Next to Mrs. Surratt, Mr. Payne stood pinioned. He gazed forward expressionlessly as his attendant placed the noose behind his left ear, adjusted it, and fastened a white hood atop his head. I got my last look at the face of the man who had sat beside me at Ford’s Theatre and had asked me about Jane Shore.
Mr. Herold, plainly batting back tears, received his noose and hood, then Mr. Atzerodt. There was a long pause before Colonel McCall carefully untied Mrs. Surratt’s bonnet and took it off her head. As she blinked in the sunlight, he murmured something only she could hear and slipped the noose over her head.
“Gentlemen!” A man standing in the yard threw up his hands and turned to face the crowd. “I tell you this is murder. Can you stand and see it done?”
51
MARY
JULY 7, 1865
Fathers Wiget and Walter kept me so securely in a protective cocoon of prayer that I hardly noticed the arrival of my fellow prisoners on the scaffold until Mr. Payne took his seat in the chair next to mine and said despairingly to his minister, “Can’t anyone save her?”
The minister murmured some reply, and Mr. Payne sighed.
What if he had not come to my house that night? What if I had not made those trips to Surrattsville? What if I had sold my tavern instead of leasing it to Mr. Lloyd? What if that mad scheme to kidnap the president in March had succeeded? So many what-ifs I could not help but wonder about, even as I tried to heed the priests’ words that it was God’s will that I die on the scaffold instead of as an old woman in a bed surrounded by my grandchildren.
I hoped it was also God’s will that death come quickly to me.
• • •
There were rituals to be gone through at a hanging, I learned—the reading of the death warrant, the prayers offered on behalf of the condemned. The priests ministered to me throughout them, preparing me for the moment to which all this ritual tended. “Lord Jesus,” I whispered with them. “Into thy hands I commit my spirit.”
At the other end of the scaffold, Mr. Atzerodt’s priest ended his own prayer with a fervent amen. There was a long silence, broken by General Hartranft’s solemn voice ordering us to stand.
Slowly, Fathers Wiget and Walter lifted me to my feet. “God bless you,” I managed to say before they relinquished their hold on me to those who would prepare me in another way for execution. “Look after my poor girl.”
Colonel McCall, who had always been kind to me during my imprisonment, gently took over. “A couple of necessary preparations,” he said as Sergeant Kenney bound me with white strips of cloth. The sergeant was clearly ill at ease in trussing a lady in this manner and, in his eagerness to be done, tied my arms much too tight. “It hurts,” I complained weakly.
“It won’t hurt for long,” he snapped, and I could tell before he finished the words that he regretted them. Gently, he loosened my bonds. “Is this better?” he asked softly.
“Yes.”
With a sigh, Sergeant Kenney stooped to bind me below the knees as I bent my head, grateful for the veil hiding my flush of humiliation as he drew my heavy woolen skirts tight with his ribbon. When they balked at being constricted, I remembered the Bloomerite at my trial, and it occurred to me that in her odd style of dress she just might have had a point.
My trussing was over. Gently Colonel McCall guided me forward, just beyond the hinge of the platform from which we would plunge to eternity. “I think you would prefer me to do the next myself. Would you, madam?”
I nodded. Delicately, the colonel removed my bonnet, which he handed to someone near him as I blinked in the blaze of sunlight revealed by the absence of my veil. He took the noose dangling in front of me and slipped it around my neck, nudging it against my left ear. Someone on the ground shouted something about murder, but I could not look down to see the commotion even if I dared. Instead, I stared ahead as Colonel McCall adjusted the noose. “You will most likely lose consciousness very quickly,” he told me. “Perhaps as soon as the trap is sprung, given your weak condition.”
“Thank you, sir.”
I turned my head slightly to see Captain Rath make a final adjustment to Mr. Payne’s noose. “I want you to die quick,” he explained.
“You know best, Captain,” Mr. Payne said matter-of-factly.
My noose in place, Colonel McCall said, “Don’t be frightened by this. It is only to hide your face,” as he slipped a white hood over my head, blotting out all earthly sights. “Courage, madam,” he said as he fastened it. “God be with you.”
