The Judges of the Secret Court (24 page)

That was a relief to Edwin. He could not have borne to see any more accusing eyes. One look at the trial room, empty and waiting, and he had guessed what would happen to these misfortunate people. He went back to New York and Mary Ann. All Mary Ann could talk about was Wilkes. Did she not realize that John Wilkes had caused all this?

No, she did not.

The best he could do was to send a cheque to Mr. Garrett, for the furniture stored in his barn and for the barn itself. His only solace was Edwina. With Sleeper Clarke out of prison and back home torturing Asia, it had been necessary to get Edwina out of Philadelphia. Now she was with him. When he went into the nursery, to tuck her in at night, he would say: “Edwina is Papa's baby. Edwina is his darling.” She was like a Reynolds portrait: innocent, but artful. She would reach up her chubby little arms, put them around his neck, pull him off balance, and say sleepily: “Papa is my baby.”

Perhaps he was, at that. But he was no one else's. He scarcely dared to leave the house. The streets were too ugly. And yet what did it mean? He was a Shakespearian tragedian. He knew better than to ask such a question. It didn't mean anything. It had just happened.

It was still happening. It would always go on happening. He could never forget it.

For though he did not attend the trial, and refused to discuss it, he read about it in the newspapers, all the newspapers, and when the Government brought out Pitman's unbiased, if censured, transcript of the proceedings, he bought a copy and read that, and understood it, perhaps, too well.

It was something he never recovered from, that trial. Being an actor, he knew every audience for the latent mob it was, a democracy is only an audience which has surged up on the stage, and as for Stanton, as for politicians, who are only puppet masters after all, though they can move their own men, they can do nothing to stop the fury of the mob, once they have aroused it, and would not if they could, for they need the diversion of that public clamour and that audience, for that is what allows them profitably to pull the strings.

But we may all of us at any moment be lifted up by those strings. That was the terror of it. Mrs. Surratt might as well have been Mary Ann; Payne, his brother Junius, and all of them himself. Anyone might be caught at any time, and caught or not, be guilty. Yet it was those poor people down in Washington who had to bear the brunt of that guilt. Wilkes had seen to that. Even if innocent, even if spared mere human malice, they were still caught up in the inexorable malice of events. It was inevitable. He recognized that. It was less a process than a parable. He could only watch. He had plenty of time to do that, for, as Sleeper Clarke had said so bitterly,
he
had not been touched. On the contrary: every moment of the process, as he followed it, tore everything he lived for into shreds.

The trial began on May 10th, which was John Wilkes's birthday, though only Mary Ann, Asia, and Edwin remembered that. It had a curious atmosphere of rehearsal, that courtroom, on the first day. There were pauses.

Yet it was some release to the prisoners, just to come into that courtroom to be condemned. The seven men entered first. Even among the condemned there are social distinctions. Six of the men wore what was called a stiff shackle, two handcuffs connected by an iron bar, so that they had to hold their hands out stiffly before them, or up, in the attitude of begging dogs. Dr. Mudd, however, had been allowed links to connect his handcuffs, so that he could chink his hands restlessly in his lap. All seven men clanked their leg chains as they sat down. The iron had developed the acrid, burnt rubber smell of sweaty metal. To a man, they blinked and shut their eyes.

That was because for two weeks they had sat in solitary confinement, with those canvas bags over their heads. The bags had been removed only for their appearance in court, and would be clapped back over their heads, like candle snuffers, when they were returned to their cells. For two weeks they had seen nothing but the dim glow of daylight through the close weave of the canvas. Now they could see what that light contained. They could see their accusers.

The court reporters and spectators were disappointed. Two weeks seemed to have changed the men's appearance very little.

The prisoners sat down to the right of the door. Among them only Dr. Mudd looked worth hanging and only Payne uncowed. That puzzled baby face had a certain physical dignity. He had been given a new black jumper. It spread tight across his enormous chest, and only the stretch of the cloth, as he breathed, showed whether or not he was moved by what he saw and heard.

