before we seemingly exchanged roles to my seeking her plain advice for everything, and the thought of spring was the only comfort of winter. Halcyon times.

  “I’m sure I don’t know,” I tossed with scarcely a reflection. My nonchalance perceived not for the dullness it was, but for a deeper knowing. She hesitated to extract full meaning from the dark mystery of my flippancy.

  “And what is villainy?” she continued, as if the one thought led naturally to the other.

  “Now, that is easier,” I mused, wondering myself where we would be led, and hoping, as ever, it would be to a final intrigue soluble only with a kiss.

  “Villainy is a refusal to act upon one’s instinct,” I sounded. “One has an impulse to do a thing, and it is right. Or one chooses to do another for fear or confusion? That is villainy.”

  “I don’t understand. Are all our impulses then worthy?”

  “All,” I replied.

  Strophe

  Now I am an atheist, and there is no God—no justice. No plan, either—only compromise or disappointment. Neither is it the work of a demon, this earth. It is random chance and opportunity.

  It is those who care too much and those who care too little. Those who want and scheme and plot, and those who think only of this day and the next. Nor will I be associated with any less than willful madmen, full of fury, full of gesture.

  This is not new for Wilkes. As his name implies, this has always been suggested and ordained. I shall not think myself too little of a man while I may act in any manner whatsoever. Only when a sudden fit of conscience tricks and traps me again into believing there is truth—or God or love.

  Antistrophe

  A momentary lapse of concentration. Relaxation and an amnesiac’s view of life. There was nothing before—no reason, no event, no consequence. A glimpse of eternity.

  If I believe in God, profess faith in the ultimate, desire a universal truth and order, how will he not acknowledge me? Indulge me for an instant? Restore the memory whose chest does not pump or fit or tire to take a single breath?

  I must look elsewhere. There is an ordered truth, but I have been so long outside its sketched frontiers that it is no longer concerned with me. I am abandoned. I have chosen my own patterned events as I dream and deem they should be. And now there is no ease, no trust, no comfort in the path.

  What was begun must be continued. If I have chosen my course over that of my god, then I must complete the circuit, navigate the waters as one who has from the outset begged his commission as captain and may not later plead promotion’s pre-maturity.

  ***

  Time. Place.

  “Uncle Adam calls me Cara. It means dear one. My father and I met with Uncle Adam in Rome the year after my mother had died. I shall never forget our meeting there. He would have been my favorite uncle even if he had not been the only one.

  “Oh dear, that is not entirely true. He has a brother, you see, but one whose sympathies have made him both strange and stranger to the family. I daresay you may be able to understand that yourself. I think he is a spy.

  “As to Uncle Adam, he was already in Europe at the time, and we had arranged that we should meet in Rome at the Spanish Steps. I saw him first from where we sat, as he stood in the piazza below—imagine, amid the throng—and he saw me, too. He never once took his eyes off of me, leaping the stairs three and four at a time until he was at our side.

  “He took me up, kissed me quickly on the lips, on both cheeks, and on the lips once more, the way my mother had done, and exclaimed with the deepest joy and sadness all at once, ‘Oh Cara!! There is nothing in the world I would not do for you!’

  “Then he held me to his chest and I felt as if I had been borne upon the wings of angels and lay suspended in both time and place. I wante
d that moment to last forever, and in a way it did. I still hold him as dear as any man I could ever know.

  “I want to tell you something right off. I’m not quiet or shy at all. Poppie likes to think so, though—and I’d rather do nearly anything than hurt him. I’m all he’s got since Mama died. He had her for everything. Fix his supper, darn his socks, choose his collar, cravat and pin. He would even ask her advice on how he should view a particular issue during a campaign or referendum.

  “Now he wants to ask me. He can’t, you know. He needs to think all the decisions are his. Of course, they aren’t. I let someone else do the cooking and sewing but I tend to the rest. Still, he doesn’t remember a single conversation. As far as he’s concerned I never say a word. Too timid. Disinterested in civic affairs. It keeps him happy.”