In the darkness, I felt him step back a little. “Please don’t let me fall!” I begged.
A hand—earthly or heavenly—steadied me. Then a muffled clap, like that of a weary playgoer, sounded from the ground below.
A second clap.
And then a third.
52
NORA
JULY 7, 1865
The man who had shouted, failing to gain any response, turned his back to the crowd and, weeping, pressed his palm to his bowed head. Beneath the scaffold, one of the four men detailed to knock out the props wearily leaned against a support. Atop the scaffold, Mr. Payne, Mr. Herold, and Mr. Atzerodt stood noosed and hooded as Colonel McCall carefully slipped a hood over Mrs. Surratt’s head.
And in our room, Anna slept on, and I thanked God for this one small mercy.
Captain Rath, who had been overseeing the final preparations on the scaffold, descended the stairs, his face set. As the weary prop knocker pulled himself upright, the captain looked toward the building as if expecting a signal. Receiving it, he looked up at the gallows. Everyone but the prisoners had stepped back. Only Colonel McCall’s outstretched arm kept Mrs. Surratt upright.
Slowly, Captain Rath brought his hands together three times as Mr. Atzerodt cried out, “Good-bye, gentlemen who are before me now. May we all meet in the other world! God help me now!” Then the props crashed to the ground, and four human beings plummeted to their deaths.
Mrs. Surratt, who had pitched forward when she fell, wildly swung back and forth like a ghastly pendulum, one hand making a slight clenching motion, before the rope subsided to a gentle spin. Mr. Atzerodt hung motionless, save for a heaving of his belly. Mr. Herold writhed as urine stained his pants, his body finally going limp after five minutes. And Mr. Payne—poor Mr. Payne! Even after Mr. Herold had ceased to fight for life, Mr. Payne struggled on, even pulling himself into a sitting position before death finally claimed him.
All this time, the crowd had remained frozen and silent. Even Mr. Brophy, who had made toward the window shade as if to shield me from watching Mr. Payne’s grisly exertions, had paused, rooted to the spot. The bodies growing still, however, was the crowd’s cue to come to life. The men of the press resumed scribbling in their notebooks, while some spectators, clearly shaken, left the yard, probably in search of something stronger than the lemonade waiting outside the gates. Others began to debate who had given up life the hardest, Mr. Payne or Mr. Herold, while a few began a furtive search for relics.
The clergymen gathered up their Bibles and crosses and slowly walked down the gallows stairs, followed by soldiers carrying the seats in which the four condemned had sat. At last, nothing remained on the gallows but the dead, hanging there listlessly while a young boy—surely too young to be watching a scene like this—stared at them in awe.
Anna stirred, and Mr. Brophy quickly drew down the window shade. Unwilling to wake Anna and numb with what we had just witnessed, Mr. Brophy and I sat there in utter silence until Father Walter, holding a bonnet, entered the room. “I’ll take Miss Surratt home. I have a carriage here somewhere.”
Anna blinked and rubbed her head. “Is Mama—?”
“Yes, child. It is all over.” To Mr. Brophy, he said, “The doctor has pronounced them dead.”
When Anna—still too groggy to grieve—had finally been roused enough to walk, the men supported her out of the room. I started to follow, then said, “Excuse me. I forgot something.”
I had to take on
e last look at her.
Returning to the room, I opened the shade. The four bodies, still wearing their white hoods, were lying atop the crude boxes that would serve as their coffins. Up on the scaffold, soldiers were cutting down the ropes and tossing bits of them to their friends, who were scrambling for the souvenirs. When one of two men, competing for a bit of Mr. Atzerodt’s rope, stumbled backward and fell into one of the open graves, his friend seized a shovel and gleefully began throwing dirt on his flailing companion.
I pulled down the shade and hurried away.
• • •
At the boardinghouse, its door covered with black crepe I supposed the Holohans must have put there, a crowd had again gathered. As I followed Father Walter and Anna out of the carriage, and a policeman yelled at the crowd to stand back, I saw my father. I walked over to him, and I saw another familiar face: Alexander Whelan. He gave me a sad little salute and disappeared into the crowd.