His appearance was inconvenient. He towered over the others. He, at least, had tried to kill a man. He was a giant. No one was averse to seeing a giant in chains, yet in some manner he dominated that room. Try as you would, your eyes came back to him whenever the prosecution had scored a point against the defence. And despite their elaborate and well pressed uniforms, he made the judges seem somehow puny. But mostly he dominated that room because he was uncowed. The court could not get around the impression that he was in some way scornfully amused by all this pretence of legality, and they did not like that. There is little satisfaction to be gotten from the hanging of a public statue. They would rather have smashed it instead. But that they were forbidden to do. There was the press to be thought of. Besides, how could he seem so amused? He had been examined by War Department doctors. They said he had not the intelligence to betray such an attitude.

The press was staring at the one remaining empty chair, the one to the left of the door into the prisoners' dock. That was Mrs. Surratt's chair.

The door opened and she entered.

There was no one who did not look up. About her already there was the air of a martyr. That she should be on trial at all disturbed everyone but Stanton, who had never seen her. Something in a country should be sacrosanct, and so far, in this country, it had been their mothers and the more innocent of their womenfolk. She made them uneasy. She also cheated them by entering veiled. She had been spared the canvas cap, for women, too, as well as gentlemen, have their prerogatives. She had also been spared handcuffs. Day after day she was to sit there, behind her veil. She raised it only once, in order to be identified. Her face at that moment had had no expression, but veiled, she unnerved them. They tried not to look at her.

For her, too, to be released from solitary confinement and so see people again, if only from a distance, while they condemned her, was a sort of freedom. She sat there in a ramrod posture. They would not even let her see a priest. She had no one to advise her. Dignity she associated with immobility, and with not being stared at. Hence the veil. Besides, behind the veil she could allow herself to show her fear. She did not understand. What had exposed her to this horrible thing?

For it had been horrible.

It was true she was not entirely innocent. She knew that John, her son, had been up to something. He had, and she knew that, too, though she had never quizzed him, been a runner for the Confederates. But that was just the high spirits of youth, and there had been no harm in it. At least she had been aware of none.

She had not seen her fellow conspirators before. From where she sat, she could see only their profiles. But she recognized three of them. John had brought Payne, under another name, she realized now, which made her angry, Atzerodt, and Herold to the house; and Mr. Booth had been there, of course. To bring such people to the house had been very wicked of John. She looked down at her crocheted black mittens.

John was irresponsible. She had always known that, even though she had refused to admit it, even to herself. And she was deeply hurt that he had not managed to smuggle some word to her in prison. Hurt, but not surprised. He had none of the character of his older brother.

She was not unduly worried for herself. But what had happened to John, Annie, and poor Honora Fitzpatrick, her boarder, who certainly had nothing to do with this mummery? For herself, she had been told that she had merely to sit through this trial. That was her punishment, but that would be the end of it. No matter what the judges might say, no man would hang a woman. When the furore had died down, she would be quietly paroled.

Such was Stanton's way of keeping her quiet. He wanted no one to speak out, which was why he allowed the prisoners to speak to counsel only in court, and he had bought her silence with a rumour. She believed that rumour. There was no reason why she should not, for it was only what Stanton did that was novel. His promises were as conventional as any man's, and so far he had not told even the judges what it was he meant to have them do.

Yet she was bewildered. She had been put in a solitary cell with damp walls and very little light. Only the Superintendent of the prison, a Mr. Wood, had been so much as civil to her.

One day, during her constitutional, she ran into Annie and Honora. Honora had a newspaper with her. In it Mrs. Surratt could read a denunciation of herself and of everyone she knew. It shocked her. There was no trick her captors did not stoop to. No doubt the newspaper was another one. She read the account and said, “I suppose I shall have to bear it.”

And so she bore it. It was not, however, so easy to endure.

On Thursday, May 11th, the prisoners were allowed to consult their attorneys, whom they had never seen, for the first time. Court adjourned for the day to make that possible. But what can one say about a matter of life or death in one day?