  “And now, I feel it only fair I should tell you something—right off.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes—well, you see—I am not the sort of man women take lightly.”

  “Oh, I know,” she smiled wickedly. “I have seen them look at you!”

  “What I mean is—I am scarcely prepared to fall in love.”

  “Oh, I shouldn’t imagine you are. And if I were to fall in love with you—would you be terribly, terribly merciless?”

  “What? Oh no. Or should I have told you all this?”

  “No, I suppose not,” she said with apparent disappointment. “I would be. I am. Without mercy completely.”

  She answered my startled gaze with a smile and a coy shrug as she trained her eyes evenly ahead. We continued walking together in silence, but I chuckled to myself and then wondered the more at her pert beauty and the possible evil that suddenly seemed to rest precariously upon her gently turned upper lip.

  I found myself thinking there were three basic reasons Ella and I were ill-suited, and told her so.

  One, age—to which she quickly rebutted that matches were daily made between girls her age and men twice mine.

  “That may be so in your society, but not in mine,” I contested, “where true love is the principle reason for marriage.”

  Two, the fact my profession would surely have a detrimental effect on her—and her father, and family.

  “Then give it up,” was her off-handed reply. “Talkers are no good-doers,” she quoted from my own repertoire. “Go into some sort of business.”

  “I may have to,” I admitted. “I am rapidly losing my voice.”

  I choked accidentally, if on cue.

  “Then?”

  “Three—and most importantly—we do not really belong together. Your society, as we have said, is very different from mine. It is evident. Look at your father. He knows. He can hardly wait for me to leave each time I have only arrived at your home.”

  She of course insisted that he liked me and was all the more adamant after my attempts to dissuade.

  “Why, he nearly insisted that I host that horrible New Year’s Eve party, and used your name to convince me, knowing how much I desired to meet you.”

  “I didn’t know until that very day I even had an invitation.”

  “Nonsense. Poppie knew it the week before. Of course, he knows everything before it happens. Even Mama’s death. He sensed it coming too. He had finally agreed to take her to Europe. Something she had long wished of him. She died on the last day of their visit. Very suddenly. He still hasn’t gotten over it, or the fact that he very nearly wasn’t able to give her the one thing she had ever truly desired of him. It is certainly why he spoils me as he does.”

  She paused.

  “I have never been alone with a man before,” she continued. “Oh, I have kissed a few. Most of them boys, really. Boys one day, dead the next any more. I guess this war has changed us all. But it is not the war, I think, that is changing me, Mr. Wilkes. It is you. Yes, I am quite sure, it is you.”

  Her eyes fixed deeply to mine.

  ***

  Even before the melodious lyric of her voice took definite shape, the choirs of angels must have found harmonies in her breath.

  It was the summer of 1858 when her father made good his promise to take her to Italy, a kind of posthumous bargain. It was a trip long-planned for the family, but with the passing of her mother the previous year it was much the assurance of a sacred memory. The senator had just won his third term, I was playing my first engagement in Richmond, and Boston Corbett was having his spiritual epiphany. Ella was barely 10 years old.

  The trip across the ocean from all accounts had been uneventful if not uninspired. Young Ella dreamily weathered the occasionally restless seas singing renditions of The Drunken Sailor, with its choruses of “Hooray, and up! she rises.” The sturdier passengers gathered, laughing at the less fortunate objects of the be-petticoated little girl’s play, who were confined to regularly pot-changed staterooms. There was no daunting Ella’s spirit, or the dreams and devotions she aimed dutifully to fulfil for her late mother’s soul.

  “If I pray hard enough,” she reported herself saying to her father, “Mother’s soul will be present when I kiss the hand of the Pope.”

  “Now, sweetheart, I told you, our audience is not guaranteed, and even so there will be hundreds of others to see him at the same time. There is no guarantee that we will be close enough to catch more than a glimpse of his robes, much less gain the touch of his hand.”

  “You are a United States senator. And I am a senator’s daughter.”

