The popular Charles Fechter opens opposite him at the Princess Theatre. Edwin takes a week off, hoping the enthusiasm for Fechter will ebb, but it doesn’t. He goes to see Fechter’s Othello and dislikes it. Fechter builds his characters visually from a myriad of physical moments. His Othello shakes hands with everyone who steps onto the stage, like an overly friendly dog. He sits through one whole scene, writing at his desk, waving a feather pen about. Edwin builds his characters through motive and emotion. The constant busyness onstage annoys him. “Bobbing fiercely hither and thither like a dumpling in a boiling pot,” is what Edwin thinks, yet the critics are rapturous. Charles Dickens seems to attend every performance. All London is agog with Fechter’s “new Hamlet,” his “new Othello.”

In early November, the war back home comes to England. The USS San Jacinto intercepts and boards the RMS Trent, removing, without permission, two Confederate envoys from her. This aggressive action inflames the British public. That it doesn’t result in Lincoln’s second war is partly due to the patient efforts and diplomacy of Prince Albert. The rise in anti-American sentiment further sharpens the tongues of Edwin’s critics. He’s out one day for a brisk walk through the streets, when a young man in a shining top hat mutters in passing, “You have a lot to answer for.” The man is houses away before Edwin understands that what he has to answer for is the Trent affair, that, even for people who’ve never seen him onstage, something in the way he dresses or walks marks him instantly as American.

The calendar turns to December with all her chill and dark. One morning Edwin wakes to find the windows coated with frost inside as well as out. “My legs are aching,” Mary tells him and he massages each in turn, trying to stir the blood.

They’ve moved to a villa in Fulham, small, but charming. The air is better, the street quieter, and Mary loves it. She sings in her lovely alto voice as she goes about the house. This is the house in which their child is born, one week old when Prince Albert dies.

At the time of the Trent negotiations, Albert was already very ill. A pall settles over the streets. The theaters are never full, rarely half-full. The baby is small, but hearty. The villa is a little spot of joy inside the great sad city.

The more London fails to love him, the more Edwin loves America. When Mary goes into labor, he tacks an American flag on the wall above her bed. His baby may be born in England, but will enter the world under that flag.