On the 12th, the legal jockeying over with, the indictment began. It lasted for days, alternating with the general testimony, so that as soon as Counsel defended client against one charge, up rose another. The indictment shook her. It was monstrous what she was accused of.

It was monstrous what they were all accused of. Only Payne seemed to take those accusations calmly. He knew perfectly well how much justice the world contains. That was what had made him willing to commit murder for a friend.

She was guilty of the plot to capture Lincoln. She was the intimate tool of Jefferson Davis. She was in the conspiracy to destroy naval vessels and buildings in the Capital. She was responsible for the City Point Explosion. She would share in the million dollars a Mr. Gayle, a mad lawyer from Selma, Alabama, had demanded as the price of assassinating everyone in the Northern cabinet. He had put an advertisement in the papers in order to make his bid public. She had never even heard of Selma, Alabama. Nor had anyone else in the courtroom. But there was the newspaper clipping of Mr. Gayle's advertisement, entered as a government exhibit against them.

She and the others had conspired to raid Buffalo, Detroit, and New York. She had aided in the starvation of Union prisoners, she who had fed Yankee soldiers at Surrattsville for nothing, because she was sorry for the boys, whatever side they were on, when their own commissariat failed and they were hungry. She was guilty of Andersonville. She had helped to mine Libby Prison, she who did not even know what a torpedo was. And a wretched shirtmaker's jobber from London, England, reported that one Dr. Blackburn, a Freemason, had promised him 100,000 dollars, if only he would sell shirts infected with plague, and so spread pestilence in Washington City. A Mr. Brenner, of Washington City, even said that the shirts had been sold to him.

In some way the prisoners were responsible for that, too, right down to Dr. Mudd, who, being a doctor, must surely be fully conscious of the mischief planned.

The web of the assassination plot was outlined while she listened. She was caught in its strands. What did she, or anyone else there, know of shirts sold by an anonymous Englishman? He might just as well have been selling Jesus' cloak, for all the sense that shirt selling made. Indeed, he might better have been.

He was a little man who stood in the dock on tiptoe. He had perjurer written all over him. Or perhaps he believed what he said. Perhaps they all believed it. It was patent: everyone but the Defence was doing as he had been told. And for that matter, who could believe in the probity of the Defence? Who could believe in anything?

The accusations were the worst. The Defence, before the fury of those, sounded almost meaningless. Even the judges showed their boredom: there was nothing novel about a man's defence. The accusations, at least, had a certain interest, for they were levelled by such disparate people.

The courtroom was forty-five feet long and thirty feet wide. It had four badly placed windows. The judges sat against one wall, the reporters and the Defence Counsel against the wall opposite. The witness stand was in the middle. The prisoners sat on a raised dais at one end of the room, so they could see and be seen. The room had new furniture and was freshly painted. It had been fitted up for the trial. But after a few days it smelled dingy and discouraged enough.

Atzerodt, Arnold, Spangler, Herold, and O'Laughlin were only small fry. Not much was to be said either about them, or in their defence. Along that far wall, only Mrs. Surratt and Dr. Mudd were worth the catching, only that insensate giant Payne worth the pulling down.

The small fry did not see the trial in that way. As far as Herold was concerned, the longer he was talked about the better he liked it. The testimony lengthened his life. At least to have people talking about him was better than silence. He did not like to be ignored.

He sat there with the absurd quavering self-importance of the mentally retarded and did not much care for what the witnesses had to say. He saw no reason why he should be condemned. He had run away when Payne did that wicked thing. And as for going along with Booth, what choice had he had? Surely he was not to be blamed for doing that.

He looked curiously at people he had once known.

James Nokes was up there in the witness box. Old Mr. Nokes was the Herolds' nextdoor neighbour, and an old friend. He tried to wave to Mr. Nokes, but being shackled that way, he couldn't. Mr. Nokes would get him out of this.