I put my arms around my father. “I’m sorry, Father. I had to try to help her. And I had to see her.”
He shook his head and led me out of the crowd. “You have the look of death upon your face, child. You saw the executions?”
“Yes.”
“I saw a hanging many years ago, and I have never been able to forget it. You saw four. I have not been able to protect you from anything this summer.”
We walked on in silence. “What are your plans?” he inquired politely.
They must have been developing at the back of my mind all along. “I want to move in with Miss Surratt and be of what help to her I can. And I want to find work. If no one in the government will have me, perhaps I can find a teaching job. But first—first, I want to go back to Baltimore and get away from here for a while.”
“As you wish.”
I squeezed his hand. “And I would like you to take me there, Father.”
We got to the station just in time for the next train, crowded full of people talking excitedly about the executions, a few clutching bits of fake souvenir ropes that were already being sold to the gullible. This time it was my father who sat stiffly beside me until the train started to move and I began to nod off.
“You’re exhausted, child. Rest here.”
I leaned my head against my father’s shoulder, then opened my eyes wide.
You don’t forget the sight of a woman who treated you like a daughter swinging at the end of a rope. That night, and many long nights afterward, I would be haunted by the sight. I would never be the same, just as I knew the men in blue who had walked in triumph down Pennsylvania Avenue and the men in gray making their way in defeat to their homes would never be the same. Maybe someday the memory would beat me down. If the past few months had taught me anything, it was that everything could change in the blink of an eye.
But I was sick of death. It was life that was calling out to me, and I wanted to make the best of mine.
I closed my eyes again. This time, amid the gabbling of the crowd clutching their ersatz ropes, the train lulled me straight to sleep.
Epilogue
NORA
JUNE 1869
Four years after her mother’s hanging, Anna married William Tonry, an Irishman who had spent much of his childhood in Boston and who worked as a chemist for the army.
In other words, he was a certified Yankee.
What singular quality in Mr. Tonry possessed Anna to abandon her most cherished prejudice, I cannot say, but when (with President Johnson’s permission) Mrs. Surratt was finally laid to rest in February 1869 with a proper funeral service at Mount Olivet Cemetery in Washington, Mr. Tonry was there, and it was plain to everyone, even the members of the press who stood at a discreet distance from the mourners, that he adored Anna, which certainly helped. All that was needed was a decent interval from the funeral to pass so they could marry, and that interval having passed, the party that had gathered at Mrs. Surratt’s graveside gathered at St. Patrick’s Church for a very different occasion. I knew if Mrs. Surratt’s soul had been uneasy, it surely was at peace now, knowing Anna was in the hands of a good man who would cherish her.
The day before, Anna had gotten all of her crying done over the fact that her mother wasn’t there to see her married (I had shed some tears myself), so as she dressed the morning of the ceremony, she was dry-eyed and beautiful, if not exactly calm.
I adjusted her headdress for perhaps the fifteenth time. “Is this better?” I asked.
“No!”
You don’t argue with a bride. Sighing, I tried again, moving it forward just a fraction. “This?”
I held my breath as Anna, her mother’s earrings sparkling, surveyed herself in the mirror. “Perfect,” she pronounced.
“Then don’t you dare move your head until after the ceremony is over.”
The press still took a certain interest in Anna, so this was to be a private, quite wedding with no bridesmaids or groomsmen, save for her oldest brother, Isaac, to lead her to the altar. He had finally made his way back east in the fall of 1865, having been held in Texas along with the rest of his regiment.
Having dressed Anna to her satisfaction, I left her in the charge of Isaac (whose resemblance to his mother still startled me at times) and slipped into the pew that Mrs. Surratt had favored when I was living in her boardinghouse. It was a tribute I’d paid to her on many a Sunday since her hanging.
At the front of the church sat John Surratt, lost in his own thoughts. Having learned from the newspapers of his mother’s execution, Mr. Surratt, then hiding in a remote part of Canada, had fled to Europe and had finally ended up in Egypt, where he was caught and brought back to Washington to be tried for the president’s death. I had reprised my testimony from the conspiracy trial, as had many others, including Mr. Weichmann, whose memory, I thought bitterly as I read the newspapers each morning, seemed only to have sharpened with time.
