Rosalie is right to think this is wrong. She’s wrong as to which part. John has not been arrested. He escaped the theater on horseback and is currently in Maryland at the surgery of Dr. Samuel Mudd, having the bone in his leg set. He’d broken it the night before, leaping from Lincoln’s box to the stage to deliver the most shocking conclusion Our American Cousin will ever have. It was a big scene, with blocking and a speech—sic semper tyrannis—and everything. He’d choreographed it carefully, all but the broken leg.

In his diary he writes: “Rode sixty miles last night with the bones of my leg tearing the flesh at every jump. I can never repent it, though we hated to kill . . . God simply made me the instrument of his punishment.”

ii

Edwin returns to New York on the 16th, anxious about his mother, but otherwise dead in his soul. He finds Mother in her bed, unable to rise. “I truly think this will kill her,” he tells his friends. “I think her heart is so broken, she may will it to stop altogether.”

Rosalie is once again her mother’s inadequate comfort. Perhaps there is some special love reserved for the child who has never given a moment’s worry. Rosalie doesn’t feel it. Her own grief is unacknowledged, submerged in her mother’s, but it does, from time to time, choke her unexpectedly as she tries to eat her breakfast, read a book, lie sleepless at her mother’s side. John’s face rises in her mind and she hates him as much as she loves him, in both cases, too much. “Remember him as he was,” Edwin tells her, but who was that? Did she ever really know him? Has she only just lost him or did that happen long ago?

—

John entrusted a friend with a manifesto he wanted printed in the papers. On hearing of the assassination, this friend opens, reads, and burns it. What does appear in the papers are the letters from Asia’s safe, the ones Sleeper gave the federal marshal. Rosalie tries not to look at them. She lasts three whole hours.

The first is to his mother. It’s odd to think that this was written many days before the letter they’d received at the very hour of the newsboy’s calls. This one is full of protestations of his deep love for his mother, the best, the noblest mother in the world. Still, he owes a duty to his country, he says. He complains, with no sense of irony, that he’s lived a slave in the North and can bear that no longer.