  “Darling, Rome is in Italy, a different country altogether. That is why we must spend these weeks crossing the ocean. I have no authority in Rome. Less in the Vatican City.”

  “Then I will pray even harder. And if the Pope will not do it because my father is a senator, then he will do it because my mother was a saint. Surely he will respect that authority, even in his city.”

  I never asked her to explain her conviction, whether the product of her own invention or something she repeated after her father, uncle or another. But I was as sure then as I am now that her mother’s canon and celestial nature is certified in her own.

  “I thought Rome was in Italy,” she said to her father that first afternoon.

  “And so it is, my darling.”

  “Does this staircase lead to Spain?”

  “No, dear,” she said he chuckled.

  “And why is nobody here speaking Spanish?”

  “Those two gentlemen there,” he pointed. “What is that? It most certainly is not Italian.”

  “It is Portuguese, Father. The funny lisping language of the sailors on our boat. It is not real Spanish, but only the kind of Spanish spoken by pirates and Moors and explorers.”

  “Maybe these steps were stolen at sea by those two pirates posing as gentlemen,” was his playful suggestion. “Perhaps it is our duty to report them to our embassy.”

  “Shall we report them to the United States Embassy or the embassy of Italy? Or of Spain?”

  How serious she must have found the matter that her father had to promise she might, at least, report the incident to the Holy Father.

  And when she was admitted into St. Peter’s court, and her father’s persistence and her unfailing eyes found their way to the purple cordons, it was just in time to face the mitred robes. Having never been to the Vatican City, I am not sure I can do the scene even the cursory justice I feel—as a non-practitioner—its due. But perhaps you may imagine of your own the custom, the ceremony, the censered calm.

  Nor am I in unpleasant company to have been the object of that same gaze that cast its early spell on the least corrupted flesh then made man. To hear her father explain it, as he did one afternoon almost unaware of my presence again, the sounds and forms of the multitude were suddenly vanished. All that remained was Ella’s bewitching gaze and the extended hand of the pontiff.

  As her face was held in the cushion of the Holy Father’s blessed palm, her father swore he heard, in steady English as the Pope made the sign of the cross, a pleasure expressed at meeting the daughter of a true saint, affirmation her
mother’s soul was indeed at peace, and that Ella’s girlhood prayers could now be saved for the gypsies of the world.

  ***

  It was no coincidence I had long romanticized myself, in my youth, a gypsy prince. But on first encounter Ella recognized me for the truth of it, told me in so many words. She was kind, but I understood her meaning. I was a nomad, yes, but not of royal blood. Merely some scurvy pirate balanced between mutiny and shipwreck, marooning and the plank. What I had held as an alpine homeland was only a temporary perch upon some splitting mizzen.

  Meanwhile, spring 1865 had not yet raised her head with the uplifting year. The naked limbs and knuckles of acacia were still wintry as they scratched at an overcast sky. And below that gray and just above the charcoal earth, six hundred thousand homeless spirits could be felt ghosting their way between the seasons.

  Whatever certainty had been theirs, whatever confusion presided, their verging situation echoed of a deeper promise. Sorrow would not be forgotten. No, nor pain. Yet there was comfort even in these, to sense so near the balance of time.

  ***

  “I’ve heard you are an engaged man, Mr. Wilkes.”

  “Am I? If that is the case, it is the furthest thing from my mind at the moment—or perhaps not."

  “I’m flattered, sir. Whatever the case.”

  I imagine I was too. Though I wasn’t thinking of that. I was still wondering whether I could believe what she had said about her father. And if it was true, how he knew of my invitation and acceptance sooner than I.

  Each time my visits tarried later. Evenings began to linger into morning, mouths and hands into their favorite echoes and companions.

  “Do you, are you, will you—John?” she asked.

  She did not have to complete her questions.

  I kissed her one last time on the back veranda of the senator’s home. Long, two-story shadows cast by the well-lit porch reached toward the carriage house. Only the occasional murmur of stabled horses broke the silence. All was still, deep, certain.

  Scene II

  Pleading,