But although the government had trotted out witnesses swearing Mr. Surratt had been in Washington on the night of April 14, other, more convincing witnesses claimed to have seen him elsewhere, and the civilian jury had been unable to reach a verdict. So he had gone free. But many shunned him now, some because they believed he’d had a hand in the president’s murder, and others because they believed he could have saved his mother by returning to Washington. Still, Anna and Isaac had remained loyal to him—Anna visiting him in prison, taking him delicacies, and procuring a first-rate lawyer for him, Isaac sitting in the courtroom and glaring at whoever glared at John—and I hoped he would take comfort in that in the lonely days to come.
Anna, looking as pretty and rosy in her wedding dress as when I first saw her, glided down the aisle on Isaac’s arm, and the small congregation, John Surratt included, broke into a collective smile. Father Walter, presiding as he had at Mrs. Surratt’s reburial, had tears in his eyes as he pronounced the couple man and wife.
We had a little wedding breakfast before Anna changed into a cream-colored traveling dress, her mourning dresses having been packed away, not to be needed again, I hoped, for years to come.
“Write to me,” I said, hugging her good-bye as the carriage that would take her and her husband to the railway station appeared at the church door. “And you had better bring me a souvenir from Niagara Falls, do you hear?”
“I will,” Anna said. She kissed me on the cheek, then took Mr. Tonry’s arm. “Nora!” she called when she reached her carriage. “Catch.”
I held out my hands, and Anna tossed her wedding bouquet straight at me.
As the couple settled into the carriage, someone coughed, and I turned to see the now-widowed Mr. Whelan, who had lately gotten into the habit of walking me from work to the house where I resided with the other teachers. “How was the wedding, miss?”
“Beautiful.”
“Are you going back to school?”
“No, sir. I have the day off. A substitute is boring my girls to death.”
“Then maybe you’d like to get some ice cream?”
I smiled and took
his arm. “That would be lovely,” I said, cradling the bouquet in my free arm as the wedding carriage clattered away.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Nora married Alexander Whelan in January 1870 and bore him three sons: James, Bernard, and John. Unfortunately, the marriage broke down, partly due to Alexander’s alcoholism and perhaps partly due to Nora’s deteriorating physical and mental health. After separating from Alexander in 1882, Nora was in and out of hospitals until August 1885, when her brother committed her to the Government Hospital for the Insane (known informally then, and officially now, as St. Elizabeths). Whether Nora’s mental health problems were in any way connected with the events of 1865 can only be guessed at. Her brother, who wrote a detailed account of her troubles at the time of her admission to St. Elizabeths, blamed her misfortune on her husband and made no mention of the war years at all.
Nora’s slender file tells us little about her life at the asylum, but she appears to have stayed in contact with her sons and stepdaughters and was allowed occasionally to visit her sister in Baltimore. She died of tuberculosis at St. Elizabeths on January 7, 1896, at age fifty. Her death certificate describes her as having suffered from “chronic melancholia.” Nora was buried in Mount Olivet Cemetery in Washington next to her parents, in a plot not far from Mary Surratt’s grave. Her husband, Alexander, died in 1916, at age eighty, and was buried in the same cemetery at some distance from Nora. If anyone at the time of her passing remembered the brief part Nora had played in history, it went unremarked.
Days after he married Anna, William Tonry was dismissed from his government job in what the press believed was an act of petty retaliation for his marrying the daughter of Mary Surratt. Despite this setback, Tonry went on to become a prominent chemist who was often called upon as an expert witness at trials. He and Anna settled in Baltimore and had five children. Anna stayed far out of the public eye following her marriage, letting her husband speak for her about the events of 1865 on the rare occasion that it was necessary. She died in 1904 and was buried next to her mother at Mount Olivet; the following year, her husband was laid to rest beside her. Although the Cincinnati Commercial made the sensationalist claim in 1882 that Anna was a “wreck, both mentally and physically, with hair as white as the driven snow,” this is likely a gross exaggeration.
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