The Booth family is gratified by the depth and breadth of national mourning for Junius Brutus Booth. Every American paper reports Booth’s death and most include long eulogies. But one response is memorable for its brevity. Rufus Choate, a storied trial lawyer turned Whig congressman, a man famous for his soaring and sustained bouts of oratory, says simply, “There are no more actors.”

If Father’s legacy once seemed tainted by drink and madness, it no longer appears so. Death has burned everything else away and only genius remains. Wires and letters for Mother pour in from everywhere. Some come from people Mother knows, but far more from people she doesn’t, people once touched by a chance encounter or a long-ago performance. For the children, there’s a comfort in the sheer number of these letters, in seeing their father recognized as a great man. The further comfort is to see Mother recognized as his wife, themselves as his children. Father has died without leaving a will and the courts are not so settled on the matter. Richard Booth, now a married man with four children, sues on the grounds that he is Father’s sole legitimate heir. The entire estate amounts to $4,728.99.

He even claims Father’s costumes, but, since she made them all herself, the court awards these to Mother. A few years later, Mother will give them to Johnny. A few years after that, Edwin will destroy them, one by one, in the furnace beneath his theater. It will take Edwin more than three hours to burn them all.

—

Although Father earned a thousand and eighty-four dollars in his final New Orleans engagement, only five hundred of that makes it home. Father’s salary ceases, of course, and the rents on certain properties in England now go to Richard.

Mother decides that the only way forward is to let the place on North Exeter and return to the farm. This is complicated by the state of the new house there. Tudor Hall is only recently completed and the architect, James Gifford, not yet paid. Gifford removes the heavy tin roof. He lets Mother know that, until his money arrives, the unmaking of Tudor Hall will continue. Mother gives him most of what’s left in the coffers and the house is re-roofed. They must manage to support themselves now on the rent from the Baltimore house and the yield from the farm.

—

At the time of Father’s death, Asia is seventeen, Johnny fourteen, and Joe twelve. Once again, the family cracks and shifts. The gravitational center that was Father is gone, with June and Edwin flung all the way to California and Johnny and Joe to a boarding school in Catonsville, some seven miles southwest of Baltimore. St. Timothy’s Hall is the sort of school that charges top dollar for a regimen of cold, exertion, and hunger, a basic program of toughen-up. Mother selected it.