The first time Edwin and Mary met, sparks flew. He spoke up to her balcony and her lovely voice drifted down to him. Although he insists otherwise to Asia, she’s uncommonly pretty. Usually when Edwin acts, there’s a part of him standing aside, critically watching his own performance. Suddenly, he was too immersed in hers to think about himself. His heart raced giddily in his chest, he felt all of Romeo’s agony should his love not be returned.

“You were wonderful,” she told him at the curtain and he stumbled through returning the compliment.

She reminds him a little of June’s wife, Hattie. Same abundant brown hair. Same pink-and-cream complexion. Same sympathetic manner. The next morning, he’d bought an expensive turquoise bracelet and given it to her after their final show. “I want you to remember me,” he’d said. She’d come out from her dressing room, fully dressed, her hair only half-pinned. He would have given anything to bury his hands in that hair, but a bracelet won’t pay that toll. He wrote to his mother—“I’ve met a young woman who could almost make me forget my vow to never marry an actress.”

Mary’s family had produced more children than they could afford to keep, so when Edwin first meets her, she’s the ward of the actor Joe Jefferson and his wife, Margaret. Jefferson knows Edwin and likes him. He also knows Edwin’s reputation for bedding, in the words of Adam Badeau, “singing chambermaids,” and that he does not like. He makes Mary return the bracelet.

Edwin takes it from her hand, their fingers touching. “It’s still yours,” he says. Her eyes are big and brown. “I’m just keeping it for you.” And soon she has it back again, in a package in the post containing two bracelets, hers and an identical one for Jefferson’s wife. “I hope you will both accept these as they are intended,” Edwin writes, “a sincere expression of admiration and friendship.”

He’s gone by then, less dangerous. Mary is allowed to keep the gift.

And then the sparks flicker out of their own accord. The two fall out of contact and Edwin does nothing to change that. He’s preoccupied with his family’s finances and his career. He thinks of Mary constantly, and then less, and then hardly at all.

—

Mary started acting at age twelve. By seventeen she’s a leading lady at the Marshall Theatre in Richmond, Virginia, the same company John’s just joining. Most of the Devlin family lives in Philadelphia, where her father works as a tailor and makes costumes for the Arch Street Theatre, the company John’s just left. Both her parents are Irish immigrants.