“If I had only my arm to give, I would. But my brains are worth twenty men, my money worth a hundred,” he says. “I serve the South best as I am. Thanks to Edwin and his friends in high places, I have General Grant’s pass. It’s a passport to anywhere. Little does Grant know what a good turn he’s done the South.”

His meaning is just coming clear to Asia. John is a spy, a smuggler, a blockade-runner. Any one of these carries the penalty of death. She hadn’t known this. She doesn’t want to know it. She begs him to stop, but he sits, smiling at her, shaking his head. She reaches across the distance between their two chairs to take his hand, surprised by its heat and hard calluses. She runs her thumb along them. “Many nights of rowing,” he says in answer to the question she doesn’t ask. He tells her that his thigh-high boots hide pistol holsters. He’s chosen his shabby coat—he who once was considered quite the dandy—deliberately to keep attention off him. His hat has a brim that covers his face. Against his promise to his mother, he’s joined the Knights of the Golden Circle, a fanatical group dedicated to raising an army, conquering Mexico, and making it part of a slaveholding Confederacy.

Upstairs the baby cries out. Asia feels a mother’s disappointment. She should have slept another hour at least. She hears Becky’s footsteps going in to her. The milk comes prickling into Asia’s breasts and if she doesn’t go up, her dress will soon be soaked with it. She stands. “Please don’t go back to the South,” she says.

He sounds surprised. “Why, where else should I go?” He begins to sing softly—“in 1865, when Lincoln shall be king.”

“That will never happen,” Asia says.

“That will never happen,” he agrees.

The baby’s cry is loud now and heartbroken. Becky’s unable to soothe her and Asia worries she’ll wake the others. She hurries up the stairs.

She’ll share none of this conversation with her husband. If she must choose between the two, the choice is easily made. Booths are Booths above all. She’ll share none of this conversation with her other brothers, a decision that will haunt her the rest of her life.

Lincoln and Shakespeare

Some of Shakespeare’s plays I have never read, while others I have gone over perhaps as frequently as any unprofessional reader. Among the latter are Lear, Richard Third, Henry Eighth, Hamlet, and especially Macbeth. I think nothing equals Macbeth—It is wonderful.

—Abraham Lincoln to the actor James H. Hackett, 1863