Edwin’s friends are desperate to keep him occupied. They visit often, so the house is filled with interesting and accomplished people, famous people, important people. Rosalie is too shy to speak, but now that she feels presentable in her looks, she likes to sit and listen to the politics and the gossip. She’s never wanted to be at the center of a story, not even her own, but she likes very much being near the center. If she stays seated, no one sees her awkward gait. Her life is suddenly interesting. Also, the brandy comes out. Edwin does not drink himself, but he won’t deny his friends.

One evening Julia Ward Howe, a frequent visitor, brings a friend from Boston, the Unitarian clergyman James Freeman Clarke. Clarke takes the seat beside Rosalie, introducing himself. She knows who he is. She’s read his sermons in The Atlantic Monthly.

Like Mrs. Ward, Reverend Clarke is a prominent abolitionist. Rosalie thinks he has a comfortable, likable face, his beard streaked with gray and neatly trimmed, his hair long, white, and unruly as if he combs it only with his fingers. “I met your father once,” he tells her immediately. Perhaps he took the seat beside her for just this purpose. She stiffens slightly. “When I was a young man in Kentucky. Just starting in my first posting. He asked me to officiate at a funeral for some pigeons.”

Rosalie hears Grandfather’s voice. Is there no end to your freaks? Is there no end to the Booth children being reminded of them? “I believe he was arrested,” she says just so she can be the one to say so.

But Reverend Clarke pats her hand reassuringly. “He was such a lovely, gentle man. He read The Rime of the Ancient Mariner to me. The power of his voice—uncanny. He wrote me a letter afterwards forgiving me for refusing. I wanted you to know that it’s a memory I treasure.”

The group around him has been growing and next, at Mrs. Ward’s request, he begins to describe their delegation to President Lincoln, shortly after his inauguration, back in 1861. He and Mrs. Ward and several of the other abolitionists had gone to urge complete emancipation. They’d come away disappointed. Lincoln had evaded their requests with his meandering stories. His high-pitched voice, his rustic accent—an unsophisticated bumpkin, they’d thought, too small for the moment he finds himself in. “Never have we so misjudged a man,” Mrs. Ward says.