They get to the panic around the fire. June says, “If this were California, the arsonists would have been strung up without a trial.”

“They’re just trying to show Northern cities one fraction of what’s been done to cities in the South,” John says. “Little enough return for what’s happening right now in the Shenandoah Valley.”

The family is increasingly worried about John. He’s become monomaniacal. He rejects any news of Northern victories. “I haven’t heard that,” he’ll tell June when faced with evidence as if, since he hasn’t heard it, it can’t possibly be true.

“It’s a family quarrel,” June says. “North, South—we’re all still family. We quarrel, we make it up. Don’t drive yourself mad over it.”

Here’s the thing about John. You can talk to him. But you can’t make him listen.

Still since it’s June and not Edwin saying these things, there’s no reason to spoil the day over it. Asia goes inside to find a hat for the snowman. When she comes back, Molly is chasing John with a handful of snow, the other children shouting, laughing, and dancing like monkeys.

xii

The next night the Winter Garden Theatre sees the debut of Hamlet with Edwin in the title role. The play runs for two weeks, three, eight, until Edwin feels the exhaustion of playing the same part, night after night. He begs for a change, but Stuart says no, the play is still selling out. This run, which will last one hundred nights, is the final making of Edwin’s name. Ever after, he will be America’s Hamlet. Edwin refers to this as “my terrible success.”

It was a shame Shakespeare couldn’t see him, the critics write, he was so exactly what Hamlet ought to be. In outer aspect composed and gentle, inwardly filled with a fierce passion, Booth’s Hamlet inspired a sort of worship. It was more than a calling, almost a cult. One morning little Edwina is offered an omelet. “That’s my daddy,” she says.

The role of Claudius is played by Samuel Knapp Chester, the same man John credited with saving his life in Montgomery. Night after night, Chester stands onstage with Edwin, saying nothing beyond his lines. “ ‘God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another,’ ” Hamlet tells Ophelia, and no one knows better than Chester how true this is.

Unbeknownst to anyone else, John has made repeated attempts to enlist Chester in a plot he is forming against the president. It’s to be a kidnapping. Lincoln will be bundled into Richmond, Virginia, and held there until he can be traded for Confederate prisoners.

John has applied every pressure at his disposal on the frightened, but unyielding, Chester. Chester need only show up with the carriage. He never even has to see Lincoln. John is asking so little.